'Nuff Said

Thanks for Reading! (Andrew)

Here's a post I wrote on my phone in the airport before leaving (with typos for authenticity):

After 41 days of adventure in China, Mongolia and Iussia with Cameron i am now in the St petersburg airport waiting to board a flight that will eventually take me to the uk.

To sum up, here are a bunch of things I will miss, and a few things I won't, in no particular order:

Miss : hilarious mullets in Russia, hilarious t-shirts in China ("Bob Damp" still makes me chuckle), "for men" drink, mystery meat (it's an adventure!), subway stations that look like museums, taking about my money in millions, discussing what animal or plant our food is, Putin jokes, Genghis khan (in drink form, sandwich form or otherwise), hiking in the Gobi, really cute stray dogs, street food, not feeling obligated to change socks and underwear everyday, making sweeping cultural observations and posting them on the internet, 2 litre beer bottles, the kababs in st petersburg, the samosa like things in mongolia, bonaqua and nonfu springs, zakety goose beer, the greasy smell in Mongolian restaurants, the egg pastries at kfc in China, the banya on lake Baikal, having an excuse to eat cup noodles.

Won't :mystery meat(a sandwich shouldn't be an adventure), having to hear about camerons most recent bristol scale reading at breakfast every morning, salmon roe flavoured chips, train showers, yurt showers, all other showers not in an actual shower, slow internet, informal taxis, getting my 5 to 10 from freeze dried packets mixed with my noodles, dealing with units of currency too small to buy anything, pit toilets, public toilets, public toilets that are actually pit toilets-as in the toilet at terminal 5 at st petersburg airport I just used (fewer vaulted glass ceilings more flush toilets? What do you guys think?), having to carry my own tp, having the tp unravel in my bag so that it looks like Im performing some kind of gross magic trick pulling it from bag before I go to the washroom every time, having at least three snorers and one go-getter early riser in my room every night, buying yoghurt instead if milk at the grocery, realizing that the jokes I posted on the internet are less hilarious than i originally thought, horse's milk, the hole in the bottom of my shoe that lets in the dirt and things that smell way too bad to be dirt, bins of used toilet paper beside toilets (even when the toilet is a pit. Like seriously, what are we saving it for somethinge?), lactose free icecream, agonizing between the most delicious and the least 'offensive ' (gastrointestinally speaking) options on the menu (these rarely coincide).

Thanks again for reading and thanks for a great trip Cameron. See you all at Christmas!

PS my flight has been delayed 30 mins now and I think there's something wrong with an engine because someone on a ladder is sticking their head in there. I only have 60 mins to make my connection in Moscow, which requires a trip through customs and immigration so might be signing off here a bit early... Stay tuned!

finish line (cameron)

i'm hanging out in an empty hostel. well, other than staff girl and the girl who started drinking vodka at 11 this morning and has been passed out since 2. it's 5 now. we planned on having a quiet last night, but things escalated real fast, and long story short, i'm in struggle town

at 10:20pm st. petersburg time i fly to moscow, then a 7 hour layover, then fly to dusseldorf, then a 2 hour layover, then fly to vancouver and arrive at 10:10am vancouver time; a very long trip, bookended by daytime, worst case scenario for jet-lag. by the end of this i expect to be not only the mayor of struggle city, but the elected leader of the majority of the municipalities in the metro struggle area.

for now i will write about banya. banya is a russian sauna. it is very hot, and very steamy; usually they are fancy, like a turkish bath, with marble and stuff. but we went to a tiny portable banya on the shore of lake baikal, and it was awesome.

it was a cold, overcast day, and the lake was dark and a bit kicked up by the wind. just before we get in, an englishman runs across the sandy beach and dives into the lake. he was happy when we told him the unlikely function of the little hut we were about to enter. so he joined us, along with our german friend

we alternated between lake and banya, the lake being quite tolerable for a minute or two after being warmed to the core. when you use a lot of water on the rocks it gets extremely hot, it can be hard to breathe

you also beat each other and yourself with bunches of birch branches. and you really give'er too. this is a unique sensation, and it is extremely refreshing somehow. the smell of birch permeates everything. an hour later i could still taste it

when researching this post, i came accross a description of the banya by saint andrew in the 12th century:

