Rivethnoexp. Part II. Myshkin, Rybinsk, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Ples

July 18–21, 2011

A crucial part of navigation on the water is knowing the signals and codes—lights, buoys, etc. Every watercraft (and airplane—since it’s an aircraft) must have a green light shining on the right side, a red one on the left and a white one at the top. There are many other variations (for example, at night it’s possible to tell a jumbo barge from a hydrofoil ship by lights alone), but these three are the obligatory bare minimum. The red and green lights are visible only from the sides and front of the ship. The white one can be seen from all sides. If we see a white light at the top and a green one below, it means the ship is headed to the right in relation to us. If at night we look out the window and there’s a powerboat heading straight towards us, it will look like this:

The big white light on the left is the moon.

Myshkin

Myshkin used to be an ordinary, featureless little town on the Volga. Ships would pass it right by without stopping.

Its buildings were slowly falling into ruin.

But one local historian decided to change all that. And he came up with a legend.

The legend is so awful and silly that I won’t cite it here. Its level of historical credibility is on par with that of the background story in a theme restaurant’s menu. The essence of it is that the city of Myshkin allegedly owes its name to a mouse (myshka in Russian). Unable to come up with anything better to offer the world, they settled on this über-far-fetched story.

Severgasbank. Mouse Bazaar

Now everything here is all about mice.

Mouse Chambers

There’s a Mouse Museum.

The souvenirs: mice.

Mouse souvenirs

The taxis: Mouse City.

The flowerbeds: shaped like mice.

Even Lenin, with a drunk passed out at his feet, appears to resemble a mouse.

Apart from the mouse theme, there’s also a fairly extensive museum of local history, which contains buildings and structures from various time periods collected from the entire region.

And—for whatever reason—an auto museum, which even has an American school bus.

The town even has its own wooden Jesus talking on a cell phone. I was convinced that these statuettes exist only in Perm, where they’re dubbed “Perm wood sculpture” and passed off as some inimitable local artistic accomplishment.

Sculpture. Early 19th century

A good example of creating interest from scratch is the city of Lviv. It owes its popularity to the opening of multiple theme restaurants, although it would have had far greater etymological success appointing itself the birthplace of lions (the name of the city is a derivative of the word for “lion” in Russian and Ukrainian).

We sail on.

Pass through yet another lock.

Rybinsk

I thought Rybinsk was just some lame village on the edge of the water reservoir. But the view of it from the water is incredibly gorgeous. It actually looks like a real city.

And quite a pleasant one at that. It was even a flourishing city before the revolution.

Then the Soviets came along and put Lenin up on someone else’s already existing pedestal.

And added a fish out of flowers.

Some highlights among the local gems of beauty: the magnificent lattice supporting the payphone.

Attorneys. Entrance through the arch

Hand-painted signs indicating the location of nearby manholes.

A trash can.

Another trash can.

Citizens! Help keep the city clean!

Old street signs.

B. Kazanskaya St.

New street signs. Maybe not the prettiest ones in the world, but points for trying.

V. Naberezhnaya

A rare “Well-Maintained Building” plaque (these plaques usually say “well-kept” in other places, but the ones in the Volga region all look like this).

Pure charm, in other words.

Charm. No vending! Violators will be fined

Looking at the Rybinsk waterfront, some readers will first notice the young woman, others—the sculpture. Personally, the first thing I notice here is the buoy marking the left edge of the navigable channel, even though it’s black. I don’t know who came up with the idea of painting them black, but it makes them very hard to see. And failing to see a buoy never leads to anything good. A white one is much more visible and indicates the same thing.

Yaroslavl

The sun sets on the horizon.

And Yaroslavl rises up in its stead, in all its incredible nighttime glory. It turns out that, in general, cities look very beautiful from the river in the nighttime. The impression of beauty is magnified if there’s a yacht club (or a boat dock in simple terms) right in the center of the city.

New signs, mounted with screws, were put up for the city’s recent thousand-year anniversary. This is the pinnacle of what the founders’ descendants have been able to achieve in all this time.

Andropov (formerly Rostovskaya) St.

Historical buildings now have “Mobile Guide” plaques. You dial 76 1000, punch in the building’s code, and listen to an audio-guide. But the creators neglected to account for one thing: the locals don’t care about the city’s history, and visitors won’t call because they don’t want to rack up massive roaming charges.

Mobile guide. Community Almshouse. Cultural heritage site. Protected by the government. Dial 76 1000, enter building code 092, and listen to a brief audio recording about the history of this building and its creators

A trash can.

Kirov District Property Management

An adverticycle. Some bar that stole Esquire Magazine’s logo wants to let everyone know about its promotional cocktail prices.

A rare find: a manhole cover with a weave pattern.

A rarity: a 1960s bathroom sign. Of the same age as the pedestrian crossing arrow in Yegoryevsk.

Paid bathroom

The trace from an insurance company’s plaque (see specimens in the wild in Ganja or Girona) dismantled by a local collector named Jan.

Outside his own office, Jan has put up a restored and painted plaque (they all used to be color-painted).

St. Petersburg Insurance Company

A pre-revolutionary business card tile has miraculously survived by the door of a grocery store.

Arthur Perks

A plaster house number is still alive and well.

The number “29” (directly in the center of the photo) has made it to the present day by sheer miracle. It spent its entire life unnoticed behind a rain pipe.

Contemporary Yaroslavl boasts incredibly beautiful payphone half-booths. The cast-iron thingamajigs at the top are evidently meant to complement the arched windows of the building behind them.

A Sberbank micro-branch serves as an extension of the bus shelter. Unsurprisingly, the part meant for passengers has neither glass around the perimeter nor lights.

A modern bus schedule display.

Kostroma

Although the river is broad here, there are no yacht clubs downtown. The city isn’t expecting guests from the water. We had to raft up our three boats at a pier that’s still under construction.

Our stop here is brief—we grab some refreshments and continue onwards.

Bar

Ples

Still the same quiet oligarchs’ resort. Only now they’ve also built a ski slope and a summer house for President Medvedev.

The city’s infrastructure is divided into two parts. The entire waterfront (with restaurants) and almost all the buildings (which have been converted to hotels) belong to the oligarch Shevtsov. And at the top of the hill, in the little houses and verandas descending down the slope, is a guesthouse and restaurant with the strange name Private Visit, which alone is a good enough reason to visit Ples. And break the bank, so to speak.

* * *

The banks of the Volga along our entire route turned out to be amazingly clean and well kept. Our hopes of coming across a massive trash dump were completely dashed. The rusty private boat garages we encountered from time to time were the only thing in any way dissonant with the natural landscape.