Category Archives: Ian

Baikal, Ian, On the Road, Outside the Box

A Siberian Film

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When our conversation practice teacher, Irina Vladimirovna, asked us to make a video about our Baikal travels to aid class discussion when we returned, I groaned inwardly. I absolutely despise multimedia assignments and by nature would sooner write a 5, 10 or 20-page paper in any language than record a second of footage or make a single cut.

Nevertheless I decided not only to cooperate with the assignment but embrace it, hoping I could learn a little bit more about shooting footage and creating videos. I borrowed the program camcorder from Diane and declared myself the group’s “primary cameraman.” I became a surprisingly enthusiastic cinematographer and shot nearly 2 hours of footage over the course of our 12 days in Siberia, and after days of editing, I’ve landed on the following video as my “final cut:”

To help contextualize the places shown in the video, I’ve put a  guide below with timestamps. You can follow along and have the same experience our class had discussing the video as it played–the opportunity to recollect and learn about the places we’ve been while actually seeing them. Enjoy!

00:18 Ulan-Ude (Улан-Удэ) is the capital of the Republic of Buryatia, which was the region we primarily spent time while in Siberia. The Lenin head pictured, weighing 2 tons, is the world’s largest. Sitting in the city’s center, it’s arguably the town’s main attractions.

00:23 This video of the Selinga river is taken from the point of Ulan-Ude’s founding, where in 1666, Russian Cossacks built the city’s first fort.

01:13 A view from above Kyakhta (Кяхта), about 100 miles south of Ulan-Ude. The white monument is dedicated to Red Army veterans from the Russian Civil War and near the end of this clip, you can see into Mongolia. For more information on Kyakhta in general (and the two other Kyakhta places featured in the video), please take a look at my blogpost on the subject.

01:26 The Gostiny Dvor in Kyakhta.

02:18 The Voskresensky Sobor in Kyakhta.

02:28 A view from the bell tower of the Voskresensky Sobor.

03:03 The Murochinsky Datsan (a complex of buddhist temples)in Baldan Breibun, close to the Mongolian border and to the east of Kyakhta.

03:14 Pictured is a nearby shrine maintained by the monks of the Murochinsky Datsan. Within, gypsum pyramid sculptures are left by individual purchasers as prayers. Each of the pyramids has a one thousand Buddhas on it, representing the one thousand Buddhas who must past through our world before it is complete.

03:35 Volkan (in translation, his names means Volcano) was the name of a friendly dog we met at Murochinsky. A very good boy, Volkan is Buryat-Mongolian sheperd dog, a breed unique to the region. They are famed for their guarding abilities and the yellow “eyebrows.”

04:39 Lake Baikal, Ust’-Barguzin. Ust’-Barguzin is a small town of around 10,000 located about a 15 minute drive from Lake Baikal, and we stayed their for three days. It’s close to our next location, the Barguzinsky Gulf.

05:25 The Barguzinsky Gulf (Баргузинский Залив) is one of two bays on the Svyatoy Nos peninsula. We visited it during our trip to the Baikal National Park.

06:00 The Svyatoy Nos is a mountain range and peninsula near Ust’-Barguzin. To read more about it, check out my blog post on the subject.

06:14 Shown here relaxing on some ice, nerpas are a species of freshwater seal endemic to Lake Baikal. To understand them from a true Nerpa-lover’s perspective, check out Claire’s excellent blogpost about them.

06:40 The Selinga River, one of many rivers feeding Baikal. We crossed it by ferry to continue our journey to Tankhoy.

07:53 The lighthouse (маяк) at Tankhoy. This lighthouse is one of several English lighthouses erected in the 19th-century to help guide ferries across Baikal. These massive ferries carried railcars across Baikal, connecting the two sides of the Trans-Siberian railway before an overland route was created.

08:58 Baykal’skii Zapovednik in Tankhoy. In Russian environmental law, a zapovednik is a more strongly protected area than a national park and visitors are only permitted to walk on the raised wooden path.

09:29 The next sequence shows us crossing Baikal from Tankhoy to Lisvyanka and stopping for a quick taste of fresh Baikal water in the middle of the lake, some of the world’s cleanest.

11:25 Baikalskii Museum, Listvyanka. Here, we observed nerpas feeding on their favored food, the fatty golomyanka.

