russia: gagarin

12 April 1961 is a date every Russian learns while growing up. This is the day the Soviets won the human space race, when Yuri Gagarin became the first person ever to orbit the planet in space.

Gagarin was born in 1934 in the village of Klushino, in Smolensk oblast; his parents worked on a collective farm. Yuri was the 3^rd of four children, he had an older brother and sister, as well as a younger brother. During WW2 the Nazis took over his house, but they 'let' the family build a mud hut in the backyard; the family lived in this shack for almost two years. After the war, the family moved to the nearby city of Gzhatsk, which is where Yuri received his secondary eduation.

Back in those days, standard education was a bit different. At age 16 Gagarin became an apprentice at a steel plant in Moscow, where he also took classes for the 7^th grade in the evening. He continued working as well as learning for years, eventually graduating from a technical school in 1955. After this he was drafted into the Soviet Army. He went to piloting school in Orenburg, and became an officer in the Soviet Air Force in 1957.

To make a long story short, Gagarin spent the next 4 years working, training, and learning in different schools and programs. 12 April 1961 was the day he became the first person to orbit the planet in space. He was sent into space on a Vostok rocket, and spent around 90 minutes orbiting the earth once.
It goes without saying that he was celebrated when he came back to Earth. The videos of the reactions of Soviets celebrating are pretty intense. There will never be another accomplishment like that one, partly because there is a limit to frontiers that have not yet been explored.

Over the following years he met Soviet and foreign leaders, but also continued working in the Soviet space program. Sadly, he never went back into space, as the government was loath to risk losing such a hero. He received a lot of awards, statues of him were erected, and things named after him.

Gagarin died in 1968, when a jet he was test piloting crashed. After this time, the city of Gzhatsk changed its name to Gagarin. The family home was given to the city/state by his family, it is now a museum.

We decided to do a day trip to Gagarin, after discovering it was less than two hours away by train. We arrived around 0900 Saturday morning, and went straight into the train station. It isn't terribly big, but celebrates the one person/reason the town gets any visitors. There were paintings on each wall of Gagarin or space in general.

We walked up the street named after him, eventually getting to a monument to him in the middle of a big traffic circle. Obviously, we took photos of and with him.

On another side of the traffic circle there was a pink church, we went in. The interior of the church wasn't at all exciting. Entering and exiting wasn't much fun either, because of the group of women begging very aggressively. They definitely weren't part of the church, and we got the impression that the people of the church weren't happy the women were there.

We saw a sign pointing to a museum, and thought we were following it by walking up the street. We didn't find what we were looking for, and thought the sign was wrong. Since I'm writing this after the day was finished, I know the museum we thought the sign referred to was the wrong museum.
After going up the street a bit and not seeing what we were looking for, we turned around, and walked back to the traffic circle. We took a different street from there, Lenin street. After seeing a simple memorial to soldiers and a monument to Peter the Great, we crossed a bridge and finally saw the museum we had wanted to visit.

The Joint Memorial Museum has that name because the building in Gagarin is a museum in tandem with the home in which he grew up in Klushino. The museum in Gagarin exists there only because the man lived in Gagarin for a while, the city itself has no other link to space. As far as we could tell, the city doesn't have anything else of note.

The entry fee to the museum was 150 rubles for each of us, and there was a photo fee of 100 rubles. For our group of three we only had to pay one photo fee, yahoo!! We hung up our coats and snack bags, put on foot covers, and started to explore.

There were machines used in the space program, I'm not exactly sure what they were. There was also a training capsule in which Gagarin spent several days, I'm guessing he was 'trained' to deal with the conditions of space. How to eat, how to sit, etc... (At least we think that's what this thing was. It could've been a place he spent time after returning to Earth for all I know.) On this first floor there were a couple cardboard cutouts of astronauts with places for visitors to put their faces and have photos taken. Cute.

We took the stairs up to the third floor, (the second floor was only for staff,) to see more. The whole room was designed really well, the aesthetics of everything were lovely. Someone designed a gorgeous exhibition, even though the items themselves weren't anything spectacular.

There were photos of Gagarin in different parts of his life, reproductions of his space suit and military uniforms. There were reproductions of various parts of his space flight, as well we some history of the space program. There were photos of the dogs sent into space before his flight, and a giant globe.

After leaving the museum we followed Lenin street a bit further, hoping we'd find a statue of Lenin. Gagarin seems to be one of the few cities in Russia that doesn't have a statue of the man, at least not one that we found. We didn't find the man, but we did find a school Gagarin attended for a while.

We saw the onion domes of a church, I couldn't resist peeking inside. We could see two churches right next to each other, one of them abandoned/under renovation. The open church wasn't very exciting inside, with just a small iconostasis and very little else. 
As we walked in, we noticed a baptism/christening taking place. I wonder if the other building will ever be finished, and what the interior of that church is like.

We went back over the river, noting the name, Gzhat. Obviously, the city was originally named after the river. It's a small river, at least what we could see of it. We followed the river for a couple blocks, then wound our way through a residential area back to Gagarin street.

A bit further up the street we found the museum the street sign referred to. This was the home in which the family lived when they first moved to the city, and we got to see the car Gagarin was given as a prize for his accomplishment. Go to space, get this car.

Entry into the family house was 70 rubles each, plus another photo fee. The house was really small, it was hard to imagine 6 people living in there. The house had been divided into a kitchen, three bedrooms, and a living room, none of them big. 
The bedrooms were tiny, even if just one person was sleeping in each of them. Let's just say privacy wasn't a thing in that house. At all.

After the house we decided we were done exploring Gagarin. There really wasn't anything left to see. We found a cute cafe for lunch, then found another cute cafe for dessert. Yours truly might've had two pieces of cake, yum.

After killing time in both places, we walked through a park with another war memorial on our way back to the train station. There was a layer of snow throughout the park, but it was at the dirty stage where it wasn't pretty, and the mud underneath wasn't any better.

We got back to the train station and sat outside on a bench for a while, enjoying the weather. When it got cold we went inside for the last hour of waiting. During this waiting we realized that at least one person was spending their time watching us, and not hiding it. Creepy. 

The train arrived at the station on time, departed on time, and we arrived back in Moscow on time. Yay for day trips!