At 7:00 in the morning I stepped off the train and a beautiful blond lady ran up, said "Privet" and kissed me on the cheek. I thought to myself "this is either one of my my translators Marina or else this is heaven." She and Tatyana escorted me to my hotel and then they went off to work with the promise to be back at 7:00 pm. I slept some, ate something I could not even now identify and went walking.
Yoshkar-Ola is a smaller and newer city than Moscow, though still older than almost any city in the USA. There are a lot of parks and memorials to Russian heros. And of course almost every building is a work of art. Yoshkar Ola is a city of about 300,000 and yet I was able to walk from one end to the other.
Upon the arrival of Marina and Tatyana that evening the trip would take a dramatic turn from site seeing and advanture to pure party Russian style.
This is a beach that they have along the river side.
This temple is brand new and supposedly they put it up in just 2 weeks. There was a lot of new constructin going on buth in Moscow and Yokshar-Ola and there were several other things I learned about it. 1st is that they still build building that are decorative like the old ones. 2nd, they do not have the obsessin that we do with safety. It is common to see a bulldozer operating in the street with people walking all around it. This was true also of the smaller train stations. You just walk across the other tracks to get to the train.
The following pictures are from the market in Toshkar-Ola. I did a lot of souvineer shopping here and even bought some food. I learned quickly that all of the stands used a calculator to figure prices and if I walked up to one and pointed to something and said "nyet Russian" they would simply put the price of the item I was pointing to in the calculatr and show it to me. It worked pretty well as long as they understood that I wanted the price. One lady did not sem to understand it. No matter how much pointing I did she didn't get it. I saw an item hanging on her back wall that had a price tag on it so I pointed to it but she got the wrong thing. Pretty soon there were peopel comong from all ther neighboring stands wanting to know what the silly American wanted. I kept pointing to the item with the price tag and people were shouting out what they thought I wanted. She kept handing me things but nothing with a price tag. Finally she gave me the right one and I was able to communicate wehat I wanted by pointing to the tag and then the item. Everyone threw up their hands and said "Ahhh" and walked back to their booths.
These are some of the parks around Yoshkar-Ola. There are a lot of parks and boulevards with statues and fountains in Yoshkar-Ola. Many more than in any American city I have ever visited except for possibly Portland, Oregon. The Russian parks are a lot more natural than ours as the Russians don't share the same fondness that Americans have for finely manicured grass. Actually they are apparently not real kean on weeding because a lot of the flower beds were pretty overrun with weeds. But the was a natural beauty to it.
I think that this is a memorial to those from Yoshkar-Ola that died in Afgahnistan
Tatyana on th left and Marina on the right assisted me there. There wee very few people who spoke English so they were indispensible. I have often heard about the legendary drinking or Russian men but these two gals can put it down. One night the three of us consumed 3 bottles of wine and a bottle of vodka. Another night we drank over 20 bottles of Russian beer (many of them double sized) and some more vodka. We survived the the first night unscathed but after the 2nd one both of them were moving a lot slower the next day.
It was very interesting going to Russian bars. In the summer everything is outside. They barbeque shashlik which is some sort of kabob with a very interesting marinade. The music the play is very eclectic because Russia is eclectic. Some of it I recognized and some of it was very middle eastern sounding. They played a lot of good samba music for the dancers reading this.
The only bad thing that I would say about the Russian clubs is about the restrooms. I went to the restroom in one of them only to find that the mens stall was locked.Tatyana found thast the mens room was apparently broken so she told me to get in line to use the ladies stall. Unfortunately she did not tell any of the ladies in line so when I reached the front of the line they just skipped me. With a little more help I got a turn. When I stepped inside all there was to it was a hole in the floor that apparenbtly you had to squat over top of-no where to sit. You just squat, aim and shoot. As I am trying this it occurrs to me that I am only here because the men's "hole" is apparently broken and I wondered how can this possibly break. What could possibly be going on in the next stall that you can't do this. Must have been a mistranslation.
Tatyana's husband joined us on Friday night. He is a retired train engineer from Denmark. Tatyana works at one of those mail order bride places and he came to visit one of the girls at her agency. The girl that he visited did not like him but he and Tatyana fell in love and he moved there 7 months ago to marry her.
