Yaroslavl

Happy birthday to me!! I'm a few days late with my blogging but may have some time to catch up today. Our next stop is Yaroslavl, a large city of 600,000, but we don't arrive until mid afternoon, so we filled our morning with Russian language lessons and I even painted a Matryoska doll. It doesn't look too bad if viewed from a distance and you squint but compared to some other efforts it looked like something a preschooler would do.

Our tours at Yaroslavl included the usual church - ancient with fresco paintings. We had a tour of the Governor's House which was done in a very entertaining fashion with pretty young Russian girls who acted as the daughters of the governor and they were showing us through their house. It finished with a live classical music (cello, violin, piano) with ballroom dancing. At another place we also sat and listened to a quartet who sang choral music. Beautiful voices but not something I could listen to for long.

Dinner tonight was a pirate night - not sure what this had to do with Russia, probably just an excuse for the crew to dress up. Halfway through they come parading around to sing Happy Birthday to me and present me with a birthday cake. Very nice touch.Read more