spud says hi

Homer wants you to know this

And he's probably right.  I bought a gorgeous Uzbek platter (I think a plov plate) (plov=the Russian world's version of rice+meat+veg+spices) from the stand that stood next to this informative and eye catching sign.  So apparently it worked.

At the other end of the former Soviet Union, the image of Ukraine in Soviet era art is often of a place of abundant agricultural riches.

This is particularly true at my metro station.  Not the severe one I showed before, but the other two options.  Since they're all by the Kiev train station, they're all dedicated to showing off the glories of Ukraine.

Up at the entrance, that means glorious mosaics of festivities and flowers.  (It also means a place too dark for me to take a good picture, unfortunately.)

In the ring line station, there are more mosaics--and, unfortunately, more darkness.

But in the radial line station, there are simply paintings that show of specific benefits of Ukraine.

Like, apparently, turnips as big as your head.

And cabbages and pumpkins of unusual size, as well.

And what would life be without dancing under Lenin banners and a statue of Bogdan Khmelnitsky?

A few more notes, some involving transport

I am, for some reason, feeling not at all like going out onto the streets today, even though it's a rather nice Sunday, and even though I also don't really feel like doing much of anything at home.  It's a dilemma.

So instead, I shall catch up on a few things I've been meaning to post.

• I find it odd the way you can take the same path over and over and then suddenly, on your fifty fifth time along that path, see something you've never noticed.  That's happened a couple times recently as I ride the bus.  On one route, I noticed a giant "snow depository," obviously not currently in use.  I noticed that the intersection where the metro station Universitet is located is also Jawaharlal Nehru Square.  And not too far down the street from that intersection, at Indira Gandhi Square, there's a statue of THE Gandhi.
• Bus stops here are often places where people put up notices.  There were interesting differences between Moscow and Iaroslavl.  Here, they're mostly for apartments.  In Iaroslavl, they were mostly for trips.
• Also, one day as I waited for a bus an older women came up and started ripping down all the notices for apartments.  I've always assumed that those were notices put up by individuals, but the next day another woman came by and started pasting up a whole bunch of notices that look like they're from individuals, but obviously aren't.
• There's a small pack of dogs (I think three) who live around this abandoned building near my apartment.  They're remarkably happy seeming for stray dogs.  They actually play with each other, and although they occasionally bark, they seem only to bark at men, never at me.  I think their happiness may have to do with the fact that there aren't too many other strays in my relatively large neighborhood, and I've seen people dropping food out their windows to the dogs, so they must do OK, as stray dogs go.  And yet they still make me sad.
• Mushrooms can grow out of tree stumps.  I knew that, I guess, but I didn't realize they could grow HUGE out of tree stumps way up above the ground.  Like, taller than me above the ground.  See?

• I'm remarkably pleased with how I've packed for this trip.  I only made one bad clothing choice ( a shirt, too, so nothing major), and I haven't had to buy much of anything.  Even my planned knitting has gone well.  The socks were perfect to work on for a train ride, as I suspected (though, admittedly, I had a hard time with them on the return trip, as for some reason the car I was in was really shaky, so I gave up and turned to sudoko [I was seated backwards, so reading was right out]).  And the lace shawl?  Well, after I frogged the first few inches because I decided I needed smaller needles, it's gone well.  I'm on tier nine (of supposedly 23 but I'm hoping for 19 with the amount of yarn I have), and it's... well, really, it kind of looks a right hot mess at the moment, as lace tends to do before being blocked.  But I did finally manage to photograph it in such a way that the pattern is at least vaguely visible.

The importance of people

I spent most of the last week in the city of Iaroslavl (Ярославль), which is a four hour train ride north and a little bit east of Moscow (here).  I went to work in the local archive for the week, and I found some interesting material there, so it was from that point of view quite a success.  Also, the people at the archive were pretty great--the woman who ran the reading room was incredibly nice, and they were able to get me my ordered materials a day early, which turned out to be the only way I was able to look though it all.  So, that part was excellent.

Otherwise, the trip made me realize the importance of the people you spend time with when it comes to your impressions of a place.

I should have been utterly thrilled with Iaroslavl.  It's an old, old city--they're getting ready to celebrate the 1000th anniversary of its founding next year.  The old center of the town is stuffed with churches.

One central square (still called Soviet Square--I actually felt like there was a lot more still remaining of old Soviet names here, and still a few prominent statues of Lenin) was dominated by the Church of Il'ia the Prophet.  Since it was under construction, the domes were the most photogenic part of the church.  Well, that's not true.  The most photogenic part of the church is inside--it's all covered with frescoes, amazing frescoes.  I found a few pictures of them here.  I went in late in the day, and a big French tour group was there too.  In one corner of a low section of the church a quartet of Russian guys serenaded the tour group.  It was actually pretty impressive, the way the four voices expanded within that space to become kind of all encompassing.

