Pskov and the Great Bus Adventure

More program travelling!!  Yay!!

.......not yay, you say??  Must be the Pskov trip.  Here's what happened.

On Wednesday night, I stuffed my backpack to the gills full of clothing and food while also helping Yulia Georgievna make little meat pies for breakfast.  There was a lot of dancing around the kitchen and her granddaughter Dasha and I had a mock sword fight with a spoon and a rolling pin.  My host mom also gave me enough food to feed me for an entire day and said that they were also leaving early the next morning for their dacha (Russian summer cottage).  So morning dawned bright and early (far too early) and we all set off for our separate destinations.

My destination for the weekend was two towns nearish to the border with Latvia and Estonia.  The first is Pskov, which is about 4 hours away from St. Petersburg by vehicle.

Pskov from afar

It's an old town, built back in the early days of Russia's history, the first mentioning of the town just barely into the 10th century when a prince married Olga, princess of Pskov.  It's got a kremlin (fortress with wall) and a nearby monastery and feels like something out of Robin Hood's era.  The second town is another 2 hours beyond Pskov called Pushkinskie Gori, where Pushkin both grew up and lived while in exile from St. Petersburg.

So idyllic.  Perfect place for the writer/poet-to-be to grow up

May I take a moment to mention that the 1st of May is a Russian holiday.  And that the way Russians do holidays (correctly, may I add) is that if it lands on a Thursday, the entire weekend is taken off from work.  Despite this, we were assured that everything would be fine.  Everyone would've left for their dachas already, and the roads would be clear.

No one, not even the coordinators who've done this many times before (and who've left on Thursday, May 1st before), could've expected what happened.

There were two different sites of construction that no one knew about, and more than a few car accidents along the road.  Traffic was appalling, to put it mildly.  We were moving at a rate of 10 km an hour for a while, and that was lucky.  It took us almost 9 hours to reach out halfway point to Pskov, and 11-12 hours to make it to Pskov itself and "lunch".  This was also with us leaving at 8:00 in the morning.  Eeesh.  To make it worse, there were no stops for bathrooms in that first 9 hours to the halfway rest stop.  My fellow students were doing the awkward dance waiting for the one on-bus bathroom to free up.  Not me though.  I am the human camel.  Long car rides with no bathroom breaks??  No problem.

Be careful though.  We spit

Also the bus was a double-decker.  That was TOTALLY AWESOME and made for good vantage points for applauding our driver on his superb driving.  How did he drive, you ask??  Why, like any other good driver.  He switched into the oncoming traffic lane and played chicken with the oncoming cars.

It felt a bit like that, not gonna lie

Oddly enough, that wasn't what our bus ended up being pulled over for.  The entire top deck was crowding the windows to see what our driver was doing with the cop and to exclaim about his badassery in driving a bus full of Americans breakneck towards our weekend destination.  That cop was wicked efficient though.  He pulled us over while talking with another car already pulled over, then proceeded to flag down another car while talking to our driver.  I think he was just bored and wanted something to do other than watch traffic crawl by.

He just wants a friend......

By the end of the bus ride, everyone's food was gone.  No one saw that coming.  All the host mothers give enough food to feed an army always, and think that that's just gonna tide you over for lunch.  We all legitimately ran out of food on the bus.  By the time we pulled into our hotel at Pushkinskie Gori, it was midnight.  I grabbed my stuff, found my room, and burrowed under the covers.

The new day dawned sans long bus rides.  Thank heavens.  Friday ended up being a walking tour to Pushkin's childhood village, Mihailovsky.  There, we wandered around the village and inside Pushkin's old home.  That place had some spectacular views, let me tell you.

It was SO COLD in Mihailovsky.  We all packed for warmer weather, not for a super drop in warmth and a light bit of snow.  But everything was so pretty, even with us all shivering.

More awesome shots of Mihailovsky

Wandering around the village, with all the picturesque scenery, we found a statue of Pushkin.  This was the source of much amusement as it was Pushkin "post banya", as I dubbed it.  Essentially it was the writer-poet lounging around with just a skimpy towel  across his lap.  To make things funnier, all these older Russian women were insisting on taking pictures with Pushkin, and they felt the need to lie next to him.  Pasha, one of our program coordinators, said duh they're doing that - this is their last chance to lie with Pushkin.  We all died at that.

From there we went to an active monastery, which means all the girls suddenly sport the latest fashion of the Orthodox church - headscarves.  My little silver scarf wrapped 'round my head, I went with my group to see the final resting place of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.

