A Trip to the Town of N

What it’s like to experience smaller destinations in Russia.

In one of the recent newsletters titled “Establishing Realistic Expectations for Americans Considering a Move to Russia,” my final point was “Leaving Moscow and other major cities, you’ll discover that the rest of Russia is radically different.” What does "different" mean? Let's explore a real-life experience of traveling to a destination outside a major metropolitan area.

I was booked for a client session in a city with a population of slightly over 100K residents, located 240-something kilometers (149 miles) south of Moscow. The city was established at the rise of the Soviet Union as a mono-town. Mono-towns are cities developed by the Soviet system to provide housing for workers of large industrial objects. In the case, it was a chemical factory, the largest in the entire USSR. Nowadays, the city area hosts many different businesses, including manufacturing enterprises, but the chemical factory remains the largest. Approaching the city, you see that factory, which has the size of a small city: chimneys, pipelines, hangars, and other industrial-looking pieces of its extensive infrastructure, the purpose of which I have no idea.

240 kilometers don’t sound like a terribly long distance, but getting places in Russia is a challenge not always that easily sorted. On two previous visits there, I tried two options: driving from Moscow and taking a bus. Driving was very tiring, as driving on Russian roads is anything but easy. Taking a bus was not much better; in addition to an almost four-hour trip, the bus was actually a Russian-made minivan with narrow seats, extremely uncomfortable, shaky, and smelling bad. Having those experiences, I opted for a train. Quick research revealed that the local train station serves only commuter trains. I looked up a nearby station on a main line, and it was not overly far away. Now, dear reader, attention! For a 240 kilometer (149 miles) journey, Russian railways offered train rides from four hours to nine and a half hours, sleeper trains only. From the station, I’d have to somehow travel another 20-something kilometers to where I needed to be. Finally, I decided to ride a train to a regional capital. From the train station, I took a taxi, 66 kilometers (41 miles), one and a half hours of driving with a fare of 30 dollars converted to US funds. I left a generous tip, minding that the driver is unlikely to pick up a passenger on the way back and he’ll be driving an empty car.

The place I was going to is a typical non-touristy Russian town. In its ambiance, it’s a sibling to most cities of its size outside the Moscow region: dirty streets with potholes, pavement that needs an urgent rebuilding, Soviet housing of different architectural generations, and other buildings in various degrees of ugliness and decay. It was all dull. The city must be very green and maybe more vivid in summer, but in winter, it was gray and even more uninviting. Around central parts of the city are vast areas with detached private houses with large vegetable gardens adjacent, dirt roads with no sidewalks instead of streets, and randomly scattered industrial facilities.

There are three hotels in this town. One is an old Soviet hotel in which I had experience staying on one of the previous trips. That experience I wouldn’t want to ever repeat. Another one is a modern one with good ratings, but it was full to the brim because of some business event, and I just couldn't get a room there. I had no choice but to book a room in the last larger one, a local sort of “spa resort” with saunas, a swimming pool, and a plethora of other amenities. Hotel pictures showed a lot of outside entertainment options for kids. I think in summer, locals come to this place for weekend leisure, entertainment, weddings, and birthday parties maybe. Perhaps because of winter, their room occupancy was quite low. The room I booked was with a private dry sauna. I love sauna, and it was brilliant, as I would be able to relax a bit after the trip.

The navigation led the taxi through the city outskirts, to a location on a dusty road between some warehouses on one side and private homes on the other. The taxi dropped me off at the hotel entrance, and I stepped inside a reception area. It was very quiet, and I barely noticed a security guard leaning against the wall. A guy in his 30s with a face devoid of any emotions, he stood there like a piece of furniture, not moving and staring at one point the whole time I was checking in. “What a wonderful job!”, I thought to myself, ironically.

Steps away from the door, there was a reception counter, but there was no one standing there. I only saw the tip of someone’s tall hairdo sticking out from behind the countertop. It looked like those tall, curly wigs you see in French artworks of the 17th century. I approached, but it took a good minute for her to bring her face up and give me a grim, heavy look, like I interrupted an important errand, which namely was her playing with her phone. A middle-aged woman, a typical surly, off-putting persona you find in places like this. That hairstyle was not a wig, but her own hair, a hairdo which looked like a tall lighthouse mounted on top of her head. I bet it took her an hour to make it and a ton of hairspray, and she was wearing it for several days, carefully preserving it during sleep and adding some more hairspray to fix it each morning. She wore a lot of makeup on her face. She never smiled, never stood up from her seat, never said a word aside from what was required for a check-in procedure. I bet, outside her workplace, she was a totally different personality.

