Chow and Chows

There was a huge face at the window, a big chow looking in at us, and emitting a very low, very menacing "woof" over and over again, as he saw very tall Dan standing there.

I had to laugh because all I could see was Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion.

It had actually been a shock to look over my shoulder and see Beau (I think it was Beau--I'm sure someone will correct me if it's not) when the last time I looked over my shoulder, I saw a smaller dog.

We had come to the home of Ned's in-laws (without Ned and Marta) for dinner with Ned's sister-in-law's in-laws, Lynn and Dan, with whom we had lunch in Russia. If you recall, they were on our sister ship and their schedule put them one day ahead of us, but we did manage to run into each other at the Catherine Palace and had lunch together after our palace tour.

We never saw them again in Russia, but Marta's stepmother wanted to get us all together for a BBQ and to hear about our trip.

My job was to bring dessert, so I picked up a bunch of blackberries at Costco a couple of days ago and made two pies this morning. Very frustrating because I am the queen of pies and especially the queen of pie crust, but something has happened in the last few years--I can't roll out a pie crust to save my soul. It's the same recipe, the same equipment, the same technique, but the result is different almost every time. I end up having to patch it at the end...

(But that doesn't affect the taste...they are still delicious. I'm just no longer the queen of the NEAT pie crust!)

The time for dinner had been set for 3 p.m., and we arrived at about 3:04 to discover that everybody was two drinks ahead of us. They had been to a dog show earlier in the day (Ned's mother-in-law raises Chows), which had ended earlier than expected. Everybody was all full of tales of the dog show, since 9 year old Isabella had shown one of the Chows, who had taken best in breed, so there was lots of excitement about that and talk of Chows dominated the conversation.

But I had printed off some of my photos and shared them with Lynn and eventually with the others. Lynn had put her photos on CD and we never did get to those, which I felt bad about. But we compared notes and I guess we were very lucky on our trip. Right now Moscow is having a record breaking heat wave and fires in the country sending smoke so thick you can hardly see the city. We escaped that. Lynn also said that the day they were at Kizhi (my favorite place) it poured rain. We were there the next day and it was beautiful and clear. The woman who bought my necklace there said that there were four (or more?) ships there and that the island was mobbed. We were the only ship there the day we toured and pretty much had the place to ourselves. I guess we really were blessed with how beautiful the conditions were almost throughout our trip.

In preparation for re-living our trip today, I finally got the last of my photos uploaded to Flickr. The cossack show and our vodka tasting, should you not yet be totally sick of hearing about our trip! I still have one more video to put together (of our vodka tasting), but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Hurry Up and Wait

We are home. In Davis. With dogs. And I'm ready to revisit yesterday. When we crashed at Mike and Char's last night, we realized we had been up for 28 hours (at least), and I'm not sure how much sleep the others got en route, but if I got any at all, it was only for a couple of minutes.

Now I could say that we got on the plane in Moscow, changed planes at JFK and arrived in San Francisco at about 9 p.m. But what fun would that be? No...the whole story is MUCH more complicated (and painful) than that!

Let's start with the night before. We thought it was the last time we would see our favorite server, Mary Jane, and we had a tearful farewell and gave her a tip. We ended up seeing her the next morning, too, but we had already had our tearful farewell. There were several servers we liked, but the last week, we always went to MaryJane's table and she got to setting it up for us when she saw us come into the dining room.

I had a bad night and was awake at 3:30 a.m., so by 4, I was up walking the decks and taking pictures of the sunrise. It was strange to remember that just a little over a week before, in St. Petersburg, it never got this dark at any point during the night!

I even found a fisherman fishing off the dock by the boat at 4 a.m.

Our instructions were to have our bags out in front of our room by 7 a.m. I got mine out early--obviously the first in the hall to have bags out (you can see the "shop" which was across the hall from our room...lots and lots of beautiful, too expensive things to tempt us!)

By 7:30 we were on the bus headed for the Moscow airport. For one last time, we got to wave goodbye to Hotel Manager Dieter, who always waved whenever a bus took off on an excursion. This time he was joined by Katherin too. Unfortunately I was on the wrong side of the bus and missed my last chance to take a picture of these people we had come to enjoy so much.

