Just Another Manic Tuesday

It is Tuesday, isn’t it?  We’re never quite sure around here.  At any rate, this morning we had our first of three classes on the history of Russian cinema… and holy moly.  Our teacher – Галина Аксенова (Galina Aksenova) – is a human encyclopedia.  No lecture notes, no reading from slides.  She just projected images and dates, and then she was off and running.  First she gave us a brief history of Russia over the 20^th century – most of which, I’m proud to say, I was fairly familiar with (especially the Gorbachov coup… that made a big impression on my punning development – my Odyssey of the Mind team did a whole sketch about Gorbachef hunting the elusive coup-coup bird… pretty heady stuff).  Then she talked about silent films, which was great, since there’s none of that language confusion that comes with watching something in Russian!  Definitely the most popular film of the morning was a stop animation piece about a couple of adulterous beetles.  Yes, you read that correctly. After a stern talking to about the bad kids who have been getting wasted in the dorms (bad undergrads!), we had a hurried lunch before rushing upstairs to practice our etudes before class.  This time my group created a whole gym workout atmosphere with people checking each other out and getting all flirty.  The other group created a restaurant setting on the morning of September 11, 2001.  Two more different atmospheres you might never see, but both etudes worked very well.  We moved on into our training exercises for the day which were an awful lot of fun.  I can’t wait to teach the DG folks the new samurai game I learned.  We’ll need a fairly big group to make that game work… so lots of people will have to come play with us!  We also continued our inanimate object etudes – the big hits for me being a popcorn kernel and a bra. Class went a little long today, so I booked it back to the dorm before heading out to see a piece called The Demon devised by Russian directing/design badass Дмитрий Крымов (Dmitri Krimov).  For the first time since we’ve been here, the language barrier was almost a non-issue (aside from finding our seats).  Oh… the seats.  Before I try to explain the beautiful insanity that was this show, I have to talk about our seats.  A lot of these plays that we’re seeing, we’re getting into because theatres are exchanging favors with each other.  So we got a card that said there would be four people coming courtesy of the MXAT… but the show was sold out.  So they had to fit us in where they could.  In this case, it meant the tech gallery.  And this is not your Warehouse Theatre tech gallery.  Oh no.  This theatre was built specially for experimental director Анатоли Васылев (Anatoly Vasiliev) to be extremely free form.  It’s in the round with three seating galleries around the center, and the tech gallery is on the fourth level hovering above it all.  We were craning our necks to see around the lighting instruments, and I spent most of the show standing up and bending out over the abyss I was so totally engrossed in what was happening. To try to explain The Demon in words is not an easy task, since they used almost no words to create it.  The entire floor of the stage was covered in layers and layers of paper and plastic, and the performers painted images, tore shapes, crumpled, ripped, stomped, splashed… it was magnificent.  I wept at stick figures.  I sat there watching the entire human experience (and a good portion of human history) unfold beneath me, and the simultaneous simplicity, specificity and complexity of every single moment was simply breathtaking.  The three curtain calls this cast took were well deserved. After the show the grad students sat down with our professor to talk about other shows that might be available for us to see over the next couple of weeks.  My head might explode. Doppleganger update – Today was a day for too-tall doppelgangers.  I saw too-tall Russian Mary Freeman and too-tall Russian Amy Holtcamp. Travel abroad tip - I know there are a lot of those Americans who think that loud English is more likely to be understood than regular old English when addressing non-English speakers.  This is not the case.  It turns out, however, that speaking English in the accent that you hear Russian English-speakers using does not work either.

Our First Full Week - GO!

