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.
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