Credits First Camera, Editing–Ian Bell
Second Camera–Claire Williams

Claire, Ian, Moscow, Outside the Box

What We Learned Visiting Every Station in Moscow’s Inner Ring

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It started off innocently enough:

“Ian, how long do you think it would take to visit every station on the metro? I wonder if you could do it all in one day.”

Fast forward a week, and we were out of the dorm by 9:30 on a Sunday morning, coffee in hand, ready to settle this question once and for all. Somehow, we had convinced ourselves that this wasn’t an entirely terrible idea. After all, the Moscow metro is the greatest subway system in the world and a tourist attraction in its own right, boasting unique design and architecture in every station. Although we ride the metro all the time, the free wifi on the trains allows us to spend most rides sitting and staring at our screens, which means that we often pass through many stations without even looking at them on the way to our destination. Plus, we would earn bragging rights for having visited them all.

To make this trip different from every other ride, we set a rule for ourselves: at every station, we had to get off the train and take at least one picture. This forced us to search around for interesting architectural, artistic, and lighting features in every station, and ensured that we didn’t miss anything cool not visible from inside the train. We also decided that if three lines intersected, we had to change lines and visit all three train platforms (which often means doing a five minute transfer).

We started off on the red line at our beloved Universitet station, and headed north. Even one station in, our excursion felt like a great success: we realized that we had never gotten off the train at the next station over, Vorobyovie Gory, and discovered a display of historical chess sets in giant clear pillars right on the platform. This was going excellently!

We were having a great time exploring the familiar red line stations, discovering interesting chandeliers and symbolic tile patterns, but we soon realized that our original idea of visiting every metro station (there are over 200!) was not feasible. It took us an hour to get to Komsomolskaya on the opposite end of the inner ring. In other words, about half of one line took us an hour, and there are over ten such lines. Staring at a map, we came up with a new plan: go to every station within the brown inner ring (line 5). This is still over 50 stations, and includes many of the best ones. But there was a problem: how do we visit all of these stations without repeating ourselves? We also wanted to limit the number of line transfers, which take extra time. We stared at the map for another ten minutes and traced the lines with our fingers, to the annoyance of several other travelers who were trying to plan their own routes.

Finally, we came up with a solution:

What the route looked like above ground.

Video of our progress on the metro mp

At the end of the day we were exhausted, having visited 59 stations over a period of seven hours. We got off the metro only twice, once for pizza and once for ice cream and water, which meant that the whole trip cost us 114 rubles each, or $1.76 at the current rate (plus the cost of the pizza and ice cream). We saw stations that looked like they could have come out of royal palaces and stations that could be parts of the star ship Enterprise. We discovered many “easter eggs” along the way, from the molecular-structure themed chandeliers in Mendeleevskaya to the plaque describing how Mayakovskaya’s beautiful mosaics were made by artists during the Siege of Leningrad.  Below are a sampling of the photos we took along the way. 

(This was a joint blog post written by Ian and Claire)

Baikal, Ian, Sacred Sea

The Svyatoy Nos

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Campbell Hill, the highest point in Ohio (PC: Skye Marthaler)

Until we landed in Buryatia, I had never seen a mountain. In my defense the highest point in my home state of Ohio is Campbell Hill, which is 1550 ft above sea level. This actually compares favorably to Baikal’s Svyatoy Nos mountain range, which is only 328 ft taller. But because it has only 700 ft of prominence, Campbell is a tall hill, whereas the Svyatoy Nos rises enough to be the the genuine article:

My first view of the Svyatoy Nos on the way to Ust’-Barguzin, rising out of the haze

I gasped when the first time I saw it outside the window of the van, and it’s probably the subject I photographed the most in Siberia. I’m still stunned by how imposing it is:

A view from above the Barguzin Bay

Reporter Peter Thompson description of it as a “gargantuan, pointy schnozz”¹ gives a good impression of its form while obscuring the first interesting fact about the peninsula: the complexity of its name. The Buryat name for the range–khilmen hushuun–actually means “sturgeon’s snout,” not a human nose. In Russian, of course, it’s called the Svyatoy Nos, which means “the holy nose,” likely in reference to Buryat shamans performing rituals on the mountain.

