Language Learning Goals

Today I filled out a Mid-Program Evaluation for the Critical Languages Scholarship program that I am participating in here in Ufa.  As part of the evaluation we were asked to list our language learning goals for the second half of the program.  I thought I would list my goals here in order to remind myself, perhaps create some accountability (that means you should ask me how I'm doing with my goals) and just to let you all know a little more about what I'm up to this summer.  So here they are: 

My Language Learning Goals for the remainder of the summer:

     1. Grammar - I will improve my Russian grammar by spending 45 minutes

         per day working through Shaum's Russian Grammar book.

     2. Writing - I will improve my Russian writing by keeping a journal in Russian.  

         I will write 5-10 sentences every day.

     3. Vocabulary - I will improve my Russian vocabulary by making 10-15 

         flashcards per day from words heard/read 

         throughout the day. Review 25-50 flashcards twice a day (or more).

     4. Comprehension - I will improve my Russian comprehension by 

         listening/watching at least 15 minutes of Russian audio/video (radio, 

         TV, movie, news) per day.

     5. Reading - I will improve my Russian reading by reading for 15 minutes 

         per day from a Russian book, website, newspaper, etc.

So those are my goals for the summer.  What are yours?

Home sweet home..

So today I thought I'd post a picture blog of my apartment.  I'm feel pretty spoiled here in Ufa.  I live with a great family (pictures of them coming soon) and I live in a pretty incredible apartment.  A bonus on top of my family and the apartment is that I live close enough to everything I need to just walk everywhere.  Enjoy the photos.

This is the kitchen/dining room/living room area.  The kitchen is directly across from the couch.

There are many chandeliers, pretty much one per room, 

except for maybe the bathroom.

  

And here is the bathroom.  

This towel rack is pretty cool.  

Hot water runs through it, so the 

towels are warm when you take 

them off the rack.  Genius! 

Why don't we have this set-up back home?!

I had a couple of requests to see the medication that I needed for my bout with pink eye, so here are the boxes that the drops and ointment came in along with the original prescription.

My copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in Russian!

And my bedroom.  Nice huh?!

Complete with the sweet old movie border.
Notice the near mirror reflectivness of the ceiling.

And some more classics..

And finally my own personal chandelier.

Plans Change... often.

The Aksakova Museum

Everywhere you go plans change, but in Russia, they change approximately every 30 seconds.  Or so it seems anyway.  This evening (Wednesday) we were supposed to go to Музей им. Аксакова (The Aksakova Museum) to see an art exhibition and to meet with some local poets.  I actually just had to look at my planner to see what the original plan was because there have been so many revisions that I couldn't remember what had initially been planned.


At some point yesterday afternoon, the excursion was cancelled.  An hour or so later, the excursion for Thursday evening was moved to Wednesday evening.  Not too long after than there were additions to the plan.  Later... the time was changed.  And so on.  Just about a half an hour ago as I was about to head out to catch the трамвай (the streetcar- which conveniently runs in front of my building just like in Portland!) when I got a text saying that the event had been cancelled.  So after all of that, no excursion.

In the two and a half weeks that I have been here I have pretty much come to expect that very few things will go according to plans.  With all of the changes, one nice thing is that everyone here expects it.  No one melts down or gets angry, they just roll with it.  Any of you who have known me very long, know that my motto while traveling is: expect the unexpected. This mindset is definitely helpful in the midst of unfamiliarity and changes and everything else that is thrown my way.  I have been very thankful that my fellow students are all pretty laid back and able to roll with the punches as well.  We just kind of laugh and ask what the new plan is knowing full well that it probably won't be the final plan.

Look we were on the news!!

Hello all!

Well, I’m getting a late start on the whole blogging thing, but as ever, better late than never right?  We are two weeks into the program already!  Hard to believe.  The time has been flying.

For all of you who didn't see this video on Facebook, I'll post it here.  During our first week of class our program director ran into our Russian Lexicology class and basically said, "there are cameras coming act natural."  This statement seems to always have the opposite of the intended effect.  And it is pretty hard to act completely natural when there is a video camera about six inches from you face while you are trying to read a text full of new vocabulary out loud.  

If you watch carefully you will see me once in the classroom and once out in front of the university.  The day after this aired I had a lady tell me that she had seen the news program about our group.  This is the second year that CLS has been in Ufa and it is a economic boost for the city.  Hence the interest of the general public and the news-worthiness.

