A Fool Who Chases a Wise Man

All my days are starting to run together and it's harder to write about one specific day anymore because I remember things I want to write about other days! One of these days, I need to write a post all about Anatoli, because he needs a whole one to himself. Someone remind me!

Today we had class again. We discussed teaching social studies in a multicultural setting. It was really interesting! I actually debated one point (surprised?) when we read a quote from a famous historian about multiculturalism. It was an excerpt from "The Disuniting of America" by Arthur Schlesinger and the full article can be found online, but my link-poster isn't working for some reason, so I'll just post the URL: http://academics.eckerd.edu/instructor/griggscm/pel/Intro_Am_Civ_00/schlesi.pdf

Basically, it questioned the motives of trying to teach a less Eurocentric history, claiming that changing the curriculum was an attempt to raise "minority self-esteem." I, frankly, thought this was farce. I think that teaching a Eurocentric history has served for hundreds of years to raise OUR cultural self-esteem at the expense of any other participants in history (EVERYONE), and to continue that way would just as wrong as changing it to be more truthful/culturally fair. Anatoli discussed the example of the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving with the class, and we talked about whether it was right or wrong to idealize Thanksgiving for elementary students. I honestly don't know how I would answer the question, but I couldn't rightfully say that it's wrong to teach the truth. Whether it's appropriate for young children to teach the whole, ugly truth is a harder question. I know one thing, though: I wish that what we were taught in elementary school WAS the truth and then we wouldn't have to discuss this question!

Sorry to bore you with the class portion of my trip, but this course isn't just a vehicle to Russia for me, it really will apply to my career, someday very soon!

So, after class, we had lunch in the cafeteria. The food is okay, not great. It's nice to get to try some traditional Russian food, but I'm sure that it still fits the "school food" mold and shouldn't be considered fine Russian cuisine (especially since it only costs 55 rubles, $2, haha). Today it was a meatball, julienned beets, and mashed potatoes. Not too bad.

Then, we went to St. Isaac's cathedral. Oh my gosh you guys, these cathedrals. I realize that I'm raving about them and it might be getting excessive, but they deserve it. Some people in our group appreciate them, but once they've seen a few, they're ready to leave. I could stay for hours! Every cathedral (3 so far), they've had to find me and tell me everyone else was ready to leave. ALL of them are so beautiful. God is SO there. It sounds cheesy and I know all the art work is man made, but it's an eerie feeling. The paintings and mosaics are so numerous. The ceilings are so high. It's so wonderfully quiet and cavernous. There's so much to see and yet only One to see. I can't describe it any better, I'm sorry. You'll just have to see it for yourself. :)

After we left St. Isaac's, we walked behind it to a smallish park where the most famous monument in Russia stands. It's called The Bronze Horseman (even though it's not made of bronze; Pushkin wrote a poem about the statue titled "The Bronze Horseman," so the name stuck). It was commissioned by Catherine the Great because she didn't like the other statue built to honor Peter The Great. It was pretty cool, he looked tall and proud, pointing forward, trampling on a snake, and standing high on a rock (that was all one piece of rock, huge!). We took some pictures, then everyone bought some ice cream (following Anatoli's example of course).

Then we walked around the side of St. Isaac's to a similarly smallish park in the front, where a statue of Tsar Nicholas I stands. Tsar Nicholas was NOT popular, and it's funny, because Russians have a rhyme (which rhymes in Russian, but not English) that says that "A Fool who chases a Wise Man is stopped by St. Isaac's" or something similar. It's like this because Nicholas I is on a horse in facing the front of the cathedral and Peter the Great is behind the cathedral facing away, so St. Isaac's is blocking the chase. When the Bulshevik's pretty much trashed all the Imperial monuments, they left this one not because they liked Nicholas I, but because the statue was so unique. It features Nicholas astride a horse that's rearing on two legs. So there are only two points of contact for the statue, making it unstable. However, the head of Nicholas I and the head of the horse are hollow, making it lighter. (The Bronze Horseman's horse is also on two legs, but the tail touches the trampled snake, making 3 points of contact).

We also saw the seed bank that Vavilov the Russian agriculturalist put together (still the largest in the world) before WWII. It was even kept and guarded during the siege of Leningrad, when over 1 MILLION people starved in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad). The scientists inside the seed bank starved trying to stop hungry people from breaking in and eating the seeds. They needed that bank because they hold many many different hybrids that can be bred with newly discovered hybrids to make even better plants. We learned about that in Ag Econ 250 this last semester, so it was really cool to see it in person so soon!

Also there was the house where Ras Putin was killed/drowned in the canal outside. I don't know much about him, but apparently he was very hard to kill. They tried to poison him with cyanide in the pastries, then they shot him with a rifle, then they hit him over the head. None of it worked, so they finally drowned him in the canal.

After our adventures with Anatoli, we took the metro two stops past our Sportivnaya to a humongous park. We will definitely go back, so I'll write about it another time. This is long enough. :)

I'm having an amazing time here, but I'm starting to miss people from home, so I would love it if you could let me know if you're still reading this blog so I know you're here with me!