Heading East

Lewisham, United Kingdom @ Lewisham, United Kingdom

2008-12-20T03:18:04.000Z

Departure from the UK @ Lewisham, United Kingdom

2008-12-21T00:31:04.000Z

Bremen, Germany @ Bremen, Germany

2008-12-22T00:29:48.000Z

Schuelp @ Schülp, Germany

2008-12-24T10:15:34.000Z

Back to Bremen @ Bremen, Germany

2008-12-24T18:29:11.000Z

Christmas in the Harz @ Bad Harzburg, Germany

2008-12-25T12:00:05.000Z

We rented a holiday apartment with Jill and Anna and enjoyed roast Pork for Christmas dinner. Bad Harzburg itself didn't have any snow, but we were about 15km from Torfhaus, which is a popular skiing spot. There was about 30-40cm of old snow up there.

Driving in the Harz @ Bad Harzburg, Germany

2008-12-26T11:44:35.000Z

Drove from Bad Harzburg through a traffic jam in Torfhaus and through a town called Elend ("Misery" in German) and to coffee and cake in Schierke. We stopped to have a tramp in the snow in the afternoon, then drove back to Bad Harzburg.

Around Bad Harzburg and Christmas Market in Goslar @ Bad Harzburg, Germany

2008-12-27T12:13:11.000Z

Sam and Leonie climbed the Burgberg in Bad Harzburg and then we all drove to Goslar around dusk for the Christmas market, complete with "Christmas forest" (pine trees set up to form a forest) for Gluehwein drinking.

Winter Tourism im Harz @ Bremen, Germany

2008-12-28T11:44:35.000Z

We drove to Windhausen to pick up Belinda, drove to St. Andreasberg to slide down a hill on a little piece of plastic (almost tobogganing), then went ice skating in Braunlage. A few minor injuries resulted, most notably Jill's left arm in a lovely ice skating stack and Leonie's tailbone, hitting a snowdrift a bit too hard in the tobogganing. Anna experienced the slipperiness of refrozen snow and took another lovely tumble, but was uninjured (with the exception of a small cut on her finger which she proudly bore). It was a lovely day, but all agreed it was too cold.
Our final stop, of course, was for coffee and cake. Belinda took us to her favourite haunt, a cafe at Koenigskrug, where we had "Windbeutel" (see picture - translates as "windbag") and enjoyed the cosy atmosphere and efficient German service.

And home again @ Bremen, Germany

2008-12-29T11:01:30.000Z

An uneventful drive back to Bremen, interrupted in its uneventfulness only by the ambiguous directions of the Satnav.

Vienna @ Vienna (Wien), Austria

2008-12-31T09:04:23.000Z

We've arrived in Vienna and located our hostel (with free wireless!!) We're about to head out and see what there is to see in Vienna on New Year's Eve.
Came back to the hostel at around four. NY's will be a huge spectacle. There are events at locations across the city and we'll try to see two or three, ending up at the Rathausplatz, where we'll join everyone else in dancing the Blue Danube at midnight. We had a little practice this afternoon (see photo).
As the photos show, it's still bitterly cold. It hasn't got above zero all day. It'll be -5 tonight. Brrrr.

New Year's @ Vienna (Wien), Austria

2008-12-31T19:21:08.000Z

We stopped first at the Prater, the amusement park near the Danube for some (pretty lame) salsa and other latin music. At least it warmed us up. We then headed back into the centre of town and wandered through the markets and between the stages (avoiding rogue fireworks), and we ended up at the Rathausplatz at eleven o'clock and listened to Viennese music (of varying degrees of silliness) for an hour, trying to keep our toes warm. At midnight, they played the Blue Danube, as promised. The square was so packed, we managed a bit of 3-4 swaying, but walzing was difficult. It didn't bother us much, as our walzing skills (acquired earlier in the day at the Walzertanzkurs on the Platz) only consisted of 3-4 swaying.
The fireworks (legal to buy and set off oneself) made it a bit like a war zone, but so long as they weren't too close, they added to the atmosphere.
There was an abundance of pig merchandise for sale at various stands around the city and at first I just thought they were strange souvenirs, but there's obviously a tradition with pigs and New Year's. People were wearing pig hats and carrying around soft toy pigs all evening. We have to ask someone at our hostel what it means and I'll pass on the explanation. Even one of the soloists on the stage with the Kammerorchester came on with a pig and kissed it at the end of the song (one of the sillier numbers).
It's so easy to get around the city in general and it was also very easy to get home. We left after the Blue Danube and the U-Bahn wasn't even full.

Sightseeing in Vienna Day 2 @ Vienna (Wien), Austria

2009-01-01T20:30:51.000Z

We ate a tasty New Year's breakfast at our hostel (mainly because there was nowhere open to get anything else - the breakfast was great, though) and then headed in to town to watch the live broadcast of the New Year's concert. We got a little sidetracked (quite happily) at Karlsplatz U-Bahn station. We took a wrong turn, but ended up finding some really interesting public art (see first picture), which was basically a lot of statistics with little counters. The one in the picture is the number of days until Chernobyl will be inhabitable again. It was sitting around 150,000 when we were there. They also had the population of the world, the first wall's worth of pi with a counter continuing to count through the decimal spaces, the number of people in love in Vienna (going up and down as we watched), the number of Wiener Schnitzels eaten since the first of January (which we're sure was wrong, as it was sitting at 11,000 and it WAS the first of January - or maybe they think 11,000 are eaten each morning), more seriously, the number of people killed in wars since the first of January (39 when we walked past, 40 when we came by a second time a few minutes later as we were still taking wrong turns) and the number of starving children (around 100 million). We also found the Viennese Opera toilet out of necessity. We'd seen it the previous day, with tourists avidly photographing themselves in front of it and turned up our noses at such behaviour. But then I really needed to go and we knew the Opera toilet was close, so I tried it out. 60 cents and one obligatory photo later, and I'm now keen to try out the Toilet of Modern Art at the Hundertwasser Haus (which is on our sightseeing list for tomorrow).
Once we finally found the connection to the U2, we made our way in to the Rathausplatz to watch the New Year's concert live on a big screen. There were quite a few people there and it was a nice atmosphere. We stayed for about half an hour.
We got back on the U-Bahn and joined the hordes of tourists and made our way to Schloss Schoenbrunn, the summer palace of the Hapsburg Emperors. I think I should say here that, as much as we are loving Vienna, we have been a bit half-hearted about our research, because we're really looking to head further east and this was just a convenient place to stop. So I must say I don't know much more about Schoenbrunn than what I overheard the other tourists say. We also didn't take the time to go into the palace itself, as the gardens took up so much time and we were on our way somewhere else. Nevertheless, the gardens were well worth the time and the view from the Gloriette at the top of a hill was gorgeous. It certainly helped that the temperature rose and hovered around zero for most of the day. After the minus temperatures and Vienna's notorious wind-chill factor of yesterday, it was positively balmy. The sun also made an appearance, so it was a glorious day to look down on the grounds of the Schloss. Unfortunately the labyrinth was closed (as it's deciduous).
From the Schloss, we took a tram further out of town to the 23. Bezirk (district), which has two attractions we wanted to see: Kirche der heiligsten Dreifaltigkeit and a Heurige. The first is a cubist church, the Church of the Holiest Trinity, or the Wotruba church, as it's known. It was based on an idea by the sculptor Fritz Wotruba and finished in 1976. It's made up of 156 concrete blocks, each of a different size, without symmetry. Even inside, it wasn't shaped like a usual church, but had the lectern awkwardly placed half behind a concrete block, because it was the only place where everyone in the congregation could see it. It's difficult to describe what I liked about the church. The shape inside was almost organic, despite being made up of concrete blocks. It was unapologetically in one particular style and that was impressive.
Also on top of the hill, a footpath away from the church, was a Sterngarten, asolar clock and calendar, which is even more difficult to describe and impossible to photograph (don't worry, I'll still attempt to describe it). It showed the place on the horizon where the sun rises and sets at the equinox and both solstices. It showed the date at midday by marking on the ground where the sunlight falls through a little aperture. Sam had a great time working out how everything worked and what all the poles were for. We were there a couple of minutes before sunset and there was a lovely view over the mountains in the distance, but there was a little low-lying cloud that obscured the actual sunset. We could still see the accuracy of the horizon markings, as sunset occurred very close to the marking for the winter solstice. It was amazing to see just how different the path of the sun is from solstice to solstice.
Back down the hill from the church and the Sterngarten, we'd found on the internet a Heurige that was open (it's New Year's day – not ever a supermarket was open). A Heurige is unique to the Vienna area and is a kind of restaurant attached to a vineyard. It's only allowed to sell it's own “new wine” (ours had 2007 and 2008 vintages) and it also has basic food, differing from establishment to establishment. So we went to the Buschenschank Lentz (Buschenschank is a similar term to Heurige – too dull to explain the differences – and it was run by the Lentz family). First we tried the 2008 white, which was very dry, but we like dry wine and it was only €1 a glass, so one doesn't complain. We both had a Schnitzel and I had a Knoedel (a ball of... stuff... in stock) and Sam had potato salad. We also tried the red. The waitress was helpful (although obviously a little amused because we asked her, in our obvious Hochdeutsch (standard German) how Heurigen worked, explaining that we'd never been to one before). She put on her best Hochdeutsch for us and we did our best to understand the Austrians who spoke to us. The wine was so ridiculously cheap. Two glasses knocked both of us out and we went straight to sleep when we got back to the hostel (at 7:30). We've now woken up again (it's 9:30).
We generally haven't done too badly with the Austrian German. It's really quite similar (especially in comparison with Swiss German which we found almost unintelligible at times). There are just a few quirks of pronunciation. Of course, we also haven't heard any full-speed, between Austrians Austrian German. It will be difficult to leave the comfort of a country where we can speak the language. I don't know if we would have found all of the information about New Year's and in general found our way around so easily if we didn't speak German. But tomorrow night we're leaving safe, German-speaking land. A few days later, we leave the Latin alphabet behind altogether. So it can only get more interesting from here.

More sightseeing in Vienna and some plans @ Vienna (Wien), Austria

2009-01-02T09:00:55.000Z

We're now on the train to Budapest, sitting with a Romanian family returning home to Bucharest. The train splits (probably in Budapest, but we're not sure), with sleeper carriages heading either to Belgrade or through Bucharest to Sofia. I still find these international trains so exciting. The ten-year-old son of the Romanian couple probably also thinks this train is pretty cool, but for his parents it must be a fairly normal thing. They have about twenty hours on this train and they only have seats, not even couchette beds. Luckily, this is a very short train trip for us: three-and-a-half hours.
We sat down and looked at our itinerary this evening before heading off to the station to catch this train. It's all so complicated. We have three days up our sleeve, at this point, so we could choose to spend more time in one of the places we've planned to go, or decide to stop somewhere else. The problem is, if we stay an extra day somewhere, the other connections we've checked out might not work. It's a common theme with Russian train timetabling to schedule trains to run on odd or even days of the calendar month. So if we put our itinerary out by a day, it might mess up all of our later connections. Many of them are daily, though, so we just have to check carefully. It's very time consuming.
The conductor is just checking our tickets. It's exciting (I know, it shouldn't be exciting, but it somehow is. We bought our tickets online and it's the first time I've tried this online ticketing system).
We mainly had to make a decision today about whether to stay an extra day in Lviv, the major western city in Ukraine. We had a bit of a scare yesterday, because these gas negotiations between Russia and Ukraine collapsed and Russia has shut off the gas to Ukraine. Our news source (the BBC) was woefully inadequate on the subject (I wish I had a Guardian to hand), but I'm annoyed at Russia. It's quite nasty of them. Ukraine claims it has paid the £1b debt, but Russia claims they haven't. Surely it could simply be solved by the Swiss energy trader that's acting as go-between in the deal confirming the receipt of the cash or not. Ukraine is in a terrible position. They've recently had to go to the IMF for emergency cash, their currency has crashed and now this. The only bargaining chip they would have is to threaten to impede the progress of the Russian gas through their pipelines and on to the lucrative European market. A similar conflict in 2006 apparently ended in gas shortages in western Europe. This time, however, Ukraine so desperately needs western help financially that they can't threaten that pipeline, leaving them weaponless against Russia. But in case any of you are worried about us, Ukraine apparently has a few months' reserves, so we should be fine for a few days next week. I suppose in a few months, they will have worked something out. I'm siding with the Ukrainians.
In the end, we've decided to stay the night in Lviv and catch the night train to Kiev the following night. So we'll arrive on the morning of Orthodox Christmas Eve and leave on the night of Orthodox Christmas Day. We're not expecting much to be open. We might be left to roam the empty streets alone, but we're kind of hoping to find something festive to see and do.
So back to today, we took it a bit easier and only saw a few little sights. We poked around the Hundertwasser Haus (the apartment building he designed that's not far from the museum) and the KunstHausWien (the museum he designed). I absolutely love Hundertwasser buildings. I saw my first one in Magdeburg, which was only completed in 2005, so soon after his death. It's pink and loopy and has grass growing on top and it's an absolute pleasure to walk around. The Hundertwasser Haus is unmistakably also his work. Each window is different, both in size and decoration, the columns look like giant chains of beads and there aren't any straight lines in sight. “Straight lines are godless,” was probably Hundertwasser's most famous statement. The bright colours and almost organic shapes of the apartment building just make me smile in an instant. Another quote springs to mind. I don't remember the whole quote, but it involved the phrase, “Beauty breeds beauty.” It got me thinking about council estates in London – especially the nasty grey concrete ones that were whipped up in a hurry to counter a housing crisis. The asbestos walls and dreary concrete squares really do create a perfect backdrop for petty crime and teenage delinquency – and, of course, for more serious things as well. The Hundertwasser Haus was built basically as council housing, as far as I can tell. I can't imagine a house like that inspiring anything other than creativity.
We went to the Haus first and then on to the museum. We'd originally planned to go in and look at the exhibitions. As soon as you walk through the door, the surroundings raise your spirits. There are uneven and asymmetrical tile murals, a fountain that runs partly upside down and, most noticeably, an uneven floor. A sign with Hundertwasser's rationale for the uneven floor is on a column as soon as you walk in. Basically, he says straight floors deprive us of our humanity. We were designed to walk on the ground, which is uneven. Flat floors are only constructs and they deprive us of the opportunity to use our bodies in the way that they're designed. Uneven floors restore the human dignity to our souls. I did almost trip once, but in general, I feel exactly what he means. It feels like you're exploring an exciting landscape, not just stepping into a building. I thought to myself at this point that wearing shoes complicates matters, as you can't feel the natural tilt of the ground as well. So it was no surprise to discover in the little video running in the shop, and from a book I picked up for a look, that he got about naked quite a lot.
In the end, we got so caught up in the lobby and the shop that we decided we didn't need to go and look at Hundertwasser's paintings and we just had a coffee (/hot chocolate) in the (uneven) cafe. And even though the coffee was really quite expensive, it was also spirit-raising (and toilet-trip inducing, unfortunately. Luckily the toilets were also slightly uneven and had interesting tile murals around the mirrors).
After the Hundertwasser stuff, we ended up somewhere random by getting on the wrong tram, but we soon found our way back to the U-Bahn and checked out the island in the Danube. We hadn't actually seen the Danube at all until then, as the centre of the city is quite a way away from it. There is a canal near the Hundertwasser stuff, but the city core doesn't go anywhere near the river. The island itself was a little sad because it's the middle of winter and the view back across to the city-side of the river was surprisingly disappointing. I suppose all of the UNESCO World Heritage sites are a long way from the river, in the city core. We walked across the New Danube (the norther/eastern track of the river at that point) and strolled briefly around Danube-City, a cluster of modern office-type buildings that would be quite pretty if they fixed up the random patches of grass and old concrete, and then headed back into town. We walked through the Naschmarkt, a food market with everything from butchers to “Oriental shops” and with copious amounts of olives, nuts and dried fruit. We returned to the hostel in time to make up some dinner and do our itinerary consideration.
We'll have internet again at Raddi's, so I'll be able to post this no problems. But when we head out of Budapest, I'm not sure where our next wireless will come from. Hopefully we'll find a few cafes with wireless and I'm sure we'll be able to check in from time to time at internet cafes. But for all we know, we might be out of touch for a while after Budapest. We don't leave until the evening of the 5th, though, so there should still be another couple of updates. I just hope that internet access isn't like google maps. Take a look at Russia or Ukraine on google maps and you'll see that it has only a fraction of the detail of any other European country. It's almost like you step off the map. Hopefully our trip tracker map will cope.

Arrival in Budapest @ Budapest, Hungary

2009-01-02T22:20:48.000Z

We arrived safely at Sarah's flat in Budapest.

Tickets Booked! @ Budapest, Hungary

2009-01-03T17:04:41.000Z

We've booked our tickets to Lviv! We're going on Monday night.

Bath House @ Budapest, Hungary

2009-01-04T18:20:31.000Z

We spent a relaxing day today, eating a leisurely brunch and then heading in to the Szechenyi Baths in the City Park here in Budapest. We spent probably just over three hours sitting around in water of different temperatures, containing different minerals, watching men with varying amounts of hair and women with varying swimsuits walk and swim by. The two saunas were a highlight, but my favourite part was jumping from the 40 degree water into the 20 degree water. It's nice to get the blood rushing that way. The outdoor pool was also pretty spectacular in these temperatures (i.e. minus temperatures).
The forecast was for a little snow today, but we haven't had any. There is a little on the ground from around New Year's, but we seem to have missed the snow everywhere we've stayed so far (including in Bremen and at Christmas in the Harz). I'm not too worried, although Sam has been a little disappointed. I've assured him there'll be plenty of snow in the next few weeks.
At least we know if it gets too unbearably cold in Siberia, we can just ask the way to the nearest Banya and have a sauna. I'm still feeling the cosy warm effect.

Train to Lviv @ Záhony, Hungary

2009-01-05T20:04:41.000Z

I love this train. We've been moving for under an hour and I already have so much to write about. Firstly, the train itself. I have never seen a train like this. Not that Sam and I are experts on night trains, but all of the ones we've taken in the past have been fairly similar – even the one between St. Petersburg and Moscow. But this train is something else. It sleeps three in a cabin, on top of each other, facing a wall where you can hang your coat and a little breakfast table and a cabinet with a mirror in it. There are plastic flowers on the little table. The curtains and tablecloth are a pink satiny material with floral decorations. The curtains outside in the hall have the Ukrainian railway logo crocheted into them. The hall has a red oriental-style runner along it and there's a matching piece of carpet on the floor in our cabin. The loo is old and flushes straight down onto the track, but it's decorated with more plastic plants. We were given individual bars of soap by the conductor. The conductors don't speak any English. Unfortunately, I can't tell if they're speaking Ukrainian or Russian (see below for complications).
Sam and I had to buy tickets for separate compartments because it's divided by gender. As soon as we got on the train, though, a girl asked to swap with Sam so she could be with her boyfriend. It left us in a compartment with an older woman called Tania (but she's since swapped to the next cabin where there was only one person). I think all the passengers are pretty much evenly distributed, now, and the conductors don't seem fazed at all. We've already chatted to Gregory (or possibly Grigorii), from Kiev and a north American man in the next cabin who's done this trip numerous times. He told all of us how the border crossing will work. Apparently, they schedule four hours for the border crossing. That actually didn't surprise me overmuch, as it is a night train, after all, and the golden rule is that no night train is ever in a hurry, usually the opposite. If we went straight across the border, we'd arrive in Lviv at 6:30 in the morning, so it makes sense to drag out the journey. Apparently we'll stop (I assume at Zahony, the last stop in Hungary) and go through exit customs and immigration with Hungarian guards. At some stage, the train will be separated (the back carriages are only going as far as Zahony, while the rest of the train is continuing to Moscow) and our carriage will somehow be lifted up and placed on a new undercarriage, as the rail gauges differ. We then continue into Ukraine and I assume at Chop (the first stop inside Ukraine) we go through entry customs and immigration. The customs and immigration checks are two separate checks by two sets of guards who come in one at a time, so we'll be checked a total of four times. The Ukrainian Gregory and the north American in the next carriage assured us it wouldn't be a big deal as our passports “aren't interesting”. The north American said the last time he took this trip (although the checks are more stringent in the opposite direction – i.e. into the EU) a man was kicked off the train and at one stage shouted out that he was a terrorist and his name was Osama Bin Laden. I imagine that doesn't happen all the time. But it seems that regardless of how smoothly our border crossing goes, we'll be in for a little excitement in the middle of the night.
It was quite comfortably social when we got on the train. Tania didn't speak much English and I was wondering whether to practise some Russian, but it's complicated. A young man (the boyfriend) in the next cabin, Yuri, cautioned Sam about using the Russian word for thank you. We unfortunately know practically nothing in Ukrainian, so it was pure utility that made us grasp for Russian. Gregory assured us that all Ukrainians understand Russian and there was no need for Ukrainian, but particularly in western Ukraine, we might give some offense by grasping for Russian in order to communicate. Especially with the current diplomatic difficulties between the two countries, it will be all too easy to give offense. But Gregory and Yuri both spoke excellent English and Gregory quickly realised we were the interesting people in this carriage and chatted to us for a while. Hopefully on our other train trips we'll find people who speak some English. The novelty of being Australians will also be something I won't worry about exploiting, as I do in western Europe. I can fairly safely assume that the Russian and Ukrainian people we meet probably won't have met many Australians. It's also nice to know that our passports aren't interesting.
There's snow on the ground outside and it was a very cold day in Budapest today. We could be in the minus double-digits already tomorrow in Lviv.

