Back On Subject

I know the last two blogs were unrelated to my trip to Russia. Frankly nothing interesting is going on and I'm not feeling particularly funny right now. There is something about living in a foreign country and speaking a foreign language that just sucks the funny out of you. But here is a brief update on what I've been up to.

Visited Pushkin yesterday. This was were Pushkin studied as a child and was the summer residence of the Tsars. Wheres your summer palace Gil Kerlikowske? First thing we saw was the hunting lodge part of the palace, which was underscontruction. Great example of a Craig-Zevin-Auto-Response here, "looks like we aren't supposed to go in there, wanna try to break in?" This is great statement because its clearly rhetorical, but the answer is unclear. How you might ask. Well the person responding is either going to say "yah of course" in which case it was rhetorical in that we were clearly going to, or they are going to say "obviously not" in which case they think it was a joke. Great way to feel people out and not look like a degenerate. Any who, Dasha and I obviously snuck and and got some great picture of Peter the Great's hunting lodge.

Literally this stuff was original from when he built it. Untouched at all by history. It's this type of thing that blows my mind. Knowing that I touched a chair that was built for and possibly sat in by Peter the Great. Un-fricken-believable. I've touched two chairs that I know for a fact that Stalin has sat in. I could go on for hours, but I just can't explain how much that both boggles my mind and excites me.

Everything else there is beautiful. It has gold walls, silk wall, granite walls, marble walls, and best of all amber walls. The amber-room was amazing, however it is forbidden to take photos. Dasha and I snuck one anyways. For those of you keeping track at home, thats Craig-2 Museum Babushka's-0. Rastrelli built and designed the whole and also painted much of the original wall and ceiling art. I imagine the conversations going something like this:

Builder: Oh, I like that painting a lot, where's that going?
Rastrelli: Oh that? Thats nothing, just something I painted while I was on lunch. I was bored.
Junior Architect: The room for Catherine's foot servant's daughter's shoes is still missing something, lets hang it on the ceiling in there.
Rastrelli: Yeah whatever I'm going to go find more places to put gold stuff. You figure it out.

Unfortunately much of the museum, including the Amber Room. are no longer original. During WWII ze Germans pitted the entire museum and took anything of value that wasn't taken during the Russian revolution. To this day the entire original Amber Room is missing. Some one stole an entire room out of a palace with 20 ft ceilings and has is hidden in their basement. Probably where Tupac and Osama are. Michael Jackson may be on his way there now. This theory has potential. Any ways, in a typical Russian, passive aggressive move the curators of the museum have in every room a picture of the original and then a picture of what it looked like after ze Germans looted, ransacked and pillaged it. You may have stolen our Amber, but we'll make you feel really really shitty about it for as long as possible. So there.

The Communist party spent 30 years and many millions (probably billions, and theoretically trillions depending on the exchange rate at times) rubles restoring there. The logic of restoring an icon of the old regime and wealth is beyond me but I can't say that I'm disappointed. They managed to save 80% of the original parquet floors (which is why you are force to wear footie slippers in the museum) and ceiling paintings, and through research and picture hunting they believe that most rooms appear almost exactly as they did before the war. It should be noted that while the Communists may have missed some of the big-picture ideas in life, through bureaucracy and minutia were able to get some pretty amazing things done.

that seems to be enough for now
ramble on,
craig