Small town Poland

We arrived after two hours or so in Augustow, a lakeside town I had booked way at the beginning of the trip. I didn't realize that the place we were actually staying (a guest house/cabin/resort sort of thing) was well removed from the town, shopping, transit, restaurants, and everything else. We had a quick dinner downtown near the bus station and called a cab to bring us to our lodgings.

The next day we walked for an hour or so to get into town and find something to eat, and resolved to buy groceries in the evening. We got some food at a place selling pierogi, then headed to a shoe store where Auberon sorrowfully parted with his beloved yet disintegrating sneakers in exchange for more substantial trail shoes.

Augustow is a very small place that is mostly suburb. A park and square forms the center near the bus station, and then a little further north is the lake and many places that will sell you boat tours in the high season. There were certainly people around, perhaps it was even one of the most bustling tiny cities we'd seen. But soon we'd seen what we needed to and took a cab back to the hotel.

There we set out for the woods, and quite some woods they were. We hiked through trails and paths all around the general area, meeting as I expected nobody else. The trails were clearly marked and I imagine that in the high season it's common to see other hikers enjoying the thick birch groves.

The next day saw an incredibly slow start as we stayed in the room well past noon. The initial goal was to buy some train tickets at the station, but once we got ourselves over there it was clear that the station itself had been closed for years, and passengers were expected to buy the tickets on the train. Later in Poland we saw more boarded-up stations, replaced entirely by mobile ticket machines carried by the conductors. We walked around the other side of the outskirts, soon chancing upon an abandoned factory.

I've seen a lot of great pictures from abandoned Soviet industry, and last time I was in Poland I saw some enticing buildings from a distance. It wasn't until one of the last buildings we went into that we discovered a huge forge and crane-like apparatus, which was extremely interesting to look at and climb around in. It looked like it had been partially disassembled a while ago, as there were strange holes in the floor and inaccessible catwalks near the ceiling. Nobody came in or disturbed us for the duration of our visit.

The partying Lithuanians next door did their best to prevent it, but we did in fact get some sleep before our very early train. A few hours and a few transfers later, and we found ourselves in Krakow.

Pictured: the Augustow lake and one of the buildings at the factory.

Klaipeda and Kaunas

At this point in the trip we were playing fast and loose with plans. We knew that we wanted to spend time in Latvia and Lithuania, but since we could hardly tell them apart before visiting there wasn't much that we were looking for specifically. After much debate and checking of transit routes we settled on going to the coastal town of Klaipeda in western Lithuania (eastern coastline being fairly hard to come by).

We had initially scheduled just two days, but soon realized that it was worth much more. Our guesthouse was relatively near the old town, but we covered it in an afternoon. For tight-pursed backpackers, old towns filled with jewelry or amber shops don't offer much excitement. If you're into amber, though, Klaipeda is the place to go. Apparently they find it on the beaches in huge chunks and then make elaborate ornaments out of it.

Instead we took the ferry to the Curonian Spit, a long and thin landmass that goes from Poland through Kaliningrad and up to the ferry terminal at Smiltyne where we got off. Sightly disappointed that it was more than a day's journey to get to the Russian border (not that our visas were valid anyway) we contented ourselves with the spit itself.

Auberon loved the beach and decided to spend much of his time there, while I walked through the forests. I was quickly and completely bewitched by their incredible beauty. The air was perfectly crisp, the grass was astonishingly green, and when I stopped walking I could just hear trees and wind. The main path branched off into smaller paths, and I saw dozens of huge orb weavers in their webs, evidence that the larger part of the tourists had stopped tramping about for the season. I saw very few people except when near the beaches, and surely only a fraction of those who come at the height of summer.

The next day we planned to go out again. Auberon would continue to enjoy the beach with a picnic lunch, and I would rent a bike and see the forests at a higher speed. Alas, I discovered that the bike rental shops were closed in the off season, and I only found this out after an hour or so of walking around town. But I had a map, and I was already on the north end of town, and so I decided to keep going north.

