Cheetah

This update will not include pictures, on account of the brokenness of our camera. I think it's still on warranty, I just hope we haven't done anything to void it... Anyway, we're in this totally surreal town of Chita. First some back story: we caught the train from Yekaterinburg to Irkutsk, and then a bus from Irkutsk to Listvyanka, which is this tourist town on the Baikal. We lived there for two days with this five crazy Poles who are on a break from school and decided to go camping in Mongolia, in the Gobi Desert, for 2 weeks. Good luck to them... anyway, we did the hiking around the Baikal, Russian Banya, beating one another with birch branches thing, until it became apparent that this one Mafia family, with which we found ourselves unpleasantly entangled, controlled the whole town...so we left earlier than we had planned and caught a train to the town of Slyudanka. Irkutsk is an extremely Chinese town: all the signs and ads are in Chinese, and all the cars have the driver on the other side. From Slyudyanka there was no choice but to hitch the 400-odd kilometers to Ulan Ude. We caught a ride with this crazy Australian Father-son team: the son was an investment banker, and had motorcycled from South Africa to England, worked there for two years, bought a Land rover, and then, together with his father, was driving to Bejing. They didn't speak a word of Russian, and had driven all the way accross Kazakstan, accidentally through Mongolia, back again, and were headed from Irkutsk to Ulan Bator, via Ulan Ude. Their land rover broke somewhere in Kazakstan, and there are no parts available, so the 400 kilometer journey was accomplished in two days, at a speed of 20 kilometers per hour. We slept in their extra tent, and showered in this river, so the whole situation wasn't that bad. Ulan Ude means Bloody Gates in Buriat, which is the label of a group of north Mongolian dialects. They have been 'voluntary' members of the Russian Empire since 1703. We learned a lot about the area and its history from a buryat woman we met on the marshrutka (marche-route-ka) from Ulan Ude to our current location, Chita. We met her because she handed me a bunch of change as we were driving out of Ulan Ude, saying 'pass it to them'. The ride cost 700 rubles, so them couldn't be the driver: turns out that she's a devout follower of some Mongolian variant of Buddhism, which is the dominant religion in this area, and that the change was to be thrown out the window to some kind of holy place. According to her, Ulan Ude and Ulan Batar are so named because of the river Ulan. Ulan means 'red' or 'bloody', in this case referring to some kind of massacre of the Buryat at the hands of the cossaks under the command of the Tsar. Baatar or Bator means the same thing as богатырь, sort of 'warrior' or 'paladin'. 'Ude' means 'gates'. There seems to be a good deal of resentment towards Moscow out here, although there doesn't seem to be any kind of a serious separatist movement, which the woman we met explained in terms of there being only half a million Buryat on earth. This far out in Siberia, the majority of the population are Lithuanians, Poles, Cossaks from Rostov-na-Donu, and Decemberists, for reasons that should be obvious to students of Russian history. There really seems to be a feeling here that everyone wants to leave, or in other terms, as if this place is still a place of exile. Because of the various paperwork issues with registration and other difficulties, it is just as hard for an ordinary person to move to western Russia now as it was when this area was all Gulags. We have had some truly psychotic conversations with illiterate locals who blame America, solely, for the holocaust, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the poverty of Russia, the brain drain, and the fact that they cannot escape Chita. There are some forest fires in the area, so the whole town is hot but choked in smoke, lending it an extremely surreal appearence. Americans are universally regarded as spies out here, and when people overhear our speaking English, the look at us as if we were a combination of James Bond and a freak in a circus. We're taking off in a few hours for Belogorsk. It probably isn't on any map that y'all have access to, it's by Manchuria and its population is something like 10,000. It's near (500 kilometers), to Birobidzhan, the capital of the second Israel, the Jewish autonomous region (kinda like Warsaw, 1944, was a Jewish Autonomous City). Onward and upward!