Then, within the walls of the Monastery of the Transfiguration, there was this funny combination of an old cathedral from the early 1500s with a newer (I think late 18th/early 19th c) church built right up next to it.

Just outside its walls on one side was this, the Church of the Epiphany, from the mid to late 1600s.

I thought the loveliest part of it was the tile work--the contrast of the blue and gold of the tiles (hard to see, I know) and the red of the brick is really striking.  It also reminded me of the tiles here.

If you go out of the monastery on another side, you end up on a lovely embankment along the Kotorosl river, which turns out to be also lined with churches.

Some had the same pairing of red brick and blue--well, turquoise, really--trim, like the Church of Archangel Michael.

While others continued the blue/turquoise (and the scaly domes, which I actually really like) but matched it with white, like the Church of St. Nikola.

Then, as you continue, you come to a lovely spot where the Kotorosl empties into the big river running through the city--the Volga.  This makes the fourth Volga city I've visited, and the river's a little different in each place.

There were beaches along wide stretches of both rivers, and people were really out taking advantage of them.  I saw boats and even jet skis, particularly on the quieter Kotorosl--the Volga had bigger ships on it.

I strolled along the Volga embankment a number of times, because it really was lovely.  At one point, I came upon a group of eight or ten older Russian women gathered around one of the benches.  One was sitting and playing the accordian, another sat next to her and sang, and three were dancing.  It made me smile.

(Granted, this was right by the museum "Music and Time," so they were entirely possibly there just for the tourists.)

And later that day, I realized that a movie (or something) was being filmed in a garden along the embankment--there were a bunch of men and women dressed in late 19th century garb hanging out smoking and talking.

There was even a rather gorgeous church right by where I was staying.

The Great Theodore Cathedral Church (or something like that).  It's too bad I didn't take this picture at a different time--they're doing some repair work on the towers and men were rappeling up and down them.

But over all, I found myself feeling kind of sad much of the time I was in Iaroslavl, and I think that has a lot to do with the specific place I was staying, and the specific woman I was staying with.  She was very nice, and very hospitable, to an extent, but she was also, it seemed to me, a somewhat sad woman. 

She's a friend of my landlady here in Moscow, but she's older than E--for example (and this was really interesting) she told me that she rememered both the beginning and the end of the Second World War (the anniversary of the Nazi attack on Russia, Operation Barbarossa, was on Monday).  In particular, she remembers that the news of the end of the war came at four in the morning, and that people banged on their door to shout the news, and there was shouting and crying and dancing and singing, but that since it was at four in the morning it was a little scary to a little kid.

So she's just a little less able to adapt to the new Russia, and is one who thinks of the past as better--she at one point told me that things were better "under Soviet power," and I'm sure that was quite true for her, personally, particularly because if I understood her right I think her late husband was a local party official, which under Brezhnev would probably have been quite a good thing.  Her daughter lives in Germany, and she didn't seem to do much, other than very intently watch Russian soaps in the evening (I became familiar with one in particular--Carmelita: Gypsy Passion--that was RIDICULOUS, and I say this as someone who used to wath All My Children fairly faithfully).

She also lived in an area that was such a strange place.  Her building was a Brezhnev era apartment building, finished in 1971, she told me, and a pretty decent place of its sort.  But it was in this odd neighborhood of abundant greenery, which was very nice, and...

...little old wooden houses, which I usually really like.  Here, though, there was something about the conjunction of her building, these buildings, a bunch of brand new buildings that were under construction, that combined with the local "roads"...

...which were somewhere between dirt roads and footpaths, kind of unnerved me.  I felt a little unmoored in time, somehow, particularly one evening when I came back from the archive and saw two women pushing carts piled high with hay, with rakes atop them, that could virtually have been an image of Russian women from any time in Iaroslavl's 1000 years of existence.

(Also, and I probably shouldn't write this because my mom reads this blog, but I just read on Wikipedia that this neighborhood [or possibly the neighborhood adjacent] is the most dangerous neighborhood in Iaroslavl', and is the source of its mafia; that might explain the what seemed like very many tattooed men I saw around the city... tattooed like in Eastern Promises tattooed, not that I could see their knees.)

All of this slightly off feeling might also have something to do with being short on sleep, because I didn't sleep well at all, between the even more light nights (virtually white nights, actually) and a mosquito that tormented me more by buzzing than by biting (though that, too).

But I did find myself feeling much farther away from home while I was in Iaroslavl.  Coming back to Moscow felt almost like coming home, in comparison.  And then I realize I have less than two weeks left of this trip, and am amazed.

