Hello, zdrastvuitye, (something in Mongolian) and ni hao! I am SO terribly sorry that I haven’t written a post in ages! Unfortunately, or fortunately, rather, our lives have been so full of fun and adventure and lack of internet that I really haven’t had a good chance to get a post out. Also, I didn't count on communism blocking the blogger while in China. However, I have a lot to update you on, as we’ve now completed our time in Russia, as well as our incredible trans-continental train trek on the great Trans-Siberian Railroad, with some terrific stops along the way in Russia, Mongolia, and China.
But let me write to you in chronological order so that I can try to keep my thoughts straight! :)
We flew into St. Petersburg after an mid-morning departure out of Berlin. I’ve really enjoyed getting to experience all the countries we’ve been to so far, but arriving in Russia felt just a little extra special since I’ve actually studied the Russian language and culture. Both Jim and I minored in Russian in college, so we share a special affection for the Cyrillic alphabet and those mushroom, beet, and sour cream-loving Slavs. By the time we waited for our delayed (due to rain) flight, flew to “Sankt Peterburg,” took the bus to downtown, took a metro to somewhere approximately near our hostel, and then wandered Vladimirskii Prospyekt to find the particular alley in which our hostel was located, it was late afternoon. We were pretty tired, so we decided to go for a short wander down the famous Nevskii Prospekt, get dinner (borscht and blinis!), and then return to our hostel to get to bed early. Surprisingly, it seemed everyone else was going to bed early, as well, but we were too tired to notice.
The next morning, we slept in as late as we could. All that late-night Autobahn driving had taken its toll (literally and figuratively) and we wanted to catch up on snoozing. By the time we got out the door sometime around lunchtime, we decided to head to the Hermitage. Jim had visited St. Petersburg some years earlier and remembered the Hermitage as the city’s top attraction so that was our first goal. The Hermitage, also known as the Winter Palace, is a magnificent building in its own right, since it was home to the Romanovs and the empress Catherine the Great, in particular.
Us in front of the entrance to the Hermitage.
A far-away view of the front of the Hermitage.
However, in addition to the lavish luxury of the interior, the Hermitage is an incredible conglomeration of art by many of the world’s masters. This is a gem in the world’s artistic crown jewels. The majority of the art, by far, is paintings, but the Hermitage also has sculptures, ancient art and artifacts, armor, silver dishes, tapestries, etc. The paintings, though, overwhelm the brain with wave after wave of artistic input. Every corner you round, and there are myriad, reveals some new set of treasures. I am by no means any kind of expert in art history, but the quality of the pieces was impressive and even I recognized a bunch of the names. Paintings by the likes of Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Bernini fill the halls.
Here’s one of the more famed paintings by Rembrandt entitled “The Prodigal Son.”
Many of the paintings from a few centuries ago focus on great moments in the Bible. Here’s one of the angel stopping Abraham from sacrificing Isaac:
There’s even several paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci and a sculpture by Rodin. In addition, the third floor of the Hermitage is dedicated to modern art, and there just oodles of paintings by Picasso, Monet, Manet, Millet, Matisse, and the like. I definitely didn’t like the modern stuff as much as the classic paintings and found Picasso’s work, for example, wanting in style, meaning, and beauty, and therefore found his fame rather unwarranted. But I suppose that might just as well be a failure on my part to grasp his greatness. Who knows?
Anyway, these reflections on the Hermitage are based on two days there, because that first day, we forgot to adjust our timezones and were several hours off! We had bought tickets almost at the day’s end, and were so confused when the museum staff told us it was closing when we thought we had hours left. It’s funny how time changes between countries. :)
So the next day, as I said, we finished up with the Hermitage (probably only having scratched the surface) and wandered around St. Petersburg a bit to see some of the other famous landmarks. We went to Kazan Cathedral, where a Russian Orthodox wedding was in progress, and we walked through the park and visited the famed bronze horseman.
Us in front of Kazan Cathedral.
