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 [...]
Posts Tagged ‘museum’
Spring Break (Days 2-3): Chita rocks
Posted: March 31, 2010 in Far East (Spring), Out of TownTags: Assumption Cathedral, Baskin Robbins, Chita, daylight savings time, Decembrists, food, huge green tube, Jerusalem, Lenin, museum, Siberian culture, Sovietism, Subway, train, Ukranian cuisine
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Spring Break (Day 1): ‘Trevoga’ redeemed in U.U.
Posted: March 28, 2010 in Far East (Spring)Tags: Buryatia, cold, datsan, friends, guide book, hotel, Irish, jungle animal, Lenin, Lenin head, museum, тревога, трудность, Russian MTV, Snow, Sovietism, train, WiFi
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 [...]
Berlin: Prices, spirits, and thumbs–up, up & up (Jan 7-9)
Posted: January 17, 2010 in Germany, Winter TravelTags: "complimentary", AirBerlin, Berlin, Berlin Wall, Brandenburg Gate, breakfast, Checkpoint Charlie, currywurst mit ketchup, free press, gypsies, Holocaust Memorial, hostel, Jewish Museum, Meininger Hostel, museum, passport control, Reichstag, spankings, WiFi
Bottom line: I love Berlin. Or maybe it’s just Europe. Or maybe it’s just not-Russia. Even though spending in the Euro zone is excruciating painful when a simple bottled water at 1,50 EUR really means 2+ American buckeroo’s, I’ve come back to the (more) capitalist system with a new (and happy) acceptance of inflated prices [...]
Moscow: Dictators, authors & theatre critics (Jan 5-7)
Posted: January 17, 2010 in Russia, Winter TravelTags: big bell, big cannon, Bulgakov, departure, fooling the Kremlin, Gogol, holiday, house museum, Inspector General, Kremlin, Lenin, Moscow, museum, Novodevichy Cemetery, Russian Christmas, theatre, Tolstoy, waxy figures, WiFi
Jan 5. State power day. Woo! Filled with a late breakfast (usually the broiled potatoes Ryan had made, long-overdue Honey Nut Cheerios with milk and OJ–simple delights I hadn’t had in months), I arrived at Kremlin walls just after 12 noon, where the line to see Lenin’s Mausoleum (free) was being told that they probably [...]
Moscow: 10 million plus one in 2010 (Jan 1-4)
Posted: January 16, 2010 in Russia, Winter TravelTags: bad omens, Brad Pitt in Russian, Catholic church shopping, Church of Christ the Savior, food, friends, garish monuments, Georgian food, House on the Embankment, Izmailovskii market, Mondays, Moscow, museum, Peter the Great, phones, police, Russian champagne, shopping, Silent Night, Tretyakov, Tsereteli
Moskva. Bottom line: my feet hurt. Yes, great metro and bus system, but stepping out of every metro station and glancing around would hardly give a traveller the right idea of the city. Thus, walking can’t be done without, and so, walk I did. Jan 1. And the decade begins. Streets quiet (except for the [...]
Week 8: Mongolia, Days 8-10
Posted: November 12, 2009 in Mongolia (Fall)Tags: datsan, Italian restaurants, Mongolian Smithsonian, museum, passport control, Texan restaurants, the French, toys and puzzles
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, Day 2
Posted: November 3, 2009 in Mongolia (Fall)Tags: datsan, food, German Opera, monastery, Mongolia, museum, pizza & coke, survival, The English, train
Day 2 (Sun., Oct. 25): 22 steps to a [pick-your-adjective] day in UB City 1. Know that UB City is the somewhat gangsta’ name for Ulaan Baator so that you can feel hip and cool in conversations about the capital of Mongolia. Facts: 1.5 million people of Mongolia’s 2.5 million population live in UB. UB [...]
Week 8: Mongolia, Night 0.5 and Day 1
Posted: November 2, 2009 in Mongolia (Fall)Tags: 350.org, Canadians, fellow foreigners, food, Mongolia, museum, Naushki, packing, passport control, rest, sugar, train
The saga of my trip with Romany to not-Russia, almost-Far-East Asia begins. To sum it up, and in honor of Asia, I’ll even compose a little haiku (with full knowledge that the haiku is, in fact, not a Mongolian poetry form). Train across the steppe. UB. Camels. Really far. Russia seems better. Publishable almost, right? [...]