Oh, and I knit a sock and a half, between train rides and evenings spent watching Russian soaps and then listening to podcasts and/or audiobooks.

Replicating a memory

I just finished reading the first volume of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, aka In Search of Lost Time.  I've meant to read it for ages--I bought it back when I still lived in Chicago, and it's moved from place to place, always sitting on my to-be-read shelf.  This year, when I packed up my apartment, I cast a harsh eye on that shelf, and forced myself to pick out the books that I was determined to read during the upcoming year, and to donate the remainder.  I decided that Proust (I seem only to own the first two volume) was finally going to be cracked, so it came with me to Chicago, and now the first volume, at least, to Moscow.

I'm undecided about it.  In some ways it annoyed me enormously.  I lack the patience for five page long paragraphs extolling a view, I fear.  But individual passages of description were perfect.  Take this passage:

"...what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet--still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed--with an iridescence that was not of this world.  I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like one of Shakespeare's fairies) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume."

I'm similarly both annoyed and attracted by the behaviors of the characters in the book.  They're utterly annoying--but then I recognize their behaviors in myself and am disconcerted.

And the very idea of the power of sense memory is of course brilliant.  The famous moment comes when the narrator has not simply a cup of tisane, and not simply a madeleine, but the two in combination--and that combination of flavors and textures sends him back to a childhood memory that he'd lost.

I was thinking about this tonight because one of my perpetual challenges when I come to Russia is to recapture a taste memory from my very first trip in 1992.  That was a tough year, though I was lucky to be a vegetable lover living in a small city in southern Russia--we had a good market and so I ate pretty well through much of the fall.  By December things were a little dire, but up to that point I was OK.

Better than OK, in some ways.  In the big main market there was a tiny stall--barely more than a hole in a wall--that sold only one thing:  lavash.  Not the thin lavash that seems to have made its way to the US:  big rounds of maybe inch-thick wood oven baked bread.  If I was lucky, the lavash was so fresh from the oven it was almost too hot to carry home.  I ate it with everything: peanut butter until what I'd brought from home ran out, cheese, jam, adjik, which is a spicy condiment I'd buy at the market, too, or just plain.  I adored the stuff.

And I've never quite found its equal.  I keep buying other varieties of lavash, but nothing's ever measured up to that.  Tonight I bought the lavash I've been buying (I realize, according to its packaging, that this is apparently Georgian lavash, as opposed to Caucasian or central Asian), and I heated it for a while in a pan, but though it comes close, it doesn't quite manage it.

I wonder if that stall's still there in the market in Krasnodar, or if now, 17 years later, that memory will never be exactly replicated?

And just because I can't post a post without a picture, I'll probably also never find another image as surreal as the yellow Mercedes with an angry cat painted on its side.  But that doesn't mean I won't try to capture the other semi-insane varieties of painte cars I still see here.  For example, this one was parked up at the top of Vorobevy gory last weekend.

Even crazier was the car with an image of what seemed to be a pile of snakes and skulls.  But I didn't have my camera with me for that one, so this will have to do.

Patience

When I'm doing my research, I've actually got a lot of patience.  I can spend hours combing through something looking for a few little pieces. 

But when it comes to certain other things, like long gaps between buses, or inexplicably long lines at stores, then I have a hard time with the patience thing.  Ugh.  I've had a few bad cases of transport fatigue over the last couple of days, with...

wait.

No, instead, let's think about how I today made a librarian say "Thank God."  And not sarcastically.

So, first, here's how the Lenin library works.  It's a closed stack library, so to order a book you want to look at, you fill out a little order sheet of paper, with all the normal stuff--title, author, catalog number, and your library card number.  You then hand these in to one of the women who staff your particular reading room.  I'm in reading room #1, AKA the good one, and that means that the books I order will generally be ready for me within a few hours if I so desire.

When your books have come, you pick them up from another woman.  Usually there's a separate room for this, but at the moment... something happened there, or something's going on, and half of my reading room is currently taken over by everyone's books.  Anyway, each book has its order form stuck in it, and the woman pulls out all the orders, puts them in a little folder on her desk, and then writes down the number of physical volumes I've just gotten on my "control paper."  That's something you get on entry, and on which everything you do is noted; in order to leave the library, there have to be marks that show you've turned in all the materials you've looked at.

Now, when you're done for the day you can either leave books for next time or hand them back in.  You take your stack to another woman, and say what you're doing.  The books you're handing back are easy--they usually just count the volumes, stamp your control paper, and then that's pretty much it.  But if you're leaving books, they have to sort through all your little order sheets and put them back in the right books.

Today, there was a line up to return/save books, and the librarian who was working there is one who's generally reasonably nice, but who also always seems a little stressed and overwhelmed.  And the two people before me had very complicated and/or numerous books to leave in part and to turn in in part.  So it all took a while.

