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The story now continues!
We awoke the next day to be told that we would not be sailing anywhere, but gathering berries. Thinking back, this was the best memory I have from the trip, so I am at a loss as to how to describe it, to make it understood because it is, in some ways, the most ephemeral of all the things we did. We were, after going up the shore for half an hour on the boat, given the tin berry-pickers used by Russians: as simple and ingenious as hard to describe - they're in the shape of a rectangular cube, pulled up at either extreme like a canoe, and have long teeth, which look like elongated 60d nails. You run them through the short bushes, which resemble Maine blueberry bushes, slowly and easily, and the berries come off into the picker. The process itself is relaxing, cathartic, mind-easing, and there are berries in their millions everywhere (this is no exaggeration - there was simply an unfathomable number of the things all up and down the mountain). Colleen and I worked as a team, saying little, but gathering berries actively. I carried the tin backpack (which, if anyone knows what I'm talking about, look like the old Indian-brand fire extinguishers) into which we dropped the berries as the pickers got full. It was easy to forget, for 20 or 30 minutes, where we were, and then look up and see the lake stretch out beneath us, and the mountains above us, and realize that we were standing on the dream-like snow-capped peaks we saw from the boat, or the week before from the train. And then we would go back to picking. As Colleen and I worked around, finding good patches, the captain, with his ubiquitous video camera and equally ubiquitous smile, rushed around, alternately shooting film, pointing out good photographs with a shout of excitement, and making comments like, "now, this is how we pass time in Siberia!" "We Russians know how to have a good time!" or, simply, "класс класс класс!" And, to his credit, he always really DID know where the good berries were, and had an eye for photographs.
That night was another banya night. Bair, when the girls had all left, and it was only a few guys left, threw an unreasonable amount of water on the stove which literally hurt my eyes in the following blast of heat, and proceeded to say, "I'll show you how men do a banya in Russia!" At which point he beat us with the bundles of birch twigs which they use, and the slightly frightening log (which is really good for massages!!). When we emerged, red and welted and hot and running for the frigid water of Baikal, dark had completely fallen, and I realized that standing waist-deep in Baikal and looking past the banya to the dim outline of the mountains and then up at the stars was the most beautiful thing I had seen. After the banya, we had our first encounter with vodka s pertsom (for which there's a handy Russian word which I have forgotten) - vodka which has been infused with chili pepper. Now, I'm not usually a huge vodka fan, but my love of hot food seems to have carried over. For one thing, the quality was good, so the liquor itself had little taste, and for another, the spiciness, added to by the bite of alchohol really warmed your body up - an illusion, of course, spicy foods and alcohol both bringing blood to the surface, but I can see why people in this cold climate would like it. We sat around the little table until pretty late, talking.
Before I go any further, a word on alcohol in Russia. When I mention alcohol, some of you will picture us all in some nightly scene of drunken debauchery, or anyway drinking to excess. But, when we drank (well, when I drink in general, and when people drank on the trip), it was usually a small quantity, usually over a long period of time. I have been positively surprised by the DEconfirmation of the stereotype that all Russians drink to excess all the time. There are, to be sure, drunks. Alcohol is, to be sure, easy to get, cheap, and ubiquitous. There is a traidion of dinking together which we simply don't have. But, Russians are much more likely to grab a beer and chat with friends than to seriously drink liquor together. And - and this is quite different from college kids in the states - the focus is always on the people you're with, and never on the alcohol for its own sake, or even just having a "good time." You don't hear Russians brag about their drunken antics, and no story starts out "Oh, my God, I was so drunk last night..." My memories of Russia will include alcohol as a backdrop, a part of the social process here as inextricable from daily life as any of our rituals in the US, and will instead focus on the friends I made.
Okay, вперёд! The vodka s pertsom did have one effect of note apart from its warming properties: a number of us, myself included, dreamt some VERY strange dreams. I wouldn't make the connection except there is something simply unnatural about vodka with chili peppers floating in it, and the dreams were so very strange. Colleen and I inparticular. I won't go into details about either of ours, and particularly not my own, but suffice to say I awoke wondering what I was thinking.
