She said houses are popular. Inside our “model” log

She said houses are popular. Inside our “model” log cabin, constructed especially for tourists, there is a beautiful green tiled “stove” covering nearly one-half of one wall. That •only works as heat storage for hot air passing through. The room also has a “baseboard” heater of a four inch iron pipe where I suppose a one inch pipe of hot water passes to provide additional heat in the winter. Outside all the village houses are stacks of wood cut for heating this winter - for the most part birch, the most prevalent forest tree, together with fir.

While it seems that most people in the USSR want to live in Moscow (read N.Y.C.) or some other large city, clearly, as in the U.S. most live in other places - villages, towns and lesser cities. Our guide said Vladimir has a population of 350,000 “the optimum size,” according to her.

We have no opportunity to talk to people here because of language problems and the fact that our tour takes up all our time, or leaves us exhausted when we have free time. It is amusing to hear people we are traveling with discuss this situation, just as they did when we were in China.

We don’t have time to do most things we are scheduled to do. We have to decide whether or not what we have had arranged for us is worth more or less than what we can arrange for ourselves. Tonight I decided to skip supper to write this - we are being overfed! I had heard the food isn’t especially good here, but I’ve found it quite good, although short on fruit and green vegetables. I’m skipping supper because we spent two and a quarter hours at lunch today.

The first course was tomato salad; the second, scalloped fish; the third, chicken soup with lots of cabbage. Then came a big individual bean pot full of sauce, vegetables and large pieces of veal, very hot, served beside a plate of cut up fried potatoes and sliced cucumbers. White and brown bread and butter are served with every meal. For