After 3 days of school, we got another vacation. This time it was for the Russian version of Memorial Day. We had a ceremony at school on Wednesday to commemorate the event. My kids don’t get too much out of it, of course, because they’re just too far removed from historical events.
Yesterday was the big parade downtown. Streets were already blocked off Wednesday night when I went down to play table tennis. (It was only Claudia and me, so it was essentially pure training for me. I’m definitely going to pursue the sport when I get back.) I had originally planned to go to the parade but Claudia suggested a two-hour boat ride down the Volga to a little town called Tashkivo. Geologically it looked a lot like Chimney Bluff on Lake Ontario by Sodus Point. It is a really old farming village with lovely old wooden houses. Meanwhile some of the younger residents have built summer dachas there. It’s basically an escape from the big city. There is one major road which runs along the mountain ridge from Kazan parallel to the Volga and there are turnoffs for little towns like Tashkivo along the way.
The twin still has dirt roads. There’s one little store in the back of a semi which serves the community’s needs. There’s no pier for the boat to land at. The board just pulls up close to shore bow first and let’s down a set of steps for passengers to get on and off. And the boat was full going down. It made several stops before we got to Tashkivo and all the villages were similar; Stoney beaches, old, rickety steps going up the embankments to the old wooden houses, and dirt roads. This was really countryside.
There were some day trippers like us, but many of the passengers on the boat were older people with bags of plants and gardening tools. They were obviously headed to their dachas for the long weekend to work in the garden.
When we got off at Tashkivo, we first walked up through town, past the goats and through a very interesting and colorful old cemetery in the woods. After looking at some of the graves we walked down a set of metal stairs to the stony beach where we spread out our blanket and had a picnic. It was just nice to sit and relax and look at the Volga......until the fishermen came. It seems we had settled down in an area which the men felt should be reserved for them. We got the evil eye more than once. They made it seem as if we were intruding on private property. Nope. We weren’t.
But it was getting late in the afternoon and the last boat would leave at 5:20 p.m. so we figured it was time to wander on downtown where the boat would land. We practiced skipping stones there and just generally watched the people. It was definitely a different side to Russia that I hadn’t experienced before.
Then today, I decided it wad time to clean my bike because I hadn’t done it since buying it. Where to do it? Hmmmmm. Ok, outside my building there’s a little patch of grass right behind the garbage containers. It was in the shade, so I figured, Why not? I took out my oil and my cleaning rags, turned the bike upside down and got to work. You can’t imagine how many people had to “throw away their garbage” just to check out what I was doing. One young father with a little boy and a baby came by and struck up a conversation but the others just seemed to be weirded out. I told Ravil about it and he says people here don’t sit on the lawn and they NEVER clean their bikes. Oh well, it was a new experience for the Russians then.
I also got my haircut, went to the post office and rode to school to water or little garden. It was a very productive day.
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