A city where tourists are not welcome.
Having traveled to all the interesting cities around Moscow, our campaign decided that we could try to take a chance and go to the more distant Smolensk. We expected that the half-million European city, which celebrated its 1150th anniversary a month ago, is quite suitable for caravanning. It turned out that it was not so.
Surprises began already at the stage of ordering a hotel and a restaurant.
Having found the most pretentious restaurant on the network (“Smolensk fortress. ” Located in one of the towers of the Kremlin), we decided that we could afford to celebrate our arrival in the city in it.
The polite manager of the restaurant, on the phone, said that you can reserve tables, but for this you need to make an advance payment and order dishes from the menu. Europe! 21 century! Yeah. Still Europe. Prepayment can only be made in cash, but the menu is not on the site and they cannot send it electronically. For some reason, this did not alert us, and the crew of the first car that arrived in the city rushed not to the hotel, but to the restaurant to place an order. In total, 15 people went to us, and one can imagine how much effort and time it took to call all the suffering, in order to read the menu to them from the sheet. The situation was complicated by the fact that several new people went with us, and we did not know how unpretentious they were. (You could safely say to your own - “What they give, then eat”)
When we came to the institution in the evening, it turned out that we were alone in the hall, and in the corner there was a man with powerful equipment and wildly loudly playing all sorts of songs.
Here I will give a dialogue with the manager.
- Can there be no music?
- Not. We have live music on Saturdays.
- But we are alone in the hall, there are 15 of us, quite a respectful number, and we want to talk. And so I can’t even hear my neighbor on the table. Is it possible without music?
- There are people in the next hall who want to dance. (really, a family with a small child came to our smoky hall a couple of times and they danced a little)
But it's in another room. And we just want to talk.
- No impossible. The singer has already been paid by the restaurant.
- In this case, we will pay a penalty to both the restaurant and the singer, just let him leave.
- (After painful reflections) No, you can't, because on Saturdays we have live music.
We couldn't leave. Tired, and the pledge was a lot. As a result, instead of communicating, I just had to put on kerosene and start dancing. When we were leaving, the manager came up to me and said reproachfully - “You see how much fun you had, but you didn’t want to”....(I must admit that the musician was not bad. He quickly caught our “wave” and sang quite professionally. ) Bill 22.000 rubles. Food quality is average or below.
The hotel was also difficult. The price for a room in Smolensk hotels of the middle class starts from 3.900 - 4.500 rubles. per day, which is beyond the means of some members of our group, and simply unreasonable. I had to look for economy class options. Judging by their websites, inexpensive Smolensk hotels are quite nice and we were ready to make a reservation in one of them when our fellow traveler and friend, an FSB officer, contacted his colleagues in Smolensk and asked them to tell us how and what. It turned out that ALL the cheap hotels in the city are, at best, rendezvous houses specializing in hourly rooms, or just frank lupanaria. The only inexpensive hotel for which they had no information was the Black Pearl.
I was responsible for booking the hotel, and having some experience behind me, I understood that when I announced to the people about my choice, gundezh and disputes would begin. And I had almost no choice. In order to stop any attempts at discussions, I scribbled a whole poem, where I told in detail about the hotel, and about which rooms got to whom, and about prices and about services. According to the rules of good manners, it was also necessary to answer and argue in verse, and this already strained. (I inserted a piece of the work taken out of context below)
"". . . I booked a hotel like.
Not a Hilton or a Sheraton
Of course he is more modest, and yet
Not a hut and not a hangout.
I did not sleep at night, I smoked along the way,
Looking for a hotel for you
And I understood - or inaccessible,
Or sloppy, creepy feces.
And that's when the dawn broke,
And I'm weak and oh---l,
Found! Hooray! Hotel worthy
With a strange name - "Black Pearl".
"Pearl", for those lazy,
Who doesn't speak English.
She is comfortable and beautiful
And the toilet is not leaking…”
Well and further in such spirit. There were no objections, and the "Pearl" was ordered.
