And only 2 weeks to go...

And Siberia continues to amaze me with its strangeness and its beauty. Every time I walk down to the lake, it never fails to completely take my breath away. On clear days, the water reflects a cool blue-green tropical color, and it's so crystal-clear that from the shore, you can see straight through to the stones at the bottom. The other day I went for a long walk along the beach, and when I got thirsty, I drank the water straight from the lake. It's still icy cold, and in certain areas there are still piles of snow on the shore, but I remain determined to swim in the lake before I leave!

The weather has been beautiful, but the wind is chilly enough that I'm still wearing sweaters on a daily basis. At nighttime it's uncomfortably cold, but almost every night there's a bonfire and guitar sing-along either at Nikita's or down at the beach. I've managed to make some transitory friends as tourists come and go and have also become good friends with Dima, the guy who's in charge of the internet and wi/fi at Nikita's (by the way, he is one of 5 "Dima's" that I'm friends with). A few years back he spent a year in Texas, and his English is so good that at first I thought he was an American. Unlike most Russians I know, he has excellent taste in music, and we spent a few hours the other night exchanging music (I'm in desparate need of new stuff; I go on so many long walks with my iPod and I think I've listened to my iTunes library more than 3 times).

Luckily, my friends from Irkutsk have been passing through every few days, so I've gotten a chance to say goodbye to everyone one last time. My best friend Anna is coming today and will stay for a few days, which will give us enough time to plot our next adventure together (we decided we want to travel somewhere together; I mean, after navigating Eastern Siberia, everywhere else will be so easy!).

In the two short weeks that I've been here, my Russian has actually gotten a lot better, and after having a conversation with a fellow worker during lunch today, I noticed that I didn't have to ask "what?" even once! The man I was talking to was asking me if I'll return to Russia after I graduate from college. When I told him I would have to work for a while to earn money before I could return, he responded, "Money isn't necessary. Just get married to a Russian man. And have children. This is the most important thing in life."

And then there are the conversations that I have with locals on my way back and forth from the store. Yesterday evening, I was walking in the village and a car stopped to ask me for directions to a restaurant I've never heard of (which is surprising, because there are only like 3 in the entire village). After hearing my accent, they immediately knew I was a foreigner and asked me where I was from. When I told them I'm from America, the guy in the passenger's seat, who was holding a beer in one hand and a small child in the other, jumped out of the car with the child, took a last gulp of beer, threw the can into a bush, and when I asked him what he was doing, told me that he wanted his son to meet a real American. I stood and talked to them for a few minutes and then told them I needed to get back to work. The encounter was both hilarious and incredibly sad; I just hope that they made it to their destination in time before they were too drunk to drive. The little boy was sitting on his father's lap in the front seat without a car seat or even seat belts. Luckily, there is literally no traffic in Khuzir and not a whole lot to crash into either.

Overdue pictures

I get kind of aggressive when I play sports and accidently tripped my friend Paul!

A project seminar for GBT. We built a walking trail in the botanic garden.

Manual labor.

Dima and I

A few days later...

So here I sit in my cold drafty shed with a hot morning tea and space heater that my co-worker set up for me before I got here. I just ate a delicious breakfast of kasha and blini, and I'm well-rested from a good night's sleep following a few hours at the banya. I've been taking evening walks along the shores of Baikal, watching the last of the ice melt away into clear blue water, and I watch the sunset at midnight (yes, I'm that far north!). Although I've been a bit bored and lonely, I've also been busy with the tasks that I've been assigned, especially laundry collection, which has turned out to be particularly difficult. How can laundry collection be difficult, you ask? Well, I'll tell you: I have a list of women who volunteer to do laundry for some extra cash, and new ones are coming up to me each day telling me that they would like to do laundry too. Although I have nearly ten women on my list, there are usually only 3-4 bags of laundry each day at most. Because these women have volunteered primarily because they need the extra money, they come up to me hourly, asking me if there's any laundry, if there will be any laundry, if there was laundry and I gave it to someone else, etc. I've realized that it's very important to distribute the laundry evenly so that no one gets left out, but there just isn't enough laundry to go around. I've even considered pawning out my laundry just to keep them busy (even though I've been washing my laundry in a sink for 4 ½ months now and I'm pretty much a pro). In addition, these women are from the village of Khuzir, and village Russian is extremely difficult to understand, even for native speakers from the city. Oh god, I can see one of the laundry ladies approaching right now…

Other than laundry collection, I занимаюсь (one of my favorite Russian verbs that can't be directly translated into English; it means "occupied by" or "kept busy by") teaching English to 7 and 8-yr-olds. Oh my god are they adorable. They know a few phrases, but I have to teach mostly in Russian, which has turned out to be extemely rewarding given that they don't measure my intelligence by how well I speak Russian (I feel like this is the case when I'm speaking to adults). I teach them simple phrases, which they repeat in unison, and play silly games like "Simon Says" and "I spy." Secretly, Matvei is my favorite. He's this adorable 7-yr-old with two front teeth missing and wears a skull cab with bear ears on it. Another thing that I find completely adorable is that they all address me with the formal "you" ("vui") and greet me with a formal hello ("zdrastvuiche") every time I see them.

Although these things keep me reasonably busy, I spend most of the day sitting at my desk with nothing to do. The other day when I told Alexei (the Russian construction worker who comes to visit me) that I was bored, he told me to make a birthday card for the owner's younger son Tihon. I told him that I can't draw very well, but he still insisted that I make a card. Naturally, I got my computer, got on the internet (which is so fast here, thank god!!), and starting looking for a picture to look off of so I could draw something. When he caught me doing this, he said "Katusha [diminunitive of my name], what are you doing?? When I was in the army, we didn't have the internet! You have to draw something from your mind!" He then made me close my computer and told me to draw "uz dushaa" ("from the soul"). After he left, I managed to outsmart him by drawing a replica of the map hanging on the wall, and wrote on the card "Happy Birthday from America, from Europe, from Africa, etc." When he came back and realized I had done this, he almost fell over laughing, saying, "See, you just have to use your head! You don't need the internet! The internet is for stupid people [dyraki]."