Protected since the Soviet era as part of the Zabaikalsky National Park, it remains almost uninhabited. The largest settlement is Kurbulik with 101 people. On Russian Wikipedia, its economy is described in a single word–“tourism.” The small size of such communities might seem to suggest the range is isolated, but the Nos is accessible by a short drive from nearby Ust’-Barguzin. It wasn’t always this way, however, because the Nos was once an island. Over past several thousand years, the Chivyruki and Barguzin rivers, which sit on each side of the peninsula, brought large quantities of sediment into Lake Baikal. This sediment was then deposited in a series of wide “shafts” by wave action and storms on the east bank of Baikal opposite the island. Eventually the shafts stretched from the bank to the island, trees grew on the land and stabilized the new land, and the once separate range became a true peninsula.

The Svyatoy Nos in a model of Lake Baikal held by the Baikal Museum in Tankhoy. The lake in the middle, Arangatuy, formed not long after the peninsula itself.

Before I did any research, however, I decided to ask Evgenii Dmitrievich, a friend of the program along with us for the day, about the range. As simultaneously a retired professional hunter, the father of the current director of the Zabaikalsky Park, and, most of all, a true Sibiryak, he probably knew something.

“How many times have you been up and down it?” I asked.

He grinned in a way that seemed to say “are you kidding?”

Too many to count, he said, shaking his head–and then, as I blushed, added that he’d built one of the first trails up there. I decided then that it might be a good idea not to ask any more questions if I didn’t have any good ones and went back to staring in awe.

¹ Thompson, Peter. Sacred Sea: A Journey To Lake Baikal. August 28th, 2007. Oxford University Press. 

Baikal, Ian, On the Road

Kyakhta

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In the middle of our stay in Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia and our first “home” in Siberia, we left town and spent a night in Kyakhta. Located about 100 miles to the south of Ulan-Ude, Kyakhta was the sole point of overland trade between the Russian and Chinese empires through the end of the 19th century. Founded in 1727 to execute the treaty of Kyakhta, it quickly grew rich through the tea trade and became known as “the only city of millionaires in the world.”

Today, it’s considerably less glamorous. One point I was really excited to see was the Kyakhta river–the reason for Kyakhta’s location. The founder of the city, diplomat Saava Raguzinsky, wanted to make it impossible for the Chinese to poison the city’s water supply if hostilities should ever break out. Thus he chose the only point on the Chinese-Russian border with a river that flowed North to South.

Despite Raguzinsky’s best efforts, the river has been poisoned–from the North. Trash covers its banks. While I was there, I tripped and felt my foot brush something pointed. I looked down and realized I’d almost been impaled by a 6-inch nail.

The Kyakhta River

The river isn’t the only point of interest, of course, and most of them are better maintained. A five-minute walk from the west bank of the river lies the Voskresenskiy Sobor (in English, The Cathedral of The Resurrection), an imitation of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg. 19th-century American visitor Thomas Knox describes its cost:

The double doors in front of the altar are of solid silver, and are said to weigh two thousand pounds avoirdupois. Besides these doors I think I saw nearly a ton of silver in the various paraphernalia of the church. There were several fine paintings executed in Europe at heavy cost, and the floors, walls and roof of the entire structure were of appropriate splendor. The church was built at the expense of the Kiakhta merchants.

Today the cathedral is far too humble for a city of millionaires. The inside is bare but well-kept, only simple, white-washed walls covered with icons. I was happy to see a thriving church community on the bulletin board; the current austerity of the cathedral’s design seems not to have dampened enthusiasm. Thanks to our guide Rada, we received special permission to go up into the belltower, which offered a wonderful view of Kyakhta and, across the border, Mongolia.

Voskresenskiy Sobor (PC: Claire Williams)
View into Mongolia from the belltower of Voskresenkiy Sobor (PC: Claire Williams)

Just across the street from the church, we visited the city’s gostiny dvor. Both a shopping mall and a trading floor, the gostiny dvor was where people would haggle over the price of tea, weight it, repack it and trade various other goods. Like the river, it is unprotected from abuse, and the entrance is festooned with fascist graffiti. Out front there’s a Lenin statue that looks surprisingly new and serves as a reminder of how destructive and apparently recent the neglect has been.

Gostiny Dvor

Our last stop was the Kyakhta City Museum. It’s an ordinary small-town history museum in most respects; the first floor greets visitors with the obligatory two-headed cow and dubious ethnography. Upstairs we saw items more instantly recognizable as “Kyakhta,” such as small teapots for tasting and scales. Seeing the luxurious European clothing, furniture, and handcrafts imported by the merchants also made it easier to understand the other sobriquet of Kyakhta–“the Paris of Siberia.” Finally an eclectic set of objects represented modern Kyakhta; I remember the glasnost and perestroika dress in particular. Don’t believe Kyakhta is a hollow shell of the city of millionaires, it seems to say–we’ve stayed up to date.

