How to correctly compose a travel note 5 grades. The role of the travel writing genre in displaying national characters

However, it is clear that the genre of “travel notes” or “travelers’ diaries” did not arise today, but has a long tradition. Interest in the “other” was most pronounced in the 19th century, during the era of romanticism. Of course, there were reasons for this, because it was a time of formation of nations and the creation of collective identities that needed other cultural groups to define themselves: the identity of a group is always defined by what that group is not - in other words, by those who does not belong to this group. In the same way, one could say with confidence that this process of establishment and self-determination is based on a mythical matrix expressed in the binary opposition “we” - “they”, that is, “ours” - “alien”, and what is “ours” "almost always better, more convenient; this is order, a planned structure against the “alien”, which is amorphous, chaotic. The genre in which the picture of the “other” appears most clearly is, without a doubt, travel notes.

The reason for this is that the concept of the road encourages reflection, provokes thinking, develops thought, and forms new models of the psyche. Anyone who travels cannot help but reflect, because this is what life consists of - change, dialogue, sometimes even with oneself. Therefore, this genre is characterized by an active authorial principle.

Travel (or travel) notes are traveler's notes that contain travel impressions, descriptions of road incidents, observations, and which claim to convey to the reader new information about little-known or newly discovered countries. However, there is no consensus among experts regarding a clear definition of the travel writing genre. “Journey” is a collective form that includes, as a whole, elements of various genre formations.

The traveler introduces an organizing principle into the chaos of life (a sign of which is the very choice of route), transforming it into the special cultural world of his journey. Thus, any journey is an analogue of cognitive human activity in general, if it is carried out from a certain cultural position and has a given cultural character. Travel follows essentially the same epic pattern as the course of human life: the transition from one impression to another, the appearance of new pictures and characters. But if the process of cognition as such does not require the obligatory fixation of the known and mastered reality in the form of its model, fixed in one form or another, then the world created by the traveler should naturally “materialize” and join in this capacity to the objective values ​​of the cultural series.

The main genre idea of ​​“travel” was understood as the idea of ​​freedom. Therefore, “travel” was understood as a literary form that has maximum possibilities for an unrestricted choice of objects of depiction and an equally free, at the author’s will, transition from one such object to another. The idea of ​​freedom permeates all levels of the artistic structure of the “journey” and is enshrined in its constructive basis as the principle of free, plotless storytelling.

Travel writing is one of the most vibrant, lively, interesting, but at the same time the most labor-intensive genres of journalism. Let us emphasize once again that the travelogue is perhaps the oldest form of literature. And this is not surprising, since it was this genre that answered “the eternal desire of man to penetrate with his gaze beyond the limits of what is visible to the eye - to expand the horizon, to multiply the experience available to an individual in his short life.”

In Rus', “notes of experienced people” were also given great importance. In this regard, in literary criticism it is even customary to distinguish between the genre of ancient Russian “walks”. However, it is not in the “walks” of Afanasy Nikitin that one should look for the origins of the travelogue, which became so popular in the 18th century. The Western literary tradition made a significantly greater contribution to the development of the essay genre. The origins of the essay genre are the works of Swift, Smollett and Stern.

We can name several more striking examples of travel writing in world literature.

In 1826-1831, Heinrich Heine painted Travel Pictures. This is a sequence of thematically related artistic essays. The author places himself in the foreground of the work, but the role of an inquisitive, energetic observer suits him very well. Heine's journey through the Harz Mountains forms the basis of the plot. It is noteworthy that the poet not only describes what he saw, but also expresses critical thoughts regarding the social, political and cultural life of his native Germany.

The travel essays “Impressions and Pictures” by Federico Garcia Lorca, which were published in 1918, may also be extremely interesting for the inquisitive reader. Lorca's emotionality and naturalness are combined here with his deep simplicity.

The origin of travel writing in Russia was also due to the urgent need to acquaint the general Russian public with foreign life. In principle, this was the problem that N.M. successfully solved. Karamzin in “Letters of a Russian Traveler,” which can be placed at the origins of the Russian travel essay.

