Fourth and last for now, mid-week escape to the dacha.

So on Tuesday, Lauren, her friend who is visiting, Syd, and good old Kostya, invited me to go with them to Kostya's family's dacha for a day trip. I was needing to get out of the city again, at least for a few hours, after having been overwhelmed by photo projects and the week before, so I took them up on the offer.


Kostya's dacha is located not that far from Olga's dacha, just outside of Kirovsk, where I went in the summer. His is slightly more out of the way though and woodsy. We took the metro to the last stop on the yellow line, going south, and then took a shaky, wobbly bus for abou 35 minutes out along the highway and then on a road that wound through woods. After Kostya met us at the bus stop, we walked through the woods (with some really beautiful birch trees) and along train tracks for about 20 more minutes to finally get to the little dacha village by the mouth of the Neva and right at the beginning of Lake Ladoga, the largest lake in Europe. Looking at a map we where here:


Kostya's dacha itself is great -- not just because the house is my favorite color, but because he has his own little pond which was full of eggs and frogs mating loudly, because we ate lunch outside at blue and white tables, because Kostya cooked us shaslik with his mother's recipe on a woodsmoke fire that smelled just like being back at Lake Baikal again. Smells are always the most powerful memory triggers for me, and the smell of cooking on fire, and Russian woods and wilderness, really made me feel like it was August 2007 again, and I was at Baikal and my life was less crazy, but on its way to becoming more so..... I don't know, it was just a good feeling to be there again. All of my pictures are up on my site, but here is one of my favorites, of our host making us lunch:


After eating ourselves sick, Kostya took us for a walk along the mouth of the Neva, and explained to me the history of the fortress there, right at the mouth of Ladoga, that was built by the Swedes (he told me and Lauren that we should go back and visit the dacha again later in May or June when the boats to the fortress are running so we can go in it and poke around), and also how this area was key in the siege of Leningrad. According to Kostya the Guide, the part of the Neva we were on was the very end of the blockade, and the part that was still Soviet, and on the other side of the river, where Kirovsk is, is where the Nazis held control. I found it all quite interesting, relaxing, calming, it gave me a place to clear my head, we skipped some stones, had one more cup of tea, and went home. The perfect day trip.