While I’m in Russia in 2019, let me tell you about my first ever trip there.
It was March 2002, I was sixteen and it was a school trip. I went to a very ordinary school and speaking to people around my age, it appears several local schools did pretty much exactly the same trip around the same few years. Under the guidance of a very ambitious language department, my school has since gone on to send trips to every continent except Antarctica – and that one started planning, only to get abandoned when they realised there isn’t much for a school group to do there except spend days or weeks looking at penguins.
Anyway. Russia was hugely ambitious for a rural secondary school in 2002. Technically it was a history trip and I dropped history as soon as I possibly could, but you bet I was going on this trip.
Last year I discovered that I kept a diary during the Russia trip. It’s a treasure. It’s relatively light on Russian details but very good on things like what my friends and I ate and hilarious conversations that were had. Not so hilarious now, seventeen years on, but a treasure to look back on, nonetheless.
We stayed in one of Stalin’s Seven Sisters, a series of tall Soviet towers. The hotel I stayed in in Kyiv is a half-sister. Looking at it for my 2019 Russia trip, its way out of my budget. It’s had new owners since then, it’s been renovated… but my memory is of multiple restaurants or dining rooms, lots of gold and a harpist in the lobby, which definitely sounds too expensive for a school trip, although the rooms were nothing special. We had – or maybe the boys had – a room quite high up in the tower and the windows opened wide enough to push someone out, which I know wouldn’t happen now.
We went to the Kremlin and St Basil’s. I wish I could remember it better. I remember seeing a big bell and a big cannon – both too big to actually be used for their intended purposes. A small chunk had broken off the bell – it weighed eleven tons, that small chunk. By the time you’re reading this, I’ll be in Ekaterinburg and I’ll have been back to the Kremlin for a better look at that bell.
St Basil’s was covered in scaffolding. The teacher in charge of that trip was most annoyed; every significant building he’d been to see lately had been hiding under scaffolding. I thought of him in Rīga two years ago when the House of the Blackheads was under scaffolding. It was still open. We went inside. I’m pretty sure I remember it being dark and cave-like inside. Another thing to check two weeks ago when I was there.
And of course, we went to Red Square. We saw the Eternal Flame and we saw guards pacing back and forth guarding something or other. They swing their legs right up and wear long green coats and they’re far better entertainment value than the guards at Buckingham Palace who aren’t employed by the Ministry of Silly Walks. To be honest, my main memory of Red Square is one of the history teachers noticing my fortune-telling watch.
We went up on the roof of a church, we saw the ski jump from the 1980 Olympics, we did a day trip to a monastery that I still can’t name and we did two… evening entertainments.
The first was a piano concert, which I have no memory of, except that I wore my white polo neck jumper with the red star on the front. The diary is hilarious here – apparently we were all bored to death and I’ve listed all the various things we all counted to pass the time. Acoustic wall tiles were popular. On the last night in Moscow we went to the circus – that is, some of us did. Several boycotted it because of the elephants. I think that was the only animal act. I don’t have photos of any others and no mention in the diary.
The last thing we did in Moscow was take the midnight train to St Petersburg. The school had built this up into quite a terrifying thing and we all expected to be robbed and kidnapped in the middle of the night. One of the boys scared the life out of us by banging on our cabin door in the middle of the night.
One thing I do remember is our guide on the coach from the airport to the hotel telling us that for the poor ordinary people, life had been better under communism. I know very little about communism or everyday life in the USSR or Russia but that little snippet has always stayed with me.
Look out for my blogs on Russia 2019 in October, when I’ll be comparing all this to what I’m experiencing in Russia right now.