Expect to stay for three nights to get the full experience: long strolls along the promenade, slow-paced meals in your dacha and in neighboring cafes, a stop at the Levitan museum or the area’s eight historic churches, visits to local sea bream smokehouses and old boating stations, and yacht cruises down the Volga.
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Go in July or September for prime people-watching, said Shevtsov, when you get peak summer weather and music festivals or vibrant fall foliage. (Winter is so bitterly cold in Plyos, he likens it to a Eugene Onegin drama.)
According to Tepper, you might run into Medvedev at the morning farmers market. “Russians love their own culture, and this is a place where they reconnect with their own Russian-ness,” he explained. Then book tickets for the opera (there’s a state-of-the-art theater in town), and check out the new brewery and Hidden Russia Museum Complex, which has individual buildings dedicated to facets of the local lifestyle—everything from yacht-building to fish-smoking and, of course, wooden architecture. Both debuts are bound to draw attention.
Poke your head into La Villa Plyos—the home that was supposedly earmarked for Putin and is now being converted into a six-star spa—and queue up at Kuvshinnikova bakery for cooleyka, a local riff on American cheesecake made with sweet cheese curds. “Our most distinguished guests always take one back to Moscow,” said Shevtsov, so clearly you should, too.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.