So, my roommates are dragging their feet in getting pictures uploaded, so for now we're skipping Chapter the Sixth. Whenever they get around to giving me the photos I requested, then I'll publish the Lost Chronicles of Emily's Baltic Spring Break Adventure.
Anyway, I've only got about 34 more days here as I'm writing this, and I could not be more conflicted about how I feel. On one hand, I've missed home a lot, and have been more or less looking forward to leaving from the moment I arrived. At the same time, though, I have had a ton of fun here. I've met some awesome people, I've done stuff that none of my friends and family can say they've done (which makes me cooler than all of you, for all time hereafter :P), and now that the weather is finally starting to get really nice, I'm faced with the prospect of having to leave. And I'm kind of sad about it. I mean, I'm going to leave right before the major tourist season begins, otherwise known as the White Nights. The days are already absurdly long as it is (sun rises at about 6, sets around 9:30) and getting longer by about five minutes every 24 hours, but the fact that I'm going to leave mere WEEKS before the sun stops setting altogether for a while is just not fair!
At some point in the next month or so (actually less than that, [expletive]), I need to produce a 3000-word term paper on a topic I have not yet chosen. I have a few ideas floating around in my head, but I'm running into this very common problem of thinking up topics that sound neat, but that really don't have much written about them. My options for sources are basically Google Scholar and whatever I can access on the library's servers from here. I'll make it happen, but ugh, around this time every year I start wishing for the power to cut to a montage just to make the grueling process of paper-writing go faster.
Term papers make me sad, so it's a good thing I've got a lot of other things happening to take my mind off of it! (That's my argument. I'm sticking to it.) Last weekend we went and toured the summer palace at Pavlovsk and got a lesson on imperial history. The palace is gorgeous--so much gilding and detail. It was painstakingly restored after the Nazis bombed it during the war, with all of the beautiful ceilings recently repainted (ca. 1950). The exhibit contains some posters with photos of the room that you're standing in as it was immediately after the bombing, as well as a few examples of unrestored furniture and the like to compare the restoration to the original. The restorers have done an amazing job, replacing painted silk panels on the walls, repainting and reupholstering chairs and sofas, and generally returning the palace at Pavlovsk to its former glory for the most part. We also walked around the grounds and tried to imagine the garden as it will be in a few months, after all the plants start growing again. There are statues and paths and even a stream all throughout the garden; it's more like a large public park than anything, which isn't surprising, because the summer palace hasn't actually functioned as a residence for quite some time.
Last night, Brenda and Holly and I attended a performance of Swan Lake at the Mikhailovsky Theater. Our seats were on the highest balcony, in the front row; I've never been so close to the ceiling of a theater before, and the Mikhailovsky is gorgeous. That's a link to the search page on Flickr for "Mikhailovsky Theater," because one photo wouldn't do it justice. The performance was good; I've never really found ballet to be compelling, but it is very impressive. Even from the top of the house I could see how strong the dancers were. The costuming at this particular show was also really cool; I liked some of the dresses they had on the female dancers.
Here's a quick run-down of the story, for those less familiar with it: Odette is a princess under a spell that makes her take the form of a swan during the day. One evening, Prince Siegfried catches sight of her after she transforms into a human again, and they begin to dance together and gradually fall in love. Odette reveals that she will be freed from the spell if she finds a man who will remain faithful to her for all time, and Siegfried pledges his eternal love, inviting her to a Royal Ball so that he can choose her as his bride. At the Ball, the evil sorcerer Rothbart, who cursed Odette, shows up with his daughter Odile, who is enchanted to look just like Odette. (This part is often danced by the same ballerina who dances the part of Odette, so the avant-garde approach of the crazy director in Black Swan is not quite as avant-garde as the movie made it out to be.) In this way, Rothbart tricks Siegfried into breaking his vow, thus sentencing Odette to life as a swan forever. Normally, this ends with both Odette and Siegfried drowning themselves in the titular lake to break the spell, but apparently this particular company decided that such an ending was just too dang depressing. So, instead, Rothbart gets a wing ripped off and promptly dies in the final showdown against Siegfried, which has the intended effect of releasing Odette from the spell. Happily ever after, etc etc.
As for upcoming events, this weekend we're being taken to the Leningrad Blockade Museum. I'm not really entirely sure what to expect from that, but I will blog about it afterward. Next weekend, weather-permitting, we're going to Sergei's dacha for an end-of-course wrap-up discussion. I hope the weather holds out for us; we nearly visited Tamara's dacha for Orthodox Easter, but she canceled because of some health issues she's been having. And at the beginning of May, we have a 4-day excursion to Moscow. We're taking a train, and I'm more excited than I should be about that, but whatever! Moscow! Trains! Yeah!
The university is also offering a few excursions to Peterhof (lovely palace, lovelier fountains), Novgorod ("Old Russia"), and Kronstadt (I don't know anything about this place). They cost between 800-1100 rubles to go, and the first one to Novgorod is next weekend. I haven't decided if I want to do any of them, but I had better decide quickly because the deadline to sign up for Novgorod is tomorrow. They're just day trips, but that's still an amazing price for a guided tour and bus ride. I think Novgorod's price includes a meal. 1000p is about US$30, to give you an idea of what figures like "800 rubles" mean. I want to go to at least Peterhof, but I've got so much to do for the end of this course, and I would actually like to come back home with *some* money in the bank. Not hurting for cash right now, but I'd like it to stay that way.
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