Fairytale Houses, Operas and Getting Lost, Again

This past weekend was a long weekend due to Women's Day. Women's Day is the one day a year where Russian men respect women and do housework. The concept makes me twitch, but I got my first holiday since being here, so that was nice. On Saturday, class was canceled, so I went exploring and tried to find stuff for my Off the Beaten Path list. I picked a random metro stop in the northern part of the city and walked around. In a shady neighborhood between a couple of run-down apartment complexes, I found the Vasnetsov House Museum. It was very, very cool. Vasnetsov was an artist and architect who has many works on display in the Tretyakov Museum such as Peter Riding the Grey Wolf (one of my favorites) and Aladdin on the Flying Carpet. In fact, he designed part of the Tretyakov. He depicts whimsical, fairytale scenes and designed his house in the same way. It is completely wooden with much of the interior and furniture carved to display different scenes. But the real treasure is his studio, secreted in an attic upstairs. At the entrance is a staircase which leads to a museum with ceilings over 20 ft. tall. In the room are some of his painting, a few of which span the length of the wall in every direction. It is very, very cool. It is definitely making the list.

After the Vasnetsov Museum, I headed down south a bit to try to find the Novaspasskiy Monastery. After 2 hours and about 3 miles later, I gave up and got blini. Then I received a call from Valentina who invited me to the theater, conveniently at the same metro stop. Valentina's sister is training to be an opera singer and her studio was putting on a concert. It was really nice. I love opera...
After that, we went to dinner at this really cool, reasonably cheap Ukranian restaurant that had a vegetarian menu! I love Lent! After some weird metro happenings – they randomly stopped the metro and made everyone get out – I made it home safe and sound. And then there was Sunday...