ISCO POST: Muscovy, ducks

02.11.06

A week or so ago I went to my first ballet, at Ykaterinburg, on the edge of Siberia, with Claire. When it comes to performance, I would generally rather be at the opera, as a rule, so when the ballet started I kept waiting for someone to break into song... Sadly it was not to be, and I have to admit to losing interest from time to time (the ballet was Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, and we all know the plot) despite the grand surroundings of a beautiful provincial opera house.

But last night Claire and I hustled thru the cold St Petersburg night to see the Kirov ballet at the famous Mariinsky Theatre. The ballet was Don Quixote -- not, I would have thought, an obvious choice for a ballet (and in actual fact the Don and his squire were only there for comic relief) -- but I was hooked.

We sat up in a box on the belle-etage, dressed in our best backpacking finery (there is definitely a lot to be said for travelling with mostly black clothes -- they fit in almost anywhere), with opera glasses, watching some of the world's best dancers, then flew home again on our flashing twinkle-toes to eat bad lasagne and have our ears assaulted by an Ace of Base CD at our hotel's restaurant. The sublime and the ridiculous -- that's what it's all about.

Today was a landmark day on our great journey -- we have clean laundry for the first time since we left home, courtesy of the coolest laundromat in Europe. It was a tiny below-stairs establishment with a grubby front parlour and two kids in charge, one doing the launndry and making espresso, and the other playing some fabulous slabs of white-label electronica, a very welcome change from the ubiquitous and generally awful Russian pop music, which makes other Eurovision entrants sound like Mozart by comparison. Courtesy of our friendly laundromat, I now have a few good recommendations for St Petersburg clubs for this evening -- unfortunately we will miss the city's great Halloween bacchanal, but we should be able to get a few good nights out here to compensate.

We leave Russia on Saturday, via bus (*groan*) to Tallinn, in Estonia. We're looking forward to getting somewhere boring where we can drop our packs for a while and do nothing, except take stock and reflect on the month we've just had.

Travelling across Russia has been a great experience, from the 'wild east' of Vladivostok, to the urbane cosmopolitanism of Irkutsk (forget Perth, this place is really isolated -- the nearest large city is Ulan Bator), the incredible beauty (and excellent smoked fish) of Lake Baikal, the strangely Bostonian (well, at least I thought so) city of Ykaterinburg, and then to the great cities of Moscow and St Petersburg.