Ten Days in Russia , 1997, by Gwendolyn Grewe

From MemoryArchive

Who: Gwendolyn Grewe
What: Ten Days in Russia
When: November 1997
Where: Russia

While living in Heidelberg, Germany, I was given the opportunity to spend ten days in Russia. In November 1997, I traveled to Russia with the Heidelberg American High School Model United Nations contingent for ten days. Though I was still at Heidelberg American Middle School in the eighth grade at the time, I was invited along with several other eighth graders to join the high school students who were going to Russia. My trip to Russia began on a bus full of American students and my trusty gloves that my dad helped me remember. I flew out of Frankfurt, Germany in tiny plane with a strict weight requirement no more than 20 kilos!

I arrived in Moscow later that day and exited the plane into the bitingly cold November air walking down the icy metal stairs, holding for dear life. Despite worrying about slipping and falling to ground (and taking several people down with me) I noticed a huge Marlboro Man billboard sign. After experiencing my first taste of Russian winter I scurried onto the bus, which drove me the main terminal where I go through passport control. I took my passport out of the annoying travel pouch that I used to safe guard it and I was ready and waiting for my turn to pass the inspection. At this time everything was really strange and I was simply a scared rabbit soaking everything in from my surroundings. When it was my turn in line to face the firing squad, I dragged myself in front of the passport control officer and handed her my passport. This woman had a face of stone and then she looked at my picture and said my name in her Russian accent and smiled handing me back my passport.

After we successfully passed through passport control my group was conveyed to the Delta Complex hotels, which were originally built to house the foreign athletes for the Moscow Summer Games of 1980, complete with missing shower curtain and lighting that made you look paler than a ghost. There was also a Dutch group that was also planning on participating in the Ivanovo Model United Nations Group, who ended up passed out from drinking vodka in the hall ways. The women who guard the floors were not too thrilled about Dutch students lying about the floors.

My group and I toured the highlights of Moscow during our first few days in Russia. The Kremlin was a major stop where I saw such things as the Arsenal, the State Kremlin Palace, the Cathedral Square, Ivan the Great Bell tower and Assumption Cathedral. Tsar Cannon, which is the largest cannon in the world, is an impressive marvel to behold. The barrel is more than five meters long and had a caliber of 809mm. The Tsar Cannon has not ever, to my knowledge, been fired but it is an imposing structure with the scene of a fierce lion killing a snake in relief. My group got to go inside Saint Basil’s Cathedral, which is located on Red Square across from the State Historical Museum, on the condition that we did not speak to each other. Russian prices vary depending on who you are. Adult Russians paid a small fee to enter the cathedral and foreigners pay roughly the equivalent of western art gallery but Russian students have free access to almost all museums and monuments. We pretended to be Russian students so that we did not have to pay.

After a few days in Moscow we checked out of our hotel and piled on to a bus that conveyed us to Ivanovo for the Model United Nations conference, which was the main purpose of our trip to Russia. Along the way we stopped at churches, where we saw the glorious Russian icons and beautiful ornamentation and at schools were we were fed and entertained with skits displaying Russian culture. In between stops our tour leaders would tell us Russian fairy tales over the loudspeaker system, which was soothing to hear while staring out the window at the endless snow covered plains during the day and the darkness at night.

At one of the stops we ate in a cozy darkened tavern which was really stuck in the middle ages (hole in the floor toilets and all) but served scrumptious borscht. It became known that a cold was passing through the group. I thankfully did not get sick but I took some measures to help make sure that I did not. The smart measures were that I made sure that I was warmly dressed, my lighter was in working order to light my hand warmers and that I ate food. The one sketchy thing I did was take the charcoal tablet that I was offered by one of the tour leaders and by instruction swallowed it. I did not get sick other than a runny nose, but I think that was the result of passing through extremities of hot and cold. We arrived late in Ivanovo and piled into a school to meet our host families and then be spirited away to their warm homes and home cooking. To make things a little bit easier the Russians, who were claiming us for the few nights that we were there, wore name tags with our names on them. Some girls wore the name of their American at the furthest point of their breasts. I wanted to tell them that if they wore the name tags a bit higher it would look better, but then I realized that they were probably hoping for an American male.

