Welll, I am in London and will be flying back this afternoon the the US. For some reason, Internet access in hotels in Siberia is not readily available. Go figure!
However I did jot some things down along the way. Here is "Part 1" of the comments about the trip since the last real entry. (The quick blog was sent by text message so I was obviously not able to write too much.)
Well, I was very glad that I had spent a couple of nights in Moscow before joining the group. On Monday, the group had a long drive back to Red Square (near my first hotel) and then we only had 15 minutes to look around on our own without the guide talking to us. We also de-bussed (new word) on the other direction from where I had stayed and there were no souvenir tents in that area. Since I had decided that I would buy a couple more things when I returned, I used my 15 minutes to walk briskly back to the merchants and purchase the remaining items that I had wanted for myself. As it turned out, we have yet to see such a large tourist trap…I mean, large collection of souvenirs.
Oh, I think I forgot to mention in my last decent-sized post that the business center at the Marriott made a mistake. Instead of charging me 240 rubles for my Internet usage, they put the ticket # down (133444) as the cost for the time. Fortunately I caught the mistake during checkout. I won’t give it away, but go ahead and use xe.com to figure out how much 133,444 Rubles is in USD and you will see why I was concerned.
We flew on Monday night to Irkutsk. With the time change that meant that we left Moscow at 6:30pm and arrived in Irkutsk at 5am the next morning event though the flight took less than 5 hours. Siberian Air uses a bright green color on the entire outside of the plane and a combination of a lot of different bright colors on the inside of the plane. They fed us dinner about an hour into the flight and then breakfast about an hour before we landed. So, we essentially ate our way across Siberia. When we arrived, the airport was definitely…. an experience. We were shuttled to a building that looked like a little shack and it looked like the inside of a house that had been gutted to make a more open building in the inside. The luggage carousel appeared like a donkey should have driven it. Many of us took pictures of it because it was so rough looking. Fortunately, once our luggage arrived we were able to quickly locate our tour guide and take us to the hotel.
Hotel Irkutsk was supposed to be a 3 star hotel but obviously perceptions between countries can differ in what they think is a 3 star hotel. It was nice a clean but extremely small rooms. I was fortunate that due to some confusion I ended up with my own room instead of sharing with the only other person that needed a roommate – a guy. Considering the tiny space of the room, I was very lucky!
Siberia turned out to be very hot (not India hot but still very hot). Apparently the rooms in the hotel that faced the river (including my room) were the only ones that had A/C. I didn’t find the control at first because it was actually a remote control that operated it but once I did turn it on, believe it or not – I froze myself out with how cold it got. I actually had to turn it OFF for a while!!!! (Gosh, that was a great air conditioning unit!)
Irkustk was a very unique looking city of 600,000. There are many buildings in the downtown area built in the 19th century that look very elegant and regal – like Paris but more colorful yellows, blues and pinks. In contrast, the surrounding town has a lot of wood home and log homes. Apparently the cost of a nail was so expensive when the city was being successful that you could buy a horse with one nail (okay, I can’t remember exactly what the tour guide said because I was still jet-lagged so ignore this comparison if I got it wrong – see what happens when I can’t regularly “Google” things I hear about?!?!) Anyway…. the city used resources that were readily available – Trees – to make their homes and didn’t really need to use nails the way they constructed them. Today there are a variety of styles of homes but many of the wood/log homes still stand () and from what our tour guide/English teacher said, the city is very expensive so she still lives with her parents.)
Wednesday morning, we headed to Lake Baikal. It is HUGE and Beautiful!!! It reminds me of Lake Tahoe in CA but at a much larger scale and less people. The lake was too big for us to drive around in the time we had and we stuck to the lower mountainside of the lake. Many of us were commenting that if it were in the States that developers would have put up exclusive homes and hid the coastline with condos. In general, the parts of Siberia that were saw were gorgeous with birch and pine trees all over the place. Although it looked green and enticing now, apparently the 7+ months of winter deter people from moving there…go figure!
