I'm Baaaaaack

Well, I think that's officially the longest I've ever gone without posting since I formally embraced this whole blogging thing years ago. Obviously, I've been busy. I don't really want to dwell on why I've been busy because, really, who ISN'T busy with something? Suffice it to say I went to Russia, had a 28 hour-long trip home (including a four hour layover in Moscow and a six hour layover in New York, followed by an hour sitting on the tarmac because JFK really sucks balls), and have spent the past two weeks playing catch up.
But now I'm finally back to my regular routine and I don't feel like all of my work is in this enormous, ominous Indiana Jones-style ball rolling along behind me and threatening to consume me completely. And it hasn't been all work the past two weeks. There was a really lovely, warm afternoon that I spent watching Penn play his rec soccer game (and actually--horror of horrors--playing myself for the first six minutes of the game because it's a coed league and they were short a girl. Considering that the only thing I know about soccer is that you're not supposed to touch the ball with your hands, it's a really good thing an actual female player showed up). We also had a couple of Penn's friends stay here with us last weekend so we did some tourist stuff with them in City A and went to a concert. Oh, and I went to a different concert, one featuring Tragedy: the World's #1 All-Metal Tribute to the Beegee's. (My suspicion is that it is the world's ONLY All-Metal Tribute to the Beegee's) So yeah, I've had some fun time, but no free time, if that makes sense.
But now I'm sitting here waiting for my cake to cool enough so that I can frost it, and I actually have time to write. Yes, I actually baked a cake today! I'm planning to surprise Penn with it when he comes home from work tonight since it's his birthday today. It's a yellow cake and I'm frosting it with browned butter frosting. I suspect from the way it looks that the edges might be a little crispier than I would have liked, but that's nothing a little frosting can't mask, right? And since this is my first attempt at baking a cake from scratch (actually, I've never even baked a cake from a mix), I'm not planning on being too critical of myself. If it's edible and remotely resembles an actual layer cake when all is said and done, I'll be pleased.

Anyway, I have a couple of posts flitting around in my head, but I think I'll start by writing about Russia. I'll just give you my highlights, although if you're my friend on Facebook you can also look at some of the pictures I posted. There are 250+ pictures over there with commentary and you definitely don't have to look at all of them, although even with my non-existent photography skills I still think I managed to get some really nice shots. I think Russia would be a real (or amateur) photographer's paradise, by the way. I was constantly blown away by the colors and textures. So much of it was unexpected, and so much of it was utterly different from anything we have here in the United States.

We were in Moscow first. I'm glad I went to Moscow for a couple of reasons. First, I don't know that I'll ever get there again. It's not as if it's exactly close to anywhere else (St. Petersburg, on the other hand, can be relatively easily tacked on to any tour of Scandinavia or northern Europe, so I can actually imagine ending up there again someday). Second, while St. Petersburg mostly felt like the rest of Europe--if you've been to Amsterdam or Venice or Germany, then you already have a schema that St. Petersburg will fit into pretty well--Moscow was more challenging. It's a huge city, labeled in a language I don't speak at all, full of things that made me go, "Well, this is kind of like [whatever] but, huh...bizarre." As just one example, I ate at a sushi restaurant one night (sushi seems to be very trendy and prevalent in Russia right now, much like it was in the U.S. about ten years ago) and the tables spilled out into the corridors of a shopping mall, the decor of which prominently featured a disco ball. Uh, okay. I feel like Moscow is a nice transition city for a traveler. Like I said, it still feels very European in a lot of ways, but there aren't many English speakers (I've found in most of Europe it's easy to find someone who can understand you, but in Russia I was almost always having to use charades to get my point across), and while after a few days there I knew the cyrillic alphabet and could painstakingly sound out words like a kindergartener learning to read, the language barrier was still sizable. However, having tackled Russia I now feel like traveling to Asia (which I plan to do...someday) won't be quite as jarring and overwhelming.
My highlights of Moscow? Red Square and St. Basil's were impressive, of course. I was thrilled to discover that it looked exactly the way I imagined it would. Usually places are smaller than I had imagined or not as colorful or whatever, but St. Basil's did not disappoint. We also took a tour of the Kremlin and the armory museum there, which I thought was great. My favorite room had the coronation and wedding dresses of most of the tsars and tsarinas. One of the wedding dresses blew my mind. It was so simple and yet so pretty that I looked at it and thought, "That's it, that's the dress I want to get married in someday." I've been looking for images of it online ever since and of course I can't find it (they only have images of the gigantic 1800s coronation dresses, and this was a late 19th century/early 20th century empire waist number that's, as I said, actually fairly simple...it would help with the google searching if I could remember whether it belonged to Empress Alexandra or Maria Fyodorovna, but I can't). Fortunately, a couple of the people I was on the trip with bought catalogs of the collection, so I'm planning to bug someone to make copies of the pictures of that dress for me pretty soon so I can keep them for inspiration. I've never been one of those girls who imagined her perfect wedding dress, so it was surprising to fall so in love with an outfit. I realize any dress I eventually wear will not be an exact replica of that dress, of course, and I also realize I'm waaaaaaaaay putting the cart before the horse here, but I suppose if it doesn't end up being a wedding dress for some reason it can be inspiration for a really rockin' party dress, right? :-)

Okay, so twenty minutes went by and so my cake finished cooling and I frosted it and then my mom called and then Penn came home and I surprised him with the cake (it looks very homemade, i.e. messy, but I hope it's going to be tasty when we try it later!) and now his mother is going to be here any minute (she's staying with us for the weekend), so I have to go. I'll have to save my musings on St. Petersburg for some other time.

Have a nice weekend, everyone. It's finally spring!!