Aug/090
Safely Home in NYC
This image of Manhattan is anything but what we experienced upon arrival to a sweltering Newark Airport today, but it was a nice image of our city.
Erika and I have arrived safely back to our respective houses in New York. Check back to this page in the next two weeks or so, as I will be updating the page significantly in that time. In this update, I will have a more comprehensive description of our travels along with many photographs taken (I took about 2500 images — 10 gibabytes!).
Now to plan our next trip…Any suggestions?
Aug/090
Excuses from St. Petersburg
Greetings all! I am now in St. Petersburg, enjoying Russia’s second largest city. I leave tomorrow for Stockholm, Sweden where I will stay for a day and then fly back home to New York.
I’m sorry that I have kept you all in suspense regarding news from Kazan, Moscow and St. Petersburg these last few days, but I’ve just not had time to post anything of substance. I’ll post a whole writeup of our travels in the next couple of weeks and fill you in on the last week of Soviets, banyas, blinis, peroghi, canals, and more! For now, I’ll have to tide you over with a photograph that Erika took of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square in Moscow.
St. Basil's Cathedral is actually a collection of 10 different churches (each onion dome is its own very small church). It is located in Red Square in the heart of Moscow and has come to be a national symbol of Russia.
Aug/090
Siberia to the Urals; Rubles and Cyrillic
We reached Moscow this morning after an overnight train from Kazan; however, this post is not about Moscow. This post is to fill you in on our last week or so in Central Siberia and the Ural Mountain region.
We left Irkutsk last Saturday on an overnight train that took us to Krasnoyarsk, the third largest city in Siberia. Krasnoyarsk is much more metropolitan than Irkutsk, and Erika and I both instantly liked it. After trying locations of two purportedly inexpensive hotels with no luck (Krasnoyarsk is not too much of a tourist town), we ended up splurging and going to the Hotel Krasnoyarsk (not really splurging, as this is Siberia after all). What we didn’t realize was that this hotel is the very center of the city, with people identifying locations based on their distance and orientation to it, so it ended up being a great place for us to stay for a night. Across the street was the Opera Hall, the Yenisei River, a series of colorful fountains and a slew of shikebab (called shashlik) and beer (called peeva) bar-cafes. Excellent!
The mighty Yenisei River flows through Krasnoyarsk, contributing significant wealth to the city as a trading port. The Yenisey is the 5th longest river in the world at 3,500 miles, as long as the Mississippi-Missouri River system, with headwaters in Mongolia and draining into the Arctic Ocean. It is even featured on the 10 ruble banknote with a view we saw from our hotel in Krasnoyarsk. Tourists can take several day river cruises along its waters, but we were already fixed on our plan of taking the train the whole way across Russia.
The Yenisey River flows through Krasnoyarsk, and is featured on the 10 ruble note.
Speaking of rubles, they are the national currency here, currently going at about 1 American Dollar = 31 Russian Rubles. Each of the banknotes has a different city highlighted: 5R = Novgorod, 10R = Krasnoyarsk, 50R = St. Petersburg, 100R = Moscow, 500R = Arkhangeslk, 1000R = Yaroslavl, etc. It is sometimes a bit upsetting to ask how much something costs and here a price in the hundreds or thousands. Sometimes it is easy to think of costs in foreign prices as “some” money, without heed to how much things actually cost–but that is a good way to spend all your money fast. E and I have been pretty good about always figuring out equivalent prices before making purchases.
This monument, located in Krasnoyarsk, commemorates the many convicts who were exiled from European Russia to Siberia. Oftentimes they were forced into chain gangs like this and made to walk hundreds of miles to their final gulag destinations.
After our time in Krasnoyarsk, we took a 32-hour train to Yekaterinburg. Originally we had planned to go to Novosibersk, the 3rd largest city in Russia (after Moscow and St. Petersburg), but in the end it seemed like there was very little to see or do in industrial Novosibersk, so we skipped it. This particular train was a bit different from our previous trains, as it was “firmenhy”, which indicated it was a higher-quality train (cleaner, newer, faster, and a bit more expensive). All of the firmenhy trains also have unique names; ours which began in Krasnoyarsk and went all the way to Moscow (we didn’t take it that far) was called the “Yenisei” (like the river in Krasnoyarsk).
Aside from the firmenhy train designation, there are four different classes of train travel: First Class (SV), Second Class (Kupe), Third Class (Platzkart), and Fourth Class (obschiy). In first and second class, the train car is split into little cabins of two and four beds respectively. In third class, there are no enclosed cabins but bunks all over the place (more like 6 per cabin-like area), and fourth class just has seats. Erika and I have been riding second and third class throughout our trip, depending on what was available on the trains that best fit our itinerary in each city. I personally prefer third-class because it means getting to talk with other passengers more and it is usually about 66% the price of second-class.
