Day 328 revisited – Sat Sept 26 – “I wish they’d taken my wallet” or Why the Russia posts have no pictures

Considering how long our trip is, we have done a great job keeping track of our things. I lose more in Canada in an average year than I've lost on this trip - so far, our losses have amounted to small things: one bank card, one neck-cooling gadget called a Cobber, a pair of underwear, various pens. It's not much of a breadcrumb-trail - we packed well, we packed light and when repacking to leaving a place we can quickly scan a room and tell when something's missing. We watch our wallets in crowds, watch each other's backs in uncertain situations and know the quickest way to travel through a busy sidewalk is to split up and meet on the other side.

On day 328, we do the latter. We're in front of the Kazan Cathedral, a typical Sunday, working our away around the bus shelters and pedestrians. Busses pull up, unload, reload and leave. I find the quickest way through the crowd and stop to wait for Pierre on the other side.

I'm used to killing time waiting for Pierre - we spend a lot of time waiting and getting just the right shot - so at first I'm not surprised when he doesn't appear at first. I wait 10 seconds, 20 seconds, let my mind wander and then find I've been waiting a lot longer than usual. I flicker through my file-o-fax of reactions: irritated (what could possibly be so interesting to photograph?), curious (could it really be that good?), confused (is he waiting for me further ahead?)... Eventually, Pierre strides out of the crowd and for a split second it's hard to read his face: it's a cross between teenage-temper-tantrum and the expression on my brothers' toddler faces in our family's beloved we-just-kicked-our-favourite-ball-into-the-ocean photo.

He flashes the empty bag on his hip toward me. "They got the camera."

The pickpockets are long gone, but we walk around to see if there's anything we can do. Every fifth person in St. Petersburg seems to wear a uniform - soldiers, sailors, police officers - and the meanings of these uniforms are a mystery to us. We have no idea who to talk to on the street.

We speak to a couple of men in uniform that seem to be responsible for the Kazan Cathedral. Pierre explains the situation: 3 guys in black jackets (at least 2 in front, 1 to his right) stop walking in front of Pierre in the crowd, which blocks him from going forward (guys in black jackets), left (bus stop booth) or left (guy in black jacket).

At first it seems like an 'oops, pardon me' sort of situation but after a few seconds he starts to get suspicious, then the camera bag jostles...and when he reaches back the bag is already empty. It takes only a few seconds but the camera is nowhere in sight, probably already passed off to someone else like a sneak pass in football. Pierre looks at the thugs, the thugs look back, no one's holding anything and there's no one to get mad at. Players in the scene include “innocent bystander” who tells Pierre in English that the thief ran the other way down the street. Moments later, everyone's dispersed onto buses and into crowds and it's over.

The guys in uniform listen to our story, but they can't help us - it's not the type of thing they're responsible for, it seems. We hurry here and there, hoping we'll see someone that Pierre recognizes, or see our camera. We ask people directions to the nearest police station. A couple of non-uniformed employees come out from behind the counter and talk to us in the lobby. Can you tell us what happened? Did you see the men? Do you have insurance? They write us a letter that we could give to an insurance company if we had insurance on our camera. They see this almost every day.

Losing the camera is not our biggest problem - our problem is that we haven't backed up the pictures since leaving Huizhou. We've just lost Beijing and all of Russia, which works out to several hundred photos and approximately 2 months of our trip. We have a grip on reality - we realize we haven't lost a person or each other, and we're both safe and healthy.

Still, it blows.

We feel pretty stupid. This pretty stupid feeling lasts for quite a while and shows no sign of stopping once we get home. It's pretty constant the first night, only slightly less so the next few days and still kicks us in the ass every so often a months later. We feel stupid... for not having backed up the pictures...for losing the camera on a day when we didn't use it...for having extra water in our bags that we didn't drink which kept us from storing it in the pack like we often do at the end of a day... And so on.

On top of that, we think of specific pictures that we'll never see again. This happens every few minutes in the beginning : "Remember the one of the guard in front of the Forbidden Palace?" "Remember the mountain valley in Arshan?" We cringe again, and feel stupid.

After the 5th or 6th time this happens, I decide we need to be more proactive - we sit down and spend an hour or so writing down every photo that we can remember and that we're really sad to lose. We think of a picture, feel bad about it, then think of a new one and feel bad about it too. The mosaics in the cathedral, the Lenin head in Ulan Ude...Not a fun way to spend our time but we get most of the feeling sorry for ourselves out of the way, and are then able to simply deal with feeling stupid and angry. Plus, that way we have a list of pictures to retake someday when we come back.

We put up a poster near the place the camera was swiped - all we want is our memory card back:


We only have a few days to re-take photos of St.Petersburg. Pierre takes out our little point-and-shoot Canon Powershot to get a few photos of our apartment building...

...the view from the kitchen (the Neva river is just behind this white building)...

...as well as our cozy, furnished, and usually messy bedroom...


...and the kitchen:

He gets a few photos of the pillars of the Kazan Cathedral...


...the Church of the Spilled Blood where Pierre had originally gotten gorgeous pictures of the interior's floor-to-cathedral-ceiling mosaics.

Damn.

He reshoots the exterior of the Isaac Cathedral...

...various street scenes...



... and tries a few shots of the canals that carve rings through the interior of the city:

He even gets a little of his sense of humour back.


For me, most of the sting fades over the next few weeks - it still bothers Pierre months later, usually when we see a picture of a landmark in Beijing or Russia.

He looks, assesses and humphs. "Ours was better."

Days 323 to 332 – Mon Sept 21 to Wed Sept 30 – Week 4+ in St. P

Week four brings more lessons at the school, this time ending off with a certificate awarded for my time there (lower intermediate!). We say goodbye and thank you to all of the staff, and take a few more days to explore the city. Pierre does a lot of exploring on his own as well and visits the museum across from the Hermitage (which is not of the Hermitage, but one of a family of Hermitage museums - confusing) to check out the exhibits - as always, it's very large, very impressive.

Together we travel to Peterhof and make a point to hunt down each of the fountains that sound interesting - a few are activated by trick rocks. You walk by it, accidentally triggering a sensor, and a few seconds later it goes off. It doesn't really catch tourists unaware since the spots are pretty popular and the soaked stones and screaming kids give it away. During my last visit, these trick fountains were covered in tiny children running around in their bathing suits - their parents had brought them to the park to enjoy the fountains and cool off from the summer heat.

This time, it's teenagers who can't get enough of it. They walk past us, dripping with water as they head away to meet their school groups or as they head back to the trick fountain for another dousing. The inside of the palace itself is smaller than I remember, and very oddly organized. There are two rooms where we are not allowed to stop and look - we are shuffled through by the "gatekeeper" before we realize this, and then aren't allowed to walk back through the room to look. Pierre sneaks back in anyway and does his best to look until he's done looking. The gatekeeper is not amused.

Within St. P, we take time to see the Yusupov Palace, which is infamous for being the place where Prince Yusupov tried to kill (several times in a row) Rasputin before he finally succeeded. The house of one of the only former private residence that we visit, and it's beautiful, from top to bottom. It was not destroyed during the war and was kept in pretty good shape during the Soviet years, and so it's all original work, and not a reconstruction. The wealth of the family is pretty obvious in every detail (including the miniature Baroque-type theater in the basement, complete with tiny orchestra pit) - they might have been even wealthier than the Tsar's family at the time. The place is a bit more bare-bones than it was during its glory years (the art collection of paintings and tapestries now belongs to the Hermitage) but the detailing that couldn't be removed - the woodwork, the plaster work and carvings - are really impressive. (there's a site with great photos of the interior here)

After a few false starts (closed for renos and holidays), we finally visit the Zoological Museum and get to see the collection of mummified mammoth carcasses:


They're one of the many really unique things that only St. P seems to have, which is why we've been so stubborn about trying to make it to the museum. The mammoths (4 in total) are a little leathery but in good shape - the rest of the exhibit is good, but some of the displays are a bit bizarre. What's best described as Vultures Eating Man's Best Friend is a personal favourite...