Aside from Alexei, I've had other interesting conversations with Nikita's staff. One older man with whom always end up having meals because we happen to be on the same schedule, told me the history of the tribes that used to live in this portion of Siberia thousands of years ago, and then went off on a tangit about eugenics. After spending a year and a half at Wesleyan, it is, admittedly, a bit refreshing to hear what people actually think, minus all that political correctness nonsense (even though I completely disagreed with what he was saying).

So that's all I can think of for now, but I'll keep you posted…

Pics from Mongolia

Monument of Ghengis Khan in the estimated location of his death

Our hostel...

Лощадь (horse)

Overlooking Ulan-Bataar from a memorial in dedication of Russian-Mongol relations

It was so windy in the desert when we stopped for a "bathroom break" that we could barely stand straight!

The most beautiful place on earth

During my time here in Siberia, I often find myself wondering, "How did the path of my life lead me here?" (In fact, a man from Olkhon asked me this very question on the marshrutka from Irkutsk to Olkhon yesterday.) And as I sit here at my little desk answering tourist questions, ordering marshrutkas for visitors, and booking the banya, I feel espeically disoriented. My job is conducted almost primarily in Russian, and for the most part, I can understand when given direction. Even so, I've found that Russians tend to be extremely vague and pretty much expect you to figure out everything by yourself. For example, this morning I was given a small office in a shed labeled "customer service" and told to answer tourist questions. I was not, however, informed how to answer these questions, nor how long I would be sitting there (so far six hours and counting). It turned out that I spent the better part of the afternoon entertaining and practicing English with the owners' 13-year-old son. I was just thinking of some of my first jobs and how it's always awkward to start a new job because for the first few days you never know exactly what you're supposed to be doing. And here I am, going through that awkward phase, but completely in Russian. For example, earlier today an older Russian woman came up to my little "help desk," introduced herself, and asked me where I was from, why I'm here, etc. Later in the day, I was delagated the duty of collecting laundry for the guests and the lady came up to me, pointed to the pile of laundry on the floor, and asked me something with her strong "village Russian" accent. Because I thought this woman was a guest, I assumed that she wanted to drop off her laundry and I explained the process (you drop it off, pay by the kilogram, pick up the next day). She then mentioned something about picking up laundry, which I assumed meant that she had dropped off her laundry yesterday and wanted to know where to pick it up. I then told her that she should ask in reception because I hadn't been working yesterday, but she kept pointing to the laundry and saying something out of which I could only distinguish the words "Don't be scared." When I saw an employee who speaks English walk by, I asked him to help me, and he told me she was simply stopping by to pick up the laundry. It turned out that she works here at Nikita's and thought that I was "afraid" to give her the laundry because I didn't believe she actually worked here and that she would steal it, when in reality I simply had no idea that she was the laundry lady!

All other things aside, Olkhon is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been and probably ever will be. Believe it or not, the lake is still partially forzen, and if you stand in a quiet spot you can hear the ice cracking like glass. Last evening I watched a beautiful sunset over the lake followed by a strange lightening storm that I watched safely from my front porch. The village of Khuzir is peaceful and simple, and I truly enjoy the chance encounters that I make with the people who live here. Yesterday, my firneds and I met an old man ouside of the village's only grocery store and talked to him for almost 45 minutes about the Ukraine and Belerus's dependence upon Russian oil. This was all before his wife, dressed in a sparkely purple dress, came over and yelled at him, "How old do you think you are?! What are you doing talking to these young ladies?!" The funny thing was, he was a bit senile and for some reason insisted that we were German, and tried to speak to us in German multiple times.

So there's my update for now! Within the next few weeks I'll probably be writing more often than I have been because I'll sitting at my little desk for most of the day refusing to give the laundry lady the laundry!

Snowstorms in May

Sorry everyone, but the internet has been so bad lately that I can't even load photos onto the blog website, so you'll just have to wait for me to get back! J

This past weekend we had our last horah with our Russian friends from the university and took a weekend trip to Baikalsk, a small village about 4 hours north of Irkutsk and the place where we had gone skiing 2 ½ months ago. Unfortnately, on the day we were supposed to leave we missed our train and had to order a marshrutka, which meant we have to splurge a whole 150 rubles ($5.50) instead of paying only 40 rubles (less than $1.50). I think I'm really going to miss cheap public transportation when I'm back in the US and I have to pay $60 to get from New Haven to Harrisburg on Amtrak. All 30 of us stayed in this odd gymnasium-school-hostel that our friend Olegue knew about (he grew up in Baikalsk), and ate in a school cafeteria for 50 rubles (which was truly the most rotten food I think I've ever eaten). When we got back from lunch, two of my friends from England started a football (soccer) match with all of the guys. When I joined in, I think they weren't really expecting anything from me, mainly because I'm a girl and the standard mentality here towards women is that they can't do things (especially sports) nearly as well as men. It turned out that I held my own pretty well in front of my rather good-looking European guy friends and even scored 3 goals! Given that I haven't played soccer in probably about 8 years and that I haven't managed to work out regularly within the past 3 months, I could barely move the next day because my muscles were so sore.

We spent the evening utilizing the banya and toasting to friendship, international relations, and several other things as the evening proceeded. We spent the next day and a half doing pretty much the same things: kicking a soccer ball around, banya-ing, and having a vecherinka (party). All in all, it was great for everyone to spend the whole weekend together before the end of the semester and the beginning of exam week.