We went, the next day, across Baikal, which took us four hours, to an island where the famous Baikal seals hang out. I really enjoy the Russian word for seal: нерпа (NYER-pa). We didn't see any - though Sarah and Lizi (now dubbed Slizah, their inseprability rivaling that of Golding's Samneric) did see some other, smaller wildlife which will make them think twice about removing clothing on the beach again. It was, however, one of the more beautiful places I have seen, this island. Simply stunning. The panorama was endless and changing, the air crisp and temperate; the group split up around the island (losing Colleen, who wandered off alone, and met with some rather subconscious wildlife of her own - her fear of snakes manifesting itself quite forcefully).
We arrived in the early evening at the hot springs. We changed into our still-wet swimsuits and, walking to the slightly steaming square pool, lined with wood (maybe 5 feet to a side) which was the hot springs and smelled of slightly off eggs. Bair was the first one in, entering with a grunt which was uncharactaristic and gave me pause - just how hot WAS the hot spring, exactly? It's one thing to say 75-80 degrees Celcius, it's quite another to step into water that hot. I had put my whole body in before the heat overcame the residual chilliness of the air. And it was very hot. And amazing. We spent maybe two hours in and out of the hot spring before returning to the boat. Or, most of us did. Slizah, our Siamese starlet, were with the captain, having taken a liking to him, he to them. The captain was filming them as we left, all the while saying "класс, девушки!" and "супер!" As the rest of us ate dinner and talked afterwards, Sarah and Lizi stayed in the springs and darkness fell. When, at long last, (but not before many jokes had been cracked at their expense) they returned to the boat, their crush was fixated. They happily announced that the captain was a very cool person, and while we had been mumbling in broken Russian over dinner,they had been sipping wine and talking with the captain about Mongolian customs and the legends of Baikal. Thue begins the as-yet unfinished(!) romance of Slizah and Captain Aleksei.
We travelled in the night back to the captain's dacha, doing little the following day but hike, read, and feel the onset of cabin fever. And, of course, another banya that night. Here, as we rush to the end, beginning to feel that maybe we've seen enough of one another for a while, there is little else of note. We stopped briefly on Ol'xon, early in the morning, but I'm afraid my pictures won't come out, again, thanks to the lack or a tripodand the low light. They were pictures I would have been proud of: searched for, chosen, and taken carefully despite the possible futility of it. I took one full roll onthe sacred island, though I fully expect tohave wasted it. As I took photographs on this trip, thanks to the heavy, familiar, and reassuring weight of my father's Minolta, I began to remember and use the things I had learned years ago: aperature adjustment, rule of thirds, looking in overwhelming and breathtaking beauty for the rectangular section where the composition would yeild not a snapshot, but a photograph. Not simply a memory to be tucked away in a shoeboxon on a computer file, but an instant in time and a rectangular expanse of shape, pulled from the panorama around me, which speaks. For all my efforts, however, I could not find a photograph which could tell of the clarity of Baikal's water.
I close, then, with the water. Baikal's water, oldest and cleanestin the world, purer than distilled water and more plentiful than in any other lake on earth, is eerily clear, unearthly. Raised with close ties to the ocean, the normality of a foot or less of visiblility had not prepared me for Baikal. Landing, the floor of the lake appeared at first too far from land. As the boat was still yards from shore, rocks, clear as through a pane of glass, appeared. These rocks, 50 feet down, looked magnified, unreal. The captain, on the deck with me one day, dropped a piece of shiny metal into the water at what he said was 25 meters. We watched the sun glint off the metal as it slung its way back and forth to the floor, amongst the unseen rocks, glinting still from the depths. Which would be, anywhere else on Earth, impossible.
I would have been good to close with that, but I'm writing this by hand now, and I'm on a bench looking at the Angara and the city, and there were, inexplicably, a bunch of street-cleaners wading slowly in the water by a large pipe leading to the river from the bank. I just saw one reach into the water and pull out what looked like a pike - 4 feet or a little less in length, I would say, as it was was most of his height as he carried it, flapping to the sidewalk. With his hands, he caught it. I love Russia.
