Russia

A collection of photos from Moscow, Siberia, and Lake Baikal. There are other pictures from the Trans-Siberian Express and the Moscow Metro.

Check out our interesting correspondence with Dmitry, our tour guide in Siberia.

Cool. So I figured out how to update my site from the more remote parts of the globe. This does away with all those annoying travel emails, now you can check my site at your own risk.
So....
We've spent the last couple days in Moscow, the most charmless city in the world. Think bleak, gloomy, depressing, and gray. Instead of the all-out despair of a city like, say, Calcutta, Moscow complacently languishes in the throes of a depression. Its no wonder that Russia did not produce a single optomistic writer, if I was born here I'd hit the bottle before kindergarten and probably wonder about the meaning of existence well before I even reached puberty. Russians are mean and unhelpful - they don't even bother saying "Nyet" when you ask them a question, instead they just turn their heads away in disgust. If MIT was to create an entire city, Moscow would be the results. Endless factories, smog, and smokestacks dotted with the occasional steel or granite monument to Lenin or Stalin. Nadja and I haven't seen anyone smile since we've been here. Laughter seems unfamiliar to the Russian people.

In every way, we feel like we're in a time-warp back to the 70s. Eastern European fashion (if you can call it that) is downright frightening. The women wear nauseating floral-print suits, and the men tuck their beige mesh shirts (with the pink flabbiness protruding through the holes) way into their pants. Once they hit the age of thirty, the women like to dye their hair atrocious shades of red and purple.
Russian food lives up to its poor reputation - we've been on a diet consisting of fried pancakes filled with meat and ice cream, the only two edible food items in this country. Nadja seems to have bad luck - her baggage didn't arrive with us in Moscow, and she got bitten by a stray dog. We had to go the American clinic so she could get rabies injections.

More to write but gotta run... Anyway, we can't wait to get out on the 5 day train to Siberia, we leave later tonight. Later, -Anna