Now, when I say "exam week," I don't mean the type of exam week that I had last semester when I didn't leave my room for a whole week and lived off of crackers and coffee. When I say "exam week," I mean that the teachers threaten about an exam all semester and then end up giving you an "avtomat," which means that you get an "automatic" 5 (A) because you did your homework and showed up for class. I only actually took one real exam, and for one of my classes the conversation with regard to by grade proceeded as such: teacher—"Do you agree with a 4 [B]?" Me—"Um, ok." Teacher—"Do you strongly want a 5?" Me—"Well, yes." Teacher—"Well ok then, 5!" If only things worked this way at Wesleyan!

Right now I'm sitting in Studio Coffee looking out the window at the May blizzard that fell upon Irkutsk late this morning. I'm waiting for my Greek salad and americano to arrive while watching the wealthy Irkutsk businessmen come and go, braving the weather in their sharp suits and Russian-style pointed-toe men's shoes. I'm thinking back to my first trip to Studio Coffee back in February when all of my friends had taken a trip to Ylan-Yde and I was stuck in Irkutsk by myself feeling homesick and lonely, looking for any semblance of American culture that I could experience. Even though by looking out the window alone you can't tell that much time has passed, I feel like that was a lifetime ago and that everything has changed since then (except maybe, the precipitation). Back then I orded a cappucino because it was the only thing on the menu that I could recognize and I remember looking up how to say, "waitress, can I have the check?" Now, I'm capable of ordering a marshrutka by phone and understand even the most weathered drivers (every one here seems to agree that marshrutka drivers have their own sub-culture and speak their own version of Russian which is nearly unintelligable even to native Russians). I feel like the gloomy skies are indicative of my current mood, mainly because all of my American and international friends will be leaving within the next week and my time in Irkutsk and in Russia is coming to an end. It's hard for me to imagine returning to the US because I've really made a life for myself here in this bustiling Siberian city. I've made a few good Russian friends, become extremely close with my dormmates, manged to finally crack the code of the local transporation system, located all of the good cafes in the city (even the ones that have coffee "to go"!), and finally gotten a handle on conversational Russian. I've seen the lake change from solid ice that you can drive on to a (nearly) liquid state and I can finally see buds on the trees. I've braved what locals have dubbed "the coldest winter in recent memory" and exeprienced the most awkward experience that I'll (hopefully) ever have when I accidentally brought up gay marriage at a Russian non-profit (it still makes me angry thinking about it). The truth is, I've really changed as a person and have become more patient, thankful, and have gained some very important new perspectives, not to mention a completely new tolerance for cold. The city is a completely different place in the spring and I feel completely different about Irkutsk and Russia in general than when I arrived. Nonetheless, I so excited to spend my last three weeks living on Olkhon and reflecting upon this amazing, awful, boring, exciting, ridiculous experience!

MONGOLIA

It's 9:00 on a Tuesday night and it's RAINING! This normally wouldn't be exciting, except for the fact that this is the first form of precipitation that I've seen that hasn't been in the form of snow (although now that I look a little more closely, it might be a snow/rain combo). I'm currently fighting the endless struggle with the internet, which works about as fast as the internet worked in the US in the year 2000, and waiting for my laundry to finish soaking in the sink. I'm really going to miss Irkutsk when I leave at the end of the month, but I will never be nostalgic for washing my clothes by hand. Luckily I'll have no reminders of this because most of my clothes are nearly destroyed from hand-washing and I'll be leaving almost all of them behind.

I spent this past weekend in Ulan-Bataar, Mongolia, which was a surprise trip SRAS organized for the 4 of us on the program. In all, the trip was pretty amazing, although I don't know who is responsible for planning a trip in which we spent 2 ½ days traveling and only 1 full day in the city. We left by overnight train on the trans-Siberian railway late Friday night and arrived in Ylan-Yde early Saturday morning. From there we took a 12-HOUR bus ride to Ylan-Bataar, Mongolia. Crossing the border was, of course, a complete fiasco and pain-in-the-ass. The process goes like this: Pull up to the border, wait. An official comes on the bus and personally checks everyone's passports, wait. Cross the border, disembark, gather luggage, wait in line. Passport control, customs, wait. Get back on the bus. An official comes on the bus and personally checks everyone's passports, again. Then we cross the border. And that was just to get out of Russia. The same process occurs on the other side with the Mongolian officials (the only difference was that the Mongolian drug dogs were a lot wimpier than the Russian ones).

We got to Ulan-Bataar around 7pm and met our tour guide, who was about 20 yrs old and spoke excellent English (and quite attractive, might I add). When I told him I was from PA, he told me that he's going to Lehigh University in the fall! He then added that he had also applied to Colgate, Vassar, Hamilton, Brandeis, and Lafayette, and that he had to apply two years in a row because none of the schools he applied to the first time around offered him enough financial aid. When he told me that he found out about these schools by reading US News & World Report's "Top Colleges" list (my temporary bible when I was applying to college), I realized just how small the world is. Even though he was obviously a very intelligent person, it turned out that he didn't really know too much about Mongolia (we started to doubt the fact that he grew up in Ulan-Bataar) and wasn't a very good tour guide.

He showed us to our hostel to drop off our stuff before going to a Mongolian barbecue buffet for dinner (where I tried horse meat for the first time). After commenting on how "nice" the hostel was, we all realized that our standards had significantly lowered after coming to Russia. Looking back, the hostel was of about the same quality as you would expect at "Purdy Motel" on 11&15 South. After dinner, my friend Andrew and I went to a very Western-style karaoke bar and had the opportunity to hear Mongolian renditions of songs by Michael Jackson, Journey, and Whitney Houston. We also tried the very popular Mongolian "Chengis Khan" beer, which was a disappointingly light and flavorless beer. (I don't know why, but I was kind of expecting something dark and bitter.) Before we left, I left a 100-tugrug (Mongolian currency) tip for our waitress, only to rush back to our table as soon as I realized I had only left her the equivalent of $.07. In fact, the currency in Mongolia is so inflated that they stopped using coins a few years ago.