I found forests soon enough, as well as a huge and sprawling adventure park which looked far too fun to ever be constructed in the United States. There were ziplines, balance beams, tightropes, swings, and more dangerous playthings all suspended twenty feet or more off the ground. There was a ticket office with ropes and helmets but I knew that if I was a student at the nearby university, that park is the first place to go after a night of drinking in the dorms.

I reached a tiny beach suburb after an hour or so of walking around the port and railway depot. There was not much to see besides some strange and old concrete bunkers half-buried in the sand and clearly still used by enthusiastic drinkers and urinators. I popped into the tiny town library and had a halting Russian conversation with the kindly librarian, explaining that I had worked in a library and that I liked to see what libraries around the world looked like during my travels (many people speak Russian in Latvia and Lithuania, and the guesthouse owner was the only person to tell me I should have learned some Lithuanian).

Returning to home, Auberon and I had a pizza dinner and planned for the next day's trip to Kaunas.

Auberon had been told that Kaunas was worth three hours at most, but like Moscow we found it a very agreeable place. We stayed right in the old town, in a hostel connected to a church. Our room came with a crucifix and a shrink-wrapped picture of a saint plus literature inviting us to retrace the pilgrimage of John Paul II around Lithuania.

Apart from a small fort near the church, there was a long pedestrian street that formed the main attraction of the city, starting in the old town and leading far further into a wider shopping area. I walked a good distance by myself the first night owing to Auberon's now-tattered shoes making it uncomfortable to keep up the hard miles. I saw some people square dancing in a park to a drummer and accordionist, forming a beautiful and wholesome scene.

The next day we walked more in a different direction and wound up at a large art museum, where we were some of the only patrons present. It had a large selection of more classical European art in the upper floors, with seascapes and wildlife sketches next to fine silverware and furniture. Auberon noticed a couple of pictures by the same artist who had taken a few liberties with proportions, such that when you looked closely Mary's eyes were the size of teacups and her legs were folded in knots around the Christ child.

From Kaunas we found an evening bus to Augustow, and the rolling plains out the window soon gave way to the forests of Poland.

Pictured: The fairy tale forests of Klaipeda, concrete on the beach, and the Kaunas old town.

The Russian tongue

I had studied Russian in fits and starts before this year, but once I knew I was going to the country I put in more effort. Every time I study a new language I go about it in a different way, drawing from experience and new techniques that I constantly come across. With Russian I hoped that I could ignore the notoriously complicated grammar and focus on acquiring it more or less naturally. I studied it for six months, doing at least ten minutes a day but generally closer to half an hour on average. Say 90-100 hours in total.

Because of my love of phonetics I focused a lot on the sounds and the flow of the language. This paid off in a way, since people rarely switched to English on me and some guessed that I had Russian heritage. Someone that had spoken Russian with a grandparent once a week, maybe. Just a student, I said, though sometimes I mentioned that my grandmother was Polish.

Conversation was difficult. As nice as it is to speak with a good accent, it doesn't mean much without the words themselves. My method was to practice whole sentences at a time, thus internalizing some grammatical constructions easily while remaining fully ignorant of ones I hadn't come across. So I fumbled a lot, especially in the beginning, making sure adjectives matched nouns and pronouns were in the right case.

It was a bit stressful, as I mentioned previously. When you practice with a teacher or a Skype partner you don't quite feel the pressure that's palpable in a restaurant or a ticket line. To hear and understand my mp3s on my phone was great, to hear a string of jumbled syllables from my conversation partner was dismal.

Reading was nice. After a week or so the Cyrillic came back easily (having not looked at it since departing for Korea) and I generally knew what signs said. I still need a lot of practice to read books, but it's just something that will take time. It wasn't until years into studying German that it was truly easy to read average articles or books.

I grudgingly admit that Russian is a useful language and I should really put more effort into it. It really comes in handy in some places where German or English don't reach. I spoke it first on this trip in Vietnam and twice just today. I can function with it, and I can tell that with a few hundred more hours of studying it'll get to that wonderful point of being accessible at a moment's notice.

