russia: nizhny novgorod and bor again

During my first year in Moscow, Claire and I went to Nizhny Novgorod for a weekend, for two reasons. First, it was home to another branch of the school we work for in Moscow. Second, it was going to be one of the host cities for the 2018 World Cup.

That trip was at the very end of March, beginning of April, and when we left, we were not big fans of the city. We knew that part of it was because we visited at an ugly time of year. Winter was over, but the city hadn't yet been cleaned up, and all the beauty of spring hadn't yet arrived.

I couldn't help but wonder if the reason we didn't like the city was because of circumstances that could change, so I decided to go back this fall.

My train arrived on time, of course, at the ridiculously annoying hour of 0430. That's too early to wake up, but too late to stay awake all night, argh. Anywho, I sat in the train station for around three hours, because walking at that hour did not sound fun.

I don't know if any renovations had been done on the train station in the past two years, but it didn't feel like the interior of the station was the same as when Claire and I visited. There was a giant Lenin mosaic on one wall in a large hall, which seems like something I would've noticed last time. 

Maybe we just missed that hall last time, I've been known to be really close to something and completely miss it.

The view upon leaving the train station was the same, just at a warmer time of year. When I turned my head around, the outside of the train station looked the same as I remembered, not very interesting.

Since I was traveling by myself in a place I remembered not liking very much, I'd made a tentative itinerary for the day. I decided to start my trip by returning to Bor, the town on the other side of the river. Claire and I had gone to Bor out of curiosity about riding on the cable car, more than a desire to see the town. 

I wanted to find out if there was anything we'd missed seeing.

The walk to get to the cable car station from the train station was long, especially because I stopped regularly to take photos. The weather in Nizhny had already started to change, so there were plenty of orange and yellow trees, everything was beautiful. Walking over the main bridge was still really windy, but it was worth stopping to take a few photos.

I got off course even before getting to the bridge, I went to see a church Claire and I had skipped. The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral sits on the right bank of the river, not too far from the new football stadium. The outside was yellow and had a typical orthodox 'look' to it. The inside was awesome, I'm glad I went inside. The entire interior was painted with frescoes, and the iconostasis up front was wood with colourful icons. The side iconostases were also wood, and also awesome. There were quite a few people inside the church, so I didn't get to take all the photos I wanted, but I definitely appreciated what I was seeing.

After crossing the river I walked partway on the boardwalk, which had been finished since Claire and I were there. Just about anything looks better than a construction zone, but the finished product really does look nice. That being said, it's still pretty windy, that wasn't any different.

I also stepped off the walking route to see another tree, this one had also been under renovation when Claire and I had seen it. The inside of this church was really boring, and not worth seeing, but the onion domes outside were really colourful. Almost like a baker had been able to play with ganache to create different patterns.

When I finally got to the cable car station I'd already walked well over seven kilometers, in a bit over two hours. The ride still cost just 100 rubles each way, which is a great price for a 15 minute ride.

Lenin was still where I remembered him being in Bor, as was the WW2 memorial. Instead of going straight back to the cable car, I walked a bit further in town, just to see what was there. I found a small monastery with bright gold domes on the main church, and back roads that looked like they'd been paved a loooong time ago with no upkeep since.

I also found the main intersection in the middle of town. There was a local market on one side, with plenty of produce, dairy, shoes, plants, etc... available. Anything I might've wanted, but I didn't need anything.

Except some of the baked goods I found in a small bakery. I definitely needed those. ;)

There was also a church on that intersection, and a big supermarket. Overall, it was a great place to stand around and just watch people.

After that intersection I found my way back to the cable car and headed back over the river. From there I walked to my hostel and checked in, another long-ish walk. 

I guess I hadn't paid enough attention to the map when I made the booking, but oh well.

After resting up for a while I walked back out to see at least one more museum. I headed to one of several Gorky related museums in town, only to discover that it was under renovation, argh. There was a sign on the door pointing me to another museum, one that I ended up liking probably better than what I'd intended to see in the first place.

The museum I did see was an apartment in which Russian writer Maxim Gorky had lived with his family for a while. 

It was neat to see the different rooms, their furniture and interior decoration. Again with the awful wallpaper, yuck. Women did not get to wear comfortable clothing. There were also informational signs all around, which were conveniently in several languages.

After leaving the apartment museum, I realized I had time for yet another museum, this one a history museum. Officially called the Nizhny Novgorod State Museum of History and Architecture, this one was in a renovated mansion.

I wouldn't say mansion, I'd say former palace, but I'm not the one who decides the specific wording used.

This museum required visitors to wear shoe covers, something I find incredibly wasteful. The weather was good, so no one was going to track in dirt, and these plastic shoe covers don't prevent the damage done by women wearing heels on a wooden floor.

