St. Pete details

So as you all know, we went to St. Petersburg this past weekend. What a whirlwind of experiences! We left around 1am Thursday night/Friday morning and it was my first time riding on a passenger train. Pretty nice, slept for the whole ride and woke when we were about a half hour outside of St. Petersburg. We were met by our tour guide then proceeded to breakfast. New food obsession: blini. They are like crepes and are awesome. You can order them with all sorts of fillings like ham and cheese, sour cream, condensed milk (my favorite), berries, chocolate, bananas, etc.

We then moved on to a tour of the city. There are many beautiful buildings in St. Petersburg. Some parts reminded me of Moscow, but there was a distinctly different vibe. I was very impressed with the number of bookstores I saw. As a whole, my impression has been that the Russian people are a very literate group and appreciate books. Tons of people read on the metro, bookstores are everywhere, there are booksellers that set up shop on the street, there just seems to be a literary air in this country. As a reading and book enthusiast, I love it. Anyway, after the tour we went and at a restaurant that one of the girls (they work for MiM and help us around town) knew from before. Some friends and I were still hungry later that evening and found a pelmeni place that looked promising. We got to try dumplings from many different countries like Uzbekistan, Russia, and Georgia.

The next day, Saturday, was spent touring the summer palace of Peter 1. This place was amazing! A bit too much gold for my tastes, but the grounds were truly impressive. Also, I got to see the Baltic Sea. Having spent most of my life not far from the ocean, it was great to be by the water again. Apparently Peter would host these parties and pull pranks on people. If you made some kind of faux pas or did something dumb/mean, he would punish you by making drink alcohol out of this monsterous cup. Apparently, some people even died from too much alchohol. Very crazy.

That night we ate at this amazing Georgian restaurant. If you can't tell, I really love trying new restaurants. So far, the best places I've eaten have been the Georgian restaurant and this one Caucasian restuarant in Moscow.

Finally, on Sunday, we toured the Hermitage. This place is very beautiful and part of it is in the winter palace. Really cool paintings, my favorites were by Renoir and Monet. Also saw some old coins, armor, weapons, sculptures, and tapestries. I remember watching this Russian movie called "Russian Ark" that was filmed at the Hermitage, so it was cool to actually be there in person. After the Hermitage, we went to the graveyard where Euler is buried. I didn't know this before getting there, but there are a bunch of other famous Russians buried there too. I saw Tchaikovsky's grave and a few others. It always amazes me to be around things that are so old. Some of these guys died in the 1700's.

The weekend was exhausting and no homework got done, but it was worth it. The train ride home was uneventful, slept the whole way. Apart from that trip, courses and homework have consumed all my waking hours. I have never been academically challenged like this before. Tomorrow, a few of us have to make our way to the International University to take the GRE subject test. There aren't many of us, but there are a few that are also applying to graduate school during our semester here. So it is nice that others will be going through the process at the same time as me.

Its time that I started getting ready to sleep (have to be at the GRE super early). Until next week!

Ryan and Yuki on the train

Arrival in St. Petersburg was a little rough.

This cool candy store. This is marzipan in different fruit shapes.

Me in front of a cathedral in St. Petersburg.

Two guys playing these awesome steel drum sounding instruments.

A great restaurant name

Two of the girls that have been helping us around Moscow
and St. Petersburg: Sima and Anya.

A little cannon by the sea

Our crew hanging out by the water

Yuki and Ryan. The winter palace is in the background

Anya, Sima, Andy, Josh, Joey, and Prince in front of a battleship.

They have canals running through the city.

More canals.

The outside of a cathedral 

Another cathedral

This crazy old dude that plays the saw with a violin bow.

A night in Petersburg.

Jacob, Ryan, Yuki, and Mitch at the pelmeni restaurant.

Me in front of this garden thing at the summer palace.

A nice fountain. Summer palace.

Summer palace fountains

More fountains

The Baltic Sea!

Beautiful gardens

Gardens

Euler's tombstone

Rimsky-Korsakov's tombstone. I like the font

Tchaikovsky's tombstone

Chris and Prince relaxing by the graves.

St. Pete beach (hahaha). I guess I got another chance.

Part of our group near the beach.

Renoir at the Hermitage

Cool ceiling

Yuki in front of a bunch of paintings

A short breather

Class is over for the day, but this is only a short breather. Tonight we leave for St. Petersburg! Most of the MiM group will be spending the next three days in Petersburg, touring the Hermitage, some museums, and checking out the cultural center of Moscow. Apparently, Euler is buried there, so maybe I'll go and pay my respects to one of the most famous guys in math. We'll be leaving sometime around midnight (a dreadful idea, if you ask me), but the train ride should take at least 8 hours, so hopefully I'll catch a decent amount of sleep.