That’s right, we haven’t even been here a week yet, and in some ways it feels like we’ve been here for months.  Of course, all I have to do to counteract that feeling is attempt to have a conversation with a Russian person.  Then it is abundantly clear that I am a dumb American with only a couple of days under my belt. But today began our first full week of classes… so time marches on!  We kicked off the week with our movement class taught by Владимир Сажын (Vladimir Sazhin), a Russian beefcake of a man who can move his buttocks independently of one another (and does so with great relish).  He led us through an hour and a half (no breaks) of stretches and isolations and bending and jumping and jumping (so much jumping), and all sorts of other ridiculous things that your body doesn’t usually have to do.  I did manage to do this crazy double jointed thing with my arms that I can’t possibly describe, but it made me feel like I accomplished something for the day.  After class with him, we went straight to singing class where Marina kicked out the women in order to work with the men for an hour.  She then brought us in and finished handing out the songs that we would be working with for the next few classes.  I have to admit, I was a little disappointed at being assigned “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” from the world’s most overrated musical, Phantom of the Opera.  But still, this class is sort of like taking voice lessons from the Tazmanian Devil (the woman punched me in the stomach while I was singing today), so it seems our best bet is just to hold on for dear life and learn what we can along the way. Lunch was very quick, as we only had an hour and we all wanted to practice our etudes before acting class.  Class began with the first group’s etude about several blades of grass who grew up and then were tragically mowed in the prime of their lives by a man and his lawnmower.  It was a pretty fantastic etude.  My group created a gumball machine and a whole progression of a person trying to get the right gumball… it really wasn’t all that successful or clear, but it was a lot of fun putting it together.  From there we did a series of exercises which proved to be very frustrating.  The second was the worst because we all understood it, but then a couple group members started asking a bunch of questions which led the interpreter to give us the wrong instructions, so Sergei then chastised us for not understanding the exercise and not asking more questions when it had been the questions that had led us astray in the first place.  Then we completely failed at the third exercise – and since my half of the class was second to go we were chastised again for not being better than the first group after having watched them.  After our break, however, things got a lot more fun when we presented our first individual etudes.  We had to become an inanimate object and illustrate a story about it.  There was a tree, a cloud of hairspray, a match, a hair tie, a baseball glove, a Russian cathedral (which ended up being hilarious), a clothes drying rack, a stick of gum… and I was an egg.  I went from fridge to bowl to whisk to frying pan to plate… it was quite a journey.  And though I ended up with a bit of a floor burn on my elbow, my little egg went over pretty well. Monday nights are not dark theatre-wise in Moscow as they are in the states, but they are slightly less action packed, so we don’t have tickets to anything tonight which gives us a much needed evening off – as we have to work on new etudes and re-read The Three Sisters for tomorrow’s classes.
Doppelganger Update – Today I saw Russian April Schaffer on my way back to the dorm from the theatre, and apparently Russian Craig(e) Holcombe lives in our dorm on another floor.