Big and small cities in an unfamiliar place

After a fairly nightmarish train ride (bunks smaller than we were and enthusiastic snorers) we arrived in Riga, the capital city of Latvia. I knew little to nothing about either. In a nice turn of events we had arrived well into the morning, and from the looks of the market outside the train station things were already in full swing. I had been getting intermittent blisters from walking eight hours a day in new shoes, so we decided not to explore and just walk straight to the hotel.

We had booked just two days in our hotel, which we figured would give us the same ability to combine wandering and targeted tourism. Sure enough, we saw a few museums and also got in a great deal of exploration of the old and new towns. The Occupation Museum was rated poorly by every Russian on TripAdvisor, which brought me back to the War Remnants Museum in Vietnam. It told the moving story of Latvia's struggle for independence against the Germans and later the Russians. A short video clip showed what I felt to be too little of the amazing nonviolent protests of 1989, when millions of people joined hands to create an unbroken line from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius.

The state history museum deserves a mention too, since for a miniscule entrance fee we had four floors of exhibits to ourselves. It was much more of a traditional arrowheads-under-glass museum, and most of it was in Latvian, but I liked the atmosphere. They had several life size dioramas of typical rooms at different points in history, and the silence of the museum lent these exhibits an eerie edge.

There was definitely a beauty to Riga, but we reached a certain point quickly where we felt like moving on. In the train station I impulsively suggested that we take the next train to the coast, and after discovering the incredibly low price of the Latvian intercity rail, we did. We ended up in Vecaki, which was mostly a road leading to the beach with a few lucky restaurants on either side. Vecaki seemed like a fairly popular destination even in this off season, and we followed other tourists to the water's edge.

It was gorgeous, especially so because of the flat shore and flat surf, surely the most gentle I've seen. The sun was slowly setting to the west, though the ocean horizon stretched out northward. We had come from the Pacific coast in Nha Trang across desert, forest, grassland, and more to make it to the shore of the Baltic Sea halfway around the world.

The next day we took another train to Sigulda, a smaller town at the edge of a national park. Our guesthouse was on the outskirts, a huge log house that had a dining hall for fifty people or more. But in this in-between season (past summer and not yet to snowfall) it was not only cheap but ours entirely. We walked for a while in both directions of the road, raising the attention of a neighbor's friendly dog who accompanied us into some small woods. The other dogs were less pleased to see us, but there was no trouble. I wonder if they can tell how far we've come.

Sigulda is a few hours' hike from another town, Turaida, known chiefly for its castle. We walked through some very nice forest, past a malfunctioning cable car, and over a few flights of nice new wooden stairs to get to this castle, stopping at a lovely little café for nourishment. The castle was red, clearly a bit different from the classic Western European stone towers. Inside there were a few guides in period costume and some brief descriptions of the restoration efforts. Only the main tower was accessible to the public, but the view over the forested countryside was very fine. Back in the courtyard I surprised all present by paying a euro and scoring a bullseye with my first shot from a bow and arrow. This feat earned me another free shot, where it was revealed that the first was entirely luck and I had no idea how to handle a bow.

We took a bus back to Sigulda after seeing a small sculpture park next to the castle (known as Folk Song Park but with hills that remained silent). By then some other guests had moved into the house, though we hardly saw any of them. The next morning we went off to Riga again, headed for the bus station and a route south to Lithuania.

Pictured: Auberon exploring the Baltic Sea, Riga from a rooftop, and Turaida Castle.

The capital of Russia

The train to Moscow was very comfortable, though I caught a bit of a sore throat. We had our compartment mostly to ourselves and the journey was just a bit more than overnight. In keeping with the general Russian theme we arrived around sunrise and braced ourselves.

I had studied Russian language and culture for a while, and something I had seen over and over was that Moscow was not a fun place. From the man at the embassy to our hostel mate in Yekaterinburg, I had been told I would have no fun. But Moscow was beginning to shine in the morning sunlight. As a capital city it was enormous, and just getting to the hostel brought us past three or four incredibly large buildings. Architecture ranged from 1940s New York to big wide Soviet glass and concrete blocks.