There is a town called Jurevic. It has one street. This is it. No hotel in this town, so we couldn't stay, but the Volga was good for some swimming. Besides that temple and the local museum, there wasn't a whole lot to see here. This is from a long time ago, in Peterhoff, near Petersburg. I don't know how well the picture turned out, but this is the church that we took the pictures from inside of a month or so back.
I have a feeling I've already posted this, but this is pay by the megabyte internet, so it would cost 2 dollars to go back and check. This is an American-made statue at midnight in Petrozavodsk.
This is just flat out the mightiest bank I've ever seen. It's in Nizhny
This is me, climbing the Nizhny Kremlin. It didn't work out too well, I fell after I got about 20 feet up.

Various more pictures

We got stuck in Ekaterinburgh for until 9 tonight, because train tickets are nearly impossible to come by. They're also fairly expensive: we're catching a train from here to Novosibirsk, and it costs 2800 rubles a person, so like $112 a person. Prices everywhere have raised dramatically, even in the last year. It is rare to find a hotel for less that 1000 rubles a night for the two of us. We allowed a fairly large cushion in the budget, however, so we're doing fine on that front. These are just some more interesting pictures. This first one is a mosque in Kasimov, a great little village near Ryazan' which is extremely Tatar in architecture and racal features. An old local had a great story: at some point, the Tatars of Kasimov decided that the Christians would accept Islaam or die. They appraised the local Christians of this, and told them that they had till dawn to decide. The Christians weren't enthusiastic about either idea, so they held a meeting. One genious young merchant's son proposed a plan: each man would eat 10 kilos of peas that night, then they would all go to mosque the next day..... in short, the most ancient of Russian weapons, unholy reek, saved Pravoslavie in Kasimov. This is in the tiny town of Pogost. Not a lot there, besides a huge cathedral covered in cryptic alchemical symbals. The reason there are more pictures of me than Marina is that she took virtually all of these pictures: until our camera broke, she was a lot better at getting good results out of it than I.

This is the view from the mineret of the mosque above. This is me in the river Oka at Kasimov.
This is a view from the walls of Nizhny Novgorod's Kremlin. The river is the Volga.

Gorodets

This is from a long while ago. This is some kind of cursed lake, where supposedly a cathedral sank into a sudden pond to save itself from the tartars. The pond really is very wierd: the ground around is flat for miles, but then suddenly there's this pond that's cold and so deep that it's not been measured, although it's only like 50 feet accros. My theory is that there really was a church here, and that the pond is a sinkhole. There are a lot of limestone caves in the area.
Here's a blurry picture of Marina. Our time on the computer is over. We probably won't post for a long time, but we'll try. WE will answer emails faster, at dunarj@u.washington.edu. Marina gets like 100 spam emails a day, so when bandwidth is a problem, we use mine. our phone number is 8-919-714-20-48, if anyone local wants to call.

More fotos.

This is a picture of one of the monastaries in Suzdal'. Suzdal looks like it was built as a tourist town 500 years ago, by which I mean that there are literally hundreds of Temples, all crammed into a town not any bigger than Anacortes. They have honsetly begun blending into one for me at this point, tho. The nature around the town was beautiful, tho, and we took a swim in the pond in the picture. Finally, water without industrial runnoff or dead fish! This is Plyos. It's Marina's favorite, but for a variety of reasons, to me, it just seemed like one of Russia's more depressing spots. The volga was black, poisonous, and full of dead fish. The depressingness was more a question of attitude than appearance in this case, unlike, say Perm, which looks exactly like Bratislava in Eurotrip. It was even that same cloudy grey there...we just kept repeating "It's a good sink you came here in ze summerrr....in ze vinter, it can be veeeeery depressink...