The museum had a fair number of grand rooms with amazing ceilings and chandeliers, as well as intricate wooden floors. 

I liked the rooms with old school furniture, I did not like the old school wallpaper. I loved the old school pajamas, I did not love the fake fruit on one of the tables.

After leaving the museum I made my way to the main pedestrian street in the city. I went back to a burger restaurant I remembered from my last visit, which was good, and so much cheaper than it would've been in Moscow. I also went back to the cafe I remembered from our last visit, because of my memory of a really good chocolate cheesecake. 

Why mess with something that wasn't broken?

The next morning I woke up to rain. Argh. I packed up and waited around for it to get better, but it didn't. Because of the lousy weather (hard rain, cold wind, dark clouds,) I didn't do much during the second day of this visit. I kept finding ways to take cover: in supermarkets, churches, archways into courtyards, etc... The rain finally let up after dark, go figure.

Instead of wandering around the city like I'd wanted to do, I killed a lot of time in the burger place from the night before, then more time in the coffee place. 

Is there such a thing as too much chocolate cheesecake? I don't think so ;)

I finally left the cafe, and made my way to the metro, riding the entire length of one of the two lines Nizhny Novgorod has. Just like Moscow, all of the stations were clean. Just like Moscow, a few of the stations were really well decorated and designed, and the others were boring but still nice. The biggest difference I noticed was in the time of how often trains came through each station, as it wasn't nearly as often in Nizhny Novgorod as it was in the other three cities I'd seen. 

Since I've seen the metro systems in St Petersburg and Moscow and Novosibirsk, so it was neat to have another comparison to add to the list. Russia does metro systems really really well.

My train back to Moscow went as expected. Will I return to Nizhny? Probably not. Even so, the dream of a full weekend with good weather is going to stick in my mind for a while, hahaha.

russia: nizhny novgorod and bor

The first time I heard of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, was in August of 2011. I signed a contract to work for a school that has branches in Kyiv, Ukraine, Moscow, Russia, and Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. (At the time there was also a branch in St Petersburg, but that has since closed.) I always wondered why Nizhny Novgorod has a branch of the school, I have never gotten an answer from anyone, and after this weekend, I was even more uncertain.

We chose to visit Nizhny Novgorod for two reasons: one, because our school has a branch there, and two, it was selected as one of the World Cup host cities.

Nizhny Novgorod (usually shortened to Nizhny,) was founded in 1221, it isn't a new city. It was founded by the same people who founded many other cities in early Russia, one of the princes of Vladimir. From 1932 to 1990 it was known as Gorky, because the famous writer Maxim Gorky was born there. For a time Nizhny was an important industrial center of Russia, it was even called the Detroit of Russia. During the years it was known as Gorky it was a closed city, (that is, closed to foreigners,) to make sure no one could access the Soviet military research and production facilities.

Claire and I met as we usually do, on a metro platform, then went to find the correct train. The ride to Nizhny was only five hours or so, we arrived at 0430. Not a terribly convenient time to arrive anywhere, we found seats in the train station and just hung out for a couple hours. Despite having previously been so important to the country, this was another city with a less than impressive train station. I was starting to give up on finding/seeing the type of grand stations I loved so much in Ukraine.

When it got light enough, we started walking. First impressions of the city were not great, nothing looked very new, or very clean. Google maps didn't help, as it had us climb what we called the icy hill of death to get to our hotel. Obviously, it wasn't really an icy hill of death, but it certainly felt that way. There was a (not so) lovely mixture of snow/ice/slush all over the city, which is what happens at the end of winter in every part of the country. Nothing is clean, and all the melting just reveals more dirt and rubbish.

We also had to cross a bridge over a river, we somehow managed to avoid being blown off the bridge by the crazy cold wind. 

Before our trip someone told me the city was windy, but I'd forgotten; as soon as we felt the wind on the bridge, I remembered. Being built on a hill, with a river at the bottom pretty much guaranteed awful wind the whole time.

We arrived at our hotel and were initially told our room was not ready. That was fine with us, we sat on the couches for a moment to get ourselves sorted and leave our packs at the hotel during the day. Magically, our room was ready about five minutes later. We put all our stuff in the room, warmed up for a bit, then started walking.

Our first sight of the day was closer to the edge of town, a monastery. It took us a while to walk there, partly because we kept stopping to take photos. (Totally typical for me wheneva I travel.) The Pechersky Ascension monastery is old, having been founded in the 14^th century. It's fairly big, surrounded by white walls.

We walked in the main gate and found a small garden off to the side. There were a bunch of busts of previous leaders stood. Interesting to see the differences in styles of how they were 'dressed.'