The travelogue has come a long way in its formation and development. At the same time, it has revealed itself as a flexible genre, able to quickly adapt to changing external conditions.

After all, a travelogue is one of the most open forms of expression for a publicist-artist. The author enters into direct communication with the reader, freely presenting the material. He can combine elements of history, statistics, natural sciences, express views on certain political issues, talk about personal adventures, feelings and thoughts, and encounters with people he meets. The publicist can at any time stop the natural flow of the narrative directly related to the journey, insert any short story into the fabric of the work, use a lyrical digression, etc.

The revolution of 1917 was a deep shock for travel notes. After it, values ​​other than those that existed in the former Russia began to take first place. New thematic varieties of the genre also emerged, for example, an essay about the Soviet village, an essay about socialist construction.

The travelogue genre developed, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union it lost popularity. Experts see the main reason for the crisis of the genre in the temporary abandonment of journalism as a method of journalistic creativity. Journalism, which replaced the Soviet party press, shifted priorities, focusing on information genres. Travel notes did not find a worthy place on the newspaper page.

However, with all this, we cannot claim that the travelogue is a relic. Today, more and more often, journalists are beginning to turn to this complex and labor-intensive genre. Modern Russian society is in dire need of analytics. And the travelogue, raising acute pressing problems of our time, provides him with this analysis, but framed in a vivid artistic form.

Considering travel writing in the context of modern culture, we propose to move away from the traditional formulations of the genre, which can be found in almost any textbook on journalism. In this regard, the remark of V.Ya. is correct. Kantorovich: “definitions - formulas listing the characteristics of genres, as a rule, are ahistorical, because they pretend to be valid in all eras. In this way, they are similar to the recipes according to which works of art are supposedly created. But there are no such recipes and cannot be, if only because in art they are constantly looking for and creating new forms; the former, already due to repetition, are passively perceived by human consciousness and are not able to reveal new content of life. But there is no work of art if it only repeats what has been passed and does not add a single new feature, no new image, or character to the picture of reality we have realized, if it does not raise problems that concern modern society.”

Note that only in the Soviet period of Russian history were there clear boundaries between the genres of newspaper and magazine periodicals. Now these lines are gradually being erased. As for travel notes, they have never been distinguished by their stability of form. In this regard, its division into separate varieties (travel, problem, portrait) has always seemed quite conventional.

At all times, the author of a travelogue had to show himself to be an extraordinary researcher. At the same time, “many writers choose for an essay a relaxed form of recording direct impressions, thoughts and associations born of a meeting with a particular reality. However, they subordinate their narrative to a single internal theme, a single image, clearly expressing their interested attitude towards what is being described and giving it their assessment.”

The quality of a travelogue, as before, continues to largely depend on the language in which it is written. “Simple, precise, figurative language makes it possible to make even a complex problem posed in an essay more intelligible and understandable for the widest range of readers. And vice versa, the most striking facts and phenomena become uninteresting, and the simplest thoughts incomprehensible, if you write about them in a confusing, illiterate manner.”

The work on the travel note itself consists of two stages. At the first stage, the journalist collects, checks and comprehends factual material. The second stage is the creative process itself, which is always purely individual and unique each time.

The first stage is the most responsible. The essayist records diverse factual material, from which he has to select only the most visible and vivid, from his point of view, facts. At the same time, a journalist should not give up on the little things that the skillful hand of a master can turn into vivid artistic details that illustrate the essence of the phenomenon being described.

The travelogue “represents an artistic and journalistic model of the real world. Moreover, the surrounding reality should not just be recorded in it, but depicted visibly, in images. The essayist, adhering to the factual basis, models with his imagination a picture of a “slice of life.” This is precisely the value of travel writing as a genre.

Travel notes (Lessons 23-24)

Travel notes, like an essay, are created on the basis of the author’s observations of the facts of reality, but contain (include) not only a reproduction of what he saw, but also the author’s thoughts and feelings in connection with what he saw. As K. Paustovsky wrote, “a fact presented literary, with the omitting of unnecessary details and with the condensation of several characteristic features, illuminated by the faint radiance of fiction, reveals the essence of things a hundred times brighter and more accessible than a truthful and down to the smallest detail accurate protocol.”

