I hope those mafia guys don't speak English

Shane: "Sam! Get out of there! It's some kind of private party, there's mafia guys everywhere!"

...Guess that nice-looking Armenian restaurant was a little too nice.

And, an uneventful train trip from St Petersburg back to Moscow. After Siberia, five hours on a train is nothing.

More English, fewer bears

Moscow in 2011 didn't seem all that different from what I remember from being there in 2004. But St Petersburg feels a lot different. St Petersburg has always been the most European part of Russia, but it feels a lot more European now than it did seven years ago. People still don't speak much English, but there are a lot more translated/transliterated signs. All of the subway signs have English versions, and a lot of street signs are written in both English and Russian. From my last trip here, I remember usually being a little afraid to cross the street and often waiting until I could follow someone because there mostly weren't cross-walks and the the cars would run you over; now there are cross-walks everywhere. The air is cleaner: I'm not constantly blowing black stuff out of my nose like I was then. The water seems cleaner, too. I'm still not drinking it, but at least it doesn't smell terrible like it did last trip. And I haven't seen a single live bear. There's a tapas bar called Barcelona on our hotel street, and there are sushi bars and hookah bars and martini bars everywhere. And more American fast food chains. There are two Zaras on Nevsky Prospekt.

Slightly kinder, slightly gentler, but it basically still feels like anarchy here. Horrible lines and terrible queueing behavior at the Hermitage, a thousand personal injuries waiting to happen from sinkholes and loose railings and rusty nails, the occasional blacked-out dude with some kind of open wound. And, the architecture is still stunning in its sad, neglected way and and the Hermitage still has rooms full of Picassos and the Church on Spilled Blood is still my favorite church in the world. As long as you can still drink beer in the streets, I promise I won't wring my hands too much over the Carl's Jr.'s and the Burger Kings.

It involves a boat

Peter the Great wanted a navy. "Peter, " they said, "you don't have any boats." He said "Fuck you, I'll build them." They said "Peter, you don't have a port." (At the time, Russia's only port was Arkhangelsk, which is so far north that it's usually frozen.) He said "Fuck you, I'll get one."

And he did.

He took an entourage of friends and hangers-on and giants and midgets (he loved midgets) to Holland, the world navy power at the time. They left epic mass destruction in their drunken wake, but somehow amid the debauchery Peter also learned how to build ships. He fought a war with Sweden to get Russia a better port. Not that wars are so great but man, talk about determination. He sort of built the Russian navy with his bare hands. Before Peter the Great, people made change by cutting coins into smaller pieces until eventually there was nothing left, and infanticide was fairly common. (I hate babies, but I don't actually condone killing them.) He was nice to the Old Believers, who had previously been persecuted horribly for not playing along when the Orthodox Church decided to change how many fingers are used to make the sign of the cross, and to his sickly half brother Ivan, with whom he technically shared the throne until Ivan died. And I already said he loved midgets, right?

Ok, so St. Petersburg was built largely with slave labor and thousands of people died in the process, and he he may or may not have had his own son tortured to death. A saint he was not, but he's the closest thing to a(n?) historical hero I have.

Vladivostok -- St. Petersburg

The Vladivostok airport is about 40km outside the city. In a taxi on a Sunday morning with no traffic, it took over an hour to get there. Because there is no road. There's a way to the airport, sort of a path, but it's not a road. I guess probably there was once a crappy road and now they're building a better road, but for now it's a slow dirt/rock dusty hole-y path dotted with bulldozers and hitchhikers and stray dogs. Maybe I overuse the word postapocalyptic, but I do think it applies here. Anyway, we made it to the airport and nine loud, rattle-y, bored-adolescent-dominated (I guess they were a school group or something, restless and basically in constant motion--by the end they were having a pillow fight) hours later we were back in Moscow and had undone our two weeks of train travel. And a long layover plus another, much calmer flight after that, we're in St Petersburg. It's one of my favorite places. I'll tell you all about it when I'm not so damn tired.

Working on a building

Man, we are so close to North Korea. There is a group of North Koreans staying at our hotel (some kind of athletes, I think) and I really wish I could talk to them.

Anyway. Vladivostok is in many ways very pretty, but it's also very under contruction. I've never seen a place this under construction. They are building two huge bridges and several big hotel-looking buildings on the bay. It looks like construction on some of the buildings goes on 24 hours a day. There's this huge ditch, about four fweet wide and maybe six feet deep, that runs like a gaping wound the whole length of one of the roads just inland from the water. There are open manholes everywhere. APEC, a pretty big-deal economics conference, is happening in Vladivostok in 2012. I dunno if the city will be ready for it, but it's definitely trying.

Speaking of trying, a lot of Russian women dress up, a lot. Skirts and make-up and stripper shoes everywhere. The ones who pull it off look hot, and the ones who don't look ridiculous. Even by Russian standards, the women here in Vladivostok are especially hot and well-dressed. (The men are the same.) I keep wanting to get uptight about all the injury potential that comes with the city's basically being one big open construction site, but then I remember that for every big ridiculous hole I have to leap over, the local women do the same thing every day. Mostly in stripper shoes.

When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke?

I went to graduate school with a nice but very strange man from Vladivostok named Rostislav. He wore huge glasses and ordered dessert for dinner at restaurants ("This is nonsense," he'd say if he didn't like his entree/brownie sundae) and once I ran into him at the liquor store wearing little tiny shorts and buying champagne. Given that one data point, I had no idea what to expect of this long-closed city on the other side of the world.

