Huge Cold War Monsters Rotting in a Field

Sophie and I went out to the Monino Aircraft Museum 1 hour outside Moscow. Wasn't easy, it snowed and we are pretty certain it delayed all the trains. It was cold and we were confused, Sophie even started to call it 'The Stupid Plane Place' instead of 'The Central Museum of the Air Forces at Monino'. But luckily we had become adept all the way to the bank at buying ourselves Kapoosta Peroski. They kept us going as we wandered around in the snow this distant Moscow suburb trying to find monsters US spies would have died to see.
We wouldn't have got there if it wasn't for this page.
They were worth it though, just sitting there, proud and ginormous, most of them had some world record set or still held. Often for just being the biggest so and so of all time. Some were very rusty, and there was a distant corner that we couldn´t get to that seemed to be a pile of bits that had fallen off or whole collapsed fly-no-mores.

You do the math...

We heart Kazan

After lazing in Irkutsk and on Olkhon Island for quite a few days, and with our flight out of St Petersburg pre-booked, we realised that we had better get motoring across Siberia if we wanted to spend any time in the big cities of St P and Moscow. We had to do couple of massive train journeys in order to cover some major distances - hours and hours traversing a wintery Siberian landscape covered in birch forest (the Taiga). The terrain is so endless and so much the same - at times it was hypnotic and beautiful - at other times you could understand why they say people can go mad in the Taiga - with no landmarks and no end in sight, it can play tricks on the brain.

We were ok though. We entertained ourselves by practising our (still awful) Russian and eating awesome fried pie donut things. We found out some of these tasty calorific treats were filled with a delicious fried cabbage concoction and learnt how to say that pretty quickly. It helped that it was a fun thing to say - kapoosta peroshki please. Basically we've been living on those and beer. Yum.

We stopped at the former capital of the Tatars - Kazan. It was claimed for Russia by Ivan the Terrible who razed the town and built a massive kremlin there. Now there is an amazing mosque in the middle of the kremlin. It's all very beautiful and the most European city so far. We're not entirely sure why we like this place so much but we really did. Maybe it had something to do with the public speakers lining a street with pop/dance music? Maybe it was the many cat and winged lion sculptures? Maybe it was the thrilling excitement of being shadowed all the way from the railway station to our hotel by a small man with a sinister scar on his face?

We really really indulged in the fun of a Russian supermarket in Kazan too. We got everything we thought appropriate for our subsequent 1st class train journey to Moskow. We got:

• Goat Beer
• Foxberry Taiga Vodka
• Moloko Printed Biscuits
• Date Fudge
• Smoked Fibrous Cheese Sausages (so great!!)
• And Unknown Tatar Pastries

1st class was cool too. No more putting up with other people in our compartment. It was the newest Trans Siberian train we travelled on. It was as if we had graduated to 7th form. Things were easier and more fun.

Olkhon Wild Western Dog Cow Tourist Fishing Film Set

We went to the world's oldest and deepest lake. Lake Baikal is the world's most voluminous freshwater lake, it contains roughly 20% of the world's surface fresh water. We stayed on Olkhon Island, there we stayed at a bombastically stylised hostel called Nikita´s place (named after its 1986 Russian table tennis champion owner). A very fun place. It was situated in the centre of Khuzhir, a small 50% tourism 50% fishing village.

 Being off season, it was somewhat ghost-townish, vastly wide empty lumpy mud streets, where for every person you encounter, you encounter 18 crows, 3 cows, 1 bull, and 6 hungry dogs.

**

The dogs seem to fully understand tourists. As soon as you decide to stroll, one of these fellows will come up to you and stick with you, guiding you through the streets all bouncy and smiley. Until they have to growl at other dog guides who come over and try and poach you. The stores look closed, but are always strangely bustling once you enter the door. And once you exit without any food to give your dog guide, he guides you back bitterly, at a distance. And stops off to find muddy old bones to munch on during the cold nights. This place and its distinctive Siberian architecture had a feeling like nothing else. Except perhaps a little like a wild west movie set.

We went on an excursion around the chilly autumn island in a monstrous russian van. You can't go long in Russia without seeing this exact model of van. It's everywhere. And it rules. It can go anywhere and do anything. We were almost driving sideways at one stage.

It was freezing but beautiful.