And that meant that when I came up and said "I'm handing them all in" she said "Thank God."

In other news, on Sunday I went to the Andrei Sakharov museum.  It's a little thing, but with some kind of cool exhibits, and a bit of interesting public art outside.

I like this angel.

Among other things, I got a couple of great Soviet era jokes.  Are you ready?

"Armenian radio asks:
--What's most constant in the Soviet Union?
--Temporary difficulties."

and:

"The following sign appeared on the side of the artillery school's building:  Our target--communism."

Ba dum dum.

OK, no more jokes.  Instead, this piece of the Berlin Wall, with metal butterflies on it.

Even odder?  Just beyond the left edge of this picture there was a circle of youths practicing capoeira.  No, seriously.  With live percussion, even.

And, finally, although my apartment is now catless again, as Kosha's family has come back from Rome, one last picture of my little Russian cat friend.  He continued to prefer my room, to sleep on my feet, and even to fall asleep on my lap as I knit.  Aw, nice kitty.

More pretty places

I've mentioned that I walk past a monastery (well, a women's monastery, so a convent) on my way to one of my archives.  It's the Novodevichy monastery, and I must admit that I haven't been inside its walls since 1992.  I tried to go there with a visiting friend in 1998, but we tried to do that the day after a crazy storm that sped through Moscow, knocking down trees and crosses from church spires, and so the place was unexpectedly closed.

But, frankly, even just walking past the walls (and through the park) is pretty cool.  They're kind of amazing, big thick things ready to protect its inhabitants.

It's just astonishingly pleasant to walk through here in the morning.  Even on the hot days, like some of those we've had recently, in the morning the walls and towers shade the path next to the monastery, and the trees (again with the abundant trees) help out in the evening.  One of these days I'll actually stop in, too.  And I'll make it to the adjacent cemetary, which features the graves of people like Khrushchev and Yeltsin.

Speaking of which (graves, that is, not Khrushchev and Yeltsin), last week I went into another monastery, and found it an amazing place.  This was within the grounds of the Donskoi monastery, which has an old graveyard in its older section, as well as a larger modern cemetary outside its walls proper.

This might not look like such an interesting array of graves, but I had to take it because one of the low graves in the foreground of the picture is that of Prince Vladmir Odoevskii, about whom I've written an article (forthcoming this summer!).  I had no idea that he was here, and was oddly thrilled to realize it.

This grave marker I just though was beautiful.

The churches within the monastery walls were no slouches, either.  This is the "small" church.

And this is the big main church, built to house the Virgin of the Don icon.  It's been gorgeously restored on the inside, but sadly my camera battery died as I was walking around the graveyard.  This is doubly a shame because along the back wall of the monastery there are what appear to be some of the original friezes from the Christ the Savior church, which is the one that was destroyed by the Soviets and rebuilt, as seen here.

On the other hand, one of the four or five tanks parked right by the entry, within the monstery grounds?  That I got a picture of.  What the heck ever.

Palace grounds

On Sunday I went to Tsaritsyno, which is a palace complex that has a long and complicated history of being not quite finished, of fires, of all sorts of mishaps and wackiness, and which has in recent years been restored (finished, in some places) according to records including archeological ones.

So, it's a big, huge palace, in very European style, surrounded by extra palaces and extensive grounds.  The main palace is now mostly a museum that has a changing roster of exhibits; I've been told of exhibits ranging from works from the Russian Museum that aren't usually shown to one on Marlene Dietrich.  No, no idea.

A lot of the structures are in this odd brick and white stone combination (this is the descriptively named "big bridge over the ravine") which gives the whole place a pretty unified appearance, actually.

But my favorite structure was this little pavillion, beautifully restored, in the... I suppose classical style.  I like the proportions of it, and in this case, I think the guard animals are properly sized.

Plus, who can't get behind a sphinx as a guard?

The painted roof of the central section is also lovely.  And I'm oddly thrilled that I caught a bird in flight in this picture!

They've also rebuilt a number of huge greenhouses/orangeries that used to supply... well, what greenhouses supply.  These are the solid sides on the north, and then these...

are what the southern faces are like.  I walked by one of them, and could see tomatoes and cucumbers advanced well past the current season.

And, really, one of the nicest things about the place was the park--extensive forested space, which is actually a really common thing in Moscow, and one of the things I really like about the city.  At times it's overwhelmingly crowded (it is, after all, the biggest city in Europe, with a population currently estimated at something like 17 million), and on a hot day like today that can be just too much to deal with.  But there are giant expanses of forest that are really easily accessible (I took this picture literally within minutes of stepping off the metro), and though they're popular, they're also... well, just grand, and often peaceful.