Our nightmare began when Misha took us all to the gate which would let us into the check-in area, told us to go through the gates, and then bid us all goodbye. Like sheep, we slowly filed into the holding area and suddenly a woman asked who was going to Atlanta and who to New York. We were in the New York group and she began waving her arms at us and yelling "Go home! Go home! Come back one hour."

Kind of in a daze, we went back out the gate and milled around in the lobby. There were almost no chairs to sit on and we didn't have a clue what was happening or why we were standing there with no idea of what we were supposed to do.

Finally we tentatively started going back into the holding area again and this time we were permitted to put our bags through the scanners. I was surprised at how easy it was--no removal of shoes, no removal of computer. Piece o'cake! I could like this. Oh...how innocent I was!!!

From the scanners we went to the passport screener. Fortunately, before we went through that gate, Walt checked our tickets for the second half of our flight, from JFK to San Francisco and discovered that the woman at the first desk had issued him two boarding passes for the same seat, both in my name. So he went back and got that fixed. While he was doing that, we lost Mike and Char. I assumed they were way ahead of us, but it turned out that somehow in San Francisco, Air France had canceled Mike's return ticket and he had no reservation at all, so they had to go to Air France to get that straightened out. (Now I understand why Viking gets you to the airport four hours before flight time!)

After we'd passed through the passport control, then we went through another scanner. This was one of those full body scans, where we stood inside a glass tube with our arms upraised and they checked us out. There we took off our shoes. Still no need to remove the computer.

Naturally we were flying from the very last gate and naturally there were no moving walkways or tram cars you could ride. It seemed like forever that we wended our way in and out of Duty Free shops. I loved the cigarette shops with all the big colorful ads for cigarettes, all with HUGE signs that said "Smoking kills" slapped over them!

We finally got to our gate and settled in for the long wait for a plane. Beatrice, from New York, with whom we had become quite friendly, was concerned about her husband Wally, who has lots of health problems and who should never have had to walk that distance to the gate, but they had been unable to find a wheelchair for him.

After we had been sitting at the gate for about an hour, some security guy with a big gun told us we all had to get up and go back outside of the gate area again and line up for another screening. This seemed silly since we had all been in and out of the area for a long time, but we shuffled back outside and stood in line. Then, when we had totally jammed up the aisle, he told we we had to separate into men and women. When I tried to move into the women's line, I ran into these two...

...the guy on the left didn't want to budge an inch and the guy on the floor (who had been sleeping there since before we first got to the gate) didn't want to move his computer, though told me he'd be very upset if I stepped on it.

I still don't understand the need for this screening. It seemed completely arbitrary. Char was patted down from head to toe and her luggage opened and searched. Another guy's sandals were given about 5 minutes of checking. When it was my turn, the woman looked at my passport and motioned me to go through, without body patting or luggage inspection.

When the screening was finished, the guy in uniform with the big gun paced up and down in front of us, almost daring us to try to leave the area. We all behaved ourselves very well. I hoped he wouldn't check my camera to make sure I had not taken any photos of McDonald's while in Russia.

Finally we got on the plane for the 10+ hour flight to JFK. The flight was pretty uneventful, other than the memorable flight safety video which featured a woman with more Botox than Lisa Rinna.

Walt was asleep before the plane even took off.

They gave us free earphones and the in-seat TVs had lot of options, including a choice of about six movies, all free. Invictus was one of the movie choices and I bawled like a baby all the way through it. Strange--you know what the story is, you even know how it all comes out, but it was so emotionally moving that I just couldn't stop crying. If you have not seen this movie--RENT IT NOW. Despite all my tears, it was incredibly uplifting.

The food on the plane was OK, though it seemed to take forever to feed us. At one point I realized that we were a group of people who had been fed five course meals three times a day, plus a mid-afternoon snack, for the past nearly two weeks and after the meal they gave us after take-off it was seven hours before they gave us anything but peanuts to eat. Best part was the Russian Baskin-Robbins ice cream.