We made it to Ukraine! @ Lviv, Ukraine

2009-01-06T19:07:30.000Z

So after all those stories from our fellow passengers, we had a fairly uneventful border crossing. Sam and I even slept through the changing of the gauges, to a certain extent. I watched all of the heavy equipment and poor men who had to do everything by hand, in the middle of the night, in the snow, but soon got too sleepy and went back to sleep to strange clanging noises. The Hungarian border police briefly had to ask each other what to do with an Australian passport, but then promptly stamped. The Hungarians didn't bother with customs in the end. About an hour later, the Ukrainian immigration police arrived and took our passports off us. It was a little nerve racking, as we couldn't speak to him to ask him when we'd get them back. After about half-an-hour, and when the train had started moving again, we asked the north American in the next cabin and he assured us we'd get them back “in a couple of hours”. I still have no idea what they were doing with all of our passports (they collected them all) for a couple of hours, but they came back a bit before four in the morning, at which time I was too sleepy to do more than smile and tuck the passport away, roll over and go back to sleep. We then slept through until 9, so we had a decent night's sleep in the end. In the morning, I could take our my passport and see my Ukrainian visa stamped with the little train symbol and the word “Chop” (the border town where the checks take place).
When we got off the train, it was a little surreal. We couldn't find a bank or a currency exchange office (we'd run out of forint in Hungary, otherwise we might have tried to change some back in Budapest). Because of all this language confusion, Sam asked the woman at the ticket office if she spoke English, thinking it was better than just starting out in Russian. She didn't speak English. Luckily the Russian word for currency exchange is fairly simple and she understood immediately what we were looking for and directed us to the other terminal (I suppose terminal is the best way to describe it). But we finally managed to get some Hryvnia (try saying that one ten times fast) and made our way through the horde of taxi drivers offering their services. For I think the first time, their services were tempting, simply because we had no map of Lviv and we only vaguely knew which trams went into the city centre. Then from the city centre, we only vaguely knew how to get to the hostel we'd chosen (but not booked!). But we found the trams actually fairly easily. We asked a random woman “how tickets”, in Russian, because that was the best sentence we could make. We didn't understand what she said, but the meaning was clear and she even motioned to tell us which trams were at their terminus and we couldn't get on. I think we correctly bought tickets, but the driver of the tram said something and again I had no idea what she was saying. Either way, we definitely paid, we just didn't receive a ticket. The tram ride lasted about twenty minutes and cost 10 Euro cents. Just wait till I go through the amazing things we got for €6 later in the day.
Sam had stumbled upon a programme for the Lviv Opera House on the internet while we were in Budapest, so we knew they were showing the Nutcracker at midday today (as it's Christmas Eve). We stumbled onto the Opera House quite easily (after getting off the tram when a fellow passenger told us to (the word “centre” is very handy – tsentr in Russian, perhaps Ukrainian, too). We walked through the doors thinking it would surely be sold out. We had to make a decision about which line to line up in and the lines moved painfully slowly. I was sure we wouldn't get tickets. We could have been lined up at the collection window, for all we knew. And everyone seemed to be having in-depth discussions with the lady behind the window, so I really didn't think it would work out. But in the end, I walked up to the window (while Sam waited with our backpacks – a bit too conspicuous for the opera) and said “two tickets”. She asked me something and I replied with a blank smile, but eventually she gave me two tickets and it was as easy as that. Each ticket was €3. So that's the first fantastic thing we got for €6, today – Ballet tickets. I'd never seen a professional performance of the Nutcracker, before, but I don't really think the dancers were world class or too fantastic, but the music was lovely and the opera house itself is beautiful. And, of course, it made our second Christmas a little Christmasy. Outside the opera house, there was a huge Christmas tree set up and a sheaf of wheat on the stage. I forget what the significance of the sheaf of wheat is, but it's to do with Ukrainian Christmas tradition. Families decorate their Christmas dinner tables with them. We later saw a market selling both Christmas trees and wheat-sheaves.
After reclaiming our bags from the slightly surprised cloakroom lady (I'm sure it's not often she has to stow bags of the size of ours), we made our way to the hostel and, after a curious exchange with a guy who only spoke German and we still don't quite understand who he is and then the cleaner, we filled in a registration card and dumped our bags.
We wandered around the city for the afternoon. Thankfully the horrible temperature didn't dampen our enthusiasm for tourism too much. I think it's a good sign. If we're handling -12 so early in the trip, we should be fine. The city itself is just lovely. Sam made the comment that it's going to profit from the 2012 Euro football competition, which Poland and Ukraine are hosting, because it's such a beautiful city and could attract a lot of tourists. As it is, it's filled with Ukrainian and Russian tourists. It's covered with a layer of snow at the moment, so it looks even more perfect. It's colourful and the houses are decorative. The churches are impressive (and there are heaps of them). It's still very western European at this point. We had to actively search out an orthodox church to visit tonight for the Christmas service. So there aren't any baubles on the skyline. But they will come, so I'm not too disappointed (I love those baubles).
We were walking around the Rynok Square (the main square) and ran into Gregory from the train, which was funny. He recommended we climb the clock tower of the building on Rynok Square (we're still not sure what the building was, as we don't have a guide book for Ukraine) and the view was gorgeous, with everything covered in snow. I imagine in summer it would also be beautiful, as we could see hints of different coloured roofs through the layer of snow. The buildings really are in excellent condition, which surprised us a little, coming straight from Budapest, but I'm sure once you get out of the inner city, it might become a little more dilapidated. Our view when we woke up this morning was just perfect: our first glimpse of snow-covered steppe country. The grass was poking out through the snow. When we stepped out of the train station, it suddenly felt like we had arrived East, but in the city centre, Lviv feels very western. The only worrying thing was that they switched our heating off some time during the night on the train and it got me thinking about this gas mess. But things generally seemed heated today, although perhaps not as much as they otherwise would be.
After wandering around, admiring architecture, we briefly considered going into a museum, but the two we checked out were both closed, as it's Christmas Eve. They'll probably be closed tomorrow, too, so we'll have to resign ourselves to finding out about Ukrainian people in a different city (we still have two cities left on our plan for Ukraine). But it was lucky in the end, because we found out afterward that the restaurant we'd planned to eat at was only open until 6 (Christmas Eve again), and we got there at 4:30 in the end, which was only 20 minutes away from dark anyway.
Here is the next €6 story, although it was actually more like €5.80. This restaurant was originally a recommendation from Sam's colleague Nataliya, as a good, cheap chain in Ukraine. It's called Puchata Hata (that's how you would spell it in the latin alphabet, anyway) and it's cafeteria-style. So you pick up a tray and just ask for plates of what you want from the ladies behind the counters (or in our case point to what you want). We had no idea what we were getting in most cases, and therefore only a vague idea of price (as we couldn't understand the price lists), but the most expensive thing listed was about €1.50, so we weren't too worried. The only thing I knew how to order was Borsht (again a little mangled when you put it into our alphabet) and it was delicious. I ended up having three kinds of cabbage, but I didn't mind, as I love cabbage. Sam and I pretty much shared our meals, anyway. We both got a soup (still no idea what kind of soup Sam ended up with – he said he ordered the one that was easiest to pronounce), then Sam got some kind of cutlet (no idea what kind of meat – we couldn't identify it from the taste, either) and I got mince wrapped in cabbage leaves and drenched in a thin red sauce. We shared a plate of fried potatoes (and discovered that the Ukrainian word for potato is very similar to the German one) and a plate of spicy cabbage (okay, when I list it all like this the three kinds of cabbage does sound kind of silly). We finished the meal with cheese-filled crepes (cheese like marscapone – we'd only discovered this in Hungary with Raddi). And with it, we got two 500mL glasses of kvas, the very lightly fermented Russian soft drink (it tastes like sarsaparilla, only better). And all of that was only €5.80 for both of us. We were even overcharged for our drinks, we realised later, but it was so cheap we didn't want to argue over 50 kopeks (5 cents) per kvas. It was a lovely meal and if we hadn't been so stuffed, we might have wandered downstairs for coffee and cake for €1.20, but that might have to wait until tomorrow. At the moment, the only thing we know with certainty will be open tomorrow is Puchata Hata.

Leaving Lviv @ Lviv, Ukraine

2009-01-07T19:32:32.000Z

We're on our way to Odessa. We successfully managed to buy our tickets using Russian and we even bought our tickets for Kiev the following night. The trains are ridiculously cheap!!! I mean, I think we found some indicative prices before we came, but I didn't expect it to be this cheap. It cost us €8.50 for the overnight train from Lviv to Odessa and only €7 from Odessa to Kiev! In Ukraine there are only two classes (whereas there are three in Russia) and so we asked for second class (first class was only €12 but Sam wanted to go the way everyone else goes) and second class in Ukraine turns out to be the equivalent of third class in Russia (which we've read about), the big dorm-style carriages. But we're the only people down this end of the carriage – it's fairly empty, although other people could get on through the night, which could be tricky.
We were a little sad to leave Lviv, although we'd exhausted the things to do so it was time to go. We spent most of the day just wandering around. Everything was closed for Christmas, but everyone was out and about, some of them dressed up in weird costumes (we haven't worked that one out yet). The park was full of people sledding, as there'd been a thin layer of fresh snow overnight. It was snowing quite hard when we left – and when we arrived, so it was nice symmetry. The temperature remained quite low, but we both decided to get out the ski pants today and they were marvellous. We were fairly comfortable to be out for a couple of hours all rugged up like that. But hopefully the temperatures won't get too much worse during the day. I expect Lake Baikal will be a bit chillier, but otherwise we should be okay.
After doing a bit more planning on the (fairly dodgy) hostel wifi (we had to sit in the stairwell to get good reception) last night, we went out again at about 11:30 and walked up to the Orthodox church we'd found earlier in the day for the midnight mass. We went thankfully knowing that people come and go during the service because we certainly couldn't have made it through the whole time. It's expected that you stand up, which is part of the problem. We arrived early and watched people gradually trickle in and bow to the alter and the nativity, light a candle under the painting of Mary and Jesus or kneel in front of the icon and read. It's certainly a deeply spiritual variety of Christianity. The part of the service we stayed for consisted only of chanting (mainly by the choir, but the congregation joined in one that I think might have been a Christmas carol) and the priest walking around the church distributing sweet incense smoke. It was beautiful to experience, with the men's choir chanting and the candlelight in the huge, decorative building. It was lovely to stand with everyone else, although we didn't know when to cross ourselves and have never done it anyway. It's fascinating because it's such a different worship experience, but it's still the same religion. The icons are showing familiar depictions of Jesus and saints, the cross is recognisable. I love the byzantine style of the icons, the huge gold halos and strangely two-dimensional figures. It's seeing a familiar religion in a new light and it does feel old and dignified. It still fascinates me to see people of all ages and types walking in to the church, bowing to the waist in front of the alter and crossing themselves. We stumbled across a very grand church today when we walked to the top of the park and even though there was no service on, it was still the same case. The visitors (perhaps tourists) crossed themselves and bowed. At this church there was also a shroud of some kind displayed in a frame and covered with glass. Some people were kissing the glass. Unfortunately, there was no explanation that we could find. We meant to wiki it, but we haven't had the chance, yet.
The atmosphere in the city was fabulous, today. Everyone was out, but there was nothing open, so they were just with their families or friends, admiring the Christmas tree and wheat sheaf in front of the opera house and taking photos. Horses and carriages turned up from somewhere and were offering rides. We thought they were nicer than the horses and carriages that are everywhere in Vienna because the horses looked like they might work in the summer and the carriages looked old and charming. They were wooden and decorated with garlands of fake flowers and pine fronds.
And I don't know if it's just because of Christmas, but the atmosphere in Lviv in general was very comfortable and friendly. We felt completely safe and welcome the whole time. We hadn't expected to feel unsafe, but it was nice how relaxing it was.
We'll arrive in Odessa quite early tomorrow morning and I imagine we'll have exhausted its winter charms by the time we get on our train at ten past eleven that night. It's a pretty late train to have booked, but we booked it because it gets in to Kiev at a reasonable hour (quarter to nine) and because we've found two Puzata Hatas in Odessa and they're usually open until eleven. We've also located two shopping centres (the two locations of the restaurants) where hopefully I'll be able to find a new pair of shoes. My shoes are fine, except for the toes, which are made of some kind of rubber-like material and it seems to remain very cold. So I'll see what I can find. The woman at our hostel warned us that shopping for quality items isn't very cheap, but I've had cold toes for ages now, so I'm willing to pay a bit more for leather shoes.

Odessa, Ukraine @ Odessa, Ukraine

2009-01-08T22:34:46.000Z

We had a highly successful day in Odessa, despite a few ups and downs. Neither of us slept very well last night, possibly because of the short, narrow beds. We questioned the wisdom of taking second class again, but we did have the worst possible assigned beds and we'll know better next time if we do decide to travel platzkartny again. There was also a group of students who sat in our section and drank beer and chatted into the morning. That didn't help.
So we arrived quite sleepy still and had to rest for another hour in the station waiting room. Unfortunately, we discovered that facilities in stations differ significantly. Although there was a little shop selling essentials like bread and water at the station in Lviv, there's nothing here in Odessa except a chemist. So we had to rest before we had the energy to go in search of breakfast. We accidentally left our food bag at the hostel in Lviv, so we had nothing with us. When we'd sufficiently recovered, we put our bags in the luggage service and headed off in what we thought was the direction of the city centre. We had no map, only a vague memory of a map we'd found on the internet. So we spend the morning rambling, not quite knowing where we were, but luckily it was a balmy -2 degrees and the wind hadn't started up yet, so it was quite comfortable
We weren't very impressed by our first few sights of Odessa. We'd been warned that it wasn't a very pretty city and as it's a port, it's been bombed and rebuilt several times. But we didn't expect the level of dereliction we found, especially after Lviv, which is beautifully maintained. There are crumbling facades and boarded up windows everywhere and then at the end of the streets is the port, which was eerily quiet today (we're not sure why – it didn't seem to be a public holiday). The port s as you would expect: a jungle of cranes and highways and freight train tracks ambling along the waterfront.
We stumbled on the Potemkin stairs – the only tourist attraction I could remember – and were fairly nonplussed. The funicular is also a little silly. But gradually as the day wore on, our impressions improved. The first good thing was that we found a supermarket. Not one of the little convenience stores with surplus attendants, not a little street stand, but a proper supermarket. After forgetting our food bag, it was a godsend. Then we got a map and some information from the friendly receptionist at the Hotel Mozart. We found the proper centre of town and our wanderings became a little less aimless.
It must be said that Odessa shouldn't be judged on our impressions. Apparently it gets up to 30 degrees in summer and hotter, and there's evidence everywhere to suggest that it has a lovely Mediterranean feel to it in warm weather. The city centre has also been nicely renovated and well maintained. It's actually quite posh, although perhaps not quite as much as Lviv. There is this strange dichotomy in Ukraine that essentials are dirt cheap, but what's seen as “luxury items” are at least the prices they are in Britain. I discovered this in the quest for new shoes. Unfortunately, warm, leather shoes are seen as a luxury item (although how, I don't know, as they're definitely an essential). I eventually found a good pair I liked and was pleasantly surprised to find them actually reasonably cheap, in the end. I think we stumbled upon the shop where the locals get their shoes.
But when we went to get more cash out to pay for them, our first minor emergency occurred. Because there had been activity on our bank cards originating in Ukraine, our cards had been tagged and blocked. They wouldn't work at all. We spent a frantic hour trying to work out how to call HSBC and eventually got it sorted instantly. It was partly our fault for not telling them we were travelling, but we were a little peeved because we'd been on netbanking the previous night and there were no messages explaining what had happened. HSBC could easily have sent us a message and we could have sorted it out before encountering difficulties.
So afterwards, we did what we always do after a minor emergency: we ate McDonald's.
We took a walk around to admire the Christmas lights on the promenade and the cinderalla-style horse-and-carriages, had a hot chocolate (me) and a kvas (Sam) at Puzata Hata and walked back to the train station, where we are currently. Our train leaves in half an hour. Hopefully, we'll get some more sleep tonight. We're both so tired that it'll be a good test. We're staying at a hostel in Kieve tomorrow night, so at least we'll be able to recover. Then on Saturday night it's goodbye Ukraine and hello Moscow (briefly) and Vladimir.

Eventful arrival in Kiev @ Kiev, Ukraine

2009-01-09T11:35:28.000Z

Well the good news is that we both slept like babies last night. But that's the only good news at the moment. Well, it's nothing too bad, but we've had to change our plans a little. We had three spare days factored into our plans, so it's actually not such a big deal. But when we arrived in Kiev this morning and tried to book our tickets to Moscow for tomorrow night, we found out that they were all booked out. So we're going on Sunday night and staying another night at the hostel. The tickets to Moscow were also ridiculously expensive, but I suppose it's another “luxury item”, so they can charge what they want. And hopefully once we get into Russia the domestic trains should be more reasonable (all of our research suggests this is the last rude shock we should receive regarding train prices).
But the extra day means that we have the time to sit in the hostel and update triptracker first thing! We'll get into town eventually, but there's no rush, now we have another two days after this.

Morning in Kiev @ Kiev, Ukraine

2009-01-10T10:28:02.000Z

I have to try to be quick, as we should get out of the hostel soon and see some more. It's so easy to sleep for hours and hours when it's dark and cold. We went to bed at quarter to eleven last night and woke up at quarter to ten this morning. But it didn't feel excessive, although I can see the bags under my eyes caused by too much sleep.
Yesterday, we were so tired from walking around. Kiev is a huge city. It has a metro system, but our hostel isn't near a metro stop and it's only a half hour walk into the centre of town anyway, so it meant we walked everywhere and exhausted ourselves. But it was amazing. The city is fantastic. It has a lot of hallmarks of Moscow and is impressive in a lot of similar ways. We had a bit of deja vu walking into the metro the one time we took it, as it looks exactly the same as the Moscow one, except without the expensive marble and stucco decorations. There's an abundance of stunning Stalinist architecture, as well as grand, older looking buildings which, as old as they look in style, can't be older than the end of the second world war, or otherwise very well restored.
The highlight of the day was what we did first: St Sophias Cathedral. The Cathedral was built in the early eleventh century, making it one thousand years old. The exterior has been redone several times so that it looks quite different to the original red-brick, round domed structure it originally was. Now the walls are white and the domes have a bit more baubly shape and some of them are green (copper, I suppose) and others gold. As impressive as it is from the outside, though, the inside was much more amazing. A lot of the original eleventh century frescoes and mosaics are still in fairly good condition, so the interior takes you straight back in time. The mosaics are amazing, although difficult to observe up close because they decorate the high section of the sanctuary (I know it's called something else in Orthodox churches, but I forget). There was a display about the mosaics in one of the wings and each piece was only 1-1.5 square centimetres. They're made from coloured glass pieces and gold plated pieces.
I was particularly amazed, because I wish the original St Sophia's Cathedral in “Constantinople” still stood. It was the church that Kiev's St Sophia's was based on, the mother church of Byzantium. It was destroyed in the middle ages. I read about it in the book Baudolino, which I read last year, oh I mean in 2007, and wished it was still to be seen. So this was the next best thing.
After St Sophia's, we walked down to a street that was supposed to be cute and a little touristy and I don't know if it was because it was winter or a Friday night, but there was nothing there: it was just a street. Then we got the metro to the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Maidan Nezawhats'mecallit in my language), which is the main square, famous for the Orange Revolution demonstrations, where the whole square was decorated in orange in support of the current president (then candidate and people thought the encumbent was rigging the election) Victor Yushchenko (we saw a Happy New Year message from him on a billboard). It's a very impressive square, decorated at the moment with the ubiquitous Christmas decorations. It's roughly a star-shape, with five or six very similar buildings marking the intersections between the five or six streets that originate there. They're all fabulous Stalinist buildings, very impressive, and the street heading south is called “the most impressive unbroken string of Stalinist architecture anywhere”. We're going to have to go back in daylight, but even at night it was amazing.
After the long walk, we headed back to the supermarket near our hostel and made Pelmeni for dinner. Yum.

