I have spent the past ten weeks studying and traveling around Russia, from Moscow, Bulgakov’s mighty metropolis of “multicolored towers” and the “dense hum of the most incredible rumors” to Dostoyevsky’s “splendid panorama” filled with “various taverns and cesspools,” St. Petersburg (1,2). I drank water from the pristine waters of Lake Baikal, toured around cities over a thousand years old, and listened the traditional songs of Old Believers in Siberia.
Even better, I haven’t been throwing all of my extra time into triple integrals and Lagrangian computer simulations for my physics classes as I would during a regular term, so I’ve had extra time on my hands for more artistic pursuits. I’ll leave the poetry to Nick, Amelia, Bulgakov, and Dostoyevsky, but there are many ways to be inspired! Although I suffered Nick’s gentle teasing for taking constant photos, the literally thousands of images I have from my time here yielded some relatively nice ones, allowing me to put together an album of images from all over Russia for the blog. I’ve also done some drawing in the dorm, inspired by the art and architecture around me.
Without further ado, here are 75 of my best photos from our time in Moscow, plus a few drawings to boot.
Three weeks ago I boarded a plane to Ulan-Ude, a city five time zones and six hours of flight time away from Moscow. I didn’t really know what to expect from our Baikal trip: if you had asked me what Siberia was like prior to my trimester in Russia, I would have said something about miserable gulags, deserted tundra, and extreme cold. In our class readings, I read about Mongol hordes, shamanistic rituals, and the natural majesty of Lake Baikal. These impressions suggested to me that Siberia would a far cry from the western capital city of Moscow, which can at times feel like any other European capital with classical European architecture, American brands, and thousands of tourists.
When we landed in Ulan-Ude, my prediction seemed to be accurate, as I quickly started noticing all of the differences between this city and Moscow. For example, the whole landscape was surrounded by beautiful, rolling mountains, signs advertised a regional specialty called buuza, and a bright yellow and red Buddhist Datsun topped the highest point.
However when our van rounded a corner to drive through the central square, an incredible (but familiar) sight met our eyes. A 42-ton statue of Vladimir Lenin’s head gazed at us tiny visitors. Not a bust–just an enormous, metal, discombobulated head. Finally, here was something to connect this city with the Moscow I knew and loved: both have a huge Lenin monument in the main square.
Lenin’s head in Ulan-Ude
This was the first of many Lenins we would see in Siberia. In Kyakhta, a bright white Lenin gazed sternly at a gorgeous, gleaming cathedral, perhaps considering the various “opiates of the masses” which survived here despite the Soviets best efforts. In Irkutsk, we celebrated several Lenin-statue-related firsts: not only our very first “taxi-hailing” Lenin (which we had been looking forward to after reading about these in Lisa Dickey’s Bears in the Streets) but also a modest reddish carving with the distinction of being the first monument ever erected in Lenin’s honor in Russia. The Lenins we encountered were not the only examples of the influence of the Soviet years on these cities with rich histories of tea trade, Buryat tribes, and Old Believers. We read Vladimir Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora, which describes the destruction of a village for a Soviet dam project,and saw a Buryat-language play in response to Rasputin’s work. In the historical museum in Ulan-Ude, we saw World War II medals belonging to Buryatia’s Red Army war heroes. To me, the many Lenins of the Siberian cities were a symbolic reminder of Russia’s Soviet past, connecting these far away places full of traditions, religions, history, food, art, and languages that I had not yet encountered with the Western half of Russia I have been experiencing and attempting to understand.
Lenin statue overlooking a cathedral and the Mongolian border in KyakhtaRussia’s first Lenin monument in IrkutskOur first taxi hailing Lenin!