I saw the land of the Slavs, and while I was among them, I noticed their wooden bathhouses. They warm them to extreme heat, then undress, and after anointing themselves with tallow, they take young reeds and lash their bodies. They actually lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. Then they drench themselves with cold water, and thus are revived. They think nothing of doing this every day, and actually inflict such voluntary torture on themselves. They make of the act not a mere washing but a veritable torment.

what do the proprietors do if you misbehave in a russian sauna? they banya!

but now i pack up to go; Andrew left 5 hours ago; it's been a heck of a trip; i'd probably be a bit more sad if i weren't so darned tired, and the struggle-plane beckons

St Petersurg! (Andrew)

Note: this keyoard is roken. ear with us and take are reading, I ant e othered to opy and paste them all.

Cameron and I took the loal train (as opposed to the faster direct trains we were on efore) from Moscow to St Petersburg. In Russia trains get a numer and the lowest numbers are the est trains. Irkutsk to Moscow we were on 4. This one was 260 AND it made all the stops... so it took 8.5 hours, smelled like cheese the whole way and a Russian kid insisted on jumping on my bed and banging on the wall of the train while I was trying to sleep for a solid portion of the journey.

Moscow is a very intimidating city. The buildings are imposing brick Soviet era strutures and the streets are crowded and full of different kinds of military personel. The tourist attractions have multiple security check points (in the spirit of the quantity of over quality security chekpoint approach we first saw in Beijing), everything is shokingly expensive and there is little english for us gwylos.

St Petersburg, y contrast, has the feel of a friendly European ity. The broad boulevards are wide and tree lined, there is stunning Victorian architecture and anals rissross the ity full of sightseeing boats (reread that if needed, my apologies to our more sensitive readers). The Hermitage was free (eause we're students) and I haven't yet seen even a polieman.

other stuff:

From the small sign at st Basils I learned that St Basil was a 'nude walker ' and a 'fool for god '. Cameron suggested these might be technical terms, ut when pressed on what 'nude walker' might be technial for he was unertain. Feel free to rainstorm in the comments.

We've been drinking a yoghurt drink called 'for men '. It has 2x a bunh of good stuff we ant read ecause apart from the title everything is in cyrillic. One of these good things, we discovered the other day, is chicken . so apparently we've been drinking a lot of innamon apple chicken flavour yoghurt drink. This is potentially related to some anomolous ristol scale readings we've een getting. We'll keep you posted.

It took the combined efforts of 4 sandwich people and probably about 15 minutes to order at suway. Word to the wise, dont even try to mime 'whole grain', you just look ridiculous.

dressing for the weather when you only ring tshirts

1 t-shirt= 1 t-shirt (what are you? an idiot?)

2 t-shirts = sweatshirt

3 t-shirts = rain gear

4 t-shirts =snow gear/way to look uff for the ladies (provided you're wearing 4 nice shirts (4 collars is too many though. At very least alternate popped and not popped)

5 t-shirts = personal floatation device

6= t-shirts = spacesuit? deep sea diving gear? low udget hazmat suit?

7= t-shirts = impossile

Irkutsk to Moscow (Cameron)

Prologue:

"Well the good news is that my back doesn't hurt anymore," said Andrew, returning after a 30 minute sojourn in the dining car, "but the bad news is that I'm really drunk." Without further explination, he climbed into his bunk and passed out for four hours.

Irkutsk to Moscow:

We went to the market in Irkutsk and bought enough vegetables to supply our "5 to 10 a day" for the 4 day train trip to Moscow. But sufficiency of vitamins alone does not a healthy trip make, and unhealthy it was. Which reminds me: dedicated readers may recall that we're both often quite tired. We have arrived at a possible explanation: lack of sleep. Extremes of temperature and humidity, tiny beds and mattresses that simply cannot have been so uncomfortable unintentionally, power snorers, late nights, drunken roommates (our 8 bed dorm was full last night, but at 4:00am I was the only one home!), etc...

(NB: If you are on a Russian train and ask someone for the time, there are four possible answers: the time where you are coming from, the time where you are going, the time where you are, and Moscow time. All Russian trains run on Moscow time.)

