During my last day in Moscow, I had the opportunity to go with Julia P. to an upscale hotel to visit her mom. We also spent some more time around Patriarch Ponds, and it was then that I was able to realize something that was happening to us while in more tourist-y areas. Usually if […]
What are you? Where are you from? No, where are you really from? These are all questions of which I’ve heard some variation while in both the U.S. and Russia. While in the U.S., there’s a certain level of disrespect inherent in having these questions asked by someone you’ve only just met, and at first […]
For our neighborhood, we (Julia Preston and Maya Costales) chose Patriarch Ponds. We visited the area a total of four times together over the course of the term. We chose Patriarch Ponds because we’d read about it in The Master and Margarita and we were curious what the area was like today in comparison to […]
Perhaps the most challenging cultural difference I’ve had to grapple with since coming to Russia has been the prioritization of supervision and safety ahead of privacy. This isn’t something that just applies to interpersonal interactions- it influences the way dorms and grocery stores are set up. In my first blog post I talked a bit […]
If you haven’t already, I’d encourage you to read Ma’ila’s earlier post about our first trip there. It focuses mainly on the Vvedenskoye cemetery, and it’s a good read. Our second trip back did not take us back to the cemetery, much to my relief. I found the cemetery crowded, the graves almost piled on […]
A few weeks ago we read, in Caroline Brooke’s Moscow, about the Khodynka Tragedy, in which a crowd of some 50,000 trampled 1,389 in a mad dash to try to get free goods celebrating the coronation of Nicholas II. We’ll let you be the judge of whether that was a bad omen for his rule. […]
Per a recent assignment, Schuyler and I made an intentional visit to one of Moscow’s much less touristy areas, the Maryina roshcha (Марьина роща) district north of the city center. This provided an impetus to get away from the hustle, bustle, and sense of relative wealth one inevitably feels in the areas around Red Square. […]
When it came to choosing a new district of Moscow to explore, I settled on one I knew next to nothing about: Lefortovo. It was the architecture that captured my interest first. I read that several old palaces stood there, including one used by Peter the Great; that it had previously been a district populated […]
To and from Suzdal, our group took a public bus. As a person from a small town who goes to college in Northfield, Minnesota, my experience with public transportation has been quite limited up until this this trip. The bus itself was normal, and seated around twenty people comfortably. Our group alone had fifteen people, […]