Welcome to LeninLand!

Fearless Readers:
I've been taking it very easly up in our apartment, although I have forced myself out and into Moscow at least once a day. It is disturbingly easy to slip into the habit of lethargy, especailly after a trip such as my own. A few notible excurisions:

The Tetrakov gallery was interesting, the best of Russian works before the rise of Communism. Russians came from tightly controlled artistic backgrounds: all works of art were church related up until after the renassance in Europe. Then all of a sudden, Russian artists had to learn how to paint people, landscapes, and battles. They love thier battles. It was interesting to see how they progressed in that short time from ikon-like simple portraits to the verge of impressionism. There were a few really striking peices, but on the whole, it was nothing spectacutlar.

The Red October Chocolate Factory was one of the more interesting things Ive done here. We donned our scrubs and toured a confectionary. The entire factory floor was crewed by women, as it is a low paying unskilled job. They mostly glued labels on boxes, and picked out defective chocolates. We actually passed a crowd of people in the lobby looking for work here. In the musem I was surprised to hear the guide casually mention that during WWII, the chocolates were laced with something "to take away fear" from pilots and submariners. Made me wonder what they drugged them with, probably cocaine. Anyway, we got to try a lot of chocolate and in the end, we got some more and listened to music to eat chocolate by while we had a tea and chocolate party. Everyone else in the tour group was over 40 and american.

Gorky Park is the name of a book I am just finishing and the name of a park in moscow. Taylor and I went there today to see the amusement park part of it. To enter, we had to walk through a marble gateway with bronze reliefs of Lenin and Red Army flags. In typical russian fashion, we had to buy a ticket to get in from a ticket booth, present it to the gate guard, then for every ride, go to their ticket booths, get tickets from them and then take it to the ride ticket collectors. We took three rides, the best one being a kind of platform that flipped around and upside down as it spun around, kind of hard to describe. I wonder where they got thier rides. It looked like a collection of decent german imports (the rides titles were all in german) and american carnie rides (with titles in english in bright bulbs). One ride we saw looked like someone had installed pirates of the carribean in Mt. Rushmore.

Here is a picture of me on the Cinque Terre hike in northern Italy.