Coming home from Siberia three days early gave us extra time in Moscow to use in a different Lenin-related way: instead of looking at statues, we went to one of the strangest buildings on the Red Square and paid a visit to Lenin himself. Although there are quite a few monuments to Lenin in Moscow today, there were once many more such statues all around the city. Several of these Lenins now reside in the “Graveyard of Fallen Monuments” in Gorky Park, where monuments to Russia’s out-of-favor leaders have been aging unceremoniously by the river, reduced from objects of awe to props in tourists’ selfies. Yet the most important Lenin remains, despite some controversy. Against his wife’s and his own wishes, Lenin was embalmed after his death and put on display in a pyramidal mausoleum the color of the Kremlin walls, where he resides to this day.
View of the Red Square from Lenin’s perspective
I knew that I couldn’t leave Moscow without satiating my morbid curiosity about this building I had passed so many times on the Red Square but never entered, so I dragged Alexis, Nick, and Ian along with me to visit the body. We had no idea what we were in for. Along
with a crowd of mostly tourists, we cheerfully stood in line in the shade for approximately 45 minutes before we were ushered through metal detectors by guards and into the front entrance of the mausoleum. We stepped into the cold, dark air of the pyramid. The mood of the crowd turned solemn as a guard holding a finger to his lips urged us to be silent, remove hats from heads and hands from pockets, and not take photos. My eyes had just finished adjusting to the dark when we emerged from a labyrinthine series of turns into the central room.
There, illuminated in a glass case lying underneath a black blanket, was Lenin himself. His hair and beard were perfectly trimmed, and one of his hands was clasped in a fist. We shuffled along the guided route in silence, and I found myself facing him front on.
The preserved corpse of Vladimir Lenin (Photo source)
Face to face with the father of the USSR, I was surprised at how small he was–nothing like the 42-ton version. Yet his face was familiar, thanks to the fact that I have seen its likeness hundreds of times. His skin was pale but well-preserved, and he didn’t really show any signs of being dead for almost a century. In fact, he almost looked like he could open his eyes and sit up. This thought disturbed me, and I became a little freaked out.
I wasn’t alone: when we stepped, blinking and shaken, into the sun again, Alexis turned to us and remarked:
“I think my soul just left my body!”
Grave of Joseph Stalin
I was glad that I wasn’t the only one who found the experience of seeing a preserved corpse unsettling. We passed more graves, among them Stalin’s and Yuri Gagarin’s, and were funneled back out onto the sunny and tourist-filled Red Square. But I was still distracted by our visit to Lenin. Now more than ever, it was clear to me that despite the almost thirty years since the fall of the USSR and century since his death, for many Vladimir Lenin is still watching over Russia, from his uneasy rest in the Red Square to his larger-than-life head in Ulan-Ude.
“Your assignment is to stop a random stranger on the street and talk to them???”
Our grammar professor was shocked and horrified to learn of Diane’s “cruel and unusual” assignment for us: travel to a neighborhood in Moscow, spend an hour or more walking around, and, most importantly, interview a resident about their experience living there.
“Why don’t you just go to a museum and ask one of the docents about Moscow instead,” she hopefully suggested the next day in class, “you could go the Bulgakov museum! They’re very friendly there…”
Apparently, she and her husband had been in a frenzy of concern the night before over the thought of us carrying out this task, and now she was attempting to find a technicality to save us from the apparent great danger of talking to strangers.
But this was not the spirit of the assignment. Of course, we were nervous to approach a stranger–check out Alexis’s blog on the subject here. But to us clueless Americans, the task at hand seemed quite sane: in Minnesota, where the routine of being “nice” is zealously practiced, I wouldn’t expect a passerby to bat an eye at a question like, “so, do you live around here? What do you think about the neighborhood?”
However, two out of our three Russian professors expressed concern to us when we mentioned the assignment in class. As Nick described in his blog post (read it here!) about our little journey, this concern threw us into a state of nervousness before our excursion: maybe it really was a bad idea to talk to a stranger. Nick’s google search of “most dangerous neighborhoods in Moscow” didn’t help to calm our nerves as we read about various murders, and we eventually settled on an area listed in one article I read as “the best place to stay in Moscow with your family,” hoping that this would be a safe place for our social experiment. This was Baumansky neighborhood, named for controversial revolutionary Nikolai Bauman. We planned to walk from the Kurskaya metro station to Baumanskaya station on the dark blue line, a route we barely researched beforehand except to note that there was some sort of park along the way where we might be able to find an unfortunate passer-by to interview.