Our hostel was right next to Red Square and even closer to the Lenin Library. But the staff seemed not to be feeling the communal spirit and wouldn't let us occupy our room until later. This didn't change the general plan much, so we dropped off our bags and walked. Adding on to our head start from sunrise, we walked another 30 miles or so that day from corner to corner of the city and back. What we saw was far from the dismal description I had been given, rather, the city was clean, full of art installations, and vibrant. There was even a whole section of skyscrapers, cordoned off on their own little island of high-powered business deals. Unfortunately the Russians were less welcoming than the Chinese and we weren't allowed to the tops of any of them.

During the day of walking we went back to the train station and bought a ticket to Riga, Latvia - for the wrong day. Upon discovering this in the evening we decided to kick our habit of wandering around and throw regular tourism into high gear. That night we made a list of museums and attractions that would please even my dad, noted trip-planning enthusiast.

We aimed for Red Square first. It was easy enough to find, and then by joining a group of Chinese tourists we got in line for something unknown. Within a minute or so it became clear: we were accidentally visiting Lenin's mausoleum. The Chinese tourists bowed to the body three times out of respect, but I was more transfixed with how small he looked. The line was kept moving constantly and soon we were out in the sunlight again, laughing after noticing the big sign we had been standing under that read "to the mausoleum."

Next was the museum of Soviet arcade machines, which was just what it sounds like. All the machines were in working order, though that didn't mean it was easy to win. The ingenious yet clumsy analog controls combined with a general habit of older games being difficult meant every game was diabolically hard. I enjoyed the two player games: strange foosball variations of basketball and hockey. There was a little library on the second floor with dusty Soviet magazines, a sort of parallel to old Analog issues.

We kept going on the pedestrian street Arbat until a small bookstore caught my eye. Inside I browsed art books until sufficiently rested and inspired, then crossed the street to a small gallery. The receptionist noticed that we cheapskates were wrestling with the idea of paying any admission at all, so with a wink she let us in for free. It was a wide and open space whose main exhibit was a series on typography and logo design. Much of it reminded me of things I had seen back at school, in the library or in the school's gallery.

We set out for Gorky Park, and once there played a brief bit of outdoor chess (Western this time instead of Chinese) on the type of jumbo board for which I have always had a weakness. Then we went to the Garage, a new and trendy modern art museum that would not look out of place in Amsterdam or San Francisco. The number of exhibits was pretty low but they had a lot of critique and interpretation about each piece, as well as all relevant text in Russian Sign Language on a monitor. Auberon chatted to one of the docents as I lost myself in huge and expensive coffee-table books on photography.

Since the train to Riga didn't leave until the evening and we had accidentally booked a day extra at the hostel, the following day was another excellent one where we didn't have to carry our bags. It rained on and off, and I went off on my own as Auberon explored with his new friend from the museum. I popped into the very large gold-domed church (I've got to start remembering these names) and then to an excellent little photography gallery. By way of return I went to the Lenin library, which I wholly misunderstood. It seemed to be entirely reading rooms and no actual books, though it was enormous. Plus the entrance was under construction, so I had to do a lap around the block to find it. But in the end I got another cool ID card.

I met back with Auberon and we headed off to the train station, hoping that I had correctly used the ticket machine and our expensive new tickets were for the right place.

Pictured: Moscow sunrise, a tasty brunch, the church, and chess in the park.

A few days in Yekaterinburg

Arriving as usual in the early morning, we continued the theme of heading roughly toward the city center. We were told by the hostel not to check in until noon. Given that we had no idea where it was, it was generally accepted that we should wander for a while to kill time and then maybe take a taxi once we were tired.

Again we saw the night turn into early sunrise, and again we were mystified that absolutely nothing was open around six in the morning. No 24-hour cafes, diners, grocery stores, anything. It was clear that this city was much larger and richer than Irkutsk, with a small collection of actual skyscrapers creating a skyline over the river.

Eventually we found a little pastry shop that had just opened. Quite hungry by now, we became early and valuable customers, staying and resting perhaps a bit more than necessary. I was excited by the presence of a particular Georgian cheese pastry known as khachapuri. I went to a wonderful Georgian restaurant last summer in Budapest, and I've wanted to visit the country for years. Sadly the pastries in the shop were too cold and too salty to remind me of the ones I'd had before.

