I spent most of the last week in the city of Iaroslavl (Ярославль), which is a four hour train ride north and a little bit east of Moscow (here). I went to work in the local archive for the week, and I found some interesting material there, so it was from that point of view quite a success. Also, the people at the archive were pretty great--the woman who ran the reading room was incredibly nice, and they were able to get me my ordered materials a day early, which turned out to be the only way I was able to look though it all. So, that part was excellent.
Otherwise, the trip made me realize the importance of the people you spend time with when it comes to your impressions of a place.
I should have been utterly thrilled with Iaroslavl. It's an old, old city--they're getting ready to celebrate the 1000th anniversary of its founding next year. The old center of the town is stuffed with churches.
One central square (still called Soviet Square--I actually felt like there was a lot more still remaining of old Soviet names here, and still a few prominent statues of Lenin) was dominated by the Church of Il'ia the Prophet. Since it was under construction, the domes were the most photogenic part of the church. Well, that's not true. The most photogenic part of the church is inside--it's all covered with frescoes, amazing frescoes. I found a few pictures of them here. I went in late in the day, and a big French tour group was there too. In one corner of a low section of the church a quartet of Russian guys serenaded the tour group. It was actually pretty impressive, the way the four voices expanded within that space to become kind of all encompassing.
Then, within the walls of the Monastery of the Transfiguration, there was this funny combination of an old cathedral from the early 1500s with a newer (I think late 18th/early 19th c) church built right up next to it.
Just outside its walls on one side was this, the Church of the Epiphany, from the mid to late 1600s.

I thought the loveliest part of it was the tile work--the contrast of the blue and gold of the tiles (hard to see, I know) and the red of the brick is really striking. It also reminded me of the tiles here.
If you go out of the monastery on another side, you end up on a lovely embankment along the Kotorosl river, which turns out to be also lined with churches.
Some had the same pairing of red brick and blue--well, turquoise, really--trim, like the Church of Archangel Michael.
While others continued the blue/turquoise (and the scaly domes, which I actually really like) but matched it with white, like the Church of St. Nikola.
Then, as you continue, you come to a lovely spot where the Kotorosl empties into the big river running through the city--the Volga. This makes the fourth Volga city I've visited, and the river's a little different in each place.
There were beaches along wide stretches of both rivers, and people were really out taking advantage of them. I saw boats and even jet skis, particularly on the quieter Kotorosl--the Volga had bigger ships on it.
I strolled along the Volga embankment a number of times, because it really was lovely. At one point, I came upon a group of eight or ten older Russian women gathered around one of the benches. One was sitting and playing the accordian, another sat next to her and sang, and three were dancing. It made me smile.
(Granted, this was right by the museum "Music and Time," so they were entirely possibly there just for the tourists.)
And later that day, I realized that a movie (or something) was being filmed in a garden along the embankment--there were a bunch of men and women dressed in late 19th century garb hanging out smoking and talking.
There was even a rather gorgeous church right by where I was staying.
The Great Theodore Cathedral Church (or something like that). It's too bad I didn't take this picture at a different time--they're doing some repair work on the towers and men were rappeling up and down them.
But over all, I found myself feeling kind of sad much of the time I was in Iaroslavl, and I think that has a lot to do with the specific place I was staying, and the specific woman I was staying with. She was very nice, and very hospitable, to an extent, but she was also, it seemed to me, a somewhat sad woman.
She's a friend of my landlady here in Moscow, but she's older than E--for example (and this was really interesting) she told me that she rememered both the beginning and the end of the Second World War (the anniversary of the Nazi attack on Russia, Operation Barbarossa, was on Monday). In particular, she remembers that the news of the end of the war came at four in the morning, and that people banged on their door to shout the news, and there was shouting and crying and dancing and singing, but that since it was at four in the morning it was a little scary to a little kid.
So she's just a little less able to adapt to the new Russia, and is one who thinks of the past as better--she at one point told me that things were better "under Soviet power," and I'm sure that was quite true for her, personally, particularly because if I understood her right I think her late husband was a local party official, which under Brezhnev would probably have been quite a good thing. Her daughter lives in Germany, and she didn't seem to do much, other than very intently watch Russian soaps in the evening (I became familiar with one in particular--Carmelita: Gypsy Passion--that was RIDICULOUS, and I say this as someone who used to wath All My Children fairly faithfully).
She also lived in an area that was such a strange place. Her building was a Brezhnev era apartment building, finished in 1971, she told me, and a pretty decent place of its sort. But it was in this odd neighborhood of abundant greenery, which was very nice, and...
...little old wooden houses, which I usually really like. Here, though, there was something about the conjunction of her building, these buildings, a bunch of brand new buildings that were under construction, that combined with the local "roads"...

...which were somewhere between dirt roads and footpaths, kind of unnerved me. I felt a little unmoored in time, somehow, particularly one evening when I came back from the archive and saw two women pushing carts piled high with hay, with rakes atop them, that could virtually have been an image of Russian women from any time in Iaroslavl's 1000 years of existence.
(Also, and I probably shouldn't write this because my mom reads this blog, but I just read on Wikipedia that this neighborhood [or possibly the neighborhood adjacent] is the most dangerous neighborhood in Iaroslavl', and is the source of its mafia; that might explain the what seemed like very many tattooed men I saw around the city... tattooed like in Eastern Promises tattooed, not that I could see their knees.)
All of this slightly off feeling might also have something to do with being short on sleep, because I didn't sleep well at all, between the even more light nights (virtually white nights, actually) and a mosquito that tormented me more by buzzing than by biting (though that, too).
But I did find myself feeling much farther away from home while I was in Iaroslavl. Coming back to Moscow felt almost like coming home, in comparison. And then I realize I have less than two weeks left of this trip, and am amazed.
Oh, and I knit a sock and a half, between train rides and evenings spent watching Russian soaps and then listening to podcasts and/or audiobooks.