I was claimed by Vicki who spoke English to me and her older brother (I can’t remember his name) drove us home. The car ride was very scary because Vicki’s brother drove like maniac fearlessly through the snowy streets. Also the condition of the car did not allow for much warmth to be generated for the passengers. We arrived to Vicki’s home and the stench was almost unbearable on my way to the elevator. Upon entering the apartment, I smelled the deliciousness of Russian cooking and I took off my dirty boots and put on my slippers as I was instructed to do during the orientation before going to Russia. I met her father and mother (my host mom and host dad) and was shown my room, where I put my stuff down and I was promptly ushered into the kitchen. I later deduced that where I slept was Vicki’s room as well as a sitting room. I sat down at the kitchen table and talked to my host mom, while she prepared dinner, because Vicki told me to talk to her and she could understand English but did not speak it. At this very same table I learned that Russians are quite serious about feeding you and no matter how full you are there is always room for more. Since it was very cold in November I did not mind too much being force fed as much food as my host family wanted to give me. Every place that my group went we always ate a good sized meal which turned out to be at least four times a day. I also learned that it is very offensive to decline the offer to drink the pulpy currant juice that your host mom made. I was guilt-tripped into drinking a jug all by myself.

The day of the conference, Vicki and I were bundled off to the school which had been my first stop in Ivanovo, with Kirsten F., an American like me, and her host brother Sergey and his mother in a car driven by a chauffer. The V International Conference of “Russia and the World Community” was to be conducted in English because that was our common language. We gathered in a huge auditorium, the Russians, and Americans and of course the Dutch. I was assigned to be part of the delegation from the Republic of South Korea. Having never done Model United Nations before, I was perfectly happy being a member of a delegation until I realized that one of the two of us had to go up on stage and address the conference with our country’s statement. Wait a minute I HAVE NEVER DONE MODEL UNITED NATIONS BEFORE! Having no clue what to write myself and discovering that my partner didn’t particularly want to go up on stage, I frantically told her that whatever she wrote I would go up to the podium and say. While I was waiting for my turn to represent South Korea’s position, and my partner in crime to write my speech, I watched the other representatives make their speeches. The most interesting one was when the Dutch tell everyone that though their flag is red and white and blue their favorite color as a nation is ORANGE and enthusiastically said “If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much!!” Cheering from the Dutch kids and the rest of the crowd resounded in the auditorium. I anxiously waited the time when I had to start making my way towards the stage. My fellow representative, lucky for me, was a kind-hearted soul who wrote something that actually pertained to the conference and South Korea’s standpoint instead of letting me make a fool of myself. I walked to the podium on the auditorium stage with makeshift speech in hand. I glimpsed at the packed auditorium and then speed through my speech with out looking up. I rushed back to my seat and finished listening to my heart race before it calmed down.

A day later and it was Thanksgiving, which is wholly an American celebration that our Russian hosts decided to indulge us with considering we came to see them on this big holiday. We were grouped into the school cafeteria and sat at tables will full of every Russian delicacy you could imagine. I served myself a helping from every plate near me because I am an adventurous eater and tried everything. All of the dishes were deliciously filling to the stomach and pleasing to the eye except for the jellied fish. It looked weird and I think when jelly comes to mind I associate it with sweet things, not with fish. I tried and was grossed out. I was still pretty hungry so I scraped the jelly off the fish and proceeded to eat the fish. Then these plump Russian women came out with huge trays jam-packed with these cream filled torts that looked like part of the witch’s gingerbread house, brilliantly colored and whimsical. I devoured two of these torts that tasted like clouds with a graham cracker crumb like crust. That was my first thanksgiving away from my family.

