Goodbye Mother Russia

Yesterday I went with great anticipation to the Dostoyevsky Museum. Closed for renovation.

              That can make a person sad

Today I went with great anticipation to the Faberge Museum. Couldn't get in. Luckily I saw a few in Moscow.

This Faberge egg has a tiny golden Trans Siberian Railway train that hides inside a globe

So, since I couldn't see any Faberge eggs, I went to the Museum of Anthropology & Ethnography to see dead babies in bottles. Really. 

Peter the Great was a very forward-thinking person. He created this, the oldest museum in Russia, 295 years old this year. In addition to showing Russians what people looked like around the world, he sought to elevate their thinking on a number of matters. One was that malformed babies (referred to as "monsters" at the time) were the result of witchcraft. He wanted to show people that there were medical reasons for these fearsome birth defects. He teamed up with a scientist who had just invented a way to embalm humans & animals in a remarkably lifelike way. He (Peter the Great) sent out a call all around Russia for deformed babies, to the point where he amassed a large collection. They sleep in eternal liquid in jars in St. Petersburg now, in a museum also full of full-scale dioramas of the world's peoples.*

Beautiful diorama figures guard the babies in bottles as they sleep.

Goodbye blinis for breakfast.

Goodbye amazing view out cafe window while eating blinis.

Goodbye more birthday cakes, with god-shaped candles all around the top.

Goodbye women who walk over cobblestones with amazing shoes.

Goodbye willowy Russian girls, & the Russian men who appreciate them.

Goodbye strong Russian women. Russian women can snap you like a matchstick just by looking at you.

Goodbye Russia, big land of big & small beauties.

*Taking photos of these babies is forbidden, so I did not take these. But someone did, because I found these on the web.