Murals outside of Kurskaya Station
Stepping out into the sun at Kurskaya station, I was greeted with a strange sight: a giant, modern, street-art style mural—I felt like I was in downtown Portland! Thus, I felt a little more at home as we crossed some train tracks and wandered into Bauman Garden, which, as Nick describes, is an incredibly nice park full of bright colored play structures, public art displays, and mini coffee shacks.
A walk in Bauman Garden in April
It took Nick and I half an hour at least to work up the courage to talk to someone. I saw an opportunity: an older lady with a little dog who didn’t look like she was going anywhere in particular. She was well dressed, looking down her nose at the children frolicking at the playground. After a long moment of self-doubt (what if Russians think it’s really weird to pet other people’s dogs?) I approached her and asked if I could pet her dog.
“Of course,” the lady said, “but he has really dirty feet!”
“What’s his name?” I asked, throwing myself into generous petting of this Very Good Boy, not caring in the least about how dirty his paws were.
“Tai-son.”
I stopped for a moment. Taison… Tyson?
“As in… Mike Tyson?”
“Yes,” she answered, in total seriousness.
I laughed, surprised. This dog was a very small, soft, fluffy, thing, a Maltese weighing less than 10 pounds–probably the least similar dog to Mike Tyson you could come up with (see photos below). I looked at the woman again, with new respect for this Russian babushka who for some reason was a fan of American heavyweight boxing. Understanding the sense of humor which must be required to give this particular fluffball such a name, I felt at ease with her, and was able to successfully gain some information about the neighborhood. She described to me how she was born and lived all her life here, and was now watching her grandchildren grow up in the same neighborhood. She told me the park wasn’t as new as it looked, just very well kept, and we continued with a short, pleasant conversation which should never have elicited as much nervousness on our parts as it did.
Mike Tyson, the boxer (right) (Photo by: The Ring Magazine/Getty Images)A relative of Mike Tyson, the dog (I didn’t actually get a photo of him) (Photo by: Wikipedia Commons)
“Don’t speak with strangers,” warns Mikhail Bulgakov in the opening chapter of his famous novel The Master and Margarita. Luckily for a foreigner hoping to learn more about the residents and culture of this magical city, (like us Carls or Bulgakov’s Woland) not all Muskovites heed their beloved poet’s ominous warning. Walking through the streets of Baumansky for a second time with Alyona, our praktikant, I considered how my comfort level conversing with both strangers and friends has improved since this first anxious meeting weeks ago. Around the same time that Nick and I made our first visit and the praktikanty themselves were still strangers, we met Alyona and the others for the first time when they gave us a tour of Moscow State University. I remember being ashamed of my not-always-perfect comprehension and conversation skills as the girls described student and academic life, occasionally just falling silent rather than risk embarrassing myself. Now, weeks later, here I was, doing my best to describe the plot and cultural significance of the musical Hamilton, while Alyona waxed poetic about the personal significance of her favorite holiday, Victory Day. I realized that although my Russian is still filled with mistakes and gaps, I have become more willing to commit these errors in front of native Russian speakers over the past ten weeks, and when I don’t want to talk to a random person, it’s usually out of a good old-fashioned fear of strangers than a sense of shame about my communication skills in this language. And after my encounter with Mike Tyson and his friendly owner, my fear of random Moscow neighborhoods and their inhabitants has also lessened. I think Bulgakov would approve.