Travel notes and essays help to see how our country is transforming, where and how factories and power plants are being built, cities are growing, space is being explored, nature is changing, the way of life of people is changing, and man himself is changing.

The educational impact of travel notes lies in the fact that they truthfully and figuratively reflect life, that they not only affirm the positive, but also reveal shortcomings and difficulties - this genre is an important means of the author’s active intervention in life, in various phenomena of everyday reality.

Travel notes include a description of the area, landscape, portraits of characters, elements of narration and reasoning, and dialogues.

Lesson 23

Purpose of the lesson

To give the concept of travel writing as one of the varieties of the journalistic genre, to acquaint students with their features and structure.

Equipment

Books (for example, V. Kantorovich. “Notes of a Writer on a Modern Essay”; Y. Smuul. “The Ice Book”; N. N. Mikhailov. “At the Map of the Motherland”, “Russian Land”, “I Walk along the Meridian”; V . Soloukhin. "Vladimir Country Roads"; V. Konetsky. "Salty Ice", as well as A. N. Radishchev. "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow", A. S. Pushkin. "Travel to Arzrum", A. P. Chekhov "Sakhalin Island" and others.

Main stages of work

This lesson can begin in different ways: with a conversation, with an analysis of travel notes or essays available in the book for students “Develop the Gift of Speech” (see exercises 87-89, etc.) or collected independently, with a short introductory speech from the teacher and etc.

The sequence and variety of stages and forms of work depend on the specific conditions in which classes take place, on the composition of the optional group, its interests and capabilities, on the learning tools available to students (player, tape recorder, overhead projector, camera, etc.). It is very good if, while preparing for this lesson, students take interesting walks and excursions, record their observations and impressions, take photographs of the area, historical monuments and secluded corners of nature, record interesting encounters, voices of birds and animals on tape or in diaries, " village voices" and the sounds of a big city, railway station, river station, etc.

Let's look at the content of some stages of the lesson in more detail.

Selective reading and analysis of V. Peskov’s travel essay “The River of My Childhood” can begin with answers to the questions that are proposed in the assignment for exercise. 87 in the book "Develop the Gift of Speech." Or you can - and with a brief message about the author himself: what interests him, what he wrote, what he likes to talk about (remember “Steps on the Dew”, the program “In the Animal World”). To reveal the true meaning of V. Peskov’s expression “Each of us has our own river”, listening to songs in tune with this topic, viewing slides or film clips “Around our native land”, students’ sketches and photographs will help.

The head of the elective, together with the student body, selects in advance a song that is interesting for this group, and it is played at a certain stage of the lesson. We offer several songs to choose from (of course, the teacher and students have the right to replace or supplement them):

“My Motherland” (lyrics by E. Yevtushenko, music by B. Terentyev),

“I love Russia” (lyrics by P. Chernyaev, music by A. Novikov), “Native Land” (lyrics by V. Tatarinov, music by E. Ptichkin),

“I sing about Moscow” (lyrics by Yu. Polukhin, music by S. Tulikov), “Sea Heart” (lyrics by S. Ostrovoy, music by B. Terentyev), “Meadow Flowers” ​​(lyrics by S. Krasikov, music G. Ponomarenko). After listening to one or two songs (more songs can distract from solving the main task), the analysis of travel notes and essays can be continued. You should pay attention to the composition of the analyzed text (where it begins, how it ends, what parts it is divided into, why events are presented in a given sequence, etc.) and the features of the author’s language.

Students’ independent work in elective classes should be purposeful and specific. Students are offered differentiated tasks for one text or, conversely, similar tasks for several notes or essays. Here, for example, are the questions and tasks that can be asked of students when working on V. Peskov’s travel essay “The River of My Childhood”:

1. How does the author describe his favorite river at the beginning of the essay based on childhood memories? ("...For me, this river was the first and perhaps the main school of life... A nightingale trill at night... We learned to swim as naturally as we learn to walk in childhood... And how many joys and Fishing gave me discoveries as a child!”, etc.) How are the author’s feelings expressed when he sees a “river without water”? ("The river was without water... (cf. a house without windows, a forest without trees)... a grassy ghost of a river... And below the dam lay a dry and black canyon... a red-breasted bird, which had flown in for a swim, barely got its paws wet. .. The hour was especially sad when I finally reached the places that were especially dear to me...")