On Sunday, our one and only full day in Mongolia, we went to a giant metal statue of Chengis Khan in the desert outside of the city. This was supposedly the estimated location of his death, and there was a whole complex constructed in his honor. Unfortunately, the museum was under construction and there really wasn't much to see, but we got a chance to take an elevator up to the top of the statue and look out over the mountainous desert. We then drove further and went to a national park out on the steppe, where I felt the strongest wind I've ever experienced in my life; in fact, while we were climbing a hill I had to take a few breaks to sit down for a few moments because I was afraid the wind would blow me over.

We then headed back into Ulan-Bataar for the city portion of our excursion. Ulan-Bataar is really unlike any other place I've ever been in my life. The outskirts of the city are pretty rough, and there are even young children begging on the streets (which is something I've never seen in Russia). Also, most people who live outside of the center of the city or in the countryside live in yurts, which are round collapsible tepee-like dwellings no more than ten meters across and 2 meters high. They actually seem quite roomy from the inside, and I bought a beautiful silver bracelet as a souvenir for myself from a man who turned his yurt into a tourist shop (with his bed and belongings situated neatly against one of the walls). The inside of the city is fairly modern and somewhat resembles Irkutsk. The only huge difference was that behind the tall buildings you can see the desert mountains in the background, which makes you realize that even though you're in a city, you're still in a desert in the middle of nowhere, and outside the city walls there is literally nothing for miles and miles; only about every 60 miles or so do you see a tiny yurt village and a herd of animals. A lot of people in Mongolia still live semi-nomadic lives, and Mongolia is considered the most underdeveloped country in the world because it is so sparsely populated. In fact, the population of Mongolia is only about 3 million, and one-third of those people live in the city of Ulan-Bataar.

In the city, we had the chance to walk around the main city square and visit various Buddhist temples and statues. By the end of the day we were pretty exhausted and headed off to bed early to brace ourselves for the long journey back to Irkutsk. Whoever planned this trip had surely never sat on a bus for 12 hours with no ventilation, no restroom, and nothing to look at but miles and miles of desert wasteland. Additionally, the road between Mongolia and Russia is covered in potholes and blocked every couple of miles by wandering livestock. When we finally got to Ulan-Yde, we still had another overnight train ride ahead of us, and we arrived to Irkutsk at 7:30 this morning, giving us just enough time to quickly finish up our homework and drag our zombie-like selves to school.

In case anyone back home is till unaware, I recently received a grant from Wesleyan to stay an extra month in Russia during which I will work and live for free at Nikita's Homestead on Olkhon Island (the place where I stayed back in February). There, I'll probably teach English, translate for foreign tourists, help with cooking and cleaning, and, most importantly, have the chance to see Lake Baikal UNFROZEN. By now I'm getting pretty homesick, but I simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I'm actually becoming pretty excited about it, and I think it will be a great way to end this crazy experience I've had here in Siberia. Although, I'm still looking forward to the end of June, when I'll be able to grab a coffee to go at Starbucks, use a washing machine, and walk around outside without a coat. Until then, it will be instant coffee, hand-washed laundry, and wool jackets in May.

Pictures soon to come!

Easter Sunday hikes, wild horse theft, and late-night insomnia

To all of my loyal blog readers, I would like to sincerely apologize for my month-long hiatus. So much has been happening, and I feel like it's so difficult to express the experiences that I've had. But, I will give it a try! So here goes, the past month:

Two weekends after our trip to Ylan-Yde, I went on an Easter Sunday hike across the lake from the Tyomnii Padt railway station to the village of Slydyanka. I was shocked to find out that the lake was still completely frozen and covered with snow! Luckily it was a beautiful day, and I can't think of a better way of celebrating Easter than hiking 10-miles across a frozen lake in the middle of Siberia. The weirdest part, actually, was not the frozen lake, but rather the illusion of the proximity of the other side of the lake as we were hiking. From the shore at Tyomnii Padt the mountains on the other side appeared to be only a couple hundred yards away, when in fact they are much, much further. It almost feels like your walking on a treadmill, with sand.

The following weekend I went on a trip with GBT to Bolshoe Goloustnoe, a tiny village about 3 hours outside of the city. Unfortanately, I felt a little carsick after the bumpy bus ride and never fully recovered after we arrived. Nonetheless, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stay in a village with no running water, generator-powered electricity, minimal phone service, and no internet access. Additionally, I had the opportunity to try unpasturized milk and to snatch wild horses from the steppe. Please, let me explain.

The purpose of the trip was to visit the school in the village and teach the children about lake ecology. We planned a small presentation and organized a few games to play (although I didn't fully understand all of the rules of the games because they had been explained to me in Russian; for this reason I volunteered to help take pictures instead of participating). After the games, we split the children up into groups and rotated the groups through stations. I worked with Yulia, another girl from GBT (who I later found out was only 16!) in a station where we talked about resource preservation. When a group of 12-yr old boys rotated through our station, Yulia had trouble keeping their attention and suddenly stormed out of the room in frustration. I had thought that she was going to get a teacher to calm the kids down and that she would be back in a minute or two. Then I heard one of the children yell, "She's smoking!" and the others crowded around the window to take a look. Evidently Yulia was so stressed out that she needed a cigarette break and went outside to smoke in clear view of the children (she was later reprimanded for this offense). This left me with the duty of explaining resource preservation on the lake to a group of roudy 12-yr old boys, in Russian. Luckily, they were interested enough in meeting a foreigner that they calmed down a bit and asked me questions about the US. Nonetheless, I was extremely relieved when Yulia returned 15 minutes later.