The adventures have slowed down a bit now that school is in full swing. I've mostly spent my time studying and doing homework. Lured by some ridiculous ambitions, I thought I could handle 4 math classes and the Russian class, but Calculus on Manifolds fell by the way side. I didn't even get a chance to start the homework. But the three I'm sticking with are awesome (topology, basic algebra, and complex analysis). Topology will definitely be my favorite, but it is also the hardest. We just learned about the Covering Homotopy Property, abbreviated CHP (ahh California...).

This past Saturday, we did take a bus tour of Moscow. We got to see the Cathedral of Christ the Savior up close and we even went inside (unfortunately no pictures allowed inside). We also went to a hill where you can get a panoramic view of the city, it was really amazing. This was also my second or maybe third time going to Red Square. I got some decent pictures of St. Basil's Cathedral and some of the most interesting buildings around that we couldn't see last time because of the Military Music event.

I will post again when we get back from St. Petersburg. Hopefully with many pictures and interesting stories. Here are pics from the tour and other's that I have forgotten to upload. Note that these were all taken by Ryan. His pictures turned out better than mine.

The skyscrapers of Moscow

Cool building at Red Square

An Orthodox church near Red Square

Outside of GUM mall

Clock tower at Red Square

St. Basil's Cathedral

Ryan did some fancy work to get this panorama of St. Basil's.

The Olympic Stadium from when Russia last hosted the Summer Games

Me stuffing my face in front of St. Basil's

First week: Continued

The subtitle from the previous post comes from my faulty memory and a pretty funny mistake I made. So I discovered these pretty delicious things called pelmeni, which are little dumplings with various fillings. So far I've had meat filled ones and other ones filled with potato. They are really good with sour cream, easy to make, and seemed like a natural choice for a quick dinner especially after a long day at class or something. One day, we went to the big grocery store called Ashan to get some food. I thought "Gee, I ate a bunch of pelmeni last night, so I must need more." I did not remember the very important fact that the pelmeni I ate the night before were not mine, but in fact belonged to Joey (a fellow MiM student, don't worry I didn't steal them. We had a communal meal). So I then bought 1.5 kilos of pelmeni (1 kg = 2.2 lb). I get home and go to put them in my freezer only to discover that I still had 1.5 kilos in the freezer. I now have 3 kilos of pelmeni and have kind of gotten tired of eating them.

Anyway, as I wrote in the previous post, we went to this big concert on Saturday night and then watched fireworks. The concert was pretty awesome. They held it in front of the Bolshoi theater and had a light show on the front of the theater. They sang some songs in Russian, played some jazz song, and played some classical music. All in all, I really enjoyed it. We left the concert early (around 10pm) since the fireworks started at 10:30 and we wanted to try and get a good spot. We fell in with the crowd and proceeded to Red Square. When we finally got to a likely place, we saw some trails of smoke from some fireworks that were going off. Apparently a big building was blocking our view. Then just as we were about to leave (along with the rest of the crowd), a bunch of fireworks went off right over our heads. It was pretty awesome, but too short in my opinion. But apart from that, I liked that we were able to be here to celebrate Moscow's birthday. Here's some pictures from that night:

A shopping mall next to the Bolshoi that looked awesome at dusk.

I took multiple pictures of the Bolshoi as the lighting changed
and as it got darker.

Bolshoi again.

Some cool fireworks pictures.

Fireworks...

And more fireworks.

Earlier that day, we had gone on a walking tour of part of Moscow. Our tour guide was a math professor from IUM that dabbles in history as a hobby. But that may be the biggest understatement of all. Our tour consisted of walk 5 steps, 30 minute discussion of hundreds of years of historical stories that occurred on that spot, walk another 5 steps, rinse and repeat. I have never met someone with such an encyclopedic knowledge of history. And to top it off, this is only something he does in his spare time! It is amazing to be walking around buildings and houses that are older than the US by 100+ years.

Statue of Dostoevsky in front of the Lenin Library.

Our group taking photos of Fyodor. That's right, we're on a
first name 

Our tour guide said he had never seen this in his entire life. He said
this was some kind of presidential procession or something.

Kremlin wall and building.

An odd statue of Peter the Great that was supposed to be a statue
of Christopher Columbus.

Our tour guide, David (red hair), Mitchell (glasses), Jacob (back to us),
and Chris in the background.

Jacob's face and Yuki taking a picture.

Christ the Savior church

Another picture of Peter Columbus.

Can't remember.

A church that used to be a bakery/KGB archives.

Our group again. The professor describing the church above.

Tretyakov Gallery

Not sure what this is.

Ryan, Yuki, Jacob, Mitchell, and Joey at a restaurant
that serves food from the Caucasus region. Very good.