...as well as the displays of house pets...

...though the cat mummies behind the stuffed house cats are pretty cool.


We have a few final visit with our hosts, Tatiana and Viktor and later get together with Sergey and his friend Grigor for drinks at Loft Proekt Etazhi - a series of galleries and restaurants hosted in what used to be a bread factory (as far as I know). It's a suitably funky last night for the arty city of St. P. At the end of the night, we head home for the last time, and do some final packing.

Days 316 to 322 – Mon Sept 14 to Sun Sept 20 – Week 3 in St. P

Pierre's been in the country now for about 6 weeks and has a good grasp of the Russian alphabet. Reading signs is one of his favourite pastimes. More often than not, it's trendy for signs to use "international" words that are common in English. It's not unusual to hear Pierre sound something out ("Kom. Pyoo. Terr") only to discover it's not really Russian. ("Kompyooterr. Oh - computer"). Some of them crack us up. "Business lunch" sounds like biznes lanch. "Snack" is snek.

During my class days this week, Pierre stays in and works at home or goes to the islands in the north of St. P to explore. Together we visit the Kunstkamera which is infamous for its babies- in-formaldehyde-in-jars exhibit, but which really should be best known for its ethnographic exhibits (in my opinion), especially the one on the Inuit. 100 year old waterproof jackets sewn from the intestines of whales are by far some of the coolest things I've ever seen. We also take a trip to the Russian Museum, which is a lot less sprawling than the Hermitage, but still huge. We make it through about half of it one afternoon and never make it back for the second half. The wing with the art from the 1900s is under renovation during our visit, unfortunately, so Pierre doesn't get to see the amazing collection of Soviet art. Next time.

The main event, when it comes to museums, is still the Hermitage. With several hundred exhibit halls (approx 400) it covers prehistoric time, the ancient world and carries on through to the start of the 19th century. It's very overwhelming and very easy to get disoriented in its halls. You can spot the tourists that have only enough time on their bus tour to drop by for an hour or so, because they look very impressed and exhausted all at once. Pierre makes a point of visiting every hall at least once, even if it's only to walk through it. By his 5th visit, he almost knows how to find his way around without the map. Almost.

Days 309 to 315 – Mon Sept 7 to Sun Sept 13 – Week 2 in St. P

By week 2 we're pretty well set up in St. Petersburg. We know where to find a good, cheap lunch in the main parts of town. We have a room of our own in an apartment in the southeast of St. Petersburg - a retired couple whose daughter lives abroad are renting their extra room by the week, and we're lucky enough to find it. It's near a major transit line, and across the street from the grocery store. Breakfast is usually porridge at home, lunch is usually in the city at a restaurant and we share the kitchen with Tatiana and Viktor in the evenings when we have our last meal of the day.

We've been lucky enough to get our hands on a couple of student cards - my comes legitimately with my language course, while Pierre (the non-student) receives his courtesy of someone-who -shall-not-be-named-because-it-could-theoretically-get-them-into-trouble's generosity. It really is a generous gift - museum prices have gone up since the last time I was here. A trip to the Hermitage costs about 12 CAN$ a visit each - with this card, each visit is free. Other museums are anywhere from one-half to one-fifth the regular foreign-tourist price.

St. Petersburg has a staggering number of museums - some are small, like the Museum of Bread (which we don't get a chance to visit). Some are larger, like the Museum of the History of the Political Police and the State Photography Centre. Apartments of famous people have been turned into museums, and we visit Pushkin's last apartment where he died after his duel.

Some of the women working the front cashes ("kassa") and the tour guides are old school Russians, not so much about coddling the tourists, and not afraid to take down a tourist a peg or two if they use a camera flash at the wrong moment or fall behind the pack or try to walk backwards through the exhibit. Others are milder and friendlier, and ply guests with photocopies of English guides to the exhibits which they later collect at the end of the tour.

Many are even gracious when they find themselves hosting us unexpectedly. Pierre and I walk into the Pushkin Children's Library (or, as their website says, "Central Children's library by the name of Pushkin") on a whim, and are greeted by one of the head librarians. I explain that we're just tourists in town and that I really love libraries and was just curious to see the inside of theirs. She takes us on a short tour of their reading halls and multimedia rooms, and arranges us a private visit to the rare books collection.

They are a Pushkin museum - if we hadn't figured that our from the plaque out front then we would have probably guessed it from a) the collection of first-edition Pushkin printings that they have, as well as books owned by Pushkin and b) the outward appearance of the rare book curator. He's a small man, in his late 30s, with porkshop-style sideburns and a slightly frizzy styling to his balding head that is very definitely an homage to Mr. P himself. He gives us a set of white cotton gloves to protect the pages from the natural oils on our fingers and lets us flip through some of the miniature books. The ones that stick out are the the earring books (with tiny tiny pages you can actually turn) and, our favourite, the book that looks to be simply a 1"x1" white notebook with blank pages...until the curator shines a black light on it, illuminating the text and illustrations: The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells.

Outside in the rest of the city, St. Petersburg has changed in some good ways. People seem less desperately poor, though there are clearly some that are still finding it harder than others. Fashion-wise, the streets don't look like something from an early 80s movie, and people come across as healthier and happier. There are more food stores and they shelves are well-stocked. The stray animal problem is under control - there are not many homeless dogs loose in the city and we don't come across any of the packs that were common in the mid-90s. Most importantly, the social safety net seems more firmly in in place for the orphans and homeless kids - no more groups of hungry, neglected tweens eating out of trash cans and trying not to bring too much attention to themselves.

The kids we do meet are extremely polite. A couple of 10 year old boys stop to talk to us while Pierre tries to get a shot of a WWII plaque from an odd angle on the ground. "What is he doing?" I explain to them in broken Russian the type of shot he's trying to get. "Oh - would it be ok if we looked?" Pierre shows them the screen. "It's really beautiful. Thanks for showing us." And they're on their way.

Another day, on a crowded bus, we stand next to a small boy of maybe kindergarten age is sitting on his mother's lap. At one point he leans over to us: "Excuse me," he says in Russian, "could you please let us pass? We need to get off at the next stop. Thank you so much." He bumps us lightly as he's stepping down. "Oh! Excuse me, I'm sorry," he says and continues to the door. Pierre has no idea what the kid is saying, but even he can tell that the kid is incredibly articulate. He says every sound and letter perfectly. His mother doesn't seem like she's coaching him at all - in fact, she barely seems to notice how precocious her kid is. Pierre and I vote him, hands down, the politest, smallest, most self-possessed kid we've ever met.

Class starts on Day 309 and my schooldays tend to all follow a similar pattern. I catch the metro at 8 am, then transfer to the green line after a few stops, walk through Sadovaya market then over and along a canal until I reach the courtyard of my school at 9:15. I set up in my classroom and my teacher and I work together until 1:00 when I eat my sandwich, study in the resource room until around 3 or 5, and either meet Pierre for sightseeing or head home on the metro. Most travelling is saved for days when I have no lessons.

This week, our big tour is to the town of Pushkin (also known as Tsarskoe Selo, or the Tzar's Village) which has the large and lovely Catherine Palace - sky-blue and white on the outside with gilded detailing and extensive grounds. Palaces in Russia are a bit odd to visit because, along with the staggeringly rich rooms and portraits are often photos of the rubble that was all that remained of the palace after World War II. It seems as though the art and furniture was hidden or saved as much as possible, but the building itself has often been rebuilt almost from scratch. It was a matter of pride for the Russians, a kind of a big eff-you to the Nazis - in fact, Stalin destroyed one of the palaces himself just so that the Nazis couldn't crow over being the ones to destroy it.

The Room To See here is the Amber Room - it "disappeared" for years and it's fate wasn't known until decades later - apparently it was moved elsewhere, at which time it was burned in a fire by accident. The people responsible for taking care of the room were terrified of being punished by Stalin for it and so made up a story about it "disappearing," most likely due to theft. (Presumably they lived.) A lot of time and effort has gone into recreating the room - it's definitely impressive but it's not our favourite room. It's a bit gaudy.