The biggest church appeared to be closed, but we took plenty of photos of the exterior. I thought the decoration around the windows looked like rainbows, which is not something I expected. We were able to go in a smaller church, which had lovely frescoes all over. We had to borrow wraparound skirts, as both of us were wearing pants. (I've never figured out why a skirt on top of pants is so important for some churches/monasteries, but others don't care as long as you're not showing too much skin. They all expect women to cover their heads, whether with a hat, or a scarf.)

After exploring everything we could, we left the property and climbed back up the hill. While walking in the general direction of the city center we noticed a cable car that went across the river, and made a note to come back the next day.

There was a mosque nearby, and while the gates weren't open, we did admire it from the outside.

Also while walking Claire got in touch with one of the teachers of the school branch in Nizhny, we arranged to meet up for dinner. Figuring out where to meet was a challenge, as it turned out this teacher didn't know the city at all, despite having lived there for nearly eight months by that point.

We ended up meeting on Gorky Square. At one end of the square there is a statue of Gorky, at the other end of the square is a sign that says I love Nizhny Novgorod. We didn't really feel that way, but we took a photo anywho.

We ended up having dinner at a burger place, and were pleasantly surprised to find prices about half of what we'd normally pay in Moscow. Good food, and it was fun to find out what was going on in the school in Nizhny.

The next morning we took our sweet time getting moving. We left the hotel right around noon, they stored our bags for the day. 

We first walked to the cable car we'd seen the day before, and bought a ticket for a ride over the river. From reading the ticket prices, I figured out that some people use the cable car as a form of public transport. For us, a single ride was 100 rubles, it took 15 minutes to cross the river. While in our little car, we liked looking out over the area, taking note of the people ice fishing on the river.

The arrival area on the other side of the river wasn't any great shakes. (Then again, we weren't impressed so far with Nizhny, either.) The name of the town on the other side of the river was Bor, which didn't inspire confidence in the location.

We were about to leave when we noticed the 'shop of wonders.' As we got close, we could see that it sold souvenirs of the town of Bor. They even had coffee mugs!!! After seeing the magnets and mugs we figured we should wander around at least a little, just to be able to say we'd seen the city.

After walking about 3 minutes we found the city center. There was a statue of Lenin, and a couple minutes past that we found the WW2 memorial. Our visit took place about a week after the mall fire in a town in Siberia, and the whole country was still morning, so there were fresh flowers and stuffed animals laid on the WW2 memorial.

In this general area we noticed that some of the fences had the town name as part of the fence. It might be the worst name ever, but we loved the fences.

Walking down a random street showed us the water/slush/ice/snow had affected Bor just as badly. Some cars plowing through threw up what I'd almost call walls of water.

About 30 minutes later we walked back to the cable car, bought another 100 ruble ticket and crossed back over the river. From there we walked to the main sight of Nizhny Novgorod, the kremlin. Entry into the kremlin was free, yahoo!!

We walked through the gate, and immediately realized that the interior of the kremlin wasn't very exciting. There were big, Soviet style government buildings inside, which took away from the feeling of 'old kremlin.'

The walls of the kremlin were red brick, and went all the way around, even going down the hill. Either the walls have been renovated or maintained well, but they still looked good to us. The walls ended up being the only part of the kremlin that we liked.

Inside the kremlin we found a couple churches, one of them just a small chapel. We also found a WW2 memorial, complete with eternal flame and more stuffed animals as we saw in Bor.

We walked down the switchback streets (inside the kremlin,) exiting at the bottom of the hill. We continued following the streets, getting ourselves all the way to the embankment on the river. 

It seemed to be under renovation, and given how the entire city appeared to us at that point, we didn't have a lot of faith that everything would be completed in time to host football games.

Walking along the river was cold and windy, not so fun. We basically followed the walls of the kremlin, until we got to another corner. (Along the way we passed a statue of Peter 1^st, one of the great tsars of Russian history.) There was a giant set of stairs (called the Chkalov steps,) parallel to this side of the kremlin, I wanted to climb all the way up.

We didn't climb in one straight shot, as there were a lot of steps, and neither of us was in shape to do such a thing. At the top of the steps was a Russia2018 sign, just like the one I'd seen in Ekaterinburg. There was also a statue of Chkalov, for whom the steps were named. He was an aircraft test pilot, and an official Hero of the Soviet Union.

At that point we felt like were done exploring Nizhny, there wasn't anything left that we wanted to see. (Not only that, but the weather wasn't great, and we thought the city was pretty disappointing overall.) We made our way to a cafe and killed time until dinner by filling up on dessert.

We had another good, cheap dinner, again with the teacher. After eating, we went back to our hotel to pick up our bag, then rode the metro to the train station. The metro station at which we started our journey was decorated quite nicely, the train station metro wasn't nearly as nice.

The train ride back to Moscow was easy, departing and arriving on time.

I have zero desire to repeat this trip, ever.