Dear Mom and Dad,
Well I made it. As I sit here on the couch in my apartment in Petersburg writing the last installment of this trip, I’m still rocking from left to right. Or at least it feels that way. After the nine train rides ranging from 8-43 hours and totaling over a week spent rattling along (mostly on the upper bunk – it’s cheaper), being jolted about has become second nature to me. But since I still haven’t told you about my last stop in Nizhny Novogorod, let me get to that.
When I mentioned that I would be staying with a friend, I perhaps was giving you the wrong impression. As it is, this is a friend of a friend who I briefly met in Petersburg once (the original friend less briefly, and twice). And by staying with him, I mean that I asked if he might have a couch to spare, to which he responded by staying with his parents and leaving me his apartment to myself. I can’t remember if I’ve talked about the hospitality of people in Russia that I’ve experienced along the way. To give you an idea, I wasn’t even really surprised at Kirill’s offer.
Nor was I surprised when he met me at the train station at 10 am despite it being on the other side of town and despite the fact that he would then have to go back across town to make it to work. Just how far his apartment was from the train station I would come to understand more fully the next day. So we took a bus across a dreary, near-freezing Nizhny Novgorod to the apartment his parents bought and he pays the mortgage/rent on. Tucked back in a cluster of other apartment complexes in what is known as a “sleeper region” – a sort of equivalent to a neighborhood, but made up of apartment complexes, a school, some shops and maybe a hospital, all somewhere on the outskirts of town – was his apartment. Again, later I would find out just how alike they all were. As he left immediately for work having agreed to meet up with me that evening for a drink or two, I did my typical decompression routine of food and coffee and then, as you might have guessed, set off on foot to explore the city.
I had a good 6km to go to get to my destination, the local kremlin (which just means fortress in Russian) and, of course, waterfront. Luckily they are right next to each other as the fortress was built on a hillside at the junction of two major rivers: the Oka and the Volga. The first of which is the largest tributary of the latter and itself is fed by the Moscow River. The latter is the longest river in Europe and is probably the most present in terms of Russian mythology, culture, art etc., so seeing it had that added bit of intrigue. But before I got there, I had a ways to go. And soon I realized I may have over-bundled a bit as I was on the brink of sweating when I emerged from some bog that google maps had sent me through, and so I stripped down to a T-shirt to cool off for a bit and at that exact moment it started snowing. In case you didn't know, Russians love wrapping themselves up in endless layers and sitting in hot-boxed rooms and have all kinds of superstitions about drafts and sickness and getting sick. Whether they want to admit to it or not, they love getting sick and talking about being sick. I thought it was just an old babushka thing for a while, but I’ve learned it’s everyone. I die in such self-induced heat and my reactions often attract their displeasure, so the looks of approbation at my short sleeves in the snow could be felt through the concrete walls I passed by.
After about an hour and a half or so I made it to town and bypassed the kremlin for the time being in favor of the waterfront as the sun was just peaking out from the clouds. At the corner of one of the Kremlin’s walls is a statue of Chkalov, a soviet pilot perhaps most famous for performing the first ever transpolar flight from Russia to the United States in 1937. In pretty much every city there is a street or metro station named in his honor. As he was born in a small town outside of Nizhny, the city features a massive statue in his honor at the scenic overlook onto the Volga. The statue marks the head of an intricate staircase that winds its way down from the hillside on which the fortress sits to the banks of the Volga. As the setting sun shone from the West over the Oka it made the gold of the trees and the vibrant green of the grass shine out from the gray of the day that had enshrouded them. Having reached the bottom, I strolled along the deserted, newly renovated waterfront, before deciding it was probably time for coffee somewhere.
Turning back towards the city, I accidentally stumbled upon the main nightlife thoroughfare, Rozhdestvenskaya Street, or Christmas/Birth of Christ Street, named after a 1653 church at that location. Walking back towards the kremlin I passed one of two statues dedicated to the cities biggest hero, Kuz’ma Minin, who, in the early 17th century, along with Prince Pozharsky, organized a militia to free Moscow from Polish-Lithuanian rule and unite Russia under Tsar Mikhail Romanov in 1613, the first of the 300 year Romanov dynasty. Unlike the kremlin in Moscow, which is not accessible without tickets and/or special arrangements, the kremlin here is open to the public, despite it also being home to many governmental institutions. So I ascended the hillside from inside the kremlin’s walls.
