All news

Russia’s Medvedes visits recreation camp for children in Far East

Medvedev examined the rooms resembling staterooms on a ship
Photo ITAR-TASS
Photo ITAR-TASS

VLADIVOSTOK, July 3 (Itar-Tass) — Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who is making a trip to the Far-East of Russia, on Tuesday visited the all-Russia children’s recreational camp Okean.

While on the camp, he was taken to the two main pavilions called the Parus /the Sail/ and the Brigantina /the Brigantine/.

Medvedev asked Okean’s Director General Valery Marzoyev whether the Parus was the very same building that had been destroyed by fire in 1993 and then restored.

“Yes, it’s right that building,” Marzoyev said. “The construction works took quite some time and were finished only in 2003.”

Medvedev examined the rooms resembling staterooms on a ship. “It really feels here like you’re on a ship, and took at the staircase here. I myself would be happy to stay in a building like this one for some time,” he said.

As the Prime Minister and the accompanying officials were moving from the Parus to the Brigantina, Marzoyev told the Prime Minister about the history of the camp, the construction of which began in 1974 and was completed ten years later.

He recalled that the first money to help kick the project off was raised at a subbotnik – a day of voluntary work for free.

“To leave the state budget intact and to channel the monies raised into land amelioration and development on the territory, one more subbotnik is actually needed now,” Medvedev said jokingly.

Marzoyev recalled at some point of the tour that the Brigantina had already provided accommodation to children from the Chinese province of Sichuan in the wake of a disastrous earthquake there in 2008.

“We received a thousand Chinese children then and the Chinese side presented us with two computerized classrooms afterwards,” Marzoyev said.

Medvedev calls into those classrooms and spoke to the children who were taking classes in economics there.

He was also taken to the camp’s library and the Internet center and was given an opportunity to take a picture of the scenic panorama from the balcony of the Brigantine. Upon assessing the picturesque seascape of the Sea of Japan, he asked Marzoyev if it was possible to bathe in the sea at the moment.

The director told him it was not, as the bathing season in the Vladivostok area begins in mid-July.

Marzoyev also asked the Prime Minister to hand over to the camp some 50 hectares of federal lands adjoining its territory.

“That’s a good idea and we’ll have to think it over somehow,” Medvedev answered.