War and Peace

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it had to happen again. I thought Magdelena and I had reached a peaceful coexistence. Boy was I wrong. This morning as I'm getting ready to head out to a museum, Magdelena comes in and immediately starts in on one of her rants. This time it's that I have too much stuff. Some of you may recall my sheer pride and joy at only bringing one bag?? So I ignore her and continue to get ready as she says over and over "you have too much!" She pulls open the closet and says "there's too much!" (I have four hangers). She pulls open my three tiny drawers and says "there's too much" and slams them shut.

She's out of her mind. And then she started going through my bag of running clothes (four t-shirts, two pairs of shorts) and that's when I lost it. For some reason, I can understand her Russian when she goes on like this, but I can never form responses in Russian. So I just say in english "So? what do you want me to do about it?" and then when I got really mad I said "Do you want to talk about how dirty this apartment is?" Maybe not the most mature response, but I like speaking in English because I feel like it gives me the upper hand - she has no idea what I'm saying! Ha! Take that! Also I just think its funnier....

Anyway, I left in a huff and she left this afternoon to go to her Dacha, so at least she's gone. She should be back on Tuesday, ugh. By then I'll only have 2.5 more weeks of her and at this rate, there's a major blowout every two weeks, so hopefully I'll only have one left. She sucks.

Then in my bad mood I went to eat a way overpriced lunch, that was delicious, and tried to go to the Russian Museum. However, the 20th Century section is closed until August 5th and I don't really care to see a bunch of Russian icons, so I'll just wait until my last day to go.

But I did go to the Engineer's Castle today. It was a palace built by Tsar Paul I, son of Catherine the Great. Tsar Paul I was kind of a little punk. Pretty much everyone hated him for not being as cool as Catherine, so he had a rough start. He was super paranoid about getting off-ed like his father did, so he built this palace and put a moat around it to keep him safe. Ironically, he was only in the palace for a few months before some conspirators came to assassinate him. And so Alexander I, his oldest son, became Tsar.

So after Paul was murdered, they used the palace for the Engineer's school, hence the new name.

Tsar Paul I. This is a pretty new addition

The Engineer's Castle is technically part of the Russian Museum. There was some art and such inside, but I wasn't really impressed. I was more interested in just seeing the palace. They've only recently restored it to a palace, though, so I think they're working on a lot still.

I wasn't really inspired to do much more the rest of the day. Oh Mother Russia, you're so up and down. Just yesterday I was telling Tom how much happier I've been here and how I've started to like the city more...... maybe I'll be back there tomorrow?? Wish me luck!