JFK was an experience. There is no other word for it. Well, I could probably think of lots of words for it, but none of them would be very nice. I've decided that customs areas must be what it's like being in Purgatory--or have they decided there is no Purgatory. It is definitely like waiting at the gates of hell. We all optimistically filed off the plane and down into the bowels of the airport into this mass of people standing in line. Standing in line. Have I mentioned standing in line? The problem was that the line wasnt moving. At all. At first I thought it was because we had filled the corridor from wall to wall and aways up there was a gate that was supposed to divide us into two groups and so what seemed to be going on was that we were merging from a full corridor to a half corridor. But even when that happened, there was still no forward movement. I finally stepped out of line to look down the corridor and saw this:

You can't see if very well, but just beyond the guy in the right in white is a break in the line and on the other side of that break is another line, just as long, coming in the other direction. Two very long lines coming from two directions, meeting in the middle, and NOBODY moving. There was ONE TSA rep and she wasn't doing anything. We stood there, having no clue what was going on, for 20 minutes.

Finally our line moved and we were counted in groups and sent off to the left. We went down an escalator and into a series of TEN switchbacks which spanned the length of the room, back and forth, the non-citizens line crossing the citizen line back and forth. We shuffled forward, inches at a time, though the closer we got to the second of the ten switchbacks, the faster it started to move. As we reached the first of the switchbacks, there was an impatient woman yelling at us all the "hurry! hurry! hurry!" Fine. Keep is standing motionless for hours and then yell at us when we don't move fast enough for you!

We had lost Mike and Char long before we got to the desk and when we reached the "hurry-hurry-hurry" lady, she sent us off to a rep several slots down the row and we found ourselves directly behind Mike and Char. Weird.

The guy who screened us happened to be Russian and seemed to enjoy talking with us about our trip and what we had seen. He passed us through without problem. Then we picked up our luggage and went to the luggage screener who asked us about if we brought back food or liquor. We told him a pint of vodka and a box of chocolates (our Anniversary gift from Viking). He slammed the suitcase down on the moving belt (I hoe he didnt smash the chocolates--Walt was going to take them to his office as a gift) and asked us to move to the next room. In the next room, we were transferring our luggage to the new flight. I had now been through about four different screeners, none of whom had asked me to remove the computer and in this room, I checked the instructions and it clearly said to take off jackets and remove shoes but not a word about computers. So I didnt remove the computer. The suitcase went through the scanner and they yelled at me for not taking the computer out. I had to go back, unpack the thing and then send it through, and then they yelled at me for not packing it up again quickly enough.

Then we just had to get to the other end of the airport (why don't we ever leave at the CLOSE gates?) with no moving walkway in sight. But all the signs were in English, at least. I spied a water fountain and said "Oh we're back in the US where it's safe to drink the water. I can drink out of that water fountain!" But no. It was broken. Then I decided to go to the restroom, but the line for the women's facility was too long. And we finally spied a moving walkway, that wasn't working. Sigh. Welcome home!

But finally we were at the gate until our plane loaded. There was a bird trapped inside the airport trying to get out the window near the window where we were sitting. I'm still worrying about that little guy today.

Our flight from Moscow to NY was Delta; our flight from NY to SF was also Delta, and it was the difference of night and day. The plane was dirty. I had to pick up a wadded up blanket on my seat and throw it somewhere so I could sit down. There was crap in the seat pocket. I asked for a seatbelt extender and they gave me a broken one. NOTHING was free. The headsets were $2, the same movies that had been free coming from Moscow cost $6 to watch on this plane. Water (the only free thing) was served without ice...I was afraid to ask for ice, fearing I would have to pay for it! It felt like flying on K-Mart Airlines, since the cabin attendants all carried around machines for swiping credit cards for whatever you wanted to buy from them.

Lunch was offered (for a fee) or if you didn't want to pay, you could have a small packet of peanuts. We had the choice of "Flight delights" which consisted of bagel chips, asiago cheese spread, olives, pomegranate-vanilla glazed cashews, dried cranberries and pineapple, swiss milk chocolate and a collectible card highlighting Delta's exciting worldwide destinations" or "Travel Treats" which was a tasty selection of snack items containing an assortment of chips, Jack Link's beef nuggets, crackers, cheesse, dried fruit, cookies and candy. We chose the "flight delights" because I just couldn't live without getting a collectible Delta airlines card

(aren't you jealous?)

About an hour out of San Francisco, I had a mini meltdown. I couldn't sit still, and I swear if I could have opened the plane door, I would have jumped out. I don't know why I was so antsy. I went to the bathroom and nearly burst into tears when I thought I heard the announcement that we were about to experience turbulence and everyone should return to their seats. (It turns out I was hearing things). But I kept myself under control and we landed safely and got home safely, after only a couple of glitches (it's hard to remember where you live after 28 hours without sleep!)