On the train to Moscow @ Kiev, Ukraine

2009-01-11T20:41:54.000Z

So the landscape of the great Eurasian plain gets weirder and weirder. In 2007, on our first trip to Moscow, we met to girls from St Petersburg and I asked them if they'd ever been up to the arctic. The girl with weaker English had and when I asked her what it was like, she said there are giant mushrooms. We clarified, but that's exactly what she meant: giant mushrooms that are the size of small trees.
Now our compartment comparison, Vlad, told us stories of Mongolia, near Lake Baikal, where there are annual trees, a metre or so high, that die every autumn and fly away in the wind. The world is a mysterious place.
Vlad has been a font of information about Ukraine. He's Ukrainian by birth (half east, half west – significant because they were separate for hundreds of years), but he's lived in Russia for twenty-five years. He finally explained to us why we saw people dressed up in costumes on Christmas Day 9there were kings and devils and death). It's western Ukrainian tradition to act out scenes from the Bible on Christmas Day. He also told us about the day called Jordan in Ukrainian (something else in Russian) which is celebrated on 19 January. It commemorates the Baptism of Jesus and on that day it's tradition to cut a hole in the ice and plunge in. We met a Russian girl briefly at our hostel in Kiev who'd taken part in this once and said she felt much better the next day, although they had to give her a lot of vodka as soon as she got out to warm her up (and perhaps to stop her body from going into shock). It's nice to know something interesting happens on my birthday. We should be in Tomsk, Siberia, on the day. Hopefully they have a suitable body of water and we might be able to see something (I somehow doubt we'll take part).
Vlad showed us some photos of the area where he spent Christmas with his family – 200kmm from Lviv. The photos were amazing. There is so much beautiful countryside here and more than likely we won't be back. I think this is going to haunt us continually. We're really only seeing a snapshot, a very narrow angle of every country. And this trip is supposed to be a kind of farewell to travel. We'll be taking civilised (i.e. Short) holidays from September, so I don't see how we'd get back. Natalia, the Russian girl at the hostel, was from Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal. She told us you need a lot of time to appreciate the lake and all of the different parts of it. She was quite disappointed to hear were probably only going to be there for three days. She did scare me a little, though, by telling us to buy “Russian winter cream” as she called it – a fat-based cream that you smear thickly on your face so that the cold doesn't damage the skin so much. We've had above zero temperatures for the last two days, so it's hard to imagine at the moment.
We enjoyed our last two days in Ukraine, although I overheated once or twice in the ski pants. Oh, time for Ukrainian border control.
There is so much to see in Kiev and the mix of architecture is fascinating. We went out to the caves monastery, today. It's a huge complex of churches and dorms and refectories, built in the eleventh century and it's one of the holiest places for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The monastery was established above a complex of caves where monks buried their dead and left them to mummify naturally. You can go into the caves and see the glass sarcophagi, with rich robes covering the bodies. You can certainly imagine a burial ceremony down there, even thought the mummies are now kept behind glass and where there was once wall frescoes, there's now only whitewash. The most amazing thing to see was the veneration of the mummified saints. Some visitors leaned down and kissed the sarcophagi and continually crossed themselves.
The churches were fantastic, as always – golden domes, frescoes and icons. It was such a huge complex that we had to stop for a Mars bar part way through.
From the monastery, we could see in the distance a huge monument of a woman, so we wandered down to get a look at her afterwards. She's enormous. As you would probably have guessed, she's a Soviet monument, part of a war memorial for the second world war (interestingly marked 1941-1945). It was in stark contrast with the ancient serenity of the monastery, even though theyre only separated by a couple of hundred metres.
Yesterday, we visited the Chernobyl museum, which was an interesting experience. Unfortunately, a good proportion of the museum was only in Ukrainian. But they did have a cool little simulation of the explosion, perhaps a little too cool for such a sombre museum. The whole museum was a little too emotive and a little lacking in information, but that in itself was interesting. We enjoyed reading the original New York Times article about it, as well as a ten year retrospective from a German magazine. There were quite a few materials in German, which was handy. The strangest thing, though, was a bizarre video shown to a (very well-behaved) school group. We sat in on it because we were curious. It was a little cartoon, possibly from the '70's or even '60's about man's search for energy. It documented humankind's progression, harnessing different energy sources from mammoths to nuclear power. It was very badly dubbed into Ukrainian and we could still hear the American English which made it all the weirder. It turned out to be a Walt Disney production. We still have no idea why it was shown to the poor school group. Suggestions would be appreciated.
After the museum, we decided to get a look at the park that runs along the river in Kiev. The topography of Kiev is very memorable. It's very hilly, with steep valleys between the hills. By the Dnieper river, on the western bank (where most of the city is located), there's a particularly hilly section that it would be very difficult to build on, so it's a huge park that stretches along the river for the length of the city centre. The river is more like an entire river system. There are multiple, large islands and the river flows between is huge rivulets. The result is a huge stretch of land that's barely built up at all. The eastern bank is a long way away and in between is only trees and water. We couldn't quite believe it when we caught our first glimpse of the river – it was frozen! In some places there was a layer of ice all the way across (although probably not very thick). It was amazing. It's such a huge river.
We took the funicular up to the top of the hill and walked back into the centre through the snow-covered park. Near sunset, we found a lovely monument, although we're not sure what it was. We both agreed it looked like something that would be erected for the Olympics. It was basically just a huge steel arch, placed beautifully halfway up a hill looking out over the river. There were a lot of other people around just enjoying company and the view. It was lovely.

Brief stop in Moscow @ Moscow, Russia

2009-01-12T09:42:10.000Z

We only had three hours in Moscow.

Our first trip east of the Known @ Vladimir, Russia

2009-01-12T16:43:08.000Z

We stopped briefly to admire Red Square and the Kremlin (and avoid the “tourist police” hanging out exactly where they confronted us on our last visit) when we arrived in Moscow this morning, but got back on a train at 2 o'clock and headed here to Vladimir, a historic city only 2 hours from Moscow. And so far I have to say it's true: Russia is a different country outside of Moscow. We couldn't really notice last time we were here, as St Petersburg was our first experience of Russia and we only saw the two cities. But the experience we've had here in Vladimir wouldn't have been possible in Moscow.
We arrived fresh off the train and, as usual, grappled with the middle aged women in the ticket offices for our next ticket. We decided not to push our luck and book the next ticket as well, although we'd planned to do so, simply because they'd frowned at us enough already. I still think it's not so much that we lack the language (although that's undoubtable), it's that we don't understand how the system works. In the UK or Germany, we'd state our destination and they'd give us a ticket for the destination, along with a little schedule telling us where to change and possibly two reservations for seats. Here, we stated our destination and the woman replied there were no trains and said nothing more. So it was a good thing we had our connection all written down (thank you Deutsche Bahn website) and could tell her where we could change and she gave us two separate tickets for the journey. Thankfully, it all worked out in the end and cost us roughly what we thought it would (phew).
Then we set out to find a hotel. We hadn't booked anything, but had the details of four places. The first one was far too expensive (we're definitely travelling on the cheap, and it's a bit difficult in Russia – the first place had rooms for £50 a night, which doesn't sound too bad, but it was too expensive for us). So we thought we'd try this mysterious hostel I'd found the website for (unfortunately completely in Russian, so I didn't really know much beyond that it existed and had rooms). I'd gotten the address slightly wrong, but we stopped and asked a pair of old women, and one of them took us down to the road it's on and explained in detail how to get there. She couldn't speak any English and we had to apologise over and over because we couldn't understand most of what she said, but she was quite clear where we needed to go and we understood enough to know that it was ten minutes walk up the street. What we did gather from her was that it's in a Catholic monastery or convent of some description, so I don't know whether we could have stayed there anyway. It at least explained why it had appeared so cheap on the website. We set out up the street and another man approached us and asked, first in Russian, then in fairly broken English if we needed help. We repeated where we wanted to go and he confirmed the old lady's instructions. We set off again. A few moments later, he reappeared and said he'd walk us there and took my bag from me. Ten minutes later, we arrived, but it had just shut (we were half an hour late – but we hadn't known). The man, Vladimir (it appears everyone actually is called Vladimir), offered to have us stay at his place, and he'd been very friendly, so I wouldn't have worried too much about it (except that it's drilled into you not to do that sort of thing). What decided it for us was that he lived twenty minutes by trolleybus from the centre of Vladimir. It was only 5:30 by this point and we didn't want to give up the opportunity to look around the town tonight, so we turned him down. He'd already pointed out another hotel five minutes up the street, and he took us there and even helped us to check in. The hotel is very cheap (you can certainly understand why it's cheap, but we don't care at all, as it's a room – private, even, which is novel for us – and it was cheap) and really quite good value. It's less than half of what the other hotel was asking.
We were very thankful to Vladimir for helping us sort out our accommodation, and we felt a bit bad for turning him down, so we offered to take him to a cafe for a beer or a coffee. That turned into an evening tour of the town of Vladimir (too many Vladimirs – it's confusing). He took us all over the centre of town (the old town) and even though his struggled often with English, we got so much more information than we would ever have gotten from the Lonely Planet. After that, we had a beer and his English seemed to get worse, somehow, and he was trying to explain more complicated things. But it was interesting, most notably his description of the oligarchs who control oil, gas and electricity. He seemed to think of them as a different kind of person, above the ordinary folk like him. And he didn't understand why this Ukrainian gas situation was viewed as a national issue, when, to his mind, it was purely business (although he did feel sorry for the people who were cold). Russians all get their gas from the government, so they don't have to deal with Gazprom. Only the rest of the world gets that pleasure.
But he was very friendly and matter-of-fact, although he really struggled sometimes with English (i.e. we struggled to understand him sometimes). When he spoke about the people of Moscow, he always described them with a frowny face. He made Vladimir seem like such a fantastic place, just with a bit of background information. It's already a lovely town, with one of the oldest churches in the country. And although we enjoyed dropping in on Moscow again, I'm glad to be gone again, away from the inflated prices and constant presence of security guards.
We were in Moscow for only a few hours, and organisation cut into that time, as we were unable to buy our tickets to Vladimir in Ukraine. When we finally got out to Red Square, we discovered that our camera battery was flat, which was disappointing, as the main thing we wanted to do was just wander around and take photos (especially of everything with snow on it). We didn't have time for museums (and we had our backpacks, as it wasn't worth putting them into the baggage service just for a few hours). The solution was fortuitous and reinforced the position of McDonald's in my mind as the traveller's friend. We went back to the McDonald's which restored our spirits last time in Moscow after we'd been frightened by the tourism police and I bought a cup of coffee and we sat surreptitiously in the front corner, next to the Christmas lights. The lights were plugged into a powerboard that was plugged into the ceiling somehow and there was an extra socket, so we plugged the camera in and charged it for half an hour while I enjoyed my coffee and Sam eventually succumbed to an apple pie (although it was a cherry pie). So we got our photos in the end and had a nice walk, although our bags hurt our shoulders by the time we got to the station for our train to Vladimir.
But now I'm going to enjoy the interesting décor of this hotel (even the curtains and bedspreads look like concrete and the telephone must be at least twenty years old). It's past my bedtime, anyway, as Vladimir (both the person and the town) kept us out late). We have to be up early tomorrow to enjoy Suzdal.

On the train to Kazan - a lot to catch up on @ Nizhny Novgorod/Strigino, Russia

2009-01-14T20:44:10.000Z

So the last two days (three, even), have been full of drama. But, hey, if we'd wanted a relaxing holiday we would have gone to the Whitsundays. But so far we've worked everything out all right, we've just had to rejig a few things.
So we woke up in the morning yesterday to discover that our cards didn't work again. After mild panic from me and a clear head from Sam, we got money out of the credit card to pay for our hotel (of course, the hotel didn't accept credit card). We tried to phone HSBC from the hotel and it was almost comical, looking back at it. The receptionist, who spoke very little English, sent us up to the fifth floor, where we saw a woman who spoke no English, but had been filled in by the receptionist. We paid her (an exorbitant amount – we had to decide in advance how many minutes we wanted) and then she took us down to our room (with the twenty-year-old phone) to make the call. Of course it didn't work. We still don't understand exactly why. Our theory is she actually had no idea how to dial out of the former Soviet Union, because the listed phone tarifs were: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Tajikistan etc. England wasn't even on the list.
But we'd wasted so much time that we decided to leave it and go ahead with our planned day trip to Suzdal. Our time was limited by another of the hotel's strange demands. We had to be back by 5pm to pick up our visa registration. But we got to Suzdal (the bus – 1 hour – was less than a pound) and had a lovely time wandering around the small town, admiring the squillions of churches and three or four monasteries, soaking up the rural atmosphere and mild temperatures (cold snap predicted for the weekend) and generally taking it fairly easy.
Our friend Vladimir from the night before had written down directions to a pub he recommended for the local specialty, mead. We stumbled on it in our wanderings and had a cup each. It's called Medovukha in Russian and it's a honey-based ale, made in the region for centuries. It was absolutely delicious. It was very sweet, but with a slight alcoholic tang. Sam was so taken with it, he bought a bottle and we're dragging it around with us still. The woman behind the bar just poured it into the bottle from an old Pepsi bottle, so it's obviously brewed nearby. Our cups were served out of a jug. If we could have brought the cups with us, we might have tried. They looked like little barrels.
When we got back to Vladimir, we asked the assistance of a receptionist at a different (more expensive) hotel to help us with the international call. It's a little frustrating because you have to speak to so many different people and they waste so much time. It wasn't clear to us or to them what the problem might be. At the time it seemed there had been a mistake with the travel markers last time and HSBC confirmed that now, all of our cards should work. But we tried them all again and they didn't. We spent a rather fitful night and then tried again this morning, but they still didn't work. We were going to go into a branch here and ask them, so we went to the bank opposite the famous church in Vladimir and when we tried their “bankomat”, our cards worked!! So we figure it must be a problem with some Russian banks and we should be all right in future (we hope).
So with that solved, we could enjoy the twelfth century Assumption Church. Our friend Vladimir told us all about Andrey Rublyov, who painted some famous frescoes in the fifteenth century and he gave us a little tourist book about it, so we were looking forward to seeing the frescoes. The church itself was also the basis for the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin in Moscow, so it's a very important building historically. Unfortunately (although understandably), they keep the lighting very low, so we couldn't appreciate the frescoes fully, but preservation is the key at this stage, as they've been through a lot (including a couple of white-washings). But they were certainly very evocative of another time and place. The largest surviving fresco shows the Last Judgement, the end of the world, and one of the most interesting things I found was the angels rolling up the scroll of the sky as if to throw it in the bin. On the two sides are the Saints and Apostles, sitting row on row some partly obscured by others' haloes.
Although in Ukraine we were worried about getting churched-out (and it's still true that one's first view of an Orthodox church is the most spectacular), I'm still fascinated by the different traditions. I'm reading John Steinbeck's Russian Journal at the moment (a birthday present for Sam back in November – at least I let him read it first). He describes the churches as gloomy places, although I find them quite the opposite. It's true, rows and columns of unsmiling saints and sombre icons greet you when you enter, but there's an abundance of precious metals and candlelight and a kind of respect for the unknowable that lifts the spirit. In fact, for me, brought up a Lutheran with a strong interest in the reformation, all f the visual stimulus and spiritualism is almost like a guilty pleasure. I thought about lighting a candle today, for the first time, as a kind of thanks for the resolution of our bank worries, but I wouldn't have understood fully what I was doing, so I didn't. A Lutheran after all.
We then walked past the little church of St Demetrius, a bit further down the street, and admired the white, carved stone exterior. It's truly magnificent stonework. It's of a similar age to the Assumption Cathedral and the carving is like a sculpted iconostatis, with so much detail it's mindblowing to look at for too long.
After that, we headed down to the train station, about two hours before our train was due to depart. We have a lot of touristing and night trains ahead of us, so we took it easy today and planned to just sit and read our books. But as we had so much time at the train station, we decided to sort out some of our other tickets. It all started very well. We had a younger woman helping us and she was very tolerant and spoke so clearly I even learned a few new words. We booked all our tickets to Tobolsk before encountering difficulties. Two trains we'd planned to take were booked out. We had a play on the timetable machine (now we're experts – even though we still don't know the meanings of the Russian words on the buttons), but we didn't have time to sort it out by the time our train was due. We had to take a train to Nizhny Novgorod and change to a night train to Kazan. In Nizhny Novgorod, we solved this most recent problem, although it unfortunately involved skipping Tomsk and going straight through to Irkutsk, but we have our tickets all the way to Irkutsk, now (arriving on the 20th).
The timetable machine also gave us another scare by telling us that all the trains between Vladivostok and China are booked out for all of January and February. We confirmed, though, that we can't buy that ticket from just any old ticket booth, so it may be wrong (although we may need to skip Vladivostok). We're going to try to sort that out tomorrow.
In the mean time, we're soldiering on.

kazan - at an ungodly hour of the morning @ Kazan', Russia

2009-01-15T08:15:10.000Z

So it's true, there are no tickets to Harbin from Vladivostok for any train that we could conceivably take and still get our flight. So we're in McDonald's reassessing. Thank goodness for Lonely Planet. It may not have been a good guide for prices, but it has found us another border crossing. Unfortunately, we have to ditch Vladivostok. But on the plus side, we can see Ulan-Ude or Chita or both. We have to get a train to the border of northern China (at Zabaikalsk) and get a shuttle bus across. So it will work, and we'll get to see more of China (although that prospect is also a little nerve-racking, as we'll be entering the country somewhere very random with no language ability and no Chinese Lonely Planet!!!! We're hoping to get some tips from other travellers when we reach Irkutsk and possibly pick up a Chinese Lonely Planet as it's a stopping off point for the Trans-Manchurian to Beijing.

On the train to Yekaterinburg @ Kazan', Russia

2009-01-15T20:45:47.000Z

This is the second of three consecutive nights on a train. We'll be very happy to see that shower on the 17th.
We had a nice, relaxed day, despite having to reassess our entire travel plan. It brought home how good it is to be flexible and the funny thing is, this way is likely to be a little cheaper, if a little more difficult. So at least we won't have to pay extra and have extra difficulties.
Those trains to China must have booked up a while ago, as every service in January and February is completely booked out and tickets in March aren't available, yet. There weren't even any luxury berths available. The Trans-Manchurian is booked out. Our planned route from Vladivostok is booked out. I have lingering doubts about whether we've asked in the right place and perhaps the woman we spoke to today actually didn't have access to the ticket system for international routes.
It doesn't matter too much in the long run. We've found another way across the border. Although we have to skip Vladivostok, we'll now stop in Ulan-Ude and see more of northern China. It feels very adventurous. It was quite freeing to realise we can do this any number of ways and we don't need that train.
It was quite lucky that we arrived in Kazan at six this morning. We had plenty of time before sunruse to play with the timetable machine. We've now got a new temporary itinerary, in which we arrive by train at the Russian border with northern China (quite close to Mongolia) in the morning on the 26th and we cross the border by some kind of shuttle bus which operates especially for the border crossing. That's when we don't have any answers. Hopefully, we'll then get on a train to Harbin as planned. It's actually the Trans-Manchurian route we'll be following, so we hope there'll be fairly regular trains. We will check all this out soon, but at the moment, we're not 100% sure how the Chinese side will work.
So we formed this plan in the early hours of this morning, then sat in McDonald's for a while and used the internet, then when the sun was finally up, we set out to see Kazan.
It has a very long history. It was the capital of the Kazan Khanate until the sixteenth century, a city of Tatars, ethnically more Asian and now traditionally Muslim. Mosques and churches dot the city almost evenly, although it was notable that the Mosques were in less wealthy-looking areas.
There's an old Kremlin (fortress), the current wood and limestone walls from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The architecture is colourful and the geographical setting, a the confluence of two rivers – one of them the Volga – is impressive. The city celebrated its 1000th anniversary in 2005 and many important buildings were restored for that occasion, but it was also very decrepit in parts, with collapsed buildings and piles of rubble dotting the city, covered in snow.
The snow was lovely. They'd obviously had a good snowfall recently because there was a good couple of centimetres around the lake – and on the lake itself. It was impossible to tell what was lake and what was ground. We stayed well away from anything that could've hidden water, but we saw many people – and once a large group of people – walk across the ice as a short cut.
Kazan is now recognised as the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan. We're not quite sure what's involved in being a republic in the Russian Federation, but it was clear the population was proud of their ethnic and regional identity. According to the Lonely Planet, 43% of the residents of Kazan are ethnically Russian and not Tatars at all – a result of various imperial attempts to force the local culture to assimilate. But it was still noticeable – particularly among the one or two school groups we saw – that there was a separate ethnicity, if quite diluted.
In Vladimir, we'd heard about Tatar invaders who sacked the town. Vladimir was constantly repelling Tatar forces from Kazan. The city was finally conquered and brought into the Muscovite Empire by Ivan the Terrible in a Red Square was built. I've just read this section in our excellent Russian history book. Another piece of history falls into place.

