To Irkutsk...and Beyond!

Irkutsk at last, vacation at last. After a long train ride (we thought of it as a four-night, three-day tea party, bed included) we reached Irkutsk on Monday morning. The first impression I had is of course that Siberia is huge. You can just sit and watch the landscape roll by. The other odd thing about the train is that it stays on Moscow time no matter where you are. I knew this on an intellectual level, but it wasn't driven home until we were on the train and the sun came up three or four hours earlier than it should have.

As for Irkutsk, its a pretty cool city. There are lots of old buildings in the center of the city where are hostel is. That said, it's also clearly a Soviet-Russian city with its industry and fair share of ugly buildings. There's also a lot of influence from East Asia, with Asian cars, products, and people everywhere.

We're leaving tomorrow morning to begin two weeks of camping and working near Lake Baikal. We're going to be near a small village called Tankhoi. It might be a while before I get to post again.

Vacation: With Pictures!

This is going to be a bit of a long post, but I wanted to let everyone know how our vacation to Ukraine went. In a word: great!

Molly and I left Vladimir on Sunday and got to Odessa late on Monday after a long train ride. Odessa is a beautiful city in May. Temperatures were warm, but not so warm that we could really enjoy the beach too much. Spring was in full bloom with many big beautiful trees lining the streets of the old part of town and flowers everywhere: flowers in beds, flowers in pots, flowers on restaurants,
flowers in the hostel where we stayed.

We visited a few restaurants and went biking on rented bikes in a park.The hostel where we stayed was cool and we met some interesting people. It was also nice because, even though it is in Ukraine, most people in Odessa speak Russian.

After a couple of days and nights in Odessa, we took a night train to L'viv, the major city of western Ukraine. We arrived early in the morning and made our way to the center of town where we had arranged to rent an apartment for a few days. We found that the apartment was in the very center of the city, in a buiding that faces the medieval town hall.




We did some walking around, following the guide book to some of the touristy spots: churches and such. We found a square with a book market and bought some old Russian books for very cheap. We also spent time visiting restaurants, cafes, and so on. We bargained (not really, because we don't speak Ukrainian) with street vendors to buy fruits and vegetables for the meals we cooked ourselves and so on. One of the cafes had a cool wall full of old coffee mills. As many of you know, I'm a hopeless addict: while it was European style coffee and not the American style bucket of java I like, it was still great!

Ukrainian is pervasive in the city and that part of Ukriane has a reputation for having strong pro-Ukrainian feeling. We were able to get buy with our "Pleases" and "Thank yous" in Ukrainian, often understanding with difficulty onlythose parts of what people said that was similar to Russian. Many people, including Russians, don't think of Ukrainian as a separate language, but it is!

Finally, on the Saturday and Sunday that we were there, the city was celebrating a festival "City Day" complete with banners, singing, dancing, food, and street performers, like these guys and gals, who were doing sword fighting demonstrations outside our door in the town square! Also prominent in the town square, these lion statues: they appear to be kissing...perhaps connected with the town's name: lev=lion.

Lviv/L'vov/Lwow...however it's spelled in Latin letters!) is a cool city, it's only drawback being that it closes down early, which was cool with us: we took the evenings to relax in our apartment and rest. Having seen some of what the city had to offer, we headed on a night train to Kiev and the way home. We arrived Tuesday morning in Kiev, spent the day in the city seeing a little slice of it and spending our last few hryvna and then took another train for Moscow that night, arriving back home in Vladimir in the late afternoon on Wednesday.

In Kiev, we saw several cool things, including the ancient Kiev-Caves Monastery, where monks dug caves to live in and then were buried in their caves. You can see a tiny part of it as well as the churches and buildings that they took the time to build above ground. We also checked out a few slices of the rapidly modernizing city that is Kiev. One of my favorite spots in the city was the Adreevsky uzviz, a steep winding street lined with artists and people peddling souvenirs, paintings, and other art (it might be a bit strong to call it all "art," but nonetheless, it's a charming spot.)

All in all an amazing trip. We spent about ten days traveling to places we'd never been (with the exception of Molly's trip to Kiev), seeing new things, hearing new languages, and so on. I think I've caught the "I-want-to-learn-Ukranian disease" It's a lot like Russian, with elements of the little Czech that I know thrown in. There's no help for me now. Once I start learning a third Slavic language, it would all be over!

A Vacation Update and Some News

So, we're here in Odessa on vacation. The city is beautiful and interesting with lots of old buildings and pleasant streets with trees everywhere. The weather is still a bit cold for the beach, but we braved it for a while yesterday. Today we are hanging out a little and then we are catching a night train to Lviv, a city in the far western part of Ukraine that is reportedly very beautiful and not crawling with tourists.

In news, Russia and Estonia continue their spat over a monument to Red Army soldiers. The Russians seem to feel that the monument is in memory of those who died fighting the Nazis, but Estonians see it as a reminder of their occupation by the Soviets both after the 1938 Nazi-Soviet Pact and again after the Germans were driven from Estonia by the Red Army.

