After some organizational difficulties, I was able to start an internship. In addition, in a very great workplace: at the state Hermitage Museum. This is huge and houses countless valuable and famous art treasures, including pictures by Picasso, Matisse, Monet and many more. The museum's collection is not limited to pictures: everything is represented, from weapon collections to Egyptian mummies to ancient Greek vases. I previously strayed into this museum as a regular paying visitor. Now I can use a badge during working hours, which gives me access to the museum, but also to the areas labeled "Staff only". This gives me a lot more opportunities to get lost!

Even though the staff of the Hermitage Museum's Volunteer Service didn't know who I was and what I was doing there, they let me fill out the form again and I was done. My first assignment was to give a smile to people who wanted to enter the museum with a backpack for a little over an hour and a half, that they should please leave it in the cloakroom. A little later I was asked by some other interns to transport some boxes from the general staff building to our office. The accuracy with which the removal was monitored was particularly remarkable. First, it took half an hour for all responsible persons to find their key in the right place and for several forms to be correctly filled out. When we wanted to transport the parcels out, we got caught up in the bureaucracy again because one of the responsible people was negligent to lazy to count the boxes and wrote down 100. Indeed, there were 104 so we should have left 4 boxes. With a little skill, we were able to distribute the contents of 4 boxes to the remaining 100, leaving 4 empty boxes.

After lunch in the staff cafeteria, which is half the price of that for regular visitors, I was introduced to the job that will keep me busy during my stay here. An older Volunteer Service website must be replaced by a new one. In addition to the fact that it is a multilingual website, the common problem is that too many customer requests spoil the broth. While the original idea of ​​the new website was to tidy up a bit with the old website, one after the other wants one element of the old website after the other back to the new page until it reaches the old, cluttered state again. Let's see how my persuasiveness will develop over the next few days.