Ok, so this whole blogging thing takes more time than I really want to give it, so I'll briefly go over what was supposed to be in the last post, and then catch you guys up to the present.
After seeing the Kremlin, I joined two of the people who didn't just want to head back to the dorms, and we wanted to hang around downtown until sunset (we wanted to see the Red Square at night). And so here are some of the photos from that:
This is some graffiti (duh) that is right behind the playground of a school. There is a lot more graffiti than I'm used to in MO, but I think it's more prominent on the East and West coast in the US, anyway.
This is one of the "Seven Sisters" that Stalin built. I've now seen three of the seven, but I don't know exactly what this building is for. Kind of scary (because there are seven, eerily similar looking buildings built by Stalin that you see all around Moscow), but also really cool.
Some church, with a really nice park alongside it.
This is a theater, and the show they're advertising is Ромео и Джульетта or Romeo and Juliet, which I think is fun. I'm also pretty sure those black boxes coming off the building are lamps, which could be pretty at night (although I think they're ugly in the daytime...).
This is my friend Larissa posing with the mascot for a breakfast fast-food restaurant called Му-Му (Moo-Moo). At least the mascot didn't demand 30 rubles to have a picture taken with it, like this guy did on Red Square (he was dressed in some kind of traditional church attire, I think, but he wasn't interesting enough to pay, I don't think).
Okay, that's it for that night! Officially done! [this was all on Sept 17th, 2011]
Then, last tuesday, we went to a Russian Folk Dance performance. I've been looking for videos on youtube that are similar to what we saw, but I haven't had any luck. There was a good amount of this (click to see the video, but it's where the dancer squats really low and alternates kicking one leg out in front of him... just click the link), which is what I expected going in, but they alternated between about 15 different dances representing different regions and ethnicities around Russia. I'll keep looking for a better video that represents some of the stuff I saw.
This is a picture of the theater the show was in. It was a Tuesday night, and the place sold out for a folk-dance show. I don't think that'd be the case in the U.S.
AND FINALLY! Today we went to the Tsaritsyno Palace, which is a place that never really had anybody live in it (or at least, not very many people for very long). The land was bought by Catherine the Great, who wanted her palace to be built there. She hired one of the most famous architects in Russia at the time (Vasili Bazhenov) to build the palace, but when he finished it, she didn't like it. So she had the main building torn down, and she hired another super famous Moscow architect (Matvey Kazakov) to build a different palace, but then she died before it was finished. Not it's just where a lot of brides and grooms go to get wedding photos taken.
As you can see here, there are three brides (progressively getting smaller) in one spot, and there were probably 20 brides in the park in the one hour we were there.
This is the main building of the palace, and is he building that Catharine had rebuilt. There was a fairly clear difference in the architecture in this building, and that of the others.
This is a model that they have of the original building, with the new building in the background.
After the palace, we walked across the street to a honey festival that was going on, where I bought some mead (super sweet, but what else would expect? I can tell why it was popular back in Homer's day.) It might not be the stereotypical Russian alcoholic beverage, but I've never seen it back in the states, so why not?
Lots of different kinds of honey.
Now, you're officially caught up on what I've been doing!!! Whoooooo!!!
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