Posing proudly with Bauman after meeting Mike Tyson (the dog)
The first time I came across the word “nerpa,” I was reading Peter Thomson’s Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal (1) in preparation for our Siberian adventure. I learned that nerpas, one of many species endemic to Lake Baikal, are some of the world’s smallest seals, clocking in at less than a meter and a half long. If you’ve ever scrolled through my Instagram feed, you will know that I am a fan of anything “mini”: mini-pugs, dwarf hamsters, micro-extreme mini teacup piglets, etc., and thus I was immediately obsessed with the nerpa, a “mini” version of a seal. (I highly recommend googling “baby nerpa seal.” You will discover happy, fluffy, white little fuzz balls, with enormous black eyes staring endearingly back at you.) The 7-year-old part of me that says “eeeeeeee!!” when I see a cute animal now had one goal for my upcoming Baikal trip: see a nerpa in the wild. However, the rational, boring, 20-year-old part of me knew that nerpas are wild animals who do not want to see me as much as I want to see them, and furthermore, that last year’s Carleton group hadn’t seen a nerpa outside of a museum. I braced myself for certain disappointment on the wild nerpa front.
Posing with the nerpa monument at the visitors center of the Baikal Biosphere Nature Reserve in Tankhoy
We didn’t actually see Baikal until several days after we arrived in Siberia. As soon as the shimmering blue surface of the lake came into view during the van-ride to Ust-Barguzin, I donned my glasses and glued my eyes to the window, looking for the little bead of a seal’s head breaching for air. We stopped several times along the way, but there was no nerpa to be found. Two days passed, and I began to lose hope.
Our first glimpse of Baikal! Not a nerpa in sight.
Finally, on our last full day in Ust-Barguzin, we had a picnic planned in the Trans-Baikal National Park. We pulled over to take in the view of the “holy nose” peninsula, and suddenly the cry went out: “Nerpas!” A long white streak interrupted the deep blue water in the distance: ice left over from the long Siberian winter, not yet melted in the 4°C water. Scattered across the ice were hundreds of little dark smudges. With the help of Nick’s binoculars, it became apparent that the smudges were actually moving around, flopping along on the ice, and basking in the sun. Even better, some of the smudges were teeny tiny, this year’s babies who had just lost their fluffy coats! A few hours later, we returned to the same beach, to find that this ice flow had floated much closer to the shore, and now it was possible to make out tails and flippers. We had stumbled across more than a thousand wild nerpas on some of the very last ice of the year.
Nerpa sighting near the “holy nose” peninsula! That white streak covered in black dots along the horizon is ice covered in nerpas.
(video: Ian Bell)
Nerpas! (Screenshot of video by Ian Bell)
Nerpa-mania only increased among the group members after our miraculous nerpa sighting. We thought ourselves to be veritable nerpa experts after spying on the wild nerpas at a distance, reading about their place in the ecosystem, and hearing about their life cycle from our guides. They are indeed special creatures! In addition to their diminutive size, they hold the distinction of being the world’s only freshwater species of pinniped, having somehow appeared in Baikal 3000 river kilometers from the nearest ocean. According to our guide, they can live for over half a century, owing this long life span to their diet of “pure vitamin A,” aka the oily golomyanka fish.
Amelia doing some expert nerpa watching.
However, as we entered the aquarium section of the Baikal museum in Listvyanka, none of this knowledge could have prepared us for the experience of seeing two up close in person. There, right before our eyes, were the two fattest little creatures I had ever seen. They swam gracefully and quickly back and forth in their two-room tank (which was a little bit small, making me kind of sad). In profile, these healthy (not-overweight) nerpas were like watermelons with tails. We all stood there open-mouthed, staring entranced at how round, adorable, and hilarious they were.
Nerpa, swimming so fast it was impossible to get a good photo.
We returned to the tank five minutes before their scheduled feeding time to find that they were patiently waiting in the corner for their lunch of golomyanka in an orderly row, like students waiting in the buffet line in the cafeterias of Moscow State University. We fell head over heels for them as they hungrily gobbled up the fish that magically appeared in the water above them. (Video of nerpa feeding, slow motion fish snatch) As we left the museum, I was sad to leave behind our two newest friends from Baikal, the last of many (human and animal) we met in our almost two weeks there. Seeing nerpas on this Baikal expedition was a special, unexpected, and exciting part of my experience, the icing on the cake of all the natural wonders we were lucky to enjoy at the Sacred Sea.