Visiting with the bronzed and brazen horseman.
We walked a great deal of Nevskii Prospekt just to get the feel of the downtown. We found a restaurant of delightful Russian food that we enjoyed so much that we went there for three meals in a row and the wait staff started recognizing us.
Starting at the bottom plate and going clockwise: "gretchka" (buckwheat), chicken, beet salad, borscht, chicken kebab, potatoes, and brown bread... very wholesome and very tasty!
We had a lot of fun in Peter the Great’s window to the west!
Our third night, instead of going back to sleep at our hostel, we went to the train station and boarded the historic overnight train to Moscow. It was the first leg of our travels across Russia... quite exciting!
About to board the train!
We went to sleep and awoke shortly before arriving in Moscow in the morning. We went directly to our hotel where we were to meet up with our dear friend, Gordon. Gordon is a fellow Russophile and globe-trotter, and we were thrilled that we were all going to be able to enjoy the “motherland” together! Gordon, wanting to get the full train experience, had already been traveling by rail for about a week all the way from London. He went through Cologne, Germany (only a day or two after us!); Warsaw, Poland; and Kiev, Ukraine, before arriving in Moscow. We rendezvoused at the hotel for breakfast and then set out to explore the city. It was so fun to meet up halfway around the world! We took a stroll through Red Square to take a gander at the Kremlin, St. Basil’s cathedral, and Lenin’s mausoleum. It’s an impressive amount of history compacted into a few city blocks. We didn’t linger too long, though, as we had an engagement that evening that we were anxious to be ready and rested for... tickets to a ballet at the Bolshoi Theater! The Bolshoi is one of the most famous ballet companies in the world; it produces first-rate dancers and we had been lucky enough to snatch up some of the last tickets for the ballet “La Fille du Pharaon” (The Daughter of the Pharaoh). Gordon had been gracious enough to bring some of our fancy clothes to Moscow with him in his luggage (we had deposited the garments with him before we left), so we were decked out in our best. Both Jim and Gordon wore tuxes and I wore a nice black dress, topped off with the tiara that I wore with my wedding dress.
Don't we look classy! :)
It was very fun to get all dressed up for a night at the theatre and enhanced our deep enjoyment of an already fabulous evening. The ballet was the story of a young English lord traveling through Egypt who, after smoking some hashish with some local merchants near the pyramids, falls into a deep sleep and dreams that he is an Egyptian who falls in love with Pharaoh’s beautiful daughter. Of course, the love is a forbidden one and the young man and his beloved must go through many trials before they can prove their love and the man’s worth to Pharaoh. In the end, however, their love triumphs and the young man wakes up very happy after such a jubilant romance within his pleasantly drugged sleep. Now, imagine all the plot and more done to beautiful live orchestral music by dozens of graceful dancers in elaborate costumes. :) I would say it’s worth looking up a few pictures online to see the scope of the performance, if you have any interest, as I was not allowed to take pictures during the performance. It was really a lovely and memorable evening!
A view of the inside of the Bolshoi theatre before the lights went down for the performance.
The next day we delved more deeply into Moscow history by visiting the inside of the Kremlin. Gordon has visited Russia many times before and has some dear friends in Moscow, one of whom, Max, accompanied us throughout the day and was kind enough to drive us around in his car. The four of us first wandered around the inside of the Kremlin complex, meandering through the tsars’ private chapels and seeing the vast array of painted icons that cover the insides of the churches. We even saw the heavily encased coffins of some of the tsars, a few of which dated back 500 or 600 years!
One of the orthodox chapels inside the Kremlin.
Try ringing this bell.
Biggest cannon I've ever seen!
