A few pictures from Chelyabinsk

Quick Update...

I've been in the Ural Mountains since last Friday (the 30th). I came to see my friend Zhenya who I met this summer while on Cape Cod. I randomly met her at the library one day and well...obviously we became friends. There are also 4 other girls out here that I hung out with all summer named Tonya, Tanya, Luba, and Irina. According to the girls we are actually in Asia right now but I'm not sure if that's right. They have been taking me to the theater and their Arbat and their university. It's been very nice being out of Moscow for a little bit. I've been staying with Zhenya at her grannie's house. Her name is Baba Anya. She speaks no english and Zhenya likes to go off and leave me with her for an hour or 2 at a time. Talk about difficult conversation, but my Russian is getting some good practice. Zhenya's parents came last night and of course there was a big dinner, and when I say big I really mean HUGE. Baba Anya keeps saying that when I go home I'll have fat cheeks because she is going to feed me so much. She is always wanting me to eat or drink tea or something. Last night we had soup, bread, some kind of beet salad which I didn't like, some kind of meat wrapped in potatos and fried then covered with leeks and sour cream (so good), some other kind of meat with noodles inside, pelmeini, compote. Then ofcourse there was cake that Zhenya's mother had made and 3 bowls of fruit brought out. I thought I was never going to be able to stop eating. Any time I tried Baba Anya and Zhenya's mother would tell me to eat. It's a little crazy but it has been soo much fun and so good getting to see Zhenya again. I've missed her so much since the summer ended and I came home. Well, I'll post more when I get home, along with pictures. Right now Zhenya and I are going to the movie theater and then to meet her friend after she gets off work.

Pictures from the Mayakovsky...

Маяковский

Karoliina and I went the Mayakovsky Museum today. That place was SO not what I expected. I mean, I knew it was going to be interesting. The guy, Vladimir Mayakovsky, was after all into Futurism and so he collected that kind of art. What I wasn't expecting to feel as if I had walked into a Ripley's/Wonder World place....and that's what I felt like. The house almost looked like a playground and no one cared weather of not you touched the art or got close to it. The colors were so bright and vivid. I guess I almost felt like a giant disaster had ripped through the house and no one had bothered to clean it up they just bothered to paint all over the wreckage. SO FREAKING COOL! Lots of pictures! After that Karoliina and I went to Детский Мир (Children's World) and looked at the fun toys and ended up finding knitting needles and yarn. I am now able to knit. Haha. Yay for me. :)

The Bright Stream

Went to a ballet Friday night at the Bolshoi called "The Bright Stream." It was pretty fan-freaking-tastic. Originally the ballet had been written during Stalin's time and was a major propaganda piece for the Communist system. The ballet is about a troupe of artists who visit a collective farm during the harvest. One of the ballerinas is a friend of Zina, a girl on the farm. Her husband begins to wander and make advances on the ballerina but she is happily married. She and her husband convince Zina to play a joke on her husband to ward off his advances along with those of an old dacha dwelling couple who have taken an interest in the ballerina and her husband. Comedy ensues as the ballerina dresses up as her husband and the husband as his wife. When all is revealed Pyotr (Zina's husband) begs her forgiveness, all is well and the harvest is completed. The Soviet theme is or course how wonderful peasant life is and how much peasants love to work. Giant veggies and fruits are rolled across the stage showing how bountiful and productive life is in Soviet Russia. The ballet is so comedic in the fact that it's hard to believe the Communist party actually wanted people to believe that this is how life was in the USSR. Regardless the ballet was amazing, the dancing was beautiful and the set and costumes perfect. LOVE LOVE LOVED IT!

Oh another note...on the way home from the ballet, Chavala and I stopped at Kroshka Kartoshka (a food kiosk) and got a snack. We were on the way home talking about how much we loved cheese (I got toast and cheese and she got a backed potato with cheese) and the next thing I knew I was flat on my ass in the snow and ice. There was no warning, no slipping, no slow motion effect where I could have tried to catch myself. I was just walking one minute and on my back staring up at the polluted Russian sky the next. Chavala, good friend that she is, instead of asking "Are you all right?" instead asked "You didn't drop the cheese did you?" We were cracking up! It was so hysterical. So now I have a bruise the size of a baseball on my hip and the left side of my lower back kind of hurts but I consider it my initiation into snow weather. :)

Opps...