In Russia, even the cat food has sour cream in it

(Down there at the bottom it notes that it includes "tasty little pillows with sour cream and vegetables.") 

How do I know this?

This is Kosha, my landlady's granddaughter's cat.  He's staying with us for the week while his family's in Rome.  He's decided that he likes my bed best, and comes in to snooze next to me while I knit in the evenings and then settles in by my feet at night.  He's also a total hooligan.  This morning he woke me up first meowing, and then later when he found a cellophane package of cat treats and brought it into my room to try to wrestle open.  At least he's cute.

It's also a strange season right now.  It's not just warm, it's hot.  But because of the poplars, it seems like it's snowing most of the time.  I mean, this shot of the popular fuzz is nothing compared to the amount that flies around in the air all the time right by my apartment.  It's insane.  (I'm also proud that when I asked E [my landlady] what kind of tree was sending out all the fuzz, I recognized the Russian word--topol' [тополь].)

I have actual pretty pictures to post, of a palace and a couple of monasteries, but instead I'm going to pose a question.

Is it just me, or is this building too big for the lions that guard it? Can't see them?  Not surprising--they're TOO SMALL.

Cute, I'll grant, but TOO SMALL.  At least for the size of the building.

Right?

Pictures from along the way

My current routine involves walking to one particular archive every morning.  To get there, I walk past a monastery and, right now more interestingly, its pond.  It's interesting at the moment because there are ducks galore hanging out there.

Every morning they're like this, lined up, sunbathing a bit.  It amuses me.  (There are also ducklings, but I haven't yet gotten a good picture of them.)

I have some new pretty pictures from today's excursion, but my camera died in the middle of being in an interesting place, which means that a) I couldn't take pictures of several cool things and b) I can't show any of the pictures I did take until the camera battery recharges.

But I do have more pictures taken from buses.

This is the giant mall "Ashan-city," just south of metro station Universitet (Университет).  Ashan is the giant grocery store / all sorts of stuff store that grounds the place.  It's actually the only reason I stop there, because it's pretty good.  But if you look at the tall post thing on the right, that lists some of the other stores that are in the mall--and some of the restaurants, too, including outlets of a chain called "Peking duck," of one called "Starlight Diner" (and that one has memories for me, because the first one was [is] in a park in the center and when I lived in Moscow in 1997-8 it was not exactly a hangout, but certainly a place I ate at more than once), and, of course, Sbarro. 

Then yesterday I took a ride up Novyi Arbat.  That's a crazy street that is lined with giant buildings spaced a ways apart, but with low commercial buildings connecting them all the way along the street.

See?  They were always commercial buildings, but they didn't always look like this. 

Or like this. 

What's funny is once you get past that stretch, there's a short break with much plainer apartment buildings, and then you cross the river. And there, one of the great Stalin buildings awaits:  the Hotel Ukraine, which is I think undergoing a huge remont, but which also still looks pretty cool.

A couple more transport stories, too:  a couple days ago I was sitting at the back of a bus, and two young guys got on.  I was too far back to see what happened, but they did something that made the driver not at all happy, because he got on the speaker and chewed them out, ending by calling them my favorite Russian epithet, хулиганы (hooligans).  And then that seemed to remind him of the existence of the speaker, because he kept on making announcements about how we were supposed to behave as bus passengers after every stop.

And then today I took a couple of trams.  One had a rather young woman driver.  At one point there was a brief stoppage on the line, and she got off the tram to see what was going on--and I could then see her footwear:  really very high heels.  Why not?

Transport stories

I've only been here a week, and already I've got a few of them.

• Yesterday three different people almost fell asleep on me in the metro--at one point the people on both sides of me were nodding in my direction.  The one who worried me was the young guy who, at 10 am, was clutching an open canned cocktail of some kind and as he nodded it nodded, also towards me.
• At a bus stop by a market, a man got annoyed with the woman in front of him in line to get on the bus.  She was a little slow because she had a lot of bags to pull up the stairs, and as she announced they were full of potatoes, and thus heavy.  Once they both got on the bus, he told her not to do that again, because "we're not in a war.  We don't need a blockade."  This then developed into a lengthy discussion in which he told her she should get a nice wheeled shopping cart like he had, and she replied that she had one, and hers was much nicer than his, but it didn't solve the problem of things being too heavy to lift up onto the bus.
• Clearly, everyday interaction with Moscow traffic does not innoculate bus drivers from being annoyed by it.  Today one driver blared his horn all the time (when he wasn't spitting audibly).  And yesterday (I think) a driver was racing so quickly during the short stretches it was possible to do so that he was forced to brake really suddenly a bunch of times.  After a particularly egregiously rocky stop, an older lady marched over to his compartment, banged on it, and yelled at him.  This then resulted in a yelling match between the two of them, while the driver was still driving.  I don't even want to think about where he was looking.
• On Sunday, I went to Ostankino on the trolleybus.  I realized that I could walk over to the nearby monastery and pick up a trolley there that would take me all the way to Ostankino through neighborhoods I was not familiar with, which is kind of why I like taking buses here--and, really, all the way to VDNKh.  What's VDNKh?  Insanity.  On the one hand, it's like the biggest boardwalk you've ever seen, with games and food vendors and little cars to rent and rides and fake tattoos and balloons and... all that stuff.  But that's all the new stuff--it's also a bunch of other things left over from Soviet times.