Drinking Out of a Fire Hydrant

The first thing I did on Sunday was sleep until I couldn’t sleep anymore.  It felt fantastic!  And I might declare myself now officially on Moscow time.  Huzzah!  I headed to the grocery store for the first time, which was a formidable experience, since my credit card refused to work.  Luckily I had some cash, but that headshake by the cashier made me all kinds of nervous.  I knew I couldn’t get by for the whole month with the $300 worth of Rubles I had exchanged.  Eek.  Then in the afternoon we were led on a bus tour of Moscow… and then my brain exploded.  We saw so much in this three hour tour (a three hour tour…), and yet so little at the same time.  Of course, the place where we spent the most time was Red Square – a place I’ve already been.  But it was neat to be there with someone who knew all the crazy history about the cobblestones and the invasions and crazy wax-dipped Lenin.  And it makes me want to come back a third time so that I can tour around inside the Kremlin… which just sounds fantastic!  Our bus drove us slowly (and not-so-slowly) past a lot of things while our guide gave us fact after fact after fact after fact about everything on the planet.  There were places we couldn’t stop because of the difficulty of parking a bus, and there were places we couldn’t stay because we were on such a limited schedule.  We couldn’t stop at the Christ the Savior cathedral – the largest in Moscow built to commemorate the Russian victory over Napoleon, so I’m definitely going to have to swing by there on my own.  We only stopped across the river for a photo op of Novodevichy Convent (which includes Novodevichy Cemetery – the burial place of people like Stanislavsky, Chekhov and Bulgakov).  We only drove around part of the outer perimeter of the ginormous Victory Park (commemorating the end of WWII).  This city is so friggin’ huge, and there is so much history here, and we have so few days off… I am really going to need to try to budget my time in order to make it everywhere I want to go.  Our tour guide told us that we should go to Victory Park at night since they light up the fountains… and while that sounds cool in theory, that would mean wandering through a giant park in Moscow at 11:00 (when it is finally dark)… so I’m not sure it’s necessarily the best idea. After the tour, we booked it down to the MXAT.  There was little time for dinner and I stopped by an ATM where my debit card worked (Huzzah again!), and then we headed in for their production of The Cherry Orchard (Вишневый Сад).  The design was very spare and minimalistic, which gave us poor non-Russian speakers even fewer cues to hold onto in following the story, but I really liked it aesthetically.  Ranevskaya was, unfortunately, not terribly strong.  She was not – unlike every other actor on stage – a MXAT company member, MXAT trained, or even an actress at all.  She is famous throughout Russia as a personality.  I might compare casting her to casting someone like Paris Hilton – not that she’s as trashy as good ol’ Paris (PS – everyone I could think of as an example of an American celebrity personality is super trashy: Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Snookie… are there non-actor personalities we worship who aren’t super trashy?), but she’s famous for being her, not for being particularly talented at something.  Aside from her volume issues, there was just a palpable (if not entirely easily described) difference between her and the company members in the rest of the cast.  She was absolutely gorgeous, but her performance just wasn’t on par with the rest of the cast.  She certainly wasn’t as lousy as someone like Paris Hilton would have been, but she just wasn’t a MXAT actor.  The rest of the actors were really pretty remarkable though.  I thought Lopakhin and Varya’s final scene was devastating, Anya’s evolution throughout the script was really lovely, Yasha and Dunyasha were delightful, and the stage pictures were absolutely breathtaking. Having seen two Chekhov plays now on this trip – it occurs to me that every Chekhov play has that one male character who I completely forgot about.  He’s the person who doesn’t make it into my brain when I’m thinking through the plot before the play begins, and then I spend the entire play going, “Oh!  I remember him… what the hell is his name…?”  In The Seagull it was Shamraev, and in The Cherry Orchard it was Simeon-Pishchik (and a little bit Yepikhodov). After the show, we all came back to the dorm for our Sunday night meeting/potluck.  It’s interesting to see what we all cobbled together as our potluck offerings.  I brought some watermelon (which we read in a guidebook the next day we probably shouldn’t have eaten… but it tasted good), there were cookies and candies and cheeses and breads, a makeshift Mac & Cheese, and even some nachos.  Following that meeting, we divided up into two groups to plan our etudes for the next day’s acting class.  More on this tomorrow.  After that, I tried to go to sleep, but my tummy had other plans.  So, after dealing with my grouchy tummy until almost 3:00, I finally managed to fall asleep.  Phew! PS - Allergy sufferers - summer in Moscow may not be for you.  Right now, as I look out my window, it almost looks like it is snowing… but it’s cottonwood puffs (or something equivalent) blowing EVERYWHERE. 

Russian Doppelgangers

I have got to go to sleep soon, so here’s just a quick blurb for this evening: Every time I go somewhere new, I feel like I see a lot of the same faces.  So far I have seen black-haired Russian Traysie Amick coming out of the Metro, and I saw Russian Jason Underwood as Yasha in The Cherry Orchard tonight at the Moscow Art Theatre (wearing awesome purple pants).  And I saw 30 years in the future Jayce Tromsness.  I’ll be keeping my eye out for more Russian counterparts of your fabulous Американцы (Americans). 