When we're not at school or sightseeing, we hang out at our place and work. Pierre plays guitar, I study, and we relax with episodes of the American TV show known in Russia as Shpyonka - we translate this into "Spy Girl" (more commonly known in North America as "Alias"). I consider this a kind of studying - Pierre and I watch the dubbed version and turn on the English subtitles. Jennifer Garner looks very Russian when dubbed in Russian.

Days 296 to 302 – Tue Aug 25 to Mon Aug 31 – Moscow!

For our visit to Moscow, another couchsurfing.com member has agreed to host us. We call her from the metro station in the early evening, as requested, but when it comes time to walk over I discover that the apartment address doesn’t include a street name and I can’t understand the name over the phone nor find it on our sub-standard Moscow map.

“I think it will be easiest if I come to meet you,” says Polina. We wait outside the Dobrininskaya metro station and try to look as I described ourselves to her: “I have blonde hair. Pierre is tall. We have many big bags.” We’re fairy conspicuous and Polina find us easily. The walk to the apartment feels long in the dark, and as we walk past and between and behind various apartment blocks, I’m very glad we didn’t try to find our way here by ourselves.

We set up our things in the guest room/office and Polina makes us some tea and feeds us bread with homemade strawberry jam. We visit awhile and get a general idea of how they like to organize visitors, including whether they arrange times for arriving and departing or have an extra set of keys.

“Help yourself to Internet,” Polina says. “You can arrange with my mother about keys.”

Her mother, Natalia, arrives home shortly after. She a bit of a nigh owl, she says, and hopes the sound of the tv in the living room won’t bother us.

“It’s ok,” I say, “we travel a lot and we always have an eye mask and ear plugs.” Her English is pretty good, but just in case the words aren’t familiar I use my hands to illustrate covering my eyes and plugging my ears. She laughs, thinks it’s a great idea. She turns and runs to get us our own set of keys so we can come and go as we like, as if by laughing together Pierre and I have passed some kind of test. We spend our first evening in Moscow watching Natalia’s favourite show on tv: South Park episodes dubbed into Russia. “At first I watch, I think terrible,” she says of the first time she saw the show. “But then, funny. Very funny.” Pierre and I watch and laugh at the voices chosen for the characters and at the visually funny bits. Natalia laughs almost non-stop through the episode.

The course of our stay in Moscow fits a certain pattern. We try to leave the kitchen free in the mornings to that we don’t interrupt our hosts while they get ready for their day. Around 9:30 am we go out for breakfast, get dressed, leave and don’t return until around 8 or 9 in the evening. Our hosts spoil us with home-dried herbal teas, homemade jams and borscht and fresh watermelon and wild apples. We eat a lot.

Downtown, most days we end up in or around Red Square, often for no particular reason. We just like it there. We discover the free toilets and the reasonably (for Moscow) priced cafeteria in the GUM shopping center on the north-east side of the square. To the south east is the famous St. Basil’s Cathedral with its famous onion domes.

“Wow, you weren’t kidding,” says Pierre the first time he sees it. “It really is…petite.”

Compared to other hulking cathedrals we’ve seen, as well as compared to the other buildings on Red Square, the cathedral looks like a miniature replica. The beautiful outside is matched by its interior, where the 5 or 6 tiny altars range from crazily ornate (St. Basil’s) to more subdued but still lots of detail (all the others).

At the northwest end of the square is the State Historical Museum, one of the best conceived and organized museums we’ve ever seen. Built in the 1800s, it was designed so that each room (the architecture, murals, colours) reflects the time of the artifacts held in the room. Each of the exhibits are well thought out and seem pretty comprehensive but they aren’t overwhelming, holding just enough detail to be interesting but not so much that we simply turn our minds off and just walk through.

Pierre can’t take photos inside nor read the signs (all in Russian) so we’re able to move through the museum at a good pace. Even so, by the end of our tour we’ve spent several hours and a lot of our energy on the museum. I add it to my list of things to go back and see someday.

To the south of the square is the Kremlin, which is not so much a building as a set of buildings behind a high wall. My memories of my last visit to the Kremlin are vague, but I don’t remember it being too expensive because if it had been, I just wouldn’t have gone. This time, prices have shot up: 15$CAN to see the grounds and cathedrals, and an extra 30$ to see the Armoury which holds all the jewels and wealth of the old tsars: thrones, crowns, gifts, weapons and such. The exhibit sounds amazing, but falls outside of our price range for museums. Instead, we stick to seeing the Kremlin grounds, were we walk past the old cathedrals and state buildings, and a few outdoor monuments like the never-used, cracked Tsar Bell which stands about 15 or more feet high.

On the grounds of the Kremlin, painted lines indicate exactly where people can walk. When tourists step out of the lines, the guards blow on their whistles until they walk back to where they belong.

We make sure to make time to visit the VDNK, which we affectionately call “Soviet Land” but which is actually an old exhibition ground that was built in the 30s and 50s, back when everyone was still very gung ho about communism. The architecture around the place is amazing with rocket statues, ornate socialist fountains where curvy, muscular, gilded statues of field workers hold sheaves of wheat and look majestic. There are the requisite Lenin statue and old-school soviet buildings, with lots of detailing like socialist mosaics, and hammer and sickles.

Pierre loves it. We have a picnic near the fountain and walk around. The last time I was here, the place was almost abandoned, but now it’s a lively place, with amusement park games, food stalls, and lots of roller bladers taking advantage of the wide spaces to do jumps and spins. Some of them are so good that we wonder if they spend the winters being actual figure skaters.

Back out in the rest of Moscow, we visit a few markets filled with the usually kitschy merchandise – nesting matrioshka dolls, fur hats, propaganda posters, painted boxes.

I love visiting cemetaries in other countries so we take time to see the Novodevichy Cemetary. I find that Russian cemeteries usually include an image or photo on the gravestones, sometimes fused onto enamel, and other times carved into marble or etched into granite. It is a very face-filled place and I find it a much more affecting experience to be faced with the image of someone who died rather than just their name, birth and death.

There are a few mass monuments to “heroes of the Soviet Union” who died in catastrophes in factories or in airplane and Zeppelin accidents.

While we are in Moscow, a prominent Russian dies after managing to live through the worst of Russia and making it well into his 90s. This man, Sergei Mikhalkov, is famous for writing children’s poems that are loved by several generations of Russians, and also for (re)writing the country’s national anthem a record three times: once for Stalin, once after Stalin’s death, and once after the fall of communism.

My Russian teacher later tells me an interesting story about this man. He was what she refers to as “a friend to power” and so the rest of the intelligentsia were very leery about being near him and watched what they said to him. He thrived during a time when most others were persecuted and ostracized, and enjoyed the trappings of favour – houses, vacations, and so on. Once communism fell, my teacher said, there was a period of time where people were asked to publically apologize/confess for things that went on during communism. At one point, the writer’s union had set up something like this. This man was the only person who came. On tv, he publically apologized for benefitting from so many others’ misfortune and from a lack of action on his part.

His freshly dug grave is located at a prominent crossroads of the cemetery – there are rows of wreaths and adults wipe tears from their faces as they stop for a moment to pay their respects.

While travelling around the city, we spend a lot of time in the Moscow subway system and get to see a few of its famously ornate subway stations. When the original lines of the metro system were built back in the 30s and 40s, building things that suitably glorified Soviet history and the Soviet people was a priority. Some of the stations have chandeliers hanging from the ceilings, others are covered in tens of mosaics, and statues of workers, soldiers, farmers, and more.

After a few days in Moscow, it’s time for us to register our passports to meet the visa requirements, so we spend one night in a hotel. We decide to consider it a belated anniversary gift to ourselves. We stay at a Holiday Inn because it’s convenient, relatively inexpensive and they’ll register our visa for free as part of our stay. (other places want to charge us about 30$ CAN each on top of the room price). We weren’t expecting much from a Holiday Inn and are very surprised to find that the room is one of the nicest we’ve ever stayed in, and comes with a free breakfast buffet that more than makes up for the Moscow hotel prices. Pierre notes down what he eats and converts it into typical Moscow restaurant prices (v.high) to enjoy the brief feeling like he’s beating the system.

