A Horse?

This morning, as I wandered around Moscow and unsuccessfully looked for breakfast, I saw a girl riding a horse down the sidewalk. She crossed at the crosswalk with all the other pedestrians and behaved like everyone else in every way, and nobody else seemed surprised by her presence either. But she was on a horse. She was dressed in modern clothing and looked very much like a city person, so she wasn’t a poorer person from the country in the city for the day, or anything like that. It was strange. I wish I had taken a picture. Right after I saw the girl on the horse I passed some presents that the horse had left for all the other people using the sidewalk.

I seem to be handling the jet lag pretty well, except that I woke up at about 4:00 am and couldn’t go back to sleep, even though I had only slept for six hours after an exhausting thirty or so hours awake. I then proceeded to take a nap on the train in the afternoon. It’s 10:00 pm now, and looks like about 7:00 pm outside. I’m going to attempt to go to sleep in a minute. I hope it goes well.

I took the express train from Moscow to St. Petersburg. It makes the journey in four hours and forty-five minutes instead of nine or more hours. It was probably the nicest train I have ever been on, and at one point was going 250 km/h. Not bad, Russia. It was interesting to pass the old-school Soviet trains every once in a while and see the contrast.

While this was a very nice train and they have a few going every day, it seems that most train service in Russia is lagging far behind my experience, and is still more comparable to trains that I rode in the Baltics and in Ukraine. I sat next to a nice Dutch guy on the train. We chatted for a little while, and then both decided we were tired. I ended up sleeping on and off for about two and a half hours of the ride.

So far St. Petersburg has been a pleasure, aside from some minor confusion with my hostel reservation. This seems like a fantastic place to spend a couple months. It really was kind of thrilling when I walked through the grand arches on Morskaya Ulitsa into the Palace Square and saw the Winter Palace framed by the archways. It was quite a spectacular sight. I wish my photo did it justice.

This is looking from the Winter Palace back to the other side of the square (see the arches that I came through?).

Plus, I was already asked to be in a movie. As I was stopped on a foot-bridge to take a picture of a canal and the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ (more commonly called the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood because it was built on the spot where Czar Alexander II was assassinated),

a guy approached and asked me if I would be willing to help him out. I was supposed to be a guy that steals a suitcase that two girls put down on the bridge. I especially felt good about this whole thing because the entire exchange between this guy and me was in Russian and I had no problem understanding and responding. My responding needs some work though. Hopefully that will improve with time.