Moscow - June 16th - Our last day in Russia

This was the last day of our river cruise. I left the ship right after breakfast for a tour of Star City (Russian: Звёздный Городок, Zvyozdny Gorodok), the Cosmonaut Training Center. The Russians are quite right to be proud of their training center. It is hardly modern, but it has the world’s largest indoor centrifuge – a mechanism used to test Cosmonaut candidates. The capsule in which the candidate sits can be tumbled and rotated while the entire centrifuge is rotating and creating an artificially high gravity. The centrifuge is capable of generating 40gs, or 40 times the force of gravity, but no human could withstand that force. Our guide, a former cosmonaut candidate (who didn’t make the cut) passed out every time he was in the centrifuge. Of course they knew right away that he’d passed out, what with 64 electrical sensors on his body and a “dead-man” switch in his hand. He believes that he has suffered long term effects resulting from some of the early medical testing.

We also saw the huge water tank in which Cosmonauts and Astronauts (yes, our Astronauts train at Star City too!) can practice spacewalks in weightless conditions. A life-size mockup of a piece of space equipment is assembled on a platform which can be lowered about 15 meters (47 feet) under water. The Astronauts and Cosmonauts are suited up and weighted to offset any buoyancy of the air in their suits and lowered into the tank so they can practice with the tools they might have to use in space.

Finally, we got to meet Sergei Zalyotin, Cosmonaut number 92. After their first successful flight, each cosmonaut is given a number. They’re up to over 100. Sergei addressed us first in English. Every Cosmonaut speaks some English, and every Astronaut speaks some Russian. But Sergei is more comfortable in his native tongue, and most of his presentation was in Russian and was translated for us.

We had lunch in the Star City cafeteria before we returned to the ship.

While I was at Star City, Adrianne went with a dozen or so other people and one of the Grand Circle Program Directors to Московская Хopaльнaя Cинaгoга, the Moscow Choral Synagogue. This is the main synagogue of Moscow and Russia. I wish I had been able to go on both tours. She had a wonderful time.

This was our final day. Adrianne did most of the packing that evening, and we put our bags outside the cabin door before midnight. We were up at 1:30 for breakfast and left for Domedovo Airport at 2:30. Our return flights to the US were eventless. We were back in our trailer, totally exhausted, before 2:00pm New York time.

Moscow, June 15th

At this point it’s all a jumble. It’s July 17th today and I’m trying to remember what happened on June 15th. I know that I didn’t go to the Central Museum of the Armed Forces, and I don’t remember the ship being particularly empty that morning, so I have to assume that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t find that intriguing. Later in the day I heard a few folks talking about meeting Russian WW2 veterans. After almost 50 years of cold war, it’s hard to remember that the Russians were our Allies against Hitler during WW2, but our own veterans certainly remembered that and enjoyed the war stories.

I also remember that Adrianne and I had decided before we left home that we would not go to the Moscow Circus performance. We can see the circus at home for far less money. Our shutterbug friends did go to the Moscow Circus, and despite the photography prohibition got quite a few nice pictures. (Also see Moscow Circus Part 2).

Moscow - June 14th

Our second day in Moscow was busy. Right after breakfast we left by bus for a tour inside the Kremlin. We left early to try to avoid long lines, and it worked. When we arrived at the entry gate we were perhaps 200 people from the door. We later saw lines out to the street at that same gate.

Inside the Kremlin we saw the Armoury Museum. The Armoury Museum is a museum of armor, including chain mail and the like, but also on display are all of the crowns and thrones that were used by Russian royalty, and their coaches, ceremonial robes, and gowns, and also the famous Faberge Eggs. No pictures are allowed inside the Kremlin but there are plenty of pictures of this museum on the internet. All I can say is that the Faberge Eggs are more fabulous in person than can be imagined from a photograph. I was unimpressed by the jeweled crowns, but that’s just me. I’m not particularly impressed by oval cut rubies and they seem to dominate the crowns. I’m more the “glitter” type.

After lunch at a small (and wonderful) local restaurant, we headed back to the ship. Our group shutterbug got into trouble by taking a picture near where we were waiting for our bus. It turned out we were in front of the Russian equivalent of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission headquarters and an angry guard confronted him, but our guide, Nadia, smoothed things over rather quickly.