Erika sits and reads in our Platzkart (third-class) train carriage.
Anyway, the train we took from Krasnoyarsk to Yekaterinburg was a firmenhy train where we had 3rd class beds. It was a lot of fun. You might think that on such a long train ride you’ll have tons of time to yourself and you’ll get bored. But I was never bored. I was either eating, exploring the train, playing cards/chess, reading one of the books I brought (Chekhov’s plays and Bulgakov), or most likely talking to the other passengers. We were invariably the only tourists in our train car (if not the whole train), so it was interesting to hear everyone’s stories, and they were always interested in hearing about us crazy Americans. People wanted to know about our families, where we lived, what we did, why we were making this trip, etc. I’ve learned pretty well how to hold this basic conversation in Russia now after several instances of it, but I have problems keeping the conversation lively after that.
These two women from Omsk were sitting next to us on the train from Irkutsk to Krasnoyarsk. They were very friendly and very chatty.
Erika turns out to be a secret chess genius as she decimates all challengers on the Trans-Siberian Train.
Every few hours the train stops somewhere along the route to pickup/dropoff passengers, and people will get out to grab a beer or some food at one of kiosks at the various stations. Occaisionally, however, certain station stops become famous for some unique product that the townspeople come and sell on the platform. Sometimes it is fruit, or berries, but it’s best when it is freshly smoked fish! One of the stations near Lake Baikal (Sludyanka) was teeming with villagers selling smoked Omul, a delicious fish similar to Salmon that lives in the Lake. Another station on our trip to Yekaterinburg was selling a different oilier fish, but it was still very tasty and super-cheap. A whole 12-inch smoked fish cost about $3!
We ate some delicious smoked fish on the train that we picked up in one of the stations. Yum Yum!
On Tuesday, we finally reached Yekaterinburg, the fifth largest city in Russia, sitting on the border between Europe and Asia. It has an interesting history: it was the location of the murder of the Czar and his family by the Communists during the revolution; it was the place in which the U2 plane debacle occurred at the height of the Cold War; and it is the hometown of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Like many cities in Russia, it has two names. The Soviets changed the names of cities to suit their causes. St. Petersburg became Leningrad; Volgagrad became Stalingrad; Nizhny Novgorod became Gorky; Yekaterinburg became Sverdlovsk. Despite the official name of the city being Yekaterinburg named for Katherine the Great, its Soviet name of Sverdlovsk remains on the train schedules, statues and some official documents.
Our visit to Yekaterinburg began with a visit to the Church of the Blood, a church that was built at the site of the Romanov family murders. During the revolution, the Bolsheviks ousted Czar Nicholas II and his family from Moscow and imprisoned them in cells in Yekaterinburg in the Ural mountains, nearly two thousand kilometers away. Later in 1918, fearing a monarchist government revival, they had him and his family murdered, burned and buried in a mine shaft. The man responsible for the plan, Lenin’s right hand man at that time was named Yakov Sverdlov. Thus, Yekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk, to celebrate the Soviet leader responsible for the murders.
This Church was built recently on the location where the Russian royal family was murdered by the Communists during the Bolshevik Revolution. It is called the Church of the Blood.
Now that the Soviets are out of power, the Russian government recognizes that it was pretty crummy to have murdered a bunch of innocent people, even if they were nobility standing in the way of the proletariat. The government has officially rebuked those responsible. The Church has gone further, though, as they have canonized the entire murdered family, making them saints. This, I cannot understand. Yes, it was wrong for the Czar and his family to have been killed, but does that mean they get to be saints?! Don’t saints need to have three miracles or something like that? Isn’t this watering down the saint brand a little bit? Well, anyway, they’re saints and the Church of the Blood is the main church celebrating them as such.
My Russian language abilities are pretty basic, consisting of 4 months of instruction, which means I can read, write, speak and listen at about the level of a 4-year-old. Russian is a challenging language, not just because of the different character set, Cyrillic, but because of 6 different noun cases, and lots of strange constructions that we don’t have in English. For instance, to say “I like X”, you say “X is likable to me.” I spend a lot of my spare time here perusing my English-Russian Dictionary. Erika has been really good about learning the character set and reading street signs, as well as learning how to order foods in Russian. Today she learned “I would like a blinni with honey, please.” Here is a USSR-themed restaurant in Yekaterinburg. In Russian, “PECTOPAH” is pronounced “RESTORAN”, but it still looks pretty funny to Westerners unfamiliar with the cyrillic character set. Pectopah…HAH!