So the electric was out today in my sector while they did renovations in the building and in stead of being bored Karoliina and I decided to go to the mall. She has been needing a new jacket since it's started to get cold. I probably should have left my debit card at home. TopShop was having a HUGE sale. I just couldn't help myself. I found this gorgeous blue dress and matching earrings and this white sweater that was sooo pretty. I bought some new heels...they were like 4000 rubles but I guess it's not that much. I mean everyone knows how much I LOVE to shop. It's all I ever do. In total today I think I spent around 10000 rubles (roughly $400). EEK! Well...really it's not that much, I normally drop that much everytime I go out.

I guess it's a good thing it's MY money and NOBODY can tell me what to do with it! Afterall....WHY SHOULD THEY CARE?

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow :)

The snow has come to stay I believe. All day yesterday it snowed and the wind blew. Karoliina and I went to Ramstore (supermarket) and on the way I home I didn't have my hat on....I seriously looked like a snow woman when I walked back into my sector. My hair looked like icicles and I'm pretty sure if I had tried to touch it...the hair would have broken off. My fingers almost had to amputated I think from lack of blood flow even with my gloves on and hands in my pocket, but such is life in the Motherland. Took some pictures today and threw a couple snowballs at Karoliina, Jim and Johann after class. We had fun. Yay for snow. :D :D

Tip...

If you are going to post a comment and you dont have a blogger account...please tell me who is writing...otherwise I have no idea who you are, and I like to know who is commenting. Thanks. Love you all. See you soon!

I know I haven't been writing as much I did when I first got here but I'm starting to get comfortable with Moscow and I don't find going out to a bar for a glass of wine or taking the 15 minute walk to the market all that interesting anymore. That and along with the cold and sun going down at 4 in the afternoon, we haven't been going out nearly as much as we did in the beginning.
This weekend Jim, Hildagunn and I went to Vladimir and Suzdal and THAT was interesting. In Suzdal we went to the museum of wooden architecture where they had actually managed to save wooden buildings from the 17th C. and had actually recreated a town. It was an outdoor museum so it was REALLY REALLY cold. It's colder in Suzdal then it is in Moscow. I think while we were there the temp was around -8 Celsius which is roughly 18 for us. SO FREAKING COLD! We also saw a lot of monasteries and visited the kremlin in Suzdal. At one monetary that was turned into a museum they actually have bell concerts where 8 times a day a single man goes into the bell tower and plays 19 bells on his own. NINETEEN...AT THE SAME TIME.... ALONE! Craziness! I got part of the bell ringing on video and it is so beautiful!
In Vladimir we only went to the Assumption Cathedral and actually got to watch an Orthodox service. I really enjoyed going to these cities because all of the churches and some of the monasteries that we visited I had actually studied with Dr. Steeves in his Russian Civ class and now I was actually able to SEE them with my own eyes and not just through a picture in a book or on a screen. I was so ridiculously happy Jim and Hildagunn were starting to get annoyed I think but they understood what it must feel like to finally see something that you never dreamed you actually would. Oh it was SUCH a wonderful day. I would write more but my battery is about to die. So I'll leave you with pictures instead. I know you all care about that more then what I'm writing. :)
Oh and I finally set the comment thing so that anyone can post comments even if they dont have an account with blogger. Just in case some of you want to post comments. :)

