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.