Saturday

Well… damn!  Today was quite a day.  The morning started off with our first dance class.  I don’t even want to think about how long it’s been since my last dance class, so to say I was a nervous is something of an understatement.  In past years the teacher has been a woman named Larissa who is a former prima ballerina from the Bolshoi, but unfortunately her husband has fallen ill, so we have a new teacher with whom our professor is entirely unfamiliar, so it was a big question mark going in.  It turns out we have this fascinating man named (I think) Рэнард (Renard – yeah, it sounds like the French word for “Fox”… and of course he’s a ballet dancer, so he kinda is a fox.  A little skinny, but hey).  He took us through some exercises at the bar, and these went surprisingly well in my opinion.  I felt a lot more confident than I expected to, and I think overall he was pleased with the whole group.  Then he decided to teach us some rudimentary Russian folk dance steps, which did not go as well.  The steps were simple, but I have to say, I felt like we were moving in a completely different way than I’m used to.  There’s something about Russian dance that comes from their souls, and it’s just not in mine… yet.  Perhaps after tonight’s metro excursion, I’m a few steps closer.  But more on that later.  We finished out the class with some contact improv, which is not really my cup of tea, but I suppose that’s a good thing – pushing myself to do new things or re-approach old things. Lunch was another day, another plate of buckwheat and vegetables at the MXAT cafeteria.  Today my fellow PhD student and I sat with our professor to get the low-down on the shows that we would be seeing over the next week.  My head is spinning thinking about all the amazing theatre we’re going to see!  And I am now on the hunt for this monthly publication which lists every show at every theatre in Moscow for the entire month of June.  It’s in Russian… but it’s super awesome.  The box office was sold out today, but I’m hoping they’ll get more. After lunch we met with our Chekhov teacher again.  I just love that man more and more every time I see him.  He’s got this marvelously impish glint in his eye at all times.  We started out playing more of the same simple games to get us to expand our circles of attention and think like a group.  We even ended up playing Kitty Wants a Corner, which is an improve game I hate because it has a tendency to get kinda violent, but it is great fun to watch.  During this class I had a moment that made me very proud of myself – I made a joke in Russian!  Our teacher was giving us a quick Russian lesson, asking each of us to speak the phrase, “Please give me the chicken.”  I was one of the last to go, and when he got to me, I looked him square in the eye and said, “Я не ем мясо” – “I don’t eat meat.”  He laughed, and asked me to say “Please give me the wheat” instead.  Joking in another language… I’m super awesome.  After our break, we sat down and talked a little about The Three Sisters, choosing which character jumped out at us as someone we could relate to.  I chose Olga – the oldest sister who’s a little more pragmatic, a little more cynical, and a little more able to use humor to cope than her sisters.  Oh yeah. While part of the group went to dinner at McDonald’s (ick), I headed back to the MXAT cafeteria for a dinner of more buckwheat before meeting half of the group to head over to the Сатирикон (Satiricon) theatre to see a play called “The Blue Monster.”  We had a theatre management student escorting us through the metro – our first time riding it.  Due to some miscommunications from the theatre, we were running a little late, and Polina ended up getting us off at the wrong stop and we missed the very beginning of the show, but we did manage to get in and settled just in the nick of time… not that this was very helpful in understanding the show.  This play is apparently based off a children’s book and adapted for adults… and it is wacky.  There is this blue monster… and then there are these two couples… and he does something weird to both of them… and then there are all these clowns… and then there’s this weird trapeze artist/dominatrix character… and a giant robot… and a turntable on the stage, and a pool that was filled about an inch during intermission and emptied in the course of a few minutes during the middle of the act… it was nuts.  The clown characters were fantastic, and really made me want to do some commedia.  There were some truly awesome bits.  The story was some sort of fantasy, and wasn’t terribly easy to follow, but I found that, as we approached the denouement, I was able to accurately predict what the outcome was going to be… though I couldn’t really explain why.  The show was this huge, amazing spectacle that completely captivated all of us, regardless of whether or not we had any clue what was going on.  And these people took what I can only call two and a half curtain calls, since the first one was soooooooo long and involved so many pieces. Now comes the really exciting part… the metro.  Since the theatre managers have an exam tomorrow morning, none of them could come meet us after the show to help us find our way back to the dorm… so I became the leader.  Polina had given me directions on where to change stations and such, but the stations are not very well marked, so it turned out to be quite the exercise, involving reading signage in Russian, and even stopping to ask directions from a guard in Russian military garb.  I think I spoke more Russian than he did English, so that was a challenge, but it got us where we were going.  I felt oddly comfortable as we took three different trains through five different stations.  I really love metros.  They’re so logical.  And we managed to make it back to the dorm… so I’m calling it a big fat win!  Woohoo!