When the check-in was over, she called someone, a young woman dressed like a janitor who spoke broken Russian. She escorted me to the room, which had an entrance from the street. It was a motel-style place like you see in the US, but instead of parking in front of the entrance door, it had a veranda with a table and benches. Inside it was a kind of sort of a log house imitation, with everything wooden: floors, walls, and ceilings, and roughly made wooden furniture. Everything in this room screamed: "I am cheap!" I felt like I was back in the 90s, maybe in the early 2000s. As advertised, the room had a small sauna. I was explained how to switch it on and that it takes about an hour to heat up for use. I switched it on and went to a restaurant.

The restaurant was almost empty. I ordered a salad and a main dish. When the waiter brought my order, the contents of both plates looked suspiciously similar. The fact that she brought them both at the same time only made my suspicions stronger. Looking closely, it was the same frozen veggie mix you’d buy in any supermarket. The main dish had some chicken added, a salad had mushrooms perhaps from another frozen pack with some sauce. I normally don’t drink vodka in such places, because who knows what they serve you, but this time having three shots was inevitable. You see, it’s got to be three, not two or one, because of a superstition. I claim not to be succumbed by all that nonsense, but here I am ordering three shots. Why not send back the food you did not like? First off, Russian eateries do not know such things as sending back a dish. You eat what you are served, period. Even if they took it back, they would bring me something not much different, as local “chefs” are simply not capable of cooking anything else. This is what locals eat and it satisfies their taste, so why bother. On top of things, they might spit into your dish, because if you are not happy with what they fixed, you are a moron and deserve a treatment in accordance to that.

Upon returning to my room, I changed to take the sauna and went in. By then, the sauna was hot enough. Normally, after sitting in a sauna, you’d jump into cold water, but there was no water to jump in, so I just went outside to a winter’s cold and repeated warming in the sauna and going into the cold air for several times. Then, it was time for showering. I switched the water on and put shower gel all over my body, and hot water went out, turning into a freezing cold stream. I jumped out of the shower and returned to the room to call the reception.

Two minutes later, a guy appeared, again, not Russian, went to the bathroom, and started fiddling with the taps. Then he left. In a few minutes, he came back holding a new shower head, which he had replaced, as if that was supposed to bring hot water back. He turned the water on, and sure enough, it was cold. I asked him what this shower part had to do with water temperature, but he shrugged, smiled, and left. Minutes later, he appeared again and checked the water, which was still cold. He made a call somewhere and disappeared again. Here I am, practically naked, a towel wrapped around my waist, foam all over my body, sitting on a chair, shivering in the cold, the flow of which breaks in when the door opens, and the guy is cruising back and forth trying to do hell knows what. Half an hour or so later, the hot water returned. It was not boiling hot, but warm enough to finish showering.

I pulled the blanket off the bed, and I won’t describe what I saw, but simply tell you that the linens were not clean enough. I decided not to complain because it would take another hour to replace a whole set of bedding, including pillows and a blanket, and I doubt they had anything much better. Besides, it’s pretty much the standard of what you get. Luckily, I brought some clothes to wear in the room, which I put on, all of it, including socks. I wrapped the pillow in a towel and fell asleep.

The room rate included breakfast, and it was not a buffet breakfast. A waiter brought two plates with three slim slices of cheese, three slices of sausage, some butter, bread, and pancakes that I ordered for breakfast at the check-in. It’s a typical breakfast you’d get everywhere in Russia since Soviet times, so it was like an old, well-forgotten friend from decades ago. And they brought a small sachet with instant coffee and a cup with hot water. And again, it is very typical, as in hotels outside larger cities, this is what they serve you: instant coffee. There was a big coffee machine towering on the bar counter, right next to where I sat. I pointed at that machine, asking for a real coffee and willing to pay whatever extra it would cost. The reply was: “We can’t serve you that coffee because there is no one on duty who knows how to operate the machine.”

This, folks, concludes this story, because after breakfast, I called a taxi and it took me to the client, who lived in a fenced area on the other side of town, with homes for expats, a little replica of Western housing. I asked my client whether they were liking living in the town of N? And they confirmed.