Sept 28, Uglich

Photos are of our kasha; pretty red church in Uglich; our breakfast hostess. (I can't control the order of photos.)

Sept 28
Today we disembarked in Uglich, a town of about 35,000, where we divided into small groups to go to the home of a local hostess who fed us breakfast. There were 6 in our group. Our home was a very modest house with lots of knick knack type clutter. Our hostess spoke no English so we were forced to use sign language and our recently learned 12 words of Russian. We had a porridge called kasha, which is apparently a generic word for any kind of porridge. It was really delicious but we have no idea what it was made of. Our guide thought it was perhaps millet from our description. We also had blinis with homemade raspberry-strawberry jam, bread with cheese and sausage and tea of a generic tea bag sort. Overall a lovely breakfast. Our hostess was very warm and welcoming. She enjoyed having pictures taken with each of us and asked us to send her copies (snail mail…..that should be interesting since she gave us her address written in Cyrillic.) We walked though Uglich and went to the Church of St. Dimitry on the Spilled Blood, so named because it was the site of the murder of the child, Dimitry, a son of Ivan the Terrible. He was murdered so that he couldn’t take the throne allowing Boris Godunov to become tsar.
Fairy tales are a huge part of Russian culture. The poems of Pushkin provide many of the fairy tales. Laquered boxes of Russia depict scenes from the fairy tales and all Russian children are told the tales. This afternoon we were told fairy tales. It was surprisingly entertaining. The tales were told by the same guide who taught us Russian language lessons and also gave part of the history. She did a great job on the fairy tales.