It's lovely. It's hilly and the bay is full of sailboats and even though they say it usually rains for all of June, the weather today is pretty much perfect. And. The people here are so friendly that I don't quite know how to act. The taxi driver I asked for directions to our hotel was as helpful as one could possibly be. The woman who sold me a bottle of water oozed nice. We took a boat ride around the bay and the man standing next to me maintained broken conversation for almost the whole trip; he kept saying how how glad he was to meet me. A whole series of people, including a big scary shirtless guy and some kind of millitary dudes, helped us find the ferry terminal, some without even being asked. Our lunch waiter spoke good English and told us how much he'd like to visit New York one day. Our dinner waiter kept smiling. Almost every single person we've encountererd here has been not at all surly. It's very strange.

Also, none of the kiosks near the water sell beer. It's almost as if there are some kind of enforced alcohol regulations designed to help prevent people from getting drunk and falling into the bay. No beer to be found, but Vladivostok does have its own little muscle beach in the form of some grungy athletic equipment near the bay. Aside from the old dude doing dips in nothing but very snug little underwear and the other guy hitting a tire with a huge mallet, over and over and over, this place doesn't much feel like Russia at all.

Khabarovsk -- Vladivostok

I forgot to tell you another thing about Khabarovsk. Vlad showed us the United Russia (Putin's party) building and it is pink. Pink. Really light, delicate pink, the kind of pink that gets used for frilly dresses and is not remotely terrifying.

Anyway. Our last leg of the Trans-Siberian was the first where we've had other people in our compartment. The Russian woman seemed nice, but saw that we don't really speak Russian and so didn't say much; the Tajik man was a talker, and so didn't much care that we didn't share a common language. Once I found out he was Tajik I thought I would instantly endear myself to him by hacking together the Russian to tell him that I have a friend who is in Tajikistan now learning the language. (She's not actually there right now, but I don't know how to use the future tense in Russian -- close enough.) He seemed uninterested and asked if I was going back to New York after Russia. "No, to Spain," I told him. He looked at me for a minute and then said, in English, "Papa millionaire." Fuck. My first reaction was to be sort of offended. No, I'm not some spoiled rich kid. "No, I work a lot," I said as indignantly as I could in bad Russian. But as I said it I realized that he probably works a lot; he probably works a lot harder than I do, even when I'm not running around the world on vacation. And no matter how hard he works, he'll probably never get to take a three-month vacation to travel around the world; probably not even a two-week vacation. That my trip is self-financed suddenly became sort of tangential. While he complained about us to the Russian woman (who must have felt sort of awkward and mostly just looked out the window), liberal guilt took over and I decided I needed to make things right with this man who probably hated me and with whom I could barely communicate. I thought things got a little better when I asked what he thinks of Moscow (he hates it), but then he wanted to know if Shane and I are married and if I have babies, and was not happy with my replies. (I'd rather not lie about stuff like that, even if it means making people angry, and lying in Russian would have been too complicated anyway.) This man and I were clearly not going to be friends. I made one last half-hearted attempt, saying that the scenery out the window (which happened to be in the direction of the Chinese border) was beautiful. (Most of this leg of the trip runs not far from the border and apparently that's why the trains go at night. According to the guidebook, the blinds used to be locked shut for parts of the trip.) "No," he said firmly and pointed in the opposite direction. "That is beautiful. Russia is beautiful. That," pointing back at the window towards China, "is like Africa." I'm not sure what he even meant, but I was done trying to make nice, anyway.

We finished off the Schweppe's bottle of cognac/moonshine from the mean-looking woman in Irkutsk, closed down the cafe car, and got maybe four hours of sleep before arriving in Vladivostok dizzy and hung over. Our Tajik friend probably didn't approve of that, either.

The Vladfather

A colleague of Shane's used to spend a lot of time in the Soviet Union, back when it existed, and he gave us a list of Russian mathematicians to contact while we're here. We spent our first day in Khabarovsk with Shane's colleague's friend Vladimir. Communication was sort of hard, but I got some Russian practice and we got a very thorough, if a little strange, tour of Khabarovsk. We took a boat ride on the river and saw a bunch of churches and had an odd but good but tiny lunch of scallops wrapped in bacon. Vlad had already confirmed that we eat meat and things like crab ("We eat everything," we tried to explain), but when the dish that he had ordered arrived, he looked confused and sad and disappointedly explained "Meat," pointing to the bacon, and "not meat," pointing to the scallops. I wish I spoke Russian well enough to explain that basically anything wrapped in bacon is good, or to understand what he thought he ordered. Khabarovsk has a huge labyrinth of a city museum where Vlad tried to get us a guided tour in English, but the guides only spoke Russian. Some of the exhibits were self-explanatory enough (like the animal/natural history section) and once in a while I could get the gist of what the guide was saying -- both good, because Vlad kept getting too excited about the exhibits to even bother trying to translate. It was pretty cute.

The Khabarovsk riverfront is really pretty, especially by Russian standards. The other thing about the (Amur) river here is the big bridge (about 4km, I think) that crosses it slightly outside of town. Vlad didn't really need to drive for an hour through tons of traffic just to drive us across the bridge and back, but now we have seen the bridge up close and personal.

In addition to Vlad and the bridge, Khavarobsk has a lot of German-style beer halls. I'm no expert on German sausage, but it seemed pretty good to me, and it was nice to drink beer that's not super light. The Irish music playing was a little off, but their hearts were in the right place.

