spud says hi

Museums of different kinds

While I was in Riga, I took a day to go out to the Latvian Open-Air Ethnographic Museum, just because.  I caught a bus just outside Old Riga, and traveled along the big main road for almost 40 minutes.  And then I found myself walking in the woods next to a lake.  It's a big site, mostly forested, but dotted here and there with wooden structures from Latvia's different regions.

It was a good time to be there, in that the trees were all changing color.  As I walked around I saw various people raking leaves, and smelled a few piles of burning leaves here and there.  The scent added something to the day.

The most dramatic structures were windmills, which were usually placed up on hills, but which would have towered over everything else even if they had been on the same level.

I loved the curve of the roof on this house. 

And I also loved the dramatic slope of this chapel roof.

Moss grew thickly on almost all of the roofs.  Apple trees were casting their apples to the ground, big palely glowing globes shining against the dark leaves.  And mushrooms popped up here and there, like these tiny white ones, or a big red capped, white stemmed one I saw later (sadly, after my camera battery had died).

Now I'm back in St. Petersburg, with one week to go.  On Friday, one archive was closed, and I had no documents waiting at the other one I sometimes go to.  I could have gone to the library, but since it was beautiful and cold out, I decided to do something different.  And so, I went here.

That's the Hermitage, seen from under the arch of the Glavnyi Shtab building across the square.

I had a realization--the last time I actually went into the Hermitage was in June 1998, when a friend (hey, RH) came to visit me.  It seemed time to rectify that situation.

The thing about the Hermitage is that the museum itself nearly overshadows the art contained within it.  The museum is located in a series of buildings.  There's the Winter Palace of the tsars itself, which is mostly left as state rooms still in all their imperial opulence and glory.  One of them, though, had a special exhibit that was enough to overshadow all that imperial opulence--gems of the Mughal empire.  You have never seen so many emeralds and pearls in one place.

But then, even a fair bit of the part that was built to be a museum is intensely ornamented.  Like, uh, this.

Or this "loggia," which is so fancy that they don't even bother to put art in to compete with it.  The only rooms that are plain are those on the third floor that contain the late 19th early 20th century French art (i.e., room after room of Matisse, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, just about all from the collections of two men, Morozov and Shchukin [huh, interesting]) and a strange set of rooms off a passageway on the second floor.  They're not marked on the map of the museum.  There are no signs pointing you to them.  But they, too, contain late 19th and early 20th century mostly French art, in this case art "removed from Germany after the war."  Or, "hidden treasures revealed."

The other thing about being in the Hermitage is that even in the plain rooms, the windows can be distracting, because the site of the museum is so amazing.

Look out one side, and you gaze over the giant palace square, with the curve of the General Staff building, and the monument to victory over Napoleon.

Look out the other, and you see the Neva river, and the spire of the Peter Paul fortress.

Even better, stay there long enough and enjoy the brilliant colors of sunset behind the Kazan' cathedral as you walk home.

Islands

St. Petersburg is made up of many, many islands (according to this site, 42), some natural, some carved out by canals and in many ways not significantly differentiated from one another.  Last weekend I went up and walked around two of them:  Kammenyi and Elagin. 

 

The trees are just starting to turn, but thanks to the ever-present water, those bits of color multiply.

Kammenyi Ostrov has dachas and a few--well, gated condos, I think.  And a lot of open space.  This was one of the more striking buildings, although also one of the more decrepit looking ones. I know it's hard to see here, what with the awkward angle of the sun, but the stairs were all moldy, and the place was pretty much on the edge of falling apart, I fear.

Elagin Island, on the other hand, has a palace.  A lovely, lovely, little palace.  (Obviously, it's only little in comparison with other palaces.)  Tsar Alexander I (victor over Napoleon!) had it built for his mother, the dowager empress Maria Feodorovona.  They appear to have had not the smoothest of relationships, in part because Maria's mother in law, Catherine the Great, took a perhaps excessive interest in the education of her grandsons.  And of course there's the fact that Maria's husband, Emperor Paul, was assassinated five years into his reign, and Alexander was put on the throne in his place.  So Alexander had some stuff to make up for, that's all I'm saying.  Well, and maybe he wanted to get his mother off into the outskirts of town, ON AN ISLAND.

The top picture showed the side of the palace that faces out to the river; this side, then, looks out onto a big wide field (which was being mowed while I was there, which made everything smell nice).

The ground floor is a series of gorgeously restored rooms that mostly open one into the next.  Every couple of rooms had an older woman sitting in a chair, serving as both guard and guide.  There were very few people there while I was there, so I had conversations with a few of them.

The woman in this room (the great oval room, which opens out to the river) felt I was spending too much time taking pictures and not enough time reading the signs informing me about the rooms.  But she apparently forgave me, and as I was leaving the room asked where I was from.  "America," I said.  "What's your nationality?" she then asked.  "Well, American..." I started.  "No... I mean... where do you come from?"  I knew what she meant (in the past I've had it phrased as "what kind of blood do you have"), so I started listing off all the countries my ancestors came from--which is a fair few, and she got tired of it after a couple.

 

The woman in this room--the dining room, which used to have a set of sixty chairs!--was charming.  She told me about the room in some detail, in particular about the chandeliers. 

"Do you see the little bells?" she asked.  At first I didn't, but they're little round things hanging from the very top circular piece of the chandelier, the piece that has the plumy bits sprouting off the top and the chains coming down below.  "Well," she said, "you know that before electricity they used candles.  And the heat from the candles would make the bells chime while people ate." 