We also went into the Armory, which houses some incredible relics of Russia’s antiquity. It’s a magnificent collection of court clothes, thrones, armor, carriages, silver dishes, Faberge eggs, and immense Bibles. These things are quite impressive on their own for their historical significance, but what really provokes a gaping jaw is the size of the jewels or the thickness of the gold that bedeck each of these items. The shiny gold covers of the Bibles were crisscrossed with pea-sized diamonds; the priests’ robes were coated with intricate seed-pearl embroidery; one of the thrones was made of solid silver; the handle of a silver serving spoon was tipped in a walnut-size ruby; the carriages had delicate wooden carvings smothered in gold leaf; even the armor and decorations for the horses were jewel-studded with jade, turquoise, and diamonds! Simply unbelievable. After the Armory, we went to the Christ the Savior Church, which is an immense Russian Orthodox cathedral. A lot of Russian architecture dates from the Soviet era, and as a result is drab, blocky, and unimaginatively ugly; however, Russians really do know how to make an impressive church and Christ the Savior is no exception. It was a really neat day of sightseeing.
Me in front of Christ the Savior Cathedral.
The next day, we slowed our pace a bit. We slept in luxuriously late, went out to lunch, and then wandered the streets of Moscow for hours, including up and down the Arbat, which is a fun, touristy street full of interesting shops and street performers. We also stopped at a grocery store to stock up for our upcoming train trip and purchased lots of dry soup and oatmeal packets. We found a nice restaurant at which to eat dinner and were pleasantly surprised to discover that a string quartet was gracing the restaurant with their music that evening (Gordon, as a cellist, was especially delighted).
The delightful string quartet at Pushkin Cafe.
On the way home, we wandered through Red Square, which is a really neat place to see all lit up at night.
Us in front of St. Basil's, with the famed colorful onion domes glowing in the background.
On Tuesday, we made a unique kind of visit to Lenin’s tomb. The body of the famed Russian revolutionary and subsequent Soviet head of state has been on display since his death in 1924. Yeah... a dead body on public display for over 80 years... what?? However, Lenin still draws an impressive crowd that is carefully screened and watchfully shuffled through the black stone mausoleum. Lenin himself is nicely dressed in a suit and tie, reposing sleepily in his little glass case. The only skin visible is his head and hands, both of which look fake and very waxy. I later read that as part of the preservation process, his body is wiped down every several days and every 180 days he is dipped in a chemical bath and then some paraffin wax, so the Madame Tussaud’s look is no coincidence. Quite a morbidly interesting excursion. On the way out, we also passed Joseph Stalin’s tombstone.
We had made plans to get together with Gordon’s friends later that day, so we took the subway out to the part of town where they live and Jim and I got to meet Slava - Gordon’s friend, Yelena - Slava’s wife, and their three sons - Maxim, Ilya, and Yuri. They showed us their house and fed us a delicious and quintessentially Russian meal of beet salad, borscht, salmon on bread, and beef stroganoff with mashed potatoes. We sat and talked for a while after dinner while drinking tea. Ilya showed us his throwing knives and we all attempted to fling them into a wooden board up for that purpose... I was not good at that, but Jim lodged one knife and Gordon got two. It was great to meet some of Gordon’s long-time friends and fun to see a Russian family at home in their dacha!
A shot with the knives in the air.
After parting ways from Slava and his family, we went to the train station to catch the long-awaited Trans-Siberian train! We were in a second-class cabin, which meant that there were four beds. We fortunately avoided having a fourth roommate, which was a boon, as it was pretty cozy in the first place. However, the quality of the train was quite nice. The staff of “provodnitsas” (train stewardesses) was pleasant, there was a samovar of boiling water available at all times for tea and soup, and the bathrooms were cleaned regularly (which makes a huge difference when there are only two restrooms for a train car designed for 36 people). We settled in, the train departed just before midnight, we toasted the beginning of our journey with a swig of Russian vodka, and we were off!
A sign for Vladivostok at our departing platform in Moscow... that's a long trip! Also... note how light it was even after 11pm!