After visiting the school, we went back to the home of the family that had hosted us the night before. They were extremely kind, and the mother even endearingly called me "Katyusha", which is a diminunative of Katya, my Russian name. For the remainder of the afternoon, Djenya (her son) suggested that we go to see the wild horses out on the steppe. So we all piled into the back of their pickup truck and were given a tarp to use as shelter from the wind as we drove out onto the steppe. The Siberian steppe is a large flat area in between the mountains where cold air gets trapped, and it is for this reason that even the southern portions of Siberia remain extremely cold far into the spring season. Luckily, the mother loaned me one of Djenya's coats, which was made out of a material so warm that it seemed to be only one step down from fiberglass insulation.

Now, I've had very little experience with horses in my life. I've never really had an interest in riding them, and I'm not exactly what you would call an "animal person". But when I saw the wild horses, I realized that I have been missing out! The horses were absolutely beautiful, especially seeing them in their natural habitat. Initially, I thought that we had gone out onto the steppe to simply see the wild horses, but when Djenya started feeding them and saddling them up, I began to get a little suspicious. Within a few minutes, I realized that the family wanted to bring the horses back to their farm, and we were going to help herd them back. The moment I realized this, I almost fell over laughing. There I was, in the middle of a blizzard in the middle of April, helping to steal horses from the Siberian steppe. What was even funnier was the fact that everyone else had known that bringing the horses back to the farm was the original intention of the trip; I had simply missed that detail because I typcially only understand about 70 percent of what's going on.

Strangely enough, the following weekend (this past weekend), I had the opportunity to spend a day out on the steppe horseback riding. My roommate had been invited by one of her Russian friends and invited me to come along. Although I had never riden a horse before and was quite frankly a bit terrified to do so, I took the opportunity, and I'm so glad that I did. Really, the hardest part was simply getting up onto the horse; after that, it's almost like steering a car. In all, I rode my horse "Dasha" (who was pregnant, by the way) for two hours. The weather could not have been more beautiful, and it was a truly amazing experience.

So there it is, the last month of my life in a nutshell. Unfortnately, I had to leave out a few details, but those are the highlights. Luckily I was having trouble sleeping tonight and had no other choice than to update my blog in order to pass the time. I've found that since I've been here, random memories pop in and out of my head, and I often find myself distracted from performing my normal functions (such as sleeping). It's as if my body is aware that I've been displaced, and my brain is confused so it brings up past memories in order to regain some concept of reality. Or, at least that's my 2:30 a.m. wisdom.

A few random photos (newer ones soon to come)

Our friends Becca and Brendon (center) recently got engaged! Here Dima (left) and Pasha (right) are making a toast at the engagement party we threw for them.
As a theme for the party, we decided that everyone should bring a popular dish from their home country. Realizing that a lot of people were making food and that no one was in charge of drinks, I decided to introduce our foreigner friends to something us college kids like to call "jungle juice" (which turned out to be a great hit!)

Sunset on Olkhon Island back in February. I remember Anna saying, "Kaitlin, this is probably the coldest we'll ever be!" She was right, and we ended up having to go inside after only 20 minutes because we were beginning to get frostbite on our faces. It's hard to believe, but I'm actually a bit nostalgic for the -40-degree temperatures!

Ylan Yde and the Datsan

Before I forget too much, I wanted to quickly blog about my trip to Ylan Yde. Unfortunately I'll have to cut it short because my thesis proposal is due this week, and I've somehow managed to bring my procrastination habits across three continents. So here goes. On Wednesday night a group of us embarked on our journey to Ylan Yde by way of overnight train. Ylan Yde is the capital of Buryatia, the Buryat oblast (the Buryat people are Mongolians living in this part of Russia). Ylan Yde is the site of the Dotzan, a prominent Buddhist monastery that holds the body of "the living corpse," which is supposedly the body of a Buddhist monk whose body had never decomposed (they claim that he maintains a human-like body temperature and that his organs are still intact). They only put his body on display a few times a year, and it just so happened that they were revealing his body on Thursday.

The monastery was pretty incredible, and it reminded me a lot of the monasteries that I visited in Japan over three years ago. Among Buddhist temples and Asian art, it really felt like I had traveled outside of Russia into East Asia. It was really refreshing to visit such a calm and serene place—a place exactly the opposite of Irkutsk. Unfortnately, however, the living corpse was a bit of a disappointment—we were only allowed to look at it for about 3 seconds before being gently scooted away.

Halfway through the day, Jean Jacques and Mark (the only two other fluent English-speakers in the group) left to embark on their fishing trip, and so I spent the rest of the day speaking in Russian with a Russian, two Japanese, two Koreans, and a Kyrgz. We ended up having little trouble communicating and managed to visit an art exhibit, a bowling alley, the movie theater (it was a Kazakh romantic comedy—I wouldn't recommend it), and two cafes before our train left at 11 pm. After two nights on the train and very little sleep I crashed all day Friday and then spent the rest of the weekend catching up on all of the schoolwork I missed.

Take a look at the pictures! They'll fill in the extra details I missed.

It was snowing when we got to the train station (вокзал)

Getting suited up for bowling (called "bowleengg" in Russian)

At cafe "Safari"

Jung Heum and I (note: Putin propaganda in the background)

Ylan Yde is famous for having the largest statue of Lenin's head (I sure hope this is the largest one)

My new friend Su Yin from Korea

The whole group

The Datsan

We arrived at 6 am

A overdue update

So sorry to all of you dedicated readers (hi Noelle!), but there hasn't been too many exciting things going on lately. Last weekend we had a going away party for our friend Dominic from Poland. Our friend Andrew spent the entire day slaving away in the kitchen so that we could have fajita night (strangely enough Dominic had been studying Spanish here, so it seemed appropriate), and we invited all of our Russian friends that went to Baikalsk with us. Olegue brought his guitar, so there were plenty of sing-alongs in both Russian and English (it seems as though the Russians are pretty well-versed in all of the American classics—they knew all of the lyrics to songs I've never even heard of!). I ended up talking to Olegue into the late hours of the night (I was actually trying to get a Russian perspective on a few of my thesis ideas), but by around 7 am his English was getting pretty bad and I could barely form Russian words. As expected, Saturday was a lazy day—I don't even remember the last time I woke up at 2pm!