Patient nerpas waiting for lunch.
(1) Thomson, Peter. Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal (2007). New York: Oxford University Press.
On our last day in St. Petersburg, our group visited the State Russian Museum, a collection of all types of Russian art ranging from Rublev icons and folk art to giant Surikov pieces and Soviet art exhibition posters. Here, I explain why these three works of art remind me of my favorite memories from this trip.
Master F.D. Eroshkin (1879-1936) How the Mice Buried the Cat. Late XIX – early XX century. Woodcarving. Bogorodskoe, Vladimir Governorate. State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.
How the Mice Buried the Cat
Our experience with public transportation in St. Petersburg was very different from the easy and painless daily experience of riding the Moscow metro. When we stepped off the train platform in St. Petersburg, we were greeted by a giant sign announcing that we had arrived in “the hero-city of Leningrad,” a massive obelisk, and… a closed metro station. Not only was the metro closed, but the entirety of Nevsky Prospect was as well, thanks to the May 1st Workers Day holiday. Thus began a very long trek dragging all our luggage around the city. Perhaps you can begin to tell why these poor mice dragging a heavy cat reminded me of our trip! We attempted to circumnavigate all the street closures to find our hostel, only to finally show up and realize that the hostel didn’t exist.
I looked up this carving later, and discovered that it is based on a fairy tale about a group of mice who all work together to bury a dead cat that has been terrorizing them. After being hauled to its grave, the cat, who wasn’t actually dead, wakes up and eats the mice while they celebrate their victory. This story actually seemed fitting for the saga of our hostel: the first day’s fiasco seemed to be a great blessing, because we ended up being “forced” to spend the night in a five-star hotel instead. Like the foolish little mice, we rejoiced in our good luck, only to have disaster befall us the next day: for the next two nights, we stayed in a hostel that seemed to be beyond the wildest nightmares of our praktikanty. For example, when I first looked around our eight-bunk room, I heard a loud yowling noise. Walking down the stairs, I found an actual catfight going on between two ferrel cats in the litter-filled courtyard of the building, and wished for an army of little mice to come take these noisy feline neighbors somewhere else.
Alexander Samokhvalov (1894-1971). Conductress. 1928. Tempera on canvas. State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Conductress
As mentioned above, we sorely missed our beloved Moscow Metro. We took public buses to our meeting places most of the time, which I found to be slightly more confusing and a great deal more motion sickness inducing. Conductress illustrates a feature of the St. Petersburg transportation system that we encountered many times: the bus employee whose job it is to go around collecting fare from all the passengers. In our experience, like in the painting, these were mostly women, although they were never as terrifying to interact with as this painting suggests. Still, Conductress did get me thinking about the various Russian women we had encountered during our stay.
We spent the most time, of course, with our praktikanty Alyona and Natasha, who are university students about our age. Occasionally, we were aware of the cultural differences between us, such as when they were horrified by me taking off my sneakers and putting my sock-clad feet on the floor before stepping into slippers (this is, apparently, extremely dirty and dangerous). But in general we had really great, successful interactions with the two of them, and I would often forget we had been raised on opposite sides of the planet.
For example, once we tried to explain the English phrase “wild goose chase” to them as a way that an English speaker might describe our first misadventure with the hostel. Teaching each other idioms in our respective languages has become one of our favorite topics of conversation.
“Ahhh, I understand,” said Alyona at last, “We have a similar phrase in Russian, we say: finding a needle in a haystack!”
Natasha pulled out her phone and started showing me pictures of haystacks, as I didn’t understand the word in Russian. Ironically, this was happening while we were in the midst of a different wild goose chase, this time to find a tiny metal figure dedicated to Daniil Kharms, the absurdist writer much beloved by Russian 205 students.
“No no no,” I said, “we have that phrase too, this is different.”
Finally, we were able to communicate that a wild goose chase is not only long and difficult, like finding a needle in a haystack, but has no positive result at the end. In the end, we didn’t find the figure, but Alyona took the group to a bakery that “anyone visiting St. Petersburg must go to,” and we both ate a slice of speciality cake which she recommended.