A fountain (not working, sadly) with dancing golden maidens representing all the republics of the former Soviet Union?  Check!

Weirdly modernist exhibition halls (this one formerly featured radio-electronics) that now feature things to buy, in strange ways?  Check!

Imposing monumental architecture meant to overwhelm the viewer with the might of the Soviet Union?  Check!

And check, again!

 

A rocketship?  What the heck, check!

While I'm at it, throngs of people, some in Sunday best, some in... not, some bright red from soaking up too much sun?  Random bursts of music blaring?  On this day, at least, a dog show, or something?  Check, check, check.  And all this a mere stone's throw from a) Ostankino, and b) a vast botanical garden.

Incidentally, I had an interesting historical/present day Russia coincidence come to mind.  On Sunday, after I walked through VDNKh and was heading toward the metro station, I noticed police chasing away a bunch of people standing on the sidewalk selling stuff (there were tons of police out on Sunday, actually; I also saw a bunch of people having their documents checked in the metro).  Anyway, today I got an archival document from 1767 about essentially the same thing--local officials were supposed to make sure that no one without the proper trading license was trading in the town square, and in this particular case they'd found three people trading improperly.  It wasn't exactly relevant to my research, but it was an interesting little thing.

A pink palace

Another one.  And part of the possessions of the same family.  You'd think one pink palace in the family would be enough, wouldn't you?

I quite like the fact that the restoration work they appear to be doing to the palace kind of makes it look like its wearing a sun hat.  Very appropriate for the day, really.

Anyway, this is the palace of Ostankino (official site), which was built primarily as to house the private theatre of Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetev.  The Sheremetevs had, through marriage and having relatively few heirs, amassed the largest fortune in Russia (measured in the number of serfs they owned, which was the norm).  I've done some work on Nikolai's son Dmitri for my current project, and was amazed to realize just how much they owned.

Nikolai Petrovich was a theatre lover (as were many others) and he cherry picked the brightest talents from among his many, many serfs, to work in his theatre.  And he fell in love with one of them, which resulted in scandal and a dashing story.

The place is quite amazing.  Basically right next to where I stood while taking this picture, there's an even older church, one built in the style of Russian baroque.

The outside of the palace is in some ways not that interesting, but the inside is kind of amazing, particularly its ceilings, as in the "Italian pavilion" above.

And they're complemented by amazing chandeliers, like this one in the theatre itself.  It'd be hard to pay attention to the stage with this above, I think.  Of course, I could test this, because they still do performances at the theatre, which I think is really cool.

The "Egyptian pavilion" is much brighter and lighter than its Italian counterpart.  I'm not sure if there's a real reason for that.  It also has four huge stoves in it (of course hidden behind all sorts of pretty things), so it was also prepared for winter.

The rear of the palace is guarded by lions.

And, in perhaps my favorite little detail, the chimneys are all topped with little metal houses.  I'm sorry, but could they be any cuter?  I don't really think so.

Many pictures, limited narrative

This is by far the least interesting metro station I can use at my stop--Kievskaia--which has three separate lines crossing.  It's the stop for the pale blue, Filëvskaia, line.  One of the others has panels of opulent mosaics depicting Ukrainian scenes, and the other has paintings depicting the same (but also has quite gaudy crystal lights, so the opulence is there).  I rather like the simplicity of this one, though, and it's the best for going to the Lenin library.

I think I may be working in this building.  I'm not sure.  The Manuscript division of the library has apparently moved here, and I plan to go on Monday to try to get in to look at some documents there.  The entrance is around back, though, which makes me suspect they'll put the non-important researchers in some random outbuilding rather than in anyplace cool.

I love this, though--they've planted pansies in the shape of classic onion domes!  I can't figure out where to stand in order to take a better picture of this.  It'd have to be in the middle of the street, which would be dangerous.  Though, come to think of it, exactly as I stopped to take this picture all the traffic was stopped for some cars to come out of the Kremlin, so I could have run out into the street.  But then again, perhaps that would have seemed like a threat to the cars zooming out of the Kremlin, so that might not have been a great choice.