On Sunday I went to the movies with Alison, Gosha, and Gosha's Russian friend. Evidently you have to call ahead to make a "reservation" because the seats fill up quickly. It was really strange to be in a movie theater because all of the sudden I felt like I was back in the US—overpriced popcorn, cheesy flourescent lighting, middle-school-aged kids on dates, etc. I guess movie theaters are pretty universal, except for the fact that you could purchase beer or vodka to go along with your popcorn (I was quickly reminded that I was in fact not in the US). We saw a comedy called "O chome govoryat myjchini" ("What Men Talk About"), and I actually got almost all of the jokes.

On Monday Alison, Raya, and I went to Vsyo Budyet OK (Everything Will Be OK), which is basicially Irkutsk's version of Wal-Mart (it's even open 24 hours). It wasn't our first trip there, and I didn't even need anything—it just felt nice to bask in capitalism and consumerism. It's refreshing have a choice between multiple brands of the same product and to be able to buy food, toiletries, clothing (limited choices here), and almost anything else you need all in the same store! Just like a trip to Wal-Mart, we spent a ridiculous amount of money on random things. Between Alison and I we spent about $60, which is an immense amount of money to spend here considering that you can buy a week's worth of vegetables from the vegetable stand for about $2.

Compared to the excitement of OK the week was pretty boring. On Saturday Ana and I went to a demonstration against the re-opening of a paper factory on Lake Baikal. The factory had been closed years ago in response to widespread protest against pollution of the lake. Recently, and most likely in response to difficult economic times, Putin sanctioned the re-opening of the factory. The demonstration was pretty tame but it attracted about 1000 people. The speeches (or what I could understand of them) were very interesting, and it was generally a positive atmosphere in which people of all different age groups had gathered together for an important cause. After the demonstration Ana showed me a burger place that her and Andrew had discovered—a McDonald's-style fast-food restaurant with decent food and cheap coffee. This may not sound so exciting to everyone back home, but every "find" here is such an accomplishment, and I'd never really enjoyed a burger, fries, and a Coke so much in my life. To burn off the extra calories we finally took a much-delayed trip to the ice skating rink that's only 4 bus stops from our dorm. I had always considered myself a fairly decent ice-skater—maybe even slightly better than the average person, but with 20-year-old rental skates with no ankle support and bumpy ice (there's no zamboni machince) I could barely make it around without falling down. I left with both bruises and a lot more humility with regard to my ice skating skills.

Later that evening we went "out" for the first time with a group of Russian and non-Russian friends. Our dorm curfew is 11pm, so every weekend we've just been hosting our own parties in the dorm. Luckily our Russian friend Djenya was able to coax the key lady to let us in at midnight. We went to a jean-themed bar (strange, I know) that played B-list 90s music and had translated two of it's menu items into English as "neck cancer salad" and "crap chocolate dessert" (no one ordered either of these). Afterwards we brought everyone back to the dorm to hang out, but pretty soon our dedjournaya (the key lady) came up and said, "Ladies, why are you drinking beer? It's almost 1 'o clock! You should be in bed!" (it was not a mistake that she only address the girls; evidently it's ok for boys to stay up late and drink beer). Considering that I haven't had an 11 'o clock cerfew since junior year of high school and that most of the students staying the dorm are in their mid-late twenties, it seemed kind of unreasonable that she was demanding that we go to bed, especially since we weren't being loud or disruptive at all. In high-school fashion, we went back to our rooms and waited for her to go downstairs and then tip-toed back into the kitchen to hang out.

On Sunday Alison, Andrew, Sara, and I had another excursion with our tour guide Natalie. Of course, the museum was located in a part of the city that we had not yet been to and was hidden behind several other buildings. By the time we finally got there we were half an hour late and extremely frustrated with Irkutsk's transportation system and with Russia in general. I also forgot to mention that this is the third museum that we've been to, and that Irkutsk is certainly not known for its museums. Our tour guide likes to spend approximately 20 minutes at each exhibit, describing every item in intimate detail. To say the least, we couldn't wait to get out of there and get back to the dorm catch up on some much-needed sleep.

So there it is. Halfway done, and the icicles are almost completely melted. It's so hard to believe that I'll be going home in two months; I almost can't even imagine what it will be like to leave!

Weekend trip to Baikalsk

10 March

I had been fully prepared to miss ski season this year on account of me being in Siberia and all, but luckily, I didn't have to! My friend Jean Jacques along with a few of our new Russian friends planned a trip to Baikalsk for the weekend. We went by electrichka (electric train) and arrived around 10 pm to our hostel. In true Russian fashion we spent the night at the banya, jumping into the snow in our bathing suits about every 10 minutes (the usual temperature for the sauna in a banya is around 110 F). A «becherinka» (party) of course followed and we stayed up late talking with our new Russian friends.

In the morning I set off for the slopes with my Dutch friend Ana who had been a ski instructor in Austria (I was a little intimidated), Mark from England, Gosha from Poland, Marie from Belgium, and our Russian friend Tolya. As we walked past the lodge I wrongly assumed that this would be the place where we would rent skis, but as usual this was not the case and we instead walked another kilometer up the road where we came upon a small indescript shed. But it wasn't until the door handle fell off when Mark tried to open the door that I really began to question whether or not this place was legit. When we walked in there were about 15 pairs of skis and boots to choose from, which were surprisingly of good quality (though a little outdated), and it only costed $15 to rent skis and boots for the whole day. From there we took a taxi back to the slopes and purchased our lift tickets for about $40 (a process that was significantly prolonged by the fact that most of us paid with credit cards and most Russian businesses aren't credit card-savy yet). When we finally hit the slopes I was a bit nervous that I wouldn't be any good (it's been way too cold to run outside and the «gym» at our university only has soviet-era lifting equiptment that isn't worth the 50 rubles to use), but as soon as I started going down it all came back to me (and if I do say so myself, I gave the Dutch ski instructor a run for her money). The skiing was decent, although the only strange part was the fact that there was only one chair lift while all the others were t-bars that went the entire way up the mountain. It felt so good to get on skiis again and by the end of the day I didn't want to leave. When we went back to ski-rental hut, the owners offered us homemade cognac to warm up. Ana, Gosha, Marie, and I let the boys accept the offer and took a cab back to the hostel (they returned a few hours after us in not the best condition). Before the end of the evening, our friend Oleg surprised all of the girls with a bunch of cakes that he had bought in celebration of International Women's Day—yes, another holiday, and we did not have school on Monday, again.

