and a special welcome to our foreign guests ...

I often ask myself the following question: "Am I too much of a cynic?" I'm never really sure. Let me tell you about my Saturday, and see what you think.

First, some context: since the day of my arrival here, I'd been seeing the signs posted up around school campuses: "Excursion to Sergiev Posad – see with your own eyes the glorious remains of what is carefully preserved by the Russians".

Okay; curiosity duly piqued. I'd never heard of Sergiev Posad. What was it? Where was it? Why were "the Russians" so keen to preserve it?

Fortunately the information I needed was pretty easy to come by; the Sergiev Posad excursion was the talk of the teaching fraternity. "Are you going?"; "Have you booked your seat yet?"; "Better get in quick! It's filling up." Then – once I'd established what it was (a heritage town with a big fat monastery in the middle of it) and how to book (pay your 850 roubles, or AUD$40, at one of the central campuses) – I started hearing things like "Ooh, you're going? Great! Charge up your camera, Anthony. You'll be taking plenty of photos". And the ads, still hanging around on walls even after every seat on the tour coach was full, had been calling to me all week. "Those who come with us will be rewarded with relaxation in the Russian countryside", they said.

It sounded like exactly what I needed after a trying week of lesson planning, disciplining unruly teens and far too little sleep. So, having finished class a little after 9pm last night, I hurried home on the Metro, snacked on some fruit, emptied my camera's memory card, set my alarm for 5:30am and fell into bed, utterly exhausted but eagerly anticipating my first chance to explore an ancient Russian townscape.

The flyers had very helpfully offered an estimated journey time to reach this cultural jewel: "One-and-a-half hours from Moscow", they'd advertised. This was confirmed as our coach pulled out of the parking lot behind Kitai Gorad Metro station, only 20 minutes behind schedule.

As it turned out, today was the day when I got my first taste of how time runs differently in Russia. Two-and-a-half hours after we'd left Kitai Gorad, a coach full of bemused, slightly travel-sick teachers and students emerged into sunlight, having survived an epic monologue delivered by a bearded woman in a frightening tartan jacket, who evidently considered herself a "tour guide". Beardie had spent the entire journey lecturing on such scintillating topics as Moscow's wondrous motorways, and castigating the Russian students for their poor knowledge of history. (They didn't know the name of some guy after whom one of Moscow's main streets is named - can you imagine?) Her tone was somewhere between the propaganda broadcasts of Nineteen Eighty-Four and school assembly announcements, and her microphone was held somewhere between her front teeth and her molars.

After alighting from the bus, we milled around outside the monastery for ages while the guide arranged … well, actually, I'm not quite sure what she was arranging. Some kind of bureaucratic Russian business was taking place, the nature of which remains a mystery. Meanwhile, I was told that I wasn’t allowed to take photos in the monastery's grounds unless I bought a 100 rouble permit, and that if I chose not to buy the permit I would have to hand in my camera. Hmmm.

It was also around this point when it became clear that our 'free time' in the town of Sergiev Posad had evaporated, and the monastery was all we were going to see.

After standing around a little longer, I eventually thought “bugger this!” and strided into the complex (with my camera still in my bag), just to see if all the waiting around was going to be worthwhile. It looked pretty uninspiring, to be honest, and it was drenched in tacky gold-plated Jesuses making lazy peace signs, bleeding-heart Marys and the usual collection of saintly effigies, all depicted in flat 2D Orthodox Icon style. So I basically walked out, abandoned my tour group and went wandering around the town instead.

This part of the day, though far too brief, was pretty cool. There was a pleasant town square in Sergiev Posad with a reasonable market, along with some nice downtown ‘green space’. (At times you could almost have been forgiven for thinking you were in Europe.) I grabbed a horrible takeaway coffee and strolled through wooded parkland, looking at local people as they relaxed on park benches and watching students with sketch pads. I found an outdoor museum where children and teens were learning how to paint matryoshki* and casting traditional Russian pottery. It was a pleasant hour of small but worthwhile discoveries.