- porridge (yogurt, walnuts, raisins, maple syrup)
- omelet w/all extras
- salmon (a lot)
- herring (a little)
- 4 baguette slices
- Grilled tomato au gratin (1/2)
- Blue/swiss cheese
- ½ pear
- Bowl of dried/preserved fruit w/ walnuts, fruit salad
- 2 cups coffee
- 3 glasses of juice

After so many months of travelling and paying out money, anytime we feel like we’re earning back some of our money is pretty noteworthy. As comfy as it is, we’re happy to return to the cozy, homey atmosphere at Polina and Natalia’s that night.

On our last days, we catch an excellent presentation of the Romeo and Juliet ballet at one of the minor theatres. We also drop by the Arbat where I try to show Pierre the lovely, tiled Wall of Peace where years ago you could see the hand painted tiles with anti-war messages from individuals and groups like Grandmothers for Peace. We’re disappointed to see that it’s now covered with uninspired graffiti (Dimitry was here) and we wander around listening to the street performers and watching the other visitors walk past. We visit Red Square a few more times and I spend a few hours in a local bookstore relaxing before we say goodbye to our friends and head off to catch the 22:10 sleeper train to St. Petersburg.

Days 294 to 296 – Sun Aug 23 to Tue Aug 25 – Vladimir

As we head west, the accommodation prices shoot upwards. A room that cost 36 $CAN a night in Ulan Ude is almost 80 $CAN by the time we reach Tomsk, and in Vladimir we expect to pay no less that 100$CAN a night for a “low-end” room.

We decide it’s time to try something new. In China, we stumbled across an article about a website called couchsurfing.com – people register, create a profile and then hunt the database for other registered users who are willing to have guests stay at their place for a few days. The profiles of the couchsurfing hosts give you an idea of who they are, what they’re interested in (cooking, travel, etc), their preferences in guests (non/smokers, male only, couples ok, families with children welcome) and the details about the apartment (cat, dog, smokers) and the sleeping arrangements (floor space in living room; extra bed in guestroom) as well as the level of hosting available (couch available definitely/maybe, meet for coffee only). We send emails to a few people, a few people reply. Addresses are provided, arrival dates/times are confirmed.

For Vladimir, we’ve been lucky enough to find a host – our new friend Artyom arranges to meet us at the train station.

“I’ll be there in 20 minutes. Wait for me please by the old black train.”

We take a seat outside by the train set up as a historical point of interest. While we wait, I translate a commemorative plaque and sign behind us.

“This says that Lenin visited here,” I say, “and the map shows the route he walked to get to where he was going.” It’s the only Lenin-was-here sign I’ve ever seen that included a map. Usually it’s just a plaque with a relief of Lenin’s profile and the date of some meeting.

Artyom arrives almost exactly 20 minutes later, and we walk to his apartment. By this point in our trip, Pierre has started using his scooter (originally bought to give his feet a rest) as a way to wheel around his largest backpack. It’s worked well in most of the places we’ve visited, but in Vladimir it’s slow going.

“I don’t think it is made for Russian sidewalks,” says Artyom. When the sidewalk is not cracked and potholed, it just doesn’t exist, and Pierre drags or carries the scooter over damp sand and around puddles.

On the walk over and while we settle in, we all get to know one another a bit. Artyom’s English is excellent, almost entirely self-taught. He’s a big fan of the American tv show House, which in Russia is called House MD to be clearer as to what it’s about.

“Your medical English must be amazing,” I say. He laughs.

Over the course of our stay we see his sister in passing, and also meet his grandfather Vladimir who loves politics and is curious about other countries, having spent so much time behind the Iron Curtain in his youth, separated from real news about the outside world. The guests that come to visit through couchsurfing.com are an endless source of information for him. Usually Artyom translates for him but when Vladimir discovers that I speak some Russian, he and I pick our way through a conversation.

He has many questions, and the variety of them are as interesting for me as the answers probably are for him.

How much is rent for an apartment in your city? Is there a lot of unemployment? Here in Russia now we have many girls and women who wear their hair like this [uses hand to indicate straight bangs against the eyebrows]. Do you have these women too? Have you had your nose ring long? Is it common? Why is it do you think that Canadian athletes don’t win many Olympic medals in sports events like track and field and so on? Do you like politics? Do many Canadians study Russian?

Our first afternoon in Vladimir is spent walking around the center. The middle of the main street holds a towering, white city gate. Not far away is one of Vladimir’s most famous cathedrals, the Assumption Cathedral. It sits on the top of a hill that looks down over the nearby fields, a river and the holding yard of the train station. It’s a popular spot for families with kids, women with baby prams and couples looking for a pretty place to sit.

We first see this Cathedral on a Sunday, and inside there is a service. We enter, I put on one of the available headscarfs and sarongs to cover my hair and my pants. There are a few other women also trudging around in these makeshift, shlumpy outfits – mostly Russian tourists. The devout are stylishly decked out in heels and skirts and coordinated head dresses. The Cathedral is the most impressive we’ve seen so far, and one of the first I’ve ever seen that wasn’t just scaffolding and bare walls. Most churches were quite a mess by the time communism fell, and most cathedrals I saw back in the mid-90s were just plaster with a few pieces of art. A lot of reconstruction was started at that time and as we travel across Russia we see the results of that hard work. The Assumption Cathedral seems to have been less damaged than others internally because the walls are almost claustrophobically covered in colour and icons of every size, some in frames, some painted directly onto the plaster. There are details on the underside of the window arches, and on every pillar. The crowd in the church is mostly women, with a few devout men here and there. A group of priests sings at the front altar, the younger ones in long slim black cassocks with goatees and hair pulled back into a neat pony tail. They sing, a group of women chant back in answer. Some elderly women kneel on the large metal tiles of the floor. Incense smoke clouds the air.

Nearby is the Cathedral of St. Dimitry, which is famous for the delicate ornate carvings that cover its walls. It’s now a museum. The building has large metal doors on each of its sides, and these each hold a sign that says something like “dear visitors, just a reminder that it’s bad luck to knock on the church doors.” I guess it really echoes inside and is irritating for the people who work there.

On Day 295 we head to the nearby village of Suzdal, which is one of the famous villages in the area around Moscow that’s known as the Golden Ring. Since we’re not sure that we’ll be able to see many others, we’ve gone out of our way to see Suzdal, which is the main reason we’ve come to Vladimir for a few days.

The guidebook says that this town has almost more churches than people which, once we arrive, doesn’t seem like a huge exaggeration. If every local person picked a church and stuck to it and if no tourists ever visited, they’d all have very tiny congregations.

The churches are all onion-domed and we arrive early enough to enjoy a few in the morning light. We check out a nearby wood building museum, whose buildings were collected from the surrounding areas. It’s pretty impressive to see onion domes made out of wood, and we walk through a few houses, a wood mill, a church, and the whole time I can’t help but think what a fire hazard these seem after the brick and plaster buildings that followed this style of architecture.

Not a unique thought, obviously, and each building holds a prominent sign explaining the emergency exits in case of fire and the location of the fire extinguishers. In a one-room building – a house converted into a gift shop – we find our favourite fire escape plan: a drawing of an arrow leading from the one existing room to the door. The fire escape plan is probably best described as: “in case of fire, walk outdoors.”

We continue our tour of Suzdal and head to the Nativity of the Virgin Cathedral in the south of town. Inside is stunning, with ceiling to floor icons and murals. The light is warm, and lands on the hands and faces painted around us. The incense is thick like dust in the sunbeams, and the light of the sun and from the candle flames reflects off of the metal halos that cover some of the heads of the saints. We spend most of an hour walking around the room, looking at what the light is doing that’s different this time around the floor, and listening to the monk chants plying from a set of speakers. Pierre takes photo after photo, and gives himself a sore neck trying to get the perfect shot of the ceiling.

