Trip to Cheboksary

Cheboksary is about 900 miles away from St.Petersburg, it takes almost the whole day and night to get there. I am lucky to have friends in Nizhny Novgorod who offered to give me a lift to Cheboksary from Nizhny (160 miles on the M7 federal road). That was quite an experience. Usually this so called federal road is full of trucks driving at 60mph maximum. The road has a single lane to each direction, and no central reservation. The roadway is awful too. But thanks to recent regulations about whole country vacation from 1st till 10th January, the road was free and we were able to drive up to 70mph. The road police was also celebrating, and few officers we met were mostly busy finding drunk drivers than suing for speeding as usual.

The town's center is neat, and the most notable difference from other towns/cities in Russia is that Cheboksary is rather clean, reminding me quite clean towns in England/France where I used to work. Unfortunately, people don't smile like in Europe ;)
The new idol at the hill close to orthodox temples near the Volga is magnificent. Two Large copies/projections on the clouds look scary. Its interesting to see the pagan temple near orthodox churches. This could not happen in 17-20 centuries, and is a great beginning of 21 century for Cheboksary.