The Russian Psyche

Housekeeping in these hotels always turns on the annoying hotel ad channel while the guest is out of the room.  The Hilton's is discrete and light, but the GHE's channel is obnoxious and circles back on itself over and over.  Fricking annoying!

I changed to channel 3 to learn more ruski by immersion while i fidgetted with my belongings.  I happened upon the Mystic Channel, I think.  This crap is SO Russian.  It always has been: Rasputin, icons of saints, statues of Lenin.  OMG!  I saw how to blend herbal potions, devine spirits, it's all there on Moscow television.  Sure, Americans and Australians fall for this crap but it's so much more intense in Russia.

Why?

I think it has to do with the steppe origins of these people and having to find hope in anything that gimmered.  It's part of the Russian psyche, even if they are scientists, they believe more in this bullshit and wizardy.  

This psychobabbel on Russian tv is the tail end of centuries of weird Russian mysticism leading to a super cool mystical school of art, especially iconography.  And don't forget the influence of manipulative charlatan Rasputin on these supersitious imperial Russians, which changed the history of the country.  Those art treasures decorate the extravagant imperial capital cathedrals and chapels of the Kremlin, as well as St Basil's and less so the BIG HUGE RUSSIAN OTHODOX CATHEDRAL.  I caught a special early morning train to Moscow to catch the Krelim since it is closed my final day in Moscow, Thursday.  I chose a regular Kremlin ticket rather than an Armory ticket, and that was a stupid mistake.  I hear the armory is the coolest thing in the Kremlin imperial compound, and one can see a better collection of iconography at St Basil's outside in Red Square and at the STATE MUSEUM.  I was just not thinking when i hiked there in the arvo, and didn't have many rubles in my wallet when i got to the ticket booth.  (Maybe since i left my hotel in Sant Peter at 6am that day and was dazed.)  I had asked the ticket lady:

gdye bank? 

 and she replied

i dont know, do not know.  

ias if, i am so sure, they were all around red square.  idiot unhelpful devushka.

anyway, i didnt have money for two tickets, but could have bought the amoury ticket and seen everything i did.  it's part of the normal complexity of russian ultra-buraeuratic pricing.

Even though the religious art and architecture is the main draw of the Kremlin, it was great to be inside the seat of twentieth century Russian imperial power, and I got to exhaust my uniform fetish with probably two or three hundred men and women in military outfits.