We shared our compartment with "Grandma" and "Gramps" (no relation) (alternatively: Mr. and Mrs. Clause; or the moldy oldies). Very early on, Grandma developed a habit of speaking to us in Russian, often and at length. Typically this was with an angry and disapproving tone, but it was occasionally punctured by bouts of good-natured laughter. Grandma also plied us with food, primarily carbohydrates. The powdered mashed potatoes she gave me one afternoon were excellent. Andrew informs me that she would wake him up early each morning by tapping his foot with stale bread (I don't know why I was excluded). On the last morning, she became quite agitated when we slept late and didn't jump down to consume large bags tasteless biscuits and bread, and yogurt that had been left out in the heat for three days.

We had the top bunks, and a certain territoriality quickly developed such that we didn't sit on the bottom bunks, which would have allowed us to use our compartment's table. Thus we spent nearly the entirety of the trip sitting on our beds or standing in the hallway (where we ate and prepared nearly all our meals). Our boredom on the first couple days is probably best illustrated by the following exchange "I'm pretty hungry." "I'm really hungry." "Should we eat?" "No. ... Being hungry is something to do."

But things soon picked up. And not only because Andrew discovered he could use instant noodle bowls to wash his hair. At a late night stop, several women sold dried Omul on the platform. (Omul is a fish that is endemic to Lake Bakial and is eaten a lot in the surrounding areas; based on the way one draws out the "u" when pronouncing the name, we suspect that the Omuuul look something like this.) Two of them (the women, not the Omul) got into a viscious argument which attracted a lot of attention. My Russian is not yet fluent, but as best I can tell, the disagreement was over who had the greatest dried Omul in all of Russia. A mulleted teen looked at me with a sly smile and said "Velcome to Rush-a."

On the second day, I made friends with a middle aged Buryat (related to Mongolian) man, who was very enthusiastic about trying out the little English he knew. He was a coal mining engineer from Northern Siberia, and was wealthy, based the pictures he showed me of his family vacation to Cypress and his Subaru Impreza with rally-car tweaks. He gave me tea, and we ate many spoonfulls of jam made by his mother. He bought us beers and pine nuts from the platform, and when Andrew joined us for lunch, he gave us bread, sausages, vegetables, and homemade salsa. He was very interested in prices of things in Canada and the USA. He showed me videos of him hunting with a Kalashnikov and pictures of him fishing with some sort of fishing-gun (and goggles and a snorkel).

Because most of our time was spent sitting on a small bed or standing in the hallway, by day three we had both developed a bit of back strain. Andrew decided to remedy this by going to the (expensive) dining car to drink a beer and read Jane Austin. We had been to the dining car twice before, and though the food was okay (the borscht was excellent; I haven't had any non-awesome borscht), the service was a bit unusual (the waiter and waitress didn't have uniforms, and mostly sat around smoking and watching DVDs; there were almost no customers).

I found it a bit mysterious when Andrew returned inebriated, and I only got the full story when he woke up several hours later. Apparently he was peer pressured into a rapid succession of vodka toasts by a trio of Siberian coal miners. I'm still not clear on the details, but he was told an exciting tale about a recent fight with a grizzly bear, armed only with a pitchfork (the miner, not the bear). A choking demonstration went a bit far, but other than that it sounds like it was pretty good natured, though things may have taken a turn for the worse after Andrew gave them the slip, based upon circumstantial evidence discovered later.

As Andrew slept I took a walk down the car and noticed that two compartments down a shirtless man lay unconscious on his bed. This was not out of the ordinary, but the large stain around his groin and the fresh blood that drenched his pillow was. Andrew later confirmed that this was one of his mining friends.

Awhile later, one of the miners came and insisted that Andrew and I go back to the dining car. We did, though it took awhile to get in because the door was looked and it took several minutes of knocking and yelling before a fleshy, buxom blond with heavy bags under her eyes let us in.

This situation had deteriorated since Andrew had been there. The restaurant was closed, even though it was 18:00 (Moscow time), and it was still a couple of hours until sunset (local time). Two of the booths had been converted into makeshift beds. Two shirtless miners sat drinking with waiter, waitress (his wife, we learned), and blondy. One of the bottles of vodka was covered in blood, as was the table.