One night until Siberia @ Yekaterinburg, Russia

2009-01-16T12:05:37.000Z

Since the earliest planning stages of this trip, I've been looking forward to changing my facebook status to: “Leonie is in Siberia.” I probably won't have time to do that tomorrow, our first day in Siberia – probably not until the 20th, when we reach our hostel in Irkutsk. Nevertheless, tomorrow we'll actually be in Siberia. We crossed the Urals early this morning and a whole timezone last night. Crossing the Urals means we're in Asia. I'm beginning to teach Sam to read Korean in preparation.
I'm very much looking forward to a shower tomorrow. This is the longest train-only period we have planned, though, and we're holding up fine. At least it's not hot.
We spent today in Yekaterinburg by necessity. We could have travelled direct from Kazan to Tobolsk (our destination tomorrow), but the arrival in Tobolsk was at 1 in the morning, so we opted to stay a day here and get some practical things out of the way.
It is an interesting city in its own right, so we did the walking tour from the Lonely Planet first thing – past the site of the building where Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and all of their five children were executed by the Bolshevik revolutionaries. There's now a church there and two memorial crosses. We'll further follow the final days of Tsar Nicholas tomorrow, as he spent a while in prison in Tobolsk before being taken back to Yekaterinburg to be executed.
Tobolsk was one of the first Siberian cities, founded after the Moscow-backed Cossack force defeated the native Tatars and destroyed their capital, Sibir. It now has an eighteenth century Kremlin and not many hotels. We don't have a booking, despite our efforts today. We sat in the food court of this shopping centre using the wifi for hours. We have accommodation for Ulan-Ude and Irkutsk, but we're flying by the seats of our pants for tomorrow night.
Things have got a bit messy with these unexpectedly booked-out trains, but revising our plans has ultimately been fun. We found a further complication though. We're arriving in Manzhouli (the border dive in northern China) on Chinese New Year. Transport away from there could be a little crazy. We did confirm there should be plenty of trains going from Manzhouli to Harbin, but we could possibly have trouble getting a ticket. We'll see what happens.

Siberia!!!!! Tobolsk - it's not on Google Maps! It's 4 hours north of Tyumen @ Tyumen', Russia

2009-01-17T18:26:36.000Z

Our day went amazingly smoothly today, except for a bit of a hitch with the hotel losing some of our socks in the wash. We arrived before sunup and sat at the train station for about an hour, because there was no point in going into a town that would be more deserted than the train station. Although finding a bus to town (the station is a long way from town) looked difficult at first (the street was dark and empty and there were no bus stop signs), we followed the crowd and made our way into town very easily. We walked up to one of the only conveniently located hotels and they weren't too expensive and we checked in straight away and had a shower!
Tobolsk itself is tiny. It apparently has a population of 100,000 and on the way in from the station there were certainly enough ugly concrete apartment blocks to house them, but because the city is like a long string, there isn't anything much anywhere, and no real centre, except the historic centre, where there are no shops or anything (even the museum there has closed down).
But the town is absolutely beautiful. The Kremlin is all white, set on the top of a long natural ridge, with the old town on a flat bit of marshy land leading down to the river. Today the sun was shining and everything was covered in snow. It was bitterly cold, but stunning. Even the light fall of snow we got was spectacular, because the flakes caught the sunlight and shone. The golden domes of the cathedral glowed and the difference it made from all our past overcast days was obvious. Today was one of the days those domes are built for. It was very impressive.
There were a few cute little ice sculptures set up outside the Kremlin with cute little children playing on them (one of the sculptures was a maze, but it was only waist-high, so it was a bit easy for us). Which reminds me I didn't mention the ice sculptures in Yekaterinburg. There was an ice playground set up with slides of varying sizes. The whole thing was surrounded by an ice wall you could walk around, like city walls, and there was a huge Asian-style gate. It also appeared to be an ice sculpture competition. It was such a lovely thing to stumble upon.
But back to Tobolsk. Although we'd read about Tatar people mostly in connection with Kazan, they've been much more noticeably here. A high proportion of the people we saw looked vaguely related to Mongolian people. Our hotel receptionist, Fatima, was one. The old town, below the Kremlin, is made up mostly of little run-down wooden cottages (except the new developments that are in progress). We walked down through the little streets to get a look at the Mosque, which is in the “Tatar” part of town, and the ethnic group was obvious. The houses were all so cute, made of logs with wooden window decorations and bright colours. Some obviously weren't in very good nick, though.
The most surprising thing, though, was that these houses have no running water! First we saw a woman in the distance with a huge metal barrel, trying to do something, but we couldn't see what. Then we saw increasing numbers of people emerge from their houses with these big metal receptacles (kind of like steel milk containers) on sleds, dragging them to the water pump. How the water doesn't freeze in the pipe is beyond me. They also seem to have a lot of pipes above ground, whether water or gas we're not sure. It was just so strange to think of these people who live in this quite well-to-do town don't have running water! I didn't want to think about their bathrooms.

Day trains @ Tyumen', Russia

2009-01-18T13:28:51.000Z

I've been noticing the stark decline in the quality of my writing, mostly, I think, directly proportional to my tiredness. I'm writing this at 1pm in an attempt to communicate my impressions and experiences in a way that's more than simply basic description and overuse of the word “ridiculous”.
Siberia, so far, has been exactly as you imagine it, almost eerily so. Out the window I can only see endless stunted and gaunt trees, with a little cluster of snow-covered wooden houses appearing every twenty minutes or so. Imagining living out here is enough to make us realise why the Russian train system is so good. They need people out here delivering resources to the rest of the country (the rest of the world), so they must have some efficient and affordable way of transporting them.
At the station at Tobolsk this morning, there were two whole trains' worth of gas, loaded into cylindrical gas transport carriages, waiting to go. Timber appears to be another industry and Sam tells me there is also some mining out here.
The men opposite the aisle from us are drinking vodka and conversing expansively. One man brought the vodka, his friend has served out some sausage. We haven't yet come across anyone who can even speak English on any of our trains, let alone other foreigners. We've been travelling third class, and our fellow passengers have certainly been predominantly male. There are always women, but they're invariably outnumbered. In this carriage today, it's especially the case. The men are all a bit rough-looking, a bit large and intimidating. We're not sure where this train has come from, but it seems it's made a long journey from the north. I'm quite thankful we're only on this train for four hours. At Tyumen, we change onto our Irkutsk-bound train that runs along the Trans-Siberian route (but our train finishes at Irkutsk, I believe). Hopefully the passengers will be a bit more varied. At this stage, I'd also really like to meet someone who has at least basic English and a willingness to use it. There's so much we don't understand.
It's still trees and snow, trees and snow out the window. Where there aren't any trees, you know there must be a body of water. We held up quite well in the low temperatures, yesterday, although our longest outside stint without going indoors was about two hours. I had on three pairs of socks, two of them with high wool content, which certainly helped. Our thermals and ski gear are more than enough to keep our bodies warm, it's only hands, feet and face that suffer. I've watched with great interest how people keep warm here, and the use of animal products seems justified, from what I can tell. People wear a lot of fur, they wear leather with wool inside. They wear fur on their heads, around their necks, even on their feet sometimes. We first came across fur shoes in Tobolsk. They weren't mink or anything like that. The fur looked like coarse hair, like a deer or something similar. It covers the boot from the tip of the toe to mid-calf. I don't understand, though, how they keep the sole warm, because it's the most vulnerable part, the closest part to the cold ground. Other people were wearing thick woollen boots, woven somehow about half a centimetre thick. The boots are huge and clunky, like they could have another shoe underneath, but I'm not sure if that's the way it works. Sam thought maybe they were just so think that they looked clunky. Maybe they just wear huge socks.
The Provodnitsa (the woman running our carriage) just came around selling snacks and was quite jolly about it. She hassled the poor man opposite it until he bought some biscuits and two more little individual packets of coffee (if she could have offered me brewed coffee, I might have wanted some). She asked us where we were from (well, she asked if we were English – we still don't understand the question “where are you from?” We have to wait until they give us options and we can understand them saying, “Anglichanki,” or “Germani”). We explained Australia, and from what we can tell, she suggested we buy some of the Russian snacks and joked with some of the men on the carriage about sharing their “Russian vodka” with the Australian man. Eek. Luckily, they understood it was a joke, and I think that, as Sam protects me, I protect him, too. A man travelling alone would probably be subjected to more forceful suggestions that he join them in drinking vodka. The Provodnitsa then joked that we might like a book of Russian word puzzles. She seems to enjoy her job.
We just passed a wide river and another two gas trains. The bridge gave us a better view over the flat landscape. But we could just see more trees and more snow.
As soon as we arrived in Yetaterinburg, Gazprom became a prominent brand. I'm not sure why we didn't notice it so much in the other towns, because the Tatarstan Republic (of which Kazan is the capital) is an oil-rich area. But from Yetaterinburg onwards, the logo has been everywhere. There was a Christmas tree outside a Gazprom building in Yekaterinburg and on top, instead of an angel, was the Gazprom logo, which we found entertaining, although it's probably not so unusual on Christmas trees outside corporate premises. There was a young man who was on our bus into the centre of Tobolsk yesterday morning who was wearing a Gazprom jacket. Sam tells me Russia's gas reserves are astronomical. I suppose that's for the best, considering how cold it is out here. But what am I talking about, “out here.” We've only just entered western Siberia. There's still more than half of the country to cross!

5 Hours from Irkutsk @ Irkutsk, Russia

2009-01-20T14:30:12.000Z

I woke up this morning to pine-covered hills. The landscape is now back to the usual trees with white bark and grey branches. The villages are cuter, with cared-for log houses with decorative window shutters and anything not picturesque is covered in snow and we don't know it's there. We just passed a little yard with a poor cow huddling next to the barn for warmth. There is a surprising amount of civilisation between stops. I have no idea what time it is, really. My watch tells me Moscow time (as all trains run on Moscow time), and I know Irkutsk is five hours ahead, but I've no idea what timezone we're in now. It made my birthday interesting. We noted the beginning of my birthday in Australian time, for lack of a better measure. As we're crossing timezones, even night and day lose their meaning. This morning, when we finally dragged ourselves out of bed (we have top bunks, so it's easier to stay in bed than to bother the people below so we can sit on their beds), it was only 7 o'clock Moscow time, but nine in Tobolsk and Tyumen (the last time we weren't on a train) and already twelve in Irkutsk. I couldn't sleep last night, because I went to bed at about 6pm Moscow time, but it was only 8pm Tobolsk time, but already eleven in Irkutsk. It was dark, but I've lost all routine and I didn't sleep for about another three hours and then slept through the sunlight this morning. We're losing so much time, heading east.
We got our Russian train experience in the end, in the form of an ice hockey team, a couple from Kazakhstan and a family of Armenians. The ice hockey team got on yesterday during the day, I forget where. We groaned a bit, thinking they might be loud, but Sam got talking to them (as they're young, one or two of them could speak a bit of English) and we ended up joining the party. They're professional ice hockey players, but as they're travelling third class like us, I don't suppose it's a top division. I think they play in a Siberian league. But they got on with their hockey sticks and giant bags filled with protective paraphernalia. One (of course his name is Vladimir) spoke really good English, which was such a relief. He unfortunately spent the afternoon/evening (not sure what) being translator.
There was a loud, drunk Armenian in the next section, travelling with his wife and daughter back home to somewhere very far away (I didn't recognise the name, but I think it's near Khabarovsk, the last stop of this train). The loud drunk, Robert, joined in the conversation and eventually dragged us back into his section, where we met his wife Lilia, who could speak a little English (and was very tolerant of his drunkenness – I felt a little sorry for her) and the Kazakh couple travelling in the same section. Communication became very difficult until Vladimir joined us, but there was plenty of goodwill. No one knew anything much about Australia, or London, even. We weren't really able to communicate much, because there was too much jolly atmosphere and sharing of beer, cinzano and vodka (thankfully no one offered us vodka. We were only forced to drink cinzano). But the only association most people have is with kangaroos. Someone had heard that Australian men are very tall and strong and the women are tiny. It was a very strange thing to have heard. At least I could explain I was normal in Australia. Robert seemed to think that London and Australia were very rich places and it's a difficult statement to respond to. Russia is expensive. Especially in comparison with Australia, Russia is expensive. But we certainly don't have the extreme differences in wealth that occur here. Even the remotest farm in the country has running water. And we do tend to live in big houses. But it's difficult to explain somewhere that is so far from their understanding in a way that isn't only a small part of the picture. I don't want them to think that Australia is a better place then where they are.
The Kazakh couple, Irina and Oleg, seemed simply Russian at first. They spoke Russian, apparently natively. They looked Russian. I suppose I had assumed that Kazakh people looked a little different, and perhaps Irina and Oleg are Kazakh of Russian origin. They identified closely with Russian people. They asked us, “Aren't Russian people friendly?” And they insisted we come back and join them if we were hungry. We eventually exhausted ourselves trying to communicate and retreated into our beds and read until they turned the lights off.
A few more things about Russian trains have fallen into place on this trip, and it confirmed my suspicion that you have to do a really long trip to really get a picture of train culture. Every train we've taken, at the stops during the night, there has been this mysterious, loud banging and we've finally worked out what it is. It's people banging away to dislodge the ice that's attached itself to the wheels. The train clunks along and it's probably because it has to fight against growths of ice on the undercarriage. The condensation freezes on the outside of the window. The toilet drops straight down onto the tracks, so it closes for at least half an hour at every stop (so you have to plan ahead). The drain in the floor of the toilet is the same, and it was snowing up through the drain into the toilet cubicle yesterday. The snow settled around the drain in a little drift. The temperature inside the carriage fluctuates, I'm not sure according to what (perhaps the Provodnitsa), but it ranges from quite hot to too hot, too hot usually occurring at night, unfortunately, making us sweat in our beds. I haven't sweated in my bed for at least three years (my last Australian summer).
Outside, the view varies only a little. We've noticed an electric green colour that a large number of buildings are painted in. It comes in various shades, but it's always bright (from bright aquamarine, through shades of turquoise, to deep, bright green). In any other setting, it would probably be hideous, but, complimented by the snow, it's quite happy.
We haven't eaten properly on the train, but we have eaten a lot (not much else to do). Our main meals have been cup noodles. We've gotten most of the way through a loaf of lovely moist white bread from Tobolsk. Sam did an out-and-back in Novosibirsk, while we were stopped for forty minutes, to get milk and water and some strange savoury fish biscuits as a snack (chips are a western, luxury food). The one thing we haven't seen on this trip, are the famous babuschkas who, we've heard, stand on the platforms when the trains come through and sell hot food, made in their homes. I was looking forward to pelmeni from a babuschka, but no such luck. Perhaps on the way to or from Ulan-Ude we'll see some.
We arrive in Irkutsk today at twenty-to-eight local time (14:40 on our ticket – Moscow time). We'll go down to Listvyanka on Lake Baikal tomorrow. We were going to go dog sledding there, but we got some more information about it (we'd only seen the website – in Russian – and could only get a rough idea of what was on offer) and it seems a lot more like a theme park ride than an actual trip (the longest trip on offer at this time of year is only one hour and it's very expensive), so we've decided it wouldn't be worth doing. We'll just have to save up and do a proper trip at another time (or a bike tour – in our philosophical musings we realised I was attracted to the idea in the same way I love bike tours and even this train tour. It's the travelling for travelling's sake, not really going anywhere, just going). But it means we'll have time to sit in a banya (Russian sauna) by the lake and with the money we've saved from the dog sledding (well, part of it), we're going to splash out a bit on accommodation.
Mum asked me in an email near the beginning of this trip if we could mention the name of our accommodation sometimes, so she can look it up, but I would rather not, as we've been staying in very cheap hotels (most of them don't have websites anyway), certainly below most people's standards. We have a hostel tonight, which is roughly the same price as the hotels we've been staying in. We've been paying roughly £25 a night, which equates to a mouldy bathroom and concrete-coloured bedspreads and curtains. We've tried to book a place in Listvyanka for about £50, but we have to see if they've emailed back. If it works out, I will post the website here, as it looks lovely. We'd have a little Siberian hut to ourselves for the night and they have a banya on site. Hopefully we'll have an email from them when we arrive in Irkutsk (next available internet). So by the time I post this, we should have found out!

Safe arrival in Irkutsk @ Irkutsk, Russia

2009-01-20T19:34:37.000Z

We've arrived safely at our hostel in Irkutsk. And we've got confirmation from Derevenka, the hotel in Listvyanka, so we're staying in a Siberian cabin tomorrow night! You can check it out here:
http://www.village2002.narod.ru/index_eng.html

Lake Baikal @ Listvyanka, Russia

2009-01-21T10:58:10.000Z

This is the most spectacular location for journal writing I can imagine. I'm sitting in the breakfast room/common room of our little community of wooden huts, looking straight over the lake. The steam from the lake is partly obscuring the view of the sky. The sun is shining, if weakly and struggling against the clouds.
My first sight of the lake was unexpected. We knew it wouldn't be frozen. It takes a little longer to freeze such a huge body of water. What I didn't expect, was that it would look like a huge thermal spring, because of the steam. I still don't quite understand the physics of it. People are welcome to attempt it on my facebook wall!! I don't understand how water that's at around 0 degrees can steam. It was -23 when we went out for a walk before. So there is a big difference in temperature between the air and the water. The steam rolls across the surface and rises gradually. It feels like you're in the clouds. It's physics in action, meteorology on the doorstep of your log cabin.
The surface of the water freezes in places and the ice floats to the edge, leaving a buildup of sharp, jagged pieces of ice, frozen in place at the shore. There are still a couple of crazy ducks out on the water. It's difficult to believe we're actually here.
It's very, very cold. It might have been miserable, except that it's amazing to see the lake at this time. I imagine it's amazing to see the lake at any time, but it was just such a surprise to see the sun and the steam and the water fighting with ice. We managed to go out for a walk and, as we were preparing to go out, I mentioned to Sam that I would like to list every item of clothing I had on, so here goes:
Undies and bra to start (somewhere under there)
Thermal pants
Jeans
Ski pants
Thermal top
Shirt
Wool jumper
Fleece jumper
Fleece wind vest
Ski jacket
Three pairs of socks, two of them wool
Two pairs of gloves
Scarf
Balaclava (yes, it got a wear)
Hood of ski jacket

And we were all right, dressed like this. Our toes were a little cold. But we were outside for probably about forty minutes, but we were glad to have our wood cabin to come back to. The strangest thing was what happened to the moisture in our breath. Of course we were breathing out great gusts of steam, and some of the moisture settled in our eyebrows and eyelashes and froze. I had trouble opening my left eye at one point, because it was frozen together. The balaclava had a coating of ice on the inside by the time we came back in.
We took the bus down to Listvyanka this morning from Irkutsk. It would have been a nice bus ride, except the driver drove a little erratically and I was car sick, plus you couldn't see out of any of the windows because there was a layer of ice on the inside, a couple of millimetres thick. Sam scratched away at it for a minute or two, but it was no use. The condensation had long before frozen hard. But we managed to get off at the right stop, one before the end of the route, at the village of Krestovka. The last stop of the bus is Listvyanka port and it's the last stop because the road stops there. There is no road around the lake. There are villages further on, but they're “roadless” as the Lonely Planet describes them. I can't imagine how the people live there. On our walk, we saw more people hauling water. A woman dressed much like us, in modern snow gear, came out of her fairly large house and swept the snow off the landing. I just can't imagine how and why people would live here. Do they get used to these temperatures? It's exciting for us for a day or two, because we know we're returning to sensible temperatures (i.e.up to five below zero). You just couldn't spend time outdoors in winter. This lake seems like it would be a lovely place in summer, with picnic spots everywhere and lovely wooden tables on terraces, but they look miserable, now. I can only imagine the locals spending their winters cosy and indoors.
But as we have such a good excuse to be indoors and such a lovely place to sit and look at the lake, it feels decadently relaxing. Splashing out on accommodation was worth it for the opportunity to enjoy the views while staying warm. Our cabin is very cute. It's called Kultuk. According to the website, the cabins are named after the Baikal winds. Ours is a south-west wind. Kultuk is a town on the south-western tip of the lake. We'll go through there on the train on Friday. But I think we're the only guests here at the moment. Listvyanka is the most accessible part of the lake, only an hour or so from Irkutsk, set up for tourists and weekenders. I was a little disappointed, at first, that this part was about all we'd have time to see. Any further excursions take hours and hours on buses or serious diversions from south and east-bound trains. I was worried Listvyanka would be filled with backpackers, but it's deserted, except for locals (including local dogs and a stray horse who said hi to us on our walk – I still don't understand how there can be a stray horse). But I was right about one thing: it was worth coming down here, even though we only have one night and we'll only see Listvyanka. This is the largest body of unfrozen fresh water in the world. It's the world's deepest lake. It makes its own weather. Of course spending more time here and in more remote places would be great in summer, but this quiet day cosy in a cabin by the lake is worth every minute.