That evening Adrianne and I went to the National Russian Show performed by a professional dance ensemble. The dances were stylized versions of classical Russian, Ukranian, Cossack, and other nationality native dances. It was a wonderful show and there wasn't an empty seat in the house. We were amused to hear other audience members whispering about the “Amerikanski’s” in the audience.

When the show was over we returned to the ship for a late dinner.

Moscow - June 13th

We arrived in Moscow late Friday morning, and busses were waiting to take us on a city tour, which began with a trip to Sparrow Hill, a scenic outlook south of the city looking north. The view of the city from this location is spectacular, and we had some time to enjoy it before boarding the busses to a metro station, and via metro heading to КРАСНАЯ ПЛОЩАДЬ, also known as Red Square. The first word, krasnaya, used to mean “beautiful” in Russian, but over several centuries time its meaning has shifted to “red”. So “Red Square” had nothing to do with the communism – it was Red Square long before the Russian Revolution.

Red Square is outside the walls of the Kremlin (“Fortress” in Russian. There was a kremlin in every city we visited on this cruise, including Uglich.), and the beautiful and very colorful St. Basil’s Cathedral, also called “The Cathedral of Intercession of the Virgin on the Moat” is at one end of the square. Foreign Television correspondents frequently stood outside St. Basil’s while reporting on activities at the Kremlin, leading many westerners to think that St. Basil’s WAS the Kremlin. Take my word for it. The Kremlin has a huge, thick, almost featureless, brick wall, and can be considered beautiful only if you are in thrall of huge, thick, almost featureless, brick walls. St. Basil’s Cathedral is gorgeous – at least to me.

Also within Red Square are several upscale department stores, and some of our group took time to check into what they had available. Adrianne and I stood outside St. Basil’s Cathedral watching people for about 40 minutes until the bus came to take us back to the ship and dinner. It was easy to identify most of the tourists by their cameras or headphones (apparently Grand Circle isn't the only tour company to have adopted this technology), and we often knew we were looking at a Muscovite woman by her high heeled shoes; that can't be easy on the cobblestones.

Uglich - June 12th

Our final river stop before Moscow was Uglich. It is a small town, but a stop on virtually every river cruise up and down the Volga-Baltic Waterway, so there is a significant tourist business here. Uglich has a history dating back to the early 10th century, and there was a significant fortress here. It’s a walking town. Our ship docked virtually in the center of town, so we walked through the inevitable gallery of vendors to the scenic spots in town. Uglich is home to the Chaika watch factory. I’d never heard of Chaika watches (Chaika is also the name of a Stalin-era Russian-built limousine), but apparently they are well respected. Many of our party did visit the watch factory, but I so rarely wear a watch the factory didn’t interest me a bit.

Yaroslavl - June 11th

As we neared Moscow the cities began to be larger. Yaroslavl is a city of about 600,000 people. It was founded in 1010, so its 1000th anniversary is coming up in two years. Yaroslavl was founded on the site of an earlier pagan village. The legend is that the pagans kept a bear in a cage and worshipped it as the progenitor of humankind. When the Russian’s arrived they challenged the pagans, and the bear was killed with a battleaxe. The emblem of the city is a standing bear with a battleaxe on it’s shoulder.

It was a very comfortable day in Yaroslavl – around 70 degrees – and we were again in a city big enough that we were encountering wedding parties just as we had in Saint Petersburg.We saw perhaps a dozen brides being photographed at the same scenic points that we were visiting.

It was also in Yaroslavl that we saw a bell performance outside the Savior-Transfiguration Monastery. I was stunned at how the bell ringer controlled all but one of the bells with the fingers of his left hand. Only the largest bell was controlled by his right hand.

I made a video of part of this performance but my “P.H.D.” camera (Push here, dummy!) doesn’t do a great job of videos. I believe that one member of our tour videotaped it. If that video shows up on YouTube I’ll add a reference to it here.

Goritsi - June 10th

Our tour description didn’t include any stops on the 9th day, but after we left Kizhi Island we were told that a stop at Goritsi had been added. Goritsi is best known for the Kirillo-Belosersky Monastery which was founded by Ivan the Terrible.

This was also the day that those who wished to could paint their own Matreshka. Matreshkas are Russian nested dolls. The ship’s gift shop had Matreshkas for sale with as few as five nested dolls, and as many as 26. Obviously when there are that many dolls the smallest is tiny and the largest is quite a bit larger than Matreshkas with fewer nested dolls, but the quality of the work is also important. The larger sets were also tighter fitting, that is, each doll had thinner walls, and the smaller doll just fit with minimum room to spare into the next larger doll.