Pictures

A few days down

So the last few days have been very busy. After a stint of staying on campus (and by staying on campus I mean I literally didn't walk outside of the gates of the dormitory, not even for class, for a week) I finally got out did some things. Wednesday I met Molly at the Tretyakov after I finished working and we went to dinner at this cafe called Correa's. The food was amazing. It was like a fusion food resturaunt which is a new concept for Russia. I think my body almost went into shock from all of the nutrients. I've been living off soup, bread, cheese and potatos for the last two months. After dinner we decided to see a film. We saw a film called Изгнание (Izgnanii). In english the film translates into The Expulsion. Suprisingly I understood a lot of the dialouge and the plot of the story. Molly had given me a breif run down of what he expected the film to be about; a dysfuntional family of a father, mother and two children. The mother, Vera, is pregnant but the baby is not her husband's. I think it was a good film for me to see since it wasn't dialouge heavy and the director really set the film up in a way that was easy to understand but was complex at the same time. The title of the film alludes to the large amount of Biblical undertones expressed. The film is basically a retelling of Adam and Eve's expulsion from paradise. I would really like to see the film again, now that I understand even more of what it is about.
Thursday Karoliina and I went to the Tretyakov for a play day. The museum is SOOO big. I really feel like you need two trips min. to get a basic understanding of the museum (one day for each floor). The Tretyakov has me working on translating a biography of Vrubel, a famous Russian painter durring the Symbolist movement in Russia (1880ish - 1920ish I believe). Jus this year they finished an entire room (pretty much a wing of the gallery) dedicated to his work. It houses some of his most famous paintings: "The Swan Princess", "Seated Demon", "Lilacs." While I had been translating for a while, I had yet to see any of these works that I was writing about. When I entered this room I was AMAZED at the beauty and complexity and deepness of the paintings. Some of the were panels, paintings of Russian fairytales protrayed on multiple panels, and they were collassal in size. "The Faraway Princess" must have been 50 to 75 feet long and 30 feet tale and it was one complete canvas. You literally had to stand a hundred feet back to really be able to see the painting in full. I was completely in awe of this room. It is by far my favorite at the Tretyakov.
Friday was pretty much a quiet day. After class, Karoliina, Hilda and I went to Izmailovski park which is a souviener market where they sell a lot of matrushkas. Karoliina bought like 10 for her friends and family, chances are she forgot someone and will have to go back which is fine because I'll need to do some shopping at some point. After that we went home. Hilda and I watched a movie and drank some wine and we were then invited down to Jim's room with Johann, Alexander and Herman. All of the guys proceeded to get drunk and do stupid things like arm wrestle each other. It was quite entertaining to be honest.
Saturday was quite. I came to the Wifi cafe and checked my mail and spent some time translating my text. Around 6 Karoliina and I went out to dinner at Correa's because she wanted to try it. She, like Molly, is a veggitarian so sometimes it's difficult to find a place where she can eat (since Russia is a meat and potatos kind of place) and Correa's is very veggie friendly. Then we came home and watched the latest Grey's Anatomy episode. Quiet day, quiet night. It was nice.
Sunday was wonderful. I got up and read for a couple hours, had some lunch and then started to get ready for the Opera. Jim, Johann, Hilda, Camillo and I went to go see Eugene Onegin at the Hovy Opera. The building was beautiful and the opera fantastic. Eugene Onegin was a novel first written by Pushkin and then made into an opera by Tchaikovski. The basic plot of the story is a girl named Tatiana is quiet and bookish and when her sister's fiancee bring Onegin to the house for dinner one night she falls in love with him. She writes him a letter expressing this love and he rejects her advances saying that he would become bored with married life (just as he has become bored with city living and now country living where he met Tatiana). Years laters he sees her again only he doesn't recognize her because she has been introduced into society in Moscow. Tatiana has matured and grown into a beautiful and poised woman. She is also married. Upon recognizing her, Onegin realizes that he is indeed in love with her and tries to win back her affection. While she admits that she still loves him, she refuses to succumb to desire and allow him to ruin her. She remains faithful to her husband and leave Onegin. I love this story because allow it's about Onegin, Tatiana is shown as the moral strength and goodness in the story. She is a woman and yet she is not the one to fall to her desires. The performace was amazing. The woman who played Tatiana had a beautiful voice and Onegin was arrogent and sad all at the same time. I highly enjoyed the performance. I'd love to see it again in it's entirity (this was only a one act performance. the actual show is over 3 hours long).
So, this is the update of my last week. The pictures that follow are from inside the opera house, Izmailovski, the metro stations and Friday night arm wrestling. Enjoy. :)

pictures

First Snowfall

Snow started falling yesterday. I'm not sure how long it will last. It's suppose to warm up again, but I thought I'd share a couple pictures of the snowfall. Enjoy.