Today we went the Russian Artillery and Military Engineering Museum in the city. It was quote an interesting place full of all kinds of hardware from cannons built in the 1600s to the most modern Russian Rockets on display. Best surprise of the day is that it was free when we showed our student cards to get (despite a posted price of 150 rubles for students to enter). It was quite an interesting place with exhibits ranging from the fortifications for the very first Russian towns to displays of dismantled medium range nuclear ballistic missiles. And everyone loves climbing on tanks and artillery pieces in the outside exhibits. I got some great pictures of it all and put some onto my week 3 album on Facebook (but not all as I took more then 75).
After that we returned to Nevsky Prospect for a late lunch/early dinner and I came to a very important realization. I have my ability to speak Russian significantly diminished when I am hungry… Not the best time for it to happen since I kind of need Russian to order food in most restaurants. And still no peanut butter to be found despite my best efforts to locate it in the local stores! This is going to become a quest/obsession soon if I can’t find it, but I have a new lead on a place where people have allegedly found it.
It may be a few days until my next update, nothing but class, grocery shopping, laundry and trip planning (looks like Paris is going to be the winner) on the docket for this week. Hopefully an opportunity for adventure will present itself this week at some point and I will have more stories to share. Or I may start on the series of topics I have been meaning to cover in more detail about the city itself, aspects of Russian life or of my life here.
We shall see what happens…… Dun, dun, dunnnn………
Also once again, as in the Hermitage, the building itself was half of the fun and more interesting at times then the exhibits it contained. The museum is located in the former arsenal of the St. Peter and Paul Fortress. It is located in the middle of the city on an Island in the Neva river and was one of the first stone structures built at the city’s founding. I could not for the life of me figure out how they got vehicles or 40 foot long missiles into the rooms inside that only appeared to have standard sized doors at each end. I guess they could have cut the exhibits and vehicles into pieces first, but there were no obvious signs of that. I guess that leaves the only plausible explanation being the use of classified, former soviet, shrink ray technology to reduce and then restore the very large vehicles into exhibits.
After that we returned to Nevsky Prospect for a late lunch/early dinner and I came to a very important realization. I have my ability to speak Russian significantly diminished when I am hungry… Not the best time for it to happen since I kind of need Russian to order food in most restaurants. And still no peanut butter to be found despite my best efforts to locate it in the local stores! This is going to become a quest/obsession soon if I can’t find it, but I have a new lead on a place where people have allegedly found it.
It may be a few days until my next update, nothing but class, grocery shopping, laundry and trip planning (looks like Paris is going to be the winner) on the docket for this week. Hopefully an opportunity for adventure will present itself this week at some point and I will have more stories to share. Or I may start on the series of topics I have been meaning to cover in more detail about the city itself, aspects of Russian life or of my life here.
We shall see what happens…… Dun, dun, dunnnn………
 |
| Anyone need a SCUD? |
No comments:
Post a Comment