 

Glasnost and Perestroika dress (PC: Claire Williams)

After the clipper ship made the Tea Road unprofitable, Russia started to import tea from Europe, rather than the other way round, and the economy of Kyakhta collapsed. It did remain a center of political power in the region, and to this day is a major border control checkpoint and thoroughfare. Standing at the Civil War memorial on a hill to the east of the city, we drew level with the guard towers. From there we looked below to the rubble of the barely-visible gostiny dvor and the dome of the church to its left, at this distance a silver dot. Then we turned our eyes out and away from the city, following the main highway until it vanished into the distance in Mongolia. No longer the “only city of millionaires in the world,” this is contemporary Kyakhta, ekeing out the same living guarding and trading that it always has.

Click Here for a View of Kyakhta from Above

 

Ian, St Petersburg

Poetry in Petersburg

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The Catherine Palace, located in the suburb “Pushkin”–even empresses don’t get to escape the clutches of Petersburg’s mania for the poet. (PC: Florstein)

Defying St. Petersburg’s Pushkin obsession, the “poem” I was reading while in town was not Eugene Onegin but Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow To The End of The Line, an alcoholic’s lovesong to Moscow and Vladimir. It was after midnight in the hostel. Nick–one of 8 other men in our room–was dead asleep. Behind me Vadim, another guest I’d met the previous day, was clicking away on his laptop. I’d begun to wonder if he had found an elusive Internet connection (WiFi certainly hadn’t been advertised). A red-bearded man drank from a massive can of Zhiguli beer in front opposite me, just to the left of the door.

It was then, long after the lights were out and as I was still reading, that two men entered the room and started taking off suitjackets and shoes. I’d first seen them that morning, surprised to notice one of them was putting on a waistcoat. We were in a hostel where hot water came in twenty second bursts and there was no Internet. I guessed they were businessmen or students on a budget, eager to make a good impression.

Now I saw how much they looked alike; I realized they might even be brothers. They were still standing at the end of the room, undressing, when they began to address the beer drinker and exchange pleasantries. Then, with the red-bearded man lying in his bed, beer in hand, the shorter of the two men turned and moved into the center of the aisle. His “brother” moved to the left and leaned, almost too casually, against a nearby bed and pulled out his phone. The beer drinker sat up a little straighter, and I felt an unmistakable call to pay attention.

The bed end of the hostel

Jacket open, waistcoat still on, the man in the center began to speak in precise metre. In disbelief I realized he was reciting poetry (Lermontov, I later learned) as the other two watched.

The tempo was almost hurried. Why shouldn’t it have been? He ran past strophe after strophe without losing the cadence. It was impossible not to be taken in, and I felt my neck tingle. For the next five minutes I beat back the idea that “this is what the travel writers are talking about” and just watch this strange perforamnce.

The main theme was love, but the power of the poem lay in the free metaphors, from sunsets to the sea, stacked one on another. When the poem and my vocabulary coincided, the images drawn were melancholy and lovelorn, their sadness accredited by his husky voice. Not one detail, no matter how beautiful, disrupted the even cadence: the intonation rose in emphasis but fell in time. His voice did not echo but wafted, reaching its greatest tenderness when “love” entered in any form and with each return to that concern I grew more eager to here it again. Once, the phrase “I love you” was repeated twice in a row and I was ready to turn to the videographer and start telling him about love. At the end I had become so transfixed I failed to follow our makeshift salon and applaud the performance.

The scene continued with two more poems: some Mayokovskii, and then a humourous lyric about the history of St. Petersburg. The latter involved turning the whole room–including Nick, asleep on his bed–into a massive map, which is a story unto itself. And after this, an Irish goodbye without further ado as everyone went to sleep without even saying goodnight.

But that first recitation of Lermontov (which one, I didn’t catch), its sudden appearance in a hostel inexplicable, burned so hot I can’t recall anything else. The above description of it was wholly inadequate–as inadequate as the below photo is to describe the opulence of the Winter Palace we would see just 24 hours later. In 6 hours spent between the Hermitage museum and the palace itself, I saw masterpieces by Malevich, Kandinsky, Cezanne, Vrubel, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Signac, Faberge and too many others to name. Notes and photographs can’t do justice to the vastness of Petersburg. All I have are some singular impressions, shown below: a malachite pavilion, the humourously porcine Faberge figures, a statue that caught my in the suburb of Pushkin. And, of course, that unforgettable, impromptu recitation, never photographed.