Ulan Ude - Khabarovsk

This train smells like fish. We are near Lake Baikal still, and Baikal fish is a big deal here, but of all the things to sell in closed train compartments, smoked fish has to be among the worst. Ew.

This is our second and last reeeaaalllly long train ride -- about 50 hours -- taking us out of Siberia and into the Russian Far East. It's hillier and more rivery out here and it's pretty -- the little wooden houses often have cute blue shutters --but this is not scenery that needs to be described in detail. Instead I'll just tell you some things about Asian Russia and the train in general.

Aside from our very first leg out of Moscow, the trains have been fairly empty and the other passengers are all Russians who mostly keep to themselves. The Russians pack tons of food and the cafe car is usually empty except for sometimes us. The cafe cars are generally fairly grungy, but today one of the waitstaff is wearing a see-through shirt, thigh-high fishnet stockings, and a skirt that's not long enough to cover the tops of the stockings. Russian men of all body times and smelliness/hairiness levels go shirtless.

All Russian trains operate on Moscow time. In a country with ten different time zones (we're covering eight of them), I guess it is probably the least confusing way to operate, but also speaks a little to Russia's extreme Moscow-centricity and central planning. I get the impression that the Russians who don't live in Moscow sort of hate it. ("That's not Russia," our friend Yegor from Ekaterinburg said of Moscow, with no trace of irony.)

There are towns out here with names like Perm and Perm-2, and Krasnoyarsk and Krasnoyarsk-26 (not sure about Krasnoyarsk-2 -- Krasnoyarsk-25). You'd think that with a language where it's considered perfectly acceptable to have words as long as several English sentences, they could have given these towns better names.

You're allowed to smoke in between the cars and people do, a lot. As we get farther east (and some people have been on this same showerless train since Moscow), it's a close call as to whether the smoking areas or some of the smellier cars smell worse. Luckily the fishiness of our current car is more benign than either.

Big lake, big Lenin

If you like animals at all, don't ever go to a Siberian zoo. Aside from learning that particular life lesson the hard way, though, today was a good day. Ulan Ude is as close as we'll get to Mongolia. It's kind of dumb to say that the people here are mostly Asian, our being in Asia and all, but you know what I mean. East Asian, I guess. Near Ulan Ude is a Buddhist monastery and on our way there an English-speaking Russian guy named Yegor (not Igor) made friends with us. Holy crap, that almost never happens here. The monastery was full of brightly-colored pagoda-style buildings, which were a welcome change from the many, many Orthodox churches I've seen over the past few months. In particular, it was nice to see pictures of the Dalai Lama instead of huge-foreheaded, demented-looking baby Jesuses. We made it to the monastery in time to watch the 9am prayers; a carful of monks on cell phones squealed in around 8.58, and some others straggled in after the prayers had started. Still, the best part of the monastery for me was the resident puppy who tried to eat my hair. The stray animal situation here is unfortunate, but it does sometimes mean puppies. Anyway, after the monastery, we made our way to our 'hotel,' aka spare room in the apartment of Olga, a French-speaking Mongolian woman, with Yegor in tow. He tried very hard and entirely unsuccessfully to bargain down the cost of our room; in the process he and Olga became friends and hung out talking politics for several hours while Shane and I napped and showered.

The depressing zoo was part of an otherwise interesting ethnography museum; there are a lot of these open-air museums here that show traditional Siberian villages: huts, houses, schools, churches, etc. An exhibit about the native people of this region made me wonder if there's not some perfect storm of genetics (the native people here must (?) be related to the ones who crossed the Bering Strait to become native Americans, who do seem to have some genetic predisposition to alcoholism) plus Russian culture that explains why there are so many drunk people here, even by Russian standards.

Speaking of Russian culture, kind of, Ulan Ude has the world's biggest Lenin head statue. (Maybe the world's biggest head, period, but no one's bothered to do a full census of head statues to confirm that.) It's huge, and a little creepy, and people have wedding photos taken in front of it. Which is also kind of creepy.

You never can tell

The food in Irkutsk has been underwhelming. We did have one good overpriced lunch of little dumplings and toast, but it was followed up by really gamey lamb plus generic fried things; pickled mushrooms that tasted like chemicals plus salad with unannounced, not scrape-offable mayonnaise; and frozen fish that was not supposed to be frozen. Tonight's dinner was a big improvement, although not really because of the food. Not long after we sat down, the meanest looking woman ever (and this is a land of mean-looking people) sat down at the table next to us. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that it almost distorted her eyes, and the corners of her mouth literally pointed down. She looked like the kind of cartoon character that would pick up an annoying cat or crying kid and throw it out the window. After she sat down she gave us this pointed, withering look that was so extreme it almost made me laugh right out loud. But then a few minutes later she turned around and asked where we're from and started telling us in pretty good English how much she loves New York and welcoming us to Irkutsk. Later she wanted to buy us a drink and when we really didn't have time because we had a train to catch, she somehow produced a Schweppes bottle of Irkutsk-ian moonshine. (It tastes a lot better than Baikal vodka. Or any other vodka.) I don't understand this place at all.

