Ulitsa Novoslobodskaya: 6

Kazan--city of a million in the south of Russia, about 800 kilometers from Moscow, the capital of Tatarstan, a port on the Volga river. I spent a memorable five days there with the Middlebury group, eating Tatar food, wandering the boulevards, riding bicycles, trying to find a bookstore, and, most notably, enjoying my first Russian banya.

Anarchy in Tatarstan.

This is a shot of the city's main thoroughfare, a tourist-shop-lined boulevard that I must have traversed at least twenty times. It wasn't, to be honest, tremendously attractive as far as main streets go, but there was something Tatarskiy about it. Vendors selling fezes, most likely. Looking closely you can see the orthodox church that seems to anchor the whole street, the black spire in the middle of the picture.

You might ask why I don't take more color pictures. Between the landscapes and the unashamedly garish paints people choose, Russia is a nation of brilliant colors--to my eyes, at least, far more so than the U.S. Well, this is a picture of a forest near the Volga. The centerpiece of our trip, a bicycle excursion to a dacha out beyond the suburbs, wound through this forest for 20 kilometers. I will say without reservation that, in autumn, the sunlight slicing obliquely through the canopy and illuminating the ash leaves, this was the most fantastic forest I've ever been in. It was like a wood from an old Russian fairy tale, or a scene from Lord of the Rings--an element of fantasy enveloped the whole place. A very Old World scene. We emerged periodically to find a tributary of the Volga, lined with wooden dachas, lying serenely before us. And, alas, this picture simply does no justice whatsoever to the way it actually was. I've found that this is a recurring disappointment, and that's why I stick to b&w.

One of the Volga's long, slender fingers. I only saw the mighty river from afar, but the sunlight was pouring down in shafts from holes in the clouds, like a blessing.

I mentioned fezes--Kazan is an interesting place, especially for the capital of a Russian principality, because it's history is in large part Muslim, in addition to Russian Orthodox. This is the city's principal mosque, situated inside its famous Kremlin. When we went inside, after donning surgical slippers to protect the floors, we saw that it is as extravagant as its exterior suggests. Our tour guide, standing there on the left of the photograph, talked so quickly, despite our numerous "please, slowly, please!" that it was hard to make out much of the history.

It was a joy to ride a bicycle again. I ride one everywhere on Davidson's campus, and after a couple of years of doing so walking places seems like a pitifully slow waste of time. It's time to read some Thoreau, I suppose. Here's our group, lined up at the gate while our guide, Rustan, cajoles an old babushka to let us pass.

Apologies for the darkness here: inside Kazan State University, a huge portrait of Lenin holding up a scroll reading "prav" (right, correct).

We come to Rustan. As you can see, he's a small man, maybe a shade over five feet tall, and here he's cooking up some shashlik for our post-excursion feast. He lived for a long time in Kamchatka, I believe, and now leads a sort of tourist camp in Kazan. More than anything, he is the type of man you probably associate with Russia, in demeanor and behavior. He called me California, evidently because he thought Florida and California were the same place, and the vegetarian in our group vegeTABLES, stress on the tables. The night we stayed at the dacha was my first experience with a Russian banya, and Rustan ran it. I can't think of a more Russian activity. First we sat crammed in a small room built around a brick oven, in which Rustan would periodically pour water fortified with beer, and endured temperatures that must have been over 110 degrees and air that smelled of scorched beer and sweat. Opens up the pores, he said. I've never sweated so much--even training in Florida in the summer. Every once in a while we would retire to an adjacent room, where there was a hearty selection of meat, cheese, bread, and vodka. This went on for an hour and a half or so, and finally the night culminated in a frozen jog through the 0 C air down to the even colder river, where we all, of course, plunged in, and darted back to the banya. I was apprehensive, to be sure, because I have trouble even with the ice baths at Davidson, but Rustan was right: it really wasn't very cold at all, as long as you got back to the banya hastily. The body works itself up so much that it builds its own armor, I guess. There is a Russian work, kaif, which corresponds roughly to "high," in the sense of "sky-diving produces such a high." Here's to Rustan, and the Russian kaif.