I collapsed into Mike & Char's recliner and slept all night, waking almost human this morning. Char plopped a flower down on the kitchen table this morning, popped a couple of waffles into the toaster, and we had breakfast, after which Walt and I took our bags out to the car and we headed home. Mike and Char stood on the sidewalk and gave us "the full Dieter."

So it's all over, but it sure was a great experience. I'm not ready to head out on another adventure this month, but once things have settled and the laundry has been washed, I'm sure we'll be thinking about what we're going to do next!!!

The Last Entry

This will be my last entry from this cruise, and it's going to be pretty boring. Sorry.

My cold hit hard last night, finally taking that inevitable plunge into my chest, which I'd hoped to avoid until I got home. After all these days, I finally found a way to sleep comfortably, cradling a long pillow in my arms like a baby, which somehow must align all the vertebrae in my spine in such a way that I could actually sleep. Except I couldn't because of the hacking cough. I got more sleep than I had on other nights, but by morning, feeling like death warmed over, I decided to skip the tour of the Kremlin this afternoon.

I'm already the slowest in any group and gasp for breath trying to keep up. With diminished lung capacity and feeling like crap anyway, it would only make matters worse. Walt would enjoy the trip more if he weren't worrying about me. The only thing I feel bad about is missing the Faberge eggs, which had been removed from the Catherine Palace, and are stored in the Armory at the Kremlin (which we took as an optional additional tour), but Char promised to take pictures.

So that's my day today. Sitting on the ship again, coughing, sleeping, eating, and packing. We leave for the airport at 7:30 a.m. tomorrow and have a plane change at JFK and should be back in SF around 9 p.m. We are driving Mike and Char home and then spending the night at their house to avoid having to drive all the way back to Davis so late. I am looking forward to getting into my recliner and being covered with dogs. I will probably actually skip a journal entry because of being in transit for so long.

So. It's over. Just about. Just a few more meals to stuff in and then we are on our own again. In all the time leading up to this cruise, I was concerned about my ability to handle everything. Still thinking about France/Italy and Ian, I was afraid this would be a repeat. But in actuality there was only one day that was like that, the day at the Catherine Palace where we lost Marina. Basically, I've lagged behind, but not embarrassingly so.

What am I taking away from this trip? Victoria read a hilarious supposedly real blog about someone's experiences on another cruise which essentially said, for each day, that they had seen a 14th century cathedral, a Kremlin that had been attacked by Tartars, and a huge statue of Lenin. We all laughed a lot because it does kind of feel like that. Ho hum...another golden dome, another huge statue of Lenin. Maybe if you live in one of the original 13 US colonies that have a Revolutionary heritage or in states that fought in the Civil War you can relate to all the emphasis on battles and war heroes and monuments better than if you live out west, where our heroes found gold or founded industrial empires or lead scandalous lives (or all three).

The statue on the right is of Peter the Great, the Navigator. Victoria said the story goes that the sculptor intended it to be of Christopher Columbus but then Portugal didn't want it, so they put on a new head on the body and gave it to Russia as a statue of Peter the great (Moscovites call it "Peter Columbus"). It is at the same time impressive (Peter was apparently 6'8" and the figure here is far taller than that), and silly. It looks like something from the warehouse at Universal Studios and stands in the middle of the river, near Gorky Park, surrounded by fountains.

The Russians we have encountered seem fiercely proud of their heritage and, depending on their age, somewhat conflicted about Soviet times vs. modern times. There were things they had under Soviet rule that they miss (free health care, for example) and things today that they are glad to have (tourism, for one!) and things about Soviet times that they don't miss at all...living conditions for one!

I also think that Americans could adopt a Russian way of raising a bit of money to keep some of our arts institutes going. Though I don't like having to pay to take photos in a church or a museum, what a wonderful way to get a bit of income. It's not a lot--something like about $1.50--and a lot of people are willing to pay that in order to use cameras in the place. Of course you then have to hire retirees to watch to make sure that people aren't taking pictures illegally, but in smaller places this might be a good idea (they don't charge in the larger museums, just the smaller ones...I'm still kicking myself for not buying permission at the church in Yaroslavl, which was spectacular).

