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.