Back to Irkutsk @ Irkutsk, Russia

2009-01-22T11:01:30.000Z

Goodbye to Baikal @ Ulan-Ude, Russia

2009-01-23T12:18:50.000Z

We just glimpsed the lake for the last time. It has been a very scenic train ride, though, between frozen lake and snow-covered mountains. We've long lost sight of the other side of the lake. Even looking east-west you can't see the other side. We experienced a little more of Baikal's constant changes. We woke up yesterday morning in our log cabin in Listvyanka and the surface had mostly frozen over near the shore. Andrey said he thought most of the lake would freeze by the end of the day, although it wouldn't be drivable for another three weeks or so. The ice certainly wasn't stable yesterday morning. It had formed great sheets ten to twenty metres out and every now and again, cracks would form and steam would pour up into the air. It was minus twenty-nine degrees when we got up. The cracks didn't remain open for very long. They froze over again quickly. The ice around the southern shore of the lake, the shore our train has traced, looks like it's been frozen longer. There's fresh snowfall on it. Because there's no steam, we could see white all the way to the horizon, contrasting only slightly with the grey of the sky. In some places, the water had frozen into big clumps roughly the shape of waves. It looked like a dried-up salt lake, with some jagged pieces of ice like cracked and dry earth. We've seen towns outside our window that are only accessible by snowmobile at this time of year. But they usually also still have a local train station nearby. The public transport network is truly amazing. Even the tiniest hamlet has a decent way of getting to the next town, so even in the middle of Siberia, the isolation isn't desperate.
The rest of our day in Listvyanka was very relaxing. We walked along the lake to a restaurant and had some Omul dishes (as the menu said: “Omul, an endemic fish of Baikal”). I had Omul “in old Russian way”, which involved potatoes and cheese, which was delicious. Sam had a nice white wine sauce. And we got a table overlooking the lake to watch the sunset. Once the sun ducked beneath the low layer of steam, we couldn't see much, but we enjoyed seeing it begin to sink.
We'd eaten an early dinner and then had a Banya, a Russian sauna. After the terrible temperatures, it was so relaxing. I even fell asleep in the outside room in between sauna sessions. We'd been quite tired for a long time, really, getting whatever sleep we can on trains and uncomfortable hostel beds and having to get up at strange times to catch trains or get off trains and I still think we were a bit “jet-lagged” from the timezone changes on the train. We still didn't get a fantastic night's sleep at Listvyanka because of the heating. When we retired for the night, our cabin was very cold. There was a little electric heater in the bathroom, making it the warmest part. We had a stove in the corner, but it wasn't on and, although there was firewood on the doorstep, we didn't have matches or a lighter or kindling. I had thought Andrey would probably come and set the fire up, but he didn't. In the end, Sam went and asked him and basically got mimed instructions on how to use the stove and was given matches, magazine pages and some small bits of kindling. Luckily, Sam makes a magnificent fire. He had it going in about two minutes flat, although it took a while to warm up the cabin. We would have lit it earlier, if we'd realised.
It was very cosy in our our little cabin with a fire in the stove, and it was also quite warm. The only problem was that the stove was absolutely ravenous for the lovely soft pine we had to feed it. Sam had to get up several times during the night and re-stock the wood. I got up at one stage to fetch more pieces from the porch (it was very, very cold). It was a bit of an adventure, but it wasn't a full, uninterrupted night's sleep, which we needed.
Andrey made us a tasty omelette for breakfast (sprinkled with the obligatory dill). It was much more to our taste than the strange breakfast we'd got at the hotel in Tobolsk. We showed up in the cafe for breakfast and were presented with a meatball and buckwheat. It was tasty, but not particularly breakfast-y. After the omelette, we had a bit of trouble finding out about the bus back to Irkutsk. We were quite keen to get back, because we hadn't seen anything of the town. Andrey called his daughter (the public transport specialist) and she confirmed the bus should leave at eleven, but we weren't sure from exactly where. It had dropped us off about fifty metres from Derevenka, but there was no sign there to indicate it was an official bus stop and we didn't want to run the risk of it going past without picking us up. We also weren't sure if we could buy tickets on the bus, as it hadn't seemed possible on the way down. Nevertheless, after a little confusion, we were picked up by a supremely convenient Marshrutka (private bus/public taxi – they have official routes and prices, but they aren't public buses). So we enjoyed his lovely, brand new, heated minivan all the way back to Irkutsk and it cost the same as the bus.
I didn't do very well on either trip down the Listvyanka highway – I was a little car sick both times – so when we got back to Irkutsk, we hung around the hostel for a while, recovering, and chatting to other “inmates”. We had a potter around town eventually. It's a much prettier city than I imagined and it seems to have a nice way of life, but there isn't anything of particular interest to a tourist rather than the usual architecture and churches and the steaming river (it's been dammed for a hydroelectric plant, so it never freezes). I was quite tired when we got back to the hostel around dark, certain last night was a good night to catch up on sleep. That wasn't to be. We got chatting with the others at the hostel and stayed up drinking wine until 3am! We had to get up again at 7. It was the first time we'd had other native English speakers to chat with since Kiev, and there was only one British guy there who owned the hostel, so it wasn't really a sharing of travel stories. At the hostel in Irkutsk, almost everyone spoke English natively. Most were British, and there was one guy from Sydney (there were some Finnish people, too, but they had such good English they almost count). So we stayed up and exchanged stories and plans and practical information and opinions. We're all going in the same direction, which is interesting. We meet up again with the group of four Brits at our hostel tonight in Ulan Ude! We might all end up in Beijing together, too. Most of them don't have any trains booked either, so we might all end up stranded somewhere in the middle of China over the New Year celebrations instead.
So we had a hard time getting up this morning, but we made the train and have since got some more sleep. This train is so quiet compared to our others. We have a whole cubicle to ourselves (i.e. six beds), which is lucky, because it meant we could choose which windows to look out. We sat in the wrong seats to get the best view of the lake before and the mountains were out our other window.
This is our second-last Russian train. It's almost a little sad.

An Experience in Ulan-Ude @ Ulan-Ude, Russia

2009-01-24T11:55:53.000Z

Our day in Ulan-Ude turned out to be quite different to how we'd imagined. There were a few moments when we were unimpressed, but it all worked out and it's good to have expectations challenged every now and again.
We had a train station pick-up organised from the crew at the hostel. We knew the hostel was in a suburb, rather than the centre of town and it had sounded easy enough to reach by bus, but we were glad they offered a free pick-up. But what they'd advertised on hostelworld as a fifteen minute trip turned out to be half an hour. We thought about checking with them if there was a shop near the hostel, but we assumed there must be, as there are little grocery shops everywhere. When we arrived, however, we were greeted first by cows. It's not so much a suburb, but a satellite village – and I mean Village. We were lucky there was a shop in the end, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to eat. It was a tiny shop, though, and on Saturday morning Sam tells me they had practically no stock left.
We wouldn't have minded so much, finding ourselves out in the country (especially after we'd been prepared with the little sales speech from Yuri, one of the employees, about how so many tourists just go from city to city and they offer a chance to stay in a small village – we suspect he says that to everyone), except that we had already seen such a village, in Tobolsk, and we'd stopped here to see the city itself. The next problem was that we'd planned to spend the evening on the internet answering some questions about China (we're grossly underprepared), but the internet at the hostel wasn't working. The whole place was a building site. The lights flickered and the exterior wasn't complete.
It was certainly a lot more like a guesthouse or a tour operator than a hostel, which was the other idea we had to get used to. We normally arrive at a hostel, look at the information on the walls, read our Lonely Planet, and set off to find things to look at. Here, we arrived in the middle of nowhere and were asked where we wanted them to drive us the following day (but only mentioning later that the car cost 350 roubles per hour). We're much more comfortable working out the public transport ourselves, especially as we'd been in the country for over ten days and had negotiated all sorts of trams and public buses and private buses and could ask for basic directions. It definitely went against the grain to take a tour, but it seemed expected that we would prefer to be driven around to the sights than to go out and find them ourselves.
In the end, we headed out with the men from the hostel the following morning with the group of Brits from our hostel in Irkutsk and it was really good, although when we finally parted ways and were back in the rhythm of finding things ourselves, it was like I was suddenly myself again. I need a challenge, otherwise my brain stagnates and I can't take things in. It's probably a control thing I have to loosen up about. I much prefer to know exactly where I am and how I can get back and what my next destination is. In the hostel bus, we turned up at the hostel again quite unexpectedly and we weren't told what was going on. They certainly had the best intentions (“looking after us”), but I find it difficult to handle.
One thing that definitely made it worthwhile, was that what we did see, in the end, the most important Buddhist temple (“datsan”) in Russia, is actually quite difficult to get to by public transport. And it was definitely worth seeing, especially to provide a contrast to temples we'll see in China. We saw part of a “service” (no idea what it would be called, in terms of Buddhism) with monks chanting and beating drums and blowing trumpets sometimes. The head of Buddhism in Russia was presiding, which we were lucky to see. The monastery-type complex was founded just after the second world war and is a centre for Tibetan Buddhism. They were chanting in Tibetan (perhaps – we got two different answers from our hosts about whether they were chanting in Tibetan or in Buryat, the native language of the original inhabitants of the area around Ulan-Ude).
Our two hosts, Vladimir, who owned the hostel, but couldn't speak much English, and Yuri, who translated and (unfortunately for him, pushed the tours on us and asked us for money) were both Buryat people, and fiercely proud. They told us proudly that more of Lake Baikal is in the Buryatia region than in the Irkutsk region, which is true, but their Baikal tour was going to involve driving for 500km, rather than 60km from Irkutsk, and back in the direction we'd just come from. Vladimir was a top bloke, communicating very well, despite a lack of English. We used the Banya (sauna) that night (all six of us) and he came in with us and showed us how it's done in Russia. It was a lot steamier than we'd experienced (probably because we'd done it European style instead of Russian style and then done it wrong in Listvyanka). The steam makes it much harder to take, but that's the idea. The harder it is to take inside the Banya, the better it feels when you step out (into the snow, as we did once). It was about minus twenty that night and it was lovely.
I think the most striking thing about the village where the hostel is and the Datsan, was the spectacular scenery. There are mountains for 360 degrees and it's so hard to tell where the plain ends, because regardless of how far you drive, you never seem to reach the mountains. It finally feels like Asia. Lake Baikal felt like more of a boundary than the Urals, because the landscape changes on the other side. And that's not to mention the people. Apparently, native Buryat people make up only 30% of the population of Ulan-Ude, it seemed much greater. When we finally made it into town in the afternoon, the change in ethnicity was clear.
Yuri and Vladimir seemed quite surprised when we asked to be let off at the station, so we could put our bags in storage and then look around town but we were happy to be in charge of ourselves, again, looking around for the sign that indicated the baggage storage (it's an unpronounceable word, but at least we were very familiar with it by now).
The town itself was very pleasant, full of Saturday activity, and the temperature seemed mild (but we realised when we went indoors and our cheeks were sore that it was still very cold). It was very well kept up, with lots of shops and facilities. We even found some wifi (although the first place we were told about was having technical problems). Even the station was a wifi hotspot, as we found out. I imagine in another few years, every station will be a wifi hotspot. Polly is just a little before her time.
Our train wasn't until 4 in the morning, local time, but we'd checked out he resting rooms (like a nice hostel at the station, but you pay by the hour) and had been told the price. We planned to have dinner in town, sit in the waiting room at the station and eventually go up to the resting rooms for a shower and three hours' sleep. So we found a nice restaurant selling the local specialty – pozi – and ate several small courses. Pozi are basically larger versions of pelmeni (tortellini-like Russian dumplings). They almost the size of a fist and filled with meat and onion. We also tried a fried pastry thing with meat inside that was so tasty. We would have had problems ordering, except that a woman sitting near us spoke English and very helpfully translated.
The resting rooms worked out. We got our three hours' sleep and got on our train. It's our last train and takes twenty-four hours to reach the border (arriving fairly early on the second morning). Unfortunately, the trip actually only takes about eighteen hours, and we sit here at Chita for almost six hours. It's because the train splits and our little carriage will be joined to another train in just over four hours. Sam's got off to try to shave (he didn't have time last night with the “pay-by-the-hour” shower). Thankfully he waited until our carriage reached its final “park”. A girl in our cubicle got off as soon as the train stopped and I hope she can find us again, as we detached immediately and were tugged a fair way off. I'll get off at some point (mainly because they have to close the carriage toilets for the whole time). We wouldn't have minded seeing Chita, but we're tired and have a bit of an ordeal facing us when we arrive in China. We have to make our way to a large city and we have to try to book our boats. It's getting to crunch time, in that regard. We've found so many boats that go every day of the week, so there will be some way of getting across, but booking places has been problematic (it usually involves a phone call and an international money transfer). We're going to hit up a hotel receptionist at some point to help us out. In the mean time, everything is going to be closed when we arrive in China. And, one of the most difficult things, Sam has to retrain himself to say “xie xie” instead of “spasiba” (thank you). It's his word for all occasions (a very handy and polite one).

Crossing the Border - Happy New Year and Australia Day @ Manzhouli, China

2009-01-26T07:52:06.000Z

We made it across the border. It was complicated. It was a bit of a time-consuming ordeal, but we're here in China and we already have a ticket to Harbin. There was only one moment when I doubted the successful outcome of the day, but everything has worked. I imagine the border crossing on the train is a lot smoother, but this was certainly an experience. This is one thing we're going to definitely get up on Wikitravel, because more information about the border crossing would have been helpful.
We arrived in Zabaikalsk on schedule, only us, very few Russians and a few Chinese people got off. Everyone else had already got off (Zabaikalsk was the end of the line, after all). It was still dark, which was the biggest worry. We then lost track of the Chinese people, who we'd been planning to follow. We knew there was supposed to be a bus that left from outside the train station and ferried people across the border, but we didn't know when it went, how much it was or exactly where the bus stop was. It turned out this information was wrong, anyway. The bus leaves from the bus station, not the train station. We asked two people where the bus station was and they indicated the direction, but the town was deserted at 8 in the morning when it was still dark. We trudged up an unlit road with walls on either side and I was getting a bit nervous. In the end, we only just missed the bus station, because of the dark. We walked all the way back to the train station, only to be given the same directions (with a few more specifics from a friendly minicab driver). Luckily the bus station was less than a kilometre away, so it wasn't a difficult walk. And it all looked very safe once the sun came up. It turned out the wall on the right was actually the border. It led to where the trains cross into China. There's a very impressive building in the shape of a big arch that welcomes the trains into China, but our bus had to go through the run-of-the-mill road crossing.
Once we found the bus station, it was fairly simple to get a ticket (vastly overpriced, of course, but we weren't going to begrudge them a £6 bus fare at this point). We reached the border in under ten minutes, although we had to go back around the town of Zabaikalsk. The border procedure was very complicated, but quite amusing for travellers (especially when we finally got through Russian procedures and were sure they were going to let us out without a fight – Russian visa registration and things is complicated). First a Russian security guard came onto the bus and looked at our passports, making sure we matched our photos. Then the bus drove in, the driver got out and had to show another guard the registration papers for the bus. Then the bus parked near a building, we got out, with our bags, and went into the building. We filled in a currency declaration (us with help from our bus driver and the guard lady, as the form was entirely in Russian), had our bags x-rayed and then lined up at departure immigration. The departure immigration lady questioned our registration (as we expected, because we only registered once, and it was over ten days ago), so we had to get out our wad of train tickets to show her we were on the move and hadn't had the opportunity to register again. Then she disappeared with our passports for about ten minutes. Then she came back and stamped them and took our departure cards.
Then we all got back in the bus and drove to another set of gates. Another Russian security guard came on board and checked that we all had our exit stamps, then we drove through the gate and into no man's land. At the next set of gates, a Chinese security guard came on board and counted us. Then the bus drove through and parked by another building. We got our bags and went into the next building. There we had to pay a mysterious fee (but luckily Wikitravel had prepared us for this and it wasn't very much) for some even more mysterious paperwork. Then we lined up at immigration and a very friendly guard spoke to us a lot because Australians are a little rare at this border outpost. They gave our passports a very thorough run-through. I had no idea of the fantastic things an Australian passport does when it's put under UV light. All sorts of secret messages appear. We found that our Australian passports make others very friendly to us, but they take extra time, because they're unfamiliar and the guards want to put them through every possible test. But we got our Chinese stamp, had our luggage x-rayed again and had to let the customs people have a play with Polly (they seemed to enjoy it). Then we got back on the bus, were counted again, and continued through the gates into China.
The border area was a very strange place. There were impressive buildings erected in the middle of nowhere (we can only assume to impress the Russians who come across). There was one strange monument that looked like a graveyard for giant painted eggs. The bus dropped us off in Manzhouli on the main street, but we would have had some trouble orienting ourselves, finding an ATM and the train station, if it weren't for Li Yong, a fellow passenger on our bus. Very much like Vladimir in Vladimir, he took us under his wing. He was also travelling on from Manzhouli and had to go to the train station, so he got us a taxi, instructed the driver to take us to an ATM and then helped us to buy tickets to Harbin. All of this and he speaks three words of English: one, two and OK.
His train is an hour after ours (ours leaves in an hour-and-a-half), so he's helped us to spend the day, too. Almost everything is closed. Every five minutes, more fireworks sound, some very loud and very close. The closed shops are decorated with red ribbons which say (I assume) 'Happy New Year'. There is almost no one on the street. And it's still so cold that we've got ice formations on our window.
Li Yong found a restaurant for brunch and proceeded to force feed us. It was delicious at first, but he ordered a mountain of food. There was spicy fried chicken (which was really good), a chicken and seaweed stir-fry type thing and two giant plates of new year dumplings. All of this was with endless tea and an alcoholic drink that Sam only made it through half of (he has a cold, and it was eleven in the morning when we started). Thankfully, one wasn't ordered for me. I had some strange berry juice. And the total bill for all three of us was £8.50.
Li Yong then took us to a resting rooms-type place and we've slept the afternoon away, which has been heavenly. There is nothing open, so the nine hours outside or in the train station would have been miserable. This place is dirty and fairly dodgy, but we have our own sheets and sleeping bags and it was ridiculously cheap (it was so cheap, we're not sure if we'll have to pay more when we leave...).
We'll arrive at Harbin at 6am tomorrow morning. We're in need of a little civilisation. Hopefully a few more shops and things will be open tomorrow. But I don't mind too much at this point. We've made it this far.

Plans changing in Harbin @ Harbin, China

2009-01-27T07:57:59.000Z

Phew what a couple of days. We're exhausted. Heading to Beijing tonight. We wanted to stay a couple of days, but the trains are all booked up (New Year) so we had to leave tonight.

