I saw a dead cat today.

While walking from the Sportivnaya metro station to the Pushkin House. Not the best part of my day, but one of the more memorable moments. It was orange and white and lying on its side in the grass, very very wet from the rain.

More weird little museums today with Pro Arte exhibits. This week's my last chance as all the exhibits will be taken down after Sunday. So I crammed in three today before my film class.

FIRST: The Museum of Metrology near the Technologichesky Institute metro stop. This is a really odd museum as it is located inside the institute of metrology, and so you go into a security building place and need to ask to go to the museum, and naturally, of course, this went horribly wrong as I thought I had read something about it saying I needed an appointment to see the museum and the woman at the desk taking this to mean I didn't speak Russian, etc, etc. I had to wait fifteen minutes for the woman who works at the exam to come to the front desk to escort me to the museum and give me a semi-tour in English that was at about the same level as my Russian. And then there was miscommunication involving the fact that they thought I'd only studied Russian for one year and so were especially sympathetic and gave me a brochure in Russian and in English "to practice." Oy. But the museum was interesting. Once again it's one of those weird little small museums located in the old apartment of someone famous -- in this case, Mendeleev -- and it's three tiny rooms full of dusty old thermometers and such. But the Pro Arte exhibit was kind of cool. It was series of photographs taken by a St. Petersburg artist of the cement walls around the city that border the rivers so they looked like landscapes.

SECOND: I tried, once again, to go to the Pushkin House of Literature, but there was yet another conference there. I asked the woman when the conference would be over and she said, "I don't know! There are conferences every day! See, there are the people going into the conference!" So, I guess I won't get to see the Pro Arte exhibit there which was photographs by Mikki Smith, the only exhibit I actually really, really wanted to see..... but she's American so I'll probably have another chance. One day. Somewhere.

THIRD: And this time when I went to the Soil Science Museum, the door was not only unlocked but propped open. The Pro Arte exhibit there -- by another St. Petersburg artist -- didn't really grab my attention, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the soil science itself. No, really. They had these long strips of dirt samples from Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Poland -- all were different colors and varied by insane amounts. They also had a display of weird objects they've found while collecting samples -- bits of pottery, old coins, a doll's head -- and those Cow Parade cows (??? didn't get that part) and all these different dioramas, my favorite being one that showed samples of grass growing in the dirt, but in the dirt part below they set it up so it was the tunnel homes of mice.... but full of dollhouse furniture and mice doing human-like activities. Creepy and weird, and once again in a building much too old and interesting for such a quirky small museum. Sasha, you would have loved it.

And then film class tonight. Which is always great. Tonight we were talking about Evgeny Onegin by Pushkin and watched the British adaptation -- Onegin -- with Liv Tyler and Ralph Finnes. The best part was when our professor actually talked about the mTV show Room Raiders in comparison to how "Tatyana looking around in Evgeny's study is like the people in the show looking through each other's stuff and trying to figure out if they want to date the other one!" He also recited the first stanza of Evgeny Onegin by heart -- all Russian high schoolers have to memorize it apparently -- and it was great. It also ran over by about 45 minutes, but that is the one class I don't mind running over. Besides, we don't even have it next week -- we each just have a 20 minute conference about our papers.

Another busy weekend is coming up. I am busy literally all day tomorrow (11am - 8pm) and Saturday (10am - 10pm). Oy.