Marina writes: Plyos was for a long time a haven for artists and performers of various sorts. People like Levitan and Shaliapin resided here for a while. At present, it is the haven for young German and French businessmen...or would be, if the local government wasn't all 'foreign frightened'. After all, there's some Russian businessman, connected with Chubais that's doing his own kind of renovation in the town and the locals are simply screeching in horror from the clean-up. Their complaint is that the locals are losing their jobs and dying off. Hmmm....let's think for a second...their primary occupation hitherto was either prostitution or drinking and lying around stupefied, stinky, and dying. There was ONE f@*&! toilet here for the entire street. Anyway, the fondness that I have for this small town comes from spending a fantastic summer here with my brother and grandfather the year that I moved to the States. It was a summer full of reinacting favorite episodes of 'My litttle pony' and 'Care bears' with my newfound friends and watching my brother impress all the young girls in the town (which in the summer is a resort for members of the Thespian Union - VTO) with his skill of playing the piano with his feet.
Baba Yaga Real Estate offers the following selection of houses on chicken legs...
This is me and Oleg in the Museum of Wooden Architecture in Kostroma. I finally broke down and bought a coat: it may be summer, but Russia is no Morocco.
This is Kostroma. The picture didn't turn out very clear, because I was holding the camera while I was climbing a rusty ladder onto the roof of this sort of a Russian strip mall торговые ряды, and because it was twilight.

If we don't post for a while, it means we're in a camp in Siberia, cutting trees and singing slave songs, or else in line somewhere (that's like, not a way of life in the States, but in Russia, when someone asks "Where were you all last week?", a good, believable answer is "in line for train tickets."

CheboksaryWe have a huge backlog of photos....here's some of the most recent ones from Cheboksary.

Really, I'm thinking of just moving to Cheboksary. On the far left is Ljubava, who is Vita's older sister, and daughter of the woman we stayed with, Vaselena. No pictures of her, or the roomate Katya, because our camera is toast (значит, фотик сдох).
Hey Сreedo, her name is Vita, she's 16 years old, and she's interested in young, athletic american boys. I don't know if Ipo reads this, if not, Mom or Tonya, show him.

Ahh, Cheboksary. The girl on the left is Nadya, who we went to Kazan' with.
Our camera broke shortly after this picture.....couldn't handle the nudity. Anyway, this house is charactersitic of the local Chuvash houses, with the onion-dome shape in relief on the second floor. We got to visit a chuvash village close to Cheboksary where water comes from a bucket, lowered into a well, exactly like it looks in the movies, and there is a blacksmith who makes things like sickles. We harvested some cucumbers, which are not really food in my book, but other people seem to get a kick out of 'em.

Finally...

