St. Petersburg

Day 1
We've done so much in the past 5 days and it has been fabulous. We arrived in Moscow on Monday and didn't do much that day, except have our first russian meal (they use dill and sour cream on everything! but it was yummy) and then biked around the neighborhood where aunt glo and cannon live. We left the very next morning for a 1 hour flight to St. Petersburg. Neither of us had too hard of a time with jet lag as far as getting sick, but we were pretty tired so we had to try to keep our energy up the first couple of days.

I loved St. Petersburg, every building was so beautiful and detailed. Pinks, greens, blues and yellows were used on almost all the buildings, only a couple were grey. It's like going to a big city that's very historic, but colorful and literally every building is dream. It reminded me of my sister Adrea's playmobile doll house. The first day we got a driving tour of St. Petersburg so we could decide what we wanted to do. We had a tour guide and he was okay that first day but by the end of the trip we all wanted to strangle him. He was extremely insulting about America (basically everything is bigger and better here) and he had to correct literally everything we said. But he had a lot of good information and we learned a lot from him. Anyway these are some shots I took either from the car or while walking on the street (some are kind of blurry).

This is actually outside of the city, and was built under the Soviet Regime, you can always tell when something was built during this time, they didn't use any color. This statue is of Lenin, whom they love, but they hate Stalin and I'm still trying to figure that one out, seems like they did the same things.

At first I thought this bear was this guy's pet, but he just uses it for tourism, sad.

I don't know what this girl's hair was made of or how she did it, but it looked like the consistency of a pom pom. Lots of short skirts in Russia, and lots of high heels.

I love these yellows!

St. Petersburg has the nickname Venice of the North, because of these little canals and bridges. So pretty.

This is one of the few buildings built during the soviet times, and it really stands out against all the lighter buildings, this just feels heavier to me. Notice the communist symbol, which is actually pretty neat.

Starting Out

I have debated for a long time whether or not to start a personal blog. There are a couple reasons for this. 1. I'm not a very good writer. When I was younger I thought I'd grow up to be a writer. I wrote comic books, poems, short stories, I even once tried to write a whole novel (I think it ended up being 150 pages or so). But as I've gotten older I find myself totally incompetent when it comes to writing, even though my dad and my sister are both mega good at it.

So there's that, but there's also the fact that I didn't have much to write about. Seth said to me the other day that this has been his worst semester. I had to agree. For seth it was very stressful, for me it was very monotonous. Seth was finishing his bfa show, working, and taking some pretty tough classes, he was also majorly sleep deprived. I on the other hand woke up to the same thing every day. It's not that I was bored, our shop has kept me extremely busy, but waking up and getting on your computer for 5 hours can get very tiresome.

Well, now we are both college graduates and I decided now is a good time to start this thing. Mostly because tomorrow at 8am we leave for Russia. We will be spending the next 3 months in Europe and I want to try to document it best I can. I'm bringing with me 3 film cameras, 12 rolls of film and 1 digital camera. I plan on posting lots of photos on my photo blog, but here I'd like to post all of our snapshots to better describe our trip. We will be spending 3 weeks in Moscow with my family, and then after that it's 2 weeks in paris, 2 weeks in amsterdam, 5 days in switzerland, and 1 month in italy.

And since a blog post is nothing without a photo, I want to share something with you that is very dear to us and has become very important in our lives.

Stuffed french toast.

Seth made this one morning and it was. amazing. I probably think about it everyday since then, even though he's only made it once. Also it tends to come up in conversation quite a bit, like, hey remember that one time you made stuffed french toast? Oh my gosh that was so good. Let's make it again.

So here's to living exciting enough lives that we have enough exciting things to write about and enough blog posts to make you totally sick of us.
Cheers.