But things have calmed down again, after Ami's visit, after Halloween, after Moscow, and after some of my big midterms are now out of the way (and it was only a three day school week, what the hell).
So, you already heard about Ami and my shenanigans. You can read her version of them on her blog, and look forward to a co-written Counterpoint article in the December issue about our time in Petersburg together.
And you alrady heard about Halloween. I was Amelia Earhart. Bryan was a bat. Ilana was Yuri Gagarin. Laura Hauer was a tree. We were the only people who dressed up, but we ate too much candy at school, typical college party in the dorm, etc.
But what you haven't heard about yet was my little jaunt to Moscow.
So. Moscow.
Oh, Moscow.
Moscow.
Okay.
Well, if you have limited knowledge about the world of Slavophiles and Russianists, you may not know that people who study Russian generally fall into categories: you're either a Petersburg/Dostoevsky person or a Moscow/Tolstoy person. In the Wellesley College Russian Department, this also means you're either a Professor Hodge (Moscow/Tolstoy) person or a Professor Weiner (Petersburg/Dostoevsky) person. My good old friend from Russian 101 back in the day, Joan, who is currently studying in Moscow, and I basically each represent each of these said categories. I'm a Petersburg/Weiner person, while she is a Moscow/Hodge person.... though we both love Tolstoy and are luke-warm about Dostoevsky, which presents a slight problem. But maybe I just haven't given Dostoevsky enough of a chance. Anyway, this distinction has always been a big deal, and always will be, in my opinion. Remember the joke the tourist information lady told Emma and I in Jurmala? "There are three countries over there: Petersburg, Moscow and Russia." This is so true. Now having been to all three -- Petersburg, general Russia (Siberia last summer) and now Moscow -- I can definitely agree with this statement.
Another thing that is often said is that Petersburg is more like Boston while Moscow is more like New York. This also appears to be true, as I -- a Boston native -- am very content in St. Petersburg, while Joan -- a New Yorker at heart even though now her family lives in... Arizona?? -- thrives in Moscow. When we met up and chatted about our experiences in our respective cities, we decided that we definitely chose the right places for each of us.
I would argue that Moscow is not like New York though. Maybe.... New York on steroids. I can't even explain it. It's the 6th largest city in the world and it's just.... insane. INSANE. The Petersburg metro has four lines (red, green, blue, yellow) and I have most of the stops memorized and have been to most of them at least once. The Moscow metro has.... eleven?? lines (light blue, dark blue, medium blue, dark green, light green, gray, orange, red, yellow, purple and the brown circle line) and there is no way even someone who has lived in the city their whole life has all the stops memorized.
I was in Moscow for a full three days and I was busy the entire time, and I feel like I did and saw nothing. Okay, not nothing, but barely anything. There is just that much to do. Moscow is the kind of city that it almost seems a waste of time to visit, you have to live there to actually see anything. It's just SO BIG. I don't think you can fully comprehend how enormous and sprawling the city is until you finally go there. Everyone had always told me Moscow was big and crazy, etc, etc, and I was like yeah, whatever, I've been to New York..... no, you just don't get it until you see it.
Moscow was also interesting because everyone tells you that it is a more "Russian" city than Petersburg. I guess you can see that in the sense it is definitely more Soviet..... the metro stops have idealistic sculptures of workers with flags and hammers and sickles and there are many, many more Soviet-style buildings and architecture. Petersburg clearly is from a different time, the time when Russia wanted so badly to be European, and in a way it seems like the Soviet era affected Petersburg less.... it kind of got stuck in time and stayed that way, or just immediately reverted back to how it used to be after the fall of the Bolsheviks. So, Moscow is definitely more Soviet in appearance, and in that sense people seem to feel it is more Russian, but I didn't get that vibe. As Petersburg is so much smaller and more "provincial" (as Bryan puts it) and fewer people speak English, it definitely feels more Russian to me, while Moscow being huge and metropolitan now feels more just like any other enormous Western city. They have a Starbucks in Moscow. Seriously. That's not very Russian in my opinion.... there are also just more little funky, hipster cafés and dives and stuff that I greatly enjoy but that could be anywhere.... London, Cambridge, Budapest.....
Just being in Moscow was an experience enough, but I did actually manage to see some cool stuff you know, in the twenty four hours each day I was busy.