While in town, we also visited the Military Museum of Yekaterinburg. Despite claims otherwise, there was very little in English, which made for difficult going for E and me. As you know history museums can be pretty dry in their written descriptions of events and items, and the same goes for Russian history museums, which meant we were pretty lost in museums without English texts. Fortunately, this museum did have something quite interesting: a small exhibit on Gary Powers and the downing of the U2 plane at the height of the Cold War in 1960. For those of you who don’t know, Gary Powers was a pilot in a secret American spy plane flying over Russia at very high altitude who was shot down near Yekaterinburg. The Americans lied and claimed that the U2 was a weather plane that had mistakenly gone unpiloted into Russian territory, but Stalin had Powers questioned extensively and it blew the lid off of an American spyplane campaign. This museum had pieces of the U2 plane as well as some items from Gary Powers’ emergency kit (Russian phrasebook and Rubles). Interesting!
This display in the Yekaterinburg Military History Museum has several original items of Pilot Gary Powers and his U2 plane. Gary Powers was piloting the U2 spy flight over Russia that was shot down in 1960 near Yekaterinburg in a major Cold War incident.
Next post I’ll get to talk about Kazan and the Republic of Tatarstan, as well as Moscow, where I currently sit. See you then!
Aug/093
A Taste of Siberia
We’re currently in Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), a Russian city that is in the middle of the Ural mountains dividing Europe from Asia. It doesn’t quite count as Siberia anymore, as that is generally considered to be Asian Russia, but we had a great time in Siberia in the Lake Baikal region and around Krasnoyarsk.
It has taken a lot of research, but we’ve found the party responsible for the death of Russian communism: Adidas. Seemingly every Russian person owns several ensembles of Adidas sporting clothes. At least as far as our experience has gone, one in three people in Russia is currently wearing Adidas clothing–it’s really amazing. We had heard that track suits were the thing to wear on the train, but we had no idea how wide-spread the phenomenon would be! Of course, we had to follow the trend in order to blend in…
Adidas kills communism! Everyone in Russia is wearing this expensive brand or one of its cheap knock-offs.
Irkutsk is the capital of Eastern Siberia and a pretty quiet town. In its hayday, it was the center of control of all of Siberia (including Alaska!). We spent a couple of nights in Irkutsk, visiting the market, several museums, and getting situated in Russia. One of the museums we visited was one of the former houses of one of the Decembrists. The Decembrists were a group of Russian Aristocrats who attempted to stage a revolutions in the early 19th century, but ultimately failed and were either killed or exiled to Siberia. Many of them found their home in Irkutsk, the capital of Siberia at that time. The museum wasn’t too thrilling, but it was interesting to see how the aristocracy of Russia lived out their lives in exile in the backwoods of the world.
The Decembrist Museum in Irkutsk shows some tradititional wooden architecture of the region.
The traditional architecture of this region is wooden houses, cabin-like in nature. The whole region is covered in coniferous forests (taiga), so there is an abundance of natural resources for homes. The houses are all very sturdy in order to put up with the cold Siberian winters.
Like the Decembrists, it seems the Ghostbusters were exiled to Siberia. Here we see their car, Ecto-1, making its way through the streets of Irkutsk.
Irkutsk is only about an hour drive from Lake Baikal, the largest and deepest fresh-water lake in the world. It has 20% of the world’s supply of fresh water, more than all 5 of the great lakes combined! There are all sorts of animals that don’t live anywhere else in the world that live in or near the lake, including fresh-water seals, fresh-water sponges, and lots and lots of fish! It is also the only place in Russia where you can drink the water out of the taps without fearing for your health, since the sponges keep the water so clearn.
The Lake Baikal map in the Lake Museum in Listvyanka has several interesting facts about the lake itself.
It is claimed that Lake Baikal has significant healing powers, such that if you go swimming in it, you’ll add years to your life. Of course, this is no small feat, since due to its depth, it remains very cold all year round. I managed to jump in and swim around a bit when it wasn’t quite so cold!
Swimming in Lake Baikal adds years to your life, but it is very cold!