August 9 - update from Ulaan Baator, Mongolia

We left the nightmare that is Moscow on Train #10, the Baikal, to Irkutsk. We shared a compartment with two older Russian grandparents who, on the third day, became the first Russians to actually communicate with us. Every Russian city along the way reminded me of a giant cemetary. "Death" was the only word that came to mind when I glanced out at the many smoke stacks, factories, and power plants that blighted the landscape. The Siberian tundra itself was scenic and picturesque, but I wouldn't call it breathtaking. Birch forests, lakes, more forests, some hills, etc... Siberia is quite green in the short summer.
I celebrated my twentieth birthday in the middle of fucking nowhere, passing through various Siberian coal stations. We tried to celebrate with some beers in the restaurant car, but found the "lunch lady" dressed in a ridiculous tight black dress, sitting on the lap of drunk military soldiers. "Nyet, Goodbye, Goodbye" she said, waving us away. So we drank our beers ghetto-style, in between train cars, trying not to spill as the train lurched dramatically from side to side.
Dmitry, our guide in Irkutsk, was a strange, strange man. I've figured that I have 100% failure rate with booking tour guides, which I think is rather impressive. (The Egyptian tour was a major disaster, in Vietnam our motorcycles broke down and the guides stole our money, and in Nepal our Sherpa porter ran off with our bag.) He was tall, bug-eyed, super-skinny, and wore a fanny-pack 24/7. The first thing he did was give us the keys to his apartment, which we weren't staying in anyway. Then he proceeded to do a backflip on gymnastic rings that hung from his kitchen, all the while mumbling incoherently about the "expedition" we were about to embark on, the large chunk of "pine sap" that was stuck to his arm, and the cranberry stains in his bathrub from "crushing berries for jam." Seriously.
On the way to Lake Baikal, the oldest lake in the world, he actually let Nadja (Who's driven a stick-shift only once before) drive the car most of the way. She was a pretty good driver, too. We stayed at a farm on the lake for 2 days, amongst beautiful rolling hills and grasslands. Each night, Nadja and I took turns flagellating each other with birch branches as we shvitzed in the banya (steamhouse), as is the traditional Russian custom. Russians only take banyas in the winter, when every five or ten minutes they jump in the snow to cool off, and then go back to the Banya. To each his own, I guess.
One day we hiked through the hills about 8km to see some ancient petroglyphs carved into a rock wall. On the way back to the farm, Nadja, Dmitry, and Lena, a Russian girl from the farm, decided to take a very strenuous route that followed the contour of the mountains, straight up and straight down. I wasn't feeling up for a difficult hike, and my feet were covered in blisters, so I decided to head back to the farm on the same route that we took to get there, even though Lena had led us through a confusing maze of jeep tracks that were mostly overgrown with tall grass. Very, very, bad idea. To make a long story short, my blisters popped and my shoes became too painful to wear I ended up hiking - probably more like limping - over 10km (I got very very lost) through the hills of Siberia, completely barefoot... good times?
Nadja and I experienced our first Russian family get-together that night on the farm. They backed their car right into the picnic table, opened the doors, put on what sounded like Lite FM, and totally drank us under the table. I swear, these people don't stop, and they get seriously offended if you turn down a drink. The one time I tried to subtlely spilling the top of mine, they caught me and made fun of me the whole night. All I recall is shouting drunkenly in Russian: "Zavayte Vyp'em" ("lets have a drink!)" and giving toast after toast after toast, another Russian tradition. The vodka seemed to melt down the language barrier, and with our elementary Russian (da, nyet), I *think* we managed to have a political conversation. That, or we just yelled out "Bush! Kerry! Pushkin! Putin!" I really can't recall.
Nadja ended up getting pretty sick and passing out on the stairs outside of our log cabin. ("I just fell asleep on the stairs," in her words). We had a bit of a situation when Dmitry, in his extreme frugalness (he would even insist on sharing tea-bags to save money) refused to pay for his food and board at the farm. The owner of the farm, a super-nice woman named Sasha, became extremely distraught, and things got a bit messy. She refused to accept our payment for his food and board. We gave her two books as a gift, and she was so touched that she started to cry. The whole thing turned into a two-hour emotional farewell: tears were shed, and we got some old Russian music on cassettes as a reciprocal gift from the farmers.
Dmitry himself was quite the shady fuck, repeatedly asking if we'd go swimming (naked) in the water with him, and if he could take a banya with us. He caught a glimpse of my tattoo and proceeded to tug on my pants (I slapped him), and told Nadja that she had "very nice breast, nice hip" after which Nadja gave him a strong lecture in American etiquette. When he asked me if I had dredlocks just "to make people laugh, and point, and say, what is this?" I slightly flipped out, and citing a personal story which he had told us earlier in the trip about cultural differences, I asked him if he wore a thong on Venice Beach "just to make people laugh, and point, and say, what is this?" Score one for me.
Our time with Dmitry had come to an end. He made me remimburse him for the tiny shred of thirty-year-old gauze that I used to wrap my blisters on the hike - 10 cents. When we paid him for the tour, we ended up being down exactly 20 cents. He promptly whipped out his calculator, converted the 20 cents into roubles, and demanded payment. Ahhhhh, good old Dmitry.
Anyway we just took a 36 hour train (11 hours of it spent doing apparently nothing at the Russia/Mongolia border) to Mongolia. We shared a compartment with a Mongolian trader and his five year old son. They forced poor Nadja, who still had the taste of bile in her throat from the previous night, to drink a shot. I got wasted pretty fast, as each "shot" was equivalent to at least three shots.
We arrived in Ulaan Baator, the coldest captial city in the world, with an average yearly temperature of well below 0, this morning. Mongols are really friendly which is a pleasant change from the mean Russians. We're trying to get together a short motorcycle tour of the Mongolian Steppes, and a longer jeep tour to the Gobi... and given my 100% awful track record in booking tours, we're in for some crazy times.
Later,
-Anna