Visitors inspect a malachite and gold dome in the Hermitage
A plump rock crystal pig by the Faberge firm
A Grecian statue in the Catherine Palace courtyard
Ian, Rus', Vladimir

Old Rus, New Russia

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Click to View Panorama

A thin tongue of multilane highway runs into town, gleaming with cars, as a cloud of smoke rises in the distance from agricultural spraying. Directly below is a nest of new apartment buildings. And, just peeking out in the right corner, about 100 feet from where you stand, is the Dormition Cathedral–built in the 12th century.

This is the view at the edge of Vladimir: Old Rus and its storied history nestled in a major hub of contemporary Russia. This contrast–in the former capital of the Old Rus, no less–is certainly strange, even jarring. Not shown in the panorama is what I considered the most surprising contrast; directly facing the front of the cathedral is a McDonald’s.

Coffee cup with Russian text
A refreshing mocha from the Vladimir McDonald’s. (PC: Claire Williams)

 

A golden-domed church with belltower to the left
Cathedral of the Dormition, Vladimir (PC: Hd Ellen)

Within are distinctive frescos by Andrei Rublev, painted in the 15th century. Of special note is his Last Judgement, painted just above the exit to remind believers of the consequences of sin as they leave the church. Rublev’s work is much tamer than most (compared with Michelangelo’s work, being weighed up by God looks like a breeze), but his muted blues and grays are equally arresting. As I began to leave the church, I saw it and froze, and I found it difficult to push myself back out into modern Vladimir.

Fresco with christ surrounded by saints on a blue background
The Last Judgement at The Cathedral of the Dormition, Vladimir (PC: Andrew Gould)

The Dormition, sitting smack dab in the middle of a modern city, was our last stop on our excursion. We started just outside town at the Svyato-Bogolubovskoye Women’s monastery, where the appearance of modernity is less pronounced. The newest buildings are from 19th century, including the blue-domed church, but within are the remains of the palace of Andrei Bogolyubsky, the prince responsible for raising the city to the capital of the northern Rus.

A blue-domed church and matching belltower
Svyato-Bogolubovskoye Women’s Monastery

The palace itself is now a reminder of a much less triumphal history: in a still-extant staircase, Bogolyubsky had his arm cut off by restive nobility before being dragged into the street to die. Though grisly, such an end might not have been wholly unanticipated; Bogolyubsky himself had not lived a peaceful life. What brought Vladimir to prominence was his 1169 sack of Kiev, which had been the heart of Old Rus. Despite overthrowing Kiev, the city where the Rus were baptized in 988, Bogolyubsky eventually became a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was a vision of the Mother of God that inspired him to found the monastery, and the icon within became the central miracle working icon of the Russian state. Here, as I watched the nuns file by, I felt less the contrast between ancient and modern–with the exception of the Soviet era, Bogolyubovo has been in continuous operation–and more the contrasting but inseparable forces of violence and Christianity in the world of the Old Rus.

Click to View Panorama

Between our visits to the monastery and the Dormition cathedral, we saw the last of our three churches: the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl, about a 20-minute walk from Svyato-Bogolubovskoye through an idyllic field. Thick-walled to keep it warm or cool as needed–cool enough to see your breath on the hot day we visited–the church both within and without appears distinctly solid, its squat simplicity a reminder that not all Orthodox churches aspire to the theatrical onion domes of Saint Basil’s on Red Square. The interior is simple, just white walls with a couple of mosaic icons in the Byzantine style.

The Church of The Intercession On The Nerl

Seeing the history of the Rus today is not a straight look at the world recorded in the Chronicles but a collision between Old Rus and new Russia. One day in Vladimir wasn’t enough to take it all in, but seeing these three churches taught me to be a bit less confident I already know what there is to know about the rich heritage of Rus’ religion and culture. I’ll end with an image I took just two days ago in Moscow on Tverskoi Boulevard. It’s a monument to Yuri Dolgoruky, the founder of Moscow–and none other than the father of Andrei Bogolyubsky. Even here, amidst the hustle and bustle of downtown Moscow, Old Rus and new Russia collide, and the history of Vladimir is never far away.

