The Trip

OK, so I've been meaning to get this up for a little while now, but I don't have anything else to do tonight so here goes:

One of the things we've heard a lot about since we got here is how different Moscow is from the rest of Russia and how we shouldn't learn just Moscow culture and miss the vast cultural gulf between that and the average Russian village. To put it in perspective, that would be like wanting to understand the average person in a small town in North Carolina, but going to Manhattan to study the language. You can certainly learn English in Manhattan, but to identify with someone culturally from Fuquay you've left yourself a lot to do.

With that in mind, we took a trip a couple of weeks ago to Kolomna, a medium-sized city 100 km from Moscow for a couple of days. It was a great trip, and really gave me a much more positive impression of Russian life than I think I had before. We like Moscow, but to be honest, we're not really city people, and so it was great to see some trees and fields, and hear, well, just nothing at all for a while. It's funny how you live somewhere with constant background noise for so long and then you leave and you can just hear the silence. Anyway, on to the pictures:

The trip started pretty early in the morning, and Steven wasn't feeling too well (actually, the lovely B missed out on some of the trip due to taking care of him, as he got worse the whole time we were there, but that's another story). The train ride there, just under 2 hours, was a chance to catch up on some sleep after a 5:45 am departure.

Kolomna is known for being a center of the Orthodox church, with a bunch of monasteries and old churches there. Here Andrey and I are in a beautiful rose garden in a monastery. It was a great chance to find out about cultural Orthodox practices, some of which were really fascinating.

If you're wondering about the level of closeness, which is distinctly un-American, you have to remember that the Russian sense of personal space is quite different from our own. At first I found it disconcerting when Russian men (and women!) would grab my arm while talking to me, but now I'm starting to get used to it. Pretty soon I guess I'll start doing the same myself, and then someday I'll screw up and do it to some American guy when we get back there. All part of acculturation, I guess.

This is the inside of one of the old Orthodox churches in Kolomna. Very interesting cultural finds in there. One of the interesting things to me is the obvious lack of benches or chairs. During a service all the people crowd into that little space and stand up, and it can go on for hours! A dedicated lot, it would seem. Very beautiful church, with lots of paintings of saints, etc. everywhere.

This is a look at the downtown area of Kolomna where all the monasteries and churches are. I really like the architecture of the churches, and I even like the onion domes that were a little strange to me when we got here.

Country houses all have a garden, although they don't actually call this a garden. This is a "yard-garden" (J's loose interpretation), and the actual "garden" is really what we would call a field, albeit a small one. They grow flowers here, and at their garden they grow vegetables and things to eat. Each family has a small field to grow things on for themselves, and during the Soviet days a lot of the food the people ate came from the private "gardens" rather than the collective farms.

One of the reasons we won't be doing this very often - it was expensive! This is what you get for $80 a night in Kolomna - not exactly the Ritz but it was the cheapest place in town.

This beautiful little village was within walking distance of the town center, so we hiked over there. The big set of buildings you see there is a monastery that the Orthodox church rebuilt after the Soviet system fell apart.

Kolomna is right on the river, so we took a tour down to the riverbank. Absolutely beautiful, with fields and forests as far as you could see on the far bank.

The old Kremlin wall - "kremlin" (or the Cyrillic equivalent, Кремль) just means "fortress" in Russian, so there's a big one in Moscow that everyone knows about, but just about every other town had one as well. This one was built in the 1300's, and this chunk of it is still in pretty good shape. All around the old downtown you can see the big towers from the fortress walls.

We even got to eat in a Russian restaurant while there. I had tongue (the near plate) which I hadn't had since Bolivia, and although it was more tender here it wasn't really hot and thus not as good. I also got a really salty fish dish and a kind of dill soup. They really like dill here in Russia and I admit I've really developed a tasted for it. B had some meat dish with potatoes - all of it was good. She told me she plans to blog on Russian food sometime but I can just preview it by saying it's all very good (except kefir, which is so bad it deserves its own post sometime).

Every town in Russia seemingly has their own World War II monument. Having a more Western heritage, I think sometimes it's easy to forget that the Russians also made massive sacrifices, with unbelievable death tolls during the war, to help defeat the Axis. This one is a statue of the soldier's head, with names of war heroes carved on posts (outside the picture) who died during the war. Oh, and sorry about getting my shadow in the shot - I couldn't see another way to get the whole thing in at that time of day.

So, I guess I'll leave you with this picture (except for the contest, of course). Russians love flowers and trees, and do a much better job of filling their cities with them than they do in America. This is a beautiful scene just outside the monastery in Kolomna.

And now, of course, to everyone's favorite: the What Is It For?™ for the week. As usual, the rules are that the first person to post the right answer in the comments section gets a point, and at some point I plan to tally up the points and award the winner with some sort of prize (maybe a souvenir from the motherland?). Last week's winner - codename "Greenspan," B's Mom recognized the item in the picture as a beet and gets the point. The national dish, of course, is борщ, or "borshch." Theories abound on whether it comes from Ukraine or Russia, but Wikipedia lists it as from "Eastern Europe," so I'm not going to pick sides.

No hints on this one, but your job is to figure out what the van below is used for. General answers are no good on this one - you'll have to be specific! I admit that I was a little surprised to know what this van's primary purpose is, so be creative and maybe you'll get lucky. Or maybe you're some sort of Russian genius and you know the answer. Happy guessing, and see you again next time.