Autumn Has Arrived

Sometime between last weekend and yesterday afternoon, autumn arrived in Saint Petersburg. I looked out the window yesterday afternoon as I took an unnecessarily long route to get to character class and saw this in one of the courtyards. The whole scene looked so orange and autumn-like and beautiful that I had to take a picture.

On my way to breakfast this morning, there were leaves falling from the trees in the courtyard outside of the dorm building. Later, I saw some of the younger students happily playing with the leaves as the wind lifted them off of the branches of the trees.

I went for a walk with my friends Berin and Virginia. We only had to step outside the front door of the academy to see more evidence of autumn's arrival. There is a small, circular park at one end of Rossi Street, and we could see from the academy entrance that the leaves of the trees there were changing color and falling.

The park is so beautiful and peaceful, though it is enclosed by a circular roadway that constantly has cars zooming frantically around it. It is always a bit confusing when we have to figure out how to get from one place to another in this tiny little area because there are almost half a dozen roadways branching off in different directions, a little parking lot attached, and crosswalks in some places but not others. Sometimes we get to one corner, realize that we can't cross the road there, and have to backtrack a bit to find somewhere that we can cross. It wouldn't be so bad if I could only remember where not to go, but somehow that knowledge keeps slipping from my mind!

I enjoyed seeing the bushes in the park. They looked like autumn's version of rainbows because each one had a gradient of red, orange, yellow, and green leaves, the reddest ones on top and the colors fading to green near their bases.

Here is another picture of the little park, both because it is pretty and because I want to give some reference of how small it really is. The statue in the center is located at the middle of the circular park, and if you double the distance from the statue to where the street begins, that is the entire width of the park. It's small, but I like it a lot.

My friends were in need of some САБВЭЙ (Subway) sandwiches, so after we had made it back from the destination of our walk, the Grishko store, we made our way to the other end of Rossi Street to make a sandwich stop. This brought us through yet another park, also beautifully decorated in autumn's colors.

I wasn't in the mood to support a U.S. based chain restaurant, so I ate lunch when we returned to the academy. Instead of paying for a sandwich, I decided to buy a Russian dance magazine. 

I am going to try to read it, but I mostly bought it because it is full of beautiful pictures of Russian ballet stars. There are several pictures of scenes from Swan Lake, my favorite ballet, which makes me all the happier. Most of the pictures are in black-and-white, but they are such good pictures that it doesn't even matter very much- they're still incredible. I'll keep it around to look at whenever I am feeling in need of a little bit of inspiration!