Trekhprudny Lane

Above, the fortified wall around Novodevichy Convent, near the rooms where poor Sophia Alexeyevna was imprisoned by her brother Peter I (who apparently also dangled some of her executed supporters outside of her windows, just to be clear).

We spent the afternoon sightseeing in the city, like so many weekends last year. And I found myself feeling the same confused nostalgia... I mean enjoying the quaintness of certain Russian places while feeling uneasy about whether that's right.

"Today is Sunday, the nineteenth of July!" said the loudspeakers in the metro, as we followed the crowds through long underground passages and up and down stairs. "The day of the metallurgical worker, who creates wonders out of the earth!" These announcements seem rare, but listening today while trudging through the subway transfer tunnels alongside hundreds of other, mostly silent people, all moving in the same direction... it was too Orwellian to ignore. Just as the voice wrapped up, we passed one of those subterranean militsia closets, the door propped open for once, presumably because of the airless tunnel heat, and glimpsed inside a sweaty young officer, slumped at an old and enormous wooden desk, reading a book. The whole tiny room was painted institutional turquoise, without a single paper on the walls or on the desk, only the boy and a rotary telephone (which always look noirish now), and at the back there was a chain-link cage, low and dark, with a padlock on the door and a low wooden bench inside. I'm not made nervous by these things -- at that moment I think I was wondering where to go for lunch -- but somehow, I feel superstitious about enjoying these glimpses as a tourist. On some level they really do represent past (and present?) suffering. And there's always at least a chance that I'll run afoul of the law here; it happened more than once back in Chicago, usually over an animal, and even here I've got into it briefly with OXPAHA over their badgering of a collapsed woman drunk. It's like the moustached impersonators and the Red Army souvenirs: absolutely interesting on one level, but then, should I be having fun with this?

Today in the city we ran into friends, though, and that's a nice change from last year: a Russian family from EB's school. They are headed into the woods four hundred kilometers north of Moscow, with other parents and children, for a week-long camping expedition with a Little Red Riding Hood theme. The parents enact the story throughout the forest, the kids make art and sing around the fire... maybe next year.

Along the boulevard, art students were trying to hang 8x10 photo prints on unwieldy, three-meter lengths of sticky tape. Some puppeteers from a well-known national theater were trying to sell an antique marionette to passersby for 25,000 rubles. We wrapped up the day with cream puffs, a splash in a fountain and a cup of kvass. (Yes, that's a plastic cup. It's also an alcoholic drink. And a naked man washing his pants.)