As soon as you enter from the northern side, there is a stone monument with the number 1221, a number that I noticed was all over the city, marking the year of the founding of the city. At the top of the ascent is the eternal flame at the WWII memorial, covered with inscriptions honoring the “citizens of Gorky,” the name of the town for much of Soviet times, in honor of arguably the most famous of Soviet writers, Maxim Gorky, born in Nizhny Novgorod by the name of Peshkov, Gorky being a penname, which translates as “bitter.”
From there I went to meet Kirill at one of his jobs, a local coffee shop on the city’s pedestrian street – Bol’shaya Pokrovskaya, or “Big” Pokrovskaya. So, yes, the Bolshoi Theater is really just the “Big” Theater. It kind of lost its allure for me when I found that out.
Coffee shops are one of Russia’s burgeoning industries these days, as, for a long time, ordering coffee in Russia would often mean a cup of instant coffee. This is rapidly changing, though, because coffee shop culture is offering people a place to gather other than bars and churches. So we had a few cups of coffee and waited for one of his friends to get off work before we headed to a few bars for dinner and drinks. Kirill and I split a taxi home, with mine being the second stop. The 30 minute trip cost just over two dollars. But when I got to our little cul-de-sac of apartment buildings, neither the driver nor I could figure out which building was mine. The 13% beer was not helping either. Eventually I saw a familiar puddle or something along those lines and made my way up to bed.
The next morning I decided to take it easy before trekking across town to the train station. The walk was a little over 12k so I needed to give myself ample time to make my 2 pm train, while stopping by the café to drop off Kirill’s keys. I ran down to the grocery and bought him the best (not saying much) bottle of Georgian wine they had and set off around 11, so as not to cut it close. Or so I thought. At some point, as I was sitting in the café talking to Kirill's friend and colleague Denis, I realized my train left in less than an hour and the walk across the bridge over the Oka to the train station was measured at just over an hour. Shocked at my stupidity, I asked for coffee to go and made sure I was out of view of the café before I began sprinting in the direction of the bridge, not really sure how to get around the kremlin which stood in my way. Again, google maps, not as strong as it is in the US, sent me off on some strange, though rather idyllic grass knoll that I sprinted down, while drinking my coffee so as not to loose too much of it in the bustle of the run all the while my 15kg sack of a bag bounced around on my back. The amusement of the absurdity of sprinting to my last train on this cross-country (-continent really) journey helped alleviate the panic. The gently descending knoll ended in nothing but a steep drop off of a muddy slope that had obviously had its last victims just that morning. Enjoying the unsettling weight of my bag more by the second, I looked down to find a young girl staring up at me equally bewildered by how to navigate the situation. I somehow scurraged (!) my way down the slope, humming a nonexistent melody and leaving the helpless little girl in my dust. I took off once again for the bridge shaking the mud from my hands.
After I got over the bridge, I had just a kilometer to go with a good thirty minute cushion. I may have over-panicked a bit, but I just don’t like being late. Especially on the last train home. So I walked coolly up to the train station, nearly dripping in sweat despite the nearly freezing temperature, and boarded the old rickety cars for the last time.
I found it pretty incredible that over the whole trip I was never rained on, which made my rainy 6 am arrival in Petersburg all the more fitting.
That saying about the end of the Soviet Union still hasn’t come back to me, but I did remember another one that is perhaps just as, if not more, fitting. I think it was Putin who said that whoever does not regret the fall of the Soviet Union has no heart and whoever wishes its return has no head. While for some reason I don’t think this will be the last time I make the trip, for the near future I’m content with the fond memories of the Trans-Siberian Magistral'.
And with that my little epistolary log will be placed on pause for a time. Though I’ve now felt the urge that drives the world travelers, so I won’t be stationary for long.
Until then, with love, your son,
Alex
P.S. This is what each of these letters would have looked like had the whole trip not been utter chaos
P.P.S. The total train track traversed was just shy of 10,000km
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