Enchanted with Beijing @ Beijing, China

2009-01-28T11:58:48.000Z

What a couple of days it's been. I woke up in Harbin with the beginnings of a cold that's gotten worse. Sam's been kind of sniffly and coughy for a few days, but he seems to be getting better, while I might need a day in bed. We were hoping to spend most of the day in a hotel in Harbin, but you can see by the fact that we're now in Beijing that things didn't quite go to plan. It has most definitely worked out for the best.
We decided to book our tickets out of Harbin as soon as we arrived and discovered that everything later in the week was booked out by people returning to Beijing after New Year to start work again. We had the option to go early today, but decided instead that we'd take the night train and only spend a day in Harbin. I don't think we missed all that much and we're much more impressed with Beijing and we've only been here three hours!
Most importantly, though, we saw the ice world in Harbin, which is the main reason to go there at this time of year. And it was pretty spectacular. They take famous buildings from around the world and make “icy duplications”, as they were called, 10-40m high. One of the most impressive was an icy duplication of Neuschwanstein in Germany. They also had the church from Prague castle (although they appeared to confuse it with the castle itself and accidentally called it “Plague” once) and a few other churches and mosques and temples. Viewed from across the river, it looks like a normal city. It's astonishing when you realise that those buildings in the distance are made of ice. They light them up at night and we had been told that it was better to go at night, but we found the colourful, flashing neon lighting tacky, so we were happy we got to see both (we arrived about an hour before sunset and witnessed sunset, the switching on of the lights and then the gathering darkness). It was a perfect time to be there, even though it was an accident that we arrived at that time. We had no map and no guidebook. We tried asking people where it was and what bus we could take, but the first girl we asked somehow got it wrong and we ended up at a “snow sculpture” exhibition (you can see how we got them mixed up). We would never have realised that we saw the wrong thing, except that on the bus back into town, we saw these towering ice buildings and our mistake was obvious. Unfortunately, it meant that we paid to see two exhibitions, the first one being a bit strange and tacky (the theme was “Finland” and it had santa heads and Lapland themed bits and a sculpture called “Finland street women”... go figure). But the first snow show took up time and we ended up filling in our day very well, although we spent too long outside and now I'm even sicker.
We spend ages outside, probably too long, because the temperature wasn't biting. We guessed it was probably still around minus ten, but it didn't hurt our faces too much, so we assumed it was fine to be out for most of the day. We did need to find indoors and food for lunch. It took a bit to find somewhere open on the second day after New Year's (one place we wandered into after a family walked out, but there was a guy asleep on a set of chairs and when he woke up he firmly told us they weren't open). We ended up finding a place that sold everything on skewers and each skewer was 10 pence each. We were satisfactorily full (after that meal with Li Yong we never want to overeat ever again) for £2.80 for both of us. And we got bottomless tea, which was exactly what we needed after all the cold air.
The night train to Beijing was a little miserable for me, waking up constantly with a sore throat and a blocked nose and sleeping opposite a very talented snorer, but Beijing has had an amazing effect on me. I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew it was a huge city, polluted and heaving with people, but as soon as we walked out of the train station, the atmosphere struck me. It has a lot to do with the light and the warmth (not sure what the temperature is, but it feels like spring!). The sun feels like it could actually do something other than provide feeble light for a few hours a day. People aren't wearing woolly hats! I had no hat and no gloves on for a full ten minutes and my hands didn't hurt and I could still feel my ears. I feel like celebrating!
We took a bus to our hostel (after indulging in some McDonald's breakfast – partly in order to use their toilet and partly because we're still not sure how breakfast works in China) and passed the gates to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. It was all a bit surreal. Our hostel is down this cute, colourful lane with lots of shops and motorbikes. It's a lovely spot, very central and only £5 a night. I'm keen just to stay here for at least five days. We've had so much moving around and I'm captivated with the city in a way I didn't expect to be. We have a lot of exploring to do. But not today. Today we're only going out in search of food.. I'm going to Skype people and sleep and eat spicy noodles for lunch (to knock the cold out of me). We also have to find some paracetamol. But aside from that, we're staying here and planning what we're going to do for the next few days. Sounds heavenly.

Beijing Wanderings @ Beijing, China

2009-01-29T22:52:49.000Z

Just a quick entry, as we have to go to bed early. We're taking a tour to the Great Wall tomorrow. It's called a “Secret Wall” tour. It's supposed to avoid the tourist spots.
It was another beautifully mild, sunny day today. The sun reminded me how dependent I am on sunglasses in Australia. It's such a funny thought, being dependent on sunglasses. It was a cloudless day. The sky wasn't so much blue, as graduated shades of dusty grey to grey-blue. It's a shame for Beijing that the air is so bad. It would be such a beautiful city if the sky was blue and you could see clearly into the distance.
We had a very satisfying sleep-in, found a street vendor selling pancake-type things for breakfast (she was also selling fried egg rolls – i.e. the roll was fried, too – which I had and it was a great breakfast). We wandered around near our hostel for a bit, joining the hordes of Chinese tourists out and about at the moment. I'm not sure if they're native to Beijing and are just taking advantage of the days off work to look around their own city, of whether people from other parts of the country use the New Year holidays to go on holiday to Beijing. I thought everyone was supposed to go to their ancestral home for New Year, so I'm not sure why there are so many Chinese tourists here, waving the Chinese flags you can buy off old ladies on Tiananmen square, dressing their children in traditional embroidered silk. I've already been in someone's photo – “This is the foreigner we saw in Beijing” - and I thought maybe it was because they were from the country. Anna tells me it happened to her here all the time, so maybe they were native to Beijing and just enjoying the holidays (and presence of foreigners).
I've begun musing in earnest about the word 'foreigner' and the importance of ethnicity. It certainly was a frequent direction of musings while I was living in Korea, but it hasn't purely been prompted by our arrival in China. In Russia, too, ethnicity was an important concept (for example, the Armenian family and the Tatars and Buryats). Here, though, it's brought into sharp focus. Everyone who is not Chinese is 'foreign'. Of course, it also means everyone who's Chinese, regardless of whether they live in Beijing or Brisbane, is Chinese, which is an interesting flipside.
I don't want to go into too much detail about the foreign thing at the moment, as I'm supposed to be going to bed in a minute, but I'm sure it will pop back into this journal at some point.
This afternoon we managed to meet up with Anni, a Finnish girl we met in Irkutsk, and we had a lovely culinary wander from Tiananmen square to the main shopping street of Wangfujing. Highlights included glimpses of the Forbidden City (it's not actually forbidden – we'll go in on Monday), baozi (like pork buns – soo tasty, just ask Sam), Tofu on a stick, toffee-covered fruit on a stick and the sight of women eating seahorses off a stick. Oh, another lovely bit was the man behind one of the stalls seeing us, switching to English and calling out, “Hello! Snake! Delicious!” We didn't try the snake.
It's bed time, anyway. I still need lots of good sleep. Slept for twelve hours last night and it was exactly what I needed. My cold symptoms aren't so crippling, now. It's just a shame that these Chinese people may think that all caucasian women have dry, red noses.

Crashing @ Beijing, China

2009-01-30T03:27:57.000Z

We have ferry tickets to Incheon. After putting it off probably too long, to the detriment of our Beijing sightseeing, we finally made it up to the office of the China International Tourist Service office at a lovely posh hotel and booked our passage. It's now very exciting to think that we're going to take a boat. It takes twenty-six hours and leaves on Thursday. We'll arrive in Seoul exactly two weeks before our flight to Australia. I think two weeks should be decent for lots of time in Seoul, a bit of time in Korea and maybe a day or two in Osaka. It will all fall into place when we arrive in Seoul and book our next boat. We'll definitely do that first, because that will affect all of our subsequent decisions. But at this stage, we're looking good for that flight.
We have an extra day in Beijing than we'd thought, because we're leaving from the port near Tianjin, which is very close to Beijing. We'd only been able to find information about ferries from Qingdao and Weihai, which are further from here and would have involved another internal train (possibly overnight). I'm very happy to be here for another full three days, especially as it feels like we only just started with the sightseeing. The Great Wall trip was lovely. I was just well enough to enjoy it fully. The fresh air was lovely and it felt like a walk in the wilderness as there weren't any other people anywhere that we could see.
The Great Wall is no longer continuous, or at least some parts are so badly disintegrated that they're barely visible as the Great Wall. It actually stretches away into other provinces of China, but it's typical to visit the wall from Beijing. There are several sections of the wall within three hours of Beijing, some of which are set up for tourists, with cable cars and regular renovation. These apparently fill up with hundreds of thousands of tourists in summer and even in winter you expect to share the wall experience with lots of other people. Our “Secret Wall” tour turned out to be a very different experience. We stumbled up a steep mountain track, stopped for a loo break behind a large rock (I liked the rock more than your average squat toilet here in the city), clambered up onto the old wreckage of the wall and walked along it for about two-and-a-half hours. It was in varying conditions. One part was so overgrown with shrubs that we had to walk down beside it. But it was still so magnificent to see I snaking away into the distance, up and over peaks and down steep inclines. Several guard towers were still in fair (if crumbling) condition. We climbed up onto the top of one and had a cracker break while our guide had a cigarette break below.
The scenery was also spectacular. The mountains are jagged and dry and you can almost see the desert encroaching. Our guide did a good job of miming the mongols attacking and being stabbed and thrown off the wall by the Chinese defenders. He was an old man who didn't speak any English, but had obviously been doing the job for years. He knew exactly how to look after us, even though he didn't say anything.
We came down from the wall again by a mountain trail that was very hard on the knees and scarily steep. We ate lunch in a house in a village nearby, which wasn't as exciting as it sounds. The food was fairly average and they weren't very friendly, although they did set off some fireworks (perhaps for our benefit), which was fun, but hard on the eardrums (and I'm sure it scared the pheasants in the cage right next to where they set them off – the others pointed out the poor creatures were probably deaf by now). And then we headed back to Beijing – where Sam began to feel sick.
Sam slept for twenty-one hours from Friday night into Saturday evening. He woke up every now and again and was awake for a few minutes, but then he went straight back to sleep. He's still not 100%, but he was well enough to do a full day of sightseeing today. He seems to have had a mild stomach-based illness. He still doesn't really want food, especially not oily Chinese food. But he should be fine in a few days, hopefully. But we may not get to try Peking duck at this rate (although the two of us aren't so sure we're so keen on it anyway).
See next entry for continuation of this (the entry was too long for trip tracker!!)

More Crashing @ Beijing, China

2009-02-01T23:28:49.000Z

We'd arranged to meet Anni at 3:30 on Saturday, so I went without Sam, but with Susie, who showed up at the hostel on Friday afternoon. Susie is one of the British girls we met at the hostel in Irkutsk. The other two are still in Mongolia, but Susie's heading off to Japan (tomorrow, actually) to do some snowboarding, so she came on ahead. Susie also met Anni in Irkutsk, so we all met up together near where Anni is staying. We walked around a lovely lake area where people were ice skating. It didn't look like it could be safe, as there was still lots of water visible in parts of the lake. It was a pleasant area that would be lovely in summer. At one point there's a congregation of bars, but the rest of it is very residential, these lovely little ramshackle places with communal bathrooms where you can't imagine someone lives, but they seem to.
We had dinner (it was unclear what everything was, except the inevitable – very rich) and then wandered around for a really long time looking for a nice place to have a drink. We'd decided that if a place we found wasn't nice, then it wasn't worth going there for a drink, so we looked inside so many places and decided against them. They were either completely empty or double the price of the (empty) place next door or had terrible “live music” (one was just one guy singing bad covers with a backing track – I thought it was karaoke at first). We eventually stumbled on a pool bar, which had lots of locals inside and very cheap drinks. It was the first time I've had a gin and tonic that wasn't out of a friend's bottle. It felt very decadent. We all had a second round of rum and coke and I told Anni and Susie about the Bundaberg distillery and the pre-mixed cans that I used to drink all those years ago.
Sam had just gone to bed again when I got home, after eating almost a whole pizza, which was a remarkable achievement in my books, as it's terrible to see Sam so weak and lethargic and feel him so hot with fever.
This morning, I discovered an excellent breakfast, as food has become a little problematic. For Sam, it's become very problematic, but I've just been getting vague protests from my stomach that the food is too rich. Our hostel offers western breakfast options, but they're so expensive. The bread in the supermarket is woeful. It seems most people just have yoghurt for breakfast, but that doesn't keep me going for very long. So this morning I experimented and I'm so happy with the experiment that I'm looking forward to break fast today and the next day. I got quite addicted to these instant sweet teas with chewy, vaguely fruity pieces in them. It's a just-add-water kind of cup drink. So I bought one of those and put oatmeal in it and poured hot water in. I could have made plain oatmeal, but I didn't have anything to sweeten it with. The tea oatmeal was delicious. It tasted like creamy flapjack and it was quite filling. Unfortunately, Sam doesn't eat oatmeal, so his breakfast is still a bit of an issue. We have discovered this “fruit bread” stuff that's all right, so we've got him another mini loaf of that for tomorrow morning.
So after this experimental breakfast, we headed out on a Lonely Planet walking tour of the Foreign Legation district, which was “mildly diverting”, as Sam put it. Then we ticked off our errands: bought a Seoul Lonely Planet and some postcards (they become difficult to come by sometimes, so we went specifically to a shop where Anni said she'd seen some) and booked our tickets. The hotel also happened to have international newspapers, so we paid the customary exorbitant amount for a Financial Times, but I soaked up the front page instantly and immediately felt more alert and connected to the world for it (saving the rest of the paper – maybe not the rest, but some of it – for the ferry).
In the afternoon, we went to the Temple of Heaven Park, which is a fantastic tourist attraction and a lovely public park. We entered the public park section first and watched people doing their Taichi and exercises on public exercise equipment. The middle-aged women play badminton and hacky sack or join groups of random marching and yelling. There was a choir singing songs everyone knew (except us, of course), so others would join in. And there was such a variety of trees. One section had rows of cypress trees, planted so that you couldn't really see other people (perfect for your personal Taichi exercises). The next section had funny shaped pine trees, tall and green. The southern section had twisted trees, a low canopy and a desert feeling.
The temples themselves are beautifully restored (probably just in time for the Olympics). The blues and greens and reds are vivid. The important buildings in the Temple complex are round, which I found interesting, as I expect these old buildings with ornate wood and tile roofs to be rectangular. The main temple is very impressive. Its roof has three tiers, so it's an enormous structure to support. Inside, there are four huge support columns in the middle, representing the four seasons, with twelve more columns in the next row, for the months of the year. The ceilings are ornate and rich with overstimulus. Near one part (the Imperial Vault of Heaven – quite an evocative name), the circular wall (broken only by the gate) is known as the echo wall, because apparently it can transport sound from one end to the other. The Lonely Planet explains this, adding “if a tour group doesn't get in the way”. It wasn't so much a problem of tour groups (although the place was crawling with tourists) that interfered, it was the solid metal railing stopping you from getting too close, with a note about preserving cultural relics. We both tried shouting at it, but to no avail. Nothing happened. It was amusing watching everyone else shout at the wall, though.
We walked back to the hostel through some small alleys (called “hutong”) and almost got lost (our Lonely Planet doesn't have several major roads marked, as those roads are new!). When we made it back, we went across the street for dinner with Susie. The food was fantastic, but we ordered far too much. Considering we only paid £9 for the whole meal, and two beers, it was amazing that we ordered too much. We thought it could have fed four. We would have made a bigger dent in it if Sam had eaten, but he could only managed a bowl of the fried rice that came in a little wooden bucket. We ordered it just because of the wooden bucket (but the rice was great, too).
It's nice to know we have another three full days, because it gives us the luxury of sleeping until about 9 and not wearing ourselves out. Tomorrow we're aiming to do the Forbidden City. We now have plenty of time to make it out to the Summer Palace (apparently there's a marble boat – I'm excited to see that). We might even pop out to take a photo of the Bird's Nest stadium, but it's not high on our list.

Sam's almost better again @ Beijing, China

2009-02-03T23:05:13.000Z

We finally made it to the Forbidden City today. Yesterday we didn't get there. We had to make sure we had plenty of time and yesterday we got bogged down organising things. We realised we didn't know exactly where our shuttle bus to the port left from and as it was departing at 6:30am, we wanted to know well in advance how to get there. We had to get the hostel to call the ferry company and now they've organised to drive us there, too – probably for more than a taxi would ask, but were not as averse to paying too much as we were at the beginning of the trip.
But by the time we'd slept in enough, had a relaxing breakfast and sorted all of that out, it was lunchtime. We didn't get out of the hostel until about 1pm and we weren't sure exactly how we'd spend our time, as we didn't want to go into anything that we might have to cut short. We ended up at the Pearl Market. We'd heard a lot about the Pearl Market, mainly from a fellow guest here at the hostel. He'd told us about his amazing bargains for sets of pearls last time he was in Beijing and how his mum got her set valued in Canada and it was valued at 40 times what Rob paid for it here. It was obvious to us that Rob is seasoned and talented at bargaining, whereas I faint and die at the prospect and Sam just doesn't want things enough to go through all that.
We have bought almost nothing on this trip, souvenir-wise. In fact, I think we've bought absolutely nothing that wasn't completely practical (like my Ukrainian shoes). I had been thinking to myself it might be nice to get some things here that you can't get elsewhere, but we rarely have the inclination to go looking for things and even less inclination to take them with us onto a boat, a train, another boat and a flight. But I wasn't averse to buying something at the market. It doesn't just have pearls, by the way. It's also a clothing and electronics market. It has just about anything you could want. I tried to psych myself up on the way, saying that my slight disinclination for buying things would help me bargain (I'm better at walking away than suggesting a price). I did mention to Sam just before we went in that, knowing us and our attitude to buying things, we'd probably wander briskly through and then wander straight out again in fifteen minutes. When we walked in and were greeted with, “Hello, do you want to buy an MP3? How about an iPhone? You want a memory stick?” it seemed like my prophecy was going to become a reality. We walked briskly through the electronics.
Just as a bit of an aside, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is on again in the hostel bar. That movie is following us on our trip. It was on at the hostel in Irkutsk when we arrived. It must be a backpacker favourite
So, we reached the third floor of the Pearl Market, where the pearls begin and it was overwhelming. On the higher floors, they have what looks like proper jewellery shops with display necks and hefty price tags. But on the third floor, there are just market stalls and at first it's hard to believe that these pearls can be real. Each market stall has hundreds of strings, just sitting on the benchtop, not made into any kind of jewellery. There are black pearls, rose pearls, white round ones, white irregular ones or all sizes. There are strings an strings of them, just sitting there as though they were plastic beads. We had no idea what you were supposed to do with these strings, or even if they were supposed to be real pearls. We would have briskly walked through, as we had the lower floors, except that Sam happened to comment that he liked the irregular ones rather than the round ones and he pointed to some as an example. That was all it took. The woman behind the stall whipped out her calculator and typed in a number, holding it up for us. At this point, we had no inclination to buy anything, but I was curious to see how much she'd typed in. She'd typed in 60 yuan for a string of big, irregular pearls. That's £6. It was her starting price. We still weren't convinced we wanted anything, so we started walking away and the price began to drop. Eventually we were coaxed over. Although she was obviously very keen to make a sale, she didn't speak any English, which made the experience much more pleasant, because she couldn't be pushy with language. I asked about a string of smaller, irregularly shaped pearls and the price very soon was 25 yuan. We decided we didn't need to bargain any more. We probably could have, but I thought that was a fair price. She'd already rubbed them vigourously with scissors and used the only English word she knew, which was 'natural', so they seemed to be real and if they turned out to be fake, the price wasn't very high anyway (we've since showed them to a fellow guest who knows more about pearls than we do, and he says they're proper freshwater pearls. I imagine there would be a penalty in the market for selling fakes, as it has a reputation – fake clothes, but real pearls). And because the experience had been so easy and pleasant compared to most bargaining adventures, I ended up with another string, cut into two bracelets. She made the necklace and bracelets in front of us. I now wonder whether I should have got more for other people, but it was kind of an accident that we ended up with anything and I didn't have enough foresight to know I might want to give them to other people. So I walked away happy – partly because of the pearls themselves and partly because of the experience. It's a compliment to the market that we wandered in knowing we hate bargaining and accidentally walked away with a set of pearls.
But all of the above only took around half an hour (probably a bit over an hour with travel time), so we decided to head out to the Olympic village afterward. It's a strange place. The Bird's Nest is actually pretty fantastic, I decided. It's a lovely piece of architecture. I like the concept and I like the aesthetics. I suppose a stadium is one of those rare buildings you can be a bit adventurous with and it won't ruin a city skyline. The aquatics centre is entertaining. It looks like its bubbles are made of glad wrap.
The whole area, though, is a little sterile, a little freaky. They were pumping out music from speakers and we think was probably inspirational and Olympics-related, but it was terrible. And it was crawling with tourists (as is most of the city – the overwhelming majority of the tourists being Chinese). It's such a vast space, most of it empty. And it was a little cold out there in the wind. We came back to the hostel (it takes a surprising amount of time to get out there and back) and had a quiet night in.
Damn I've done the too long thing again. To be continued in the next entry.