When the appointed time rolled around, I met up with the group and we resumed our itinerary. Next stop: lunch at a local restaurant where I waited almost 15 minutes for an attendant to show me to the toilet, before being served a bowl of lukewarm soup … with a dead fly floating in it! That was followed by some unidentifiable, fatty slab of meat, dripping with grease and suitably accompanied by mashed potato with a reservoir of greyish fluid in the centre.

Mmmmm, nummy treats …

Back onto the bus after that, to head for a place called Abramtsevo. This was billed as a Russian heritage village. “Ahhh, good”, I thought. “We do get to see some non-churchy heritage stuff after all.” Except that we didn’t quite get there. Well, at least not for a very long while.

Travelling via the main street of Sergiev Posad, we were treated to more of Beardie's sparkling insights, beginning with “on ze light you ken see MekDonalds”. We veered onto a highway, then veered off again to wind down a pleasant old road lined with dachas**. Quite picturesque in its way. Shame it wasn’t here that our bus decided to break down; instead, it was a couple of miles further along the road, on a blind curve, adjacent to a messy expanse of ugly ‘farmland’.

We stood on the blind curve for about forty-five minutes while the driver tinkered with engine parts and Beardie dithered over what to do next. She then suddenly made up her mind, explained her decision (but only in Russian) and flagged down a passing local bus. The Russians in the group ran at the bus and boarded it, but the English-speakers – having not been told the plan – were a little slower to work out what they were meant to be doing. By the time they’d realised what was happening, the bus had disappeared. In other words, we’d been left behind in the middle of nowhere!

Eventually another bus came along and most of us caught it (though there were still a few people stranded on the roadside when I left). Some of us had to pay a fare, some didn’t – I really don’t know what happened there. But in any case, the bus managed to get us the rest of the way to Abramtsevo without tipping over (though it was a near thing). And we arrived just in time to be told the cheery news, which was this: due to lateness, we wouldn’t be getting the English-speaking tour we’d paid for.

Abramtsevo itself was a collection of traditional huts and churchy-type buildings with an art studio in one corner. All in all the complex was quite large, and thanks to our breakdown we had a bit over 45 minutes (as opposed to the intended two hours) to see the whole lot. So after lining up at the gate and getting our group ticket, we all filed in and followed the guide. She headed for the art studio, which seemed a reasonable first choice. The queue outside was so long, though, that many of us realised we wouldn’t get to see any of the other buildings if we stayed there, so we wandered off.

In all the other buildings we went to, babushkas in drab blue uniforms guarded the entrance hallways. To see the insides of the huts or churches, they insisted, it would be necessary for us to show the ticket we’d purchased at the gate. But of course, we only had a group ticket, which was held tightly in the hand of our tour guide, and she was still dutifully standing in line back at the art studio (perhaps enjoying some kind of weird queueing nostalgia associated with having grown up in the USSR). Result: no entry for us. Strangely enough, though, Russian people seemed free to come and go at their leisure while we “foreign guests” – to quote the sign on the replacement coach that took us back to Moscow – were barred.

Our Abramtsevo visit was capped off nicely while I sat talking to another teacher called Carol, waiting for the group to rendezvous at the front gate. Carol and myself were approached by a very friendly Russian girl, who told us she'd learned to speak English while living in the UK. She was curious and courteous and outgoing, and would've been quite likeable were it not for the fact that she kept leaning closer and closer to Carol's right ear as she spoke to us. I'm still not sure whether it was the ear itself exerting this strange fascination on our new friend, or whether she was trying to work out how to steal an earring while its owner was wearing it.

Fun, huh?

The journey back to Moscow on the "foreign guests" bus was spiced up by two more hours of Rambling Beardy's fabulous commentary, which left all of us more than ready for a drink or two in Kitai Gorad. And the whole day left me wondering about the question I put to you at the start of this entry.

So what do you think? Am I being a big fat cynic here, or does that sound like a pretty sad parody of a tourist excursion?

Either way, I think I might stay local next weekend :)



*matryoshki: the famous Russian 'nesting dolls' (mentioned once before on these pages).
*dacha: rustic summer house / weekender.