2010: A Russian Odyssey

“Hey look, it’s the sun”

Yesterday we went to Pavlovsk on our first excursion outside the St. Petersburg city limits. We caught the train in the morning at a station within ten minutes walking distance from my apartment, and the ride took about 30 minutes. The ticket was impressively cheap – only 39 rubles (a little over a dollar) for students.

The best way to describe Pavlovsk in the winter is to say it looks like the December page of a calendar. A forest full of Christmas trees (or whatever they’re actually called) leads you to a massive imperial palace on the hill:

After the palace tour a friend decided that as a child born and raised in Southern California I never got to fully experience the joys of sledding down a snowy mountain. It made me remember the time my sister and I rode down Mt. Baldy on my dad’s car mats, but besides that she was pretty much right so we rented two “vatrushki” (inner-tubes… and apparently a student ID and 600 rubles is not a good enough deposit for a plastic tube because the lady yelled at me for quite some time) and joined the crowds. In LA, kids have Disneyland, here they have the slopes of Pavlovsk – there were so many little Russian kids out and about! A lot of the slopes were safe for kids, but there was one pretty intense drop that all the adults were doing, so we eventually joined there. Connecting the two inner-tubes together and going off the huge jump there was probably not the best idea, but it was pretty fun getting several feet of air and coming in for a crash landing.

Back in Petersburg, I decided to go to my new-found Mexican restaurant (Latin American, rather) for the second night in the row. I think the waitress recognized me, maybe I can become a regular. It obviously doesn’t compare with Mexican food in California, but for Russia it is pretty impressive. They even had dancers and a live band playing Gypsy Kings in the restaurant.

After dinner we headed to a “kinoteatr” (movie theater) behind Nevskiy prospekt and watched “Voobrazharium Doktora Parnasa” (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus). It was a really good movie and insanely visual, but at the same time very confusing… I feel like it wouldn’t have made much more sense if watched in English.

Today there are no excursions planned so it’s errands time for me. My top quests for today are to buy new headphones and to somehow watch LOST!!