Adrianne painted a "blank" doll, that is, one with a printed outline but otherwise unpainted, and then over the course of the evening decorated it with snippets from such things as candy labels which she glued on using hair gel – we hadn’t thought to bring along a tube of proper glue. The next day all the dolls painted by passengers were on display and we were invited to vote for the prettiest. I voted several times for Adrianne’s doll, but she didn’t win. The winning doll was one of the few painted by a male passenger.

Khizi Island - June 9th

After Svir Stroi, we continued up the Svir River into Onega Lake, then north to the northernmost point of our trip, Kizhi. Kizhi Island is a World Heritage Site. Kizhi is just north of 62 degrees, and it was cold there, only 43°F. I took pictures of the historic wooden church as we sailed in, but this picture from the internet is far better than any that I took. Also as we sailed in I heard the bells in the bell tower (not in this picture) being played and made a short video of part of it.

We didn’t get to Kizhi until after lunch. This was the first place where we experienced parallel docking. The dock at Kizhi is the length of one riverboat. When we arrived there were already three riverboats at the dock, lashed to each other in parallel. We docked in fourth position, so going ashore we had to cross the lobbies of three other ships.

Considering the temperature I considered not going ashore, but I’d already skipped Svir Stroi and had spent nearly a whole day in Saint Petersburg on the ship, so I broke out the scarf and gloves Adrianne so thought fully packed for me and went on the tour. The structures are splendid. That church with all of those onion domes is made entirely of wood, including the shingles on the onion domes. There is also a bell tower, and we were regaled with a bell concert. The bell ringer has a cord to each bell which he holds in one hand to ring the bells. The bell ringer was inside the bell tower and we couldn’t see how he was working the cords, but I couldn’t believe that one man could create the concert we heard even with two hands. (At a later port stop we got to see how it is done, and I have a movie. I am now a believer.)

When we got back to the Tikhi Don the three ships we had had to cross to get ashore were gone, so we entered our ship directly from the dock without having to cross through other ships. The ship staff met us with a hot beverage, quite welcome after having walked around for two hours in the cold.

Svir Strio - June 8th

We had splendid weather while in Saint Petersburg. The temperature was in the mid-60s to low 70s every day, and the weather was, at worst, partly cloudy. June is “White Nights” time in Saint Petersburg, which is only about 6 degrees, 30 minutes south of the Arctic Circle. Sunset was after 11 PM, and Sunrise was just after 4 AM, but it never really got dark at night. There was always a white glow in the sky. Just as June weddings are popular here, June weddings, and especially “White Night” weddings are popular in Russia. Whereas we almost always have weddings on weekends, the Russians will marry on any day of the week. Everywhere we went in Saint Petersburg we were apt to run into a bride and groom running around to be photographed at the same cathedrals and palaces that we were visiting. Many of the couples hired limousines to take them about. I even spotted a recent model stretched Lincoln among them. Gasoline is graded differently in Russia than here. Their lowest grade is “80”, which I presume means 80 octane, whereas our lowest grade is 87 octane. Just like here the price varies from one gas station to the next, but typically was on the order of 25 rubles per liter which is the equivalent of around $4 a gallon – for 80 octane fuel.

Sunday morning we awoke in the middle of Lake Ladoga, but soon entered the Svir River. We were sailing upstream all the way to Moscow, and would eventually go through 18 or 19 locks, being elevated at all but one of them. Shortly after the first lock we docked at the town of Svir Stroi. It’s not a city – more like a village. It was much cooler here than in Saint Petersburg – perhaps not even 60 degrees, and rain threatened. The weather did not appeal to me, so I stayed on the ship. Those who went ashore were treated to a home visit – well, actually several homes since there were so many people, and visits were in two shifts to each home. The visitors enjoyed tea and piroshki, quintessential Russian pastries. Here’s a picture of Adrianne with her hostess.

One of the local crafts is articles made from birch bark. Adrianne bought two small birch bark boxes, which are somewhat reminiscent of shaker boxes.