I really love class 1 or 2** hotels. I had to spend the night in the bedbugs of Arkhangelsk, Magadan and provincial Yalutorovsk and Zavodoukovsk, but when I saw the Black Pearl, I felt uneasy. Those. they are ruins among ruins. Only worse. We had a friend with us who, in his mid-fifties, remembered that he needed to slow down with business and education, and it was time to finally get married. He married a girl much younger than himself and, being a wealthy man, spoiled her with trips to all sorts of Monaco and Goa. And if for us, experienced people, the view of the hotel was an absolute shock, then for a young maiden it was simply deadly. I expected her to throw a fit and go back to Moscow. (Fortunately, I got it wrong. )
Inside, everything turned out much better. Very good rooms with a standard set of equipment. True, frank, almost pornographic, pictures hanging over the bed in the junior suites said that the lack of information about this hotel from the local FSB did not save us from living in a house of rendezvous. Although maybe hoteliers just have such a peculiar artistic taste.
The hotel can be forgiven for its sauna. A huge room decorated with paintings on the themes of ancient life. A large illuminated swimming pool with a waterfall and a fountain of air bubbles in the middle. The dining area has expensive, beautiful wrought-iron furniture and a table with a stone top, which is not crowded with a large company. As expected, there is a room with a double bed for carnal pleasures and another incomprehensible room, where there were several imposing leather armchairs. We came to the conclusion that this is also for comfort, but, so to speak, fragmentary. We have been to different saunas, but we have never seen such luxury. (about 1000 rubles per hour for the entire room).
Early in the morning, when I went to the store to buy something for breakfast (the hotel cafe is only under construction), the receptionist sadly answered my “Good morning”, “Is it good? ”. Of course, I was taken aback and noticed that some people in police uniforms were wandering around the first floor of the hotel, and their Gazelle with flashing lights was standing at the entrance. The first thought was - “Someone of ours got drunk after dancing and drinking in the restaurant. All. Hana trip. ” But when I was walking back, I saw that at the entrance to the hotel there was a completely beaten gentleman, almost without a face, and he was not ours. It turned out that a warm company was having fun in the small sauna of the hotel at night. Then some of them (at 4 am) decided to freshen up on the street. There they met a gentleman from the Caucasus. Then there was a dialogue. Then a few more mountaineers arrived. As a result, a wild scuffle and shooting. What a shame they fought, including with a microphone from a karaoke, broke it and also broke through the wall of the hotel at the entrance.
In the morning, with some difficulties, an excursion was booked. In the thick informational Talmud “All Smolensk” there was no special section of city tours. We had to call a lot of travel agencies specializing in Turkey and Egypt before we found what we were looking for. A wonderful guide from a rare breed of provincial intelligentsia, which is now almost impossible to meet, was so pleased with the fact of the tour that at the end she even sang the Smolensk anthem for us. She was very lamented that on November 4, the day somehow connected with the Poles, who got hit on the head near Moscow, we, the only tourist group in the city, respected Smolensk with their arrival. And the Smolensk people, too, were not among the last in beating the Poles. (Guide, plus a twenty-seater bus - 3900 rubles for 3 hours. )
The city made a strange impression. Enormous money and effort were poured into preparations for the jubilee. Moscow also contributed by sending Tajiks. All the houses in the center have been painted, the monuments have been restored. But everything is too redundant and deliberate. It turned out somehow acidic and plastic. Like Disneyland. The flair of antiquity is completely gone.
What was absolutely incomprehensible - there were no souvenir ruins anywhere. Those. nowhere at all. I couldn't even buy a lighter or a magnet with "Smolensk" written on it. We also went to some Talashkino. It is associated with a princess unknown to me and also with Roerich. I did not go. I sat in the parking lot and fed pies to stray puppies. So in this Talashkino in the souvenir shop there were 7 (seven) items of souvenirs. And that's it. It is not clear why the city practically does not use its tourism potential. Yes, there in a year, with the right approach, you can become an oligarch.
