Fancy

Today ended up being kind of uneventful, so that's why you'll finally find the promised post about our fearless leader, Anatoli!

We went to class and talked about procedures, methods, strategies, and techniques. It involved one awesomely long example of why we need to us primary sources as much as possible. It involved King Henry VIII of England, and how he took it on the word of his royal portraitist that his potential wide was a beauty, only to meet her and find that she was plain and elderly. We all had a good laugh over it, mostly because we were all in that goofy stage of tired where everything is hilarious.

Then we had lunch and boarded the metro to go to the Summer Gardens. On the way, we saw a hated statue of Alexander III looking pretty stout on a pretty stout horse. Then we walked through the Field of Mars, where Pail would have his troops assemble at 5 am every morning.

When we got to the gardens, they were closed for renovations. Bah. I hope we can make it back a different day, because they looked pretty from the outside!

So we went to the Siege Museum. On the way we went in a cathedral that was built to honor the Russian Naval victories. There was a prayer ceremony going on, with a priest chanting in beautiful Russian. It was really cool.

So then we made it to the Siege Museum. There was some mix up with the docents, and for a minute or two, we thought that they were going to close too! Our luck held out, though, and we went through the exhibits. There was a lot of cool equipment and a lot of sad pictures about the massive starvation. The most interesting thing for me was the propaganda that was displayed. It was SO similar to U.S. propaganda of the same time. Try even planted the equivalent of Victory Gardens, though in Leningrad it was out of sheer need of something to eat.

After the Siege Museum, we walked over on of the bridges back to our island and took a metro to Sportivnaya, of course getting ice cream on the way. Then Julie, Nicholas, Amanda, Andy, and I went to a cafe to grab some dinner. It was tasty, plus I had cheesecake. I may have had too many sweets today... Oh well! As Grandma would say, I'm on vacation! :)

Then we played cards with Andre ( fool, of course) and we taught him what the word "fancy" means. It was also quite an adventure when he described his favorite food to us, cottage cheese ("but it's not cheese! What does 'clumpy' mean? No, I promise to you it's not like cheese, it's like milk")

It's been a good day, week, and trip. It's starting to move faster now. We leave for Tallinn in only 5 days!