How does the author’s mood change when he sees the famous Usman Forest, cut by the deep-flowing Usmanka? (“My heart sank with joy when, already at dusk, the boat got out onto the wide reaches... And the whole life of the reserved forest stretched here, to the shores... On the shore, like stray bullets, they pierced the crowns of oak trees and acorns fell heavily into the darkness ... By the light of a flashlight, I wrote in my diary: “Reserved reaches. Happy day. Everything was almost like in childhood”...)

2. Explain the meaning of incomprehensible words and expressions that are important in revealing the content of the text (canyon - a deep narrow valley eroded by a river; reach - a wide expanse of water on a river or lake; floodplain - a low part of a river valley that is flooded during high water and floods, where good grass grows, a water meadow). Give an explanation of how local words and expressions are formed: tramp, shaggy, sweaty place; Find in the explanatory dictionary an explanation of the meaning of the words: bochag, pothole, chaplygi, etc.

3. Find in the text words denoting the names of plants, shrubs, trees (reed, willow, willow, willow, hop, sedge, meadowsweet, hemlock, alder, bird cherry), names of animals, birds, fish (osprey, crake, beaver, heron , sandpiper, nightjar, kingfisher, burbot, perch, bee-eater, ide). Which of these plants and animals do you know? What can you tell us about their habits and characteristics?

4. Carry out a word-formation analysis of words denoting the names of settlements: Moskovka, Bezymyanka, Privalovka, Zheldaevka, Lukichevka, Enino, Krasino, Gorki, Pushkari, Streltsy, Storozhevoye, Krasnoe. Find in the “Concise Toponymic Dictionary” by V. A. Nikonov and other manuals the origin of the names (toponyms) of cities, rivers and villages: Moscow, Smolensk, Tula, Pskov; Gorki, Krasnoe, Usman, Ples; Elan, Ugra, Unzha, Usolye, Pochinok, Priluki, Yamskaya. Try to explain the name of the village, town, village, city where you live.

Students’ independent work can be continued using the material from other exercises (see the student manual “Develop the Gift of Speech”).

Questions and assignments for exercise texts direct students’ attention to the connection between the content and form of travel notes and essays, and focus on a holistic perception of the text.

Analysis and discussion of the materials collected by students can begin by viewing slides, photographs, drawings made by the children on a hike, on an excursion, by listening to diary entries and rough notes. During the discussion, it becomes clear what made the students difficult in the travel sketches they began, what they were able to observe, what thoughts and feelings the pictures of nature evoked and how this “falls on paper”, reflected and recorded by the young travelers. Students read their notes and explain why such a beginning was chosen, what the meaning of this description is, for what purpose a dialogue or lyrical digression is included in the text, how the travel notes are supposed to end and how to title it. Experience shows that young travel writers pay little attention to justifying the purpose of the trip. The lack of motivation makes it difficult to perceive the text and understand the author’s position. Students often avoid descriptions of nature and locality, and if they introduce them, it is clumsily, formally, and sometimes lacks argumentation.

The texts of the exercises and the assignments for them are designed to help students choose a place from which a city or village street, a river or lake, or collective farm fields can be clearly seen, i.e., the “objects of description” necessary for travel notes. But students’ attention should not only be focused on shortcomings.

Young authors who reflected living impressions in their notes and expressed their attitude to the fact and event being described should be encouraged; included their own thoughts and reflections in connection with what they saw; were able to unambiguously express their civic position.

Summarizing the discussion of the collected materials, the leader of the elective classes points out that travel notes and essays help the reader see how our country is transforming: cities are growing, factories and power plants are being built, high-rise buildings are being raised, railways and new metro lines are being laid, virgin lands are being developed . And at the same time, man himself, the builder and creator of a new life, is transformed.

Students finalize the collected materials. This stage of work can be carried out in the form of consultation with individual students. The supervisor answers questions about the content and form of travel notes, helps with advice on improving the composition of the essay, points out errors in language and style, and gives specific advice and recommendations.

