Morning time
After a late night, I barely dragged myself out of bed in time to get dressed and have breakfast before the tour guide arrived. The weather has been warmer, so at least my layering routine is slightly more brief. Though my level of exhaustion is making me just forgetful and I put my socks on before my tights and put my camera in my coat pocket, then move it to my backpack, then panic when I can’t find it. It takes a lot of effort to just get myself together.
Yusupov Palace
I met with the tour guide and we walked half an hour to Yusupov Palace. We arrived and my tour guide asked if it was ok to stop in the museum cafe for a second as she’s had too much coffee this morning and needs some juice. I say of course, and watch as she hurriedly tries to suck down a box of juice from the cafe. I tell her there’s no rush, I’m fine. She finishes her juice and as we start to walk away, I notice she has spilled out a trail of 100 ruble bills from her purse after buying the juice. I help her collect them. She is adorable.
We begin our tour of the palace and, because it is winter and “All Russians are out shopping for New Years presents”, we are the only people in the museum. Literally a museum worker is following us room by room, turning on the light in the room ahead of us and turning off the light in the room we just left. Yusupov Palace was owned by the nephew of Nikolas II. It is a very well preserved palace with tons of original furniture and decor. It’s certainly interesting to see how these people lived. But that’s not the most interesting part of Yusupov Palace. The most interesting part of Yusupov Palace is that this is where Rasputin was killed, or at least, his murder was attempted. As is well known, he was hated by the aristocrats close to the Tsar. He was a monk who claimed to have healing powers. And when the youngest Romanov child was born, Alexei, the male heir, he suffered from hemophelia. Alexandra became convinced that only Rasputin could heal her baby, and having had 4 daughters, it was very important to keep the male heir alive. So he healed her son, and in exchange, he had the ear of the Tsar. He could influence policies and make demands. Obviously, way more complicated than that, but here it is. Side note: Love that my tour guide lady was like “And Alexandra was a German princess and brought the disease with her from Germany” when telling me about hemophelia. Not, inbreeding of European royals is the problem. It’s that German blood. Pff. Anyway, a plot is hatched to kill Rasputin. The decide to invite him to Yusupov Palace under the pretense of meeting the lady of the house. But the plan is to poison him. There is a gathering of people, to make it seem legit. They are all represented by wax figures in the current palace, including Rasputin, who looks more like Charles Manson than Jafar from Alladin. They lead him to the basement, where a feast is waiting. He drinks the poisoned wine, but there is no effect. (Maybe the person who put in the poison chickened out, as he was a doctor, or maybe he had spent a lot of time in Australia.) After some time, they are getting nervous and Rasputin is becoming irritated, suspicious, so they shoot him. The doctor says he will die in 20 minutes. So they go upstairs and leave him unattended, to let him die. When they go back to the basement, he is gone. The eventually find him outside in the lawn, trying to crawl away, even with his wounds. They then shoot him again, but this time they are outdoors and the neighbors hear and the police investigate. Yusupov says he had shot a dog. That’s why there is blood in the lawn. Then they take the body and decide to throw it in the river, by cutting a hole in the ice, assuming the current would carry his body to the bay of Finland before being discovered. But the body snagged on a piece of ice not far from where it was put in. And it is quickly traced back to the murderers. Some reports even say that he died of drowning in the frozen river, not from gun shot wounds.
Because the murderers are relatives of the Tsar, they can’t be executed, so they are exiled, most of them moving to Paris. Within 6 months, the revolution takes place and the Tsar’s entire family is killed, with the exception of those in Paris. Yusupov eventually achieved fame by writing about the murder, and then was able to sue a film company for making a movie about the events in which they accuse his wife of having an affair with Rasputin. So everyone wins.
Lunch
Next, I part ways with my tour guide and go for a walk. It is around lunch time, so I decide to check out a restaurant I have a flier for. It is supposed to have a folk show 😀 I don’t assume it’s happening at lunch, but I try my luck. I pass by the Church on the Spilled Blood, where there are lots of souvenir booths, and enjoy the street market. When I arrive at the restaurant, I find out that the folk show is at 9 p.m. That will be tomorrow night I suppose. I keep walking and find my way back to a Czech restaurant I passed on my way back to the hotel yesterday. I figured, if anywhere would have good Czech food, Russia would be pretty authentic. I was wrong. So wrong. I ordered a flight of beer, which was great. Then I ordered a salad with veal cheeks, rye toasts with garlic, and fried cheese. How can you mess up fried cheese? The fried cheese obviously had come from a frozen package, and it wasn’t a nice melty stringy cheese, but a very pungeant camembert. Fried bleu cheese. mmmmm. I spend a couple of hours here, enjoying my beer collection and writing yesterday’s adventures.
