Spring Break (Days 4-5): Far-Eastbound

Our longest ride of the week–40 hours–came next: Chita to Khabarovsk on the Irkutsk-Vladivostok train. Most of our wagon-mates were on ’til the end of the line. More notably, nearly a third of the car consisted of a band of Uzbek migrant workers. They were spread out through the car, but it seemed that the [...]

Spring Break (Days 2-3): Chita rocks

If they made shirts that said “I <3 Chita,” I would buy one and wear it all the time. ‘NICE’ & ‘TRAIN’. Two words that up to now I hadn’t considered being utterable in the same sentence. Nevertheless. The train was nice (that is, from Ulan-Ude to Chita). Relatively speaking, of course. Yes, the Russian [...]

Spring Break (Day 1): ‘Trevoga’ redeemed in U.U.

Russians have a word (“trevoga”) for the spiritual qualms that you experience before traveling until you’re safely seated on your train/plane seat. I call it stress. Whatever it is, I feel it. The day of our departure, I went straight from classes to my internship, and then straight to choir rehearsal, leaving early around 8 [...]

A half month of vacation. Updates soon.

I don’t know why (and neither does our coordinator), but Midd decided to give us half a month of vacation: our trip to Severobaikalsk (posts coming soon) and an 11-day spring break. Two weeks in between–just enough to recover from the first trip and getting ready for the second–have left me stressed a bit, and [...]

Holiday: Maslenitsa, for one

Last weekend, a festive craze swept Irkutsk into a mid-winter’s frenzy that would have been hard to produce any other way. Skies beautiful and clear, the winds calm, and the temperatures nothing too extraordinary at this point, there was plenty to be happy about, the first of which might very well have been the fact [...]

Weeks 14-15: Take two

I’ll blame my lack of posting on a few things. First, wrapping up finals season always comes with alternating bouts of productivity and extreme laziness, meaning that when I was working, I was burning the midnight oil, and when I wasn’t working, I really wasn’t. Second, Ryan got into Irkutsk two weeks ago, so between [...]

Week 8: Mongolia, Days 8-10

Day 8 (Sat., Oct. 31): Mongolian Tricks and Treats A sample of a pretty standard Mongolian music video, i.e. what you watch on state busses for hours on end as disco-lights make it all the more exciting, as we had done the day before:   I had a nice sleep-in kind of morning our last [...]

Week 8: Mongolia, Home-stay 3

Day 6-7 (Wed.-Thurs., Oct. 29-30): Getting out of dodge Family life. Our third family consisted of the mom and dad, an older son or two who weren’t around most of the time, assumably tending the livestock, a five-year-old son, a nineteen-year-old son, and an older daughter. The mom was really nice and friendly, and insisted [...]

Week 8: Mongolia, Home-stay 2

Day 5-6 (Wed.-Thurs., Oct. 28-29): Wandering and wondering Last place. On our horse-ride from ger one to two, my horse turned out to be the stubborn one. I’m blaming it on the fact that the father (who was leading Romany’s horse next to his the whole way) and son both had leather whips and the [...]

Week 8: Mongolia, Home-stay 1

Day 4-5 (Tues.-Wed., Oct. 27-28): Out on the Mongolian steppe Nomad hospitality. A mentally tumultuous hour after our arrival in Sansar, Bulgan Province, we were received into our first ger. Climbing out of the jeep with our stuff, the mother and daughter, having come out to greet us, helped us get our stuff inside the [...]