On our first day there we got to check out Red Square and the big famous things there such as Lenin's masoleum and St. Basil's Cathedral. Lenin's masoleum was perhaps one of thse strangest places I have ever been to in my life. First of all, you're looking at the body of a man who died eighty-something years ago. Second of all it is lying in a glass case accented by red (???) lights that give the whole thing a haunted house feeling as the case is in the middle of a dark, dark room with black walls and the whole place smells vaguely of chlorine and reminded me of an aquarium. I was imagining something more, I don't know, stately? Majestic? Not something reminiscent of a haunted house at Disney World. And third of all, it's just so weird that he's just lying there, looking like he's only asleep in this glass case like Cinderella or something..... but our phonetics teacher told us yesterday we were lucky to see him while we could because they want to bury him in the ground soon and finally move on.
St. Basil's is the cathedral that Church of Spilled Blood in Petersburg is modeled on. You can definitely see the similarities -- mostly just on the outside appearance. The inside is crazy winding little alleys and mazes of tiny rooms. I couldn't figure out what places I had already seen and what I had yet to visit, but it's full of beautiful and ornate medevial painting and seems much more, I don't know, I guess Russian but has this Oriental/Middle Eastern feel too.... while Spilled Blood seems much more like an awkward attempt at a European cathedral on the inside with all the mosaics. I liked it though for the reason that Emma pointed out -- you can still imagine monks wanderng around in there and it working as an operating church instead of just a tourist trap.
On our first day we also went out to the former edge of the city (now just a little bit out of the center) where that famous monastery whose name I forget is located. The monsatery itself was rainy and quiet, and I liked the little museum in it a lot that had a collection of frescos and tempra paintings salvaged from various churches. Once again I really actually enjoyed looking at these thanks to my painting techniques class (thanks, Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz!) and felt like I understood and appreciated them more than before. God, everyone should take that class. It's so good. Emma and I also were rebellious and ditched the tour and wandered in the big cemetary behind the monastery where a lot of famous people are buried.... though we found none of them. Ha. Oh, well. An excuse to go back to Moscow again, I really want to see Bulgakov's grave.
We also got to wander around inside of the Kremlin. There was an organized tour but Ilana and I stopped paying attention to that pretty quickly and took photos where we pretended to be Russian girls. The two of us then wandered a little bit ourselves, but when we stepped off the marked path onto some ordinary cobblestones, three different soldiers blew their whistles at us and motioned for us to get back on the path. It wasn't a big deal, there was just something disconcerting about it and the whole place was so clean and ordered and intensely monitored that we didn't feel comfortable.... It's hard to explain.... last summer I was basically in one of the farthest removed parts of Russia, as far away from the government as you could get, and the only contact we had with government empoloyees was with those 18 year old soldiers on the railroad. Otherwise, in Bolshie Koty you could, I don't know, kill a man or something and no one would ever find out. St. Petersburg, of course, has more government control in it than Siberia. I see soliders all the time on the street here and keep my head low when I walk past police officers. But in Moscow, just on the street in general I saw more policemen and women and then in the Kremlin itself... suddenly you could feel the govermental prescense so strongly it was sort of suffocating and oppressive. It was just unsettling. So Ilana and I went to lunch early instead.
Ilana, being an expert already after spending about five days in Moscow this summer with her mom inbetween the programs, showed us all this really great market on the outskirts of the city, kind of like Moscow's version of Udelnaya.... except Udelnaya on crack. Ridiculous. RIDICULOUS. So enormous. And the people are much more aggressive about selling their shit. The market is around and in a stadium and just goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and according to Ilana we saw only maybe a quarter of it. I did finally bite the bullet and start buying some souvenirs for people and Christmas presents as I am now actually going to be home in January (oops, that was a mistake). So, some of you lucky folks have presents from Moscow. Get excited.
What else.....
Oh, we went to the circus. Oh man, the circus rocked. They had all these trained animals and crap and there was a show of TRAINED CATS that not everyone really appreciated, though I thoroughly enjoyed, though perhaps not as much as Vicky. Actually, trained cats are kind of terrible because just because they are trained doesn't mean they care. There was only little gray kitten who was clearly new to the circus and we sat and waited for it to do its trick for about eight minutes as the crazy cat lady coached him on..... There were also trained dogs who were beautiful and flawless and a jack russel terrier in a camel outfit?? (Would have made a much better Halloween costume for Gwen than the pilgrim hat, no offense, Mom.) There were also some pretty impressive acrobats and I took some pictures on the sly since technically I wasn't allowed to do so.