The next day everyone was pretty tired so we just spent the day taking a leisurely walk around the lake and stopped at a local café for lunch where I had the most delicious borsht. We didn't get home until about 10 pm and I tried to do as much homework as I could before falling asleep. All in all, it was a great weekend that costed very little considering that for about $70 I stayed in a hostel for 2 nights, rented skis and boots, bought a lift ticket, and round-trip fare for the train. It's going to be hard when I go back to the US and everything is expensive again. So there sums up another week! It feels like time is flying by so fast, and it's hard to believe that I've already been here for 6 weeks!

Ana and I eating a fish that we bought outside of the train station

Views from the top

The ski "resort"

Toasting to International Women's Day

Talking with Ana and Mark at the banya (about something very important, I'm sure)

Ice sculpture, on the ice

Our hostel, from the inside

Our very crowded mashrutka ride from the train station to the hostel

Embarking on our journey; to the left: our dorm

A few things I forgot to mention...

Unfortunately, this past week has been relatively uneventful in comparison to the others. We didn’t have classes on Monday and Tuesday because of “Men’s Day,” which is the counterpart to “International Women’s Day” and what the US celebrates as Father’s Day (except here it’s for all men, not just fathers). I’m not exactly sure why we had two days off; it seems like Russians just make up holidays to skip work and school. Anyway, to celebrate “Men’s Day,” or what younger Russians call День малчиков (Boy's Day), I went out to a Japanese restaurant with a few friends from GBT on Tuesday night. There, I met a few other international students from the other university in Irkutsk as well as a few Americans from the Middlebury program. Although it was exhausting to carry out conversations entirely in Russian, after a bit of sake everyone loosened up and it got a lot easier. I ended up having to rush home because my dorm curfew is 11:00 pm and I was at the restaurant until 10:30. My friends absolutely insisted that I go bowling with them after dinner and had a hard time understanding that I absolutely had to get back to my dorm or I'd be locked out until 7:00 am. Eventually they let me go and even paid for my cab ride home. All in all, it was a lot of fun, and it's been really great practice for me to hang out with my Russian friends.

There is really no other news for the rest of the week, so I'll take this time to go over a few notable peculiarities that I experience in my everyday life here in Siberia. First of all, by this point in the winter, we've gotten a lot of snow and the temperature probably hasn't been above freezing more than a few times since late November. Because of this, all of the snow has been compacted into a sheet of ice that covers all of the sidewalks. I've gotten surprisingly good at walking on ice, and I've found that it's in fact easier to wear heels because they dig in to the ice and provide some traction (and this is probably why all of the Russian women can wear stiletto heels all winter long). Secondly, because of the cold, it's necessary to wear both a hat and a hood at all times. However, I've noticed that wearing a hood seriously impairs your periferial vision and makes it very difficult to cross the street, especially since there are very few crosswalks. Wearing a hood also impairs your hearing, which is a huge problem when I'm walking to school with my Korean classmate and trying to decipher his Russian words through his heavy Korean accent and my hat and hood. Even on days when it seems warm enough to go without protective headgear, I've found that it's a huge faux pas to go without a hat. All Russians wear hats at all times, and if you're not wearing one, you get stared at by everybody on the street. In fact, my friend Ana got yelled at by an angry babushka who was very distraught that she wasn't wearing a hat.

Perhaps the most frustrating peculiarity is necessity to have exact change anytime you pay for something. When Russian businesses start their day, there is no system of having money in the drawer and so they usually won't have change for you if you hand them a 500-ruble or 1000-ruble bill. This is extremely frustrating because the ATM's only dispense 500s and 1000s, and most food items or other everyday purchases are between 10 and 50 rubles.

I guess all of this has become kind of normal for me, including the fact that I get my coffee out of a machine every morning for 12 rubles. It's really crazy how «at home» I feel after only 1 month. I feel like I've been living here for much longer, and my friends from my dorm seem almost as close as my friends at college. Although I tend to get homesick at certain points during the day, life has become pretty routine. I consider any temperature above -20 to be warm, have gotten used to washing my clothes in the sink (I will never again complain about doing laundry in a washing machine), and eating cabbage and buckwheat nearly every night for dinner. The random dogs barking and stray cats wondering around the dorm don't phase me anymore, and I've gotten used to practically having to push the babushkas out of the way to get on the bus each morning. My internet «dials up» and my tv only works if you position the antenna in a very specific way. Dear modern technology, I'm in Siberia. Find me.

My Debut on the Blog Scene...

Hello, viral world, friends and fellow Noel-enthusiasts.

I'm living in an apartment in Zamalek with two other girls from Wes. The apartment is ridiculous. I'll have to upload pictures of it soon. It has the most haphazard decorations, Japanese print next to a faded, colonial tapestry, which is next to one of those fake plant spherical bush things (on the wall), and this gold-plated Victorian mirror thing in the entryway. It's funny. But Zamalek is a great place to live. It's an island, it's where all the embassies are and it's one of the greener areas in Cairo, next to Garden City (hence the name). It's apparently the place to be for antique shopping--Ally Kotowski, there's this one chair in a window display with teeny angelic children popping out of the dark wooden arms... it's so creepy you would love it.

