Catching up on all the Things I Never Did

• On Saturday, Ksyusha and I had plans to meet at 2, but I didn't have anything to do until then, so I spent a lazy morning reading and studying every now and again.  At 1:00 I set out, and stopped by a Subway on my way to meet my friend in the city center.  The sandwich cost me $5, which is expensive by Russian standards, but it tasted like home.  In general, I have found that the American restaurant chains over here (although I've only been to McDonalds and Subway) taste the same as they do in America.  There is also a Baskin-Robbins on Nevsky Prospect (the main street in the city) that I'm very eager to try before I leave - the ice cream here is positively to die for.  It must be because the milk is so much thicker here than in the States (they have no conception of "skim" milk) but the ice cream is much more creamy and thick and overall delicious.  Anyway, to move on from my food fantasies...
• First, Ksyusha and I went to the Wax Museum.  There we saw Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Elizabeth the Beautiful, and many other famous figures with exaggerated superlatives attached to their names.  However, since there were only a few rooms in the museum, the entire affair only took us about 15 minutes.  It would have been a shame to end the excursion after such a brief period, so we decided to go to another museum.  Our next stop was Kunstkamera.
• Kunstkamera is the German word for art, but the museum actually consists of Peter the Great's collection of oddities and monstrosities, created to dispel superstitions about the workings of the human body.  There were lots of preserved fetuses in jars: at different stages of development, and with lots of different mutations.  It was, to say the least, gross.  Some of the exhibits were less appalling: like the two-headed calf, or the skeleton of Peter's Giant who was just under 7' 6".  On the first floor of the museum were displays of traditional artifacts from ancient cultures all around the world: North America, Siberia, India, China... it was an odd juxtaposition.
• After we had finished at Kunstkamera, it was still only 4:00, and we hadn't had nearly enough museum for the day :P so we traipsed next door to the Zoological Museum.  This was the real highlight of the day: I love animals of all kinds.  It was fascinating to see the skeleton of the blue whale and imagine what it would be like to come upon one while swimming in the ocean.  There were also several rather mediocre exhibits, like the stuffed dogs and cats and pigeons.  There were about 20 different pigeons - I guess a city like St. Petersburg would know about that... There was also a display of insects on the second floor, and it was really interesting for us to compare which species I was familiar with from New England, and which ones Ksyusha saw regularly in Russia.  Then we visited the live insect zoo, briefly - it wasn't as exciting as it sounds.  It consisted of about 15 cages of tarantulas, cockroaches, and beetles, and one scorpion.  I have a love-hate relationship with spiders: I'm terrified of them, yet they fascinate me.  Go figure.  
• While I was still wandering around the Zoological Museum, Aryeh called me to let me know that he and his friends would be meeting in about 30 minutes to eat supper together before heading over to the opera, for which I also had tickets.  So, unfortunately, I had to cut my visit short before beholding all of the wonders of the aquarium section - I dearly hope that I will have the chance to return before I leave the city for good.  I was hurrying home when Aryeh called back to say that plans had changed and the group would just meet at the theater about 45 minutes before the start of the performance, which was a good thing, since it takes 30 minutes to get to the theater.  Nonetheless, even with the extra time, I managed to be late, in the true Mills family fashion.  (Of course, I could use as an excuse that I had to change and make my own supper, as well as the 30-minute walk, and I only had a little over an hour before the meeting time...)
• When I finally arrived at the theater (well before the performance was due to start), I found out that the ticket that I bought was in the balcony above my other friends, due to some misinformation when I was buying my tickets.  However, I was able to talk to them before the show and during both intermissions (one between each of the three acts), so it wasn't so bad.  The opera was "Eugene Onegin," based on the epic poem by Pushkin and with a score written by Tchaikovsky.  It is the classic Russian opera, just as "Swan Lake" is the classic Russian ballet.  It was beautiful - the choreography and set design was fantastic, and the singers had such incredible range.  I knew better what to look for in an opera than a ballet, so I enjoyed and appreciated this much more than I did Swan Lake.  Also, it was once again in the Mariinsky theater, which is probably the most famous theater in Russia after the Bolshoy theater in Moscow.  So it was all around a very prestigious evening.  The opera lasted four hours, so it was nearly 11:30 by the time we finally headed home.  Naturally, I went straight to bed, it being already after midnight.  :P
• On Sunday I slept in - or tried to.  I finally got up at 8:30; because of the light, I really couldn't stay in bed any longer.  I used to sleep with a pillow over my face to make it darker in my room, but it has been far too hot for that the last several weeks.  Whether because of the heat, or my busy day on Saturday, I felt tired and without energy all day.  I ended up not going to church, and I didn't even leave the apartment until 2pm, when I set out in search of lunch.  However, this turned out to be a dismal failure: the restaurant that I had my heart set on going to was closed for renovations.  Not to be deterred, I set out to find a bus that would take me to the part of town where I knew another restaurant in the same chain was located.  However, I had a horrible time finding a bus that went where I wanted it to: at every bus stop there is a sign telling which buses stop there, but not every sign shows the route of said buses.  As a result, when I finally managed to find a bus that was headed in the right direction, I had already been walking for 30 minutes.  I then proceeded to wait for another 30 minutes for the correct bus to come; by that time I could have walked to the other restaurant and back.  But, at long last, I arrived at the restaurant: only to pay more for my lunch than I expected and not enjoy it nearly as much.  It was, plain and simple, a failure.  So I consoled myself with a milkshake from McDonalds and took the metro to Peter and Paul's Fortress, where I visited the Wax Museum.  Here were, again, the Russian Czars, but also Peter I's giant, Dostoevsky, Lenin, Pushkin, and various other uppity-ups who had been imprisoned in the fortress dungeon at various points in Russia's clouded history.  
• After my miserably failed excursion, I returned home and made myself an equally dismal supper of rice with a carrot salad.  The Russian idea of a salad confuses me - they seem to think that grating one vegetable and mixing it with half a cup of mayonnaise counts as healthy.  However, the carrots are good, and I'm desperate for vegetables, so I don't complain.  
• The one redeeming factor of my Sunday was the fact that we found my host's DVD player.  Latalia had bought both Gone With The Wind and Beauty and the Beast in Russian, and this prompted me to look to see whether we could watch them.  It wasn't difficult to find the DVD player - it was in the bottom part of the TV stand, which Latalia didn't know opened.  So we watched a Disney cartoon in Russian - it was very interesting.  I understood a fair amount, but not as much as I wanted to - and for whatever reason we couldn't figure out how to make the display color, so we had to watch it in black-and-white.  (I later discovered that the DVD player was on the wrong display setting, and fixed it.)  But it was good to see something so American and childish, because I was bored and felt like doing anything but studying.  Also, it was funny to see how some of the lines in the movie were translated - my favorite song was Вы наш гост (can you guess? :])

So, my growing lethargy is probably evident in the belatedness of this blog post.  Hopefully today I can write another and catch you up a bit more, although I have to admit that my adventures have been rather fewer and farther between as of late...