Last Day in Vladimir

The still working convent of Bogolyubovo

Today is my last day in Vladimir. I blinked and somehow over a month went by. I spent this past weekend doing all of the things I said I was going to do the first week here, but never got around to doing.

The Dormition Cathedral

On Saturday, I finally made my way into the Dormition Cathedral. This is the big church on Church Square, and I've been meaning to go inside for weeks because on the ceiling is a fresco by Andrei Rublyov, the famous 14th Century icon painter. So I donned a dress that covered my shoulders & my knees, tossed on a head scarf and went into the church.

Since the church doesn't allow photography on the inside, you're just going to have to take my word that it was absolutely beautiful on the inside. Extremely ornate-lots of gold chandeliers and a massive iconostasis.

The church also has the relics of 4 people. The bodies are covered but you can see their mummified hands sticking out of the cloth. On the wall above one body was a picture of Aleksandr Nevsky, who was the Grand Prince of Vladimir & Novgorod in the 13th Century.

"Oh, how cool!" I thought, "This is Nevsky. Hello there, Mr. Nevsky, so nice to see you."

Later in the day I met up with my roommate and told her about how I got to see the body of Aleksandr Nevsky. She then promptly & correctly informed me that he is not buried there-his remains were moved to St. Petersburg in the 18th Century. So I have no clue whose body I was introducing myself to.

Sunday was laundry day for me, which was about as thrilling as you'd expect doing laundry to be. While I waited for my laundry to be washed, I did take a trip over to the Museum of Crystal and Lacquer Boxes. That was again a place where photography was not allowed, so no photos of that either. Let's just say I looked at a lot of crystal glasses. And a lot of lacquer boxes. There were no surprises there.

The Church of the Intercession on the Nerl. It's a lot prettier if you pretend that that's morning fog just rolling off the field, and not toxic smoke from 800 wildly burning forest fires.

Today, however, was my trip to Bogolyubovo, a small town about 6 miles from Vladimir. This is the site of the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl River. The legend behind this church is that it's so holy that whenever the town floods only the church remains untouched by the water. The church is a 12th Century construction, and considered one of the finest white stone buildings in all of Russia. The church is on the UNESCO World Heritage list.


Also, when searching the internet to find the correct dates & information for Bogolyubovo, I came across this website: I enjoy the part that says there's nothing to do in this town other than look at the three listed tourist sites. Way to get people to visit, Wikipedia.

My favorite part of the day was the walk to the church. To get there from the center of town you have to walk for about 20 minutes through a gigantic field. It was a stunningly beautiful walk, and a light breeze made it a walk instead of a death march.

A path through the birch forest on the way up to the church.

The surrounding scenery made me feel like I was once again in a Russian novel. A huge sweeping field, a stone pathway to the church, a birch forest, and then---GOATS!

Loads and loads of goats! Just goats galore. They were on the bank of a river enjoying some grass and having a drink. They seemed to pop out of nowhere. I thought they were fantastic.



They might not have been playing violins, but I definitely felt a sense of happiness.


Tonight we're going to have an early birthday celebration for my host mom. Her actual birthday is the 11th, but I will be in Moscow by then. My roommate and I are going to surprise her by bringing home a cake. This morning she gave each of us a pile of Russian cards and Soviet era postcards as a good-bye present. My good-bye & thank you presents to her are socks (she has not been able to buy new socks in 7 years, so it's definitely high time the lady had some new socks), a pair of slippers and some more coffee.

I'm going to miss it here so much. Not only is the city a great little city with lots of interesting things to see, but I lucked out in getting such a great host mom, and a wonderful teacher at the American House.

So good-bye, Vladimir, you've been awfully good to me.
I'm off to Moscow in all its smoke-filled glory tomorrow.

The Reading List

This is a list of what I read for my classes here at the American House. Out of the three programs I've done in Russia, this one has by far been my favorite. You just can't beat one-on-one language instruction--especially for three hours a day.

The program lets you choose how you want to spend those three hours, and I went the route of reading things in Russian and then discussing them with my teacher. In 20 days we read 23 different works including shorts stories, poetry and songs.

My amazing teacher, Nelly, picked a variety of works for me to read, going back and forth between the classics like Bunin and Chekhov to modern writers like Erofeev and Tolstaya. We read things that covered the high literary style to works that used a lot of slang. I now know heaps of different ways of saying breasts in Russian.



Turgenev-Nature,
What I Will Think,
The Threshold,
Tomorrow, Tomorrow
Enemy & Friend
Erofeev-Solzhenitsyn & James Bond
Naked Beach
Rubina-Such a Long Life
Petrushevskaya-Chopin & Mendehlsson
Kochetkov-Ballad of the Wagon
Chekhov-The Joke
Death of an Administrator
Narbikova-The Watch
Kobal'-The Teapot
Istomin-God Collects Coins
Popov- How They Ate The Rooster
Grin-The Green Lamp
Tolstaya-Night
Bunin-Clean Monday
Light Breathing
Paternak-Winter Night
Akhmatova-Half-open Door
Tsvetaeva-Youth

On my own time I read the following Chekhov plays:
On the Road
The Proposal
The Wedding
The Bear
A Tragedian in Spite of Himself
The Anniversary
Three Sisters

The Great Big Blog of Russian Food

Today is my last day of classes here at the American House. I feel like I blinked and suddenly a month passed by. I've been meaning to write this entry for weeks now, but kept putting it off because I wanted to do it justice since it's probably one of my favorite things to talk about-Russian food.

