Quick Takes, errr… 13
So… it’s been a strange week and I’m feeling a bit lazy today… it’s been an interesting week this time round… delaying a nearly complete post, but allowing me to post these once again in this moment of laziness. Please do check out Jen F’s host page on Quick Takes and all the other participants’ page.
1. So, just to catch up a bit… my grandmother actually came out and visited during the school vacation. We saw quite a lot of things.. one really random one was the beauty that they decorated for New Years with here (New Years precedes and is bigger than Christmas in Russia). It’s going to seem a bit silly, but…. here’s a pic from an underground mall– stunning.
They decorated one of the giant interchanges where you can see all 2 or 3 levels beautifully.
2. We saw waaay too many things to post everything of, but we also hopped up to St. Petersburg and, having a nicer camera now than then, I did snap some more photos of the Church on Spilled Blood (Spas na Krovi) – the one you always see in photos of St.P. It’s beautiful on the outside, but the inside was completely restored over a period of decades (wow) so that visitors can now see the beautiful mosaics– every surface is simply covered with mosaic icons. Wow.
It's called the Church on Spilled Blood (or in Russian Savior on Blood) because it's the site of the assassination of Tsar Aleksandr II-- the tsar who abolished serfdom in 1861.
You can look everywhere and recognise saints and scenes telling the life of Christ. I saw and bought a Gospel of Matthew with photos of the mosaics for illustration.
3. So, about the crazy week. We’ve had a leak from the washer for a while. We got the school’s repairman out to look at it, he looked, got a new part, fixed it, and demonstrated to me it was all fine by turning it on. All is well… so the next evening I threw in a load of clothes and came back to find Lake Erie on my bathroom floor– the old leak was fine, the new leak was significantly worse. It took me an hour to mop it up. The neighbors didn’t come up to yell though so I thought I might’ve squeaked by. That’s until somebody started ringing my doorbell incessantly at ten to one in the morning (he came back Monday- must’ve been a random drunk…) Long story short, the guy came back, it’s all fine with the neighbors, and my washing machine is in pieces in the bathroom.
4. I showed up at a central school (30-40 mins from home) for an 8:30 AM class and my students didn’t… I work til 9 or 9:15 every night so I wish they’d called me… on the bright side, I read up on some news and planned my lessons for the day.
5. My roommate and I were without power for about a day… luckily we came home last night to it being back on. It was just us, which meant the building’s heat was fine, my gas stove was fine, and actually my internet was fine because it seriously comes in on an ethernet cable through a hole in my ceiling. Sometimes there are benefits to it being tightly controlled (although it being wacky right when I had scheduled a catch-up call to the States was not cool- they fixed it though). I am definitely grateful the repair guy got it going again. My roommate and I were told to look at the fusebox, but all the apartments on our floor’s fuses were grouped together, no numbers, so we just tried all of them and nothing happened…. we put them all back though, too. 
6. The evening without power was nice– my roommate and I chatted by candlelight in the kitchen and it was cozy. I was, however, glad not to be washing my clothes by hand by candlelight last night.
7. The cool thing was though a friend and I went out to a small town about 130km from Moscow by train and wandered around their kremlin (many old cities/towns have them– the word means something like fortress, maybe watchtower?). There wasn’t much there but it was nice to be out of the city. The kremlin had a small museum focused on the region’s history in general. Apparently it took quite a hit in the War– like every other area of the USSR and central Europe within Nazi reach. Here’s a pic of the Volokolamsk Kreml:
Anyway, okay, photos and stories as my pay-off… er, thank you for sticking with the blog even though I’ve been terrible about updating it. :) Hopefully I can fix that.
Thanks,
-theRosyGardener
