14 September

Ah well, dear reader, shipboard life has caught up with me. After rising at 0720, organising the laundry into dry (put away or wear), moist (lay on bed to finish) or still wet (put on hangers on the doors to dry) and the usual preparations, it was off to breakfast by the appointed starting time of 0800 and far too late for corner seat. We ended up sitting with a couple from Belgium. After breakfast it was away with the moist clothes (they had dried, courtesy of switching the heating up to full) and preparing for the day.
At 0930 there was a presentation by Elana from the kiosk on Lacquered Miniatures. It was most interesting and showed how they were made, as well as what way authenticity cold be checked. Immediately after this, I was approached by Belgium couple for suggestions about holidays in Australia (which I had to continue tomorrow as I ran out of time at Melbourne after Darwin, the Ghan to Alice Springs, Uluru, the Ghan to Adelaide, Indina Pacific to Perth and then Perth, Margaret River, Albany, Denmark, Walpole, Esperance, Norseman, Nullabor and whale-watching, the Great Ocean Road and Melbourne). After we had to leave because another presentation was on, I rang Fran while in the Panorama Bar and got all the latest news.
At 1230, a Marc Laenen gave a lecture on Russian Icons: Essence and Practice. He is a Belgium working on icons with UNESCO. Icons have a fundamental task in presenting holy images to Orthodox Christians as living images rather than just words and he presented their history in a very informative way.
Straight after, at 1330 it was lunch with Cindy, Carmel and Scott. No sooner had lunch finished than it was our final Russian language lesson and diploma at 1530. Rushing (not Russian) along, that finished to be followed by us arriving at Kizhi Island at 1700 and docking on the outside of three other ships. When we went ashore to tour parts of the island, I found out there have been
up to nine ships docked next to each other. While walking through the others, one had laid down cloth over the carpet so we mere mortals wouldn’t sully it.
We had our tour of Kizhi Island outdoor museum with our English-speaking guide and were shown the house, store, sauna, chapel (where we got a bell-ringing show), windmill, church (winter) and we saw the summer church and graveyard.
It was very cold outside, so as soon as the tour finished, we hurried back to the ship by 190. She was now immediately next to the quay. At1920 dinner was served and we all had a chat until we were almost forcibly evicted at 2145. I headed off to my cabin with some postcards I had purchased and posted one to the Lowrey and Stanley familes by 2200.
After copying and processing the photos and writing a partial blog, I was to bed by 2300.