So we are back and everyone survived the trip to Yaroslavl. I think that "survived" is a good word for it. We had about a five hour bus ride to get from Vladimir to Yaroslavl (with what saeemed like a million stops in between.) We arrived an went to the center of the city and checked out the monastary/kremlin that is in one of the town's main squares. We even got to climb some ramparts!
The next event, as you can see, involved bumper cars at a little amusement park on an island in the Volga. I haven't driven bumper cars in years and I didn't stop laughing the whole time (except when I was getting whiplash.)
This is the Cathedral of Elija the Prophet, which has tons of frescoes on the inside and was really beautiful both day and night.
This is us about 6 am. We thought that McDonald's (yeah, I know) would be open at 6:00 am.: but, we were wrong. The DRIVETHROUGH was was open at 6:00 am. So, lacking a car...what do we do? That's right, we WALK thorugh. Other than a an "О Господи!" (Oh Lord!) from the cashier, we had no problem getting our food and then we headed for the train station to eat. That bright light is emanating from McDonald's drive-thru.
You can see the results of the trip to the train-station: sleep.
So with that trip to McDonald's, we wrapped up our stay in Yaroslavl, only to arrive at the bus station to discover that our nice clean, modern, well-heated bus has been replaced with a pinch-hitter: A GAZel. For those of you not familiar with this devilish Russian invention, consider yourselves lucky. It's basically a thirteen passanger van with a minimum of safety features, little in the way of suspension, and only one heater in the front. Where do you think the coldest and wettest passangers on the bus got tickets for? In the back. Oh well, we survived and arrived back in Vladimir after another bone rattling 5 hour ride over Russian roads intact but exhausted. I think I slept a grand total of twenty minutes...It will be easy to get to sleep tonight!
2 comments:
О Ярославль, мой любимый город... You don't know me, but I'm a friend of Sarochka's. I lived about 200 yards down the road from the Sovetskaya Ploschad' and I have walked through that very same drive-through, at about the same time of night. You're lucky you got there at six - they have a течнический перерыв from 2-4, when they even close the drive-through.
Hey, so my questions.
1. Are you students interested in hearing about random things from the states?
2. Have any of them invited you to do anything outside of the school?
3. Are you meeting more Russian people outside of your students?
4. Is the heat on yet? :-)
5. Do your babushka's cats like you yet?
More to come...
Miss you!
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