On Friday I tried to go to a gathering I though might be happening, but was perhaps too early for it, and instead decided to take a scenic bus ride from Kitai-gorod to near Kievskii.  We went along the river by the Kremlin walls, so I took this from the bus.

And this one, too.

Then yesterday, as I left the Historical Library (where I had my first cinnamon roll of the year.  Man, I could eat those every day and not get tired of them.  I will resist, however, and try to make them a once a week treat) I decided to walk to the metro station at Kurskii vokzal (train station), which would take me directly home.  My path took me through a bunch of little mostly empty streets (through this area), and was really, really nice.  There were a few brand new buildings, and then a wide assortment of older ones, from this rather decrepit art nouveau (I think) building...

to even older ones, decorated with, as usual, people.  A nice day it was.  And a nice day it is.  Once some laundry's done, I feel like I should go somewhere.  Which palace with extensive grounds for strolling?  Hmmm, decisions, decisions...

Considering the quality of being that is remont

"Remont" (ремонт) means repair.  So you'll see signs for shoe repair, for example, with that word.  But particularly in the post Soviet Russian world (I think, though I'm happy to be corrected if this has longer roots) there's been a ton of "remont" meaning remodeling, too.  And that kind of remont often, it seems to me, turns into an entire state of being.

That's going on at the apartment right now.  Not inside, but outside.  According to E, the building's been undergoing remont for a year, and there's no end in sight.  There are new windows, new fancy "European" windows that do that thing where you can either swing them open along the side or just open them a little at the top.  On the one hand, this is nice, and they're well built.  On the other, that means there're no more fortochki (форточки).  The fortochka was a small window built into a larger window; it allowed a little air in to clear everything out even while most of the window (which might well have been sealed shut with a flour/water paste for the winter) to stay closed.

Now the whole building's still covered with scaffolding, which is itself covered with green netting, which made my first approach on Saturday not quite what I expected.  And they're... I don't exactly know.  They seem to be pinning some sort of insulating material all over the outside of the building.  I assume they'll then cover that up with something?  I hope??!  In any event, what this means right now, at 7:30 at night, is that this is outside my window.

Yeah, some random guy.  At least he has shoes on.  I saw other feet wearing just little gym sandals.  That does not seem safe to me, but whatever.  As a result of this, I'm currently sitting in the kitchen, because there's more light, what with me not really wanting to sit in front of an uncurtained window at the moment.

OK, now they've left, I think.  It's still brighter in the kitchen, so I'm sitting there to knit and listen to an audiobook.  But here's a picture looking down from my window.

In prettier things, I went to a concert on Tuesday night, at the Maly Zal (small hall, Малый зал) of the Conservatory.  It was called something like classics and jazz, and featured a Tchaikovsky string sextet that I actually really, really liked, and would not have guessed was Tchaikovsky, and then some Ravel and Gerswhin for piano and violin, and finishing with some improvisations by the last two performers.  It was quite enjoyable, but (putting on my classical music snob hat now) Moscow audiences have really become quite uncultured, what with the clapping after every movement of a piece and not just at the end.  Hmpf.  OK, I'll take off my snob hat now.

I got there by taking a bus from the archive to near the concert hall, because it's more pleasant than the metro during rush hour.  And as a result, I went past the new/old Christ the Savior Cathedral, which has a history worth reading about a bit, involving Soviet hubris and various unexpected results.

I took this from the bus.  It's at a big complicated square, and I had somehow never quite registered that in the one sitting part of the square (as opposed to the crazy traffic part of the square) there's still a statue of Engels.

It's interesting, there really aren't many statues of Soviet communist leaders around anymore that I can think of, other than those that are like carved into buildings or in mosaics or things like that (I could also easily just be forgetting really obvious things, and there are certainly still street names and metro stations based on Soviet leaders).  But world communist leaders are another thing, I guess, with Engels here, and I think there may still be a statue of Ho Chi Minh at the square that's still named after him.

It's like I never left

Once again, a picture of St. Basil's to start things off.  What can I say, it's insanely photogenic, and today was an insanely photogenic day, at least in part.  That sun was about to be obscured by a quick rain shower, and it was like that, on and off rain and sun, all day.  This is much better than my first day here, which was pretty much all rain all the time, except for a few short breaks.  That meant it wasn't a terribly active day, for that and for other reasons.

Today was a busy day.  I got registered--which actually turned out to be significantly easier than expected, much to my surprise.  You've always had to not only have a visa here, but also have it registered to show where you're in principle living.  That part's been difficult in the past, but now you just do it at the post office (at least, if the person with whom your staying or from whom you're renting is willing to do things legally; I'm fairly sure that not all people are).

