Suzdal

Got up early in order to get to Suzdal around 10. Based on what the receptionist had told us, breakfast began at 7 AM. Got there are 7:15ish and realized she had lied to us and it started at 7:30. But it was yummy, so it is okay.

Left in the pouring rain to go to the bus stop to buy our tickets to get to Suzdal, and got there in time to catch the 8:30 bus. (Which turned out to be little more than the minibuses that run around the city) We decided to go to the convent first, and hit the Kremlin on our way back through town. However, what was marked on the map as a path was considerably less than what either Haley or I considered an actually path. It was little more than where the rain should go down a hill to get to the river.

It had stopped raining by the time we got there but there was mud everywhere. The convent was pretty, but because we couldn’t take any pictures, and it wasn’t that great. The long journey through copious amounts of mud should have deterred us. When we finally made it back to the Kremlin, Haley had decided that by this point she didn’t really care to go in. But since it was the main reason we had come to Suzdal, I convinced her to at least try to go to the Prison Museum (I mean who wouldn’t want to see a prison in a monastery?!?!)

It took a while to figure out the tickets, because we didn’t know the word for prison in Russian and they didn’t know it in English. However, we did get in and saw it. It was pretty cool. It was a lot more spacious than what we would have considered for a prison. It had information on famous people who had been interred there (most of which we didn’t recognize). But they did have info on the Gulags of Stalin. There were a lot of them, literally all over the country.

By this time we had defrosted a little bit and wandered back to the center of town, where we went to a restraint that served local mead. Neither of us had ever had mead so we decided to try it. Haley liked it, but it was too sickly sweet for me.

Haley then decided that she was too cold to go to the other museum that I really wanted to go. (one about Peasant life and wooden architecture) This was because she had not brought or bought a winter coat and just had a light weight jacket on, no scarf or warm shoes.
So we went back to the bus stop and bought tickets home. This time it was a charter bus. Got back and settled into the hotel. Haley took a nap as I did homework. We then ordered dinner from the restraint to be brought up to the room. For dessert we had ginger and green tea ice cream.