After Irkutsk, I coaxed Erika into hiking an 18 kilometer trail (~12 miles) from Listvyanka to Bolshie Koty (literally “Big Cats”) a town of about 100 people with no roads (you have to hike or take a boat there). The trail was along the lake side, so it was a great way to get some exercise, see the environment of the lake and get to an otherwise hard-to-reach destination. It proved quite a hike, taking 7 hours and 600 meters of ups and downs as we climbed the steep hills along the lakeshore, but in the end we survived. Erika wasn’t too happy for much of it, but she stuck it out and did really well in rainy conditions!
Erika on the trail from Listvyanka to Bolshie Koty. She doesn't look too happy at this point.
After Lake Baikal and Irkutsk, we traveled to Krasnoyarsk in Central Siberia. We went there largely because of the recommendations of our friend, Josh Schroeder, who upon stepping out of the trans-siberian train 8 years ago exclaimed that he “really liked this town.” Unfortunately for him, he was only there for a 10-minute stop on the train, whereas we got a whole 2 days there, which we used to explore the city, the Yenisey River (sort of like the Mississippi River of Russia) and the hillside around the town.
I’ll have more to say on this front on my next update, but we’ve got to go. We’re going to the train station to catch a train to Kazan, the capital of the Tatarstan Republic within Russia. Update soon!
Aug/094
Regarding Mongolia and Long-Distance Trains
I promised a decent update with pictures, but I can only live up to part of that promise. It seems everywhere we go has some Internet connection problems, whether it be censorship in China, or lack of infrastructure and power in Mongolia and Irkutsk. Unfortunately, I am still having problems uploading pictures because of slow speeds, but I’ll get more up as I can.
We left China several days ago on a 31-hour train bound for Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. We were riding 2nd class, which meant that we were in a small cabin with 2 fold-out beds on each side of the room, one set at eye-level and one set at knee-level. Fortunately, there were no other people booked in our cabin, so we got to rampage about the place without having to worry about other passengers.
Riding on trains like this is a nice way to relax and recuperate in between locations, since you’re forced to just sit around, eat, sleep, read and the like for an extended amount of time. Somehow, it doesn’t get boring, at least not for us so far. The time goes by rather quickly conversing with other passengers, reading, or planning our next destination. Food isn’t generally provided, so you need to bring your own or purchase it from the vendors on the platforms at the stops the train makes every couple of hours. Some of the train stops have really tasty grub too, like smoked fish or fresh strawberries. Yum.
The only major hurdle to our first long-distance train was the border crossing. When we reached the Chinese-Mongolian border, it was about 9PM and everyone on the train was pretty tired after such an early morning (7AM train departure). No one was allowed much sleep though due to the barrage of activity for 6 or so hours of passing the border. First of all, you must deal with all of the rigamarole of passport control as you exit China, which is always a pain in the butt. Next, the Chinese make sure you’re not stealing any treasured goods from the Ming Dynasty by demanding that you open all of your luggage and show them all of your belongings (you really want to see my earplugs?!).
Then comes the changing of the bogeys… “What are bogeys?” you may ask. Well, it is an interesting story, and it starts out with the fact that Russians are paranoid. They are so paranoid, in fact, that when they created their railroad system over a hundred years ago, they intentionally made their railroad track widths a little bit differen than the standard railroad track widths used everywhere else (Europe, China, etc.) They figured that invading armies wouldn’t be able to use the Russian railroad tracks to carry their trains because of the difference in widths, which of course is true, but it also makes it a big pain in the butt when you want to travel between Russia and any other country by train.
So now you’re saying: “OK OK Cameron, enough with this pedantry, what does this have to do with Mongolia and China and Bogeys?” Yes, yes, I’m getting there. Mongolia adopted the same width railroad tracks as Russia (Mongolia was dependent on Russia for the last couple of hundred years), and China has the normal-width railroad tracks that are a few inches different than Mongolia’s. So when a Chinese train crosses the border to go into Mongolia, the bottom level of the train, the part that connects the train to the tracks called the Bogey, has to be replaced to fit the new track width. It takes about 2 hours, but it is really amazing to see an entire train lifted up off the track using massive hydraulic lifts, and then have these different bogeys shifted and locked back into place. Wow. You have to see it to believe it.
Anyway, after the bogeys had been switched, and passport control and customs had done their little routines, we finally got moving into Mongolia. But of course, then we had to do the whole passport control and customs thing again on the Mongolian side (along with a temperature gun shot at our foreheads to determine if we had swine flu!). The point is that it took forever and we were tired, but we got through safe and sound.
