Traktir Kuchkova Suzdal

... poker...mongolian barbeque...fancy train...cute Mongolian children...another border crossing...wlking around with our Mongolian friend...cold weather at Lake Baikal...boat excurrsion...lunch at the market...Nikolai's banya...nerpa seals...Decembrists museum...slow lunch service in Irkutsk...trans-siberian railway...platform food...art nouveau dining car...instant noodles...stolen bag...conversations with police...nice local couple sharing their food...sketchy drunk ...

... by the river, which makes it stratigically difficult for enemies to invade. The city did succomb to the invading Tartars byt later rebound back to be an important center of Orthodoxy. Too bad the museum displays are all in Russian, but I am already getting too tired from all this travelling, thus i am just looking at the displays without reading anything. All these churches and monasteries ...

Somewhere around Vladimir, Andrew stopped for gas at a LUCGAZ (I think that was the company's name) and then we later stopped at a random dirt road, that has since been described as "picturesque" by my friend, to stretch our legs. After five hours trying to divert my mother's attempts at ...

... a Souzdal, petit village de 12000 habitants a quelques kms de Vladimir. Cette bourgade regorge d'eglise et de cathedrales avec des coupoles dorees... Le temps etait magnifique, nous nous sommes promenes sous le soleil dans la neige. Quel plaisir ! Demain nous partons pour Nijni Novgorod ou notre 3e hote Evgeny nous attendra.

Took a 9am bus to Suzdal. 45 minutes for 15 rubles. The bus system is as developed as Turkey's. Suzdal is a tiny town of 12,000 people. Most of the houses here are wooden. Their are meticulous carvings on many of their walls. The number of churches and monasteries in this town are disproportionate to the population. There are way too many of them. The 60 rubles that I paid for the Museum of Wooden Architecture and Peasant Life was worth it. I had never seen a ...

... easier prey for them. I smiled; held his right arm, and told him that I didn't have any. He walked away. My my friend Marisa at the station. Being in the company of a friend felt great, after being alone for a week. Marisa: 22, teaches English at the American Home in Vladimir; she has been here for 4 months; takes Russian language classes; staying with an old lady; meditates and ballroom dances in her free time; comments that her ...

After Moscow we drove out to a small town called Suzdal for one night to stay in a wood lodge. The town was very quiet with one main street and about 30 cathedrals....and dont forget the museum of wooden architecture!! So not much to report, but it was nice to see parts of Russia away from the main cities. We also stopped in Vladimir for lunch at a soviet era packcake house (Yum).

Up early for the four and half hour drive to Suzdal. Stuck in time this village contains a millennium of Russian history and form part of the golden ring. At one point it contained 40 churches to only four hundred families. A guide showed us around the main monastery where apparently the tsars would send there mistresses when they no longer needed them. Spent a night in the village and headed back to Moscow via Vladimir. It was Russian mushroom picking holiday weekend supposedly ...

... around this very picturesque town, I had the feeling every third building was a church. Priests and nuns also were omnipresent on the streets. From almost anywhere in town, one could see the onion domes of the town's many churches rising against the sheep grazed hills. This charming town also had the right ambience of a medieval village with placid streams and rolling meadows juxtaposed with livestock and chicken roaming the streets ...

We got our first taste of Russian helpfulness as soon as we left the dreaded constraints of Moscow. I wanted very much to see something other than a sprawling, annoying, metropolis, so I picked Suzdal out of the options in the back of Lonely Planet Moscow. Unfortunately, the earliest bus from Moscow went at around 6pm, meaning that we would get to this wee town around 11pm. Coupled with this was the fact that none of the phone numbers listed for the hotels in Suzdal worked ...