Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Yusoprov, All Night and Nutcracker on Ice

I was going to get up early this morning and go get some last minute shopping done before I went to Finland, but accidentally said “9 o’clock” instead of “10 o’clock” (devit or decit in Russian). But it was fine since the shops were closed when I got there anyway. Today AIFS went to the Yusoprov Palace and I just met them there. This is the palace where Rasputin was ‘murdered’. The inside of this palace is beautiful. I could totally live here. Everything was tastefully done and just wonderfully beautiful. I took about 100 to 200 photos of the inside of this palace.

I say ‘murdered’ here because they tried to poison him with cyanide but he didn’t die, so they took him to the cellar and shot him three (or more) times and left him to die and went back up and partied some more. But when they came back down to check on him he had dragged himself out into the courtyard to escape so they wrapped him in a rug and threw him in the river where he drowned.

Went to a little Irish pub for lunch and had yummy cream of broccoli soup. Then went home to rest because I wanted to go out all night. It is possible to get caught in the center of the city because the metro stops running and the bridges are drawbridges which are raised every night. We left the dorms around 11:30 ish and got down into the center about an hour later. However we did not stay out because one of the guys had a headache and left, which put the other people I was in a group with in a bad mood and no one wanted to stay out. So we walk along the main street looking for a descent cab ride home before the bridges are raised. We finally find one guy who will take all 5 of us and he rushes through the city at a mad race only to be stopped at a raised bridge. I look out the window and see that the bridge time says 2:45AM as when it will be lowered again. I look at the watch and see that it is only 1:50 AM. We all start laughing at the stories we will be able to tell people when we get home. We ask the guy if he can take us back to a café so we can at least wait somewhere with hot drinks, but he says that 2:45 is the latest that they can keep the brigde open, but they usually close it around 2 ish. So we decide to wait and take kopeck bets on when it will close. Josh is the closest with 2:22 (it was 2:21). We get back to the dorms and sneak past the old snotty woman at the end of the hall. And I sleep in the extra bed in their room and go home around 9AM.

I then had to get up to go the Nutcracker on Ice at 3 pm. That was good, there were two parts: one was a different version of the nutcracker and the other was like a recital. It was good- they were all teenagers. The second half was very …interesting. Not good, but not bad, just kind of different. It consisted of a Russian folk show on ice, a circus, and freaky alien dance. But I got popcorn and all was good.

See y’all around the globe!

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