I've gotten out of the daily-updating habit.

Sorry if that means you're bored at work, but it gives me more time to actually do things here.

Though I don't really know what I've been doing over the past few days. A lot of walking around the city. A lot of sitting on benches watching people. Yeah, I guess mainly people watching. Some things I've seen since Monday that I was entertained by:

I saw a bride emerging out of a port-a-potty by the Church of the Spilled Blood. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but it's a tradition in St. Petersburg that when you get married you and your whole wedding party travel around the city drinking champagne and taking photographs at all the major landmarks. So seeing a bride by the Church of the Spilled Blood was not an unusual occurrence, but seeing one come out of a port-a-potty was a change. Especially with the fact that her white dress was so enormous that it exploded out when she exited the little green plastic box. I don't know how her whole dress fit in there, let alone how it remained white.

I also saw this blue VW Bug that Sasha had seen earlier and told me about. It is baby blue and built into the roof are two enormous rabbit ears and on the hood of the car a rabbit face is spray painted on. I didn't quite believe her until I saw it, moments after it sped by the bride who was still getting out of the port-a-potty. That was a weird few minutes.

And the other day I was sitting on a bench by the Bronze Horseman and across from me there was this man with a large, furry brown animal that I thought was a large dog for a while. I then began to wonder why tourists kept crowding around him and taking pictures with this animal, so I squinted and realized it was a baby bear. My bad. It was kind of upsetting as the animal was clearly drugged and his little tongue was hanging out and he looked so sad, but I kept hoping one of the many brides getting their pictures taken by the Bronze Horseman would stop to have her picture taken with the bear too. No such luck.

What else.....

Well, on Tuesday our excursion was to the Museum of Political History. That's a fucking huge museum. I mean, clearly. Russia has a lot of political history. It was one of the weirdest museums I have ever been in though because it had absolutely no logical flow to its exhibits. There was one room that contained the portrait of the czar that was slashed with soldiers' bayonets when they stormed the palace, a typewriter that Lenin once used or something, a cowboy shirt belonging to another politician, and a video camera that someone else used in the 1980s to record something important...... oh, and also a book that was given to Catherine the Great as a present...... ?!? I definitely missed the logical connection between those items. Sasha and I kind of lost it a bit by the end of the museum because we were in there for so, so, so very long and so all my pictures from Tuesday are of Sasha with various weird objects that we thought were really funny. I'll get them up soon. My favorite involves her and Stephen intently studying a suitcase.

Actually, this whole week has been full of weird museums. I also went to the State Photography Centre (not on an excursion) which is more of a three-room gallery near St. Isaac's that is really difficult to find as it is broken up amongst different buildings and on the third floor of a poorly labeled building and it has no permanent collection but a rotating exhibition kind of thing. I really liked a lot of what I saw though, especially Aleksandr Maslov and Sergey Kochetov. Examples of their work (and my favorites):
Aleksandr Maslov
Sergey Kochetov

And then today on our excursion we went to the most ridiculous place ever. It's called the Horrors of St. Petersburg and I thought it was some kind of museum about terrible things that happened in St. Petersburg but...... nope. It was basically a haunted house. In a mall. With these young kids who probably just graduated from theatre school dressed up in period costumes pretending to be pirates or characters from 'The Queen of Spades" or "The Nose" or all this stuff about Rasputin's murder...... Ahhh it was so crazy, I don't think I can do justice to it. It was all projections and fog machines and soundtracks of screaming women. The whole time I just kept thinking, "Just when I thought I couldn't have a weirder experience...."

I think I am going to have that thought a lot in my time here.