Consultations with groups of students working on related travel writings are recommended. The leader may invite individual students to read already completed parts of the text, ready-made fragments of work, and even, if time permits, entire essays. The attention of writers is drawn to how the main thought (idea) of travel notes is expressed, whether it is clear to the author himself and whether it is brought to the reader’s consciousness, what this work teaches, whether travel notes are well constructed (is there anything superfluous that is unsaid and unproven), what is the author's language? If necessary, and at this stage of work, it is possible to once again turn to the analysis of the texts included in the student manual “Develop the Gift of Speech” (see, for example, exercise 88 and the assignment for it).

Lesson 24

Purpose of the lesson

Check how students have mastered essays in the form of travel notes.

Main stages of work

Independent written work of students.

Discussion of written essays and preparation of materials for the release of the next issue of the newsletter “Around the Native Land”.

Statement of the problem: 1) two or three students are asked to prepare messages “M. Gorky about the essay” and “Memoirs of G. Medynsky about the essay” (see exercises 94, 95); 2) several students are given assignments to talk about how essay writers collect material for their essays (see exercise 98).

The purpose of the publication is to replenish the site’s collection with reviews and articles about travel, attractions and related topics. And to our authors whose materials meet the conditions of publication, we will happily and gratefully issue an electronic certificate of publication on our educational media website.

Examples of travel notes

The presentation is in the first person (I went, we saw), high emotionality of presentation is allowed, etc. - simply a public diary entry about your travels. The form of presentation and volume of publication are free.

• Traveling around Karelia:
• Traveling around Bashkiria:
• Trip to the village Varnavino:

Examples of descriptions of attractions

• Krasnoyarsk pillars:
• Sights of Kaliningrad:
• Sights of Nuremberg:

Examples of reference information

• Water parks of Anapa:
• How to get to Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau castles from Munich:
• How to get from Cologne to Brussels:

Requirements for tourism materials

• Text volume - from 1500 characters without spaces.
• The uniqueness of the text is from 70% according to text.ru or ETXT anti-plagiarism. You can check the uniqueness of the text online by inserting the text on the website http://text.ru/. You can increase uniqueness by deleting fragments of previously published text; rewriting them “in your own words”, adding the author’s text.
• Number of photos: no less than 1, no more than 30. Photos can only be sent by you personally; do not send photos from the Internet or taken by other people without their explicit instructions.
• Photos can (and preferably) not be compressed, but sent directly from the camera, as is. You can add your own watermark to the photo.

In the article, indicate the name of the photo in the right place:

Number the photos and attach them as separate files. It is advisable not to insert photographs into the text of the article. However, if you find it difficult to attach photos, insert them into the text of the article in the right places.

Article outline

• Material name
• Announcement - brief information about what will be discussed next. Approximately 4-7 lines.
• The material itself. When describing attractions the following is welcome:
  • indication of the name;
  • a brief history of what the landmark or place you are describing is famous for;
  • address, phone number, work schedule, cost of visiting, link to the official website;
  • photos.

note

When preparing an article, please note that the main part of the material is text and information about the attractions and your trip, and not photographs (although they are also important). The text should be written in such a way that it is useful to those travelers who plan to go to the same place: tell your impressions, tell us how to get to the place, what to look for and other subtleties.

How to submit an article for publication?

All work is sent by email. The letter is drawn up strictly according to the template:

• The subject of the email is "PUBLISH A NOTE"
• The body of the letter contains information about the author:
  • Last name, first name, patronymic of the author without abbreviations in the nominative and dative cases (issued to whom...) or pseudonym.
• The following are attached to the letter:
  • text file in Word format with the text of the travel note;
  • photographs in JPG format, the names of which have been changed to: Photo 1, Photo 2, Photo 3, etc. Please, if you have a lot of photos, do not upload them to file storages like Yandex.Disk or Mail.Cloud - just send all the photos in parts: for example, 5-10 photos in one letter. This is due to the fact that over time, files are deleted from file storage.