Mall walking
I continued my stroll back to the hotel. There are malls and shopping centers lining the streets between here and there, so I walk inside them, staying out of the cold. There are so many stores for brands I’ve never heard of, and almost no department stores that sell multiple brands. It’s very strange that there are all of these expensive, high-end stores, but no one is shopping there. There are security guards and retail workers, idly playing on their phones as no one shops. The strangest of these experiences was the mall across the street from my hotel. Again with the Ferragamo and Hermes, but this is a 4-story mall and there are maybe 10 people shopping. I ponder how on earth the economy works here that the stores can stay open. I continue back to my hotel and again crash at like 5 p.m. It’s actually kind of nice to fall asleep just as the sun is setting anyway and then be rested for night time adventures. It’s like getting 2 days in the space of 1.
Ballet
I wake up at 6 and barely manage to drag myself out of bed to get dressed. Tonight is the night that I had purchased tickets to see the Nutcracker and then have dinner with a ballerina from the show. But I got an email early in the day saying the ballerina is ill, and we were unable to reschedule. So they said just enjoy the ballet.
I had only purchased tickets to see the ballet because it came with dinner with a ballerina. I thought, I’ve seen the Nutcracker so many times…and some of the best ballet companies in the world: New York City, San Francisco. The Nutcracker is *so cliche* <<rolls eyes at self>>. But I get up anyway and go to the concert hall. –This was not a mistake. Holy cow, what an amazing show. I mean, the dancing was obviously impeccable. The orchestra and music were great as well. But the things that set this apart from other performances: The venue is a-ma-zing. Beautiful decor everywhere and the stage is HUGE, and whatever the flooring is, it is super quiet, letting the ballerinas look like they are floating across the stage rather than clomping about. And the vertical box seating arrangement is so good for seeing a dance performance. I have never been to a theater that was vertical instead of like stadium seating. This is definitely the best way to see a ballet. First row 3rd or 4th balcony is way better than 8th row balcony.
The other thing that really sets this performance apart is the costuming. I swear if there are awards for costumes, this should win all of them. Like, I have seen this ballet before. I have seen professional, well-funded companies put it on. It is nothing like this. The party scene at the beginning…they don’t look like costumes. They look like actual reproductions of some of the royal gowns I’ve seen in museums. No detail is left out. Embroidery, accessories, just dripping with details and any one of those costumes would have given me an hour’s worth of joy to just look at and turn over and touch. I swear they must have been at least thousands of dollars each. Then comes the actual ballet. The choreography was quite interesting in that there was essentially a 1:1 supply of male dancers for every female dancer, even in the Waltz of the Flowers. And the men’s costumes…. ugh, sickeningly perfect. This one guy, he had on like pink and white striped satin pantaloons. They were just unbearably awesome. But here’s the kicker: whereas most ballet companies have the costumes for the flowers match each other, then the next scene those costumes match each other….this one had an overarching color scheme for ALL of the costumes in all scenes. So that, at the end, when they are all on stage together, it’s like a postcard. And the color they chose was this perfect blush pink, so it was all creamy golden pink tones. So luxurious and soft. And all of the fabrics were, again, clearly real, heavy fabrics. Brocades, satins, silks. It was like a bowl of cotton candy ice cream. Anyway, I wish I had photos of all of them and I wish I could just to play with them and touch them and oooogle them. But alas, I cannot. —Nevermind, I have uploaded some photos (ones other people put online, not ones I took at the ballet. I am no cretin.). Every set of dancers was in pink, from the Arabian dancers to the Spanish Flamenco dancers. And somehow it just worked.
Dinner
The ballet started at 7, but with 2 half-hour intermissions, it went until 10 p.m. Then I had a 30 minute walk back to the hotel. So I decided to grab dinner next door to the hotel in a British pub. There are no fewer than 200 British/Irish/Scottish pubs here. I went in, not expecting much, but was actually quite pleased with the beer selection and had a Kilkenny with fish’n’chips. Neither the fish nor the chips were worth commenting on, but it was nice to have warm food and cold beer. Sadly, I had carried my laptop with me and selected a bar with free wifi with the express purpose of posting some things here, but alas, I arrived at the bar and realized I had left my camera (and SD card) in the hotel and hadn’t brought the cable to connect my phone. So no photos to upload 🙁 I’m tired, so this is excusable. I wrote what I could and then walked back to the hotel, full and sleepy.