So… what to tell of my Egyptian adventures? Well I’ll tell first of the things that struck me when I first got here, even though I’d been twice before. First, the driving. Complete disregard for lanes or traffic lights, headlights are optional and mostly used to tell someone either to get the fuck out of the way or to go ahead, and every car miraculously fits around and between others. I always expect at least a love-tap each cab ride, and it NEVER happens. Also, the sounds that people make at each other. When you want to get someone’s attention in the street, which is a fucking loud place, you make a hissing sound, like at a cat. It’s annoying, but way more effective than anything we do. Another one that's frequently used is the smooching sound, but I probably hear that more often because look American.

I’ve come to think of this experience as a series of opportunities I have to trick people into thinking I’m Egyptian, or… a native, I guess, is a better way to put it. I’ve succeeded probably more times than I haven’t, but I may owe that to my face. It's blatantly apparent to everyone here that I'm Egyptian which is a really strange experience because I'm very confusing in America ethnically and racially. Not Egyptians. It’s kind of wonderful. But then I open my mouth and then things star unfolding. But, back to the point, it’s usually fine. The worst experience was at the Cairo Museum. I had no trouble getting the Egyptian ticket (which costs about 30% of the Outsider rate) for my initial entry, but I took my friend Kira to see the mummy room, which is an exhibit within the museum with its own set of tickets, etc. Because I didn’t have an Egyptian passport, the first security guard wouldn’t let us through, and made us wait until three other guys came over and nodded, fired questions at me that I could partly answer, garbled some Arabic at each other, blah blah blah. Basically they were just assholes, but they eventually let me through. Basically, I have to deal with people deciding if I’m Egyptian or not every time we do something touristy. This experience has the effect of (mostly) making or breaking my outing.

The mummy room, by the way, in the Cairo museum is a must-see if you visit Cairo. Eyelashes, people!! The eyelashes have survived the ages. It’s absolutely incredible. And the King Tut exhibit has an unbelievable amount of either pure gold or gold plated items. The opulence is just breathtaking.

The university kind of sucks. Our first day of classes consisted of each professor being like “Kids, you have to do the reading. Just because daddy pays for university, doesn’t mean you can just skip every class and show up for the exam, kaza kaza kaza.” Five seconds later, a few girls ask the following questions: Do we have to read the whole book? Why is your grading scale so hard? Do we have to take notes? LET ME REPEAT: Do. We. Have. To. Take. Notes. Yes, I’m serious. In conclusion, this is a very different semester academically for me than the last one. It gives me more time to explore Cairo, I guess. The student body is also super hipster-chic. It feels like the pages of an Urban Outfitters/Forever 21 catalogue just POOF materialized in the desert, where our campus is. Curled hair, layers of eye makeup, boots, boots, boots. It makes my cousins' comments about me dressing in rags totally understandable. The in general the way you dress hear has huge meaning in terms of class and connected to that, education. And AUC is known for its snobby Egyptian student body, so there you go.

Everything going really well, although the social scene is kind of lacking. We’ve been hanging out with my friend Mus from Oberlin and his friends who are in the AMIDEAST program—which is 1000x better than AUC—and they’re a lot of fun. But the language barrier definitely makes it hard to befriend Egyptians. On top of that, we don’t live in the dorms, which has its benefits of course, but we also don’t get that much interaction with Egyptians on an intimate level like that. I basically live part time with my family—I spend way too much time there, eating their food, occupying their spaces. And they’re amazing, so it’s a great setup from my point of view. My cousin Tarek and I and a few of his friends are starting a Ukulele-Kazoo-Marraca-Accordian band, so look out for that on iTunes.

My MSA professor thinks I'm in "la-la land" and LOTR-obsessed. During the first two weeks we had to write sentences using the vocab, everything I produced was naturally speckled (and when I say speckled I mean saturated) with Tolkein references... And she had no reservations about mocking me (lovingly) in front of the whole class. So... some things never change, no matter what language you're using.

I haven’t uploaded any of my sexy pictures yet. But for now, I have one picture I took on Photobooth from a window in the library. The new campus is super clean and sterile, but it is kind of beautiful [of course this picture doesn’t really show that]. Also, I'll do a special post on Arabic, because the fuckups have been plentiful, and they're very funny.

I miss all of you, hope this incohesive rambling hasn't clouded your sweet memories of me.

Aufwiedersehen, Bremen! Hallo, Berlin!

Tomorrow I'm moving to Berlin. The day I've been waiting for for the past three months is finally here. Right now I'm just worried about moving all of my shit halfway across Germany by train without it getting lost/stolen. We'll see what happens.

(photo: a graffiti wall in Amsterdam)

Last weekend I went to Amsterdam with my friend Margaret, which was incredible, it's such a beautiful city and they just know how to live the right way. There are millions of bicycles because it's not worth it to own a car (unless you have to commute to Germany or another city to work everyday). And everyone, even the bus drivers, have a sense of humor though trying to understand Dutch is a total mind-fuck for someone who knows English and German because it's the in-between step linguistically but still remains totally incomprehensible. Needless to say, we got lost one night for three hours in the outskirts of the city and getting back to the apartment was not an easy feat.

We had our last day of language class on Wednesday and we all went out to the Lagerhouse until two in the morning, which was great, but now I'm terribly sick.

Amsterdam at night. Canals run throughout the entire city.

They call it "the Venice of the North."

My caramel cappuccino.

Bremen, the city I've been living in for the past month. This is the center of town, Domsheide.

Above: Maselnitsa festivities; Below: Sled ride (caution: scary)
Our very international Saturday-night party; countries represented: US, Russia, Japan, China, Korea, Holland, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, England, Poland, France, Taiwan, South Africa and the Congo (maybe we should get together and solve the world's problems, no?)