The other noteworthy thing about Irkutsk, besides its bad food and proximity to Lake Baikal, is that a lot of the Decembrists were exiled here. In 1825 after Alexander I (of Napoleonic war fame) died, next-in-line Constantine abdicated (he decided to remain in charge of Poland and married to his non-noble Polish wife) in favor of his younger brother Nicholas (I) and the Decembrists, a group of discontented nobles, tried to use the succession 'crisis' as a platform for revolution. (They just wanted to free the serfs, not overthrow the government or anything.) It didn't work, and they ended up in Siberia. They have a mildly cult-like status here now (the wives in particular are given a ton of credit for following their husbands into exile, although I doubt the newly-single but known to be married wife of an exiled criminal would have done so well alone in St. Petersburg at the time), and you can visit the graves and former houses of the more important ones. The Volkonsky house, which we went to, is basically a mansion, with parlours and chandaliers and nice art. Still a downgrade from St. Petersburg, maybe, but the gulag it was not.

No taste, my ass

The super friendly, incredibly fast-talking waiter at the fish restaurant was really pushing the Baikal vodka, but ordering a second carafe of it was almost entirely my idea. Shudder. We sort of had to have at least one vodka night, though, and my hangover could be a lot worse. The hot hilly bus/crowded van ride back to Irkutsk was rough, though.

Anyway, Irkutsk has some nice churches (including a Catholic one) and some hideous Soviet buildings and a lot of wooden houses that were probably once very nice but now look like the big bad wolf could easily huff and puff and blow them down. It also has some strange graffiti and 350-year anniversary signs with a drawing of what looks like a cat holding in its mouth what looks like a dead squirrel. And, a lot of dudes in mesh shirts. Also, about half the cars here have the steering wheel on the right side -- I guess because Japan is relatively close. Also, it is hot as hell here. I'm trying to remain calm, but I'm really sweaty and did not pack the right clothes for 90+ degrees. I guess that's what I get for basing my expectations of summer Siberian weather on winter Siberian weather plus a book I once read about Rasputin.

The Big Lake

Irkutsk (it's on the Risk board) is the closest biggish city to Lake Baikal, which is the world's largest (by volume) and deepest freshwater lake. It has more water than all the Great Lakes combined; take that, HOMES. Fresh off the 50+ hour train ride from Irkutsk (we're halfway across Siberia now!), we bought our next set of train tickets (whine), got in a fight with a taxi driver, and took an hourlong bus/crowded van ride to Listvyanka, which is right on the lake. A rough-ish couple of hours, but entirely worth it. The windows on the bus/crowded van opened, a big upgrade from previous buses/crowded ven I've been on, and as we got closer to the lake the wind got cold, even though it was really hot outside. Listvyanka is hot, but when the wind blows the right way it feels like you're standing in front of a very powerful air conditiner. Not surprisingly, the lake itself is freezing. I whined and shivered and contorted myself just putting my feet in the water, and couldn't keep them in very long because it hurt too much. Also, Lake Baikal has this mist or fog or something that makes it really hard to tell, even on a clear day, where the lake ends and the sky begins; it almost looks like the boats are floating. The bad thing about the area around the lake is the bugs. There are these huge swarming hornet-y bugs that are basically the size of your head, and flies at least twice the size of the deer flies in Michigan that will bite through your shirt. Yikes.

Listvyanka is basically one road that runs along the lake and has some hotels and some fish restaurants. If you walk on the main road past the last fish restaurant you'll be at the edge of town, which is really the quintessential edge of town. There is a big rusty overturned boat on the side of the lake, and car parts strewn about, and abandoned buildings with broken windows and graffiti and unhinged doors. It's exactly the kind of place where you imagine the bad kids go to drink and smoke. Except that I think they can do that basically anywhere here.

Ekaterinburg - Irkutsk

The 'rest rooms' were clean, which is all one can reasonably expect of hourly-rental sleeping rooms at the train station. The downside was that the nonstop train announcements were made, loudly, right outside the window, making it hard to do any actual sleeping, even with ear plugs. Whatever.

We're not officially on the Trans-Siberian Railroad for this leg of the trip. That train (the #2) was sold out, so we're instead going to Irkutsk on the #10 train which starts in St. Petersburg and ends in Irkutsk. This train has fewer plugs and grosser bathrooms than the first train we were on, but it is air conditioned. The AC is very much appreciated because, even though it was in the 50's (and raining) yesterday, it's supposed to be in the 90's around Irkutsk. Joder.

There aren't many passengers on this train, and aside from us they're all Russian. People mostly stay in their own compartments and the only person who's expressed any interest in us whatsoever is a sevenish year old girl with some kind of hearing impairment that means she can't really talk to us in any language. One of the train workers walks through the cars singing songs sometimes, and we got a kick out of the guy in the dining car who ordered a bottle of juice and a bottle of vodka for breakfast. He drank nearly half the vodka in the time it took us to have coffee. Mostly, though, we're just doing a lot of sitting around and reading -- more relaxing than adventurous. Luckily Shane and I can have fun together in most any situation, and there is a constant supply of alcohol.

At the beginning of this leg of the trip, we officially crossed into Siberia. It is big and green and empty. There are some cute little villages and some crappy little villages and some rivers, but the only real changes in the scenery are whether the trees are relatively more birch vs. pine, whether it's mostly flat vs. slightly hilly, and the presence vs. absence of dandelions. Even the bigger 'cities' we've stopped in (like Omsk, to where Dostoyevsky was exiled for a while) haven't really been recognizable as such from the train. I'm trying to imagine being forced onto a cattle car to go thousands of miles to this nothingness to spend years doing hard labor, but it's not quite working. This leg of the trip alone is 50-something hours long and about the same distance as going across the United States. At the end of it, we'll be a little over halfway to Vladivostok.

