more adventures

I will soon be going to St. Petersburg, which I hope will actually live up to the hype that we have been generating here in anticipation.  Seriously, it better be cool.

I will take a bunch of pictures, I promise.

It's been a long time since I just straight up wrote some stuff on the blog.  This is probably because I really don't know what to write about.  Or what would be the interesting stuff to report on.  I'll just start rambling and hope that something is interesting:

--Битцевский Лес/Bittsevsky Forest.  I got completely sick of the city part of Moscow sometime last week and decided to have an adventure.  I hopped on the metro and rode it all the way to the boonies where, according to the map, was a fairly large forest.  I succeeding in finding said forest and proceeded to happily get lost in there for an hour or two. I also spent time reading the signposts that the (probably very few) ecologically-minded Russians who take care of the park put up.  Very informative; besides learning the Russian words for oak, tree-trunk, turf, moss, and so forth, I also learned that the ancient Slavs used to worship trees.  Kind of cool.  Also, for anyone who has read Enchantment by Orson Scott Card, I wanted very much to run into a big, old, possibly magical and/or dancing Russian bear.  I didn't meet the bear, but I did make friends with the following woodland creature:

And later on that day, I had the pleasure of finding out that about six months ago, a serial killer/maniac had been hiding out in Bittsevsky Forest for a long time until the cops finally caught him.  Fun stuff.

--I got sick.  Not really that cool, today I'm just sort of getting over it barely in time to leave for Petersburg.

--День России/Russia Day.  A cooler experience than might have been expected.  This was last Saturday.  We started out the day with a boat cruise type thing down the Moscow River.  Although sitting in the shade with the wind blowing was really nice, we didn't really see anything new.  I've been up and down most of the waterfront by now.  I didn't take a single picture.  Not needed, I promise.  After the cruise we hit up a sweet park and that's where the fun began.  We bumped into some large crowds of people celebrating the holiday.  The events were some sort of Greco-Roman type of wrestling (all these dudes were Mongolian-Turcic-Tatar type peoples, interestingly enough, from one of the ex-Soviet Socialist Republics from the old USSR probs), and the other event was pretty much your old-fashioned stick pull, except the dudes doing this event were monsters.  We're talking like Rocky IV big dudes.  Anyway, at the wrestling area, somebody talked one of the dudes in our group named Jace into entering into the competition.  Jace is a fairly burly dude, and he dominated his first opponent even though he's never had wrestling experience.  His second opponent got him to brush the ground with his hands though, which is enough to get you out.  The whole thing was as about as cultural as you could get and pretty fun to watch.

The best part of that day happened at night, buuuuut I really need to be packing for St. Petersburg, so.  

Stay tuned.  I will blog about crazy Dagistani dances while fireworks went off above Red Square when I get back from Petersburg... right before I blog about Petersburg.