That night was shashlik (kebabs) and banya!!  This was the first time I've been to the banya here in Russia, and I'm kinda sad I haven't gone before now, nor will have a lot of time to go again.

For banya, you can either go naked (as the Russians do) or wear a bathing suit (as most of the Americans do).  My group was the last to go, starting at 9:30pm, and we all entered the hot room in our bathing suits.  There were two tiers of seats, one close to the floor and one close to the ceiling - all of us sat at the top.  In the corner by the door stood a wood burning stove with many big rocks placed on top.  Next to it was a bucket of water.  To make the room hotter, you splash water on the rocks and wait for the wave of heat to hit you.  Best way to do banya, or so I'm told, is to stay in for a little bit, then leave to jump in a pool or douse yourself in a shower, then return.  Repeat as necessary.

Honestly, the pool jumping is more fun

For my banya, there was an open air pool just down the short hallway.  The first time we went to go get soaked, we jumped in the pool.  And it was freezing - quite obviously so, since it was snowing a bit earlier in the day.  It made it better to run back inside and back to the warmth.  Once we'd warm up and couldn't feel any cold, back out we went.  That is, until we slipped on the deck.  Turns out our jumping in splashed a lot of water over the side.  The entire pool was ringed in a thin layer of ice, and there's six of us steaming in the cold night air trying to skate our way to the pool.  Someone slipped on the ice, and so the shower became far more appealing than the pool.

This is about the same time we realized that we could make the room hotter and bypass the fact that we were running out of water by wringing our hair out over the hot rocks.  We should've guessed that something would come of that.  Just over an hour of chatting and banya-ing had gone by, we maybe had 10 minutes left of our hour and a half banya slot, and yeah. The floor had a wooden platform - freestanding - that wasn't too high off the ground, and it had become soaked with our running in and out from the pool and the showers.  I slipped on it while wringing my hair out over the hot rocks.  BAM!!!  My elbow hit the stovepipe.

Yeah.  It hurt.  But it wasn't nearly as bad as it could've been.  I left the hot room immediately to go stick my arm under numbingly cold water in the shower until I couldn't feel it anymore.  I then returned to see if I could finish up the last few minutes of my banya, or if I had to call it quits.  Then I slipped again.  Someone caught me this time, but if I had actually fallen, that time I would've gone face-first into those rocks.  That essentially told me to get out now and not have near misses with pain anymore.  For the rest of the night, if my arm twinged in pain, I went and soaked it in the shower or put a cold compress on my burn until my arm went numb again and I couldn't feel it anymore.  Worked well enough, as now I can't feel my burn at all, though it's still a pretty angry shade of red several days later.  The pain was mostly gone by the following morning, and nothing a bit of ibuprofen couldn't solve.

The following day was the day we headed home.  Everyone piled back into the bus and we headed to Pskov to tour the kremlin like we were supposed to the first day (before it turned into an all-day bus ride).  Our poor guide.  Between the kremlin and the monastery we went to, she was having problems with children being obnoxious.  At the kremlin, they were just running around underfoot.  At the monastery, they were blowing whistles and yelling practically in her ear.  Poor thing.  Her patience was stretched very thin, and not because of anything the Americans did.

She did take us to an interesting place behind the monastery.  There are three natural fountains there, and legend says that one grants health, one grants love, and one grants wealth.  You may drink from two, but if you drink from all three you get nothing.  The guide said her husband went on a business trip to Pskov and drank from the fountain of love - the following month he met her and six months later they were happily married.  I know people who have drunk from natural springs and had horrendous health problems from parasites in the water, my own boyfriend among them.  It's such a popular site, and the fountains would be closed to tourists the moment someone got sick from them (or more likely, a bunch of people got sick, from the sheer volume of tourists that were there).  So I threw caution to the wind and drank from the fountain of heath and the fountain of love.  The water tasted fine.  And I haven't gotten sick from it yet.

Let's hope it continues that way......

After the monastery, everyone very warily got back in the bus.  With only one minor catastrophe, we headed back home.  Thankfully, with only 2 hours extra stuck in construction traffic.

All in all, I liked the trip.  And everyone I talked to said they wouldn't have minded the 16 hour transit from St. Petersburg to Pushkinskie Gori if they had been prepped for it.  Or if they had more food and another bathroom break or two.  The trip itself far outweighed any mishaps on the road we encountered.

I'm glad we went.  I don't wanna get on another bus in the next few years.  I've had my fill, thanks.  Next time, I'll take the train and meet you there.