The day (295) happens to be our 2nd anniversary, and we celebrate with a herring sandwich picnic outside on the old grassy knoll that used to be the city wall, and go to a mead-tasting hall for drinks. Suzdal is famous for its mead (honey wine) and the mead-tasting hall is empty when we arrive but preparing for a large group of tourists expected to arrive within the hour. Servers in medieval-type costumes walk by with tray after tray holding cups of warmed mead, lightly flavoured with traditional seasonings. Our server passes us an English menu that explains each of the ten small samples of honey wine on our tray:

Honey wine (plain)
Honey wine with mint
…with hops
…with spices
…with juniper berries and pepper
…with lime tree blossoms
…with hops and mint
…with hops and spices
…with hops, mint and spices
…with pine tree buds and rose petals

Between drinks we talk and snack on the bread croutons included on our tray (as palate cleansers), and by the time we finish the ten samples we’re pretty full and (for Pierre, who got the 5% honey wine) lightly buzzed. He takes a nap during the 20 minute bus ride back to Vladimir.

That night, we have a chance to visit a bit more with Artyom before we fold out our sofa beds for the night. We have to catch a bus in the morning, and rather than leave and come back for our bags, we decide to leave them in storage at the bus station while we tour town for one last time. On Day 294, Artyom wakes up early to let us out of the apartment and to relock the door behind us. We thank him again for his generosity during our stay and that we hope to return the favour someday in Canada.

Before our bus leaves, we grab a bite to eat at a local bar with a good deal on business lunches. The Russians use the English version of this word to describe the lunch menu, and Pierre loves saying it again and again a la Russe: Biznes lanch. Biznes lanch. It’s right up there with his second-favourite Russified English word, snack. Snek.

We walk out by the cathedral, and around the perimeter of the Assumption Cathedral. We approach the doors to see if we can go in again but they’re closed to the public today. I scan through the notes on the door to see if there’s any indication as to why they’re closed today.

An old woman slowly works her way up a hill and toward the door we’re standing at. She in her 60s or 70s, bent at the shoulder blades, wearing a sweater over a long skirt, mud boots on and a kerchief tied over her head. This is an outfit we’ve grown used to seeing on many elderly women in Russia. In one hand, she carries a large plastic shopping bag, and with the other she point to the door.

“What does that say?” she asks me. The font and location of the note in the middle of the door makes it look like an official notice.

“Please close the door behind you when you leave,” I read. She smiles – she too was expecting a note about why the doors are closed.

Pierre and I walk around the church again and decide it’s time to get our bags and wait for the bus. We pass the old woman again as we’re leaving the grounds, and she says “here, take this” and passes me two knotted, bright red apples, each small enough to close my fist around. We thank her and the sun glints off her metal dogtooth as she smiles back at us.

Pierre and I walk in silence for a moment. I look at the apple in my hand.

“I think I just had my first ever Snow-White moment,” I say, and we laugh.

We eat the apples later on the train, and they are sweet and soft without being mealy. It’s a lovely thank you.

Days 292 to 294 – Fri Aug 21 to Sun Aug 23 – Train to Vladimir

August in Russia is a busy time for trains – tourists are getting from A to B, Russian kids are still out of school and families are taking their final trips of summer, and students are heading back to Universities across the country. Because of this, our tickets for this stage of our trip have been booked since Ulan Ude where we picked them up on day 279.

Part of the reason for booking so early is that we wanted to a) to get from Tomsk to Vladimir by the last week of August and b) we wanted the bottom bunks in the cabin. Technically, all 4 people in a wagon share the bottom bunk during the day in order to sit and eat and such, but in reality, as a top-bunker we always feel a bit like we’re in someone else’s space. This trip to Vladimir requires 50+ hours in total, and we both agree that having our feet on the floor and a window to look out will smooth things out a bit for us.

Our bunkmates are Nadia and Leonid, a couple of biologists in their late 40s/early 50s who have just finished a few weeks of work in the Altai, a protected region of Russia’s forest in the south. To visit, it’s necessary to have a special permit and a detailed itinerary of where a visitor plans to go/camp, etc. The extra security has something to do with being so close to the Mongolian border. The region sounds lovely, but we won’t be doing it on this trip. The paperwork requirements sound like even more of a hassle than simply getting a Russian visa and periodically registering our visa has turned out to be for us.

Leonid and Nadia are travelling all the way to Moscow, but 1.5 hours past Vladimir, so the four of us spend the bulk of the trip together. We visit a bit, and they share some fresh tomatoes with us. Our days are a cycle of cup-of-soups and sandwiches. Pierre plays guitar, we read books, Nadia works on her laptop in the upper bunk. Every few hours, the train stops for 20 to 30 minutes for a “sanitary break.” These give us a chance to walk around, buy snacks and check out the stations. Only two really stand out for us: the first in the monstrous Novosibirsk train station, where for some reason I get a bad feeling that if we take the time to go in we’ll somehow not make it back onto the train in time and will get left behind. Pierre runs in for a moment while I wait on the platform.

The second memorable station is Perm, only because of its mosquitoes. When we first step out of the train, we don’t really notice the bugs, but as soon as we stop moving they swam us and bite us through our jeans and jackets. Mosquitoes are rarely this intense and thick in cities – the last time either of us remember mosquitoes this bad was back in Canada in the woods on a wet hot summer.

We decide the fresh air isn’t worth donating that much blood for, and we run back inside after just a few minutes. Leonid and Nadia come in not long after us.

“So, how about these mosquitoes?” Leonid asks me.

“Terrible,” I say. “Like dogs. Angry dogs.” He laughs.

On Day 293, Pierre gets up to take a few photos of the early mist and we start a new cycle of reading, napping and walking around.

Our wagon includes several families with small children, and they’re also up early in the morning. The kids spend most of their days on the train running up and down the aisle that runs the length of one side of the wagon, and they weave in and out of the adults standing by the windows for a smoke or a few breaths of fresh air. Throughout the day, they zip back and forth past our open door, playing different games. At one point, their game is to shuffle down the carriage, hands on the railing, feet on the radiators. Later, they march past, stiff-legged with arms stretched out in front of them.

“Zombie. Zombie.” They say as they walk back and forth. They’re still playing on Day 294 when we get off the train in Vladimir at 1:00 pm.

Days 302 to 303 – Tue Sept 1 – Train to St. Petersburg

Pierre’s a funny guy. He’s not so much a tell-a-funny-joke person – I don’t think I’ve ever heard him tell a pre-told joke - he’s often more the kind of person who has funny trains of thought. His gems can too easily get drowned out when he’s around much louder me and his humour flickers in and out of conversations, sometime accidentally.

“Hey, do you know a tree whose name uses all the vowels?”

He’s been doing a multiple choice questionnaire about health that includes a section on testing your mental acuity. “Sequoia,” I say immediately.

“Oh. That’s what the book said.” He looks thoughtful for a second. “I came up with Adirondack Spruce.”

This makes me laugh. “I only know ‘sequoia’ because I heard it ages and ages ago as part of a quiz. I didn’t even know what a sequoia was at the time or how to pronounce it, so I certainly didn’t know the name of a tree that contained all the vowels.”

“Well,” he says seriously, “now you know two.”

These kinds of conversations are useful on long trips from A to B, and keep us occupied when we’re not occupying ourselves with books or music or just staring out the window. The train trip to St. Petersburg is an overnight, starting a short while before midnight, so we only chat for a short while before everyone organizes their bed sheets and starts to settle in for the night.

Pierre and I have what were probably the last inexpensive tickets available for this train when we bought them. We’re in the last of the low-fare sleeping wagons, which means that rather than small cabins with four bunks to a room, the wagon is open with around 56 bunks laid out neatly. With the wrong group of people, this situation can be pretty tedious – children, drinkers, shouters, loud snorers and so on would ensure that no one got as much sleep as they wanted. It’s possible to travel for 7 days across Russia this way on the Trans-Siberian and, after that many days of travel, I imagine that even the nicest group of people can probably wear on the nerves.

