Novgorod the Great - Part I

Za Novgorod!
On Friday Aurelie, Charlotte, and I travel for the day to Novgorod, a city of 240,000 three and a half hours South of Piter by bus.

We decided to try for the first bus at 7:30 AM as the sooner we arrived the better because it gets dark so early here, by just after 4! So Charlotte and I dragged ourselves out of bed at 6 and grumpily took the early morning Metro to the bus station, Avtovokzal 2, where we were to meet Aurelie. The only problem was that she was very late because the obschezhitye, the student dorm where she lives, inexplicably changed its closed hours from 1-6 AM to 1-8 AM, during which no students are allowed into the building and apparently out as well as the security guard at the desk refused to let her out any earlier then 8! How ridiculous not to be able to leave your own house when you want to! It’s not like she could even have got out through an emergency exit if she resorted to that – I checked the fire exit door another day and found it secured with a big rusted padlock. Reassuring, especially when 40 women just died in a blaze at a Moscow drug rehab clinic for that very reason… Anyways, she ended up yelling her way through - the usual way to get things done in Russia when up against such inflexible and illogical stupidity (either that or a bribe) - but alas, arrived 6 minutes too late so we had to wait another hour for the next bus! Not an auspicious start to the day.

I can’t say much about the drive itself as I was asleep for most of it! The few times I did wake up long enough to glance out the window the landscape made me shudder – alongside the highway dreary lines of little wooden houses sagging into final dilapidation against a backdrop of winter-brown fields and the green-black forest of firs, under a tedious grey sky. Time to go back to sleep! Charlotte sat beside a slight, androgynous girl our age who spent the whole trip reading magazines dedicated to the Kalashnikov assault rifle – I get the feeling Russia has a bit of a gun fetish like the Americans. Back in October when I went with Andreas to the Artillery Museum we walked through a creepy exhibit dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the AK-47 that verged on the shrine-like; a beaming portrait of the benevolent Mikhail Kalshnikov, Russian genius and patriot, surrounded by display cases full of his wondrous works, gleaming assault rifles stacked up under the spotlights. A far cry indeed from the portrayal of the AK-47 in the West, poster child of small arms proliferation (an estimated 100 million in circulation now) and weapon of choice for militants and child soldiers in troubled parts across the globe.

Arriving on the outskirts of Novgorod just after noon, our hearts sunk as we walked towards the city centre down muddy Prospekt Karla Marksa. In the space of five minutes I felt that all I had heard about the grim condition of the Russian provinces had been confirmed one hundred percent; a more cheerless, God-forsaken place than this scene of rattletrap Ladas, stained concrete housing, and inescapable mud I could scarcely imagine! I think running on five hours of sleep and having missed breakfast added to our general gloom – I could tell we were all thinking, why did we come here??

To be continued soon...