The story of how to be in a real fairy tale completely by accident.
It was in autumn. We ended up in the city of Vladimir on a cold rainy November day. Or rather, not even during the day, but in the evening. At this time of the year the days are very short and the night takes over very early. Especially when you consider that the cyclone brought thick gray clouds that hide the earth from the cold autumn sun.
We decided to spend the night in a hotel in the very center of Vladimir. I must say that the hotel was not very bad. Warm cozy rooms, a good breakfast for a small price - this is what we love the most.
We spent the evening walking around Vladimir at night. They wanted to visit the theater, but it turned out that there were no tickets. Then we decided to visit a museum.
One of the first museums that came across was the city museum in the former water tower. The museum told and showed things, objects and photographs of the late 19th century. Quite an interesting sight. An observation deck is now located on the last floor of the former water tower. From it you can see the panorama of the city of Vladimir.
Nice spectacle.
Returning to the hotel, we found several promotional offers for tourists at the reception. One of them was about visiting a real glass factory.
We were interested in this story and we phoned the organizers.
It turned out that not very far from Vladimir there is a small village called Ivanishchi.
This village lies off the highway from Vladimir to Gus-Khrustalny. Gus-Khrustalny is a Russian city, very famous for its glass crafts. There is a large crystal factory there. Once we already visited this city and were there in the crystal museum. Pretty interesting. I was especially impressed by the museum building itself, which used to be a temple, which in turn was built according to the sketches of the artist Vasnetsov himself.
In a word, the interweaving of stories.
The idea of a trip to a real glass factory captured us and early in the morning we had a good breakfast and hit the road. The distance from Vladimir to this village is not large, and in an hour we were already able to get to the place.
It was Sunday, but the plant was working. First, we sorted out various administrative issues and soon the guide took us to the territory of the plant.
The factory building is quite old and the technologies used are also old. In fact, in this village everyone is engaged in this production.
I saw with my own eyes how glass is heated to a liquid state in a huge furnace and a shape is blown out of this glass through a special pipe. It can be a glass or a decanter or something else.
Several operations and now the finished glass object.
Despite the apparent ease, this work is very difficult.
The entire floor is strewn with broken glass. The glassblowers themselves look very colorful. In their own clothes, they look less like factory workers and more like mountain dwarves who mine gemstones.
After examining the process of creating glass products, we go to the museum-shop at the factory. It turned out that there are a lot of cheap but spectacular glass products that we buy as souvenirs.
A trip to this small village made our trip much more interesting and richer.
I recommend visiting even in bad weather.
