| July 12th | I know what you are thinking. Russia.. July.. why it mmust be time for Klezfest 2001! and yes it is. Last night we saw a Klezmer music festival. yes we're weird. yes, we know.
Okay, so we've been here awhile, and haven't said anything yet. well, we're here. We aren't really wandering aimlessly around europe, apparently we are following the opening of tomb raider around the world. no reall. we left the us 2 days after it opened there, we left the uk two days after it opened there, and now we're in russia, and guess what opens tomorrow?
St Petersberg is nice, although it doesn't get dark, there are lots of mosquitoes, and uh.. uh. yeah. -christi
The city here is beautiful, but many things are crumbling. However, there is extensive rennovation going on for the cioty's birthday in 2003. so today we went to the russian museum, but the futurism, agitprop and kandisnky wings (most of the museum) were closed. But the icon wing was open and there we saw a russian icon of the beaheading of st. john the baptist. But there was nothing on the finding of his head. Our hostel room mate says she saw the head in turkey. I feel like i'm in "where in the world is carmen sandiago."
We have seen the ballet once, but we're going again tomorrow night. We asked for the cheapest seats, so they put us in tiny bleacher seats four floors up. They were $0.60 each. There are like 20 ballet companies doing swan lake tomorrow night. I think we accidentally bought tickets for a school ballet company. It's hard to tell. The language barrier is kind of difficult sometimes. When we bought tickets to go to the Klezmer festival (it's not weird of us, it was a lot of fun), somebody there asked us if we knew esperanto. We used a combination of broken english, broken german, and probably entirely intact russian to get standing room only tickets. It took two hours to buy a train ticket to helsinki today, not beacause of lines, but because it took us a while to understand the international ticket office was down the block. of course, it was all clearly labelled once we get there.
My one good phrase "without meat?" caught me in a double negative today. bleah
The cathedrals here are all very impressive. they have something in them called an icon wall, where the congregation is seperated from the altar by a wall covered in icons. one of the cathedrals we vistitted looks like something from a russian fairy tale from the outside and has over 7 sq. kM of mosiac ions inside and out. It's insanely amazing.
We also saw a very impressive mosiac of lennin in the underground metro system today. It was also very impressive. But was it an icon? we don't know. we do know that there seems to be the deepest underground subway thingee in the universe here and that it was lennin's proudest achievement.
The vodka here is very good. so is the ice cream because it's unpasturized. Being a vegan here is just not ging to happen for me. anyway, it's legal to walk around drinking beer, so we're going to go hang aroubd an empty monestary in the midnight sun
Christi says i should mention the Hermitage Mueseum. It's huge. The paintings came form the tzars abd communist seizure of famous paintings from russian rich folks. Matisse's "the dance" is there. It's chock full of famous paintings by major people. apparently it would take 9 years just to glance at everything in it. Also, since it's in a palace, even if the pictures don't interest you, the rooms are amazing. -- Celeste
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| July 14th | Well, we made it out without getting run over by one of the truly insane drivers. Earlier, here I think or in my journal, I described St. Petersberg as crumbling. I take it back. Some of the veneer needs work and there are definietly smelly basements, but the foundations seem good. Or maybe not. I realized that I can't really ever know that city and never really understand it. It has a complicated past which is completely apparent and utterly foreign to me. People say travelling changes you and I've joked about that, but maybe this is what they mean. Of course, it's something I knew intellectually already, but never has it been so apparent. Enough of this pretension
Gypsies took our water bottle. Not one of those nice REI water bottles. I mean a plastic one that you buy full of water when your're staying in a town that has giardia in the water supple. It cost about $0.15 and we'd drunk a third of it. But they were very intent on getting the water, ALL the water we had. I don't know why. Maybe they were thirsty. But they were real life gypsies
We went to see the battle ship Aurora which fired the first shot in the revolution, but it's closed fridays, so we bought old communist stuff instead from the vendors there and then went to the dovtoyesky museum. it's his house. with his stuff in it. his hat is right there in a weird hat display case that may well have been specially made to hold it. then we went and bought Crime and Punishment cuz there I was at his museum in his town and I'd never read a darn thing of his and it was actually kind of embarassing. How can i consider myself well read? I hang my head in shame. Anyway, it sahould be good for more thsan half a train ride and thus better than the pulp novels we've been picking up at distracting me from studying for the GRES.
Speaking of which, we've mentioned going to cathedrals. al most all of them charge admission and we've been pretending to be students because the admission is half price and everybody assumes we are students. Does this negate any blessings we might be getting for being in so many cathedrals? I feel bad about it.
Only two more weeks before we know if we dodges giardia or not. we went and bought food from a big market yesturday, including pickles and a peach which we peeled and ate, so we really woon't know till the last second. Between %11 and %25 of visitors get it according to the St. Petersberg Times. I have no idea how they track this. I think most visitors are at the astoria and the ballet and not wandering around 20 feet from pigs heads hanging on large hooks and dripping purchasing pickles. would you beleive me if i told you that the market smelled wonderful? Supermarkets at home have no odor. we might as well be buying plastic food. I like it that Russia actually had smells, even the disel and rotting food (in basements for some reason. the rotting food smell came from basements. maybe it's where they keep the trash bins).
The final verdict: I feel like I saw less than half of what I could have seen. Being in Russia was stressful, but I left just as I was getting reasonably fast at cyrillic. Next time I'd like to stay for a month. Maybe work on a dark and depressing novel while there. or not. also, go to the ballet early in the week because on weekends much of the tech people and some of the dancers are drunk.
Anyways, we left Russia this morning with a bottle of vodka and a bunch of stuff with Lenin on it and now we're in finland, boring but safe. more on that later. -- clst |