It has also been interesting to listen to lectures on recent Russian history and realize that we are probably more alike than we like to admit. According to the people we have spoken with, Gorbachev accomplished great things for the Russian people, but not without a lot of pain in the process, very similar to what Obama is going through right now.

Viking has a videographer, Anatoly, who comes along and films your cruise. We saw part of the video on talent show night the other night and I saw the rest of it on the in-room cable TV channel. We have purchased the video as a good memory of our trip, but I'm disappointed by several things. People in our group do not appear in the video at all. The four of us do because we went to the vodka tasting, but if we had not, we would not be in the video. He seemed to concentrate on two or three buses, and never got around to us, which doesn't seem fair.

Also, the part I was most looking forward to seeing, my favorite part of the trip, Kihzi Island wasn't videoed at all. I don't know what happened. You see all the historic things on the island, but it's all stock footage. Even the shots of the sky are wrong because it shows the sun shining through grey clouds and we had a sunny, clear, cloudless day. You don't see ANY passengers, except at a distance,

But these are minor points. What we bought the video for was to remember the places we visited and the things we saw and it does that beautifully.

I'm sure there will be another cruise, possibly even with Viking, in our future. There is talk of China. But that is not for this year, or next year. However, overall the experience of traveling with Viking has been pleasant enough that I would do it again, if we can afford it.

But I want to see my dogs now, please. And start watching all the TV shows that were recorded in our absence!

Uglich Americans

Last night was the first truly bad night I'd had. I could not get to sleep for love nor rubles. I watched a movie, I stayed in bed trying to relax for 2 hours. I got up and used the computer at 2 a.m. (I actually saw the sky get dark, briefly). I finally fell asleep around 5:30, and Walt was up getting ready for our early excursion at 6 a.m. I was at breakfast by 6:30 feeling like death warmed over.

I had planned to skip Uglich until I heard Katherin's briefing on it and then it sounded like it would be a nice, easy, interesting excursion, but after breakfast, I just wanted to sleep, so I skipped it after all and slept for a couple of hours. When the group came back. Walt said there was a whole line of vendor stalls and asked if I wanted to check them out. I said no. I already had something for Brianna and didn't need to be tempted.

Then Char came and accused me of being a bad grandmother and said there were some "darling things" that she'd been looking at for her own granddaughters. Well...nobody's going to accuse me of being a bad grandmother, so I agreed to go and look at the stalls. Oh my.... Shops as far as the eye can see.

Junk interspersed with good stuff. Toys, t-shirts, kitchen ware, magnets, faux lacquer boxes, more of the nesting dolls, and the "darling things" Char had promised.

So many choices...

Walt bought himself a new red hat. It says "Uglich" (in Russian) across the top. He was very happy with his purchase.

We bought several things, possibly some unique to Uglich, and I was very happy with our purchases. I have now pretty much gotten something little for everyone I wanted to buy things for and a couple of cheap things for me (a magnet and a pair of earrings) and anything else I get will just be frosting on the cake. We haven't really spent all that much either. I am nothing if not a cheap gift giver! And, as I keep saying, it's easy to be frugal when you have left your credit card at home!!!

So I didn't see any of the beautiful churches, or hear today's mini concert by a local choir or hear any of the history of Uglich (where, I have read, the son of Ivan the Terrible either died or was murdered), but I have visited the shops and contributed to the local economy and I suspect the town residents would rather I did that than listen to their history!

The ship took off at noon, with our next stop Moscow (we have our first of 3 days in Moscow tomorrow and will get a briefing on that excursion in the morning).

As we were finishing lunch, Gunter, the guy who did the vodka tasting the other night, came to us and said he had just heard from the home office that they had missed our anniversary and wanted to apologize and tell us he had received nothing in his paperwork about that before the cruise (and that someone apparently learned about it from Facebook), and also to tell us that he had just put some champagne and chocolates in our room, along with a bowl of fruit. We will bring the champagne to dinner tonight to share with whoever decides to eat with us!

In the afternoon, there was a round table, an opportunity to question the tour guides about life in Russia. Very interesting, especially the question asking them to compare life before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Dinner tonight was the Captain's dinner, which started with a big table of champagne waiting for us at the Neva Restaurant. Everyone who wanted one got a glass and then we all went down a reception line, clinked glasses with everyone in charge, saying "na zdarovye" to each one (except to Gunter I asked "what? no vodka tonight?")