We arrived into Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia in the early afternoon. We found a cheap hostel, bought our exit train ticket for a few days later and immediately explored the city. It’s a pretty broken down place, with half-built sidewalks here and there, overgrown grass and weeds in the various parks, and the public buses looking like they were taken from The Bronx in the 1980s. Mongolia as a whole is not a very wealthy place. Their currency is the Tögrög, with about 1500 Tögrögs = $1 USD, so we were immediately thousandaires and almost millionaires! Of course, things aren’t that cheap, as one generally pays for things in hundreds or thousands of Tögrögs, but meals were usually only be $1-5, if that gives you some sort of meterstick for costs there.
The main City-Hall-type building has a huge statue of Genghis Kahn in front of it (they call him Chinggis Kahn), since he’s the most notable Mongolian in history. At the height of his reign in the 13th century, Chinggis’s empire controlled nearly all of Asia, from Shanghai and Beijing all the way west to the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Wow.
Me standing in front of Chinggis in Ulaanbaatar
Anyway, Erika and I ended up spending three days of our time in Mongolia out in the countryside living with nomadic Mongolian families in a region northeast of Ulaanbaator called Terelj. A full thirty percent of the people living in Mongolia are nomadic, typically living in yurts or gers, these really cool tent/teepee like structures. The nomads herd animals: cows, yaks, sheep, goats, camels, horses, etc, and live off of the land. Our three days gave us a taste of their lifestyle. We got chances to milk cows, practice archery and wrestling, cut logs, sew clothing, horseback riding, shovel poop, swat flies, etc. It was pretty laid back, but interesting.
Erika and Markul on the ox cart between gers
The nomads with whom we stayed were all very kind, and hardly spoke a lick of English, which meant us trying to learn Mongolian–man that was a challenge. But now we can say some basic things in Mongolian like “How was your Summer?”, and “Where is your toilet?” (a question you hopefully don’t have to ask because the toilets are all Slumdog Millionaire style toilets.)
A couple of gers. We stayed in the one on the left.
The interior of a ger is generally very brightly decorated (almost always in orange), with only a few places for belongings (they are nomads you know…). There is a stove in the middle of the ger for cooking and keeping the ger warm in the winter, a couple of beds, and a chest or two for the belongings of the family. It’s pretty minimal.
The inside of a ger
I even had the opportunity to spread astronomy education a bit, by giving one of the families our small telescope that we had brought along for the eclipse. They were really enthralled by it, as one clear night I gave them close-up views of Jupiter, The Moon and Albireo with it. In the end, though, I think they were potentially more excited to be able to spy on their distant neighbors…
Markul spying on his neighbors with the Galileoscope
Oh, the other interesting people about Mongolians is their traditional diet. With their selection of livestock, they get a lot of milk to produce a huge variety of dairy products: milk, butter, yogurt, cheese, fermented milk, cheese curds, sour cream, plus lots of other things we just don’t have in the west. A vegan would not be able to survive here because of all of the dairy. The yogurt (called tarek) was amazing, putting my homemade yogurt to shame. Another interesting dairy product was fermented mare’s milk (called airag), a kind of cross between yogurt and beer. It has the potency of wine, the thickness of yogurt and the refreshing quality of beer–I thoroughly enjoyed it. The butter they use isn’t butter that westerners are accustomed to, it is the solid layer of cream the forms on milk after it has been heated for a while. I had no idea that there was any culture in the world that was so dependent on dairy, but it seems to work well for them, even if it did mess with my intestines after a few days.
Lunch in the ger included several dairy products (curds and butter) along with fresh fluffy bread. Erika is playing a game with the children in the background involving sheep anklebones.
Erika and I returned to civilization and explored Ulaanbaatar a bit more. We had a negative experience with a hostel called Golden Gobi, who stole our $20 key deposit for no legitimate reason, and were very mean to us. If you’re traveling to Mongolia, I recommend against staying there.
Anyway, there are more adventures to tell, but it is late tonight, and we’re heading to Lake Baikal tomorrow for a 10-mile hike along the lakeside. Our plan is to take a bus to Listvyanka, a town on the Southwest corner of Lake Baikal, hike along the lake north until we reach a small Siberian fishing village called Bolshe Koty, where we’ll hopefully watch the Perseid Meteor Shower. Exciting! I’ll be sure to take pictures and hopefully get them uploaded soon. I’ve added a few more to previous posts, so check those out too.
Aug/091
Alive in Irkutsk
Hey everyone.
No time to write, as it is late and I am exhausted. Just wanted to write to say I am alive after having survived Mongolia. Erika and I are now in Irkutsk, Russia, near to the famous Lake Baikal. I’ll provide a big update sometime tomorrow with information and photos from Mongolia, nomads, yurts, milking cows and MORE. Good night for now!
Cameron