Yesterday was a kinda shitty day: our camera broke (hence the lack ofblogging), our phone was stolen (we got a new one, tho), phone cards can't besold to foreigners or Russians who live outside of the federation....many hoursor dull stares and waiting in lines to get a new phone. Anyway, just in case youwere thinking of it, I cannot do enough to advise you against visiting the cityof Perm', or Sperm, as the locals call it. We've been a ton of places last Iwrote. From Kostroma, we went through Krasnoe na Volge (population 500,counting the goats, then to a nameless town across from Plyos, then privatemotorboat across the volga to Plyos (THAT was an adventure...we were planning onswimming across and stealing a fishing boat...we were already naked for the swimwhen this dude boated by....anyway, Plyos is a sort of Tourist town from theSoviet era, which is being renovated, according to rumors, by Germanbusinessmen, or some kind of representative of the evil New WorldOrder...anyway, their offenses include paving and installing a public toilet.From Plyos, we went down through Ivanovo to Vladimir, then from Vladimir, wewent back north to visit Suzdal' (look it up, we didn't take many pictures, butit's a really famous spot on the Golden Ring), then back to Vladimir. We triedto take the bus from Vladimir to Nizhny Novgorod, but I got some kind of foodpoisoning.....in short, after a charming visit to the Russian Forest, wehitchhiked our way to Vyazniki with an interesting trader of shapkas anduniforms, which he has a factory to make in the middle of nowhere, where it'scheap, in order to move them to Moscow and sell them to tourists on the Arbat.Anyway, we caught a bus from there to Nizhny Novgorod (where we'd already stayeda few days with this sort of Orthodox political activist and organizer of theUnion of Orthodox Citizens). On the bus, we met this Chuvash woman flying infrom a three month work-vacation in Greece. I couldn't quite believe my earswhen she said "well, ever since my husband died, me, my two nubile daughters,their young, female, music student roomate, and associated friends have reallybeen pining for male company. You can stay with us for free if you'd like..."To make a long story short, especially since my mother will be reading this, westayed like three days in Cheboksari, the capital of Chuvashia (sort-of Turks,speak a language related, but not very closely, to Uzbek), which is a city fullof model-looking girls and drunk, incoherent, impotent creatures of the malegender. The cities of Cheboksari and Kazan', where we went next, are reallysurprising. Cheboksari is like an experiment with Swedish-style communism: it'sreally clean, there's free government Internet, even on cell phones, there'sRussia's best laser eye surgery clinic, and many other super-westernadvancements. Also, it's the only city we have been in where people don't thinkof black people as violent monkeys. Kazan' was incredible. We rented anapartment for 2 days with a girl we met in Cheboksari who is fanatic about shoeshops, american pop culture, and Turkey, especially Turkish guys. She's datedtwo already, and she's only 19. (remember, she's from theimpotent-man-with-no-conversation capital of Russia). Kazan' was by far themost beautiful city in Russia so far (this is Az's opinion): Kazan' is thecapital of Tartarstan, and it's generally more first world than any other cityin Russia. It's more or less clean, they've gone ahead and removed theever-present Lenins and Hammer-and-sickles, Krushev ghettos, etc, and replacedit with an amazing variety of architecture. Our camera was broken, but somehighlights of the new architecture were a giant pyramid-shaped mall, a hugegolden ring hanging out the side of a gaming arcade (hard to describe, but like50 feet in diameter, think Vegas), and a truly amazing mosque. Look for Kazan'on the Unesco site. It's inside the local Kremlin. The local museum was reallyprofessional: it looked like they'd brought in some Japanese people to designit, so everything was very high tech. There was even automatic bide (bid-day,no idea how to spell it) in the toilet! The nightclub we went to, Doktor,was...extreme. They have a bubble night: they unleash foam, like out of alaundry machine, on the crowd, which is somewhere like 500 or 1000 people insidethis enormous club. To get in, we pulled the trick from the hitchhiker's guide:marina boldly strode in, turned around, and said that me and the other girl werewith her. We got in for free, which was a major accomplishment, there were like100 people hanging around outside, trying to get past the Fejs Kontrolj (read itlike Croatian). From Kazan', we went on to the soviet hellhole of Sperm on a 12hour bus ride. It was actually a great busride: it was a german bus, whichmeans a: it goes, b: it has ventilation, and most importantly c: it has a television and speakers throughout the bus to blast american and Russianpopmusika to the entire bus from the hours of 11 to 4 in the morning!. Sperm was hard to escape, but we finally caught a fairly miserable bus to Ekaterinburg, were we currently find ourselves. Russia is really huge, especially the eastern part, and this trip to Vladyvostok, while we're still planning on doing it, is looking more and more imposing. The problem is thatthere's no trains, because you can only buy tickets in Moscow. Russia is run like an empire: all the rights and privileges are in Moscow, so only if someone cancels a ticket can you buy one somewhere east of Moscow. Similarly, when, for instance, a box of crackers is made in Moscow, it sits there for like a week,and if it's not sold, then it's moved to somewhere like Ryazan', then if itdoesn't sell there, it's moved to somewhere like Kasimov. Russia is one of the world's few countries where citizens need to get a special visa to visit their own capital. I'll post some pictures of our travels in a second if the guy lets me, the camera's only half-broken, its card can still be read.