Saturday, July 5, 2008

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

Day off, wee!

Last night was a little alarming, because apparently the boys hadn’t heard that Alexandra and I were refusing to acknowledge the existence of the massive spiders outside our windows. So they came over to our room for a few minutes, and commented on them while they were here. Which makes it a lot harder to pretend they didn’t exist, especially since they noticed a few more than the ones we had already seen. So we’ve resorted to sleeping with the window closed, which leaves things stuffy, and makes my brain feel squishy and baked in the morning after sleeping in the sun. But blinky and toasty is better than eaten by spiders.

I’ve gotten used to the weird sunlight surprisingly quickly, and hardly ever have to sleep with my little masky thing on.

The restaurant right near the dorm is, get this, called “NyamNyam”. In Russian, of course. But still awesome. I’ll take a picture, in case you don’t believe me. Unfortunately, though the bliny are pretty good, we’ve eaten there thrice and they’ve gotten our orders wrong twice. The first time they completely forgot about John’s food, and turned off the grill, so he had to get something else. And then tonight they gave Alexandra and I both the wrong thing, and gave Charlie one of what we had ordered instead of the french fries he ordered. Bizarre.

Today we went on a grand adventure over to Petrogradskaya (another island, this city is actually made up of about a thousand islands). We went to the artillery museum, which was cool but epic. My baby camera only holds about 10% what everyone else’s fancy cameras hold, so I let them take the pictures of the gazillions of weapons, and I’ll get them when we are slightly more...wired. Then we went over to the Peter and Paul Fortress, which is basically a massive tourist trap. We might go back to see some of the stuff there, but for some reason it makes us all grumpy to have to pay to go into a church or cathedral. What if we urgently needed to talk to Jesus?

One really cool thing over there was that in the canal that makes Petrogradskaya an island, apparently they have speed boat races on Saturdays. Not sure about other days, but by the time we left, they’d been making the rounds four almost five hours. As weird as it is to be in the city, being able to smell the ocean sometimes makes me feel a lot better. Anyway, the boats were super fast and it looked like an awful lot of fun. I hope everyone at home is boating for me, since alas I cannot.

In other news, there really isn’t much other news. Aside from the dreams in which I was fleeing from spiders, I dreamed that we were on the airport, and I was wishing I had more time here. I’m trying to convince myself that if it was time to go now that’s how I’d feel, but I sure would like to sleep in my bed (as well as about a zillion other things). I feel like I’ve been gone a whole lot longer than a week.

(New pictures up where the pictures live!)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi lovely! It's tillie! YAY for russian disney, and also I think that nyamnyam is a fab name for any eating establishment... even if the waitstaff suck. Also, WINE AT PIZZA HAT!!! I love it! And nothing says "looking sexy" like painting yourself up in shaaaame. Booo to spiders. I mean don't get me wrong, I like spiders, but not when they're ruffling sleep. As for tourist traps preventing people for urgently speaking with Jesus... that's EXACTLY why Martin Luther tacked the "95 reasons you guys can kiss my rump" thesis to the door. He said, "damnit mang! I need to chat it up with the big J." and they said "That'll be 37.50 please". Seriously. That's exactly what happened. True story.