We awoke the next day to be told that we would not be sailing anywhere, but gathering berries. Thinking back, this was the best memory I have from the trip, so I am at a loss as to how to describe it, to make it understood because it is, in some ways, the most ephemeral of all the things we did. We were, after going up the shore for half an hour on the boat, given the tin berry-pickers used by Russians: as simple and ingenious as hard to describe - they're in the shape of a rectangular cube, pulled up at either extreme like a canoe, and have long teeth, which look like elongated 60d nails. You run them through the short bushes, which resemble Maine blueberry bushes, slowly and easily, and the berries come off into the picker. The process itself is relaxing, cathartic, mind-easing, and there are berries in their millions everywhere (this is no exaggeration - there was simply an unfathomable number of the things all up and down the mountain). Colleen and I worked as a team, saying little, but gathering berries actively. I carried the tin backpack (which, if anyone knows what I'm talking about, look like the old Indian-brand fire extinguishers) into which we dropped the berries as the pickers got full. It was easy to forget, for 20 or 30 minutes, where we were, and then look up and see the lake stretch out beneath us, and the mountains above us, and realize that we were standing on the dream-like snow-capped peaks we saw from the boat, or the week before from the train. And then we would go back to picking. As Colleen and I worked around, finding good patches, the captain, with his ubiquitous video camera and equally ubiquitous smile, rushed around, alternately shooting film, pointing out good photographs with a shout of excitement, and making comments like, "now, this is how we pass time in Siberia!" "We Russians know how to have a good time!" or, simply, "класс класс класс!" And, to his credit, he always really DID know where the good berries were, and had an eye for photographs.
That night was another banya night. Bair, when the girls had all left, and it was only a few guys left, threw an unreasonable amount of water on the stove which literally hurt my eyes in the following blast of heat, and proceeded to say, "I'll show you how men do a banya in Russia!" At which point he beat us with the bundles of birch twigs which they use, and the slightly frightening log (which is really good for massages!!). When we emerged, red and welted and hot and running for the frigid water of Baikal, dark had completely fallen, and I realized that standing waist-deep in Baikal and looking past the banya to the dim outline of the mountains and then up at the stars was the most beautiful thing I had seen. After the banya, we had our first encounter with vodka s pertsom (for which there's a handy Russian word which I have forgotten) - vodka which has been infused with chili pepper. Now, I'm not usually a huge vodka fan, but my love of hot food seems to have carried over. For one thing, the quality was good, so the liquor itself had little taste, and for another, the spiciness, added to by the bite of alchohol really warmed your body up - an illusion, of course, spicy foods and alcohol both bringing blood to the surface, but I can see why people in this cold climate would like it. We sat around the little table until pretty late, talking.
Before I go any further, a word on alcohol in Russia. When I mention alcohol, some of you will picture us all in some nightly scene of drunken debauchery, or anyway drinking to excess. But, when we drank (well, when I drink in general, and when people drank on the trip), it was usually a small quantity, usually over a long period of time. I have been positively surprised by the DEconfirmation of the stereotype that all Russians drink to excess all the time. There are, to be sure, drunks. Alcohol is, to be sure, easy to get, cheap, and ubiquitous. There is a traidion of dinking together which we simply don't have. But, Russians are much more likely to grab a beer and chat with friends than to seriously drink liquor together. And - and this is quite different from college kids in the states - the focus is always on the people you're with, and never on the alcohol for its own sake, or even just having a "good time." You don't hear Russians brag about their drunken antics, and no story starts out "Oh, my God, I was so drunk last night..." My memories of Russia will include alcohol as a backdrop, a part of the social process here as inextricable from daily life as any of our rituals in the US, and will instead focus on the friends I made.
Okay, вперёд! The vodka s pertsom did have one effect of note apart from its warming properties: a number of us, myself included, dreamt some VERY strange dreams. I wouldn't make the connection except there is something simply unnatural about vodka with chili peppers floating in it, and the dreams were so very strange. Colleen and I inparticular. I won't go into details about either of ours, and particularly not my own, but suffice to say I awoke wondering what I was thinking.
