a day at the museum

Yesterday we went to a play called Radio Day (День Радио). It was a comedy and apparently was hilarious, however as it was entirely in Russian, the jokes were all lost on me and I found it tedious. I fell asleep quite a bit.
Anyway, today we didn't have a play to see, so we had the entire day free.
After a delicious breakfeast of sausage-in-lavash AND A BANANA, we had class for an hour and then headed out into Moscow. A couple of us went to the Tretyakov museum (one of the best museums I've ever been to). Unfortunately, you can't take pictures inside the museum, so you'll all just have to imagine. They have an enormous icon collection - mom you would have loved it. A very interesting one we saw was "Christ, The King of Glory" (cf. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2004/03/26/arts/26kimm_slide2.184.jpg).
We also saw a lot of icons of the Dormition. I wasn't familiar with these, and I was surprised to see the Virgin lying dead with Jesus standing over her holding some little baby wrapped up like a mummy. Strange, but these Dormition icons were all over.
We also saw Silver Age, Russian impressionism, tsarist portraiture, etc etc etc. I thought it was very interesting, because all of the art was Russian, and I had heard of none of the artists except Repin and Vereshchagin. All of the art was just as good as anything one would expect to find in an American or European museum, and yet none of us (including art and art history majors) had ever heard of these painters or seen their works in books, etc. My personal favorite was Grabar's "Chrysanthemums" (http://www.agniart.ru/imgoods/D/012145/Grabar_17044.jpg - this picture isn't great, but it's the best I could find). Other great artists I enjoyed enough to write their names down were Shcherin, Chrutsky, Dubovekov, Vereshchagin (he had a very nice room all to himself with a nearly full-wall painting at one end, and most of one of the adjacent walls was covered with studies he did for the large painting), and last but not least Surikov.

Susan wanted to buy a poster from the shop, so I talked to the cashier. She was impressed with my Russian and asked me, "Are you studying Russian?" I said, "What?" She said, "Are you studying Russian?" "Yes." "You speak very well in Russian!" "Thank you," I said, flattered, "thank you very much!" Then she repeated that I speak well and immediately followed that with a long sentence of which I understood absolutely nothing. Ironic.

After navigating the metro at rush-hour, we finally got back to lovely Godzillas. The rest of the group met there, and seven of us went out to dinner at this Ukrainian restaurant a block away from Kofe Hauz. We actually learned about the restaurant yesterday when some guy working there dressed up in what apparently is traditional Ukrainian drab came up to us and (in Russian of course - no one in this entire country seems to speak God's language, English) he asked us to come to his restaurant. We told him we would tomorrow (today), and he gave each of us business cards.
Anyway the restaurant was very good and pretty cheap. I got some really good chicken noodle soup with croutons, bread and kvas and it only cost 150 roubles with tip (10% in Russia). If you're wondering what kvas is, I'll tell ya: Rye bread sits in water with raisins and/or apples and is allowed to ferment; it may or may not be alcoholic at this point. So that's kvas, and it's (I've heard) very popular here in the Motherland. It actually tasted good (and it was really cheap). Our menus were in Russian, Ukrainian and English. The English translations, however, were often really bad. For example, one of the first items on the list was "smoked lard". We dared one of the guys to order it. He did. I guess you eat lard with spicy lard sauce in Ukraine, so that's what he did. It looked awful, and it wasn't cheap, but when in Rome (or Russia, as the case may be).
So that brings me to where I am now, typing on this blog and thinking about how much it would suck to be stuck on campus over J-Term, and how muddy and expensive my life has become.