My favorite instance of the bond we all formed in St. Petersburg, however, brings me to my last painting, Queue by Alexxei Sundikov.
Alexei Sundikov (1952-) Queue. 1986. Oil on canvas. State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Queue
This painting, Queue, will definitely remind the my fellow students our trip. We waited in lines for palaces, museums, boat rides, coat checks, bag checks, exits, and even other lines. We waited in lines which, had they been half their length, my family at home would have seen and promptly turned around and gone home. Sometimes, we would see the end of a line while walking along and Diane would have us all get in it, and only after we were in the line would we figure out what we were waiting for. At the Hermitage ballet, Diane taught us the art of waiting in a line: you have to be very pushy and keep your shoulders and elbows in front of the people next to you and behind you, all the while subtlety moving forward even if there’s no movement at the front of the line. But all this standing in lines meant that we had lots of time to hang around and joke with each other, and this leads me to one of our favorite moments of the trip.
Another Russian woman we had the pleasure of spending time with on this trip, in addition to the praktikanty and the “conductresses,” was one of our roommates in the hostel. She was an older woman who immediately began interrogating us when we walked into the room after our night at the ballet. What were our names? Where were we from? What did we study? How much did our ballet tickets cost? Did Amelia believe in God? Where did Amelia buy her face cream? Why didn’t she buy her face cream at the pharmacy? Why did I want to take a shower at night? Why did we presume we could come into the room after 10 pm? Why in God’s name was Amelia eating chips while she was trying to sleep?
After being yelled at least four times for such offenses as walking into the room and getting in bed after the lights had been turned out (“you can go sleep in the streets if you continue causing these scandals tomorrow young ladies!!”), we began to sympathize with Alyona and Natasha’s opinion of the hostel. The next day, as we discussed all this in the many lines involved in visiting the Hermitage, she earned the unflattering nickname of “Babka” among the group.
We all had Crime and Punishment on our mind, having come to St. Petersburg to see the city where Dostoyevsky set his novel. Soon, a running joke started that if we murdered “the Babka,” we could re-live the protagonist Raskolnikov’s crime of killing an old women in a gross St. Petersburg apartment, and thus truly get the “Dostoyevsky experience” we were looking for. Finally, as we waited in a line (which we ended up leaving because it was the wrong line), Natasha (who had mostly remained quiet on the Babka front–we thought she might be a little horrified by the awful joke), piped up with some of our favorite words from the whole trip:
“Kill, kill, kill the Babka!”
This, of course, sent us into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. That night, we returned home late after Babka’s “curfew” with great trepidation, only to find that she wasn’t even in the building. We celebrated by eating snacks in bed and coming in and out of the room as often as we wanted.
These three works of art don’t show the multitude of mighty palaces, picturesque canals, and historical monuments that we were lucky to visit in St. Petersburg. However, each one brings to my mind memories that I will treasure of my time in this city with my fellow Carleton students and our new Russian friends.
I grew up in a place that I consider to be incredibly beautiful. America’s Pacific Northwest is a temperate rainforest between the Pacific and the Cascades filled with mountains, waterfalls, beaches, and old-growth trees, where the landscape remains green and growing all year long. When I travel (which has mostly been in the US), I am accustomed to measuring the beauty of a place by the grandeur of its natural features, comparing a new place to my home. For example, during my first year in Northfield, Minnesota, I was constantly aware of the aspects of the landscape of Minnesota that were different from what I was used to. To the annoyance of all my friends, I moaned and groaned constantly about the extreme weather, starkly delineated seasons, overall flatness, and absence of conifers.