Dinner was huge, starting with caviar and ending with Baked Alaska with little topknots that looked like the onion domes of all those churches we've been seeing!

And THEN (as if the day wasn't full enough already), we all went up to the Sky Bar for a talent show, which consisted of a bunch of Canadians singing two Canadian songs, a guy who once played Tevye doing "If I Were a Rich Man," a wonderful woman pianist playing a bit of Rachmaninoff and a bit of Chopin, and then the "Bolshoi choir," which consisted of the people who have been taking Russian, singing two songs in Russian. The choir included Walt and Mike but unfortunately both were on the far side and hidden. This was all I got of Walt (though I videotaped the whole performance)

As the day was ending, we were entering the Moscow Canal, to be greeted by a giant statue of Lenin overlooking the river.

Tomorrow we have our first look at Moscow.

Yaroslavl

Last night's vodka tasting was a lot of fun. I think we were the only four from our bus group (#25) there, as I didn't recognize anybody, but this morning we have a nodding acquaintance with new people, especially this woman, who had more fun than anybody. I don't know her name or where she's from but I'm betting Texas!

We were there to taste six different vodkas...

Gunter a member of the crew from Austria graciously showed us how to drink each type.

I don't drink much and took tiny sips of each kind, but threw most of it away. I wanted to go to the tasting mainly for the ambience and to take photos! We all agreed that the Diplomat was our favorite kind. Nobody but me liked the Absolut Currant, but since I'm used to flavored vodkas from Cousins Days, I did kind of like it. (I also liked the Ukrainian vodka, which was a brown color and flavored with chili pepper.)

Today was scheduled to be a restful day, with only one stop, in Yaroslavl, in the mid-afternoon. We would take on fuel and water there, flush the tanks, and have a city tour, but most of the day was spent hanging around the ship, relaxing. In the morning, Katherin led her daily exercises up on the Sunshine deck. We watched.

After the exercise period, we had a fascinating lecture, by tour guide Victoria, on Gorbatchev and Perestroika. She gives an excellent lecture and made me sad that I had not attended her previous lectures on Russian history and one special one on the Romanoffs. Certainly got a look at Gorbatchev that I'd never had before, and learned what a tremendous change there was in the way of life of the Russian people at the end of the cold war. It made a big difference hearing about it from someone old enough to remember it.

While the talk was going on, we were passing by a very picturesque area of the Volga, with tiny villages and lots of beautiful churches visible along the shore.

The afternoon's excursion was into the town of Yavaslavl, founded by a modest guy named Yavaslavl, in 1010. Our tour guide was Olga and she was excellent. Another of those who knew Russia before and after Gorbatchev, she had many good things to say about the changes he brought about with the end of the Cold War. The town is about to celebrate its 1000th birthday and so things have been spruced up or are being spruced up for the occasion. There is supposed to be a huge celebration, though Olga sounds skeptical about how much that was promised is actually going to take place.

We visited the beautiful church of Elijah the Prophet...

This is another place where you must pay to take pictures, and we didn't, but the frescoes which cover every wall and ceiling were so spectacular, I had to sneak a photo from the camera, hidden inside my bum bag.

We had half an hour to stroll around the city center. Walt went off to find an ATM and I stuck close to the town square and took pictures of people enjoying the big fountain, and also wandered around looking at the special displays that have been put up in preparation for the anniversary celebration. These were two of my favorites...

While I was taking these pictures I got approached by a young guy who was tryijng to interview people about their thoughts of the display and Yaraslovl's 1000th anniversary. We limped along in his not very good English and my non-existent Russian and I think we completed the interview. Then I told him he had to let me take his photo.

We took a stroll along the promenade overlooking the river and found some guys practicing...something. I'm not sure what!

And then we stopped at a museum to see (and for some people buy) some lacquer boxes. This is "the" souvenir to bring home from Russia and the price is astronomical. I found a box I liked that was "only" $338 (American)!!!

It was good to get back on the bus again and head for the ship. I told Walt I was going to skip tomorrow's excursion to Uglich, but then I attended the day's briefing and it sounds like a fairly easy day and Uglich has "the biggest souvenir shop on the river." Now how can I pass that up, even though I'm buying next to nothing.

