We're hanging around in Arkhangelsk

We've got a vouple days here in Arkhangelsk to kill, so we're exploring parts of the city.  We spent a couple hours at the city's History Museum.  All the exhibits were labelled in Russian, so we weren't able to understand everything completely, but the exhibits were grouped well enough both thematically and chronologically that it was suprisingly interesting for foreigners like us.  A few of the docents didn't quite belive in our inability to speak Russian, so we got some pretty detailed explanations on local fauna, of which 99% was beyond our Russian capacity.

Some of the more interesting displays were from the early Soviet era.  Here's a couple closeups of a carved bone chess set from the early 1930s.  The evil capitalist bourgeousie:

 And the good hard-working proletariat:

Peter the Great designated Arkhangelsk a center for shipbuilding in the late 1600s.  As far as I know, they still make ships here.  The museum has a pretty extensive collection of craftsman's models of ships of many different ships from different eras.  The flat-bottomed craft at the top is (I think) a river barge.  The longer ship at the bottom is opened up to show the inner construction.

We also did a little shopping.  We found a fairly large bookstore with kid's books and games, and picked up a couple puzzles and a couple books:

Clockwise from the top, the items are: a large insect-themed 1-10 number puzzle, a wooden telephone puzzle (bolshoi to malinki sized), the book of happy vegetable rhymes, and a "what do animals eat for lunch?" book.