The view from my front porch in Portland… look at all those lovely conifers!View of Mount Hood and the Columbia river from the plane to Carleton this year
Last weekend our group traveled to Vladimir and Suzdal, our first exploration outside of Moscow. On the train and bus rides, I watched the landscape pass by, and made my usual quick judgement of the aesthetic beauty of this new place. It was very flat and (at this time of year) colorless. If you took away the ancient cities, this area would not look too different from the area around Northfield, which I complained about above. But looking back, my overwhelming impression of Vladimir and Suzdal is that they were incredibly beautiful. Here, I encountered a new type of beauty, one that I have not seen since the last time I was in Europe. Unlike in Oregon or Minnesota, the modern residents of these ancient cities live surrounded by the beauty of old, glorious, manmade architectural creations, a very different daily experience of beauty than mine, which is composed of monumental natural features.
Landscape near Vladimir… fewer mountains and conifers.
In Portland, the skyline is nice, I guess, but it can hardly compete with the snow capped peaks of Mount Hood and Mount Saint Helens that rise above it. Any Oregonian would probably agree with me that buildings such as our beloved “Big Pink” in downtown can hardly compete with one of our natural wonders, such as Multnomah Falls or Neakhahnie Mountain. These buildings are mostly big rectangles of metal, glass, and concrete, built without reference to the natural world. The natural landscape surrounding Vladimir and Suzdal, however, is both integral to these cities and outshone by the ancient constructed wonders within them. For example, Suzdal’s original fortress was purposefully built in a bend in the river to take advantage of the natural moat, and Vladimir is situated atop a cliff overlooking a river, another natural defense. Suzdal’s bend in the river is just another bend in the river, until you take into account the fact that people maintained a fortress here for a thousand years.
Portland skyline: lots of big rectangles! Big Pink is on the right.Compare Portland’s rectangles to this “Suzdal pair” of churches in Suzdal…… or this beautiful view of the Svyato Bogolyubsky Monastery near Vladimir
Residents of Vladimir can take a bus and attend service at a the Svyato Bogolyubsky Monastery just a few yards away from the same staircase where Andrey Bogolyubsky was murdered in the 12th century. Compare this to the American West, where I am used to considering structures that manage to be 200 or more years old to be ancient ruins to be revered and preserved as historical museums. Now in Russia, I am getting used to everything being so old that I wasn’t surprised when our tour guide in Suzdal pointed to parts of a church that were built in the 18th or 19th centuries and declared them to be “modern.” Although many have been destroyed, Vladimir and Suzdal are still full of these colorful and intricate monasteries, cathedrals, and bell towers: throughout the centuries, buildings have been added in new styles and reconstructed when they were destroyed. Nevertheless, many are still being used for their original purpose. We visited, for example, the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl in Bogolyubskovo, a UNESCO World Heritage sight. Here, original walls held beautiful modern icons, and alongside the tourists, worshippers were still practicing.
Church of the Intercession on the Nerl in BogolyubskovoThe Cathedral of Saint Demetrius in Vladimir
I am glad to have spent time outside of Moscow in these cities of old Russia. I felt a great sense of awe at the beauty, age, and significance of their monuments, and I am happy to report that here on the other side of the planet, like at home, people get to experience truly unique and beautiful sights every day.
Bell tower in SuzdalLazarus Church in Suzdal, built in 1667
In my twenty long years of life, I have eaten less than a tablespoon of meat. At Carleton, finding plenty of tasty vegetarian food is no problem at all. There’s a counter in the dining hall that serves exclusively vegan dishes, and those who know me are well aware of my love for tofu tacos on weekends. But when I started seriously planning for this trimester abroad, the question of whether or not I would be able to eat vegetarian without feeling terrible due to low iron and lack of protein was a big concern of mine. Thus, when it was my turn to meet with our program director Diane before the trip, I asked her with some trepidation whether or not I could realistically maintain a vegetarian diet in Russia. She assured me that in Moscow it would be easy, and the only place where I would encounter problems would be at Lake Baikal, and this had been done before and we would deal with this when we came to it.
Feeling reassured, I returned to my busy Carleton life without giving it too much thought. However, the subject came up again at dinner one night, when I confidently announced my plans to eat vegetarian in Moscow. One friend, a senior, immediately responded,
“Really? Because every vegetarian I know who went on the Russia trip had such a miserable time that they started eating meat again.”