The first leg of our journey was four nights long, and by the end of that time, we were all pretty greasy and itching for a shower. However, despite the grunge, it was fun to watch the country go by. The chain of sleeper cars just clacked away on the tracks for several days straight through the beginning, middle, and end of nowhere (but mostly the middle). The country of Russia, and in particular the region of Siberia, is simply immense, gargantuan, mammoth, expansive, etc. Choose your adjective that’s synonymous with “enormous” and it will apply to this countryside. It was amazing to seeing such vast rurality, especially as it contrasted so sharply with the condensed metropolitan cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow whence we came. We chugged along for miles and miles at a time, and would every so often come upon a tiny village or a small city. A lot of the time, the train would stop for 10 to 30 minutes and we could get off and stretch our legs. There were normally vendors, either little dry goods stores with noodles, soda, ice cream, beer, chips, etc. or babushkas, who would be out selling their homemade or homegrown products, such as raspberries, vegetables, milk products, dried fish, or sometimes even little dumplings.
Jim enjoying what's left of an egg-and-onion pastry bought at one of the stops.
We tended towards the berries and consumed them with great relish until we noticed tiny white “seeds” crawling all through the berries we were in the middle of eating. We didn’t eat any more berries after that. :)
Gordon buying some raspberries from a babushka.
While on the train, we amused ourselves with just watching the scenery go by, reading books, taking naps, eating soup... so much soup... and playing cards or just chatting. It was very relaxing for almost the entire way, although I think at a couple points each of us had a very few degrees of cabin fever. However, we got along very well together and really enjoyed the experience!
One of the little towns that we passed in the vastness of Siberia.
After lots and lots of Russian countryside, we finally arrived in Irkutsk, our first stop. Irkutsk is way the heck out in Russia, as some of you may know from the board game Risk. It’s a neat city, though, and is located only about an hour from Lake Baikal. We arrived into Irkutsk on Saturday morning and immediately went to our hotel to deposit our bags and clean up. Despite trying to wash our hair in the tiny bathroom sink, we all needed a good shower. After a breakfast of solid food (a welcome reprieve!), we decided to go to an icebreaker ship turned museum. The ship, although it was pretty small, was neat. It had actually sunk a long time ago, but was raised up from the bottom of the river and turned into the museum. The ship had a few cabins, but the majority of her bulk was devoted to a massive engine chamber devoted to impelling the blunt prow through the frozen river. That ice didn’t stand a chance! ... until it sunk the boat. :) Oh, well.
Me keeping a lookout from the crow's nest of the icebreaker Angara.
That evening we dined with some fellow travelers that were our neighbors on the train, two Danish girls - Anna and Cina, who were in the cabin next to ours, along with a young KGB agent named Alexei. They were staying nearby to where we were, so the five of us met up to sup together.
The next day was devoted to seeing the great Lake Baikal, which is the deepest lake in the world. In addition to this impressive distinction, Baikal is also an ecosystem unto itself. It has a huge number of plants, fish, and animals unique to Baikal, found nowhere else in the world. We went to the small town of Listvyanka at the tip of the lake, which is a little over an hour away. We first went down to touch the water, which was ice cold. Then we got some lunch and went to the Baikal Museum. The museum was moderately interesting on its own, but the real draw, for me, anyway, was the small aquarium that was part of the museum. They had some of the fish from the lake, as well as these freaky little crayfish things that gave me the creeps to imagine one touching me in the water. They looked like a mix of a blond lobster, a spider, an alligator (for the back spikes), and a shrimp. Nasty little interesting things, they were.
The most wonderful tank, though, contained Baikal’s fascinating and fantastically flubby freshwater seal. These seals are called “nerpa” (which is really fun to say) and they are seriously CUTE. I personally find chubby animals generally to be cuter than the less roly-poly creatures, and the nerpa top the list in that regard. They are adorable torpedos of blubber with a few obligatory limbs and no head to speak of. An engaging face is stuck on the front of the tubby mass of dark silver fur, and their big black eyes are topped by enormous eyebrow hairs, which end up looking like giant fake eyelashes. In short, they reach almost cartoon proportions of plump lovability, and I heart nerpa.