Our hostel was a bit hard to find, but once there we got into our shared 12-person dorm and dropped our luggage next to the very creaky bunk beds. There was a woman in the staircase later who was very skillfully painting someone's portrait. Seeing our interest, her friends told her спроси! спроси! - ask! ask! She hesitantly posed the question: would we like to sit for oil portraits so she could practice for art school? Would we! We made plans to meet the next morning.

I didn't realize how hard it was to be a model. I got pretty chilly in the shade and regretted choosing an awkward, twisting three-quarter angle. We talked about art and artists, and how the low rent in Yekaterinburg made it easier than other Russian cities to live and paint. She enjoyed portraits and had even hitched around Russia with a friend to do portraits of strangers in other places. Soon she switched to Auberon's painting and I was happy to stretch my legs, wander and explore.

The city was, as expected, much larger than Irkutsk. It had a younger energy too, with lots of young students seen walking around or working in cafes. Many sculptures in a sort of caricature style, mostly unlabeled, dotted the streets. There was a big pedestrian walkway near a super-sized mall and shopping center, where street performers pounded acoustic guitars to Russian pop melodies.

Breaking with our tradition of wandering through malls and buying nothing, I got myself some new shoes and a lovely shirt. My shoes were new around April, but walking hundreds of miles over the previous two months had taken its toll and they were now toast. In Asia I saw many great shirts capitalizing on the popularity of English, with no regard at all paid to the actual content of the words. Nonsense was common, and near-nonsense veered into hilarity. In Russia these were less common but I think the shirt I got fits the theme well: "University & National Sport Team."

I used to be much more into photography, especially older film methods. Back home I have twenty or so older cameras and a small library of photography books. I was thus glad to find a little museum of photography with art gallery on the second floor. I always get a little bit more inspired when I see works by other artists. The main exhibit seemed to be about Central Asian villages in the Soviet Union, though the captions were all in Russian. Auberon identified with a note written in Spanish in the visitor's book: "Nice pictures. I don't understand any Russian at all. It's very hard to get by."

In my solo wanderings I found a great library. They gave me a Russian ID card, which I will certainly use to pretend to be a foreign student in the future, and let me loose in the languages section. Auberon and I had been contemplating the physics of a central fountain in a square, and as he put it, that conversation scratched an intellectual itch but only made it worse. So we bought notebooks and went back to the library together, where I read about languages and teaching theories and he read about physics and computer science. It was a great library and we both shared with the other what we'd learned after it closed.

Then we went to Moscow.

When we stay in hostels I'm much more likely to take my actual camera with me, so not too much ends up easily postable from the phone. Thus all I can offer is the inside of the library and me in my new shirt next to an array of plastic-wrapped shopping carts.

The long train

In Irkutsk we got on the train and didn't get off for three days.

It was a lovely journey, really. I believe I've mentioned before that I find it very relaxing to lie down on a sleeper bed and watch the world pass by. We were served a single free meal at the very beginning, some very acceptable crepes with jam. Unlike the last train, we had no English speakers in our carriage and so spent much of the time in silence or talking to each other. My Russian never got particularly conversational, so I didn't want to go through the stress of almost understanding social interactions over and over. But that seemed to suit the Russians fine.

It's easy and enjoyable to slip in and out of sleep on the rails, and we all wrecked any kind of 24-hour sleep cycle we might have had. The beds were very comfortable, especially coming off of six weeks in Asia. Four to a compartment, with space for baggage above and below. You're provided with sheets and small towel and left totally unbothered by the staff for the duration.

The restaurant car, present for the first time now that we were properly on the Siberian route, served the expected fare. Thanks to a strong dollar we ate there more than we expected. They frowned upon too much loitering at first, but after the hours slid by we were allowed to sit and play Chinese chess for some time. I think Auberon won almost every game, even though we're pretty well matched. Like I said, the train puts me in a nice stupor.

