93rd birthday, amusing ourselves by watching the old women zoom down the nursing home hallways in their electric wheel-chairs, sportin' the one-armed gangsta lean while trying to run down the other women who might be competing for the one or two men in the place (my grandmother got her foot run over!). Sigh. We spent a nice Christmas in Tennessee with my family, and will be heading back to Austin for a few days before taking off for Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands next weekend. But first, I need to get caught up with the blog. Back to Moscow (cue the fog and spirit fingers)....We had to delay our departure to St. Petersburg by a few days to wait on Edward's visa
paperwork, so we passed the time by visiting the Novodevichy Convent and Cemetery, which contains the graves of Yeltsin (a large flag monument, see pic), and Prokofiev (see pic). We also tagged along with Edward to a large shopping mall near his place and the large outdoor food market where he gets his odd blue "pumpkins", and finally started getting accustomed to the Metro subway system (with gorgeous stations - see pic). Finally his paperwork came through, and we departed on the overnight Smena train to St. Petersburg, an 8-hour trip. The three of us had a 4-berth coupe to ourselves, which was nice, but the thick cigarette smoke on the train kept me up most of the night. Blech!We arrived in St. Petersburg at 6:45am, and made our way to the hotel, which of course wouldn't
let us check in yet, but after a jumbled conversation with the night security man, we were told to leave our bags in someone's room (and half expected to never see our luggage again). We then ambled down Nevsky Prospect, cold and hungry, looking for anything that might be open - the sun wouldn't rise until 10am. We finally stumbled upon a 24-hour baked potato place, and got a "unique" breakfast - here is the picture of my potato, covered with 2 cheeses, mushrooms, and pickle pieces. It actually wasn't all that bad!We killed some more time in a coffeeshop, then ventured to the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic, which documents Soviet polar exploration. As we were heading through the rooms, one of the older gold-toothed female museum employees started mysteriously following us around and started lecturing Edward (in Russian) on what is wrong with Russia today. She claimed that all the young people just want to have "sex sex sex" instead of having large families, leading to a dissipation of sexual energy, and that subliminal messages in commercials (the work of the 25th cadre) were encouraging young people to start smoking, which makes the babushkas cry. Edward frantically translated for us during the long conversation - once he got one part translated, she would come back over and start up again.It didn't make a whole lot of sense, but was probably the most interesting part of the museum visit. :)
After that lesson in Russian culture, we headed to the center of town to the Kunstkammer Museum (the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology). I, of course, wanted to see the most famous portion of the museum - Peter the Great's "natural science" collection of deformed animals and fetuses, decapitated baby heads, and children's skeletons. It did not disappoint! (see pic)
By this point it was beginning to get dark (~3pm), so we headed back to the hotel to see if
anyone had absconded with our luggage. Luckily, it was still there, and we were able to check into our 2-BR apartment, which ended up also having a party shower! (see pic) This thing had party lights, a radio, 14 shower heads, a rain shower, a massager, and a jacuzzi. Sadly though, the tap water was brown in St. Petersburg (say hello to giardia!), so the party shower mostly just went to waste. Now if only I could get one of those back to Austin...
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