Three bookish travelers on a trip to Leo Tolstoy's country house in Russia accidentally drank something that tasted awful. Despite trying to communicate the problem to the staff, they couldn't figure out what was wrong with the water.
The kindness of strangers: we thought we’d been poisoned at Tolstoy ’s house. Then a local explained what we had really drunkIn July 2019 I travelled to Russia with my sister and a friend. As three bookish girls, our highlight would be a pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana , Leo Tolstoy ’s country house.
The three-hour train trip from Moscow into the countryside where Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina and War and Peace was surprisingly luxurious, with slippers waiting on our seats and slices of lemon in our tea. That evening, after we checked our bank accounts, we realised we’d accidentally bought first-class fares for about A$300 each.
When bottled water arrived at the table we poured ourselves three tall glasses and took greedy chugs. Before anyone spoke a word, the expressions on our faces confirmed our experience was shared. It looked like normal water but our tastebuds told us otherwise. This substance belonged in a biohazard chamber, not our mouths.
We were parched, but our trepidation was even greater than our thirst. Particularly because both my sister and our friend were law students and started drawing parallels to the classic legalThen the food arrived. We thought we’d ordered a savoury pie and “Sophia’s traditional cake” for dessert. The pie was actually a cream cake and “Sophia’s traditional cake” a scone-like hunkA family of international tourists waved us down from the other side of the restaurant.
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