So we are ending today's adventures and we'll see what tomorrow brings. Right now I'm just happy that I seem to have a decent internet connection!

Get Thee to a Nunnery

Lemme tell you, I have a whole new perspective on nunneries and monasteries after our stop, supposedly at Goritzy, but actually the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery. It seems that the aunt of Ivan the Terrible, Efrosinia Staritska established a nunnery here and was eventually imprisoned in her own nunnery. Other women were banished to nunneries (like Peter the Great's first wife), and died here. Men were exiled to monasteries and died here. I lost track of how many. But Katerin had told us that this place was "in the middle of nowhere" and she certainly didn't exaggerate. This is where we got off the ship.

There are actually a couple of buildings here, one a souvenir stand and one an almost-completed snack bar, both are new within the past month, Marina told us. We stood there on the gravel waiting for buses to appear, which they finally did, in a huge cloud of dust--five buses from five different bus companies!

With guest guide, Tatiana, we drove about 10 km over a VERY bumpy road to the town of (I think it's spelled) Karolia. I could be wrong about the spelling. But anyway there is the largest monastery in Russia there, umpteen hundred hectares, consisting of lots of churches. Now see, I always thought that "monastery" and "church" were kind of synonymous, but apparently not Here, the monastery is the grounds and the church is a building inside. There is an active nunnery here with 11 nuns (presumably none have been banished here in the 21st century) and an active church with, I think, 5 priests. Apparently women are more holy than men, or at least more dedicated.

Tatiana explained all the churches in infinite detail, but I didn't get much out of it, because I was trying to walk on the cobblestones without breaking an ankle. I do know that St. Cyril was here and that St. Dyonisus was here. One painted the other. I think it was Dyonisus who painted icons of Cyril. See what a great student I am? I do remember (I think) that the buildings date from the 15th to 17th century...

With the one on the right below perhaps a bit newer.

We stopped inside one small church and heard a quartet sing a song. Walt and I bought their CD. It seemed the proper thing to do. They also have another interesting way of raising money. You can take pictures inside the icon museum, but you must pay a fee to do so. Needless to say, my camera remained in my bag! I've never been a big icon fan, though our Ukranian friend Andrij and our Ukranian wannabe friend Bill loved icons. However, some of the embroidered icons done by Aunt Efrosinia were lovely. In Russian winters when you have been banished, you have lots of time to embroider! I did learn more about iconostasises, though (like there is rhyme to their reason, or vice versa, which I never knew before.

When we returned to the ship we were in time for a Russian tea with an obscene assortment of pastries to sample and a lecture on how a samovar works, though I don't think that you're supposed to pour tea made in the kitchen into it!

I think I had enough goodies to hold me over until dinner in 2 hours and the vodka sampling after that!

Last night, before dinner, there was a Q&A with (L to R) Dieter, the Captain, and Vadim the interpreter, led by Katerin, our Program director.

We learned, for example, that women aren't captains because they have to communicate with other captains and sometimes the language gets too rough for women to hear (lots of scoffing at that!), that it takes 350 bottles of red wine per cruise and something like 3,000 eggs and other such trivia that was really kind of interesting (and which I have now forgotten, of course).

Then Katerin did her nightly briefing, talking about the next day's itinerary. At the end she invited us to taste something called Kbac (pronounced something like "kvass"). She said it is a typical soft drink of Russia and that it is made out of brown bread. She said she would describe the taste, for her, as something between "not my favorite drink" and "awful."

She then invited the staff to pass out cups of Kbac for us all to taste and I would say that she described it perfectly. It tasted like drinking thin, weak, carbonated brown bread. It wasn't the best thing I had tasted. It also wasn't awful, but definitely not something I'd be bringing home to share with the family!

We went down to Mike & Char's cabin after the briefing and helped ourselves to some of Mike's vodka, over ice, and one of the chocolates he brought back to the ship after his solitary excursion into St. Petersburg. There was just enough time to finish all of this when it was time to go up to the next floor for our "Russian dinner." I think the thing that made it a "Russian dinner" was that the wait staff all dressed in typical Russian costumes. It seems to me that the menu each night is usually something Russian already!

But everything was wonderful from the salad to the borscht to the "meat loaf" (still not sure what that meat was...perhaps pork, but definitely nothing like any meatloaf I have had in the past) to the blini for dessert. We ate with Bill and Barbara from Philadelphia, who were delightful people and who have lots of travel experience, though this is their first with Viking.