Free from the chains of Kazakhstan

Russian independence day, which celebrates Russia's indepdendence from the Soviet Union, is one of the sillier holidays I've ever heard of. Maybe the Russians think so too since, aside from closing some useful things like the post office internet cafe, they don't seem to celebrate it at all. I was hoping for music and parades and beer by the river, but all we got was another trip to the train station and a torrential downpour.

To enter the Ekaterinburg train station, you're supposed to walk through a metal detector; it's just inside the main entrance and comes with several police officers. Or, you can just go in through the exit, which is right next to the entrance. It has no metal detector and is in plain sight of the police. They don't care. We were just going to the train station to leave our bags for the day, but still that meant another line and some shoving. Joder. On the way out we saw a guy, either dead drunk or else just dead, face down on a dolly/wheelbarrow-type thing with his legs bent in very unnatural directions. A Russian train station is no place to pass out.

Ekaterinburg was named not for Catherine the Great but for Catherine I, wife of Peter the Great, who ruled briefly after Peter died. During communist times it was renamed Sverdlovsk after Igor Sverdlov, a crony of Lenin's who died during the 1918 flu epidemic. We learned from the Ekaterinburg City History Museum that other names considered were Revenge-burg and Mestigrad (City of Vengeance). Friggin' Soviets. The City History Museum also had an absurd hilarious exhibition about Soviet food, mostly reminiscing about how bad it was.

And now, we're headed back to the train station 'rest rooms,' which you can rent by the hour, to hopefully get a few hours of sleep before our train leaves at 6am. Wish us luck.

Tsar + martyr = tsartyr?

There are a lot of good things about Russians: their literature, their sense of humor, the way they let you drink beer wherever the hell you want. But holy fucking christ their queueing behavior is postively abhorrent. It's not just that they push and shove and ooze around the sides of lines -- they'll cut right the fuck in front of you if you let them. Don't I sound uptight and whiny? But when you grow up in a culture that's basically orderly, this shit is seriously maddening. For our second round of buying train tickets, my head nearly exploded, Shane nearly punched out an old lady (ok not really, but she did kinda deserve it), and the train we wanted was sold out. We ended up with tickets on a train leaving just a few hours later -- better times, actually -- but still, I'd rather be hit with sticks than go through the process of buying train tickets here.

Anyway. Ekaterinburg, which is where we are now, is not really what you'd call nice. It's a big sprawling mining town where aesthetics were clearly never a high priority. There is a river and a lake and a few parks, which are sort of pretty. And, Ekaterinburg is where the Red Army took the Russian royal family, and eventually murdered them, after the communist revolution. Boris Yeltsin (who happens to be from here) had the house where the murders took place torn down, and now the Church on the Blood (the Russians do have a way with naming their churches) commemorates the family. Nicholas and Alexandra are what first got me interested in all things Russian, so Ekaterinburg was worth the trip for them alone. In front of the church is a big statue of the whole family, except for their dog. The Reds killed him, too. No mention of Rasputin anywhere.

Moscow - Ekaterinburg

This train is much nicer than what I was expecting. It has air conditioning and the bathrooms are basically clean and it's taken the better part of 20 hours to run out of toilet paper. We've so far had a four-bed compartment to ourselves and the beds and pillows are comfortable enough. Under the tables of the cafe car are giant huge bags of carrots and potatoes, which is kind of fun. The other people in our car are some French people who assume everyone speaks French, a Dutch couple who've come all the way from Holland on trains and are going all the way to Beijing, and various Russians including Mikhail, a Siberian mechanic who's been drinking since at least 9am. He even takes his beer to the bathroom with him. When everyone was off the train at a station he asked if I speak Russian and the conductor lady standing nearby told him nyet before I could even reply. Not sure if she thought she was doing me a favor or just being nosy -- I thought I'd been faking it okish in Russian so far. Mikhail didn't have much to say besides "USA good," anyway.

Remote Russia is the kind of place where people come out of the woodwork to sell things on the platform when a train comes in. In addition to snacks and all manner of alcohol (Mikhail stocked up on beer) there was a guy selling pine tree branches. Maybe they were the kind they use for flogging in Russian massage, but there's definitely not a Russian bath car on this train.

It's like Versailles, but full of shit

BVXT, or VVTs, or something, was some kind of Soviet Exhibition center, or something. It's a huge space with something like 100 pavilions and a huge fancy House of Soviets (or something like that) in the middle, with stars and hammers and sickles and a huge Lenin statue. Plus there's a separate building for each of the former Soviet republics and some big gold shiny ostentatious fountains. It was probably nice, in its way, at some point in the past. Now in among the buildings is a super cheesy amusement park with a go-cart track outlined by piles of tires, and those big inflatable things that kids bounce around in, and people yelling into megaphones. Loud bad constantly changing dance music blared and the woman in charge of the pay portable toilets made out with some dude in her own personal portable toilet/office. Inside the buildings were wax museums and cheap jewelry stores and cell phone kiosks. As Shane said "It's like someone took a huge capitalist dump on Versailles."

Anyway, we've got train tickets and now also have toilet paper and snacks and a liter of boxed wine and are just a few hours away from getting on the train. This is gonna be a good adventure.

