Friday, April 1, 2011

More Traditional Russian Dancing. With Horses.

Tuesday was one of my days off. A mess of us wanted to go to the Fridays on Novie Arbat for lunch, as it was Dan's birthday. Alas, almost everyone had decided to celebrate Dan's birthday the night before, so my friend Whitney and I were the only ones to make it. I was actually pretty impressed with myself... I managed to navigate the metro, including switching lines, all by myself!

Fridays was amazing. Pricey, like all restaurants in Moscow are, especially American ones, but worth it. They had a pretty awesome business lunch:
Soup+Salad for 195p
Soup or Salad+main dish=275p
Soup+Salad+Main Course=345p
These came with a soda, and had refills for only 30p (I haven't seen refills anywhere else)

I was mostly excited because I got to eat an amazing salad with vinaigrette dressing (not Caesar!) I also ordered some sort of fettuccine with little porky bits. Quite tasty. And, the ever-important Coca-Cola "saldom, pozhalysta!"

Afterwards, Whitney and I walked back to the metro one Ctari Arbat. This is always interesting. She had wanted to find a used bookstore, but, as I haven't seen any, I steered her towards an outdoor book stall. She found a few very pretty childrens' poetry books with embellishment on the cover.

Walking back, we were chatting about things, and a woman in a fur coat started speaking to us in English. She is a Canadian expat who works for the British embassy. We chatted until we parted ways at the metro.

We returned back to the university with an hour to spare to leave for the theatre. We had tickets to another Russian dance show. After asking directions to the place, we managed to find it, but couldn't cross the street at the theatre... we had to run under a bridge/overpass. Which would have been fine, if I hadn;t managed to nearly be run over my a chauffeured Mercedes with diplomat tags and a Czech flag. Yep... almost caused an international incident by being hit by a Czech diplomat.

The dance show was pretty neat. Much less squeaking from the women tis time, which was nice.

The boys left halfway through to find food and party. Us girls stayed the whole time, then opted not to meet them. We stopped at a pizza place instead.

Interesting note: as we crossed in an underpass with the rest of the theatre-goers, we heard a really obnoxious voice repeating something in Russian. As we got further into the underpass, we realized there was a girl in there asking for money. With a horse. Yep, horse in the underpass in the center of Moscow.

Which is not the only horse-related story of the night. Apparently, in Kitai Gorod, there was a girl asking for 1000p to let people ride HER horse. The boys talked her down to 500p, and they put Dan on it. And he rode a horse to Coyote Ugly for his birthday.

No comments:

Post a Comment