Russia (Part 1)

Pamela Olson is a student at Stanford and for the past semester has been touring Russia.  
Her writing  style is comfortable yet gives you a real feeling of being with her. 
In our eyes she exemplifies what YAGO is all about.  
If you are going to Russia you’ll want to read this because Pam truly gives you the inside on where yago in Russia.

From Russia With Love

Our First Day

We got on a train to St. Petersburg at 11:00 Friday night and had a big ole party (the 27 students, three profs, and three tagalongs with some kind of ties to Stanford filled up a whole car). Our train was late to St. pete’s, so we missed our tour, but then we went to a restaurant, supposedly “one of the nicest in St. Petersburg” but it was just warm potato salad with pickles, oily borscht, a tiny greasy pork chop, about three peas, and stale apple cake. Tasty enough, though, and the company was good of course. 
Then we had a couple of hours to tour the Hermitage, and it was really incredible, I can’t begin 
to describe it, just   magnificent, all the paintings and sculptures and marble works and grand staircases (it is a palace after all), and then we had dinner at a different restaurant, except we had the exact same meal as lunch! It was kind of bizarre. Maybe it’s a staple, or maybe Russian restaurants have some kind of underground railroad of leftovers.  
Then we went to a really poor excuse for a Ballet, or I should say, a tragic one because of the awesome talent mixed with people who couldn’t do a proper arabesque without almost falling over. It was called Bayadera, about a priest who is supposed to be celibate but nonetheless falls in love with this girl, and she’s in love with this prince, but then the prince falls in love with this other girl, and for some reason these aborigines in loincloths keep jumping onto the scenes and bowing to everyone and shaking their hands at the heavens and charming snakes (which that special effect was so bad as to be hilarious), and there was this interminable hallucination scene which involved all of the worst dancers doing these protracted moves over and over again, and the whole back row almost fell over every time… Then we went back to the hotel, Gostinitsa Moskva, explored it a little, and went to sleep.