Weekend shenanigans.

I'm going to give the weather here a solid "basically fall" rating. When I was walking to the Russian Museum on Saturday morning for our second-to-last cultural excursion, it smelled like the first day of school. All that crisp, refreshing air. This is my favorite kind of weather. I feel the most awake when I'm outside in the autumn.

The Russian Museum was awesome. So very awesome. I liked it much more than the Hermitage because even though it is still fairly large, it is of a much more manageable size, and I really like how everything is organized -- chronologically with about one or two artists to a room. It also seems to be the way a museum should be, celebrating the art of its own country. I still find it kind of strange that in order to see one of Leonardo DaVinici's most famous works you have to come to a palace in St. Petersburg.

Going to the Russian Museum was also really exciting for me personally because of all of my spring classes at Wellesley. In my Virgin Mary religion class, my final research paper was about Russian icons of the Mother and Child, and right when you walk into the museum, the first thing you see, the very beginning room, is all of ancient icons, and right in the middle of it isone of the ones I wrote about -- The Virgin of Belozersk. So it was a little thrill to see something I had studied in person. And then, further along in the museum, in the contemporary modern art section, there are a couple of paintings by Aleksandr Rodchenko. I wrote my final research paper for History of Photograph on Rodechenko's Constructivist, abstract photographs, but here I got to see some of his earlier paintings before he switched to photography, such as "Black on Black." I'm such a fangirl of Rodchenko that I was excited to be standing in front of something he had worked on with his own two hands. And then, just in general, as the Russian Museum is entirely made up of paintings (some drawings, some sculptures, but no photography, no mixed media), my Painting Techniques class really once again made me actually appreciate the things I was looking at. Even if I was bored by the subject matter, say just another still life, now I can look at the brush strokes and wonder how many layers they had to do to make the fabric look that dimensional. Thanks, Professor Spatz. Damn, I loved that class.

After the Russian Museum, Sasha and I went to yet another strange museum together. Earlier in the day she had walked past the National Museum of Hygiene and clearly this was a place we had to go together. The Hygiene Museum wins for the strangest museum I have ever been to in my whole life. I'm not sure what I was expecting from it, maybe the history of tooth brushes or something, but it was not cases of plastic models of different kind of infections in flesh wounds or a uterus in formaldehyde or posters reminiscent of a 9th grade science fair about TB and AIDS. There were also various displays of taxidermied rodents in their environments (???) and a whole case of different kinds of retainers. They also had this rotating stand with different birth control methods, including dried out condoms with an expiration date of 12/1998. Besides all this, the museum is located in this beautiful mansion, right in the middle of the city, right near Nevskii Prospect, ideal real estate, and it is full of plastic body parts. It was one of those old, nice mansions with chandeliers and parque floors. We even had to wear little blue shoe covers while walking around. Plus there were way more people working there than necessary -- at least three babushkas -- as we were the only people in the museum. All the lights were off in the rooms, and as we approached different cases, occasionally the babushka, if she could be torn away from her crossword puzzle, would get up and switch on the light in the case for us to see the jars of different common parasites more clearly. One woman in the last room was particularly aggressive about interacting with us. She seemed to tell Sasha that she wasn't allowed to take pictures in the museum, but then later it seemed she had actually meant she didn't understand why Sasha was taking a picture of a fetus in a jar of formaldehyde and instead basically forced us to take our photographs next to an enormous blue and red plastic model of a heart. As soon as Sasha posts those, I'll put them on here. They are super awkward and hilarious. Moral of the story: I cannot comprehend why this museum is not in my Lonely Planet guide to St. Petersburg and you have to go to the Museum of Hygiene if you are ever in this city.

Once we had our fill of hygiene, Sasha and I joined up with a group of people who were having a picnic to celebrate Liza's, one of our fabulous Russian tutors, birthday. Getting to Kristovskii Island and then the park itself was a little crazy as yesterday was National Paratrooper Day. Yes. National Paratrooper Day. While this may sound like some obscure little holiday that no one celebrates, it is actually kind of a big insane deal. All these Russians who are paratroopers -- or who at least claim to be -- dress up in the macho national garb which makes them look vaguely like they should work in a French café: striped blue and white tank tops with little berets. These guys then wander around the city all day, carrying their official paratrooper flag which reads "Никто кроме нас!" the translation of which is "No one except us!" which I think could have multiple meanings, and they get completely plastered and yell and sing and roam in groups and when they run into other groups they have conversations along the lines of "HLKKASDLK!!" and then "KASDLKAJSDKLASDKL?!?!" garble garble garble drunken yelling excitement. Hart said he witnessed some good fights last summer on National Paratrooper Day, but no such luck this year. Examples of what exactly I am talking about that Adams found on the internet: here and here.

Our picnic was calm though. We ate little sandwiches and grapes and had champagne in miniature plastic cups that someone found somewhere. There was this great stray dog hanging around our picnic the whole time. She was just a puppy and had the happiest disposition for any stray dog I have ever seen. Adams and I were immediately in love with this creature as she tried to catch a duck in the water and as she fetched sticks. I also learned that the term for a stray dog in Russian literally translates to mean a "common dog." We fed her a cucumber (because we had ran out of everything else) and after a while she got bored and left. I then fell asleep in the sun for about an hour and woke up to both Sasha and Adams gently stroking my feet with leaves. Creeps.

As for today...... I did absolutely nothing.

No, really, absolutely nothing.

It was beautiful.

Those of you who know me know how I am incapable of slowing down and need to fit in as many activities as possible into one day (example: did you just read about my Saturday?) and today I was supposed to go to the flea market at Udelnaya with Sasha and Adams, but the weather was shitty and we gave up and instead I just slept. I was so tired from my busy week and the upcoming week promises to be even crazier as it is everyone's last week here, and I finally just stopped. And slept. And I feel great now. I was supposed to go out tonight too to celebrate Liza's birthday again, but now Liza herself is tired and instead I'm going to just put my wonderful fleece pants (THANKS, MELISSA!) back on and curl up. Maybe I'll watch The Royal Tenenbaums. And go to sleep again. Lazy Sunday.

Though I did make time during all the nothingness to put up photos from this weekend.