The group travelling tonight seems pretty good. No small children, no loud talkers. Even the young soldiers a few bunks over are noticeably vodka-less and eager for sleep. Everyone tonight seems to be simply travelling from A to B and hoping to get some rest before the train pulls into the St. Petersburg station at 6 am.

The only problem we see, in fact, is that we have some of the worst bunks in the wagon. We have some indication of this when the man checking our ticket at the doors looks at our seat numbers and says that it’s possible to upgrade to a private cabin. This is double the price, and for an overnight we’re not willing to pay out so much money. We decline, but they ask again later once we’ve started to set up our beds and prepare to sleep. We decline again, but this time it’s an educated decision because now we have officially met The Door.

The Door is directly next to our bunks and leads to washroom area and the passage way to other wagons. It’s not like there’s a bad smell or anything, and people are pretty considerate about not talking as they pass, but the door itself is badly designed. It swings shut with a loud bang and a click - and opens with a bang and a click - every single time a person passes through the door. This happens a lot. This happens all night.

We aren’t the only ones whose rest is seriously disturbed by the noise. Even before the lights officially go out, the man in the bunk perpendicular to us, across the aisle, lifts his head every so often to give the door the stink eye. I estimate that the ideal distance to be away from this door is somewhere around the middle of the cabin. The people sleeping there have probably learned from experience to stay the hell away from the edges.

Pierre and I are really light sleepers. Even with the ear plugs, the sound is sharp and impossible to imagine away. Traffic passing by? I can easily imagine that away as being waves on a beach. Sound of construction outside? I can pretend a factory worker on a really long shift and have been able to sneak a few hours of sleep away in a nearby storeroom. I can usually imagine myself into a frame of mind where I’m so glad for any kind of horizontal sleep that noises don’t bother me too much.

But even my last resort, tried-and-true trick of imagining that I’m on a long long flight to Australia, and have already been sitting for over 15 hours and have somehow been lucky enough to be given a first class cot to sleep in for a few hours… even imagining that doesn’t work.

Pierre manages to get a few hours of sleep. I get 45 minutes. We’re both tired and humourless when the train pulls into St. Petersburg.

Days 288 to 292 – Mon Aug 17 to Fri Aug 21 – Tomsk

As always, our firs few hours in Tomsk are a bit of a write-off. There are bags to put in storage, accommodations to find and stomachs to feed.

The search for a cheap place to stay takes longer than we expect. Students are coming back to university already, so the not-so-low-end rooms seem to be taken up by them. We check the resting rooms at the train station, the university hotel, a posh hotel and a medium-range hotel. In the end, we end up getting a room at the first place we checked out: the resting rooms at the train station are our best bet. Unlike Irkutsk, where the rooms were rented by the hour, the rooms here can be rented in blocks of time and the price for anything between 12 and 24 hours happens to be the same. This means we can unpack for a few days.

The ladies at the front desk are friendly and curious. They have foreigners stay at the resting rooms from time to time but they can’t talk to them.

“They don’t speak Russian, and we only speak Russian,” says Nina Stephanova, the dezhurnaya who checks us in. “There’s lots of talking with hands.” She demonstrates for us. “ ‘I’ [points to self] ‘want a room’ [hands draw a box] ‘to sleep’ [palms pressed together and placed under leaning head]. We used to have a dictionary and phrasebook, but somebody took it so we’re back to the old system.”

The women at the resting rooms are responsible for checking in guests, giving us hot water when we need some for food (porridge) or drink (tea), lending us the key to the pay-per-use showers, and generally answering any questions we have.

They also hold onto the room key whenever a guest leaves the resting rooms, and pass it back to us when we return. This, for us, seems to be often, as we always seem to be coming home from a walk around town or popping out to the nearest supermarket for food for breakfast/dinner in our room.

The other guests come and go, but it’s pretty quiet. We have a private room with two twin beds, but there are also dorm rooms with 3 to 4 beds. Some guests are waiting for their connecting train the next day, other seem to be sleeping off a heavy day/night of drinking, many are doing both. Still, the ladies at the desk are on duty 24/7 and don’t put up with any nonsense from the guests, so the place is quiet and clean and the only time we notice our neighbours is when the shared bathrooms are all occupied or when we pass each other in the hall, towels draped over our shoulders or grocery bags in our hands.

On Day 289 we have a chance to actually visit Tomsk rather than simply walk through it in search of a place to sleep. We originally decided to come to Tomsk because it sounded charming, and we’re happy that the city lives up to its reputation. Even the train station area is clean and well-organized, rather than the industrial wasteland on the edge of the city. All trains and buses seem to lead to the train station, so we catch a tram downtown to visit the few streets in town that still have the old wooden buildings that Tomsk is famous for. The ornate window shutters and window frames remind us of Ulan Ude, but are much more varied and better-tended than the ones we saw there.

The second day, we take a day trip to a nearby village that the guidebook recommends as a trip to a real Siberian village. The standing-room only local bus drops us off in the village of Kolarova at around 11 am, and it only takes us 15 minutes or so to walk most of the streets in town and to realize that Arshan is a tough act to follow as far as Siberian villages go, so we decide to catch the 11:45 minivan back to town. A woman at the “bus stop” (roadside outside a tiny shop) is selling a bucket of fresh baby cucumbers and a bunch of dill – enough, I assume, to make a healthy set of pickles. I ask her if it’s possible to buy just one or two cucumbers. We’re hungry and could use a snack to keep us happy until we get lunch back in town.

“Buy one?” she says, and hands me two. “Just have some. Wash them first.”

I give them a quick rinse under the faucet of a hand-pump just outside the store. We thank her, flag down the minivan and eat the cucumbers on the ride back to town.

The weather outside is generally warmish and fairly dry, so we catch trams to the center of town and walk around most days. We drop by the art museum and walk over to the WWII memorial in a park. It’s a towering statue of a mother (Mother Russia, I assume) handing her son a rifle. Music plays from loudspeakers near the rows and rows of granite memorial that list the names of locals who died. My memory of deathrates for Canadian soldiers in WWII is a little sketchy, but Russia’s death rates from that time always seem particularly high to me. Tomsk is not a large city, and of the roughly 20,000 soldiers that left the town to fight, less than half returned.

The memorial is a popular spot, surrounded by green grass and a glade of trees, and is near a scenic viewpoint. Photographers trail after brides (“Hey, look, another slutty wedding dress,” Pierre says from time to time) as they hunt down the next great shot. New moms take a few minutes to read a book on a park bench while their babies sleep next to them in their strollers and prams.

We also visit the NKVD Oppression Museum, which documents the late 1930s, which sound to be some of the worst years of life under Stalin. The museum is located in the cells where political prisoners were held and interrogated. In the hall, there are photos displayed of a sampling of people from Tomsk who were singled out. The descriptions are brief. Poet. Academic. Priest. Arrested on this date. Executed on that date.

Each of the four cells contains different exhibits: photos from the time period, explanations of how the rules of detention worked, photos of the gulags where people were sent to do hard labour.

The front desk doubles as a kiosk, where one woman reads a book in between selling the occasional ticket and handing back change. She barely looks up when we hand her our rubles. Her colleague, a slight woman in her late 40s, is much more animated and walks the floor of the museum answering questions for visitors. After we’ve walked around for a few minutes, she approaches us to see if we have any questions and notices my open dictionary and the notepad I’m scribbling in.

She says something I don’t entirely catch, a question as to whether I’m looking up words I don’t know. When I say yes she gives me a warm hug.

Russians are not generally a huggy people, at least not with strangers, so the hug is odd and entirely unexpected. Still, I appreciate her enthusiasm for the Russian language and her job, so I give her a quick hug back. She spends the rest of our visit going out of her way to explain exhibits to Pierre and I and to share anecdotes and facts.

On one wall, we see a collection of photos, much like a yearbook montage of the headshots of that year’s graduates.

“Tower guards,” she says, and then points to a nearby photo of a tower at the border of a gulag. “Once we had a visitor who recognized her father as one of these guards.” She points to his face on the montage. “She'd always believed that he’d been one of the oppressed too, he’d always said so, but it turned out he’d been on the other side.”

