holmes away from home: who's been to the very first cathedral in russia? this girl.

last saturday, we went to novgorod. can i just say, AMAZING. i love this place. i really do. even though it's a city of 350,000 people, it's still considered just a town here. and it totally had that small town feel to it too. i loved it! it felt like being back home in montana. where everyone is just walkin down the street and you cross when you feel like it and you don't have to worry about getting run over by a crazy russian driver, and it was just all around a nice place to be. it made me happy. getting there however, turned to be not a simple task....

so we decided to take the 8:30 bus, which meant we would meet at the metro at 7:15. i was gonna get up at 6 to get ready, but i was up till 2 the night before at already tired, so i woke up at 7, and got ready super fast, half asleep and left the house at 7:15. off to a good start already. so at the metro, 2 of the girls aren't showing up, aren't answering their phones, and one of them has the directions to where we're going. we thought we knew what metro stop the station was at, so we took off. eventually one of the girls called us and we got some very vague directions to where we were going, but we thought we'd work it out just fine. false. we got off the metro, headed in what we thought was the right direction for about 10 minutes, asked for directions, headed in a different direction. with a bus station no where to be found, we thought it was late enough to call the hazelwoods, one of our favorite senior missionary couples, and get directions. turned out, we needed to go 1 metro stop further. so we did. and when we got off, we realized that the bus station we were going to, was one we'd already been to, and knew where it was. oh, and we missed our bus, so we had to take one an hour later. and THEN we got stuck in traffic, and our trip took twice as long as it should have. by the time we got to novgorod, we only 4 hours to enjoy the beauty there. we didn't get to see everything we wanted to, but overall i think it was my favorite trip that we've taken. it was nice and relaxing (except for the bus rides), and still felt productive. plus i just loved it. it was good. pictures!