Some things I've been up to...

... besides writing my mid-term paper for my film class.

I went to the opera on Sunday night as part of a group excursion. We saw the opera adaptation of Pushkin's story The Queen of Spades (по-русски: Пиковая Дама). I was super excited about this initially as "The Queen of Spades" was one of my favorite things that I read last fall in Hodge's literature class and the work that I wrote my long midterm paper on. I spent hours going over that story and reading it to death and I was like, hey, an opera adaptation should be pretty cool.

Mm.... not quite. Well. Hm. Let's say they weren't exactly faithful to the story. Mainly all of scene three involved a too-long ball scene which was just an excuse for them to have a lot of dancers and an extra long song. Not only that but the dancers had to dance with these half-circle ropes of flowers but it seemed like the director had just given them to practice with maybe last week because they kept dropping the ends of the ropes or hitting each other with them while dancing. Oh, and then they had a short dance involving men in black face (black ski masks with black gloves..... um....) that was just a tad uncomfortable. And then the main guy who played Hermann who is supposed to be this young, handsome russified German was played by a short, squat old guy who sang off key. Kind of ruined my image. It got to the point though where Maneka and I just found everything funny though, so it was enjoyable in that sense. I also really liked watching the woman sitting in front of us who couldn't even be bothered to watch the opera anymore; she used her opera glasses to observe people in the balconies above us.

As for yesterday, yesterday involved me and Emma being dumb together in various ways. The most memorable incident was when we saw what we thought was snow on the grass by the Neva and were really confused, wondering if it had snowed during the night and the rest melted but it was a large big chunk, the kind that hangs around melting for months after it's already spring. We were really excited and I photographed Emma pointing to it and then in a fit of excitement I stepped in it and.... it was soap. Oops. We also saw a hydrofoil that looked like it had caught on fire sinking in the Neva across from St. Isaac's.