In Russia, train rides you

Buying train tickets is hard. Even for actual Russians, who speak the right language and presumably know how things work here, it's a slow process that requires waiting in long lines and a lot of talking. We even wrote down exactly what we wanted, in Russian (2 tickets to Ekaterinburg, Jun 9, in the evening, first class), but still the woman behind the counter responded with a whole string of questions that I didn't understand, followed by many minutes of typing and waiting, with a whole long line of people breathing down our necks. When it finally became clear that exactly what we wanted wasn't available, stress and frustration and confusion and exasperation took over and we just left. No travel agent magically appeared, though, so we just ended up in another set of train station lines. The first line we waited in closed as soon as we got to the front of it. The next line seemed to be marked for invalids, but the woman waiting in front of us seemed pretty valid. Suer enough, a helpful/nosy lady soon came over. "Devushka, this line is for invalids." "But she's not an invalid," I said, pointing at the woman in front of me. The nosy/helpful woman butted her way to the front of the line, as Russians are wont to do, and confirmed that, contrary to the sign, one did not have to be an invalid to be in our particular line. The woman behind the counter was nice enough, reasonably patient, and super efficient. No first class seats available, but we managed to book second class sets (more of an adventure) to Ekaterinburg, so tomorrow night we'll start sharing a train compartment with two strangers and 26 hours later (that's 3.30am local time) we'll be in Ekaterinburg. Whew.

Feeling like we'd just been beaten, we recovered with some coffee and a visit to the Kremlin. Then we saw torn-down Stalin statues with broken noses. And then we had a really good Georgian dinner, with more wine than we needed, followed by beers drunk on steps outside the train station. It is confusing and maddening and in parts (especially near train stations) smells overpoweringly of armpits or urine, but I love Russia.

Russia!

I wasn't surprised that the bus to the Kiev airport was a hot sweaty van. I was a little surprised that I didn't have to pay to get on the hot sweaty van. What would the driver do is someone refused to pay once we were already at the airport? About halfway there he stopped the van and made everyone pay. Well worth the approximately four dollars to not be left stranded on the side of the eight-lane highway.

And now, Moscow! Tomorrow, logistics. Then, if all goes according to plan, get on the train to, eventually, Vladivostok. That's about 150 hours of train travel and almost 10,000 km.

I am so freaking excited.

And then the monk lit my hair on fire

There are almost as many Great Patriotic War memorials (the glorifying kind) here as there are churches. Which makes me sad, because the Ukrainians got totally fucked in the Great Patriotic War. The Soviets destroyed Kiev themselves before fleeing the Nazis, who were in charge just long enough to kill about two million people. Once the Soviets were back in charge, they got to killing alleged Nazi collaborators. They took the peasants' seed grain when crop yields weren't high enough, which promptly led to another famine in 1946. (The first Soviet-induced famine was in 1932-33 -- something like four million people died. There are some famine memorials as well, but the severity of the famine now seems to depend on the mood of Ukraine's relationship with Moscow: When they're getting along the famine wasn't quite so bad.) Soviet territorial gains from the Great Patriotic War meant that the Ukrainians finally got to live united in a place called Ukraine, but they had to live there under Stalin. No wonder their collective sense of humor is so dark.

Back on the church front, the Pecherska Lavra is kind of like a cross between the Vatican and the Kremlin. It started as an underground monastery about a thousand years ago, and has since grown into this huge complex of churches and museums and gardens, plus the caves (which are more like basements than caves, but I guess they probably started as caves). The 'caves' are not that well-marked and are generally confusing, so when I finally found the first set of them I asked the monk near the entrance if I could go down. He spoke good English and he wanted me to buy a scarf to cover my head (not sure if that's cave-policy or just his personal/religious preference.) Then he bought me a cross with my money (he couldn't believe I'm not Orthodox) and gave me some kind of blessing and put the cross around my neck, while holding a candle, burning some of my hair in the process. He was good to have around, though, because he gave me a little tour and told me about the history of the monastery. It took forever, though, because he had to kiss every icon and relic, sometimes several times. So there we were, the monk and me, down in the caves lit only by candle light, talking about kissing (icons), and I started to wonder why he wasn't more sweaty in his long monk robes. He didn't smell bad at all. And he had long hair and a scruffy beard. And nice teeth.... It's a good thing I don't believe in hell, because I'm headed straight there. The more he talked, though, the less attractrive he got. He told me about how "we have the saints and they prove that Orthodox is the right religion." When I told him that there are a lot of Russians in Brooklyn he made a face and said "Jews." "Are Jews not Russians?" I asked. "They speak Russian. That does not mean they are Russian. I'm speaking English, does that make me American?" Nice teeth, but he was a lot more attractive with his mouth shut.

No photos that direction! You could be arrested.

It seems like I should remember the Chernobyl accident. I was eight; that seems old enough. And it was a pretty big huge deal. But I don't remember it at all. Twenty-five years later (yikes), they send tour groups there. I hate tour groups, but I could not have talked my way into the exclusion zone.

I was bracing myself for it to be horrible and depressing. (On the bus from Kiev they tried to show a documentary which probably was pretty depressing, but the DVD kept stopping and finally they gave up.) But you know what? I thought it was beautiful. At the power plant itself there's not much obvious evidence of disaster, aside from some memorials, and the buildings and machinery are big and dramatic and it happened to be a clear day with a bright blue sky and the sun shone on the rust and the angles and the trees and the water (artificial rivers and a lake for cooling purposes, but still sun shining on water usually looks nice) and it was all very striking and very pretty. Which was pretty weird.