Saint Petersburg - June 7th

Saturday began with a bus ride into Saint Petersburg for more sightseeing. We visited the Peter & Paul Fortress, within whose walls is the Peter & Paul Cathedral. Peter the Great and all the Russian emperors and empresses are buried there, including the last of the Romanovs, Nicholas and Alexandra and their children – well actually the remains of the last two children have only recently been identified and will be buried there next year.

Elaborate Russian Orthodox churches and cathedrals make up a significant fraction of things to be seen in Russia. We also spent time at St. Isaac’s Cathedral. The dome of St. Isaac’s dominates the Saint Petersburg skyline – it is the largest church in the city – and it is decorated with a huge amount of gold (about 200 pounds of gold leaf – that’s a lot of surface area!), huge mosaics, lapis lazuli and malachite, and – as in all Russian Orthodox churches – lots and lots of icons.

After lunch we were supposed to take a hydrofoil ride to Peterhof – the summer palace of Russian royalty, but there was an economic conference in Saint Petersburg and the hydrofoils were banned from the Neva River as a security measure. We went to Peterhof by bus. I was a bit disappointed, as I’d been looking forward to the hydrofoil ride. But Peterhof was definitely not a disappointment. There are around 150 fountains on the grounds and dozens of gilded statues. Consider that this entire area was laid to waste in 1944 by the retreating German Army after the 900-day Siege of Leningrad (the Soviet-era name for Saint Petersburg). Many of the sculptures and fountains had to be recreated from photographs. My favorite fountain, and one of the oldest, has four bronze ducks on a rotating frame. Water squirts from their mouths, and somehow the water makes a quacking sound. It’s not a big fountain, and it’s not centrally located, but it’s my favorite. This fountain was saved from being despoiled by burying it under a pile of dirt.

It occurred to me that if Peterhof were in the United States, it would probably be an adults-only attraction. Many of the statues have “naughty bits”, and the perverts who govern us would either drape the statues, alter them (heaven forbid), or restrict attendance. How sad!

On Saturday evening, during dinner, we left Saint Petersburg and sailed up the Neva River toward Lake Ladoga, the largest lake (by area) in Europe.

Saint Petersburg - June 6th

Friday began with an optional tour of Yusupov Palace, where Rasputin was murdered in 1916. That event ultimately triggering the collapse of the Russian Empire. Adrianne and I took the opportunity to rest. We had decided long in advance that we needed to pace ourselves on this cruise. On Friday afternoon there was an included tour of The St. Petersburg Music Boarding School, which enjoys the support of the Grand Circle Foundation. Adrianne, being a teacher, couldn’t miss it, but I was still recovering from jet lag and skipped it, so I had the entire day off. Adrianne thoroughly enjoyed the music school and took lots and lots of pictures. Other passengers mentioned it as one of the highlights of the cruise. My cruise highlight came the next day.

Saint Petersburg - June 5th

Grand Circle divided the roughly 200 passenger complement of the MS Tikhi Don into six ‘color’ groups, each with our own program director (P.D.). Tikhi Don (Тихий Дон in Cyrillic) is named for a Stalin-era novel by Mikhail Sholokhov. Our green group P.D., Nadia Radaeva, managed to find us before dinner on Wednesday night to welcome us to the ship. We had missed the first day of the tour which included a visit to The Hermitage Museum, and that was an important part of our visit to Saint Petersburg. We asked Nadia if there was anything we could do about that, and we mentioned that the Kleinfields were in the same situation (but they were sorted into the purple group). At dinner, Nadia found us and told us the good news and the bad news. The following afternoon was an open time, and she had arranged for a guide to take the Kleinfields and us to The Hermitage Museum. The bad news was that since our delay wasn’t Grand Circle’s fault, they wouldn’t provide transportation. We had to take a 20 minute ride on the Metro to get there! (A taxi could take an hour to get there at mid-day.) Our guide would meet us at the ship at about 2:30.

Thursday began with an optional tour of Catherine’s Palace which lasted for the morning. We were back on the ship for lunch. I won’t describe Catherine’s Palace here because my description wouldn’t measure up to the excellent description on Wikipedia (click on the link above). The purple group’s bus broke down on the way back from Catherine’s Palace, and the Kleinfields were not pleased (to put it mildly) with how their P.D. handled the situation. By evening they had been moved to the green group at their own request.

