The Rolling Stones

They gather no moss, I hear, though it's difficult to believe. Anyway, they had a concert in Palace Square on Saturday. It appears to have taken them most of the week to assemble the stage, which is probably because it had about an acre of video screen on it, and a moving platform. Attendance was better than at the Elton John concert--possibly owing to the fact that it wasn't raining. Palace Square is, as I've mentioned, a decent chunk of space; I think there were people everywhere except in the "shadow" of the Alexandrine Column. Also there were people just beyond the barrier, and people along the sidewalks at the end of Nevsky, and a lot of people in the park across the street. As for the concert itself: I was impressed. Mick Jagger spent almost all of it dancing around the stage, and didn't die from it.

Under the conditions (which were basically ideal), I think it's fair to say that Russian crowds are pretty subdued. For 'subdued' here, you may substitute 'pathetic'. They do cheer, but they pretty much only do it at the end of songs, or after someone says something, and then they stop, and basically don't cheer again until something else happens. They can be convinced to do things like clap during songs--but for some reason it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone in the band that a crowd that mostly doesn't speak English can't be counted on to repeat lyrics in English. At the end of the concert they applauded, for a while. Not long enough to really deserve an encore, anyway; everyone pretty much just left. Applause is definitely louder, longer, and more enthusiastic at things like the opera.

Pretty much the whole crowd left by walking down Nevsky. I don't think the militsia left any other path, so we basically blocked traffic out past the first canal. And here was a strange thing: a couple times a cheer went up while we were walking down Nevsky, for no discernible reason whatsoever. Kind of like the wave, but louder, and on the street. Oh, and part of the way down the street I realized that everything looked so funny because it was dark and there were lights on; the sun sets at around 11:00 now.

I didn't go on the boat ride we had planned for after the concert, even though I haven't seen the bridges go up yet. Later, right? The next morning was an excursion to Tsarskoe Selo (aka Pushkin), and then a picnic after that.

Pushkin was all right; it has a few palaces, and a lot of parks. The one palace we saw was a summer palace--only one room thick at any given point--and not all that interesting. The park was nice, though.

The picnic, by contrast, was basically dismal. Russian parks are generally pretty good, but their idea of a park shelter doesn't include benches or a concrete surface, which worked well with the fact that the area around the shelter was sandy. Also, it was raining. It wasn't a complete waste, though--we got to play some frisbee.

Oh, and today was Navy Day. There have been big posters up along the streets all week that say "Glory to the Russian Navy" (not kidding), and then apparently they paraded some of the navy along the Neva today. We didn't get back early enough to see this (the picnic was really long), but they had the tops of the four big columns lit (they're supposed to represent the four great rivers of Russia), and there were a lot (really, a lot) of sailors and/or people dressed as sailors on the streets heading away from the river. And, for that matter, a lot of people still on the banks of the Neva, considering that the show appeared to be over. Apparently they get into their patriotic holidays.

Ok. That's it for now.