The First Snow! (But no pictures of it, sorry)

Today (Sunday the 14th) was the first day of snow in Moscow! Thank goodness I bought those outrageously expensive Finnish boots.

Chase and I have been working out our holiday itinerary. It is starting to look something like this: We'll begin in Prague during the middle of December and Christmas and move south to Budapest and east to Bucharest. From there we will visit Kiev, go northwest to Minsk, Belarus (if we get visas), north through the Baltic Republics, and end in Helsinki, Finland. We'll return to Moscow through St. Petersburg.

This week, our study abroad group visited the P.I. Tchaikovsky theater near Mayakovsky Street to watch the Don Cossacks dance. You probably know what the Cossack dances look like: guys with tall black wool hats, their arms crossed, crouching down on their thighs while kicking their legs out. While I was watching them spin on their heads and flip around on the stage, I realized that Cossack dancing is like break dancing.

Here, Kyle and I are standing in front of a statue of the poet, Mayakovsky.

Yesterday, I spent the day wandering around in Moscow looking for the Biological Museum. I never found it, because I lost myself in the city just looking at the buildings, parks, and the U.S. Embassy. Sometimes just walking along the streets can be like visiting a museum. Here are some pictures from my stroll:

One of the Seven Sisters: this one is the Kudrinskaya Square Building.

I'm a big fan of that building. This is the top.

The US Embassy, down Novinsky Street from the Kudrinskaya Square Building

A park in front of the stunning Patriarch Hotel.

This picture is for my Aunt Sara and Grandpa Cy: a dentist's office (Stomatologicheskaya Klinika).

I also walked around Red Square to take pictures. Here are some pictures, and a video of Red Square. It's hard to visualize what Red Square is like. You can't really appreciate it unless you've been there. I hope the video helps you to orient the buildings relative to each each other in your mind.

And the pictures of the Red Square:


The Kremlin Clock Tower

St. Basil's Cathedral


Lenin's Tomb

The "Goom"

Inside the Goom (which is a gigantic luxury mall)

The State Historical Museum (where my host sister works)

I don't want to editorialize too much, since these pictures are pretty cool on their own, but I did notice one thing. If you stand in the middle of Red Square and turn around, you see a cathedral (representing the Church), the Kremlin (representing the State), the Goom department store (representing the Market), and the State Historical Museum (representing Academia). It is kind of a neat symbolism of the Russian world, and I think that their size is a pretty good estimation of each institution's relative importance in modern Russia. State > Market > Academia > Church. Hehe, maybe not. It's pretty hare-brained, but fun to think about.