We drank with them for several hours. Miner 2 (they may also have been mechanics or computer programmers or radio transmitter repairmen... we aren't sure) was very keen on calling us his friends, and Miner 1 would occasionally call his wife to help find the English word he needed (while simultaneously groping blondy). Waiter was very inebriated and passed out early on, but Waitress sipped beer and chain-smoked and looked unhappy.

(Fun Fact: Some menthol cigarettes contain a small vial of menthol within the filter which has to be crushed just before the cigarette is smoked to release the delicious menthol flavour/sensation.)

We went to bed at midnight, but were woken at 3:00am (Moscow time, and pitch black local time) when Grandma and Gramps awoke to tell secrets and ghost stories (we can only assume). I got up much later and went back to the dining car to retrieve my shirt. The place was trashed: broken glass, empty bottles, pornography DVDs, blankets, and coins littered the floor. The lights were off and the shades were drawn. It was definitely not open for business. But waiter was diligently guzzling vodka, and aggressively peer-pressured me into an inadvisedly large glass before I could leave. He tracked me down in the hallway 20 minutes later, demanding that I return, and were it not for his very rough state it would have been difficult to resist.

We rolled into Moscow in the early afternoon. Grandma graciously accepted one of our better "British Columbia" pins, but returned minutes later to press a 50 roubles note into my hand.

Moscow! (Andrew)

I would like to start with an apology to the readers. The previous post made a reference to rocky v. As readers were quick to point out, this reference should be attributed to rocky IV. We would like to assure our readers, especially those in Mumbia and Bangalore, that the sudmantfamily blog does not stand for this kind of sloppy journalism. Thank you to the close readers for pointing out this error. We'll try to be better.


After an eventful journey that tested the limits of the travel diet we've been perfecting, (noodles, 'dinner fish', chocolate, vitamin pills and cucumbers), our ability to go without REM sleep (with our cabinmates 'grandma' and 'gramps' telling jokes late into the night and rising at the break of dawn), and raising our pantomime skills to new hieghts (thanks to our Siberian coal miner friends), Cameron and I arrived in Moscow a couple of nights ago.

Our hostel is only a few hundred meters from red square where yesterday there were big celebrations for 'moscow day'. There multiple stages and large numbers of people from the military. Some were dressed up for the occassion but there were also crowds of teenage soldiers that looked like they'd come strait from siberian boot camp. I'm pretty sure some of them were carrying tents on their backs but Cameron thinks they were extra coats.

There were also lots of stands selling food and cheap souvenirs. For some reason pirate hats with blue hair attached are something tourists are supposed to buy. Flags with putin and medvedev are another option, (getting excited Adam and Peter?). We ate salty corn on the cob and had sandwiches from another stall. They were disappointing.

Today we're going back to Red Square to visit St. Basil's and some other churches.

Some other findings :

Produce is expensive and isn't of very high quality. Even at the shi shi grocery store we've been shopping at the apples are bruised and cost as much as 7 dollars a kg. Some other produce seems to be less expensive however.

I want to reiterate how popular mullets are in Russia. We're not even in Siberia anymore! Also, I was under the impression that once you went with the mullet you had basically made all the hair styling decisions you could make. Boy did I have that wrong. This trip has been really culturally enlightening for me.

Russia is a nation of sharpshooters. This game where you shoot at cans or minature soldiers with a pellet gun seems to be pretty common-and its fun for the whole family!

You know who's a big hit? Bruce Willis. I've seen his face on two billboards, one advertising a bank and another advertising hunting gear. Aparting Bruce is a versatile guy when it comes to advertising.

Putin is co-opting Walker Texas Ranger jokes. I heard 'Putin can make two sticks out of a fire' yesterday.

As Cameron will be elaborating on, we had a few drinks with three shirtless tattooed coal miners (or possibly mechanics) on the train. For future reference, should you find yourself in a similar situation, here are some topics of conversation/chirades that will go over well:

Grizzly bears
Fishing
Big dogs
Russia!
Hunting with ak47
Coal mine
Punching (demonstrate on your neighbor)
Choking technique (demonstrate on a foreigner)

Ask Cameron to mime lawyer (or 'advocate'). He's got it down. The 'intellectual property rights ' specialty remains a challenge however. This term is not familiar in China, Mongolia or Russia.