Getting ready...

Hello everyone! It's Bridgette here, one of the grad students going on the St. Petersburg trip. We don't leave Washington, DC for a little over two weeks, but I'm already excited! Going through the itinerary, I'm getting an idea for how our days will go once we're in St. Petersburg. There's so much to see, and I know the two weeks will just fly by. There are two things I'm really looking forward to, though: giving mini presentations to the library school at the St. Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts; and going to Repino, the hometown of the painter Ilya Repin. A depiction of Ivan the Terrible cradling his son after brutally attacking him is probably his best known work, but my personal favorite is Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (Sadko is a character from Russian folktales) .

Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16th, 1581 by Ilya Repin (1885)

Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom, by Ilya Repin (1876)

There's so much to plan and do on this trip, I can't really keep it all straight. Packing would probably be a good place to start, though...