After lunch our Hermitage Guide, Ksenia Belous, met us at the ship and we went by Metro to The Hermitage Museum. I again defer to Wikipedia’s excellent description of the museum, but Wikipedia doesn’t have a page about our guide, and I cannot say enough about her. Partly because we were a group of only five, but mostly because we were guided by Ksenia, we really felt like we got a first class tour of The Hermitage Museum. As we were finishing the trip her boyfriend met us all outside The Hermitage and drove us back to the ship. That was the only way he was going to get to see Ksenia that evening, and I must say that I don’t blame him for going out of his way to get to spend time with her. The only downside ( if you want to call it that) was that I brought home two Saint Petersburg Metro tokens at the end of the trip.

Our Russian River Cruise - June 2nd through June 17th

Our trip to Russia didn’t begin on an upbeat. We left from Newark airport heading to London where we were supposed to connect to Saint Petersburg. We left Newark just before 7:00pm – Midnight in London. Four hours later – long before we were supposed to land at Heathrow, the lights came on and the flight attendants stood at the front of the cabin. We were informed that there was a technical problem that required that we turn back and land at St. John’s, Newfoundland. Once off the airplane (at about 2:00AM local time) we were informed that the cockpit crew had smelled smoke, and even though the smell went away and they and their engineers in England thought they knew exactly what had gone wrong, the felt that they had to get the plane on the ground as quickly as possible.

We had no idea how long we were going to be there, and neither did Canadian Immigration, so the two Immigration Inspectors they called in from home at that ungodly hour began processing all of us just in case were going to have to be sent to local hotels (I wonder if St. John’s has enough hotel rooms to accommodate all the passengers from a full Boeing 777?).

We spent about two hours in the baggage claim area where there are perhaps twenty seats – oh yeah, and the baggage carousels. Alana De La Garza (yeah, the one from Law and Order) and her new hubby got two of them. Most of the rest of us sat on the carousels – some in the prone position attempting to sleep. There wasn’t even a vending machine there, but it wouldn’t have made much difference – there probably wasn’t a single Canadian dime in the pockets of the whole contingent.

Once the problem (which was exactly as expected) was repaired (by pulling the power plug from a defunct cooling fan under the instrument panel and taping the cord out of harm’s way), we were reboarded and went on to London, arriving six hours late and far too late to connect to the one daily flight from London to Saint Petersburg.

Heathrow is very confusing. For one thing we were expecting to land at Terminal 4. That’s a temporary situation. Flights from the US are supposed to arrive at the new terminal 5, but because of the initial electro-mechanical disaster with the baggage handling system in T5, Newark flights are temporarily sent to T4 – unless, that is, they arrive at a busing gate. We landed at a busing gate, and the bus took us to T5. That’s where our connecting flight left from several hours earlier, but in the confusion we wound up taking a connecting bus to T4. When we got to T4 Adrianne missed her pocket book. We went through all four bags – two roll-aboards and two small hand-carry bags – two or three times. We found her passport, which she handed to me to hold, but the pocketbook was nowhere to be found.

Now nearly in a panic, we asked if there was a way to get back to the plane. There was not. We were directed to the baggage office – you know, where you go when your bags don’t arrive – but to get there we had to go through UK Immigration, and to do that we had to fill out a landing card for each of us and we needed our passports, and we couldn’t find Adrianne’s. We went through all four bags twice more before Adrianne remembered handing her passport to me. I found it in my pocket. We quickly went through UK Immigration and headed to the opposite end of the baggage claim hall (everywhere we went at Heathrow was at the opposite end of where we first entered) to the bag office where we explained our dilemma. Fortunately they weren’t busy, and one of the gentlemen on duty grabbed his jacket and went out to the airplane to look for the pocketbook. In the meantime, the other gentlemen told us that we had been rescheduled for the Saint Petersburg flight on the following day. Twenty minutes later, when the first gentleman showed up with the pocketbook in hand, our panic level dropped significantly.

An hour or two later we arrived at the Renaissance Hotel, where British Air picked up the tab for the room and meals. There were three couples headed for the same Grand Circle ship on our flight – we met both at the airport in St. John’s, and I remembered the name of one couple. They were also in the Renaissance Hotel, so we connected and had dinner together. We later learned that the third couple connected to Saint Petersburg on Lufthansa via Munich. We could have made that connection despite all the confusion at Heathrow had it been offered to us, but it wasn’t. We and the Kleinfields arrived exactly one day late to Saint Petersburg where we were met by Grand Circle representatives and taken to the ship. It was almost dinner time.