Saturday outing: Film Festival and walking around campus

Last week Jesse went to meet with an adviser about doing a dual degree in Law and Russian and as he was leaving she noticed he had picked up a flier for the upcoming international film festival and handed him two free tickets! Most of the movies looked like they were going to be awesome but we didn't want to have to find a sitter (we haven't made that good of friends yet!) so we found one that was for kids and therefore would allow us to bring Niko with us instead :)  We saw a really fun French animated film called The Painting about characters in a painting who leave their painting searching for the artist who created them and run into some interesting characters along the way.  It was fun and existentialist and had gorgeous animation and we were so glad we got to go!  

And I didn't take any pictures (not even of the awesome old theater it was at!) so that's all you'll get to hear about that.  But since we were heading down to the campus area, we decided just to make an afternoon of it and spent some time after the movie wandering around and enjoying the lovely campus. 

Some architecture-love indulgence: 

Clocktower

Museum? I forget.

An old fashioned "arcade"--a gallery of shops right next to campus! They had really cute antique stores, a travel agency, and even a barber shop! 

A pretty church

A classroom building I think, but with a really awesome tower! 

We also saw a really cool piece of modern art: The Spinning Cube! 

Behold it in action:

Campus also has a lot of green grassy areas with lots of greenery so Nikolai had a lot of fun running around and pulling leaves and flowers off of bushes and such.

Look! It's like a forest! In the middle of campus! 

Campus also has TONS of squirrels that are semi-tame from getting fed by tons and tons of students. Nikolai, in typical Niko fashion, saw one and chased it up a tree, doing his little squirrel call (more on that in tomorrow's post) and wanting it to come down and play with him! 

Peeking out at us from the tree!

And then he wanted to get on daddy's shoulders to get a better look at it! 

At that point, though, the squirrel got freaked out that the tiny shouting human was getting closer and ran even farther up the tree, so the game was over.  

But look how cute my boys are!