More fotos.

This is a picture of one of the monastaries in Suzdal'. Suzdal looks like it was built as a tourist town 500 years ago, by which I mean that there are literally hundreds of Temples, all crammed into a town not any bigger than Anacortes. They have honsetly begun blending into one for me at this point, tho. The nature around the town was beautiful, tho, and we took a swim in the pond in the picture. Finally, water without industrial runnoff or dead fish! This is Plyos. It's Marina's favorite, but for a variety of reasons, to me, it just seemed like one of Russia's more depressing spots. The volga was black, poisonous, and full of dead fish. The depressingness was more a question of attitude than appearance in this case, unlike, say Perm, which looks exactly like Bratislava in Eurotrip. It was even that same cloudy grey there...we just kept repeating "It's a good sink you came here in ze summerrr....in ze vinter, it can be veeeeery depressink...

Marina writes: Plyos was for a long time a haven for artists and performers of various sorts. People like Levitan and Shaliapin resided here for a while. At present, it is the haven for young German and French businessmen...or would be, if the local government wasn't all 'foreign frightened'. After all, there's some Russian businessman, connected with Chubais that's doing his own kind of renovation in the town and the locals are simply screeching in horror from the clean-up. Their complaint is that the locals are losing their jobs and dying off. Hmmm....let's think for a second...their primary occupation hitherto was either prostitution or drinking and lying around stupefied, stinky, and dying. There was ONE f@*&! toilet here for the entire street. Anyway, the fondness that I have for this small town comes from spending a fantastic summer here with my brother and grandfather the year that I moved to the States. It was a summer full of reinacting favorite episodes of 'My litttle pony' and 'Care bears' with my newfound friends and watching my brother impress all the young girls in the town (which in the summer is a resort for members of the Thespian Union - VTO) with his skill of playing the piano with his feet.
Baba Yaga Real Estate offers the following selection of houses on chicken legs...
This is me and Oleg in the Museum of Wooden Architecture in Kostroma. I finally broke down and bought a coat: it may be summer, but Russia is no Morocco.
This is Kostroma. The picture didn't turn out very clear, because I was holding the camera while I was climbing a rusty ladder onto the roof of this sort of a Russian strip mall торговые ряды, and because it was twilight.

If we don't post for a while, it means we're in a camp in Siberia, cutting trees and singing slave songs, or else in line somewhere (that's like, not a way of life in the States, but in Russia, when someone asks "Where were you all last week?", a good, believable answer is "in line for train tickets."