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Deadlines for reviewing publications

Travel notes are quite difficult to publish on the website: at least minimal photo processing, text editing and layout of the article on the website are required, so we publish travel notes within about a month. Sometimes faster, sometimes longer, but we publish materials in order, regularly.

My article “Travel Notables” appeared in the June issue of Cosmopolitan. Actually, I’m writing about this here in order to give you the idea to bring back from your summer trips not only inspiration, but also notes ready for publication.. It doesn’t matter where you publish your observations: in LiveJournal, in an almanac or in a collection, the main thing is to realize that the summer was not in vain! And travel notes are a great start for something more!

Previously, wide flared jeans and video equipment, like the soul of a Soviet man, were brought from distant countries. Nowadays, tourist fashion requires us to be able to write travel notes or, in modern terms, travelogues.

In fact, travelogues have been around for a long time.. The tradition began with the Greeks and Arabs when they began to describe their travels in detail, in the smallest detail. A little later, the trend reached Europe. By the eighteenth century, “books of travel” had gained such popularity that almost every famous writer necessarily resorted to this genre. For example, Alexander Radishchev, who anonymously published “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” in 1790, wrote a real travelogue, without even knowing it.

“When I lived in Malaysia for two years, friends suddenly suggested that I write down my observations in the form of travel notes. I liked the proposal, and I began to think about what interesting things I could tell about the country. I didn’t want to simply state well-known facts. Then I had the idea to do a series of interviews with local residents, since I know the language well. Who did I meet during that year: from Indian taxi drivers to a stern, but incredibly attractive oil tycoon. For each interview, I included a portrait sketched in pencil and my impressions of the meeting. Thus was born a project that will soon be launched by a well-known publishing house. And now I have moved to Vietnam and have already begun to meet the Vietnamese.”
Lika, 29 years old

In travelogues, the author not only describes his journey, but also passes the national flavor through the prism of his perception. This is a piece of work in an individual style. After all, it’s one thing to copy the words of a guide who told why some temples of the ancient Angkor complex are closed to tourists. And it’s quite another thing to secretly explore these temples and describe your advice in notes, interspersing them with funny stories about how you were almost arrested by law enforcement officers, from whom you managed to pay off with two dollars.

In a travelogue, events are often presented in a certain chronology, but you can choose any topic. You can concentrate on serious thinking about the country and the fate of the nation, as I did Rebecca West in the book about Yugoslavia “Black Lamb and Gray Falcon”. You can settle in one of the cozy corners of the planet and convey in your notes the atmosphere of the place, like Peter Mail with his bestseller A Year in Provence. If you are in the country “on duty,” describe your impressions of your work, combining professional tales with local legends. This is exactly what I played on Denis Tsepov in his book “Keep your legs crossed, or Russian tales of an English obstetrician,” in which he described how British ladies give birth.

Look through search engines to see how many people have recently been interested in the country you want to talk about. But if, for example, there is no demand for Djibouti, this does not mean that there is no need to write about it. Look for unique ways of presenting, think about how to interest the reader. It might be worth inserting scary legends or diluting the description with excerpts from old letters and diaries. For example, so much has already been written about treasure hunters that if you stack books, you can build the Great Wall of China. At the same time, the topic of diamond prospectors remains almost untouched. Write down everything that might be useful, get to know the locals, but don’t get carried away with “jokes, legends, toasts.” Otherwise, you can end up stealing girls and communicating with charming horsemen. However, this can also make a great story!

Tips for beginning travel bloggers:

1. Brainstorm, on your own or with friends. Collect all the facts, notes in notebooks, price tags and used tickets, guidebooks, maps, photographs. Think about what facts you are missing and where you can find them. Sketch out a plan on paper.

2. Decide what exactly you will describe: conversations with locals, impressions of national cuisine, private accommodation or fun adventures on the road. Focus on one thing!

3. Think through the plot. If you are going to simply describe your life in the spirit of “woke up, ate, went to sleep,” readers will fall asleep with you. Add vivid details, dialogues, interesting incidents from your life abroad.

4. Imagine your potential reader and think about what he can glean from your travelogue: a description of convenient routes, a master class on trading with local sellers, information about “secret places” where you can buy jewelry almost free of charge.

