Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic

I finally got to the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic. It was pretty nice...Arctic on the first floor, Antarctic on the second. Everything was in Russian, and while I've built a decent vocabulary in the fields of churches, wars, and old buildings, the polar expedition lingo was beyond me. But it was nice to have a walk around the city by myself. (No one else wanted to see the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic.) I poked my head into some restaurants, walked by the Dostoevsky House again, through an outdoor market, and along the canal. I think I needed some alone time with the city so that I could move at my own arbitrary pace. A break from running ideas by the group.

I read a while back, I think in Time, that several countries have been bickering over rights to the North Pole as the ice cap melts and trade passages open. Walking around the museum, I started to get a feel for the Russian perspective of this issue. It seems that most of the Russian polar expeditions were during Soviet times and a real source of nationalistic pride. In fact, aside from stuffed polar bears and penguins, perhaps the most notable aspect of the museum was the proliferation of Soviet symbolism and propaganda (not that it can't be found elsewhere in the city). I know that the US claims a stake to the territory, I guess just because we bought Alaska. I just wonder if anyone in the US, politicians or anyone else, actually cares. Not that we should just give the North Pole to Russia. I just wonder if anyone cares. Hopefully whoever gets it doesn't use it as a nuclear testing site.