the pretty part of town

pictures and stories from the last couple days



St. Isaac's




sun dog over St. Isaac's square (I'm not positive that's it's real name, but it is the square St. Isaac's is on)



St. Isaac's almost glows at night. It's very pretty.



Ella (Marc's daughter - Marc's our prof, btw) in the subway
The Petersburg subway is nowhere near as nice as the Moscow one. It's really small, and you basically can't get anywhere on it. It's also not pretty.



me in the Hermitage
The Hermitage is the second largest museum after the Louvre; it's collection, however, is nonetheless too large to be all displayed at any one time. If you spent one minute in each of the pieces, you would be there for 12 years. It was built as a palace by Catherine; part of it is preserved as the Winter Palace. I like this place much better than the Russian Museum (tho the Russian Museum had some very nice art). The Hermitage has (I think) 3 da Vinci's. Very nice collection. And it had some ancient art from Iran (Babylon, etc), which you almost never see, so that was nice.



Winter Palace inside the Hermitage



me with a statue in the Hermitage



Hermitage ceiling
The floor in the Hermitage was also really interesting. Most of it was wooden mosaic.



Susan (the art major) with a statue
She knows how to appreciate art.
Before I move on from the Hermitage, I want to mention that I had there the worst pizza that I've ever had in my life. And it cost 100 rubles! Not a good deal at all!



the Neva
Marc told me that you can't call all the little rivers that run thru Petersburg "the Neva", because they're actually just canals. So our trip to the Hermitage was the first time we saw the real Neva. It was very pretty and the surface was pretty much all frozen.



sunset on a bridge over the Neva



dunno, but it's pretty



the Neva again

now a quick recap of the days:

The Hermitage was beautiful, but we only spent 2-3 hours there, so Susan and I are going back today. It has an enormous and very nice collection.
We went to Playing the Victim in the evening. I liked it, but it strayed a lot from the script, which I liked better. And the theater was freezing the entire time. But it was still a good play.
Yesterday we went to a theater school (did I mention this was a Russian Theater trip?) and talked with a bunch of students from Arkhangelsk (Archangel) who had come to Petersburg to do some special training. That was really interesting. It was almost all one on one, and I got to practice a lot of my Russian, because Helen (the girl whom I spoke the most with) had only been studying English 1/2 a year. That was a blast. Then after that we saw a play put on my Petersburg acting students. It was well-done (I thought) for a student play, but it certainly wasn't of the same quality as the other plays we've seen (obviously).
Today, as I mentioned, I'm going to the Hermitage, and tonight we're going to the opera Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar). Tomorrow is our last day here!
Anyway, to recap, the area of Petersburg around the Neva is way prettier than the rest of it. St. Isaac's is gorgeous.

I got yelled at twice in the last two days by babushkas in Russian (babushkas by default never speak English) for things that I had nothing to do with. One babushka yelled at me because Sean left his dirty clothes in a pile on the floor in the bathroom. I told her the clothes weren't mine and she said "I didn't say they were". Brilliant.
Then today there was a new group of Australians in the room next to us. They went to breakfast room (which closes at 11) and were trying to get it open, when a babushka appears and starts screaming at them for trying to open the door. None of them speak Russian. Then she called in a back-up babushka to help her yell at them in a language they don't understand. I tried to intervene and tell them that the Australians thought it was 10:30, not 11:30, but then both babushkas start yelling at me! I've only met 2 or 3 nice babushkas in this country. And they're all about 4 feet tall. In America (as Susan put it), grandma's get nicer as they get older; in Russia, however, they get meaner. We joked that because the Hermitage is so big, they make sure everyone's out by closing time by unleashing a roomful of babushkas who'd been couped up all day and unable to yell at anyone (so they're ravenous). Everyone would run for their lives out of that building.