During the trip to Vytegra, the group and I spent
most of our time on a bus talking about the trip and about our expectations of
Vytegra. We also talked about our time
in St. Petersburg. We stopped at a café
for a snack before dinner, and for dinner we ate at a restaurant near the
monastery called Alexander Svirsky Monastery.
While
on the trip, one of the things that stood out to me in terms of contrast with
St. Petersburg would be initially the complete difference in
infrastructure. Once we left the area of
St. Petersburg, the quality of the roads went downhill very quickly and
sharply. Guard rails were very rare on
the road, there were no shoulders on the road for stopping a car, and there was
lots of snow covering the road with little salt melting it away. Even still, people drove dangerously on the
roads. This just reinforces the idea
that I have learned that the way that power, wealth and just things in general
are distributed is in a very vertical way, with the rich cities holding on to
the most of everything and very little reaching out to the rest of the
country.
This
experience melds well with the literature that we have read for the course
prior to our trip in that in regards to the documentary we watched on a small
town that was undergoing degradation.
These experiences and the documentary both show a degrading horizontal
axis with the smaller towns and the areas outside of power losing to the areas
that have power. It is pretty much the
opposite of urban sprawl at this point, with all those at the edges seeking the
center. It makes me sad to see this
because I highly enjoy the culture these towns and areas have, and I do not
wish to see them become absorbed by the larger cities.
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