We also saw President Putin in some unexpected places. All photos from July 8, 2006.
Vitrine in the Stalingrad Battle Museum gift shop (with the vozhd' himself).We are the happy owners of the ceramic magnet in the lower right-hand corner.
Watching over a used bookstore, which - as I found after waiting for theshopkeeper to return from lunch - had a rather disappointing selection.
In a "Volgogradskii Suvenir" kiosk, with toothpicks,henna for hair-dying purposes, and other essentials.
2 comments:
Thank you very much for the pictures. If I ever make it to Russia, Volgograd is the one city I really want to see.
I was married to a Russian and took a cruise down the Volga river (Saratov to Volgograd to Astrakhan and back up.) Very interesting, so many things to see.
If you go, go with a guide (a native Russian), there's just too many things that can go wrong or get one off course or whatever (unless of course you speak Russian and know your way around travel in Russia...)
The war museum in Volgograd was interesting, but the "guides" made it a useless experience. They insisted that we stay with them as they bussled by most the interesting (to me, anyway) displays, only to languish in front of some display or another that was of particular importance to native Russians or locals but otherwise wasn't all that much to see. And of course they only speak Russian and chatter away in rapid-fire colloquial fashion.
Oh, and they wouldn't allow one to take pictures - even after charging us an exorbitant (by Russian standards) fee for the privelage of taking pictures. Every time I tried to take a picture in that museum, the same guide who'd already asked me fifty times to see the receipt for the special fee would insist that I produce it yet again, and then would try to instruct me where I had to stand and what exactly could be in the picture and etc, and would only let me snap one frame per exhibit. Utter nonsense, but that's Russia for you!
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