Of Convents and Duckies

Saturday, May 26, we spent traipsing around the Novodivechy (hold me to that spelling, and it will certainly be incorrect) Convent.  It was pretty enough, I suppose, but I wasn’t a huge fan.  It has some lovely history attached to it, though.  Peter the Great locked his sister up there after she participated in some sort of rebellion against him.  If I remember correctly, it was built by Ivan the Terrible.  I have to admit, I find it rather ironic that a Tsar dubbed  the Terrible was responsible for the creation for so many holy sites.  Just have to point it out.  At any rate, the interior of the convent was closed to visitors because it was the weekend, so we just looked at the exterior.  As I said, the buildings were very pretty, but nothing spectacular.  I don’t have very many photos, more because the convent is one of the (many) sights that forces you to buy a camera ticket in order to legally take photos or shoot video.  That is not to say that we haven’t occasionally, errrr.... fudged that particular rule, but I didn’t really see much point in doing so for the convent.
After the convent, we went to the attached cemetery.  Now, this one was more interesting, as the cemetery is one of the more famous ones in Moscow, harboring the decaying forms of people such as Chekov, Yuri Gagarin, and what was that guy’s name again?  Boris Yeltsin, or something?  Maybe you’ve heard of them.  It was interesting.... for a while.  Then the parade of gravestones got to be just a tad bit... repetitive.  In other words, you can only go for so long staring at tombstones, no matter how impressive they are, until you start wanting to smash them, because it’s so boring, and your feet hurt so much.  It gets even worse when your camera card fills up- then you have nothing to distract you from the boringness of it all.  That is, of course, the problem with guided tours- you have to stay with your group, and you cannot jump ship as you so long to do when you feel the time is right.  Still, several of the gravestones were seriously impressive, so it wasn’t a complete waste.
After the cemetery, the group split up.  Carley and I headed around a nearby lake in search of a statue funded by Nancy Reagan.  You see, there are a lot of ducks on that lake (ok, so I think it’s more of a pond, but everyone else called it a lake, and who am I to question popular opinion?), and they contributed to some sort of good mood in Mrs. Reagan during her visit to Moscow with her husband.  Thus, she commissioned a statue in honor of the duckies.  It’s a mother duck followed by a small army of ducklings (with a military sense of discipline, apparently, as they’re all in a straight line).  The statue is quite adorable, really.  
And.... that’s all really.  We went back to the dorm and crashed, reveling in the fact that we didn’t have anything else to do for the day.