Second last day in Beijing @ Beijing, China

2009-02-03T23:09:49.000Z

Today we got up to go the Forbidden City again, but this time we made it. We had a lovely few hours wandering through the colourful courtyards and through the grand gates and narrow alleyways. It truly is a city within a city, rather than simply a Palace complex. There are the grand, main buildings, oriented on the north-south axis, which were all official halls of kowtowing and other imperial bits and pieces. The names are amusing. They are the halls of harmony and peace and tranquillity. We ironically reached the Hall of Abstinence as I was recounting to Sam the story in the Lonely Planet about the process of bringing a woman each night to the emperor. There is a lovely Chinese garden to the rear, with rocks moved from nearby and gnarled old trees. Most of the buildings have obviously been renovated very recently. They're positively radiant with colour, from the yellow roof tiles to the blue and green paintwork on the wooden frames. We got to see where emperors slept and worked and imagine the little army of eunuchs making it all happen. I've even got down now that the Qing dynasty was the last one before the revolution (the first one, not Mao). Fierce looking bronze and stone lions guard the entrances to auspicious buildings and there are ubiquitous copper pots that are supposed to hold water to put out the frequent fires. Most of the buildings have burned down multiple times. Considering their regular proximity to fire (especially fireworks), it's not surprising.
We enjoyed the Forbidden City so much that we decided to walk up the hill directly to the north to look back down on the yellow roofs. It was one of the most spectacular views of the trip and it was a good thing too since it took us so bloody long to get there. There is no such thing as an accurate map of Beijing at the moment. They get out of date as soon as they're printed. Of course it could be something to do with what the Lonely Planet mentioned as a Communist Party compound or something, but we did a lot of walking around a boring wall. The view from the hill was wonderful, once we finally got there, though. The hill was built from the earth dug out to create the moat and it has five pavillions built on top which originally housed the five directions of Buddha, but they were pillaged during the Boxer rebellion of 1900. So now there are five empty ones and the main one has a Buddha in it, probably not the original. From the central pavillion, you can see just how extensive the grounds and buildings of the Forbidden City are. It looks like a little town. I imagine an aerial view would be fascinating – these shiny yellow roofs amid the modern highrises and monumental communist architecture.
We arrived back at the hostel exhausted, but had an hour to rest before heading out to meet Anni for our farewell dinner with her. Last night, some Swedish guys had moved into our room (we're in a dorm at the moment – but we've booked a double room at a hostel for Seoul, which will be a bit of a luxury). They asked us where we were from and when Sam replied, they said something like, “Oh, that other guy is from Australia.” We asked what other guy, as we haven't met any other Australians here. The Swedes said his name was Karl (or Carl... I should probably go with the C since it's Australia, not Germany). We met an Australian Carl in Irkutsk and had regretted not getting his email, but it turned out to be him after all. It's quite fortuitous that lots of our Irkutsk crew have just turned up in our hostel room. It's amazing to realise how far we've all travelled since we last saw each other, but we're all travelling in roughly the same direction. Carl is headed for North Korea soon. A bit jealous. It's obscenely expensive, but an amazing experience, nonetheless. You have to go with a tour group and you basically get shepherded around by the government. It's like a chance to go back in time, like John Steinbeck's journey in the Soviet Union. It would be amazing.
Anyway, Carl joined us for dinner, as he'd also met Anni in Irkutsk. We had Mongolian Hotpot, which was amazing. It's basically two soups – in our case one garlicky and the other deadly hot. It was basically two thirds water and one third chilli floating in water. You order one big bowl of half-and-half soup and then different raw meat and vegetables to cook in the water. The meat and vegetables take on the flavours of the soups. It was delicious and Sam even ate almost as much as the rest of us.
And now it's midnight and I've been typing for goodness knows how long. So tired. We're heading to the Summer Palace tomorrow and we have some practical things to organise (like buying won, as we're going to run out of yuan and may need some money for the boat trip). It's our last day in Beijing. It's been so comfortable here. It's such a modern city and so many people speak English. It's been so much easier here than in Russia, in a lot of ways. But hopefully Seoul will be equally comfortable and we aren't east Asian palace-d out by the time we get to Deoksugung and such places in Seoul.

Last day in Beijing @ Beijing, China

2009-02-04T21:15:13.000Z

We had a lovely last day in Beijing and are now thoroughly exhausted again, which is an appropriate way to finish off here as it means we saw a lot. One reason why we're now exhausted again is that Beijing is BIG. The city itself is spread out and huge. The centre of the city is monumental. The historic complexes are giant mazes and burrows of amazing architecture. The first thing you learn as a tourist here is that the scale of the map really is that small. The distances generally aren't comfortably walkable.
We managed to tick off the major sights highest on our list today, which was good, as we've now run out of both time and yuan. We visited Mao in the morning. I'd read that he's not as well preserved as his comrades Ho Chi Minh and Lenin and he did look rather fake and waxy, but it's what you expect. The fun of the visit is mostly speculating about what the vast numbers of Chinese tourists are thinking. Here, it's not the westerners who hold up the procession by staring for a minute too long at the waxy remains, it's the Chinese people, enthusiastically staring at him, lying peacefully underneath his hammer and sickle blanket. He has a big double chin, too.
After Mao, we visited the Bank of China. It could have been called a tourist attraction, because we had a fun experience, but we were just trying to change money. We didn't enjoy arriving in China without the local currency, so we decided to change some of our emergency Euros to won. Of course, we had the change the Euros to yuan, then the yuan to won, so the fees were quite high, but it's a load off our minds. We'll be able to buy things on the boat, now (as we don't have much yuan left and we would rather have won at the moment), so we won't starve. And we'll be able to pay the Korean port tax without having to race around for a currency exchange or a bank machine. We had to fill in five forms, two of which were purely in Chinese and had to be translated for Sam. The people in the bank were very friendly and the customer service woman spoke good English. I think that's one thing that has been most comfortable here. People speak much more English than in Russia. In Russia, if you don't speak any Russian, you're stranded. People don't even try to help you, because they themselves don't speak a word of English. Here, even salespeople speak English. Even the woman selling tickets on our bus today knew enough to say, “Summer Palace?”
We made it out to the Summer Palace after the Bank of China, which was no mean feat. It's about 15km from the centre of town. There is a direct bus from down the road from our hostel (we have high praise for our hostel – the location has been really handy), but the bus took well over an hour. When we finally got inside the Palace, it was already quarter past two and the Palace grounds close at 5 in winter. But despite the time constraint, we had an amazing time there.
Where the Forbidden City was the usual home of the Emperor and his wifes, concubines and serving eunuchs, the Summer Palace was the refuge from the heat of the city, a more private home. The Forbidden City has official, impressive halls with thrones and accommodation for lots of different people. The Summer Palace is green and very open and dominated interestingly by a temple. The location is magnificent. The Palace grounds are centred around a large lake. There's an island with a temple on it, connected to the mainland by a bridge with seventeen arches. There's a causeway created by a little sliver of land connected with several bridges. And at the north end of the lake, most spectacular, is a hill, covered in pavillions and dominated by the four storey temple. It's a very steep walk up to the temple and when you reach the top, you can see the five hundred-year-old Buddha with twelve faces (four levels of heads with three faces on each head) and twenty-six arms. It sits on a pedestal made of 999 lotus flowers. The buildings are more varied in shape than in the Forbidden City, with rock paths and trees in between, so you feel like an explorer as you walk among them.
We were on our way down the western side of the hill to find the marble boat when the most coincidental thing happened. We ran into the four Brits from Ulan-Ude. They arrived in Beijing the day before yesterday. It was so unexpected. It's strange that that one night with everyone in Irkutsk was only the beginning. We've all travelled fairly similar paths since then and we keep running into one another again. We walked through the rest of the palace garden together and caught up on their Mongolian stories.
And now we have to get to bed at a decent hour, as we're getting up at 4:30 tomorrow morning to get a taxi to our shuttle bus at 5. I'm very excited about the boat. It's a new form of transport that makes up for the disappointing realisation that our long-distance trains are over and done for now. Seoul will be warmer again than Beijing, so the weather forecast tells us. We still can't wait for the Queensland heat on the 21st.

Tianjin, China @ Tianjin, China

2009-02-05T09:34:45.000Z

Incheon Arrival @ Incheon, South Korea

2009-02-06T14:36:48.000Z

Seoul!!! @ Seoul, South Korea

2009-02-06T23:37:45.000Z

I can't believe I'm back! I'm so excited about small things. I remember the strange fish-shaped ice creams and the chocolate biscuits called “Binch”. I've seen again the banana flavoured milk I used to drink. There are so many details I'd forgotten, but they're all coming back and I haven't even gone back to my old stomping ground, yet. And most important of all, I'm not entirely disgusted with the amount of Korean I've forgotten. Things do come back when you need them. And a woman we met today realised that I spoke Korean simply by my accent when I said the name of the subway station. I'm so excited to be back. I'm so excited I've forgotten all of the things that annoyed me when I lived here and I'm on a Korea high.
Through all of the countries we've travelled, one common thought has occurred to me: I would get so much more out of this if I could speak the language. It means I don't underestimate the contribution my language skills make to the experience here and I'm so glad to be able to take Sam around and explain things to him. We can walk into any restaurant and I'll at least vaguely know what the menu is, regardless of whether they have an English menu to hand. It's such a relief.
It's all been such a relief. We're almost running on full batteries again, after our rest in Beijing. The boat was a lovely, relaxing experience (almost made me consider whether cruises were actually a good idea for a holiday). Our arrival and immigration process was quick and easy. We're finally in a country where we don't need a tourist visa and they didn't even need to see our passports when we checked into our guesthouse. We've seen our first Burger King for the whole trip, which is interesting. McDonald's has infiltrated all of the new markets we've travelled through, but those markets don't yet sustain competition in the fast food burger sector. Korea has long soaked up western influences, however, embraced them with enthusiasm. We've already seen about three Dunkin Donuts franchises and two Starbucks Coffeehouses. Of course these western things are grossly overpriced, but it's fun to note them, to recognise simple things like that after so long in an American chain void.
Beijing was so comfortable to arrive in after our journey, so “western”, for lack of a better word. People who live in Beijing would probably say “modern”. It was so comfortable, but with that distinct East Asian charm and character that I was worried Sam would find Seoul too similar. It showed how skewed my memory of Seoul was. It's completely different. The buildings are several storeys higher and most closely clustered, more brightly lit. There is more activity everywhere, especially at night. Beijing was cluttered with shops, Seoul has even more. And there are restaurants everywhere, which is the best part. I just want to eat everything. I'm sure I'll get over the novelty of the ready availability of the Korean food of my dreams in a few days. But until then, I'm going to be in heaven. The food in Beijing was lovely, especially the hot pot, but Korean food is some of my absolute favourite – and I know if I walk around for long enough I'll find a little restaurant that has what I feel like. Thankfully, I've taken Sam to Korean restaurants often enough that he knows what he feels like, too, which is great. He had his first Ddeokbokki tonight. We found (after a bit of fruitless walking – our guesthouse is located near a tourist strip that has a lot of very nice restaurants where locals come for special occasions, but I wanted a normal little eatery that has the basics, as I'm not so fond of special occasion Korean food) a little place exactly like countless others I went to six years ago, with the menu on the wall. It was a sushi place that also had Korean basics (and a Korean sushi place, not a Japanese sushi place, so I should call it a kimbab place). We got a big roll of sushi, cut up, a plate of ddokbokki (rice cakes in spicy sauce – it's often street vendor food) and ddeokmanduguk (rice cake and dumpling in broth). It cost around £3.50 for the lot. It was cheaper than most of our meals in China. And of course it came with kimchi and pickled radishes as sides. Then we got a box of Choco-Pie from the servo around the corner and ate a couple of them for dessert. I was really full. Sam's still wary of being full, which is wise at this stage. Thankfully, his stomach is familiar with Korean food.
So back to the story of our departure from China and arrival in Korea. Everything functioned with the shuttle bus to the port and our check-in at the ferry terminal. We had about £15 in Yuan left and were hopeful we'd be able to use it on the boat. The ferry was much more comfortable than the multitude of trains earlier in our journey. We ended up getting a room of four beds to ourselves as the business class didn't seem at all full and there were various mix-ups with the supposedly sex-segregated rooms. So we had our own little cabin with a window, a couch and table and a TV with DVD player. On the boat, there were various lounges, a cafe, two restaurants, a little shopping arcade and karaoke rooms. It was very exciting at the beginning, until we realised we didn't really want to sit in the lounges and we didn't have time to enjoy the cafe, as we napped in the afternoon (after our 4:30am start) and then slept for 10 hours overnight. We did enjoy one restaurant, though. It was Sam's first real Korean restaurant, with free side dishes and boricha (weak barley tea) and it was very reasonably priced for a boat restaurant. We used up most of our Yuan at the restaurant, as well as buying chocolate and bits and pieces from the shop. It was a lovely way to travel, just a little too short. And there was only one section, about five or six hours out of Tianjin, where the water was a little choppy and we felt the rocking of the boat in our stomachs. I was worried I would get seasick, but I didn't get more than a little touch queasy at one point. Hopefully our next boat will go as smoothly.
We booked our boat to Japan when we arrived at Incheon. The tourist information lady rang the ferry company for us and we made a booking, although we haven't bought our tickets, yet. We're leaving Busan on the 17th, giving us a whole day in Osaka, with bits on either side of getting from the port and to the airport. It's a comfortable buffer for me.
Getting into Seoul from Incheon was easy, but tedious, as it's one subway line all the way out there. It must be twenty or thirty stops. Our guesthouse was a little tricky to find, as Seoul is difficult to navigate with the best of maps, let alone with the crappy ones you get in a Lonely Planet. Luckily the guesthouse building is several storeys high and has a big sign on the side saying, “Beewon Guesthouse”, so we looked up at an opportune moment and just saw it there. It's on a tiny street not far from Insadong, the aforementioned tourist and restaurant strip. Changdeokgung palace is just down the road.
Tomorrow we're going to check out Namdaemun market, which I didn't remember at all until I had a sudden flash while looking at the Lonely Planet last night. I have the urge to just spend our time wandering through all of the districts, reacquainting myself with the city. I really left it too long. I should have come back sooner. I could have refreshed my Korean sooner and might now remember more. Now I'm here, I kind of want to keep coming back regularly, but it's a long way from anything in our near future. For the moment, we have a week. I'm excited and I'm going to try to make the most of it.

Exhausting full day of enjoying Seoul @ Seoul, South Korea

2009-02-07T23:16:51.000Z

I don't know where to start with this entry. Even the thought of recounting our full day is making me feel tired. It was an amazing day, emotionally bizarre in places. In the early evening, we went back to the area around my uni. I must admit I was close to tears at one point because it's been so long and I spent some important time there. It was an emotional experience remembering me, eighteen years old, arriving there and experiencing the things I experienced. In some ways I haven't changed much, which I think is good. My uni, however, and the streets around it are transformed. The front gate is new and there are two new multi-storey shopping centres that have sprung up nearby. The most amazing part is that I was able to find the first restaurant I ever ate at. It's one of the few specific restaurants I remember. Others kind of merge into one, but I remember the meals I ate at this first restaurant and I was amazed to find it exactly where I left it, still called Strawberry Village. The only strange thing was, it's now a mirror image of what it used to be. The kitchen and toilet have swapped ends. But, most importantly, they still do bulgogi on a bed of rice in a hot bowl, which is what I took Sam there for. Also amazingly, the prices haven't even gone up! It's been six years and their most expensive dish is still only 4000 won (£2). It's such a luxury to be here with pounds, now, and with the freedom of money that only comes with a temporary tourist stay. I'm indulging in everything I denied myself then. Six years ago, I thought a 6000 won meal was expensive. It's cheaper than the cheapest restaurant in London!
We wandered through the maze of streets in Sinchon, a bar area near my uni and I was still impressed and so excited to be able to show Sam and endless neon, blocks and blocks of it, several storeys high. It hasn't changed all that much, but I still couldn't find my way back to uni from there. I always used to get lost. We didn't spend much time out there, so we'll go back some time when it's not dinner time for a walk through campus and through the familiar lanes and shops and restaurants.
We didn't do all that much tourist-wise today. We walked down through what I suppose is the CBD, with city government and banks based there. We then wandered down to Myungdong, a pedestrian shopping area with every imaginable brand. With a detour via Seoul Station to work out our train to Busan, we then contrasted the brand shopping mall with Namdaemun market, very much market style shopping, with a mix of piles of clothes to sift through and bargain for, stacks of imported sweets and jars of Korean ginseng roots, in suspended animation like little aliens.
We took a (rather exhausting) walk partway up Namsan park to get a view of the city, but the hill wasn't high enough and there was a strange smog/mist over the city today. The air felt heavy with moisture and visibility was very low. It's strange to have water in the air again. Siberia was a very dry cold (which made it easier to bear) and Beijing was dry and brown and cracked. Seoul is also very brown (and we think we saw a news article about drought in one province of South Korea), but it doesn't feel as dry as Beijing.
We wandered through a little folk village with traditional houses and hip hop music (a strange combination – there seemed to be an event happening, but we didn't see much activity) and a time capsule, due to be opened in just under 386 years. We stumbled onto the Lotte Department Store and wandered through the food section in the basement, enjoying cream-filled baked goods (well I enjoyed a cream-filled bun. Sam enjoyed something sensible and cheesy). We grabbed waffles at City Hall station that were dripping with melted ice cream and sweet syrup. We stopped for a late lunch of some kimbab (Korean sushi). There was so much lovely food and free water. I love the free water. I managed to forget about the free water here.
One change that I am rejoicing in, over the last six years, is that people seem to have got rid of squat toilets. All of the toilets I used today were western style and I rejoiced in that fact. All but one even had toilet paper. Things have come a long way.

I still love Seoul @ Seoul, South Korea

2009-02-09T22:40:30.000Z

We've had a lovely couple of days exploring. I'm really tired, now, so I might have to keep this entry short. I haven't slept one hundred per cent the last couple of nights. I thought it might have had something to do with overstimulation, as I've been waking up with thoughts whirling. I'm so tired tonight I hope I'll sleep fine.
We wrote off yesterday for sightseeing, as we slept in, dawdled on the internet for a while, then made it out to book our tour of the Demilitarised Zone (cutely coined “DMZ” - I still hear it with an American 'zee', as the first time I went was with a group of American university students). We're going all the way inside the DMZ this time, not just to the observatory on the edge, so it's something different. We're doing that on Thursday. We were then pretty close to Seoul Station so we popped in and bought our tickets down to Busan for Friday. It was the last long-distance leg to book, so we've now got ourselves to Osaka, excluding metropolitan public transport.
By that time it was already mid or late afternoon, so we didn't have enough time to do a Palace, as we'd thought, so we went to Dongdaemun market instead and enjoyed the sensation of our jaws dropping at the scale of commerce. It's an area of about ten city blocks that is entirely made up of shopping: five or six huge multi-storey malls, a couple of covered markets and all the streets in the surrounding areas are packed full of informal market stalls. There's even an informal “food court” with stalls selling warm snacks and offering a perch of a plastic stool under an umbrella, curtained off from cold and traffic by a thick plastic curtain. I had my five pound splurge and got a T-shirt with a strange creature on it and a strappy dress, especially for our arrival at the Gold Coast.
For dinner, we'd planned to go to a little “Don-kass” eatery that we'd noticed around the corner from our guesthouse, but we discovered that it closes on Sunday, so we went for a wander in search of food and ended up having Korean barbecue, which was spectacular. I had meant to take Sam for Korean barbecue, but I'd never ordered it before or been in charge of how to eat it. Turns out I just had to order “two portions” and the method came back easily. The waiter removed the steel lid from the cooker on our table and placed an iron bucket of coals inside. A steel cooking plate went on top of that, and our samgyeobsal (the cheapest barbecue meat you can get) went on top of that, beginning to sizzle as the fat melted off. Once it's almost cooked, you cut it into strips with the provided scissors and let it finish cooking. Then you grab a leaf of lettuce, pick up a piece of meat, get a glob of ssamjang (the sauce for samgyeobsal – it's delicious and spicy) and dump it onto the meat. To that, add a piece of raw garlic (we cooked some pieces just for a little relief), fold up the lettuce leaf and shove it all in your mouth. It's not exactly conducive to conversation for a few moments there. Sam was very impressed and I had forgotten just how good it is. The whole is so much more than the sum of its parts. The flavours and textures all work together.
Today we finally got to a Palace. We settled on Gyeongbokgung (there are four Palaces and a couple of other Palatial bits and pieces to look at, so the decision took a while), which was the first Palace and supposedly the grandest, but it has been destroyed several times and they're still rebuilding parts of it. I think perhaps Gyeongbokgung was closed for renovations when I was here last, because it was quite unfamiliar. It many ways it was very similar to the Chinese bits and pieces we'd seen, but the colours and decoration were different and there were so few people, we had a lovely relaxing wander, while the Forbidden City had been a jostle, especially at the little viewing stations for the important buildings. I always found the Palaces relaxing last time I was here. We'll probably go to the small one, Deoksugung, tomorrow. It has a cheaper entry price (not that we complained about our £1.50 for Gyeongbokgung), so I used to go there fairly often, just for a peaceful wander among the wizened old trees and bright, graceful buildings.
After Gyeongbokgung, we'd decided to do a walking tour from the Lonely Planet, of a mountain in an inner suburb of Seoul. I can't believe I didn't clearly remember the mountains that surround northern Seoul. They're jagged and interestingly shaped. Today was very clear (so much so that I may have to take back any mention of smog in earlier entries) and the mountains featured prominently in our views from the Palace. So we took the metro one stop and walked up to the Buddhist and Shamanist cluster of temples on Mount Inwangsan. It was a very steep walk, and quite bizarre. There were no other tourists there, although there were a few middle-aged Korean men and women going to bow to the Zen rocks or just to get some exercise. A monk of some description (I'm quite confused about the relationship between Buddhism and Shamanism, now, as from Ulan Ude to here, people have seemed to treat them almost interchangeably) tried to point us in the right direction, and he did to some extent. We found the Shamanist shrine and the Zen rocks and had a nice ramble around the mountain, following the wrong path for most of the time, but the views were nice and the rocky outcrops were impressive from all angles. The little village and cluster of temples was very interesting. We walked up along a huge apartment complex, as they do here. Tall, identical buildings grew up out of the mountainside as we ascended from the metro. Then all of a sudden, the road grew steeper (so steep, cars had to give a warning honk then roar up the hill in order to make it) and there was a little decorative gate. There were at least three temples built onto the slope, as well as assorted little houses and even a convenience store. It looked how I remember the countryside in Korea, but it was right next to this huge apartment complex and it was a little cluster of temples. I'm beginning to realise how little I actually did as a tourist here in Seoul. We won't have time for more mountain escapades, but there are full-day hikes less than an hour from central Seoul.
After Inwangsan, we split up: me to go shopping around my uni and Sam to get his hair cut (he really needed it). I had a nice wander around the familiar streets, although the specific shops I was looking for, I failed to find. I ended up with a new winter hat that won't get a wearing until October or November, but it's big and purple and it will brighten up my London winter. Sam's haircut looks fine, although noticeably different from what he would normally get and he found the experience interesting (the barber and his assistant/wife were very, very precise, apparently – but it looks fine and only cost £5).
We finally made it to the Don-kass restaurant for dinner and it was a delicious as I remember. It's Tonkatsu in Japanese – the Korean name is just a bastardisation of Tonkatsu. It's a pork cutlet fried in a lovely light, crunchy batter, serviced with rice and miso soup. I'm not sure how Japanese people do Tonkatsu, but the Koreans do it pretty well. Maybe we'll have a chance to try the Japanese version. At this point we have a whole day and two nights in Osaka.