Chernobyl (Chornobyl in Ukrainian) is the town after which the power plant was named. It's mostly deserted now, but a few people do monitoring and administrative work there and there are a few houses with little gardens out front (yikes). At the power plant itself, the three reactors that didn't explode stayed operational after the accident. The last one was shut off in 2001; apparently for political, not safety, reasons. There is still containment work to be done, but it's currently on hold because of money and problems with contractors. A few people still work at the plant for monitoring, but on a Sunday it was pretty deserted. (The cafeteria was open, though -- maybe only for tour groups? They assured us the food was safe and no one made the obvious dumb joke of asking if it was local.) Pripyat is the town where the plant workers lived and it's now completely abandoned. It wasn't evacuated until a full day after the accident, though. The people were told that the accident wasn't severe ("to maintain order") and that they would be allowed back in three days (they weren't). A few people refused to leave and were dead within a few weeks. The people who left were eventually allowed back to get some of their things, but no one ever lived there again.

All of which sounds depressing as hell. Is depressing as hell. Plus, everyone who helped put out the fire and contain the disaster died soon after. And the people in charge at Chernobyl were so un-glastnost-y that Mikhail Gorbachev found out about the explosion from Sweden, where elevated radioactivity was detected days later after the wind blew it there. (That's the story, anyway.)

But like I said, it doesn't look like disaster or destruction now. Even the abandoned buildings in Pripyat were more interesting than depressing, to me anyway. More than that, though, the people there really don't play the tragedy card. I mean, they recognize it as tragedy (how could you not?) -- there are lots of memorials, for example -- but it was 25 years ago and life goes on and they don't seem to be actively mourning. And, Ukrainians have this dark sick twisted sense of humor that is probably good for coping and also makes them hilarious, once you get over feeling bad for laughing. I went to this exhibition for the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl and it had a whole section about the jokes people told after the accident. (The only one I remember was something like 'Reagan calls up the Pentagon and says "Cancel the Soviet nuclear offensive program. They've gone self-service."') Yuri, our guide, was wearing a Hard Rock Cafe Chernobyl t-shirt. The front of his shirt also said "Save the planet" and the back had what looked like a tour schedule, only it said things like Iodine 131 and Strontium 90. Before he took us to what was the school in Pripyat he said, "This is perfect school -- no teachers. But it is also perfect school for teachers -- no children. Perfect school, now we have it. Let's go."

Cover me

(some browsers fuck with the spacing and I can never figure out how to fix it -- very annoying)

The National Art Museum of Ukraine defines 'national' pretty liberally, including ethnic Ukrainians who lived/worked in other places and people of other nationalities who worked or spent time in Ukraine. (That's a fact, not a value statement.) I was sort of struck by how much the village scene paintings from 100+ years ago look exactly like what you see out the window of a train going across Ukraine today. Ukrainian peasants had a pretty turbulent, horrible last century -- Stalin made sure of that -- but you wouldn't know it from looking at their houses.

Anyway. I think living in Kiev would mostly make me very grumpy. The winters are long and cold and snowy (windy too, I bet) and spring apparently lasts about two weeks and two of the three early-June days that I've spent here have been just-barely-bearably hot. But the Kievans do take good advantage of the few warm/hot days they have and on a day like today when the weather is perfect, it's pretty glorious. There are little outdoor concerts all over the city and you can drink beer in the parks and depending on where exactly you are the river has little beaches or islands or outdoor 'cafes' that serve plastic cups of beer or abandoned industrial grit. On weekends they pedestrian-ize some of the main streets and this afternoon there was a little parade and a stage on the main square had traditional music and dancing (including an act by an 'art collective' of little kids).

There's just a good vibe here, even at the brew pub with the adequate cover band. The Kievans were getting down to Bon Jovi and the Beatles, but they really got excited when the cover band played the only Ukrainian song of their whole set. If people like the Ukrainian music so much, I don't understand why I don't here more of it here (and so then less of Sting and George Michael -- east Europe loves those two). I guess there's not a huge market but still, you'd think a country of 45 million people could give the cover band a little more to work with.

Might like to drink whiskey, might like to drink milk

Holy crap there are a lot of churches here. Gold domes everywhere you look. There is a legend that back in the early days of the Rus (10th century), Prince Volodomyr I (Vladimir I if you're reading Russian history) was deciding whether the Rusyns were going to be Catholic, Byzantine (Orthodox), Jewish, or Muslim. He sent out fact-finding missions and allegedly immediately rejected Islam because of the no-alcohol rule. Whether or not that little detail is true, the Rus became Orthodox and about fifty years later Prince Yaroslav built the Santa Sofia Cathedral in Kiev and now it's one of the places you must see if you come here. Yaroslav is buried there, along with some other dead princes and important religious people from a long time ago, and there are 12th century frescoes. Some of them are even pretty interesting -- more fierce creatures and little devils. There's also a typical Mary and Jesus icon-style scene (not from the 12th century), only made mosaic-style out of Ukrainian Easter eggs by a Ukrainian artist named Olga-something with crazy hair. I don't think you're supposed to take photos, but I did anyway.

