A weekend in complicated list form.

1. THURSDAY:

a. Before film class, I went to more museums featuring Pro Arte exhibits:

i. The Brodsky Apartment...
-- First off, did you know there was more than one famous Brodsky? This museum is the apartment of Isaak Brodsky, the Soviet painter, not Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet.
-- Second, it was one of those typical, cramped, over-filled museums with a minimum of six (maximum of ten? twelve?) paintings on every wall.
-- The older women there were quite sweet and stood smiling and watching as I looked around the museum, though they may have charged me the foreigner entrance fee to the museum (100r when I think it was supposed to be 80r).
-- There was then an awkward language miscommunication when I asked about the Pro Arte exhibit which was an audio walking tour and they were like but you are a foreigner you don't speak Russian (given that at least 90% of this conversation was held in Russian) we don't have an English translation, sorry, and I was like no it's ok and they were like but we have no translation!!! And I finally gave up because it was by the same art group that did the Kolobok video in the Museum of Bread and I wasn't so into that so, whatever.
-- Best part of the museum was the sign demanding: "DON'T PHOTO!" I wanted to take a picture of it so badly....

ii. The Kirov Apartment...
-- Definitely wins for having the best museum babushki in the city. The woman at the kassa didn't charge me to get into the museum after showing her my student ID, and at one point they even put on a special Soviet cartoon on a TV just to show me.
-- Half the museum is set up like the apartment when Kirov lived there, complete with a polar bear skin rug.
-- There is also a large portrait of Kirov himself made entirely out of feathers (the man was really into hunting, apparently) with more full and realistic shading than I see in most drawings.
-- The Pro Arte exhibit there was really cool. It was a project involving old Soviet radios which are cool enough in themselves -- the artist photographed the radios and put the images on plastic panels encased in wooden boxes, lit from behind with a light bulb so they were glowing. The photographs on the boxes in one room were flat, straight-on portraits of the radios making the boxes themselves kind of look like radios, and the photographs on the boxes in another room were of the radios in various modern settings flying up in the air in pristine, photo-shopped-clean images. And then in the third room the actual radios were there on stands playing swanky, waltzy 50s Soviet music that gave the museum an entirely authentic and old-fashioned feel.

b. Something I noticed then when going home on the metro on Thursday night that didn't full sink in until Friday morning when it was confirmed:

i. The turned off the water in both of the fountains on the pedestrian street.

ii. They have dismantled and are taking away the pieces making up the beer garden (Adams! Ahh!) where we sat so often and people watched the metro this summer.

iii. Conclusion? Winter is coming. Olga even told me that there is a holiday on October 14th or 16th that is "Holiday of the First Snow." That is in about ten days.

c. Nabokov, love of my life, was the quote of the day on my iGoogle:

i. "My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."


2. FRIDAY

a. Three classes on Friday make me so tired that I just went home after Bakhtin and sat in my pajamas and drank tea with Olga. Pretty wild start to the weekend.

b. Inbetween writing class and Bakhtin Lauren and I had our now-traditional picnic.

i. We decided we are going to keep this up for as long as possible, even persevering through snow.

ii. We ate: bread, sausage, cheese, carrot salad, chips, and a mini pie. I drank a multi-fruit juice box and Lauren had yogurt in a bottle.


3. SATURDAY

a. As you already know, printmaking was canceled.

b. Instead, I slept more and read in bed.

c. I also poked around in the consignment stores.

i. I may or may not have bought this really funky old Soviet guitar from the 80s (original price listed inside: 33r, I paid 500r [$20]) with pictures of Soviet beauty models decoupaged (spelling???) on the front and writing scrawled on the back such as "Москва 18.07.80".

ii. I am now going to (finally) learn how to play guitar.

d. Then there was a sports day in the park.

i. I sat and watched this time and shot a roll of film with the Kiev. We'll see how that comes out.

e. Followed by a group of us (BB, IT, LM, ED, JN, MK, EB) going to eat Chinese food.

i. Oh my god CHINESE FOOD. How I missed, thee.

ii. Chicken and peppers?? Fried rice?? What??

f. Followed by girliness in the dorm.

i. We kind of watched most of the black and white film Aleksandr Nevsky, though it dissolved into watching Notorious B.I.G. and Cassidy music videos on YouTube.

ii. Thanks to Maneka, my nailed were painted blue and pink with green stripes.

iii. Thanks to Ilana, my hair was french braided and is still fluffy from the experience.


4. SUNDAY

a. I was in Pavlovsk. All day.

i. Emma and I had deja vu on the train getting there because once again we were a) traveling together b) on a commuter-rail train exactly like the one we took from Riga to Jurmala and back and in my bag were c) the same four cameras I had taken with us on our travels. Then a man came into our car and tried to sell everyone knife sharpeners that looked like fish and waved a very sharp knife and a very sharp pair of scissors around to demonstrate the quality of the sharpener.

ii. Oh my god, oh my god. As Olga said when I got home, I was очень доволна. Every one says to go to the park at Pavlovsk in the fall and see all the leaves, and today it was essentially raining yellow leaves. The day turned into the sunniest, freshest fall weather and no one could piss me off. I took over 300 pictures and I want to go back. Hell, I just want to live in that park and wander around for ages. My favorite moment was sitting under these birch trees in a little glade with everyone.