Ya Chaika

The title of this blog post should be written: "Я чайка."  And that just means, "I’m the seagull."  But we’ll get to that. Today was another day of hitting the ground running.  Got up fairly early so I had plenty of time to laze about before class at 11:00.  This morning we had our first singing class with Марина Смырнова (Marina Smirnova).  This woman is a powerhouse!  She had each person come up and sing a few bars of a song – any song we could come up with – and she started messing with us.  She tested our range, tapped our noses, mimed punching us in the stomach, tugged on our shirts, snarled at us… all with the help of her trusty interpreter.  I’ve been a singer for years, but it has also been a number of years since I’ve sung in front of anyone, and even longer since I’ve had a voice lesson, so I found myself oddly nervous when I sang.  But as she got me higher in my range, I sank into my comfort zone and had a lot of fun with her.  And sure, it was really fun listening to the people in the group with fantastic voices, but I learned a lot more from watching the people who didn’t consider themselves singers – even the people who seemed pretty tone deaf.  She really stuck with them in a way that said, “I’m going to prove to you that you can do this, so stop pussy-footing around and sing, damnit!”  It was really amazing to see the steps that each of them took in just the few minutes she spent with them.  When next we meet with Marina, she’ll be assigning us each songs that we’ll be working on for the rest of the month.  I love this woman. Lunch was, as lunches often are, fairly uneventful.  It was our second day eating at the MXAT cafeteria, and though my order may become repetitive, it sure is delicious.  And I do know that it’s vegetarian, so that’s two checks in my book!  (One of the other vegetarians got a little adventurous today, and we’re pretty sure she ate some chicken… but I’m doing my best to avoid such shenanigans.) After lunch came our first Stanislavsky acting class taught by Сэргэй Зэмтсов (Sergei Zemtsov).  He isn’t quite as effusive as the other two teachers have been – there’s a little more of a “get down to business” feel about him, but this does not make him any less fascinating.  He took us through a series of exercises that focused on attention and creating a sort of group mind.  Some I had done before, some were totally new.  And, as he told us repeatedly with a glint in his eye, any time we were successful at an exercise, we would just have to add something to make it more difficult.  These are definitely exercises that my acting students are going to get a piece of this fall!  Over and over he repeated the Stanislavsky credo, which comes out to something along the lines of "easier, lighter, simpler, merrier."  If there’s one thing we keep hearing from these teachers it’s how tense we are.  They are doing their best to loosen us up!  For the second half of class he went around the circle of the 20 of us students asking our names and our first impressions of Moscow – both positive and negative.  This proved to be a difficult task, as we played the polite Americans who didn’t want to say anything to offend.  But in the course of the hour we spent doing this, we learned a lot about Moscow and its history, so while I found it a little nerve wracking, I think it was time well spent. After class we had a couple of different sets of instructions.  Some people went back to the dorms where they claimed their new rooms on the 3^rd floor, where apparently the collapsed ceiling from the night of our arrival had been fixed.  Since I was one of the people seeing the production of The Seagull this evening, I didn’t go back, which turned out to be a big pain in the ass.  But more on that later.  I hung around Kamergersky street for a while, had a delicious блин (Russian Crepe) for dinner, and headed to the theatre.  Despite the Soviet insistence on simple décor, the theatre really is pretty spectacular.  And is made even more so by knowing the kind of people who have performed on this stage.  The production itself was fairly interesting.  It’s a slightly experimental version of The Seagull, and it’s been pretty clear from the careful comments of the MXAT faculty that they don’t like it very much, but I have to say that I enjoyed it.  Certainly there were things that worked better than others for me, but overall I felt like it was an energetic production that made some compelling choices about the characters.  It was pretty surreal watching the whole thing in Russian.  I know the story, of course, but it was a lot of work to keep up with what was happening.  The curtain call at the end of the show was one of the first moments I’ve had here of real cultural difference.  The clapping began as the curtain closed, then it fell into a rhythm with the music playing as the curtain reopened.  The cast strode confidently downstage – but in no sort of hurry.  At the front of the stage they were met by people lined up in the middle aisle with large bouquets of flowers for their favorite actors.  Once the flowers were distributed, the actors exited upstage.  By this time the whole house was standing and had fallen into a rhythm together again with the claps – this time in rhythm with each other rather than any music, since the music had long since stopped.  But after the actors left, the clapping continued.  They came back on, stood at the front of the stage, brought three people on from the wings, clapped for them, bowed almost individually and haphazardly, and exited again.  The clapping continued through a third curtain call – it was interesting to see who tried to hang around to be the last person to walk away from the applause.  Apparently the third time was a charm, and the clapping died out as the cast disappeared for the third time.  It was really quite something.  We keep being told that we need to see the production of the Seagull happening at the Satiricon theater, so perhaps I will have more seagull-related goodness at a later date.  I also plan on keeping a count of how many curtain calls each show receives throughout the course of this month. Once the show was over we booked it back to the dorms where I discovered that there were no more rooms available on the third floor… so what the heck was I supposed to do?  This led to about 20 minutes of angst until one of the Canadian students told me that he had collected the key to what they thought was a spare room, and would I like it.  You bet I would!  It was the final single available, which was extremely necessary, as the other four people who weren’t quite sure about rooming at that point were all boys.  There ended up being enough doubles to take care of them (one extremely begrudgingly, but tough tacos, I’m the PhD student and the chick.  I win.), so we all managed to be housed.  Once that madness was put to rest, I finally sat down, took a breath, and got ready for bed.  Whew.

