Russia 2 Suzdal
Today we drove through the Moscow suburbs to Suzdal. The traffic in Moscow is bad. I noticed this coming from the airport about 8pm at night. The traffic queuing to come out was crazy.
Our young, achingly attractive inside and out guide, describes the current state of the Russian world as post Soviet. The young inside Russia don’t like Putin because they feel he doesn’t do enough for people inside Russia rather than his focus on how he looks externally.
The landscape is tall pine forest, long busy road, broken up by industrial, smoking chimney towns with unattractive, grey, typically Russian tenements. The bonus seems to be they don’t pay a lot for gas and electricity.
There are lots of little dachas – some in extreme states of disrepair. Sometimes there is a giant grey fence with plastic windows – I guess to shield the locals from the traffic noise, if not the air pollution.
Suzdal is a world heritage site with lovely old buildings and endless churches. We stayed in a cosy wood guest house and ate at another local’s house – home made soup, chicken and potatoes, blackberry vodka and tea from a giant flowered teapot. We cooked our own pastries. As we left she gave us all apples.
It’s kind and wholesome and so grounded. When we walked back in the dark it was -7 and the snow crunched under our feet. It felt like Christmas.
In the morning, after a lovely breakfast, we had a tour of the monastery and watched the guy ringing the bells. The frescoes were amazing and the guys singing made me want to weep with emotion.
Our guide today had a Russian look that is not great – very black dyed hair and bright lipstick. She knew her stuff, but the passion had gone out of her. I asked her which 20th century Russian leader she had liked the most and she said Brezhnev (18 years – 1964-1982). She described it as ‘a period of stagnation, a happy time, I was young. All the churches were closed, but the people’s hearts were open whereas now the churches are open, but the people’s hearts are closed’.
She talked about how bad the 1990s were with the collapse of the Russian Federation. people were no longer able to travel to previously Russian countries. Her husband was Ukrainian. When we took the bullet train back to the city we needed passports to board the train.