To Conclude

I had hoped that over the course of my journey through the Caucasus, I would be able to write more. But, unsurprisingly, Max and I rarely had time on the internet to do more than say hey to our parents and check necessary travel information.

Since the last time I wrote, many things have happened. I'll share one of my favorite days of the trip, since I won't be able to recount everything.

One day we needed to get from Azerbaijan to Yerevan through Georgia, since Azerbaijan and Armenia don't dig each other. It started with an outrageous taxi ride from western Azerbaijan to Tbilisi with a mysterious Moldovan who winters in Tyumen, in Western Siberia, and summers in Azerbaijan. Among the many services he offered as a driver, one was a three day car ride to Moscow, costing about $2500, begging the question of who exaclty would pay that much to be DRIVEN to Moscow, and why?

So after overhearing us talk about how we were going to eat lots of Xinkali once we got to Tbilisi, he decided he wanted some too and proposed we stop at our first opportunity, just over the Georgia-Azerbaijan border. He ordered 30 big dumplings. He ate 15, Max ate 8, and I ate about 6.5. Max and I were working on digesting for the rest of the day. The man was a Xinkali eating machine. He was silent as he went about his business, and we were bursting with questions about who he was and what he did, but he didn't really want to talk--only adding to the mystery. We shared our marshrutka ride from Tbilisi to Yerevan with two short Armenian ladies carrying with them approximately 27 bags of varying sizes. What was in those bags was anyone's guess. When we asked, they said something about sewing needles. Adding to their cargo, they bought three watermelons at our first stop. The watermelons rolled around the van for the rest of the ride, getting pierced by chair legs until the marshrutka floor was slick with watermelon juice.

We stayed in Yerevan for several days, resting and lounging in cafes, and from there we stopped in Dilijan, in the Armenian mountains, then went back to pass our last couple nights in Tbilisi, city of dreams.

I was thinking this was going to be a concluding entry, but then I got distracted writing about xinkali and the taxi driver and the watermelon ladies. I thought maybe I could write something that would Sum Up this year I've had. But basically life just keeps rumbling along, one day you're in Siberia, the next day it's Baku, and then all of the sudden it's Grinnell again. I hope I will be seeing the former Soviet Union again soon. In the meantime, it no longer seems appropriate for me to be blogging at Krasnoyarskhelen.blogspot.com. Maybe I'll start making use of my tumblr.

Anyway, thanks for reading, we'll be in touch.

Azerbaijan

Max and I are in the city of Quba, north of Baku and not too far away from the border with Russia. Quba is kind of a sad little city, but it's famous for providing the opportunity to go eat shashlyk at cafes in the middle of the forest. We're staying in a very strange old Soviet hotel with a disgusting shared bathroom and a shower that costs extra, but it's all very interesting nonetheless.

We came here for a few reasons. One was to find and talk to the community of Mountain Jews living in a town right accross the river from Quba. The other was to go up to the village of Xinaliq, touted by the Lonley Planet as one of the most beautiful places in Azerbaijan. We have accomplished both of these goals. The Mountain Jews were very interesting and friendly, and Xinaliq was one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. Tomorrow we're heading back to Baku.

Our time in Quba has been marked by nearly constant conversation and tea drinking with whomever we run into. People are exceptionally hospitable. Most of the time it's really lovely, and we've learned a lot.

We spent most of this morning going through the most horrendous negotiations I have ever experienced in order to secure a ride to Xinaliq in a timely and affordable manner. Amid the overwhelming chaos of the bazar from which taxis leave to Xinaliq, there was one moment that really brought me joy. I was standing around, eating a peach, waiting for our driver to find some more passengers, and a man walked by carrying two live chickens by the feet. He saw me looking at his chickens and said "do you need a chicken?" I said no and he kept going along his way. I thought this little scene was so funny I started laughing, but then a couple minutes later the chicken man was back. Again I was staring at the chickens, this time laughing, and he said "you really don't want one?" It seemed like a great way to sell chickens, just wandering around with them, holding them by their feet.

Anyway, I wish I had time to explain better or in a more decipherable manner what I'm up to. This trip is endlessly fascinating, no matter how sweaty we are by the end of the day.

Travels

I've covered a lot of ground since the last time I wrote. Just as I said I would, I took a train to St. Petersburg. It lasted three days and I made a lot of friends, including a couple little boys with whom I played cards for hours and hours and hours. One of the boys had a hard time saying my name and called me Helli. It was cute. Then I spent some time in St. Petersburg, which was ok, and then I spent some time in Moscow, which was nice. Then I flew to Georgia, where Max and I reunited in a Tbilisi apartment.

I've been in Georgia for about a week and it's proved to be just as wonderful as I always dreamed it would be. After spending several days walking all over Tbilisi, soaking in Pushkin's favorite sulphur baths, eating decadent meals and a little too much khachapuri, Max and I headed on to Sighnaghi, where my former Russian teacher Amanda is now living. Amanda drove us all over the Kakheti region, Georgia's wine country, to some ancient churches and fortresses and past many villages and wandering cows. We had to slow down for lots of ducks to cross the road. After passing watermelon filled truck after watermelon filled truck, we stopped and ate a big juicy watermelon right next to the watermelon field at a little picnic table at the side of the road.

The next day saw more feasting and a little lesson in the Georgian art of toasting, more beautiful scenery, as well as the ancient cave city of Uplistsikhe. We went to Gori, the birth place of Stalin, and visited the very bizarre Stalin Museum. It's located in a big mansion with stained-glass windows, and tells the story of a hero-revolutionary with an exceptional talent for escaping from Tsarist prisons. The displays wind around a thick red carpet to end in a dark round room with a tiny bronze cast of Stalin's dead face in the center and a painting of Stalin in his coffin on the wall. It was a strange place and a strange experience.