It's really hard to get a good picture of a moving animal through wet glass, but this picture at least gives you an idea of what they look like. This one is swimming upside down, too. :)
After I dragged myself away from the pair of nerpa, we left the museum and Jim and Gordon decided to try out the nerpa lifestyle by plunging into the frigid water of Baikal. They stripped down to shorts and launched themselves in. Both were out again in a matter of seconds, half-paralyzed with the icy shock, but gleeful that they survived the submersion. I went in just past my ankles and decided that the instant numbness was enough submersion for me.
The shivering but triumphant swimmers.
We stopped at another museum of sorts just outside of Listvyanka, except the displays were full-size buildings laid out on a main street, so it was half ramble and half museum. The buildings were reproductions of Russian frontier buildings, watermills, cossack houses, old churches and forts, etc. It was neat to walk through “town” and get a feel of what life looked like a long time ago.
Me in my bright raincoat in front of the "post house."
We made it back to Irkutsk in time to pick up a few more soup packets and head back to the train station. We settled right back into the swing of things on the train and were headed on our way to Mongolia.
On the train again!
The next day, we were chugging along quite well when we slowed down at the Russian city of Naushki, the last town before the border. We arrived there at about 2pm and the train stopped in order for the customs and border patrol to do their job. We knew there would be some formalities at the border, but nobody was ready for the next EIGHT hours of bureaucracy, paperwork, and waiting, especially since they lock the toilets when the train is in the station! It was an amazing display of insouciant red tape. We were allowed out of the train for parts of the waiting, but a lot of time was spent awaiting the next official poking his or her head into the cabin to request another form or do a cursory search of the cabin. We all breathed a sigh of relief when we finally made it out of Russia after a few hours, but after a short ride further down the tracks, we got to do the same thing on the Mongolian side in Suukhbaatar! Eight hours felt very, very looong.
However, we eventually made it through and the next morning we arrived in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, the coldest capital on earth, home to the history of Ghengis (properly, Chinggis) Khan and the infamous Golden Horde, and site of the densest yurt concentration on planet Earth. It was very nice day and we wandered through the city, first finding a place to eat and then setting off in search of a particular travel agency. Since our train tickets were booked through a Russian company, but the ticket from Mongolia to China does not involve Russia, the Russian travel agency could not issue Mongolian train tickets, so we had to find the Mongolian partner agencty, Great Ghengis Expeditions, in order to get our printed tickets for the third and final leg of our journey. We had a map from the travel agency listing nearby stores and restaurants and thought we would have no trouble finding it. However, we discovered, block by city block, that this map listed chain stores that were found throughout the city and the map could be applied almost equally as well in different parts of the city. Thus, our quest for tickets soon turned into a great Ghengis expedition of our own. We finally found the correct map configuration, though, and got our train tickets. Phew!
Us in front of Mongolia's seat of government, which we passed in our wandering search.
After the ticket adventure, we went to the Natural History Museum. We wanted to see some of the attractions from the Gobi Desert, which we would be passing through, but not stopping in. The Gobi Desert of Mongolia, besides having some nifty animal life, has been the site of a great deal of excavations revealing some amazing dinosaur fossils, bones, and eggs. We saw some incredible fossils of all different kinds of dinosaurs, including monstrous pelvis and femur bones from one of those massive plant eaters (brachyosaurus?). There was several fearsome-looking and toothy T-rex-like skulls, too. They even had a few skeletons from wooly rhinoceroses (did anyone else not know about wooly rhinoceroses?). But most impressive were the bones of the Deinocheirus. Only a single pair of arm bones have been found for this kind of dinosaur, but they’re really not the type of relics that you would confuse with another species, as they are simply massive. Picture the tiny, yet viciously-clawed arms of the T-rex, and then multiply the size of those arms by about 30 times. They are quite a spectacle and must have belonged to a truly formidable and terrifying beast. After another session of wandering about the city, we went out to dinner at the restaurant that TripAdvisor rated to be the best in Ulaanbaatar, which was actually an Indian food restaurant... super tasty.