Monument of man on horse, right arm extended
Monument to Yuri Dolgoruky
Ian, Moscow, Moscow University

Ins, Outs and Laundry: Security etc. at Moscow State

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Sign with smiling group of students holding metals and MSU main building spire. Slogan over photo reads "Graduates of MSU--the future of Russia!"
Sign proudly hanging in First Humanities Building Stolovaya

“MSU Graduates–the future of Russia!”

–Sign, Cafeteria, First Humanities Building of Moscow State University (MSU)

A smiling group of students at graduation, holding up medals awarded with their diplomas. You wouldn’t be surprised to see this image or slogan at any American university; like them, MSU takes seriously its role safeguarding the future.

Very different from most American state universities is how seriously MSU takes the “safe” in safeguarding: the security apparatus is tightly run and vast. To get into the dormitories in Sektor E, for instance, you must present your student ID at least twice, first in order to enter the main building courtyard and then again to get into the building itself. This is certainly in keeping with the general emphasis on security and anti-terrorism in Moscow: all malls, metro stops and tourist attractions have metal detectors and security guards.

What differs again at Moscow State is that everywhere else metal detectors and guards are for the most part unobtrusive. No one slows down to walk through the metal detector. Even if you set it off, keep walking: the only reason to stop is if the guard waves you over, which I’ve seen happen exactly once in two weeks here.

At MSU, slowing down is a necessary part of the program: even if he knows you (and after a few days of entrances and exits, you’ll see a look of recognition on their faces), the guard for the courtyard will need to see your ID and sometimes even examine it in more detail. Late at night you’ll need to present not only your student ID but also your propusk, a paper pass showing you’re authorized to enter the dormitory, to the security guard within your building.

And these are just the two security positions for your main entrances and exits. To enter the academic building each morning, it’s another metal detector and ID presentation. Going back to the dorm, when you reach the floor and emerge from the elevator, you’ll see a third, para-security position. She’s typically sitting at a desk in the middle of the lounge or napping in a chair not too far away, and her uniform is more casual than a jacket or suit. This is the dezhurnaya, usually a kind but formidable pensioner, who won’t demand your ID but may force you to sign several room-policy documents you don’t entirely understand. She’s not charged with security in the access sense, but does make sure students are following dorm policies and organizes repairs. (She will not hesitate, for instance, to let you know you shouldn’t put a foot up on the coffee table). Even your laundry is protected by another dezhurnaya with another notebook: sitting outside the room of washing machines, you’re required to sign in with her after adding your own load, including the date, time and where you reside.

All this illustrates that MSU’s security apparatus is extensive, but more important still is that there’s not a single swipeable card or automatic door in the previous (hardly exhaustive) account. Security at MSU requires human contact: moving anywhere in the institution requires an interaction with someone, and often a conversation. Getting in and out of the courtyard, which you’ll do multiple times per day, naturally doesn’t require much more than a nod and some thanks. But almost anything more complicated will be much more demanding.

The first time I went to do laundry, I went up, confidently inquired with the dezhurnaya about where to go, and proceeded to receive a response I did not entirely understand. Moments later I was shouted at because she had gotten up to help me find an empty machine while I was still standing at the desk, dumb as a post. (She was justifiably curious as to why, I, the young person, was doing nothing while she was slaving away, though I recall some more colorful terms used.) Luckily my friend Claire–who is both a spit better at Russian than I am and a master at conciliation–was with me, and she showed me what to do and proceeded to apologize to the poor dezhurnaya. We put our clothes in, signed the book, and went to grab a meal in our beloved Stolovaya Number 1 (a subject for another post).

An hour and a half later (high efficiency washers mean that laundry day is a long haul here) we came back and grabbed our clothes, deciding to dry them in our rooms rather than risk an introduction to the Russian dryer. As we were leaving, I was struck by a thought: the dezhurnaya, whose name we didn’t even know, really had gone out of her way to help us through the confusion. I turned back just as I passed a desk and gave a loud “Spasibo vam!” (thank you, formal) in her direction as we left, knowing that this probably wasn’t the way things were done but hoping she wouldn’t mind. She turned around and looked at me for a moment, not quite sure that I had said it, and turned back to her desk, shaking her head just slightly. Needless to say, the charm of this human-centric system can be oblique if you’re used to Minnesota nice. But the professionalism and attention to detail is indisputable, and if you act with a little common sense and patience (let’s hope I take my own advice), the results are excellent–my clothes have never been fresher.