Religion in Ukraine is confusing. I guess almost everyone is basically Orthodox. (Seems like everyone who's not a tourist crosses himself three times when walking past a church.) But one kind of Ukrainian Orthodox has a patriarch in Moscow and another kind has a patriarch in Kiev. And in the (formerly Catholic-Polish-controlled) west there is also the Uniate (aka Greek Catholic aka Ukrainian Greek Catholic) Church, which looks and mostly acts Orthodox but also recognizes the Pope. Talk about covering your bases. I also can't get a straight answer on how religious the people here really are. I've heard several people say that almost no one goes to church, and I've heard others say that communist repression made people even more religious and so now lots of people go to church. They've got plenty of options, anyway.

Hot, hilly, and crowded

Kiev is big and loud and hot and crowded and I like it. So far it mostly feels a lot like Moscow but also a little like New York, and I like that too. The subway stations are so deep that if you walk on the escalator you'll tire yourself out, even going down, but if you don't walk you'll get bored because the ride is so long. They play music anyway, and sometimes the escalator music sounds like Tetris music (which makes sense because Tetris is Russian, blah, blah). The river is good to walk by; there's a sort of dilapidated walkway with good graffiti and a few stray dogs where couples make out and trash piles up and arty types brood and old fishermen fish and drink vodka. And I had a really good Georgian lunch of something with beans and something with cheese and something with eggplant and it was spicy and flavorful and good. (Even before I lived in New York and had friends who read food blogs, I knew that Georgian food is basically the best thing ever.) And, even though it meant waking up at 5am, I was able to get here not on an overnight train. So far, not bad.

It hadn't really occurred to me to miss being in a big city, but it feels good now that I am. (Incidentally, someone told me that no one really knows how big Kiev is (the internet seems to agree on about 2.6 million people) and that population estimates are based on bread sales. I can't find anything confirming that claim, though.)

Severin, down on your bended knee

Apropos of nothing, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who wrote Venus in Furs and after whom masochism is named, was born in Lviv.

Anyway, about a thousand years ago there was the Rus. The Kievan Rus to be exact. It's where both Russian and Ukrainian history sort of started, although it was originally ruled by Vikings. (Russian histories like to gloss over the Viking part.) The Rus had a complicated ineffective system of hereditary rule where all the brothers of the current prince were in line ahead of the current prince's sons for next in charge, and it made everything all fractured. By the time the Mongols showed up and took over in the 13th century, the Rus had split into three Rus-lets, each of which was its own little disaster. The part of the Rus that would become Russia, or part of the Russian empire anyway, regrouped on its own and the part that would (eventually) become western Ukraine came under control of sometimes Lithuania but mostly Poland and, when Poland ceased to exist, Austria. The western Ukrainians living under Polish rule could join the noble class, but they had to assimilate and basically 'become' Polish. Ukrainian culture belonged mostly to the peasants, until some scholars took up the subject in the 19th century; and western Ukrainians didn't live in a place called Ukraine until after World War II. That's why at Lviv's huge Lychakiv cemetery the old graves mosly have Polish names and the newer ones are mostly Ukrainian: Ukrainians have always lived here, but peasants weren't buried in mausoleums. I assume that's also why there is not a ton of Ukrainian art besides contemporary stuff and icons (unless it's all in Kiev). Some of the really old (like 15th century) Ukrainian icons are actually pretty cool. A lot of them are judgment-day-themed and have all kinds of little Bosch-like devily-y guys and monstery-y creatures and snakes simultaneously eating and impaling people.

Anyway, at the cemetery I met this adorable old man who works at the war memorial there. We could barely communicate but he was really trying and once we established that I'm here by myself he decided that I should take a Ukrainian boy home with me. I don't know how to say 'they're not exactly knocking down my door' or 'in these shoes?' in Ukrainian, Russian, or Polish, so we agreed (I think) on 'maybe.' Actually, if I met a boy here who I liked enough to take home with me, I might just not go home. I could stay in Lviv for a while. I don't know how to say that in Ukrainian, Russian, or Polish either, though.

Bottoms up

Train travel in Ukraine is a little maddening. At the train station there is only one line for advance tickets, even if that means that 30 people are waiting in that one line and no one is waiting in the other lines. And each line is closed for ten minutes of each hour -- a different ten-minute chunk for each line -- so there's this stupid musical line dance that happens every time a line is about to close. And, even if you pay the extra money to go first class, you still might end up sharing a sleeper car with a fat man who strips down to his small underwear to sleep, and snores, and doesn't like black or Turkish people. (He was nice to me at least -- showed me photos of his kid and insisted on sharing his dinner with me -- my being the right color and all.) But, if not for my dinner with Andrey the racist, I would not have made it to Lviv (one slow overnight train is apparently the only possible way to get between Ukraine's second and third largest cities--there aren't even any flights, even though both cities have airports), and that would have been a shame.

I love Lviv. It is so beautiful and so lovely and so charming that I sort of want to give it a big hug. There are all these beautiful churches and cute little squares and big plazas with fountains and tiny cafes, and there are good restaurants and hardly any tourists. It has a big old university and a beautiful opera house. It's basically the perfect European city. Which is kind of weird if you're like me and have only ever really thought about Ukraine as it relates to Russia. Turns out it's more complicated. What is now western Ukraine spent most of its modern pre-World War II life as part of either Austria or Poland, and it really shows. Odessa felt entirely Russian to me; aside from the language and absurdity at the train station, Lviv doesn't feel Russian at all. (Even the language isn't actually Russian -- people mostly speak Ukrainian here -- but to my gringo ears they sound the same.)

Anyway, I usually roll my eyes whenever a city is referred to as 'the next Prague' but seriously, people, come here before everyone else does. Just try not to come via the overnight train from Odessa.