Ken Burns’ Prohibition

I’ve started watching Ken Burns’ series Prohibition on Netflix. I only mention this now because I ended up at the vodka museum today!  Paul and I had originally planned to go back to the Russian history exhibit to catch things that we had overlooked before. Paul bailed because he wasn’t feeling well so I headed out to catch the bus and meet Anna there. I get there first and the guard tells me that the building containing the first half of the exhibit which is, of course, the half we want to see, is closed for a week. Oh crap, what to do? I waited for Anna and when she arrived, I suggested we head back into town and check out the vodka museum. It’s relatively new and Sonia and I had been talking for awhile now about seeing it. Since Anna and I couldn’t think of anything else we wanted to see, we just said let’s go!
We first stopped at the House of Tea in the pedestrian zone and enjoyed a piece of Russian cheesecake before we trundled out into the cold and walked another few hundred feet through the pedestrian zone to the museum.
We get there and there are two entrance fees; one with a vodka tasting and one without. I knew I wasn’t going to touch the stuff and Anna didn’t want any either. We get inside and are told that our guide will be with us in a moment and we are welcome to look around and take pictures until she comes. We hang up our coats and start walking around. They had a lot of great antiques and some really inventive stills. One was made out of a trombone!
After waiting and looking around for about 5 minutes, a very pleasant lady comes and starts explaining everything to us and waited patiently while Anna translated. I caught some of what she was saying and Anna filled me in on the rest. This place was only a relatively tiny room , but they had everything divided nicely into time periods with excellent explanations of the development of vodka and government policies about alcohol throughout Russian history from before Ivan the Terrible. And I had no idea that the process of distilling was invented in India and alcohol was used originally for medicinal purposes. The tour guide was very gracious with her time and answered all my questions. When we were finished with the tour, the lady at the gift counter tried to convince me to by a bar of soap in the shape of a cucumber. No thank you. Anna had enjoyed the museum as much as I did because she could relate many stories that her grandmother had told her to the artifacts she saw in the museum.
We both left in a good mood and walked back through the pedestrian zone. We wanted to stop for a cup of coffee so I suggested we go into the great cafeteria at the youth hostel. Anna ended up having a tasty fish stew and my cup of coffee cost $.25. And the place has one of the nicest interiors I’ve seen in a Kazan restaurant/cafeteria. The inner walls are brick and it just makes the place look so warm and friendly. And, at the silverware counter, they also offer chopsticks because I’m sure they have a lot of guests from the Far East.
When we got done, I quickly ran into the store to buy a birthday card for a colleague and then headed home. Tomorrow’s the seminar on teaching kids about the environment and Tuesday I’ll go go my first Kazan bike club meeting. I’m looking forward to that.
There’s still not much snow here. This has given people a chance to clear parts of the sidewalks but they are still overwhelmingly covered with a layer of ice.