5. Make a “do’s and don’t’s” list for the reader- what you can do and what you cannot do in this country. If you know that in Thailand you cannot pat children on the head or give money with your left hand, write about it!

6. Use your strengths make your travelogue unique, decorate it with drawings or photos. It’s great if you know something about cooking and can not only review the best Parisian restaurants, but also write how to prepare the “poor Parisian’s sauce” at home. Or refute the usual:who said ladies don't swear, ha, cross your legs!

St. Sophia Cathedral in Polotsk. Photo from the Internet, may its author forgive me!

I stood with a group of tourists on a green hill and looked at the tall snow-white Cathedral, it seems, St. Sophia. It was in Polotsk, I was 13-14 years old and this was my first independent trip without my parents. I remember that I was holding a small notebook in my hands, where I tried to write down the names of attractions. I didn’t have any other gadgets then, in the late 80s. And the desire to at least somehow document the trip has already arisen.

It was later, years later, that I learned that there is a genre of travel writing in travel journalism, when a traveler writes down his observations, the most exciting moments of the trip and his impressions of it. Especially impressions that fade over time, like old printed photographs. Of course, in our digital age it is easier to photograph than . But it is still important to note some details in the notebook.

These are the names of settlements, cities, names of people with whom we met and talked. By the way, it is important to record as accurately as possible. Take the time to write down what the weather was like and what nuances it brought to the trip. The names of streets, cathedrals and monuments, and most importantly - the state of mind that they evoked, because even cities have history, not just history.

I admit, I have never been to the sea, to foreign countries or to the mountains (except that I saw the Ural Mountains from the window of a train and car). For now I travel most often around Russia. It's a pity that I didn't always take notes. But even now I can remember some details. In the village of Mikhailovskoye I was surprised by the tall, powerful pines (or spruces?) and shady alleys with bridges, and in the Svyatogorsk Monastery, where Pushkin was brought to be buried, by narrow dark corridors and the poet’s death mask, similar to a theatrical one.

Minsk is remembered for its neat station square and bright, uncrowded metro. In the mysterious town of Nesvizh, for the first time I saw a medieval castle with guardhouses, a courtyard, parks, earthen ramparts and deep ditches. In Yekaterinburg, I visited the site of the death of the royal family at a time when, instead of the Church on the Blood, there was a cross with a photograph of the royal family. And nearby you could see the hills from the blown up Ipatiev House...

Now I live in Kazan, but once I lived in Zelenodolsk and. I visited Bolgar, Urzhum, Malmyzh, Nolinsk... Even in the smallest provincial towns there are so many interesting and unique things that you won’t see anywhere else. In Nolinsk, for example, the ensemble of St. Nicholas Cathedral amazes with its grandeur and... abandonment. The tall white walls of the cathedral are being destroyed by time, and perhaps by people, although it is an architectural monument. I saw it and remembered it...

And one day we went to the Urals, to the city of Serov by car. My grandparents and my mother’s parents lived there. It’s a long way from the Kirov region, it took us a day to travel. But it was an unforgettable road trip! Through the sea-like Votkinsk reservoir, the cozy city of Tchaikovsky, in flower beds, the foggy bridge near Kachkanar... But much was forgotten, because I did not write down the interesting names and impressions they made.

Here we stand in Europe. And Asia is already around the corner!

I had a camera with me (a point-and-shoot camera with film), so they photographed some things, for example, the border sign between Europe and Asia, which is marked in this place by a white elegant pillar. On it you can see completely inelegant, but eternal inscriptions: Vasya was here... We were there too! Here we are showing off in a photo, an old one, still in print, and slightly blurry.

By the way, there are a great many such pillars throughout the entire Ural Mountains (which is more than 3000 kilometers) and they are all of different types. Everyone has their own story. Unfortunately, I forgot (because I didn’t write it down!) in which place in the Ural Mountains the pillar near which we were photographed is located. But maybe some of the readers will recognize this place?

And from the notes you can create a travelogue that will please the author and benefit other people. They may never visit there, but thanks to the author's travel notes they will learn a lot of interesting things.