don't forget to breathe

Every week I'm busier and busier, it's a little insane.


The week before last we went to the Opera. We saw Eugine Onegin, which some of us had actually already seen last spring in New York City, but this time the theater was smaller and we were closer to the stage so I could actually see the actor's faces. In other words, the opera was amazing. Eugine Onegin was written by Pushkin, the poet most dear to Russia. There's a saying, Пушкин - наша всё (Pushkin is our everything).
He's kind of a big deal.
Eugine Onegin is a novel written in verse, so Tchaikovsky composed music for it and voila: Opera. It is a classic tale of tragic love. So good.

Friday night we went on a walking tour around Moscow, at night. The tour was based off of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Now. I'm sure the tour would have been really really awesome, but I've never read Master and Margarita. I kind of knew what it was about, but the tour also had actors who would pop up occasionally and act out parts of the book. It was all really neat and cool, I just didn't understand. I do want to read the book, now, though.

Saturday the group met in the wee hours of the morning, aka 8 am, to catch a train to Aleksandrov. Aleksandrov was once the capital of Russia during Ivan the Terrible's reign. After a tour of the Aleksandrov Kremlin we took another train to Sergiev Posad where there's this really really big and beautiful monastery.
I'll post pictures sometime next week.

Tonight we are off to St. Petersburg! We're taking a sleeper train, which I am so very very excited about. The train leaves at 9:30 pm and arrives in Petersburg at 5:30 am. We'll also be staying in a hostel, so the group has one big room alllllll to ourselves. Should be interesting, to say the least.