Live from McDonalds

There are still marshrutki here, like in Irkutsk, but they don’t make up 50% of the traffic. That would be a lot of marshrutki- there is a lot of traffic in Moscow. I wonder how much the marshrutkas cost, and who rides them, and where they go. There’s something incompatible between the neat little marshrutka system and the hugeness of Moscow. Or maybe just between my familiarity with the marshrutka system and the impossibility of being comfortable or familiar with Moscow.

Our stay in this hostel includes breakfast in the most amazing “cafe” ever, on the other side of this apartment building. They are pretty surprised at people showing up there at 9:15 in the morning; I think most of their business comes closer to midnight. It has a fabric ceiling, and hookah pipes in the window sills, and around the tables those kinds of sofas that you’re supposed to lounge on like at a Roman banquet, and trendy square dishware, and television monitors permanently playing some modern art compilation of shifting images and bizarre photographs. I am very glad we will be going back there often. Such as today, whenever my loud typing finally wakes Abby up. After our awesome breakfast we’re planning to go to the Tretyakovkaya Gallery, about which I am excited.

Someone in the hostel playing Tatu. Awesomeness. Nas ne dogonyat.

Other Middlebury Irkutsk people now having moved west: do we agree that we’ve answered the recent question of our Siberian History class, whether there is a separate culture in Siberia, as differentiated from that of European Russia? That there most certainly is?

Cont.
Went to the Tretyakovskaya Gallery yesterday. There’s something disconcerting about seeing in real life paintings you’ve seen reproductions and photographs of many times. They’re so much different with actual brushstrokes. I saw most of the paintings discussed in my Russian history class at Middlebury, and they were as huge and dramatic as expected.

I also saw lots of the icons I’ve written papers about for Hatjig, and, while I suppose I should be indignant about them all having been stolen from the churches where they should be, it’s certainly easier to be icons in a museum. And it was cool having them arranged by school and time period; I think I actually understand what people are talking about when they talk about different schools of medieval icon painting now. But all of them, all the pre-18th-century icons, were so expressive in their simple, deep colors and in some fuzziness of the edges of the forms from the way the paint was laid on the wood, and the economy of form, that going into the room with more recent icons was rather an unpleasant shock; they all seemed cheesy and garishly colored and gaudy.

But my favorite part of the museum was the Vrubel rooms. The paintings were all much more fantastical and crazed than they seemed on a computer screen, and being surrounded by all the centaurs and seraphim and prophets and Fausts and Margarets and demons was very cool. There were big, towering panels and an amazing tile fireplace from a “Gothic Study” he designed for some person of odd tastes, and two of the famous demons, but the most striking of all was this little head of Christ that was possibly the most frightening painting I’ve ever seen.

In the afternoon Abby and I went to Sparrow Hills, across the Moscow River, and walking around this “monument to nature” or something and looked out over the city. There was this amazing ski-jump structure that we looked at in disbelief for a long, long time; I still don’t know how a person would ever agree to climb onto that thing, or why the flying skiers don’t just shoot out into the river, or into the Olympic Stadium on the other side. Then we met Dennis, after a long period of confusion regarding what the heck he was talking about when he said to meet him on “the terrace,” and we walked around downtown with him. We saw people ice-skating on Patriarch Pond, where Woland (the Devil) first appears in The Master and Margarita. The wintery mix that was occurring covered the ground in what looked exactly like dippin’ dots.

Then today we went to the Kremlin. There were lots of large churches with famous icons, and the tsar cannon and the tsar bell, both very large, and the tomb of lots of tsars and tsareviches and metropolitans and patriarchs. I have decided that a good career goal would be Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. We saw an exhibit of their ecclesiastical robes, and they are the coolest things ever, all covered with embroidered and beaded icons and flowers and such. And the hat things are awesome, with metal icon things hanging down in front sometimes, and sometimes just more embroidered awesomeness, and all just very elaborate and heavy. I was very impressed, actually, to see the actual staffs and robes and things used personally by Filaret and Nikon and other patriarchs who I think of as being legendary figures of the impossibly distant past. Especially Filaret- he just belongs in operas and things. It was the same with seeing the tomb of the tsarevich Dmitri, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, who died in childhood and then had his identity assumed by every crazy Pole who pretended to the throne.