Album updated with pictures from our riverboat cruise to Samara here. I wasn't very attentive about taking pictures, so there aren't many of the boat ride itself, which was about 18 hours each way (for a four-hour jaunt in Samara - yes, clearly it was about the journey, not the destination).
That's ok, we can use our imaginations. Picture a river boat. Now, make it Russian. Specifics: Russian discotheque at night, which includes terrible European techno and terrible Russian dancing (for a stereotypically sexy nation, Russians cannot dance their way out of a paper bag); Russian women wandering around in inexplicably high heels and Russian men wandering around drunk, both at 10 a.m.; heavy Russian food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (it's like how you get fat on a Caribbean cruise, but with none of the deliciousness); Russian-style cruise narration, which is light on anecdotes and heavy on information on the various mineral deposits of the Volga provinces; and a little old man who turned out to be a stowaway, sleeping in the deck chairs at night, using stories about how he wept at Kennedy's death (J.F.'s, that is) to get our boys to buy him drinks at the bar, and shamelessly filching all of our group's free toilet paper from our cabins right before we all disembarked.
Now imagine that you have 27 American college kids, a resident director, and two middle-aged Russian women, and they all have cabins right over the boilers. And you'll have a pretty accurate picture. Thankfully, nobody got drunk and fell off the boat, or (to my knowledge) pregnant, so, there's that.
Not to imply that it wasn't fun. It was! It was just a very specific, very Russian kind of fun, which requires some gritting of the teeth.
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