It's one of the first questions I get when I tell people I'm going to Russia (besides "Why?"). "How's the food?" My answer is always the same, "Awesome!" It's true, I love Russian food. When prepared by a host mom it's always fresh, always hardy and always comforting. When I meet someone who says that they don't like Russian food, I'm automatically suspicious of them. My brain goes, "I'm sure you're a nice person-for someone with no soul."

Granted, there are a few exceptions to that-it's darn tough to be a vegetarian here. It's just a concept that host moms don't understand, and they will often try to sneak meat into your meals. The way that I understand it is that they feel you don't like meat because of the taste, so they're going to prepare it the best way you've ever had it & man, will you be surprised when you love it. Most of my friends that study Russian put their moral & culinary objections to meat aside when they step foot in Russia because it's just easier to go with the flow.

For now I'm going to talk about food that your stereotypically Russian host mom cooks, and hopefully in Moscow I'll be able to write a little about street food since that's also one of my favorite types of Russian food.

So let's start with breakfast. It's a force unto itself. Russian breakfasts are huge. When I first sit down to breakfast here the morning after my arrival, I'm always staggered by the size of a Russian breakfast. A typical breakfast at Zinaida's includes a bowl of kasha (think oatmeal) the size of a hubcap, yogurt, tea, and then these wonderful little devils:



Blini. These are probably what I miss most when I'm back in the U.S. These delicious little crepe-like treats are the highlight of my morning. In the bigger cities in Russia like Moscow & Saint Petersburg you can buy them on the street & have then filled with ham & cheese or chicken or bananas & chocolate. I like my morning blini with homemade raspberry jam. You'll notice that there are three on the plate. This picture is from a few weeks ago before Zinaida began trying to trick my roommate and me into eating more. A week or so ago she got the brilliant idea to stack two blinis on top of each other & lining up their edges perfectly so that we were actually eating four blinis instead of the requested two or three. She even tried to go up to five one day before we called her out on it. Like I said, Russian host moms are tricky little things.

Breakfast usually leaves me waddling to class so I skip lunch on a daily basis. At six o'clock each night it's dinner time.

Dinner always begins with a bowl of soup. Zinaida sticks with two types: veggie soup & borscht.

This is the veggie soup. It's also around the time that Zinaida discovered I was taking pictures & sharing them via email so that's why it looked like a parsley bush exploded in my bowl:



And this borscht:


You'll notice it's not the bright magenta color that you sometimes see in pictures of borscht. Each host mom has her own special recipe for borscht. I have to admit that I'm partial to Zinaida's out of all the borscht I've had. A lot of borscht recipes call for mutton, which I don't really like. Zinaida makes her with chicken, and goes light on the beets and adding in carrots and potatoes instead. I like to eat mine with thick slices of Russian bread. I love it.

After the soup of the day comes the main meal. Zinaida varies it up quite a bit, so there's almost always something new on my plate that night.

I'll start with one of my favorites: pelmeni.


These are little dumplings of awesome filled with some kind of meat-either chicken, beef or pork. I've had them both boiled and sauteed (Zinaida sautees hers). When I lived in the dorms of Saint Petersburg seven years ago I ate mine boiled & topped them off with a bit of vinegar and salt. The sauteed version is so flavorful that they really don't need any condiment.

On another night we might have a cutlet served with potatoes. A cutlet is ground beef, spices & some onion. They're pretty popular in Russia, and very tasty. You'll notice this picture was also taken during Garnish-pa-looza.



Another version of the cutlet is a chop of some type of meat. One night Zinaida made breaded pork chops, potatoes and cabbage.



One of the special meals that Zinaida made for us one night was Plov, an Azerbijan rice pilaf dish. The dish consists of rice, heaps of spices, chicken, dried apricots, and some type of tart little berry that I have no clue how to translate into English. According to my quick google search to make sure I spelled the dish correctly, I found out this dish is served to highly respected guests. It was, in short, amazing. The perfect combination of salty, sweet and sour.



And then, of course, are the things that accompany every meal-bread, fruit and cucumbers. I'm obsessed with cucumbers. The ones that we have here are tiny compared to the ones you get your typical U.S. supermarket. They're bumpy and have a ton of flavor. Zinaida prepares our fresh cucumbers "Russian Style" which may or may not be a real thing. She slices them length wise, scored them and rubs them with salt. I almost always have at least two cucumbers with my dinner. Sometimes three.


Zinaida also makes her own pickles. They're super salty, which I love, and very tasty. She has three massive of jars of them pickling right now on the kitchen counter.

The bread goes along with the soup. Vladimir is pretty well known for its bread. There's a big bread factory not too far from where I live so Zinaida always picks up a variety: the standard (and delicious) Russian black bread, white bread, dried fruit bread and seven grain bread. Given the sheer amount of parsley in this picture, I'm going to guess that this picture was also taken during Garnish-pa-looza.





Sometimes, she'll even throw in an extra veggie or two for us to try. A few days ago she brought home fresh peas for us to eat raw while we wanted for dinner to finish cooking.



As I've said before, this area is surrounded by farmland so there's always of plenty fresh berries. Zinaida brought home a mixture of black currants, red currants and gooseberries (which she claims were Pushkin's favorite berry) for us to try.




And as always, it was more food then we could possible eat, so she made a fresh fruit juice for us out of the leftovers.


So that's my great big blog of Russian Food. When I get back to the U.S. I want to have a Russian dinner party. Hopefully these pictures will entice people into coming.