OMG

I HAVE YARN!

All you anime watchers can insert one of those obnoxiously satisfied kitty smiles right there.

It sort of gives you an idea of the shopping around here that it took me three days to figure out which clothing store by a pharmacy near the metro station it was that sells knitting things.

Anywho, they were having a sale and I bought six skeins of a lovely acrylic-wool blend in dark blue and steely grey, and am about four inches into the purse I've been designing in my head. My head is much clearer, and my hands are much happier. Knitting is magic.

Beyond that, I went to the Yusopov palace on Saturday. That's the palace where Rasputin... um... started to be killed? It was where he got poisoned and shot the first time, at least.

That grisly story only takes up two rooms of the palace, and the rest of it was lush and beautiful. I have so many more ideas for stories set in palaces now. Coolest of all for me was the Mirror Room, which was an octagonal little vestibule where each wall was a white door with a mirror taking up most of its surface. It was as though we were standing in a sea of doors, and it was impossible to tell which we'd come through. Some of them were just closets, one went to the main hall, one held the gramaphone that had been playing the night of the assassination, and one led to the secret staircase entrance that Rasputin took. Down in the basement and up above, they had wax figures of army dudes and Rasputin himself, eating a fatefully (or not so fatefully) poisinous cookie. Veeeerrry creepy to be standing a) on the place where he actually had been shot, and b) looking at him eating a cookie.

And then Sunday was sleeping in, shopping, buying yarn (YAY YAY YAY) and doing lots of laundray.

Another student has lent me his copy of The Historian, and I somehow am two hundred pages in just since Friday, although I did manage to get all my homework done too. It's nice, because it's printed on big sheets of tissue-thin paper, so you don't have to turn the pages too often and they stay put once they're turned. That means- you guessed it!- sitting in bed, The Historian on my lap, and knitting. Heaven. The irony of handling sharp wooden sticks while reading a vampire novel is not lost on me.

comments:

For those of you that didn't hear this, my hostess told me (as I sat completely silent at the dinner table like a little American storm cloud) that the third week of an exchange is always hard. You forget how to talk, everything gets scary again, you get sick (this said as I sniffled pathetically.) But then, she said, that sometime in the fourth week it all gets better again.

With the advent of yarn, I believe her.

Oh, and if you aren't commenting because you don't know how, just click comments and write your comment in the text box on the side. Leave it as Anonymous and just type your name at the bottom. I live for comments!

PS

Drunken young men like me here, apparently. This week's specimen was actually kind of polite, in a weird way, and asked permission to follow me around. When I told him he couldn't- no, no matter how pretty I was, no matter how nice he was, and no matter how much he liked me- he just sort of said, "I can't?" and wandered off. Weird.