The second floor of the palace was set up as a little museum of decorative arts.  Each room (of only a small part of the larger palace) had a different style of furniture from some part of the nineteenth century.  The craziest room was this one, which featured a "hunter's study," with heavy neo-Renaissance styled furniture all covered with forest animals.  There are bears and a rams head on the desk, bears and rabbits on the big bookcase you can kind of see behind it, and various other animals on other pieces of furniture.

 

Also slightly crazy, or at least a little unexpected?  The soundtrack to my day.  This man was sitting on the palace's portico, playing the sitar.  He clearly had permission, given that he was plugged into the palace's electric system.  I kind of wonder if he's the husband of one of the ladies inside.  Whatever the case, his music kind of floated through my visit inside the palace.  Then when I got outside, it started to be in competition with another bunch of music, coming from across the giant lawn.

These guys were playing dance music, as a bunch of couples, including quite a few couples consisting of two older women, danced happily in the autumn chill.

A few random things near where I live

Last weekend I decided to take a trip to some of the islands that are mostly parks here--but even before I made it there, there were some sort of interesting things along the way as I walked up to catch a bus.  Some were not actually all that interesting in many ways, but nonetheless struck me for various reasons.  Like, say this restaurant.

No, it's nothing terribly interesting on one level.  Except it appears to be a Western-themed steakhouse/saloon, named "Montana."  (Incidentally, on Thursday I walked past a Mexican restaurant called "La Cucaracha.")  And even weirder than that (well, maybe) is the cartoon figure the place uses.

I am, for whatever reason, always somewhat discomfited by images of animals getting ready to chow down... on themselves.

A bit further on, actually right by where I waited for a bus (for twenty minutes, since I just missed one and it was Sunday morning), there was this church, from the early 19th century.

There are actually quite a few of these small corner churches around town, but I quite liked the columns on the front of this one.  But it, too, had a rather discomfiting feature.  See those white rectangles on the side facing the camera?

I've never been terribly fond of the cherubs portrayed as just heads and wings.  Except maybe in a few paintings I've seen where the wings are rainbow colored.  But mostly, I find them slightly... well, a little creepy, to be honest.

Meanwhile, looking the other way down the street from the bus stop, there was this view, which is repeated all over St. Petersburg.  There are an amazing number of yellow stuccoed buildings with white trim, often involving columns.  Really, it's not just St. Petersburg.  Official building plans from the early nineteenth century called for buildings like this throughout Russia, so when there were fires and towns had to be rebuilt (not an uncommon thing), a lot of buildings like this one went up.

I'm going to be knitting a lot of socks

I brought a ridiculous amount of knitting with me for this trip.  All the time I was in Britain I worked on a baby blanket for twin #2 (no pictures until it's gifted, though).  But I finished off all the yarn I'd brought for it by the end of my trip (my train travel, particularly my train delay, allowed for that) and so mailed it off back home from Oxford.

Then I also brought along the lace shawl I worked on during my spring trip.  And I happily started working on that again.

But alas!

Yes, one needle is now significantly shorter than the other.  Sigh.  First, I managed to break off the very tip of the needle--and I'm still not sure how I did that.  But with the help of a nail file (a sort of frighteningly effective nail file) I resharpened the point and kept knitting.  Sadly, however, I then managed to... well, I'm also still not sure what, but apparently I knelt on it or something, and broke off a couple of inches of the needle.  While I managed to sharpen it again into a workable point, it's just too short to use comfortably.  So, bye, shawl, for now.

And that means socks.  I also brought, for reasons that made sense at the time, four different sock yarns.  This is the first I've tackled, a golden version of Malabrigo sock, which I'm knitting in the well-loved (but never before knit by me) Monkey pattern.  Except I'm knitting it toe up.  And with a short row heel (which is now done, but I don't feel like photographing it again).  And I'm using a size 00 needle.  And knitting on the bus, despite being told by one bus conductor that I was not allowed to do so.  After a day of twiddling my thumbs on the bus, I decided she was making that up, and so started knitting again.  Not a problem, apparently.

The only problem with being in Petersburg after two weeks of being a tourist in Britain is that I'm a little touristed out, and thus am not inclined to go to scenic places and take pictures.  But the benefit of being in St. Petersburg, and particularly with living in the center of town, is that it's hard to go anywhere and not find something scenic.  Like the canals, and the columned buildings, and the famed Cathedral of the Spilt Blood, built on the spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881.

I'm not sure what all those people were looking at, but it's a spot where canals and rivers come together in a confusing maze of water, streets, and bridges, girded with pastel buildings.  My bet is that it involved boats.

I didn't see the bridal couple I'm sure came out of this car, but they were probably having pictures taken either by the cathedral or in the gardens next to it.  And, man, that's a ride.  Make the car I saw covered with images from "From Dusk 'Til Dawn" pale in comparison (no, no pictures of that--it drove by, and I wouldn't have known what it was if it hadn't had "From Dusk 'Til Dawn" written out as part of the painting).

Petersburg is a funny city, in that although I think it's just lovely to walk around, even on a wet misty day like this (Saturday, of course, when the archives are closed and I don't have to work), I find it hard to capture that loveliness in pictures.

But so much of the beauty is in little things--like this building, which is ornately decorated in Russian style, but WITH DRAGONS.  DRAGONS!!!  How crazy cool is that??

And then there are even odder things, like this old church.  Its domes are gone, its brick exposed and a bit worse for the wear.  But you can see that cross put up there at the top--I was surprised to see that, because I figured this had long ago been converted to a sport center or some such thing.  But, no, even if it was, it's now been converted to an evangelical church.

There's always something in this city.

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.

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.