We went, the next day, across Baikal, which took us four hours, to an island where the famous Baikal seals hang out. I really enjoy the Russian word for seal: нерпа (NYER-pa). We didn't see any - though Sarah and Lizi (now dubbed Slizah, their inseprability rivaling that of Golding's Samneric) did see some other, smaller wildlife which will make them think twice about removing clothing on the beach again. It was, however, one of the more beautiful places I have seen, this island. Simply stunning. The panorama was endless and changing, the air crisp and temperate; the group split up around the island (losing Colleen, who wandered off alone, and met with some rather subconscious wildlife of her own - her fear of snakes manifesting itself quite forcefully).
We arrived in the early evening at the hot springs. We changed into our still-wet swimsuits and, walking to the slightly steaming square pool, lined with wood (maybe 5 feet to a side) which was the hot springs and smelled of slightly off eggs. Bair was the first one in, entering with a grunt which was uncharactaristic and gave me pause - just how hot WAS the hot spring, exactly? It's one thing to say 75-80 degrees Celcius, it's quite another to step into water that hot. I had put my whole body in before the heat overcame the residual chilliness of the air. And it was very hot. And amazing. We spent maybe two hours in and out of the hot spring before returning to the boat. Or, most of us did. Slizah, our Siamese starlet, were with the captain, having taken a liking to him, he to them. The captain was filming them as we left, all the while saying "класс, девушки!" and "супер!" As the rest of us ate dinner and talked afterwards, Sarah and Lizi stayed in the springs and darkness fell. When, at long last, (but not before many jokes had been cracked at their expense) they returned to the boat, their crush was fixated. They happily announced that the captain was a very cool person, and while we had been mumbling in broken Russian over dinner,they had been sipping wine and talking with the captain about Mongolian customs and the legends of Baikal. Thue begins the as-yet unfinished(!) romance of Slizah and Captain Aleksei.
We travelled in the night back to the captain's dacha, doing little the following day but hike, read, and feel the onset of cabin fever. And, of course, another banya that night. Here, as we rush to the end, beginning to feel that maybe we've seen enough of one another for a while, there is little else of note. We stopped briefly on Ol'xon, early in the morning, but I'm afraid my pictures won't come out, again, thanks to the lack or a tripodand the low light. They were pictures I would have been proud of: searched for, chosen, and taken carefully despite the possible futility of it. I took one full roll onthe sacred island, though I fully expect tohave wasted it. As I took photographs on this trip, thanks to the heavy, familiar, and reassuring weight of my father's Minolta, I began to remember and use the things I had learned years ago: aperature adjustment, rule of thirds, looking in overwhelming and breathtaking beauty for the rectangular section where the composition would yeild not a snapshot, but a photograph. Not simply a memory to be tucked away in a shoeboxon on a computer file, but an instant in time and a rectangular expanse of shape, pulled from the panorama around me, which speaks. For all my efforts, however, I could not find a photograph which could tell of the clarity of Baikal's water.
I close, then, with the water. Baikal's water, oldest and cleanestin the world, purer than distilled water and more plentiful than in any other lake on earth, is eerily clear, unearthly. Raised with close ties to the ocean, the normality of a foot or less of visiblility had not prepared me for Baikal. Landing, the floor of the lake appeared at first too far from land. As the boat was still yards from shore, rocks, clear as through a pane of glass, appeared. These rocks, 50 feet down, looked magnified, unreal. The captain, on the deck with me one day, dropped a piece of shiny metal into the water at what he said was 25 meters. We watched the sun glint off the metal as it slung its way back and forth to the floor, amongst the unseen rocks, glinting still from the depths. Which would be, anywhere else on Earth, impossible.
I would have been good to close with that, but I'm writing this by hand now, and I'm on a bench looking at the Angara and the city, and there were, inexplicably, a bunch of street-cleaners wading slowly in the water by a large pipe leading to the river from the bank. I just saw one reach into the water and pull out what looked like a pike - 4 feet or a little less in length, I would say, as it was was most of his height as he carried it, flapping to the sidewalk. With his hands, he caught it. I love Russia.