At the end of our stay in Ivanovo, my host family asked me to write to them from the United States. I gave up explaining that although I am American I was living in Germany because my parents were stationed in Heidelberg. I really did not feel comfortable writing them because I was overwhelmed by their hospitality and everything else that was happening to me. I kept telling them that I did not know how to send things to Russia because the postage was different. I was scared for no reason and I wish that I had written them. After escaping my really sweet host family, I joined my group in proceeding towards Nizhniy Novgorod. Continuing the journey by bus, we stopped at a monastery along the way to Nizhniy Novgorod. We had a late start leaving Ivanovo and had not eaten for a while. The whole group had become ravenous from the cold and we toured the monastery tortured by the wonderful wafting smell of freshly baked bread produced by the monastery. We were herded back on to the bus by our tour leaders Starving for piece of bread many of us implored to be allowed to buy some bread. Yet when all seemed hopeless loaves of bread magically appeared and were distributed through out the bus. My eyes were bigger than my stomach and I took more of the delicious bread than I could actually eat. I guiltily offered the remainder to those around me.

We arrived in Nizhniy Novgorod late in the evening and repeated the same process of going to the school that was hosting us and having our host families claim us for our one night there. I was claimed by Tanya and her friend. Tanya lived with her grandmother, who fed me Kasha with huge amounts of butter. I quickly noticed that I was huge marvel to my new host sister and her friend as the simply poked at me and giggle back and forth to each other in Russian. They offered to show me the city of Nizhniy Novgorod but I knew that I could not stray from the group. Nor was I equipped with the needed skills to anywhere by myself. I told that if there was time the next day I would like to be given a tour of the city. I probably should have read the itinerary that I received at the beginning of my trip but who doesn’t like surprises? It turned out that my group was to tour Nizhniy Novgorod on foot. Nizhniy Novgorod was the name of the city in Tsarist times but during the Soviet Era the city’s name was changed to Gorky in honor of Maxim Gorky, who as great author of the proletariat, and after the fall of the Soviet Union the town reverted back to its pre-revolutionary name. On the walking tour of the city, we saw all of the monuments and learned that there is a significant number of stairs in Nizhniy Novgorod and that it was the greatest number in all of Russia. Our last stop was the house of the internally exiled Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov. There my group and I received a tour in English and learned that Sakharov had been exiled to Gorky because he refused to create weapons for the Soviet Union. On the day that he was pardoned, a phone was installed for the sole purpose of formally releasing Sakharov from his imprisonment. After the excursion, we hopped back on the bus, which was packed with our suitcases (because we were going to take the train back to Moscow later that night), and we headed toward our lunch destination. We ate a hearty meal and then we visited an outlying church where we were entertained with more displays of Russian culture.

We were bound for Moscow in the midnight train from Nizhniy Novgorod. We traveled in the first class cabins with four Americans to a cabin on the train. These cabins had four berths: two upper and two lower and a tiny cramped little table. Our suitcases, covering every inch of the floor, barely fit in the cabin with us. My head hit the pillow and I was fast asleep because tomorrow I would be in Moscow and I sleep well on trains. We arrived in Moscow at 9:00am and piled out of the train station and were bused back to the Delta hotel, where we unloaded our things into our new rooms. This was our last full day in Moscow before getting on a plane back to Heidelberg, Germany.

The day was spent largely on our own at the huge bazaar that celebrated the 850th anniversary of the founding of the city of Moscow. I got to practice my haggling skills with the vendors and bought some Russian stacking dolls, several lacquer boxes and coins from the Soviet Union. I saw beautifully carved and liberally glittered Ded Morozes and some that were made to look like Santa Claus. One of my fellow group members bought swords from several vendors and backed them in her suitcase. I really enjoyed walking around the cold streets and seeing what the vendors had to offer and how well the American dollar talked.

The next morning we had a 4:30am wake up call to quickly eat breakfast and stow our suitcases on to the bus in order to catch our flight back to Frankfurt, Germany. Everyone had boarded the bus in a timely manner except one guy who was missing. His roommate said that they both got up when they received the wake up call but the other must have fallen back asleep. At the bus left for the airport with out our sleeping comrade and we were told that he could catch a cab back to the airport. Luckily this high school kid did wake up and actually beat us to the airport in his cab ride. Once we checked our luggage, we boarded our Lufthansa flight and promptly fell asleep as we headed home to Germany.