4-4-07

4-4-07

I don’t know why I’ve felt the compulsion to write a blog entry every day for the past few days; it’s not as though they’ve been particularly busy. Right now, Marina’s out somewhere til 11 o’clock, so I’m sitting in her big comfy chair with my laptop in my lap, flipping between the World Curling Championships on EuroSport and the big Zenit-Spartak match. Zenit’s the soccer team from St. Petersburg, Spartak is one of the two big teams from Moscow. They also played on Saturday, and Spartak won 3-1, so Zenit’s looking for revenge. Right before halftime, though, Spartak scored on a penalty kick. Apparently scuffles broke out after the last match. I’ll keep the windows open for a while and see if I hear any yelling from the match. The stadiums are on the other side of the island, but it’s really not that far. Maybe a 20 minute walk straight down Bolshoi Prospekt.

Before I found curling, I watched the end of an old episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos dubbed over in Russian. It was probably from about 1989, Bob Saget’s hair was quite wavy at the time. I would’ve found it hilarious at the time, but now all the videos seem inane. It’s even weirder when the strange, old voiceovers that Bob Saget did to “add to the humor” are dubbed over. Is this funny to Russians? I suppose the humor of a guy getting hit in the crotch bridges nations.

I went to the Ermitage today and made it to the third floor, though not without complications. I was looking on the map in my guidebook, and I knew that there should be a staircase directly to my left in a certain place. Had I stepped one more step forward, I would’ve seen the large, tourist-friendly staircase in the next room. Instead, I see this dark staircase to my left, and I see a guy in a t-shirt in jeans come up the stairs and enter the room I’m in. So I assume these are the stairs, and in my head I’m thinking, “Man, the Ermitage has some majorly crappy stairs, these are dark and dank.” Then one of the old women who sit in every room pops her head in and says (Not angrily), “Where are you going? These aren’t the tourist stairs!”

I pop back out into the room, and see the guy I had seen was actually a worker, as he’s standing in the hall holding a piece of scaffolding. I say to the woman, “Oh, I thought he was a tourist!” She finds this hilarious and goes into the other room to laughingly relate the story to one of her colleagues. Needless to say, I took different stairs back down from the third floor.

Then I was up in a room full of Picassos and my phone rings, it’s Hannah, I try to quietly answer to tell her I can’t talk. The old woman guard in this room comes up and actually wags her finger in my face. Hannah understood why I suddenly hung up. I plan on making one more visit to the Ermitage. Hannah, Marisa, and I really want to see the treasures room, where they keep lots of golden treasures given to Russia through the ages.

It snowed today for most of the day. It didn’t stick, it just made every moment outside this morning uncomfortable, and then everything while walking home muddy and unpleasant. When I was walking to the Ermitage, it’s like the Alexander Column split the sky in two: On one side—low, dark, snow clouds, and on the other—bright blue, cloudless sky. Although I suppose two days of crappy weather after two weeks of sun and warmth isn’t really much to complain about.

Oh, it looked like Zenit scored, but the ref said he was offsides. Tensions are running high on the field. The Zenit fans are actually pretty cool to see around the city, because they’re all decked out in blue, with crazy spiked hats, scarves, and flags. On Saturday, before that match, there was a big group of them coming up the escalator at the Metro, and they had a big flag out that was waving as they slowly made their way upward.

The match has about half an hour to go, barring overtime, so I’m going to wrap up this absolutely and completely pointless blog entry and devote all of my attention to the match. Or I’ll watch cartoons.