**Please note the sign our pooch is quietly reading. It says "Cautiously the Malicious Dog".

Some Photos

Hey people

We have been slow to update our blog lately. But some photos we have taken can now be found here on picasa.

I will not buy this record it is scratched

Our Russian is terrible.

Example #1
We got on the bus in Ulan Ude, which is one of Russia's Eastern-most cities, reasonably near the border with Mongolia. Having slaved over our phrase book I knew how to ask if the bus went to the place we wanted. However, after hearing my carefully rehearsed line, the driver looked completely confused. This was particularly mortifying as we were going to the main square - ie, a very well known location - so you would have thought a loose approximation of it would have been understood. Embarrassingly he then turned to the other passengers on the bus to ask their assistance in translating my appalling Russian. 20 helpful Russians looked expectantly in my direction. I stammered the same phrase then repeated it in English - after some consultation amongst themselves, they agreed we were indeed on the right bus. I blushed and thanked them - again in English - and stumbled shamefully to the back of the bus.

 (we got there in the end)

Example #2
Still in Ulan Ude, we visited a pub for a beer and some lunch. Armed again with our phrase book, we carefully studied the menu for about 25 minutes. At last we were confident we knew what to order. We'd painstakingly matched it with the phrase book and were ready to go. The waitress wandered over and we pointed to the item on the menu, we were pretty darned sure it was french fries with a slight spelling variation. However, it turns out our Russian had failed us again. The waitress returned with - a plate of prawns for these two vegetarian explorers. Kind of the opposite of french fries for a vegetarian, you swallow their heads and eyeballs whole. We swallowed our horror and thanked the waitress profusely. How could we get it so wrong? Not only did we fail in our efforts to secure fried potato - we managed to get the only thing on the menu with eyes. However, Brett didn't want to let the waitress see our failure. He manfully gulped 8 of the little monsters down. I sidled up to the waitress and pointed out "french fries" in our phrase book. That was what I ate.






















Example #3
On the train. In the restaurant car, again facing a menu filled with Cyrillic. A kindly man came up to help. I said in perfectly-accented Russian "I am vegetarian". The man smiled - "oh, you are Italian!". I gave up and resorted to English and pointing.

We're still working on it though.

Leaving Mongolia

Barely looking at our tickets, some rail ladies knew instantly which carriage we needed to board. That was because our car was the only international one. In Sükhbaatar near the Mongolian-Russian border, when we returned from the station squat toilet, we found our train had been reduced to simply our single carriage, sitting there with no means to move itself. We had heard that the trains crossing this border could spend many long hours clearing customs and that might be why our tickets were cheap ones. We sat at that station without an engine for over 5 hours. And shortly after that, or the otherside of the border we sat for nearly 4 hours.
A long long day, sitting, abandoned.
Being driven a little mad by the rustling of our cabin-mates.
We were worried who we would have to share our compartment with, we feared it would be 2 drunk, smoking, raw beef shot downing human boars. But instead we were relieved to get 2 Mongolian women who were polite and smelless enough. One of them seemed obsessive compulsive, and annoyed Sophie to no end with her careful placement of various packaged foods and drinks on our table, and repacking of her many bags into the night. The reason she did this is because they are smugglers, the spectacular food packages actually held socks, probably Mongolian cashmere. They even asked Sophie to store some socks in her pack. But they got through fine. I wouldn't have minded so much if it weren't for this salami right near my head as I draft this. Which is getting very stinky in the sun. And I don't believe they plan to eat it. I think it's here to add authenticity, and the smell is mingling with the smell of everyone's sweaty feet. But that's alright with me, we've got Chinggis wheat vodka, and at least the train is moving for once.

Mongolian Miscellany

 We visited a few giant things in Mongolia. First we saw a 26 metre golden Buddha hiding quietly in an unobtrusive temple. He was pretty magnificent. We then visited a 40 metre Chinggis Khan statue in a faintly more conspicuous position in the middle of the steppe. You can see him for miles around, triumphantly riding his horse into battle. You go up an elevator and emerge through his crotch to view the landscape. Words really cannot express how hilarious and brilliant this is. We then visited a (sadly closed) tourist ger camp which has giant dinosaur statues dotted around the camp. The dinosaurs are falling into disrepair and have an air of faded grandeur about them. We also saw a giant Chinggis boot and another giant Buddha but you'll have to wait for those photos. We're in Russia now.