Friday, January 22, 2010

ALL THE THINGS WE HAVE BEEN UP TO!!!

Please pardon our lack of entries, the internet has been screwy, and we have just been packing in so many fun and exciting things before we leave that blogging just hasn't crossed our minds. But!!! We have a spare minute now, so let us tell you all that we have been up to:

Wednesday 1/20/2010:

So, Wednesday we had our second "field trip" for class. As I told you the other day, we were supposed to go to the Mayakovsky Museum. Well, in a typical kind of fashion, when we arrived at the Mayakovsky Museum after class it was, you guessed it? Closed on Wednesdays. Fail. So we sat for a while and drank coffee in a café in the basement of the neighboring bookstore and tried to figure out our plan of action.




Maya, our guide/teacher leading these field trips, suggested we go to the Museum of Contemporary Art (not to be confused with the New Tretyakov Gallery), not that far from the Pushkinskaya/Tverskaya/Chekovskaya metro station. As in any contemporary art space there was some good art, some bad art, some thought provoking, some ludicrous. I especially liked the few photos they had there by Boris Smelov, a photographer from Petersburg whose work I much enjoyed last year. We were shocked and then horrified? confused? frightened? by an installation criticizing Muslims, where robots covered in black robes bowed and "prayed" over and over. Jessica particularly liked the collection of modern statues outside of the museum, pictured below:




After the museum, Galina and Aisling tried unsuccessfully to get tickets to the Bolshoi Theater for a second time, Jessica and Emmy went to a bookstore, and I wrote in my journal in a café near the dorms until I found out that apparently I had gotten a roommate while I was out. In typical, Russian dormitory fashion, there was no warning, just suddenly someone moved in to the extra place in my room. But it's ok because she is Italian, from Rome, speaks fluent English, has studied Russian for six years, and is generally fine as a roommate for the next.... two days.

Thursday 1/21/2010:

We had our second-to-last day of classes yesterday, followed by "business lunch" at the very same Uzbek restaurant where Jess, Asya, Galina & I went to almost two weeks ago, with all of the teachers from our program. There were more teachers than students at our lunch, that is for sure, but it was fun, the food was good, and the professors seemed to like the thank you presents we gave them -- each a different, silky scarf with colors to match their wardrobes. I personally love watching teachers interact outside of class with each other, how our music class teacher -- the youngest teacher by at least twenty years -- is treated like their young, protege, daughter, and the teasing that goes on and the pushing, always pushing, of food. Our СМИ class teacher encouraged everyone to clean our plates, and our "practical vocab" teacher, told a funny story about how Lenin once supposedly visited a school where children were eating poorly and he basically said, "Let's start a Clean Plate Club!" and from then on the children always ate everything on their plates.










Alla L'vovna also gave her "dear 5 devushek" a present of her own: she canceled our Friday classes and instead scheduled a third "field trip" -- to all go see a Russian movie together in the morning with Maya. Everyone was quite excited.

After lunch,
Jessica and Emmy went to "Vinzavod" which is a contemporary art space with a lot of funky graffiti. Galina and Aisling went to try to get student tickets for a third and final time at the Bolshoi Theater, and I went to the Mayakovsky Museum since I had been really disappointed that I hadn't been able to go the day before.

I didn't take any photos inside of the Mayakovsky Museum because you really just have to go there to fully experience it. It was designed by Tatlin with a winding, spiral shape -- four levels, leading up to the tiny room where Mayakovsky lived and finally killed himself. The spiral design makes for a very emotional build up to Mayakovksy's room, and it also really beautifully portrays the entire avant-garde and revolutionary movement, the idealism and the disappointment that went along with it.




But then, just as I was finishing up in the museum, I got a text from Aisling saying that not only had she and Galina finally found student tickets to the Bolshoi that night, but that they had THREE of them. So I went right to the Teatralnaya metro station and met up with them from a 7:00pm showing of "Carmen."

