Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Evening in St. Petersburg, Russia

This evening we went on our 2nd excursion for St. Petersburg. We went to a Russian ballet, Swan Lake. I've never seen Swan Lake and didn't even know what the story line was about. At first, we got into the place where the ballet was taking place and thought to ourselves, oh boy, cheesy. It wasn't that big, not like Gammage at ASU like we were use to. We were also appalled at what people were wearing to a ballet. We got all dressed up fancy and people were there wearing jeans and a t-shirt. No respect. We weren't aloud to take pictures or videos either so we didn't even bring our camera. We should have, because the building inside had other beautiful rooms. I got some pictures off the internet of the ballet we went to and we were lucky to get a picture of our guide the next day. Anyway..once the ballet started...holy moly....it was fantastic!!!! Our first impression was soon forgotten. We loved this ballet, even Jake liked it!!


This was our ballet tour guide Elena. She was awesome. She's also a teacher of English to older students. We told her how we would like Russian Rubels as souveniers and how hard it was to get it. She told us to give her a dollar and she'd give us the equivelent in rubels. She said there was no law against it and would be happy to help us out. She was awesome!! She did tell us that if our dollar was not that clean looking that they would give you less money for it. They have 30 Rubels to our one dollar.


The outside of the building


The inside seating area. We were on the ground floor sitting in like row 12.


One of the other rooms. Great woodwork.


The stage and swans




These four ladies were awesome!! They did everything synchronized. I just loved when they would jump up in the air and their legs/feet would go back and forth really fast. I don't know the term they use in ballet for that, but it was so cool to watch.

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