Travel Announcement: Return to Russia!
Jan. 21st, 2015 12:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peacetraveler22
It's now official! I just purchased my tickets to Russia. :) Here I am, standing on the frozen Neva River in Peter. Glorious! Dates of the visit will be 23 February - 9 March. For those in the U.S., airfares on Aeroflot are incredibly cheap now. Nonstop flights from Washington, DC or New York City to Moscow cost only $492 USD roundtrip, including taxes. I can't even fly to many places in the U.S. for this price.
The first week I'll travel with my Russian friend on a road journey to some new cities, though I'm not yet sure where. Proposed options include the following:
(1) Moscow → Yaroslavl → Vologda → St. Petersburg → Moscow
(2) Moscow → Vladimir → Novgorod → Cheboksary → Kazan → Moscow
Where to go? What to do? Suggestions for other intriguing driving routes from Moscow? Help me! :) I'm mostly interested in unusual people, wild and frozen nature and village life. Museums, Orthodox churches, and standard tourist attractions aren't really important to me.
If there's interest, I can try to arrange a reader gathering somewhere in Moscow the second week. Although I'm not sure where in the city is convenient for most people? If you know a good gathering place, like a restaurant or pub, please tell me in the comments.
I'm excited for the trip, to see if attitudes toward an American visitor have changed since my visit last February when I attended the Olympic Games. Since then, relations between our countries have shifted dramatically and even here on my blog I've noticed more anti-Americanism and hostility, even when the topic of my posts have absolutely nothing to do with politics.
Btw, I'm sure many of you saw Ilya Varlamov's post hanging in the TOP all day yesterday, but if not I suggest you give it a read. A foreign tourist's brutal impressions of Russia. Her story makes my first Russian post seem like a fairy tale. I think she was harsh in her review of the country, though she's certainly entitled to her opinion. It's especially amusing to view the reader comments to the story (over 4,000 of them now!!).
Russia - your country remains a fascinating place for me, and I'm very happy to return!
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Date: 2015-01-21 09:31 pm (UTC)well… visit public bath house (городская баня) for $5 in one the local towns (the smaller town, the better, less people) you're going to visit, that would be definitely non-standard tourist attraction and unusual women :)
"Where to go? What to do?"
I ask myself the same question here in frozen snowless Moscow outskirts. I would suggest you to go to sunny Barcelona :)
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Date: 2015-01-21 09:31 pm (UTC)Authentic
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Date: 2015-01-21 09:45 pm (UTC)A nice example of "melting pot" of cultures and peoples (yup, plural). Plus it's mostly Christian, unlike Kazan.
Re: Ford Sollers
Date: 2015-01-21 09:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-21 09:53 pm (UTC)And indeed, Elabuga is a nice town, classic 19th century on one side, and soviet on the other, plus there is a very gorgeous place called "Gorodishshe", where you're standing on a huge hill over two rivers just mixing up below you. Feels like you're on the top of the world.
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Date: 2015-01-21 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-21 10:06 pm (UTC)I wish you good luck on your trip!
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Date: 2015-01-21 10:06 pm (UTC)I think the second route is more interesting (cause Kazan), but feel free to skip Cheboksary. IMHO, nothing special, i was there in last april - booring country town (http://drinkclub.spb.ru/travel/cheboksary). I'd rather visit Yoshkar-Ola - it is close by Cheboksary.
IMHO, of course :)
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Date: 2015-01-21 10:25 pm (UTC)Don`t go to Petrozavodsk though.
Date: 2015-01-21 11:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-21 11:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-21 11:13 pm (UTC)It's not too far from Kazan and Cheboksary (less than 100 miles to the north). It's not a usual/common Russia, there is nothing to do, those replicas in center turns out to be of plastic and the quality is not to good when you take a close look...
But still it's very nice.
* * *
Besides, not too far from Kazan there is a "refurbished" medieval city of Bulgar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolghar. It's not well-known by the tourists yet, and actually the archaeologists have not yet found everything there, they are still digging. Nice place as well, but I don't think it's a good place to visit in winter, unfortunately.
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Date: 2015-01-21 11:20 pm (UTC)Welcome to Russia :)
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Date: 2015-01-22 12:13 am (UTC)Sounds pretty dangerous.
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Date: 2015-01-22 12:28 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2015-01-22 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-22 12:41 am (UTC)I'm really sorry about this. I think, trip to Havana (thru Canada) will give you much more positive emotions. Especially for this time of the year.
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Date: 2015-01-22 12:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-22 12:51 am (UTC)