2 new appearances yesterday have made me uneasy :
- A policeman holding a big automatic gun. Normally, there are about 10 policemen hanging out by the metro station. Yesterday, 9 of them were replaced by a gun. Sadly, their salaries probably cost less than the gun did.
- Cockroaches in our dorms. Eek! 2 of them! It’s the first time I have cockroaches. Deanna says I will grow to like them.
Since I’m way behing on my trip reporting, I will make it short :
Krasnoyarsk was fun times. I got to meet people from Yakutya (woot!), Buryatya (cute!) and Tuva (wah!). We got lost in the tick infested Siberian forests. Ticks there carry encephalitis, and encephalitis kills you. We seem to have made it out ok.
St. Petersburg was fun but sad, since we realized that our circle of friends from two years ago is completely gone. But we still got to hang out with Lyolya, Roma, Olya. Lyolya will be coming soon to Moscow. Yippee!
Astrakhan was very welcoming. During our 2-day-long train ride, we had the nicest traveling companions, a mother and her son, who was deaf and had a crush on D. They made sure we found the German-Russian house when we got there, helped us carry our many boxes and bags and were just all around good people. We got to meet up with our organization’s Dutch partner, who always has so many interesting stories to tell, but also we got to meet their Czech partner who was such a nice and entertaining man. The seminar was ok, but D got sick and my ear got completely clogged after playing water polo. It still is somewhat clogged, two weeks later.
The bus ride to Pyatigorsk was pure hell, we had a soviet bus from soviet times, my seat didn’t recline, there was no space, it was uncomfortable, we spilled food everywhere, our window kept opening on its own and people kept screaming at us to shut it. Oh, did I mention this was a 14 hour overnight ride?
Pyatigorsk however was like an oasis. It has manage to sprout underneath trees and in between mountains. Fields of flowers with butterflies, in the background the Caucasus and the Elbrus (the highest mountain of Europe). The name of the city means 5 mountains, but there are many many more than that around. Pushkin and Lermontov have written about it, and we got to visit’s Lermontov’s house and the place where he got killed in a duel. Our host was the Armenian organization and so we always had about 10 Armenian guys walking with us everywhere and making sure we were safe (every Russian thinks his or her own city is the most dangerous in the country and takes it upon him/herself to protect us). The group at the seminar was particularly interesting, since there were not only leaders from ethnic youth organizations, but also some from human rights organizations. I got to know one girl who works in the Youth Human Rights Movement in Voronezh and she has invited me there. I’m looking forward to that. I also was interviewed on tv. The next day, when I asked some people for directions, they actually recognized me from the interview! How nice is that. On the train ride back, we met a troup of soldiers coming back from Chechnya and had a nice train party.
And that’s that. We have less than a month left and it seems like such a short time!
- A policeman holding a big automatic gun. Normally, there are about 10 policemen hanging out by the metro station. Yesterday, 9 of them were replaced by a gun. Sadly, their salaries probably cost less than the gun did.
- Cockroaches in our dorms. Eek! 2 of them! It’s the first time I have cockroaches. Deanna says I will grow to like them.
Since I’m way behing on my trip reporting, I will make it short :
Krasnoyarsk was fun times. I got to meet people from Yakutya (woot!), Buryatya (cute!) and Tuva (wah!). We got lost in the tick infested Siberian forests. Ticks there carry encephalitis, and encephalitis kills you. We seem to have made it out ok.
St. Petersburg was fun but sad, since we realized that our circle of friends from two years ago is completely gone. But we still got to hang out with Lyolya, Roma, Olya. Lyolya will be coming soon to Moscow. Yippee!
Astrakhan was very welcoming. During our 2-day-long train ride, we had the nicest traveling companions, a mother and her son, who was deaf and had a crush on D. They made sure we found the German-Russian house when we got there, helped us carry our many boxes and bags and were just all around good people. We got to meet up with our organization’s Dutch partner, who always has so many interesting stories to tell, but also we got to meet their Czech partner who was such a nice and entertaining man. The seminar was ok, but D got sick and my ear got completely clogged after playing water polo. It still is somewhat clogged, two weeks later.
The bus ride to Pyatigorsk was pure hell, we had a soviet bus from soviet times, my seat didn’t recline, there was no space, it was uncomfortable, we spilled food everywhere, our window kept opening on its own and people kept screaming at us to shut it. Oh, did I mention this was a 14 hour overnight ride?
Pyatigorsk however was like an oasis. It has manage to sprout underneath trees and in between mountains. Fields of flowers with butterflies, in the background the Caucasus and the Elbrus (the highest mountain of Europe). The name of the city means 5 mountains, but there are many many more than that around. Pushkin and Lermontov have written about it, and we got to visit’s Lermontov’s house and the place where he got killed in a duel. Our host was the Armenian organization and so we always had about 10 Armenian guys walking with us everywhere and making sure we were safe (every Russian thinks his or her own city is the most dangerous in the country and takes it upon him/herself to protect us). The group at the seminar was particularly interesting, since there were not only leaders from ethnic youth organizations, but also some from human rights organizations. I got to know one girl who works in the Youth Human Rights Movement in Voronezh and she has invited me there. I’m looking forward to that. I also was interviewed on tv. The next day, when I asked some people for directions, they actually recognized me from the interview! How nice is that. On the train ride back, we met a troup of soldiers coming back from Chechnya and had a nice train party.
And that’s that. We have less than a month left and it seems like such a short time!
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