We arrived at our hotel in Vladimir after dark following an long day or more of travel. Early the next morning, Palm Sunday, we got up early to begin visiting churches and worship services. Although we did not spend much time at the hotel, we were able to get our first daylight look at our home base. We had been told various things as preparations for our trip, but being there was different in significant ways from our expectations. That is to say, better in some ways, not in others. Subsequent experience has taught me that such variation is nearly always the case.
From outside, our hotel was hard to distinguish from many of the buildings in Vladimir. Given that none of us could read Russian, this kind of uniformity afforded us no clear way of noting distinguishing features should we have needed to find our hotel on our own. Those of us who had grown up seeing black and white news footage of events in the Soviet Union would have described the blocky, multi-story, nearly colorless, nearly featureless concrete structures as typically "Soviet era."
To be fair, new buildings were going up. We saw construction in various parts of the city, so surely this and other Russian cities experienced renewal in the twenty years since our visit.
We began and ended each day meeting together for devotions, debriefings, and next day assignments in a room basically lacking furniture. My understanding is that team meetings of this sort are common for athletic teams and for teams doing short-term missions, but it was a new experience for me. These meetings were important for many reasons. I understood their value although I found myself impatient at times to get back to the room Stefan and I shared to write in my journal.
Many of us sat on the floor around the edges of the common room where we had our meetings. Well, that choice was more comfortable for some, i.e., the younger among us, than for others.
Some needed the ease of the couch and chairs.
And some of us preferred standing to sitting on the beautiful parqueted floor. We were told that the hotel was undergoing renovation, which had begun with the common rooms and would at some time in the future work through to the bedrooms we inhabited.
Some of the bedrooms assigned to us were "better" than others, but all shared the same basic layout: two single beds along the sides ending at a window with a steam radiator and a very short bureau at one end, and a desk at the other.
The photograph to the left is my side of the room, which I have been able to identify by my travel bag. Our window looked out onto another building, which I believe is the first building featured above. For identification purposes (if you are inclined to look for such clues) I will note that the window in our room matches the windows in the second picture above, whereas the windows of the pink building match the windows visible from our room.
I will also note that what might be construed as mismatched wallpaper in the photograph of the bed to the right is, in fact, the curtain. This photograph is some other room, as one can easily tell from the carpet. That said, the diamond patterns clearly prevailed when design choices were being made lo those many years before.
In those minutes before, after, and between other obligations, the journal keeper sat at the desk at the end of his bed and wrote the things that made these blogs possible. If I had a gift as a student other than my curiosity about nearly everything natural or man-made, it is that I am usually able to make notes that will summon memories. It is quite a bit more difficult to work with notes written nearly twenty years ago than with recent notes, but the practice seems to hold up better over that time than one might expect.
The only remaining information one might need to fill out the profile of our living circumstances is the bathroom that one passes to reach the sleeping area.
I shall leave it with the observation that we found the shower/toilet area workable and that we have seen in our travels conditions much more primitive.
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