Looking at Russia

Some travelers keep tally of trips they made. A woman in Albuquerque will tell you proudly that she has been on 52 tours with Sun Travel. Unfortunately she was my cabin mate on the river cruise in Russia.

In St. Petersburg our group saw palaces, tall columns and facades like Wedgewood with white wreaths and festoons against backgrounds of gold or blue or green. We walked up marble staircases into rooms decorated with gold leaf on the walls and paintings of gods on ceilings. Everyone exclaimed, “How magnificent! St. Petersburg is the most beautiful city in the World!” I looked out the window of the bus and saw endless miles of dreary gray apartment buildings, door frames crumbling, iron railings falling off balconies, broken windows patched with cardboard or plastic.

On the ship chugging softly as we floated down the Volga, I spent hours looking out our cabin window. My companion lay in bed, her back to the big window, reading romance novels.

For four days I saw nothing but trees, endless miles of tall pines, dark green against the cloudless blue sky. Surely, I thought, Russia’s principal export must be timber. I climbed four flights of steep iron stairs to hear a young man lecture in barely accented English on current history and economics. He told me that Russia’s leading export is not lumber, but oil. They sell their oil to India.

My companion only left her bunk to go to the dining room to join her friends from Albuquerque for our gourmet lunches and dinners. She came home with a stack of postcards to show where she had been.

Every place I’ve gone – to Russia and China or to the arts center in Mesquite, Texas, – I looked and listened. Each time I learned something to help me better understand this marvelous and complicated World we live in.

Other people travel all over the World and never leave home.