The trouble with neglecting to do things is that they tend to catch up with you. And so, having neglected this blog for far too long, I now have three weeks of St. Petersburg fun to condense into one entry.
It began with a trip to the Zoological Museum or, to use Tom's more creative description, "the museum where the animals are, only the animals are dead." Whoever started this museum could surely rename himself the Noah of taxidermy as he seems to have taken it upon himself to collect at least one, if not the necessary pair, of every animal known to man. The highlight has to have been either the dogs or the pigeons, or perhaps the dung beetles... There were, of course, slightly larger and more exciting animals; lions, panthers, polar bears and an improbably large collection of mammoths, including a mummified baby, a stuffed adult with half a trunk, and numerous skeletons.
As if I hadn't had enough museums for one week, the day after our trip to the ballet (the details of which are in my article on the Bubble) I took a little trip to Vladimirskaya to visit the Dostoevsky Museum. Perhaps turning down the offer of an audio-guide to preserve my pennies (or should that be kopecks?) was a mistake, as explanatory signs in any language were distinctly lacking, but the pictures of St. Petersburg in Dostoevsky's time were very interesting. I have since done some research and discovered that in the corner of Sennaya Ploschad, where my local supermarket now stands, there used to be a huge church (the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary), which was only knocked down in the 1980s. Dostoevsky's flat (fully restored in period style, though it was turned into a communal flat under Soviet rule), was also fascinating, especially the clock on his desk which stopped the day he died. While in Vladimirskaya, I also took the opportunity to go into the cathedral there, but left quickly when I realised that, it being Sunday, it was full of head-scarfed women bowing and kissing icons.
For the next week, I did very little, other than suffering from a nasty stomach bug, and doing lots of homework so that I didn't have anything to do while my family was in St. Petersburg. They came for ten days, and we spent that time seeing as much of St. Petersburg as possible and eating a lot of Italian food (after seven weeks of bland Russian cuisine, it was nice to eat something that actually tasted like food!). I have now been to the top of St. Isaac's Cathedral, visited the Yusupov Palace where Rasputin was murdered, seen the graves of Nicholas II and his family in the Peter and Paul Fortress (and of Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky in the Tihkvin Cemetery), and marvelled at the blue mosaic interior of the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood. However, from this busy week of sightseeing, the anecdote I most want to share is from our visit to the Tihkvin Cemetery. As many of you will know, I am a cat lover, and so I was delighted to see a cat skulking outside the cemetery. When I bent to stroke it, however, I was interrupted by the woman on the gate. At first I thought that I was being discouraged from touching a stray, but then I realised that the woman was actually the cat's owner, and was showing me her two other cats, happily munching a fish dinner inside the cemetery. Pleased as I was to have some feline company, I was a little confused - who takes their cats to work with them? Especially when you work in a cemetery....
One thing that has been getting me down since the family left is Vera's constant pessimism. I honestly think that she enjoys being miserable!! Before my parents left, my dad fixed the shower curtain (the one which I pulled down in my first week here...) and it was with positive glee that she informed me last night that it had fallen down again. "I think it is bad," she told me, with a barely-concealed smirk, and then went on to lament my lack of white clothing - it apparently makes washing very difficult!! As I prefer a slightly more cheery outlook on life, I'm finding it rather difficult to avoid saying something snarky and potentially offensive in response. Or maybe she'd enjoy being offended...
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