Suzdal

Following Thanksgiving, we traveled to Suzdal for 2 days. This was a very fun but very quick trip. Suzdal is only about 40 minutes from Vladimir, and it is a very small town, around 40,000 compared to 350,000 in Vladimir. There is not much to say about Suzdal itself. We went to a Monastery and the Kremlin, but spent half our time in our hotel. Now there is a lot to say about the hotel, it was great. Our hotel had billiards, a pool, a sauna, a couple bars, and it just a nice hotel, but I’ll get to that later. For now, I’ll talk about the Monastery. The one thing about that place that sticks out in my mind was the bell tower and the bell player. Just about every monastery in Russia was a bell tower, which contains many bells of various sizes. With every bell tower, there are also monks who play the bells, or maybe I should say monk, because all the bells are played by only one monk. This is really cool. All the bells are connected by ropes. The monk stands at one end and holds all the ropes (or planks that hold several ropes), and there are at least 15 bells. The cool thing is that it is not just slowly ringing Church bells; these monks are really good. The music is fast and very beautiful. I have a 60 sec clip of the monk playing and if I can figure how to put it up I will, it sounds so awesome.

So that was really neat. The monastery itself was the same as many that we have seen, a couple big beautiful churches and some museums. These particular museums focused on Suzdal’s role in World War 2 and the monastery under communist rule.

We were there about 3 hours or so and then we went to the hotel to eat lunch and to check in.