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.