BBC has the details

Moscow Times Commentary

Petersburg Adventure

So, back from our trip to Petersburg and back to the real world. Molly and I had a great time. I love Petersburg more every time I visit it and look forward to having a chance to live there some day for a while. We saw a lot of fun stuff, wandered around, and hung out in cafes and things. As you can see from this traditional "Aaron with coffee" picture, I decided that the beard was getting too itchy and shaved it.


One of the cool things that we found was this group of lions. The real marble lions are on an embankment overlooking the Neva not far away. These replicas had been painted by various groups, including some young students, which was pretty cool. We took pictures next to a couple of our favorites.





Another prominent feature of the city was election posters. The trick is that even though there were many parties running, only two actually had campaign materials out. Surprise, they were the two pro-Kremlin parties. In Indiana, I often get told I look like Larry Bird or Peyton Manning. (My common response is to say that I wish I could play and or get paid like they do.) In Russia, I am told that I look like Evgeniy Plyushenko, the Olympic Gold Medalist figure skater.

Along the way we visited a museum to Anna Akhmatova, the poet and searched out several used bookshops where we made interesting discoveries like Czech textbooks and books on Soviet economics.





All in all it was a great trip and we had a blast. The weather was typically Petersburg-like, but other than that we had a great time. This last picture is from one of our evening walks in search of a bar that has been opened in the boiler room where our favorite Russian rock singer, Viktor Tsoi, worked. Come to find out, it was a block from where I used to live when I was a student in Petersburg. Sadly, the bar was closed because of a private party there.

We caught the train back to Vladimir on Saturday night and arrived before the crack of dawn, a little tired but happy!

Fun With Balloons, or: Off to Petersburg

Just a funny picture I took the other day. Fun with balloons! Clearly we are easy to entertain.

On a more serious note, here's an interesting commentary column from BBC.com that I found. Mostly about ostentatious spending and ostentatious consumption of energy resources, both of which are clear to anyone who visits Russia, especially Moscow.

BBC Commentary

We also have our train to Petersburg to catch tonight. As you can tell, I am very excited as this is the second time I've blogged about it and we haven't even left. On an interesting side note, the train we are taking goes from Nizhniy Novgorod to Petersburg via Vladimir and Moscow. But there's a catch. Even though Nizhniy changed its name over a decade ago, the train schedules still call it by its Soviet name, Gorky. I love this country.

Smoke on the Moscow River

Well, I didn't write about it earlier because we had to find pictures to confirm our suspicions, but Molly and I had an encounter with Rock and Roll greatness in Moscow on Thursday night last week.

We were sitting in a cafe/restaurant having coffee and two or three middle aged non-Russian men came in and sat at a table in the corner. Middle aged men are not out of the ordinary, but their appearance was. They screamed: OLD ROCK STARS. Then the rest of the band came in. Then some roadies. Then some more roadies. You get the idea. Soon there was a large group of them trying to order, but the waiter didn't speak English, so they found someone from somewhere to translate. This would have been rather comical, except that it was our waiter, we wanted our check, and Deep Purple over in the corner was taking him up for half an hour ordering everything on the menu!

We finally got our check, got our coats from the coat rack behind them (pretending to be not speak English) and then left without talking to them because we weren't sure who they were!

We're not positive exactly who it was, but from some of the pictures we found on the Internet, it appears to have been some former members of Deep Purple. We also saw a poster for a concert, but I don't remember the names, just the "ex-Deep Purple" that was all over them.

There you have it...out brush with Rock and Roll fame. We have some pictures that we took, pretending to just take pictures of each other, but they are on Molly's camera: I will try to get them up soon!

Have a Nice Trip!

Our trip to Moscow turned out great. It was very relaxing. I hate to admit it, but every time I visit Moscow I like it more. The first few times, I was not a fan, but it's now becoming more familiar, if still a little overwhelming. We got in on Thursday morning and spent the day hanging out and walking around the city. We went and found our hostel, which was in a cool like neighborhood and close to a good Metro stop. (The Metro is the only way to get around Moscow.) We went through some of the regular tourist places around Red Square, went to a cool little book store, and had some sandwiches in a little shop. We also took advantage Moscow's many coffee shops to stop and warm up with coffee, tea, or cappuchino...a lot. [Pictured]

Friday we went to the Tretiyakov Gallery which has Russian art. It's a pretty cool place. We spent several hours there and then met up with Joanna and Eric for some dinner at a place that ostensibly served Arabic/Middle Eastern cuisine, so we ordered up some tabouli and hummus. After dinner we went to the Spleen concert which was pretty cool. Spleen is a Russian rock group that we like, so we were excited when we saw that they were playing in Moscow during our break. The venue was not that great, but the show was good and they played for close to three hours.

On Friday we hung out on the Arbat and spent plenty of time warming in coffee shops before catching a train back to Vladimir in the evening. At the train station we had a conversation that could only happen in Russia.

As we go through the turnstyles:
Train Station Lady, Angrily: Not that way, this way!
Us: Okay...
Train Station Lady, Still angry, but not quite so angrily: Have a nice trip!

Today we are catching up on some reading and doing a little bit of work (not too much!) We've got exams to give this week, another teachers seminar Monday and Tuesday, and a further Wednesday-Sunday vacation in two weeks that we have no hard plan for yet!