After that I went to one archive, where I was remembered (by both the archivists, who therefore didn't make me fill out a form again, and by the guard, who asked if my pass had expired--yes, I thought, two years ago).  Then I went to the Historical Library, where I realized that I may have built up their pastries into something more than they are.  Well, it's actually probably just that I was "good" today and didn't get one of the sweet ones.  The sweet ones are where it's at.  And then, because it was pretty out, rather than taking the metro one stop and then changing lines, I decided to walk to the metro line I needed.  Conveniently, one way to do that is to walk by some amazing stuff.  First, the above--Varvarka Street (Улица Варварка), which is lined with a strange and lovely cluster of old buildings.

Some are obviously very colorful, like the churches above, but others are more staid.  This white building is the "first English consulate in Russia."  The first ambassadors from England stayed here back (I think) in the reign of Ivan the Terrible (like in Dorothy Dunnett, for those who've read her!!).  In all of these you can really see the very different way that churches (and other buildings) developed in Russia compared to the Gothic splendors of the West.  Thick, thick walls, small windows, surprisingly limited chimneys.

The reason this street is so odd isn't that there are a bunch of churches by it.  After all, it's right by the Kremlin and Red Square (my walk continued across Red Square to the metro).  It's what was right next to it.

There used to be the ENORMOUS hotel Rossiya right here, right behind the little churches.  That was the hotel that all the Western news media used to use to have their newscasters sitting in front of a window looking down on St. Basil's and the Kremlin.  It was enormous, and I always found it rather unpleasant in a whole series of ways.  Anyway, last time I was here it was in the process of being torn down.  Rather to my surprise, it seems not to be quite torn down yet, despite the fact that it was nearly gone two years ago.  And even more to my surprise, there's nothing else there.  Hmmm.  Interesting.

One of the many good things that its absence means is there are cool new views now, like of this Stalin gothic building.  I can't remember which one, but I kind of like it rising out of the flowering trees, all innocent-like.

Free time

The extra time I've had in Oak Park, necessitated by my visa issues (now resolved--it came Tuesday morning, so I'm set for my flight tomorrow), has actually been really nice.  I got to relax a bit after a very busy year (I still tend to think in academic year terms, unsurprisingly), and particularly after a pretty stressful last few weeks.  This was enforced by the fact that for the first week I didn't have access to my computer, due to having left my power cord in Toronto.  We've been reunited, but I still haven't done much work.  However, those extra ten days have let me do some things.

• I got to see a bunch of tv finales!  When I made my original plans, I didn't really think through the fact that I'd be flying away on the same day as the Lost finale.  What was I thinking?!  I'm intrigued by where a number of shows are going, and so this has been oddly nice.  I also watched the end of American Idol, which I don't usually watch regularly.  My parents, do, though, and my mother is OUTRAGED that Adam didn't win.

• I helped my mom put in her vegetable garden.  This meant:  tomatoes, herbs, eggplant, peppers, and cucumbers planted as plants, and patty pan squash, turnips and beets planted as seeds.  The turnips are already sprouting, too, which is fun.
• Rhubarb experiments!  See those huge leaves in the background there?  That's the rhubarb after I'd cut off several pounds of rhubarb stems.  When I got here and saw the plant, I told my mom about the amazingly good rhubarb sorbet I'd had a few weeks before.  She replied, "well, I have an ice cream maker."  And so we experimented, and made some remarkably good rhubarb sorbet, and some slightly less good, but still tasty, strawberry-rhubarb sorbet.  Yumminess all around, really.

• I finished my green sweater, though I have yet to block it or sew on buttons.  Still, the knitting's all done, with an improved collar, I think.  Pictures, though, will have to wait until I'm back from Russia and can block it.  After that I started one of my Russia projects--the forest path shawl, in a lovely lightly variegated alpaca lace weight yarn.

• I have tried to help broker a peace between cats.  Ziti and Sophie are actually doing remarkably well together.  My mom got Ziti a collar with a little bell, so Sophie knows when he's coming.  This actually seems to have helped a lot, and Ziti appears not even remotely phased by having this put around his head.  He scratches there a bit more than before, but hasn't tried to get it off.  The funniest thing so far to happen was a few days ago, when Sophie was sitting on my lap.  I then called out for Ziti--and she got very mad!  She whipped her head around to stare me in the eye and hissed with all her little body.  I apologized for offending her, and apparently we're now OK.  And Ziti's just a big galoot, who alternates between wanting to chase Sophie and being completely under her little paw--the second funniest thing that's happened is Sophie hissing and him immediately flopping over in submission to her will.

And... that's all I can think of at the moment, though I've done other stuff, too.  But now, repacking calls.  And tomorrow (well, Saturday, really), Moscow!