The Russian Countryside

The rest of the fellowship group arrived at the end of the week, and our first official function of our two week program of events was a splashy dinner at the restaurant run by the director of our organization.

Arkady is a charismatic and charming fellow, eloquent in both Russian and English. He’s a bit of an entrepreneur, and has established something called “The Center for Liberal Conservative Policy.” It consists of a private membership and a private restaurant in the building where the offices are located. One wall of the lounge area is particularly impressive – it’s all photos of Arkady and various luminaries. The centerpiece is a large photo of Boris Yeltsin giving a speech from a podium during those uncertain last days of the Soviet Union. Sitting on the floor at the base of the podium is Arkady, both attentive and vigilant at the same time.

We also received our schedule for the next two weeks, and that’s when I received first notice of the next day’s trip to Suzdal, a golden ring town outside of Moscow. Well outside of Moscow. Like 5 hours. And we were scheduled for a day trip. Ouch. That wasn’t going to be easy, and I was right.

We struck out from the office at 8:30 the next morning in a bus with a tour guide. She began talking over the speaker system and did not pause for 50 minutes. Not once. Again, it was the typical level of detail one comes to expect from a Russian tour guide – highly detailed and precise and excruciatingly minute. I desperately wanted a nap on what would be a long trip, but didn’t get much chance. As we passed through little villages in the middle of nowhere, she chimed in with the entire family history of whatever important personage had been born there, or lived there, or as in the case of Pushkin – even stopped over for a night on the way to somewhere else.

Anyway, as a result, I have a better appreciation for medieval Russian history with an emphasis on Yuri Dolgoruki and Andrei Bogolubovsky. Maybe appreciation isn’t the right word, since I learned all of this from her very grudgingly at best.

Suzdal took nearly 5 hours to reach – 4 hours and 40 minutes to be exact. It’s a small town, compact, but chockablock with churches and monasteries and a kremlin, all in wonderful condition. It may be as close to a fairy tale location as one can get. We ate lunch and then toured a handful of the most important sights with our guide on this incredible autumn day.

On a day like this, in a place like this, you begin to get an appreciation for why the birch tree holds such a storied place in the Russian psyche. The white trunks blend into a hazy mass in the distance, feathered with rustling golden leaves. It really is a beautiful sight to see a stand of them isolated in a harvested field. Suzdal was a feast of culture, art, history, and landscape.

But we had to turn around and head back. After a very brief stop in Vladimir we struck back out on the road to Moscow. We made occasional stops for provisions and comfort, with varying levels of success. One LUKoil gas station didn’t have the right fuel for the bus. Another did, but wouldn’t let us inside to buy things until we pleaded our case at length. Still, all they had was gas station food and we had to take what we could get. We also did enough research on pay toilets to write a doctoral dissertation. One effort to get into a restaurant was frustrated by a gypsy wedding taking place there – the men wanted us all to come in, but the women were quite adamant that the restaurant was closed.

We got back to Moscow at around 11pm, thoroughly wiped out from the long trek. I remain convinced, as I said when I first saw the schedule, that Suzdal is too far away for a day trip. We spent twice as long in the bus (10 hours!) than we did at our destination.