Penultimate Russia post, I think
May. 10th, 2006 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyI sort of got more haphazard about writing towards the end of my trip. I also started running out of space on my memory card.
Wednesday, April 26
We caught one of the minibus things up to the town of Pushkin, where we visited the Catherine Palace. Of all the rooms, the best and most famous is the Amber Room. We weren't allowed to take pictures in it, which is probably just as well, since pictures wouldn't do it justice.
Here's one of the other rooms, though.
You know what happened to these guys, right?
Nothing else around the palace was open, so we went back to St. Petersburg to wander. We went to the Free Arts Foundation, a collective of "non-conformist" artists, musicians, and poets founded during Perestroika. The story of the collective—emerging at first as the stifling influence of the Soviet regime was crumbling, its message changing from non-conformity to State aesthetics to non-conformity to greed and capitalism—was more interesting than most of the art itself.
As the sun set, we wandered past the Palace Square, where the military was massing in practice for the May 9th parade (and marching to the Stalinist anthem!):
to the Decembrists' Square:
to look up at the Bronze Horseman.
Quick entry tonight, as we need to wake up early tomorrow. We went to the Anna Akhmatova House. Everything else we wanted to do was closed. We spent our last night in St. Petersburg listening to a recital by a Hungarian pianist. Very good despite it not really being my thing.
[I was catching some strange Russian virus by this point, by the way, and I could barely move, let alone write.]
Wednesday, April 26
We caught one of the minibus things up to the town of Pushkin, where we visited the Catherine Palace. Of all the rooms, the best and most famous is the Amber Room. We weren't allowed to take pictures in it, which is probably just as well, since pictures wouldn't do it justice.
Here's one of the other rooms, though.
You know what happened to these guys, right?
Nothing else around the palace was open, so we went back to St. Petersburg to wander. We went to the Free Arts Foundation, a collective of "non-conformist" artists, musicians, and poets founded during Perestroika. The story of the collective—emerging at first as the stifling influence of the Soviet regime was crumbling, its message changing from non-conformity to State aesthetics to non-conformity to greed and capitalism—was more interesting than most of the art itself.
As the sun set, we wandered past the Palace Square, where the military was massing in practice for the May 9th parade (and marching to the Stalinist anthem!):
to the Decembrists' Square:
to look up at the Bronze Horseman.
Quick entry tonight, as we need to wake up early tomorrow. We went to the Anna Akhmatova House. Everything else we wanted to do was closed. We spent our last night in St. Petersburg listening to a recital by a Hungarian pianist. Very good despite it not really being my thing.
[I was catching some strange Russian virus by this point, by the way, and I could barely move, let alone write.]
