Smolny Cathedral

Umm… I don’t even know what we just went to see, so sorry if I don’t give y’all a detailed description. At Kazansky Cathedral the other day, we saw a poster about this concert which played music by M. Lomonosov. Sergei, our program director, said the acoustics in the cathedral were worth hearing, so we decided to go. The concert was in Smolny Cathedral, which is beautiful, but the ‘concert’ was very bizarre. It had Russian Orthodox monks and people dressed up in old fashioned attire. Some guy was narrating the whole thing, and at one point, some of the actors were even wearing ship costumes… Very strange and I had absolutely no idea what was going on…Needless to say, our experience pretty much alternated between stifled laughter and nodding heads (a bit longer and we could have gotten in a decent nap).

Smolny Cathedral

Whaaa?? Dancing Boat People?

Now, I’m pretty much wiped out. I’m going to have amazing endurance going into my summer training, because all we do here is walk! My shoes actually have holes in them, and I now understand why people need foot massages…We met up with our Professor from Rhodes to eat blini, and later had dinner with Lisa, but other than that, we walked from 12:10 to 7:00 (and that was only between the university and the cathedral)!

Kroshka Kartoshka: The Russian McD's
(Yes, that's a potato!)

Tomorrow our Russian ‘friends’ are leaving, but on the bright side, they brought us a pot, so no more teapot dumplings! (As a side note, when I say "ya ne nonyimayu," or "I don't understand," I don't think people  realize I literally do not speak their language. I'm pretty sure they just think I'm a bit dull in the brain...)