After the Stalin Museum, Amanda and her friend, the expert vintner Gala, drove us back to Tbilisi and dropped us off at Dodo's guest house, where we planned to stay the night.

This country is easy to fall in love with.

Tonight we are on to Baku, if all goes according to plan.

GOODBYE KRASNOYARSK!

I had something like a 24 hour layover in Krasnoyarsk between my train from Ulan Ude and my train to St. Petersburg. Now I'm really leaving!

Here are some nice Buryatia pictures:

The grand hotel Buryatia

A view of Lake Baikal from the train + cute little boy

Ulan Ude

Here I am in Ulan Ude, the capital of Buryatia, a republic that borders Lake Baikal on the eastern side. The Buryats are closely related to Mongolians. They're also Buddhist, and there are a lot of Buddhist temples all around the city. Buryatia, like pretty much all of Siberia, is very beautiful, a mix of foresty mountains and expanses of steppe where buryat cowboys corral their cows and sheep around on horses.

I've been working with kids, 13-15 years old, teaching them English. We've been singing folk songs, mostly. "Charlie on the M.T.A." seems to be a favorite (it's also been a favorite of mine since I was a tiny child, so I find some satisfaction in passing it along). The kids are all really sweet and smart and easy to teach. I don't think I've ever met such a uniformally nice and interesting group of teens before.

I've been pretty much free in the afternoons, so I've had a lot of time to wander around Ulan Ude. It's a very clean and pleasant city, with the largest Lenin head in the world. I went to the open-air "ethnography" museum outside the city which displays examples of the dwellings of various peoples of the Buryat Republic; Russians, Buryats, and others. The coolest, in my opinion, were the Evenks and Soyots, who live in fur teepees in the winter, and have lots of cool shamanist icons and things. They have really got to be some of the toughest people on the planet to have been living in this cold wild place for centuries. Of course, there aren't many of them left. There was also a zoo there with Siberian animals--reindeer, wolves, a lynx, a yak, bears, and even a Siberian tiger. It was pretty cool to see reindeer and wolves, but the animals were living in really tiny cages and so it was also kind of sad.

I'm staying in the Hotel Buryatia, a very big hotel in the center of the city with an intensely Soviet feel that is both creepy and hilarious. It makes me feel a little like a traveling bureaucrat. The hotel is very quiet, and on every floor there's a lady that keeps the keys. I have to hand in and retrieve my key every time I come in and out, but the lady is always off somewhere cleaning someone's room or something, so I spend 5-10 minutes searching for her. And then she usually tells me to go open up the key box myself and take my key. It's a little counter-intuitive and makes me feel a little uneasy about security at Hotel Buryatia, but I think I'm going to miss these little absurdities when I leave Russia, so right now I'm savoring them, however inconvenient.

Next time I write will most likely be from St. Petersburg. I'll be spending most of next week on a train.

Too Much

I think it's going to be hard for me to write in the coming weeks. There is so much happening, so many places to be, so many things to do, so many people to say goodbye to.

My mom came to visit me, she left today. We had a lot of fun, we did a lot of things. We went to a little city not too far away, Mariinsk. We got interviewed for the newspaper and we had a great party with a women's choir. We took a banya and the ladies sang to us. We thought we might get to have all these things happen at the same time, but unfortunately the only people singing in the banya were me and my momma.

Last week I said goodbye to my two favorite Hungarians, and it started to really set in that I'm leaving Krasnoyarsk. At the moment I'm realizing how much energy I've put into living here over the past year, and now that I'm leaving I'm not sure where to direct that energy. I'm focusing on the spectacular Caucasian vacation awaiting me in July, and collecting stories for my memoirs.

Unlike most of my Fulbright colleagues (I assume) I was lucky enough to have my mom help me pack and clean my apartment! She is also currently hauling a large amount of my things back across the ocean with her. This all significantly reduces moving-related stress. Thanks mom.

I can't really write anything coherent at the moment. I'll try to pass on interesting events now and then until I land back on American soil, at which point I think I will no longer feel I can continue blogging at krasnoyarskhelen.blogspot.com, save maybe some kind of insightful summation of how much I've learned over here in Siberia. But honestly I have a feeling any such attempt won't come anywhere near doing justice to the strange and beautiful year I've passed in this mysterious land.

I seem to be entering a period of transition. This morning I was feeling very emotional, mostly good emotions. I almost burst into tears three times, instigated by things like the oil spill and scheduling my last English conversation club.

I have been having a really wonderful week, I made my English club sing folk songs with me, I've been enjoying the summer cafes, and for some reason I've been feeling like a pro at speaking the Russian language. I've also been working on a project that has been giving me an immense amount of satisfaction. It's the beginning of something Max and I will hopefully complete together. Right now it mostly involves me interviewing my friends about how they feel about the Soviet Union and things like that. It's a good excuse to discuss my favorite topic (Russia) and it's led to some really special conversations. Hopefully it will become something more.

I'm leaving Krasnoyarsk on June 12, and then I've got quite a schedule. I'll be moving around the country for a couple weeks. First I'm going to Ulan Ude to teach English to children, then I'm meeting Riley in St. Petersburg. I memorized Katyusha (a favorite patriotic folk song) last night so we can sing it together while walking along the canals in St. Pete and enjoying the 3am sunset. Then I'm heading on a trip to the Caucasus that I've been dreaming about literally for years.

But now I've got to go meet my Hungarians and my Russian teachers for some celebratory pelmeni and vodka.