Cruising and a Visit to Mandrogy

Tuesday evening, we have had some success in posting as we approach Moscow. We will upload older posts as we have the bandwidth

Friday, May 12, 2017 

Still no Internet. 

We cruised through the night, along the Neva River, across Lake Lagoda (Europe’s largest lake), and onto the Svir River.  Very early this morning, the air was clear and the lake placid.   Not long later, on the Svir, the view from our veranda seemed like a classic Russian winter scene – snow on the ground and flurries swirling around the bare white trunks of tall birch trees.  And so it went throughout the morning – changing skies and occasional flurries.

We reached our dock in the small town of Mandrogy at lunchtime and spent a couple of hours on our own there.  The village was razed during World War II and reconstructed in the late 1990s as both a recreation center and a community of traditional craftsmen.  We visited a series of workshops housing a variety of artisans fashioning, selling, and demonstrating their crafts, which ranged from everything imaginable made of birch bark, painted silks, woven products, musical instruments, matyroshka dolls, wooden toys and implements, ceramics, pottery and paintings.  The workshops were clustered in a series of log structures heated by wood burning fireplaces and ceilings ranging from bump-your-head low to barn-like rafters.  

Though the presence of several hotels, large picnic pavilions, and a number of riverside dachas (summer homes) in the village are indicative of the summertime popularity of Mandrogy, today our ship’s passengers seemed to be the only visitors. 

Before dinner, there was a “meet your neighbors party” in the corridors outside the staterooms.  Sounds corny, I know, but it actually was fun to chat with those living around us.  Fueled by champagne, chocolate and strawberries, conversation flowed freely.