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Novosibirsk Culture Museum, Photo Museum, Ob Sea

I took a nice bit of sleep and then Vika walked the 20 min to my dorm.  Academ Gorodok is set right inthe forest, its a maze of paths and everytime we went anywhere it was via a different path making the me, the casual visitor, unable to figure out the layout of the place.

We took breakfast in an unremarkable diner type joint that reminded me more of a fast food version of Denny's. But it was a cheap and quick place to fuel up for a day of sight seeing.  We rode a minibus into the center of the city and Walked by Vladimir Lenin standing proudly on Ulitsa Lenina. I thought it was a bit strange that they left him there, but in general the Russians I had met were apathetic about politics in general. The culture museum certainly had a few itneresting exhibits and didn't take an incredibly long time.

We walked around for a while. I bought some food at a grocery.  We then visited a contempory photography exhibit which was very large and quite interesting. Vika had done some translation work for them so we got in for free. We spent at least 90 minutes walking through the various photography exhibits.  Vika seemed to welcome my oppinionated commentary.  And I certainly have oppinions about what I like in photography and in general I was happy with what we saw.

We ate lunch at a fast food place called American Pizza, it was more american than american and it had a large teenage birthday party going on along with the requisite happy birthday singing. The few fast food type joints I went to were not bad, cheap, and full of teenagers. Perhaps there is hope that restraunt culture will flourish in Russia, but currently that is not the case.

We headed back to Academ and had tea with a Friend of Vika's who also had studied or was studying some english. Vika's cousin and roomate also joined us for Tea.   Like so many of the soviet era apartments they were built during the time of the populist Krushev and there is a word in Russian that is something like Kruschev's Ghettos, they are small and very utilitarian and in general don't seem to have much maintenence done on the outside of them.  Tea time was nice, we discussed many things and had much for tea.  We were going to meet up with a second friend of Vika's who wanted to meet me, but for some reason she was not available.

Not knowing what we should do, Vika decided that we should head to the Ob sea. Which is a gigantic manmade resevoir created by the damming of the Ob River.  The mighty Ob is one of the longer rivers in the world and drains into the arctic sea. It was a nice distance of walk, and the wind was blowing nice waves onto the large beach, which sadly was closed due to some sort of parasite being present.  The sun was setting, the view was picturesque.  It was remanecsent of a great lake, except the beach was better.  We chatted till it got dark on a peace of driftwood and then she walked me back to the visitor dorm whereI spent another late night chatting with teh expat Russian students. I didn't get as much sleep as I should have. I was sharing my dorm room with a man whose daughter was visiting a prestigious local school. Sadly there was only one key between the two of us and we didn't share language abilities. The key also didn't work very well. Lots of Russian keys don't work very well, and that doesnt seem to bother them. 

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