Funny story about how these student rush tickets were obtained: so Aisling and Galina went and waited in line with all the other students, in the cold, for the third time this week (bless their persistent little hearts) and apparently for Thursday night's show they gave out 40 student tickets. Galina and Aisling were numbers 41 and 42 in line. They were crushed. But then Aisling started talking to these three Russian boys who were in line in front of them, asking if they were students in Moscow, if they could go to the theater any old time, and that she was an American student and leaving tomorrow and she loves music and came all the way to Moscow just to see a show at the Bolshoi -- she may have teared up a little at this point -- and she got the Russian boys to not only give her their three tickets, but they gave them to her for FREE (they were already at the very cheap student price of 50r, but still, just look at that). So seeing "Carmen" was all the more exciting for that reason. Aisling and Galina went home to dress up, I showed up looking frazzled and messy from the museum, but we all had a good time. We had standing-room-only tickets for the first half, but a lot of Russians leave at intermission so then we got better seats where we could see everything that was going on. It was excellent.






We ended our Thursday evening feeling very pleased with ourselves.

Friday 1/22/2010:

We started off our day with a 10am showing of a Russian film, "Чёрная Молния" ("Chernaya Moliya" a.k.a. "Black Lightning"). The film was produced by Timur Bekmambetov, the director of two of my favorite modern Russian films "Night Watch" and "Day Watch" -- two dark, trippy, action films about vampires in modern day Moscow.


This film was done in a similar style: flashy, colorful, fast paced, great loud soundtrack of Russian music. It was unique though was it is the first ever Russian super hero movie, but, in typical Russian style, it blatantly and kind of tongue-in-cheek ripped off every famous super hero film of all time. The main character -- a young college student (think: Spiderman) named Dima -- receives an old Russian Volga (a Soviet car) from his father for his birthday when he really wants a fancy Mercedes to impress a girl in his class (note: commentary on Russia vs. America, criticism of capitalism, oligarchy, etc). A super villain, a wealthy new Russian, with a side kick that looked just like Willem Dafoe is trying to dig up diamonds under Moscow..... yadda yadda yadda don't want to ruin it for you, but turns out the car can fly (think: Batmobile) and so this once ordinary student (think: Spiderman, Batman) starts to fly over the city (think: Superman) and save people (think: any super hero ever). There is even a shot of Dima brooding over the city on top of a building, ripped straight from the Dark Knight, and the actors who play Dima and his lady friend look just like a Russian Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. Would you look at that.



But we all absolutely LOVED it, had a grand old time, and because it was an action film it was pretty easy to follow (save the technical lingo involving the flying car and the bad guy's diamond-digger machine). It reminded me of being in high school and getting all psyched up after seeing Spiderman or the Dark Knight with Rosie. Good times. Also, I especially loved this film because I love it when a movie takes place in a city that I can recognize (think: The Departed) and so after spending two weeks in Moscow, it was fun to see the car flying over MGU and Red Square and the romantic walks of the leads by Patriarch Pond, etc.

Post movie, we actually loved our singing class of our Russian curriculum so much that we actually asked if we could have our class today even though it was supposed to be canceled, because Aisling and I had been planning to record our songs so we could remember how they go. If you're lucky, I just might upload some sound clips to this blog. But then, you might not really want to hear that.

Then after all that, Aisling, Galina and I experienced our first really truly "Russian" day when just everything went wrong, or more just that nothing went as planned. I wanted to go on a photo walk, but by the time we got to the area I wanted to photograph, the sun had set and then we tried to go to the New Tretyakovskaya Gallery again to see the temporary exhibits, but while it had been free last time with our student IDs, all of a sudden they realized we were foreign students this time and wanted us to pay full price of 200, and then 300, rubles. So we didn't go in, fuming on principle, and just drank tea instead.

We are planning a fun final night out now though. We are napping and resting now, and then hitting up another movie -- we are planning to see "It's Complicated" dubbed in Russian, the translated title being "Simple Complications" -- and then go to a bar or two.



And then! Guess who had so much fun last weekend that she decided to come back just for a day trip to visit me again tomorrow? That's right! Carly!

So, all is good on the Moscow front. Sorry for the delayed response!

-- E.B. (with some help from Aisling & Jessica)

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