After dinner there was a George Gershwin concert up in the Sky Bar, which Walt and I went to. Vladim Vinogradov, the ship's pianist, did jazz stylings of 9 familiar Gershwin tunes, but he "accompanied himself" on something that sounded like a harmonica. This is what he looked like...

It was fascinating, and at times haunting (especially for "Summertime"). I took video, which I will post, along with other videos, when I get home, assuming I don't lose them between here and home!

Kizhi

Today was the stop I have been most looking forard to, and it did not disappoint. Kizhi is a state historical open-air museum (a UNESCO World Heritage site) on an island in the middle of Lake Onega, and is the farthest north that our travels will take us.

"The collection of the Open-Air “Kizhi” Museum includes 89 monuments of wooden architecture: old chapels and houses, windmills and granaries, threshing barns and racks for drying crops…The gem of this collection is the 22 domed Church of the Transfiguration of Our Savior, 37 meters height. The Church of the Intercession of Holy Mary and the Bell-Tower located nearby emphasize the harmony and magnificence of the main Church."

The prize of the collection, however, is the Church of the Transfiguration. I stood on the deck of the ship this morning, watching the island come into view, my eyes fixed on the spires of the church.

We got off the ship and gathered in our usual groups, prepared to make the 3 km walk around the island.

As we got to the entrance to the museum, the ever-present, always pleasant Dieter, who is the restaurant manager, was there to see us off.

The church is spectacular. One of those edifices which is photographable from every angle.

It was completed in 1714, during the reign of Peter the Great and supposedly built by one man, using no nails (wooden nails were not "invented" until later), who is said to have tossed his axe into the lake when it was finished, saying that there was never a church like this and never would be again. Whether the story is apocryphal or not, I think it's fairly safe to say the statement was true!

There are 22 domes, the most of any church in Russia, all created out of hundreds of aspen shingles.

Beyond the church is a collection of wooden buildings, all brought there to preserve the culture of the native people. Like Mandrogy, there are craftsmen engaged in the traditional activities of the Karelia people, but unlike Mandrogy (a) they are pleasant!, and (b) it seems more "scholarly" than touristy. Yes, there are shops, but only by the boat dock and those are tiny and don't take plastic. It seems that the people here, perhaps like I imagine colonial Williamsburg to be, are here to preserve a culture primarily.

We went inside a small church

and heard a brief hymn sung by three singers, one of whom reminded me of our old friend Ed Andrews (Now Father Alexander, O.P.)

I was glad I had brought the Flash Video so I was able to record it.

We visited a typical home and heard how the people lived.

I liked the part about how the youngest and the old people slept on top of the oven shown above, to keep them warm in the winter. Always take good care of your old people!

We watched this woman crocheting the most intricate "snake-like" designs using teeny, teeny little glass beads. Char bought one of her necklaces at one of the shops, but I didn't have time to check them out.

We continued on around the island to other wooden structures. I liked the way the fence was laid out.

Out in the field we watched a mother seagull with her babies, and some in our group were dive bombed by angry terns, who were obviously trying to protect their own nests, hidden somewhere out in the field.

The wild flowers were beautiful.

Mike and Char have really lost their touch, I'm happy to say. Our tour guide said that it poured rain all day yesterday, but today is was clear and sunny, with only a pleasant breeze. We could not have asked for a more perfect day, weather-wise.

We made the trip back to the dock, completing our 360 circle around the Church of the Transfiguration, and back onto the ship just in time.

I was happy that I was NOT one of the last back.

But despite our schedule, we didn't leave right away. It was announced that there was an "emergency medical disembarkation." One older woman had to be taken off, with her daughter-in-law, for some sort of medical emergency. They rushed a stretcher to the ship.

I didn't find out until later who the patient was. I was too busy trying to get a picture of this great dog. I am very much missing our dogs right now.

Tonight we are apparently having a Russian dinner. Not sure what that means, but I will find out soon and will report tomorrow. I missed most of the afternoon activities (a couple of lectures and a tour of the captain's bridge) because I hadn't slept well the night before and took a long nap--and then took advantage of having internet connection to write this entry.

Today has been a GREAT day. If I never leave the ship again on this trip, it would have been worth it to come to Kihzi.