Looks Like We Made It

Monday I woke up in Greenville, Tuesday I woke up in Detroit, Wednesday I woke up on an airplane somewhere over Ireland, and this morning I woke up in Moscow.  We landed around 10:00 last night, when the sun was just beginning to set.  We waited in a massive line at passport control where the immigration officer stared at me wordlessly… seriously… this man didn’t even ask me a question.  He just bored holes in my skull.  By some strange miracle we all got our luggage and then we headed out to meet our liaison, a theatre management studio at the MXAT (Moscow Art Theatre) named Настия (Nastia – and I think I have the Cyrillic right).  She led us to a bus where she quickly made herself into our very favorite person in the world by supplying water and sandwiches.  She even had four vegetarian sandwiches for the four vegetarians – the first time that has happened.  The airline apparently never got the information that the study abroad asked us for in regards to vegetarians, so I’ve been eating a lot of bread.  Bonus: I can now say “bread” in Russian (хлеб [klyeb])
We got to the dorm where we learned that though we were supposed to be on the third floor, a bathroom ceiling had collapsed mere hours before, forcing us to move to the fifth floor.  And you guessed it – there’s no elevator.  So we dragged our suitcases up to the 5^th floor where we discovered the move also meant that there were not as many single rooms as we had expected either.  I did manage to snag one for myself, which is a VERY good thing, what with my general disdain for other humans (sorry, fellow travelers!).  We met in the hallway to get schedules for the next day and then went about our business.  Some people went on a quick preliminary grocery run, but I stuck around, got a tour of the kitchen with the other person who stayed behind, and then took a much needed shower.
Sleeping was not as difficult as I expected.  It is really pretty hot, but if you open the window you end up with a decent draft, some street sounds and a few bugs (no screen… yeehah).   Plus, I was exhausted enough from travel that I managed a good night’s sleep and was fairly ready to face the day.   