Since eating meat “again” is not an option for me, I quickly started to worry again, and arrived in Moscow with a lot of concerns about what I would eat, especially after reading under the “Vegetarian Eating” heading in my guidebook that almost all Russian food, including salads, contains meat, and I would be better off eating only at restaurants serving other cuisines.
Today, however, I am glad to be reporting to you at the outset of my third week in Moscow, alive, well, and still not having consumed any of my fellow members of the animal kingdom. During my first visit to the extremely cheap University stolovayas, I was pleased to discover that there is always a selection of (mostly meatless) salads and yogurts before you get to the main dishes. The main courses consist of a piece of meat on rice, plain pasta, or kasha, but these are separate and you can just get the grain without the meat slab. Much of the time there is a steamed vegetable available, and if you get lucky there might be a vegetable stew. Once, there were delicious eggplant slices with cheese. Finally, there are a variety of pastries and bread.
Vegetarian options in the cafeteria
However, although non-meat options technically exist in these cafeterias, during my first week here I quickly found that eating unseasoned grains, almost flavorless boiled vegetables (invariably carrots, cauliflower, potatoes, and sometimes broccoli), and vinegar-drenched cabbage for both lunch and dinner became monotonous, and every day the only protein I was getting was from a single serving of peach yogurt. I started to feel tired and hungry all the time. Of course, the stolovayas are not the only places to eat in Moscow, but they are the cheapest (the dinner I described above costs a little over two dollars) and most convenient for students in the dorm. Thus, I had to find strategies for eating as a vegetarian at the university (future vegetarian program participants take note!).
Broccoli and potatoes in First Gum
You can buy a freshly-baked mini-baguette for less than 50 cents at Ashan, the closest grocery store, so I have been exchanging one monotonous lunch a day out for a tasty sandwich of cheese and veggies on crusty bread. I also purchased a variety of protein-rich snacks: cheeses, almonds, sunflower seeds, etc. to munch on throughout the day. In addition, I take iron supplements. Finally, I figured out that carrying a jar of pesto in my purse to dinner to put on the pasta and vegetables makes the cafeteria meals way better. You will find that you have no problem with breakfast: every cafe (and there are many) on campus offers almost too many delicious looking pastries, and I have been happily working my way through the “daunting” task of trying them all.
A waffle and jam pastry from the cafeteria“I want-I want Ekaterina!” pastries from First GumThese raisin twists are currently leading the competition for best pastry at MGU.
Plus, the stolovaya opposite Stolovaya #1 in the main building offers blini every morning: you can get two big blini with a pile of fruit jam for about 70 cents, a delicious treat that in my home town of Portland, OR would probably set you back about eight dollars at a brunch restaurant or food cart. There are a few other types of food on campus as well: I recommend the veggie quesadillas on the tenth floor of First Gum, our class building, and the pizzeria in the main building which has a great veggie slice (way better than the famously bad dining hall pizza at Carleton!).
Breakfast blini!Tasty vegetarian pizza for only around a dollar a slice from the main building
Outside of the university, things are not so dire as my guidebook would have me believe: plenty of restaurants have vegetarian offerings. The fact that it is currently Lent is very useful: many places advertise a “Lenten menu” for those who are going without meat or animal products which has vegetarian and even vegan options, and I have been enjoying supplementing the Russian food I eat in the university with other flavors and cuisines elsewhere in the city sometimes.
Overall, being a vegetarian (after some initial time spent adjusting) is not as difficult as I worried it might be. I have been able to try many new Russian foods, such as vareniki and cheesy potato pirozhok, and am getting enough to eat every day. I would advise future vegetarians that maintaining this diet is doable (in Moscow, at least), but you have to be a little creative and try a little harder. However, I think veganism would be a lot harder to pull off, and I would caution vegans that there is very little non-animal protein available in the cafeterias. I have not mentioned an important fact, which is that there are simple kitchens on the dorm floor, which I think I will be taking advantage of more as the term goes on. At the end of the day, I won’t doubt Diane’s advice again!