The next day we arranged for a young man named Nomgon affiliated with our hotel to drive us out to one of the national parks, Gorkhi-Terelj National Park. We had wanted to get out of the city and see some of Mongolia’s natural beauty, and we were not disappointed.
A view of the opposing ridge of the valley through the trees on our hike up.
Nomgon, who had hiked many of the surrounding trails as a teenager, took us up a steep ascent towards the rocky crest of a small mountain. The scenery was gorgeous, both far away - overlooking a yurt-filled valley, and up close - with loads of beautiful and interesting wildflowers blooming on the slopes.
Nomgon brought us to an old mine shaft and we crawled through the tiny opening. It had apparently been a vein of quartz that they mined until it ran out, several hundred feet into the mountain. One of the drill bits even remained lodged in the rock where it had gotten irreversibly stuck.
In front of the entrance to the mine shaft that we crawled into.
We went onward and upward and noticed an increasing amount of ants. There seemed to be huge swarms everywhere we stepped, which became slightly alarming when we didn’t step quickly enough and they started crawling up our legs... an all-too-literal “ants in my pants” feeling. At one point, Nomgon poked at a huge ant mound to demonstrate the ants’ defense mechanism against birds. He poked the dirt heap rapidly several times and then held his hand just above it. When he held out his hand to us, we could smell the formic acid that the ants spray when threatened coating his palm. Pretty wild!
A big ant mound swarming with lots of acid-spitting ants.
We kept climbing up, up, up, and finally made it through some very still woods to a grassy meadow at the top, where we ran into a Mongolian cowboy out for a ride to round up his horses.
Some threatening clouds starting rolling over the top of the mountain, and although we didn’t think they’d hit us, we decided we’d better descend anyway, just in case. We made it down the mountain and a good ways towards where we had left the car when it started to rain. We kept going at a quick clip, thinking maybe we could make it before getting too wet, but it started to rain a lot harder. We were getting pretty wet, but we pressed on. Finally, when the gate of the area we left the car at came into sight, the entire sky seemed to let loose and giant pieces of hail began to pelt us! A hailstorm in July! Perhaps that’s not too unusual for Mongolia, but it was utterly unexpected by us. The hail was pea-sized, too... not just little specks, but big enough to sting.
I snapped a quick picture of the downpour of ice and then put my camera away before it got sopping!
At that point we were pretty soaked, but for some reason I just thought it was awfully funny that a nice summer day ended up being a freezing ice storm. We piled into the car as fast as we could and drove through the severe thunderstorm to get back to “UB,” as it’s known for short, where the streets were gushing streams of water to already flooded intersections. We got back to the hotel with extra appreciation for hot showers, which we proceeded to enjoy in order to raise our chilled body temperatures. Having warmed our bodies, we went out to fill our stomachs, eating at a “hot pot” restaurant. I had never heard of this, but I now love it. Basically, each person has a personal gas burner in front of them on the table when he sits and orders what kind of broth he wants. The table then orders a selection of meats, veggies, noodles, dumplings, etc. The broth is put on the burner and each person creates and cooks their own soup from the ingredients on the table. It was so fun and delicious, and also a very interesting way to eat, as it was an ever-evolving meal with the flavor of the soup constantly changing based on what you added. I highly recommend it, although you may want to avoid the menu options of fatty sheep’s tail, beef heart, horse belly, and bull “unmentionable.” It was a great end to a fun day.
The next morning, sadly, came the parting of the ways. Gordon, wanting to complete a full trek across Russia, boarded a different train to backtrack to Russia and go all the way to Vladivostok while Jim and I left Ulaanbaatar to continue onwards to Beijing.
Gordon sending us on our way before boarding his own train later on.
Beijing was short but great, and I'll update on it soon. We're currently in Malaysia and are heading to Brunei tomorrow (happy Ramadan!). Thanks for your patience in waiting for me to get this up and your perseverance if you actually read this whole post! :)