I also walked around the old Soviet world fair grounds at VDNKh and looked at the architecture and how the whole area has now been turned into a weird fair grounds of sort. It's really odd the whole thing.
A couple of us wanted to see Red Square at night and take pictures, but we chose to go on Monday night when Red Square was baricaded off because of the holiday on Tuesday. Apparently they were cleaning the whole square to prepare for the march of the Russian youth group, Nashi, that would take place during the holiday. But at the time we didn't know these details, so Ilana just did cartwheels outside of the gates and I took photos of that.
And and and and and AND I got to the Tretrakovskaya Gallery. This is basically the Hermitage of Moscow and is chock full of all the most famous paintings that you've seen on the covers of your Penguin Classic editions of Russian literature. I got to see that famous portrait of Dostoevsky... that famous portrait of Tolstoy.... that famous portrait of Chekov.... that portrait of a girl in a pink dress that is on the cover of my book of Chekov's short stories.... I got to see all of the most famous icons that I have studied now in a billion different classes -- Rublev's Holy Trinity, Our Lady of Vladimir, etc..... and I really enjoyed a lot of the modern stuff that they have and want to go back to a) go through the Tretakovka again (because it is just too big, I hit museum-over-saturation mode really quickly) and b) go to the new Tretkovskaya Gallery that has all the even more modern stuff that I would really freak out about. But it was really good to at least get a beginning of taste. Motiviation to go back and visit.
Plus, I got to see Joan! I'm not really sure how because I was so damn busy with all the excursions and crap, but it was so good to see her. It was nice having another Wellesley Russian department face in Russia.
So, this week, after getting back from Moscow, I've just been recovering. You know, sleeping and catching up on homework and crap.... trying to avoid the cold that almost everyone from my program now has after being together in close quarters for four nights and three days. Last night though I did meet up with Ilana, Zach and Pinski at this music café place near the Cherniskevskaya metro stop, which was fun, and it was fun to catch up with Bev Mbu and meet Stephanie Brown from Wellesley too.
Oh, I'm sorry, what? Yes, Bev and Stephanie from WELLESLEY. Who are NOT currently studying in Russia, no, no, not at all, who are currently abroad on Wellesley's program in France who just decided to go to Russia for a few days, who had checked the list of students abroad in Russia and Bev thought "Oh, I know EB! She's in Petersburg!" but then never had time to contact me, who I RAN INTO BY TOTAL ACCIDENT when I just happened to decide to leave for the jazz club on the Vasileostovskaya metro station...... yes?!? I am serious!!! LOOK, PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE:
It just blew my mind. It was kind of a hilarious situation after being in Moscow -- just speaks to how small Petersburg is in comparison, and how small the world is in general. There I was, just standing on the escalator, and I noticed a girl ahead of me in a bright yellow coat and I was like, "Oh, wow, a black person. That's the second black person I've seen in about three weeks. Oh, she looks like Bev from Wellesley. No, that can't be Bev, that makes no sense, Russia is just making you racist, E.B. -- you think all black people look alike now, that's terrible, you need to get out of this country, wait, no, that IS Bev.... wtf.....?????" And I grabbed her arm and we talked and couldn't believe it and they came to the jazz club with me for a bit, and it was just..... really insane and bizarre and then we were all sitting in this club listening to one dude on guitar play everything from Jesus Christ Superstar to I Will Survive to the theme from the Godfather and I couldn't get over how oddly the world works.
And, of course, if you know me at all, you know all too well that I have way too many photographs from all these past events so needless to say I am a wee bit behind on uploading and editing and such.... I've got the self-portrait bit up to date. And you can see my polaroid project of Ami Li with various sites around the city (think: E.B. in D.C.), and my most recent stuff from printmaking class. As for everything else, you'll need a little patience....
So. Yeah. Oh, and one last important thing. Yesterday was the 20th birthday of one of my favorite people ever. HEY, ERIN GREENE. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
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