Of a Saturday's Outing

A second Real Time entry for your reading pleasure.  Enjoy!

Today, we visited... a convent.  It was a really pretty convent, yes, and I did enjoy it, but at the same time, it was the type of place that I want to go investigate on my own, maybe with an English guide book, or after having looked it up on the internet.  The Novodevichy Convent was built by Ivan the Terrible, and one of Peter I sister’s was locked up there after she was involved in some sort of attempted over throw.  Sad, really, but I guess there are worse places to locked up.  At any rate, the convent was pretty, and I wish that I could have wandered around there at my own pace, or gone inside (the convent’s interior is closed to the public on weekends).
After the convent, we visited the neighboring cemetery of the same name.  It’s where a lot of really famous people are buried, from Tchaikovsky’s brother (Tchaikovsky himself is buried in St. Petersburg) to a man named Boris Yeltsin.  You might have heard of him.  He was the first president of Russia, or something equally important.  At any rate, under the guidance of Vladimir Alexeevitch, we wandered around the place, taking in the graves of various and sundry important people, and their rather impressive grave markers.  Still, while I am willing to admit that it was rather nifty to see Chekov’s grave, I wish we had spent significantly less time there, especially after my camera card decided to have full memory.  It was worth seeing, though.
Other than that, Carley and I wound up taking a long walk around the nearby pond, and got to see a statue of a mother duck and her ducklings commissioned by Nancy Reagan.  It was rather cute, and I’m glad I got to see it, but by the time we got there, I was tired and kind of cranky.  Therefore, I was not in the best spirits.  Nope.  Not at all.  I was definitely glad to be going back to the dorm.  Before we got on the metro, we stopped and got some 35 ruble (that’s about.... $1.17) ice cream that was really good.  Russian ice cream, like all European ice cream, is significantly better than it’s American counterpart.  Why Americans feel the need to make their ice cream incredibly heavy when it’s obvious that the lighter European version is so much better, I shall never know.  
At any rate, we eventually made it back to the dorm, and other than an attempt to finish off various perishable goods now that we no longer have ready access to a refrigerator.  In other words, a dinner that was more enjoyable due to company than actual content.  So Carley and I are cheap.  Deal with it.  After dinner, we settled down to enjoy Russian homework and relaxing.  Carley attempted to get an episode of Game of Thrones, which.... didn’t really work out.  Slow internet, you see.  She did manage to get ten minutes of it before concluding that the internet was much too slow to be any good for downloading huge long episodes.  Shame, that.  Oh well.
And... that’s all, really.  Just a typical Saturday.