At another exhibit, she explains the rules of arrest. “If a married man was arrested, his wife could avoid arrest by divorcing him. If she didn’t, she’d be arrested too.” She also explains the rules about the children of the arrested, but I only slightly understand. I believe she says that kids under 3 were not arrested, kids 3 to 15 went to the gulags but lived in the nursery there, while any kids over 15 were arrested as adults along with their parents. “It was very easy to be accused. You could be arrested for just talking to the wrong person. Let’s say the three of us were in the same place at the same time, a museum like now, and we talked for a moment about one of the exhibits and then went our separate ways. If you turned out later to be accused, I could be brought in for talking to you, and interrogated about what we had plotted during our conversation.”

We pass through all the rooms, pass the exhibit of the administrator’s desk, and past the cell with wooden bunks where prisoners slept.

“Do you find this a sad place to work?” I ask her.

She doesn’t. She explains that one of her family members was held here – an uncle, I believe – and who most likely died in the gulag or was shot. “When I’m here, I feel like I’m close to him.”

On Day 291, we have to register our passports, which the train station is unable to do for us. (The current visa laws say that you can only stay a maximum of 3 days in a new city before registering your passport with the authorities, and you have to either stay at an institution that’s capable of registering the passport or with a Russian who’s willing to do the paperwork to register you. So we pack up and leave the resting rooms at the train station to go to the Sputnik hotel, the medium-range hotel we had checked out earlier in the week.

The original price we were quoted for a room seemed quite high, but once it turned out that we didn’t need to have the breakfast and that we were fine with a king size bed instead of twin beds, the price dropped by about 25 percent. We’re not quite sure why a king size bed is drastically cheaper than a room with two twins, but we don’t feel like arguing. We enjoy a night of free showers and a tv in the room, which allows us to watch Japanese anime dubbed into Russian. On day 292, we pack up again an catch the 11:08 am train to Vladimir.

Days 282 to 283 – Tue Aug 11 to Wed Aug 12 –Arshan, Arshan…

Day 282 gets off to a late and creaky start. We talk to the landlord about extending our stay with him in Arshan. To do this, we explain, we need to register our visas.

The latest Russian visa rules state that foreign tourists must register themselves if they plan to stay in one town for more than 3 days - registering involves paperwork and having a local vouch for you as their guest. Danil's wife, Larisa, kindly agrees to register us, a process which ends up spreading out over 3 hours as we hunt down the appropriate forms and a working photocopier, and wait for businesses to re-open after their lunch hours and work breaks are done.

Arshal has a population of about 1000 residents (but more in summer) so infrastructure and services are limited. There's one main street that runs through town - the highway - and it ends where the trails to the mountains begin. We don't find any place during our stay with Internet and don't see any public phones.

We relax in town on 282, and by Day 283, Pierre's eager to get out again though I'm still not too enthusiastic about the idea of a hike. My feet and legs hurt, and I'm still a little irritated with the mountain. Pierre suggests a short hike so I pack a few apples and some bread. I notice Pierre packing 3 litres of water and wonder if our ideas of a "short" walk are quite different.

I join the walk on the understanding that I'll turn back if I get tired - more tired than I already am. This will let me get back to the room and get some work done at home. I want to study a bit, maybe write a few blogs out by hand in a little notebook. I have lists and lists of Russian words and phrases that I've been learning/remembering for the past few days and I know that if I don't review them and copy them into my study book then I'll forget them all. These words and phrases are tools we need for getting around everyday so they're important to me.

The beginning of the hike starts in the shady woods - it's a bit steep and dry, and it feels like we're up near the end of the tree line.



Around the time I'm ready to turn back down the mountain, we run into a group of students hiking up the mountain. One of them, Julia (sounds like Yulia), strikes up a conversation with us in English and introduces us to her friends Christina, Nikita and Sasha.


We talk about music, and school, and as the trail gets steeper and dustier, they teach us the trick of taking rests by leaning backs against the trees, facing up towards the top of the mountain. We use this trick a lot.


The trail becomes much more challenging than I or my tired body had bargained for. Julia and her friends keep assuring me that the peak is just 20 or 30 minutes away, but the "just a few minutes" and "just over the hills" keep adding up until, before I know it, we've been hiking, almost straight up for almost 4 hours.





Finally, about 30 minutes from the actual top of the mountain I sit down and enjoy the view and let Pierre keep going. Our group of hikers is a bit scattered by now. The boys have gone on a side trail to find some water in a nearby river and the girls continue on to the top. There are storm clouds in the distance...


...so when Pierre returns we head straight down.

"The top really was only 30 minutes away," he says.

But I don't care. I'm happy to be hiking down and off the mountain, though my knees are still sore from our long walk down on Day 281. After 2 hours of walking down hill, we reach Arshan again. By this time, even Pierre is pretty sated and not in a hurry to go for a big hike. We agree that this will really really be our last big hike together in Arshan (though Pierre is welcome to go alone since the trails are so busy and well marked).

As we arrive back at our little cottage, the storm we saw in the distance finally arrives and the wind picks up. After dinner in a snackshop, on the way back to our place, we get caught in a small duststorm on main street. We walk into some stinging nettles (which really do sting) and get home and settled in just as the rain starts (and just as the nettles stop stinging). The wind does its best to shake the walls of the cottage, and just as we are debating whether or not to turn out the lights, the power goes out. The entire town is dark.

Problem solved: we go to sleep. I try to dream about anything but hiking and wonder if I'll get time to work tomorrow.

Photo credits: All images in this post courtesy of the lovely and amazing Christina S!

Days 284 to 285 – Thurs Aug 13 to Fri Aug 14 – …and more Arshan

We wake up to a rainy, mellow Arshan on Thursday. The air temperature in the valley better matches that of the incoming airstream this morning, so the winds have died down. The electricity is still out from the night before - we open the curtains for light, have a cold snack of pepperoni and bread and put on an extra layer of clothes to keep warm. When we cross the yard to the outhouse we can see our breath. Danil knocks a short while later and starts a fire for us in the whitewashed woodstove in the corner of our bedroom. This lets us boil a little water to cook breakfast, and make something warm to drink from the mountain water that we collect from the sink next to the banya and carry into our kitchen by the bucket.

For the first time in at least a week, I'm able to to sit down at a table and work. I transcribe some of my hasty language notes from the past few days into my study notebook, and look in the dictionary for some key terms I'm lacking. Pierre plays some guitar. The sound carries out into the yard, and Danil drops in for a few minutes to listen. He sits and plays us a Mongolian ballad. He tells us he hasn't played the guitar in about 15 years, but after a few minutes his fingers remember their way around the strings just fine.

Later, we pass him in the yard cooking some shashleek (shish kebobs) on an outdoor wood grill, and he talks hockey with us. The game between Canada and the Soviet Union in the 70s (1972?) is still a strong memory for him - especially how the Soviets lost. "But then Canada came and played here, and we won that time." I tell him that during a hockey strike a few years ago, CBC Canada played old games from the 70s to make up th dead airtime, so we've actually seen a few clips of those games.

"No helmets," he days, "and long hair. The more scars you had, the more money you earned." He mentions how shocked the Soviet commentators were by the fighting between players during the game with Canada, how they said "this sort of thing doesn't belong in hockey."

"Russians don't fight when they play hockey?"

"Rarely," he says. "It's not the norm."

Shashleek, he tells us, is a Mongolian word. Shash means 'thing' and leek means 'on a stick'. Ghenghis Khan's troops would cook their meat while travelling across the steppes, with the meat stuck on their swords and cooked over an open fire.

Even later that night, Danil drops by with a bottle of vodka, two-thirds empty, and visits with us at our kitchen table for about an hour or so. He talks to us about Mongolian history and culture, and I do my best to keep up with his words and to pass on the gist of things to Pierre. Also, in my haste to be a hostess of sorts, I commit the faux pas of pouring the vodka into glasses.

