Showing posts with label Fellowship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fellowship. Show all posts

Sunday, June 19, 2011

June 17 - The Great Novgorod

Today we arrived in Novgorod really early in the morning. We began the day with breakfast in our family homes then met back together and took a tour of a Russian Orthodox Monastery,  Alex  is getting a new appreciation for the United States and the Methodist Church because of how differently women are treated and viewed. After touring the Monastery we toured a wooden history museum that showed life in the 1880s in Russia. We then had lunch in park at a very nice little restaurant. Things in Novgorod are much cheaper than in Moscow, for example a taxi in Moscow could cost 10x what a taxi cost in Novgorod. Once we had finished lunch we toured the Kremlin which we figured out basically means fort or castle and we led on the tour by a native who teaches English and History, she was full of wonderful information. Novgorod is the oldest city in Russia and was very important in the history or Russia itself, so the 1000 year monument to celebrate Russia's 1000th birthday was built here. It is a bell shaped piece with all the influential figures in Russian history. We learned many legends about Russian and specifically Novgorod history. After the tour we headed back to our host family homes and ate dinner. After eating we all met back at Natalia's flat (the pastor of the church here) and hung out with two Russian college students and played games, charades was interesting playing with different languages. Lots of fun was had by all of us.