Best Eastern Beresta Palace Novgorod

... to read all signs, advertisements, menus, etc. in the latin alphabet in stead of the beautiful swirling Cyrillic alphabet.

2. Friends - I've made some great friends from all around the world and had all sorts of interesting experiences from the beautiful to the grotesque to the culinary. It will be strange to no longer have Friday night "vecherinkas" where we watch silly Russian television and eat chips or lasagna or macrons.

3. Museums ...

... the day of the trip. Well, so at least we know now I guess! In the evening on Friday I made hamburgers here for my friends. Everyone was very curious how a "real American" hamburger is made and it suddenly felt like summer as I was flipping burgers on the frying pan and offering friends food and ...

... town and friendly people were a bit of a shock to me after coming from the busy St. Petersburg where I have been almost constantly for the past 4 months. All in all it was a very worth while trip!

This last week I am going to be running around doing the tourist thing and fortunately it looks like I am going to be met with some decent weather.

I'll be writing more soon after a couple days of cultural saturation!

... et visiter dans la ville. Le lendemain, un ami francais a eux nous guide dans la ville. Encore une fois il fait super beau (on commence a etre habitué). La ville est superbe et on arrive facilement a se ballader sans croiser des grosses avenues polluées. A midi, on deguste notre premier borch, pas mal... mais ca remplit le ventre que temporairement ! On appercoit des pecheurs sur la Oka gelée ...

Premiere vraie galere, pourtant c'etait bien partis, j'avais pris mon billet pour Kazan (en Russie, les billets s'achetent a la gare de depart), mais apres avoir marche sous une pluie battante avec du vent et 6 petits degres (affiches a la sortie de la gare, les chiffres qui apparaissent ici, sont des chiffres veritables) a la recherche d'un hotel ni rase ni ferme et ayant ...

... was a holy holiday and their version of an archbishop for their region was there (big guy with long beard in traditional church robes), very impressive! After that we wondered some more and eventually wound up at the Gorky Museum (famous Russian writer from early 20th Century). His house was impressive, hadn't changed since the 1930's. We then headed back to the hotel to prepare for the long train we were getting on ...

Niznij Novgorod (Gorky). Km 461 of the Trans-Siberian-Railway. A big vibrant industrial center of Volga region. More ...

... buildings that all look the same. Our teacher explained this housing was probably left over from collectivization. That's where they went and threw all the farmers out of their homes and farms and put them together in these huge communal apartment blocks, and they all worked on the same farm together. The peasants weren't exactly fans of this, but Russian peasants don't really get a say in things. Novgorod ...

Nizny Novgorod was not stop we planned in the beginning, but was recommended by people we met and Tim wanted to see the Volga of the Boatmen. It was a very nice town with lots of nice looking churches and a kremlin on top of the hill. A girl in Mcdonalds seemed surprised that tourists would come to Nizny Novgorod but its a nice spot. We arrived in the morning and booked the train to go that night (saves accomodation!) so had a day to wander.

... to head down so we asked them to meet us at the bottom them we looked around and took some photos. Kenny was at the top as well, so when we finished at the top we decided to sprint to the bottom. Teigan had told me that her and Cate had lost Kenny the previous day when they were going to run up the steps for exercise! Well...this plan didn't work too well because on the way down I had a touch of vertigo and could not go faster than a crawl! Sorry guys! At the bottom we ...