I'd gotten to see great rivers and lakes on the first train leg. This time it was almost entirely forest, punctuated with villages and open fields. Slowly the architecture changed from the hardier log cabins of the eastern regions to tin-roofed buildings and small farms, sometimes with a church spire poking out above. At night, since we were constantly traveling west, the sunset stretched out into twilights almost eerie in their length. Perhaps my favorite view was seeing a copse of birch trees, denuded somehow, nearly the same color as the fading sky and with a small campfire adding a splash of orange in between them.

In what seemed like nothing near 53 hours, we had arrived at Yekaterinburg.

Pictured: Yekaterinburg in the morning light and the author several days after last seeing a shower.

Middle Siberia

Outside the station we grew a little nervous at the presence of the bad guy from every action film ever made. You could cast a gangster movie in ten seconds. But of course they paid us no mind, even after I set off a car alarm, and eventually we found a big bridge and decided to cross it. Both of us were in fine spirits and ready for more walking after our longest train ride to date.

We did some circuits around the parks and squares of Irkutsk, without much of an idea of where we were or where we were headed. The city instantly reminded me of my time in Poland last summer, and so I was struck with excitement to wander the streets as I had done back then. At this time of day, though, the streets were almost entirely empty. It was very strange to both of us that it was about seven in the morning and that nobody was beginning the bustle of the day. We had been used to waking up later, sure, but in the morning in China and Vietnam people were up and starting the day early. After about an hour of this confusion we had grown tireder and hungrier and paid a taxi too much to bring us to our very nearby hostel.

This was actually our first time in that backpacker mainstay, the hostel. We had shared rooms before when volunteering, but when buying accommodation it was well within budget to just get private rooms. Things were a bit tighter in Russia, so for all of Russia we booked hostels in an effort to force us into being social.

At this point actually, we were a bit cynical at the prospect of repeating The Script for the thousandth time: I'm from California, I'll be staying in your country this long, funny story actually we came from Vietnam, haha yes it's a long way to Denmark, Alex, Auberon, Au-be-ron, yes it's a hard name for Americans too... We'd started saying these things in Ho Chi Minh City and hadn't really stopped. In China it was especially frequent because of all the English teaching. Auberon declared that if he met a girl that went off script he'd have to marry her. He's still single.

After such cynicism you'll be happy to hear that we met a cool Mongolian guy named Timin (spelling uncertain) and went around with him for most of the day. He was there on business, coordinating international shipments of construction materials between Russia and Mongolia. He matched us in walking enthusiasm and his Russian blew mine out of the water. We wandered to a nice restaurant and then to the parks on the south side of the city, then back to the center where he departed for a bus ride out of town.

The next day we found passage to the nearby town of Listvianka, a popular and easy to access day trip. Jumping on the chance to collect another method of transportation, we traveled by speedboat. It was very fast and didn't offer too many opportunities for photography since the decks were crowded with Russians at all times. I find it very easy to fall asleep at the beginning of car or bus rides, and the boat was no different. In no time we had arrived at Lake Baikal.

Lake Baikal is huge, and the destination for throngs of Russian and international tourists. We were really there because we'd seen big cities for a long time and needed a good hike in the woods. We found a nice path leading away from the souvenir shops and started off. In seconds we were alone on the path. Apart from some women gathering mushrooms we had the woods to ourselves. They were wonderfully European woods, broad and dense and filled with roots and birches and ivy. Bright red mushrooms peeked out of the leaves here and there, and though the path was clear it was far from the paved trails of China.

After a solid climb we reached one rocky summit and were immediately covered in flies. Not biting or stinging, just aggravating and persistent. Even though the temperature is dropping in Siberia it's still bug season. After a minute or so of selfies we reluctantly pushed on. It turned out there wasn't much of a view from the actual summit, but at least we had a lively scramble down the very steep mountainside to the town.

Back in Irkutsk we felt pretty complete with our time. There wasn't a ton more to see and our train left very late at night, so we had just one more goal for the day: vandalism. Irkutsk is a territory in the board game Risk, and months ago over a game with some friends we decided that we would take one of the little Red Guard game pieces and secure our control over the area by supergluing him to the city. We did. If you find him and send me a picture, I will personally mail you a card of congratulations and all of the remaining Russian coins I have in my possession - a sizeable stack by now.

Pictured: a boat on Baikal and a very large church.