This morning we didn’t have to be anywhere until 10:00, so I was able to take my time in the morning.  I accompanied two of the boys to the Starbucks across the street where we discovered the difficulty of dealing with currency, and that Starbucks does not take American Express.  But I did prove my usefulness in my ability to read the menu.  We made the trek to the Moscow Art Theatre (MXAT) as a group – it’s about a 30 minute walk – and then walked up the five flights to the American Studio.  The guys who went last year said it, and I can now confirm: Moscow is made out of stairs.  We got a little chit chat about the rules and decorum of classes, went to exchange our money, and headed off to lunch at the MXAT cafeteria, which was delicious, affordable and a bit of a leap of faith.  All good things.  After lunch we began our training in earnest with an hour lecture on the history of the MXAT with the dean of the MXAT school, Анатоли Смэлиански (Anatoly Smeliansky).  The lecture took place in the foyer of the main theatre which is basically a museum to the greats of MXAT past.  Each person has his/her photo, name, and four photos of different roles s/he played.  It was awe-inspiring and humbling to be sitting there in that room with those faces staring down at us – Stanislavksy, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Dostoyevsky, Meyerhold, Chekhov – gulp.  The lobby was a little warm, and jet lag has by no means become a thing of the past, so staying awake was a bit of a struggle, but I wanted to hear every word he had to say, so the struggle was well worth it!  After his lecture, we were led back up to the studio where we met Миша Лобанов (Mischa Lobanov), for a two hour class on Michael Chekhov technique.  This man is a human beam of sunshine.  The pure joy in his eyes and the sheer excitement in every detail of class was enthralling!  He taught through an interpreter, which is definitely going to take some getting used to – learning how to listen to two people at once.  We did a series of exercises that dealt with tempo/rhythm and imagination.  The exercises are extremely simple, and won’t be terribly exciting if I detail them here, and I can only scrape the surface of Mischa’s warmth and impish delight.  Suffice it to say – I couldn’t stop leaning forward.  It was amazing!

After class, we split up.  Oooh.  Half of the group is attending a production of The Seagull performed by a company run by one of the MXAT members who also happens to be one of the most famous actors in Russia – Олег Табаков (Oleg Tabakov), while my half will be going to see the same show tomorrow night.  So, a handful of us non-Seagull-types decided to hoof it the two blocks from our studio to Red Square.  Yup, two blocks and we’re at the Kremlin, St. Basil’s… it’s breathtaking.  As sparse as so many things in Russia can be, the absolute splendor of Red Square is really something.
Now, on one side of Red Square is the entrance, on one side is St. Basil’s and on one side is the Kremlin.  I know, I can hear you geometry minded folks all the way from the US chanting angrily: “But a square has FOUR sides, red or no!”  And you would be right.  The fourth side of the square is the Гум (goom) – the largest Mall in Moscow.  It runs the whole length of Red Square, so we decided we would go ahead and walk the massive mall on the way back.  ­­­­­­The ice cream we bought in the middle was a big hit.  And then we hoofed it all the way back to the dorms.  Now, it is unseasonably hot here in Moscow, and the 7:00 sun feels an awful lot like high noon anywhere else.  So that uphill walk back to the dorms sure felt like it took a while.  And though I haven’t even considered what to do for dinner yet, I will say that I’m considering the day fairly over… and it’s been a little bit on the full side.