Rainy and grey in Busan @ Busan, South Korea

2009-02-13T17:36:08.000Z

I'm a bit distracted by Four Weddings and a Funeral, which is on the TV, but our booking got mixed up at the hostel and we can't hang out anywhere else until later. It's raining outside and almost five in the afternoon anyway. We'll just go out to find some food later.
I've been terribly lazy with the journal and consequently have too much to catch up on. Right, so I was up to Tuesday. We visited Deoksugung Palace first (we ended up doing one Palace per day from Monday to Wednesday), where they were doing a fire drill, which was amusing. The fire fighters were climbing all over the main building. Sam wondered why a fire drill involved climbing over a burning building. We decided it was a PR activity, as the Namdaemun Gate was destroyed by an arsonist last year.
After the Palace, we took the long trip out to COEX mall, which six years ago was around the top of the list of big, underground shopping centres. I'm not sure where it stands at the moment. It even got Sam in a shopping mood, but although he needs about three pairs of shoes, he wasn't keen enough on the small range of shoes that came in his size. We had to ask information for a map to find our way out again. We looked briefly at a Buddhist Temple and then walked down to the river.
Dinner was a highlight of the day. Six years ago a friend took me to an area where the local specialty is long rice cakes and other bits and pieces in spicy sauce (ddeokbokki – Sam had already become a big fan). I had completely forgotten where it was, but by chance we saw an ad for it on TV, which was a bit bizarre. So we got our big hot plate of rice cakes, two types of noodles, spring onions, two boiled eggs, odeng (fish cake stuff) and a bit of water and sauce. The waiter came over and turned on the gas flame and we stirred it all through.
On Wednesday we visited a Palace and ancestral shrine complex. We had a big meal at lunch – dakkalbi, which is the specialty of the region where I worked. It's marinated barbecue chicken and was very tasty. In the evening, we'd thought about watching the football, but we couldn't find anywhere that was decent to watch, so we watched the light show over the little creek instead.
Yesterday was an amazing day. We took a tour into the Demilitarised Zone and the Joint Security Area at the military demarcation line between South and North Korea. It was bizarre because they stressed that the two sides are still technically at war, so war was the tourist attraction up there. Last time I was here I took a tour to the edge of the DMZ and peered across, but I didn't go all the way in. It was a complicated process. We had our passports checked twice, which reminded us of our many border crossings. The guards were all armed, which was a bit scary. Within the DMZ the guards are only allowed light weapons, though (although of course that means it's not completely demilitarised).
I'm far too distracted and hungry and dopey from our train trip, so I might continue this later. Nevertheless, we're here in Busan after our super-fast train trip.

Unvalentine's Day @ Busan, South Korea

2009-02-14T19:11:50.000Z

So Valentine's Day in Korea isn't as bad as I remember. There have only been a handful of men walking around carrying embarrassing packages of soft toys, chocolate and random things with love heart motifs. I don't quite understand why Valentine's day is about giving your boyfriend something, rather than both giving things to each other. They have another day in March where the girl has her turn. What I don't understand is why any self-respecting guy would want soft toys and things with love heart motifs.
It's been a sunny day today, which was lucky as it was miserable yesterday, raining and very dark. It was so bright today we needed sunglasses. Hmmm, we might be going out for dinner in a minute, so I might have to cut it short again. We did very little today, anyway. We got out of the metro at the beach stop and wandered down to the beach. We got a picnic from a little eatery and a convenience store. We're really going to miss the food here. It's cheap enough to just eat whatever we feel like and the convenience stores are tops. They are about twenty metres apart – the definition of convenient. So we grabbed two big rolls of sushi, flavoured milk and a packet of sewookkang (Korean snack – shrimp chips) and sat at the beach. Everyone was out at the beach. We haven't seen so many children since our arrival in Korea. In Seoul, there was a noticeable absence of small children. We saw so many today that we wondered if they were just kept cooped up in Seoul. The birth rate supposedly is dire, though, around 1.2 per couple. The families were probably just out in force today because the weather was nice.
We wandered around the headland and saw where Johnnie Howard posed in his Korean traditional wear for APEC 2005. The sea air, rocky headlands and gnarled pine trees were lovely. We enjoyed the walk so much and didn't want to get back into the underground, so we kept walking, which kind of ended in disaster. We ended up walking along an expressway with terrible traffic and it took us a long, long time to make it back to a station. We had meant to make it to a temple a bus ride away from the beach, but we had such a nice time just walking and not really being tourists, that we didn't get there. At this point, neither of us minds any more if we don't get to tick of some major sights. We're going to Kyungju tomorrow, anyway, and we'll have to be on enthusiastic tourist mode as it's an hour from here and there are so many tombs and temples to see.
Yesterday after dinner, we turned on a Korean movie that I'd been meaning to see, especially after our tour to the JSA on Thursday. The film is called JSA and it's a fictional account of a friendship between North and South border guards that ends in tragedy (two out of four of them die and another is in a coma at the end). As a Korean movie, it was very sentimental in parts and violent, but very smoothly done, so it was entertaining. There were quite a few bits in English out of necessity, but they were the weakest parts, which was a shame. But it was good to watch it so soon after we'd been there. In the film, there is a brief scene with a tourist group going through, which was funny.

Infinite turtles @ Busan, South Korea

2009-02-16T16:36:20.000Z

I always struggle to keep up a journal when we're almost home. Instead of planning our accommodation and booking boats and trains, our current planning activities are all in Queensland with family and friends. We've switched on tourism autopilot to a certain extent.
I'm very glad we made it to Kyungju yesterday. It's the old capital of the Shilla dynasty in Korea, the first one to unite the peninsula. There are sites from 650AD. I didn't come down here when I lived up north, even though it's the premier tourist attraction in the country, so I'm glad we made it. We did have to take five buses, though, which wasn't great fun. I've rediscovered carsickness, unfortunately. It probably has something to do with how few times I've been in a car since we left Australia in 2006. I got a bit carsick back near Lake Baikal and it wasn't fun yesterday, because Korean bus drivers have no consideration for the comfort of their passengers. You just get thrown around. Sam commented that we got air once going over a bump.
But we made it, anyway. The city of Kyungju is just under an hour away from Busan by bus, but the historical sites are spread out over the surrounding countryside and mountain slopes. The primary site is Bulgugsa, the centre of Buddhism from the Shilla period. There are two pagodas that are over one thousand years old. Of course anything wooden was burned down by the Japanese in the sixteenth century and some of it wasn't rebuilt until the seventies, but luckily the Shilla people were well known for their masonry, so quite a bit of stonework survived. The larger pagoda, the feminine one, was under construction and surrounded by scaffolding, which was a shame, but luckily it had a set of steel steps and a glass panel so you could see some of it. The stonework was amazing. Because it represented the feminine, the lines were curving and there were lotus leaves and complex series of tiers and pillars. The other pagoda was free from scaffolding, but it was the masculine one, so it was all straight lines and squares.
There were a couple of Buddha statues that are national treasures. It was hard to believe they were really that old, though, because we saw a five hundred-year-old Buddha in China and it was a little tarnished and really looked old. These ones looked like they'd just come off a factory production line. Supposedly two of the statues are from the Shilla period, though.
The coolest bit was the grotto on the mountain. There was a shuttle bus taking people up, but we decided to walk the 2.5km track up to the ridge. Of course when we decided to walk, we hadn't quite realised how steep it would be. Needless to say, there weren't many people walking up. We took the bus back down and it occurred to us halfway up that it might have been simpler to take the bus up and walk back down, but it felt good to walk up to the grotto, rather than back from it.
The grotto itself is a man-made granite cave with a grass mound on top. It was build in the 700's AD. Inside the grotto is a granite Buddha, also from that time. It was really hard to believe the statue was that old. It looked in very good condition. We can only conclude form what we saw that the Shilla people were very skilled in stonework, because the lines were still smooth and defined. Around the Buddha were numerous reliefs of Boddhisattvas and things that we couldn't identify very well. The interior of the grotto is closed off with a glass pane, so you can't walk around the statue, you can only look at it. It was very impressive, though, and popular with domestic tourists. There were lots of families at both Bulguksa and Seokguram, the grotto. I enjoyed hearing one girl ask her father why one particular Buddha had so many hands. The father didn't answer her. I almost wish he had, because I would like to have heard the answer. There is still so much about Buddhist iconography that I don't have a clue about.
We did see a few more things placed on the backs of turtles, which we remembered well from Vietnam. How is the world held in place? It sits on the back of a turtle. And what does the turtle sit on? Another turtle of course. It's not so different from our current ideas about infinity.
After Bulguksa and Seokguram, we walked across town in amazement at the astronomical observatory and the ubiquitous tumuli. The observatory was a large stove-looking piece of stonework, in excellent condition but unspeakably old, as we'd become accustomed to. It was made from 365 stones and somehow helped to predict eclipses. The tumuli were dotted all over the city. They're burial mounds of kings and queens, generals and aristocrats. Some are up to 40m high. There's one park with the most important mounds, but they appear unexpectedly in all directions as you look down a street or across a construction site. They were excellent stimulus for thinking about a realm that is so old we don't have much of a concept of it. It's been centuries since people were interred in burial mounds with all their armour and preparations for the afterlife.
The weather turned a little cold again yesterday and we'd been caught a little by surprise. Unfortunately, all of these sites are outdoors, so we spent a long time outdoors and it wasn't warm. We were happy to get back on the bus to Busan and the warmth of our hostel. When we came back after a fairly early dinner, we didn't leave the hostel again, we just watched a movie. Our fellow inmate wanted to watch a Korean classic called “My Sassy Girl”, which I had heard a lot about but had never managed to see, so we watched that. It's a lovely movie, because it was funny enough that Sam was rolling in his seat at times, but they also get together in the end, which is nice for me. When the movie finished, we sat in front of the TV for a bit longer, flicking through channels. This TV in the hostel receives a channel called the “Australia Network”, which is amusing. It plays lots of AFL. Last night it was broadcasting “Looking for Alibrandi”, which I sat and watched because it was quite a novel experience. The film is probably almost ten years old, now, so it's odd that I can watch it and identify individual songs and what album they're from. It was a fairly annoying movie at the time, and it still is, but I enjoyed the nostalgia. I think nostalgia has me by the throat at the moment, what with our impending arrival back in Aus and my digging up in Korea.
Today we're being very lazy. We went out for ddeokbokki for lunch, because it's our last ddeokkbokki opportunity. It's a shame to think that we got two big plates of it for £2.50, but one small plate at our favourite restaurant costs £4.50 in London. Other than that, Sam's been job searching and we'll just go out to find a post office and a grocery shop soon. Our boat leaves at 3pm tomorrow afternoon. It's really countdown time. I'm only going to wash my hair twice more on the road. We'll only have one more international withdrawal (thank goodness). We only have two more border crossings including Australia, which doesn't really count, so one. And five sleeps!

Dry land again @ Osaka, Japan

2009-02-18T20:44:56.000Z

A Perfect End @ Osaka, Japan

2009-02-20T15:59:05.000Z

We just walked under the plum trees, deep red and pink with early blossoms. A hint of spring is a perfect ending to our winter journey. Someone told us earlier in the journey that plum trees flower first, before the cherry blossoms that April is famous for in Japan. So we searched out the plum grove in the Osaka castle park. It was full of people, strolling and taking photos, having picnics and carrying small children. It's still a little cold, but we had some bright sun.
Osaka is a very pleasant city, which is a bit of a surprise considering its size. The Lonely Planet author doesn't seem impressed with Osaka and we heard over and over again that there's nothing to see here, but there are so many things that we didn't see and would have liked to. We could easily have spent a few days more here, but it's definitely time to arrive in Australia.
Part of the reason why we didn't see all that much was that it's very expensive. Transport is more expensive than London and it's the real killer, although if you went into every attraction, you would also bankrupt yourself. Eating is at London prices (but more for western food – the Australians in our hostel were calling home about the $80 pizza). Apparently it's just because the yen is awkwardly strong – awkwardly for tourists and also for the Japanese economy. Japanese people are among the most conservative about debt and savings, so they won't risk anything but cash, pushing the yen up. But it also makes Japanese exports much less attractive. It's been interesting travelling at this time, because there has been so much talk about the “financial crisis”. Currencies fluctuate from day to day, rather than from month to month. We hear stories about people meeting bankers and consultants who've either been made redundant or have taken extended unpaid sabbaticals with the encouragement of their employers. Some fellow travellers have expressed a degree of pity for the many, many people who've lost their promising careers because of the mess. I feel sorry for the people who used to clean their offices. It has been a humbling process, realising just how rich we are compared to the rest of the world. We can go off across two whole continents just because we felt like it, with very little practical benefit. We don't need visas to visit many other countries. There are ways we can even go and live outside of our own country. We are very rich, both materially and in our birthplace and citizenship.
On our last night in Busan, we had a long, in-depth discussion with a Canadian guy who was also staying at our hostel. It's been so surprising the conversations we've had with people we've only just met and most likely will never meet again. We spoke for hours about the state of China, about North Korea and Russia, about business, economics and culture and how the three interlink. It's been an invaluable experience to see the spectrum of eastern Europe to Asia and to realise there are many ways of running a country. Some things we were able to observe, most things we learned through talking to people who've spent time in these places. I remembered a lot about Korea that I had forgotten and it's become my east Asian benchmark country, that I compare with China and Japan.
It's been noticeable that Japan is a very rich country. It's not just the cost of food and transport, it's the cleanliness and obsession with hygiene, the high quality of everyday goods and, paradoxically, the existence of little shanty-towns of homeless people. We learned at a museum yesterday that there are seven hundred homeless people in Osaka. We reacted to that statement with scepticism. According to the Rough Guide, which we read in the common room at the hostel, a typical Osakan greeting is, “Are you making any money?” It was interesting to compare that to the common Korean greeting, “Have you eaten?”
We have been a little boring with our food options here, partly because we changed our emergency US dollars into yen and we were hoping not to have to get any more money out (partly because it could be a nightmare trying to find a bank that will accept our cards). We've had pasta and red sauce for dinner the last two nights and bread for lunch. We have got some nice Japanese snacks for the plane, though. It was just so difficult arriving from Korea, where we had such a fabulous culinary experience and we could basically eat whatever we wanted, whenever we felt hungry. The prices are a shock. We might have been able to afford one meal of udon noodles, which would have to be the most basic Japanese food. Even the supermarket was expensive. It was definitely more expensive than Tesco's. Actually since leaving Russia fruit has been the thing to stretch our budget. It's so expensive and was even in Korea. Yesterday, we bought two huge carrots and just ate them. It was a “taste the vitamins” experience. Someone else at the hostel bought a single apple here and it cost him £1. We're looking forward to going mad for fruit in Australia. As I mentioned to Sam, Queensland is one of the few places you can eat bananas without a hint of a guilty conscience. We ate bananas in Russia and wondered where on earth they'd come from and why they were so cheap.
But aside from the rude shock of the prices, we've had a pleasant couple of days here, not entirely counting down the hours. We went to the Human Rights museum, yesterday, which was thought-provoking and we managed to easily stay in there for two-and-a-half hours. The most interesting section basically has exhibits devoted to the sections of society that have experienced repression in Japan. I was a little guilty about going first to the Human Rights museum after coming across from Korea, where they make a big song and dance about how Japan was nasty to them. But the museum didn't actually focus on the repression, it focussed on how those groups acted to secure themselves rights. It meant, though, that there were only fleeting mentions of involuntary sterilisation of people with disabilities. We kind of reeled at the mention, but it wasn't spoken of in any more detail than a mention. It had a bit of information about a single mother winning a sexual harassment court case, but it only fleetingly mentioned that single mothers only received parental rights to the child within the last thirty years (I can't remember exactly – Sam thinks in the nineties, but I thought perhaps in the late seventies). The most confusing section was about the Buraku people, the outcasts of the old Japanese caste system that was formally abolished in the nineteenth century. There was a large exhibit about community development for areas with large Buraku populations, there were artefacts from the community groups that fought for equality, but there was nothing about the current situation. The exhibit focussed on the traditional craft of the Buraku people – leatherwork. They had tools for leatherwork, different types of leather and drums. Sam asked the volunteer guide who kind of just followed us around whether Buraku people now worked in offices and (through language difficulties – we could only really understand half of what the guide told us, so perhaps he only understood half of what we told him) he told us that they still make traditional leather products. We have to look further afield for more information. Perhaps we should have looked it all up beforehand so we had a bit more context for what we were looking at, but context was missing for a few of the exhibits. Another thing that caught our interest was that the Japanese words for concepts involving sexual identity issues were all borrowed from English. It was disconcerting to listen on a video to a Japanese woman speaking about being 'lesbian'. We couldn't understand anything she said (there were subtitles, though) except 'lesbian', 'gay', 'bisexual', 'homosexual' and 'coming out'. It made us wonder what conservative Japanese people's impressions of English-speaking culture are, if they believe these concepts came from us. Surely there must be similar concepts or ways of formulating these ideas in the Japanese language. Also surprisingly, the Japanese word for the women's liberation movement was “Women's Lib”.
The first section that we had to walk through to reach the exhibits about the repressed groups in society was very confusing and had very little explanation in English. It basically set out exhibits about each of the human rights that are important to “us” (perhaps in a Japanese context – not sure), as a kind of introduction to human rights. The exhibits were: right to a good education, right to a secure job, right to cleanliness and hygiene, right to gender roles (wish I could have understood that one), right to maintain nationality (it was explained in the context of staying in the group you were born into, rather than right to become another nationality) and right to family. It was actually quite different from what we expected from an introduction to human rights.
We have to go! Our train for the airport leaves in half an hour! I will update again for you dear people who aren't in Brisbane. I'm certain to be teary when we arrive. Hopefully Jetstar won't be delayed..

Coolangatta International Airport, or lack thereof @ Coolangatta, Australia

2009-02-21T07:00:42.000Z

Brisbane, Australia @ Brisbane, Australia

2009-02-21T12:42:14.000Z

Mum and Dad's @ Herberton, Australia

2009-02-25T12:43:14.000Z