Danil stares at me for a moment, as though I've just emptied the bottle down the sink. He clears his throat. "Women never pour liquor," he explains. This, it turns out, is a Mongolian/Buryat thing. "They don't drink either. They sit at the table and don't talk. Talking and drinking is for men."

His words are much more gentle and polite in person than on paper, and I'm more than happy to not have to drink.

Danil still has family living in Mongolia, just below the border that runs east-west a short drive south of where we are. They are separated from each other by the randomness of country borders. By the time the bottle empties, he's talked his way through colonization and life under the communists, and has sung a few acappella Mongolian songs. The electricity comes back on halfway through his second song. When he and Pierre empty the bottle, he offers to go and get another.

"I can drink two of these myself," he says. I believe him, but it can't be very easy on his 50/60 year old body, even if he does only do it on special occasions. (They have friends visiting today).

"He wants to get a second bottle," I tell Pierre. "I'm going to tell him no. My head is sore from translating, it's late and I feel like a bag of hammers."

"OK," says Pierre, and he turns to Danil. "Thank you very much, that's very generous but I will hold off for tonight. I like the vodka, and I can drink more,but it's late and we should get to bed."

Danil looks to me for translation. I know that if I tell him what Pierre said, it won't make sense to him, and he'll see it as an invitation to good-naturedly harangue him into drinking more. If we tell him I'm tired, I know that it really really won't matter to him and he'll just get a second bottle.

"Pierre says thank you," I say to Danil, "but vodka makes him very tired. He cannot drink like you. He thinks it is time for bed."

Danil laughs and pats Pierre on the shoulder. Danil seems happy to have more tolerance than the young'un, while Pierre's is glad that Danil takes the refusal so well. I don't bother to explain - I'm just happy to be getting to bed. Being in charge of the conversation has its perks.

We don't see Danil at all the next day, doing any of his normal chores, so we assume he must have a considerable hangover.

The cottage is still very cold on Day 285 - we do our laundry by hand and hang it out to dry on the clothes line. Danil's wife, Larissa, drops in and starts us another fire. It starts to drizzle - we bring the laundry back in and drape it over whatever is handy: the metal bed frames, the kitchen table benches and the strings that hold up the curtains. We walk down the main street, eat at a snack shop and buy tickets for the next day's minivan trip to Irkutsk. When the sky clears up, we walk to the nearby datsan, a tiny Buddhist temple near the edge of town.

The temple is different from what we remember from Thailand and Cambodia, and the style, we're told, is much closer to the Tibetan style of Buddhist temple. There's a building with a colourful room and altar. There are two small stupas that people walk around, following the direction of the sun in the sky. We poke rubles into the prayer wheel and spin it the requisite number of times.

We walk back into town, and decide to make one last stop at the mineral water fountain and enjoy the ribbon trees.

Arshan is a kind of resort town, known for its mineral waters. We go most days to enjoy the free, naturally carbonated water, and bring a bottle or two home for drinking. The tub the water taps drain into are red with rust from the natural minerals in the water, and the water itself runs clear when it first pours into a bottle, but by the second day it starts to take on a reddish tinge. People travel a long way to drink the Arshan water, to bathe in hot springs, to breathe in the healthy mountain air, and to generally hike, rest and heal.

Nearby are trees covered in strips of ribbon and cloth tied to their branches as a kind of prayer flag, another sign of the Tibetan-Buddhism so prevalent in town and in this part of the country. The ribbons are linked to the healing waters, and seems to play a part in the healing process for the people who come here, no matter how young or old.

On our walk home, drink mineral water from our bottle and notice a sign for a performer coming to the local bar. The poster promises music in Buryat, Russian, Mongolian and Turkish. From the photo, the looks like it has the potential to be slightly new-agey - a dark eyed man with long black hair is photoshopped next to the head of a wolf - but we decide to try it anyway.

The show, however, is much more fun than the poster implies, and the whole event reminds me of a wedding at the local Legion. Groups of friends sit around small formica top tables, and sip beer while they wait for the show to start. Quick bartenders zag back and forth behind the bar, like printheads on old dot-matrix printers. A pair of multi-coloured disco balls light up the ceiling near the stage and a smoke machine chuffs out a bit of atmosphere every so often.

When the music starts, the singer kicks off with a few slower ballads set to synth music. The long hair from the poster has been tamed down into a tidy mullet. The first song is in Mongolian, the second in Buryat - his pitch is perfect and the songs are very catchy. When the singer takes a 15 minute break to rest his voice, the crowd dances to Russian disco from the 70s and Russian pop from the 80s. After the break, the signer keeps the pace and crowd going with (what I assume are) some Russian favourites, all set to a danceable beat. He has a cordless microphone and is able to walk down the aisle of tables, past the neon lit bar fridges to serenade tables, often just in from a smoke break and ordering a few more sundaes for the children at the table.

The show starts at 10, and by 11:30 we head home, the crowd still dancing and singing. There are no street lights in the town, so we find our way down the bumpy sidewalk with the help of the headlights of the occasional car that drives past.

Days 286 to 288 – Sat Aug 15 to Mon Aug 17 – Arshan -> Irkutsk -> Tomsk

On Day 286, we spend a few last hours in Arshan before we say goodbye to our hosts. The bus to Irkutsk is actually a small van (a marshrutka), with assigned seating, like the one we took from Ulan Ude to Arshan. We have, as always, our two big backpacks, our two small backpacks, Pierre's guitar and a grocery bag of snacks for the road. At first, all of this luggage makes our cramped seat in the back right hand corner seem like a terrible idea. I take a stab at getting different seats but the seats, I'm told, are sold out and we'll just have to make due.

However, when the van leaves the first stop it's short of a few people, and by its last stop in town there are still three free seats left. Everyone spreads out a bit and Pierre gets a seat with a bit more leg room while his guitar tucks in nicely next to our seats.

A few hours later the marshrutka drops us off at the Irkutsk train station. Our plan is to stay at one of the "resting rooms" available at the train station since they're the best deal in town and will let us avoid lugging our bags somewhere tonight only to have to bring them back in the morning to catch our train. As always, the prices for the rooms are significantly higher than those listed in our guide book, but we bargain to stay in a room from 9pm to 7am to save a few (hundred) rubles. We have a few hours to wait until we can get our room and we need Internet, so I leave Pierre with the bags and go searching. The Internet club across from the station has no connection when I drop by.

"But you usually do have a connection?" I ask, just to clarify.

"Usually, yes. Right now it's not working."

I'm not clear if this means the whole town's connection is down or not, so I catch a tram into town to try locate a few of the Internet cafes listed in the guide book. I check address after address over the course of the next two hours, but none of the places listed seem to exist anymore. I see no clearly marked hostels, and when I ask passers by about Internet, they think for a moment and then shrug. Hmm, good question. By the time I meet up with Pierre again at the train station, I'm very glad that we didn't bother devoting more than one night to Irkutsk.

We head upstairs to the resting rooms where at 8:59 we see the door to our room open and the previous tenants - a married couple with a small child - exit the room with their luggage to catch their train. The front desk clerk escorts us into a small room with two twin beds in the center and two cribs along one wall. We put our new sheets on the bed and unpack just enough for the night. The ceiling is about 15 feet high, while the room is maybe 12 feet wide. The windows look down onto the track and when we open the windows for air, we can hear the trains pass, and the loudspeakers announce departures and arrivals. When we close the windows, the sounds are blocked out almost entirely, and we sleep soundly.

Our train leaves at 10:06 Irkutsk time - our cabin mates for part of the trip are Pavel and his daughter Katya, just back from a family trip to Moscow ("Very expensive") and St. Petersburg ("Less expensive, but still very expensive") and another woman, whose name we never learn. We have the top bunks and when the train starts we take a moment to make our beds and settle in. The train stops every few hours for 20 to 30 minutes, and we get off to walk around, buy snacks, take pictures, and look at the old steam engines that are set up as monuments.

We eat, sleep, drink hot water and read. The train arrives in Tomsk 30 hours after leaving Irkutsk at 3:35 pm Tomsk time.