The Cross-town Chronicles

Given that I'm not able to take two months off of work to travel the world this summer I am embarking on a different sort of endeavor. Some adventure loving friends and I are embarking on a journey that we have dubbed "The Cross-town Chronicles". Ever seeking a story to tell, we will set out to see Portland through the lens of the TriMet transit system (http://trimet.org/). Armed only with a bus pass, a video camera & a desire to further our knowledge of this great city (and have a lot of fun along the way) we will eventually ride every mile of each and every bus, train & trolley line that serve the Portland-metro area.

Why you ask? This is a question I am well acquainted with. It is a frequent response to my (random) ideas. My constant answer (and perhaps even my motto) is "Why not?!" Beyond that though, I can tell you a bit about how the idea came life.

I am a proud mass-transit commuter. I don't own a car and am lucky to live in a city that makes not owning a car a viable option. As I find myself on bus lines that I haven't ridden before I often see parts of town that I am less familiar with and find all sort new restaurants, coffee shops, bookstores and random other places that I would not ever have found otherwise. This in mind I decided that I should on occasion take different routes to some of my regular haunts just to see what I could see. The more I did this, the more great things I discovered. This then morphed into a challenge (as many things do for me, I am always seeking the next great challenge). Why not see everything? Ride all of the bus lines, MAX lines (Portland's light rail train) and trolley lines.

That was all it took. I was off and running with the idea. Luckily I have some friends who are at least close to as crazy and random as I am. They jumped at the idea to join me in this undertaking. As we have been playing around with a bit of film making (or at least the concept thereof, we haven't actually filmed anything yet) we decided that this project needs to be documented. So I will be keeping up the blog here with the latest and hopefully, eventually, there will be some videos posted here as well.

It's hard to say what this will all look like in the end, but I'm excited at the prospect of a project to be working on. So if any of you are in town and are up for a bit of an adventure come join us. You don't have to commit to the whole project, just come check it out if you like. I'll be posting our plans (the logistics of where we're meeting, when, etc.) as we make them. Otherwise keep checking back for new installments of "The Cross-town Chronicles".

Return from hiatus

Here I find myself again six months after my last post. I had grand ambitions for this little blogspot, even post-travels. But alas the hands of the clock and even the pages of the calendar seem to change more quickly than I can keep track of. I have of late been encouraged to start writing again (yes, I mean you Grandpa & Krys). So after a long break I am going to give it a shot once again. Look for further posts coming soon...

Home again...

Well, hello all. Yes, I'm quite aware of how long it has taken me to get this post trip post up. A lot has happened since I last wrote. Elizabeth and I are in fact home, in our respective cities. Settling back into work and both of us into new housing situations. I am settling into a new job as well which has kept me quite busy.

Our trip home was good, fairly uneventful. A direct flight from Beijing to L.A. We got on the plane and all of a sudden we were home, or so it seemed. We arrived in L.A. 11 hours before we left Beijing. Craziness.

As I am typing here I am uploading pictures from the trip and I will leave the link here for any of you who are interested in checking them out.

I will continue to post on the blog on occasion as things of note come up in my life. Seems like a good way to keep in touch with folks I don't get to talk to all that often. I definitely won't be posting as often as I was this summer (my real life isn't nearly as exciting as my travels were), but as there are changes or random other noteworthy events going on I will try to keep you all posted.

And here is the link to the pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/kdfrance/TransSiberianTrip

An End to Journey Toward

Friday was a long day for us. We were picked up at 7am and didn't get home until around 7pm. A full twelve hour day. We hadn't had one of those in a while. Long as it was we had a really good time. We went to the Ming tombs, the Jade Factory, the Great Wall and the Silk Factory. The weather was not the most conducive to seeing the sights and distances that the Wall is known for providing. I was pretty excited that it was a nice cool day and that we even had some rain. The thick fog made for a bit more of an adventure as we were walking from tower to tower. As we couldn't see more than 50-100 meters ahead of us we never knew what was up ahead until it was right in our faces.

Yesterday we went to the "dirt" market and to Wangfujing Street. The street market was a HUGE flea market with pretty much anything and everything that you can imagine. From Chairman Mao paraphernalia to jewelry and Chinese antiques. It's fun to walk around and listen to the bartering and haggling going on around. Wangfujing Street is a pedestrian mall lined with large department stores and various other shops. Just behind Wangfujing is a smaller backstreet, called Wangfujing Snack Street, lined with noodle restaurants and a bit further down with souvenir shops.

After spending the day at the flea market we were famished so we sat down and ate some delicious noodles and beef stir-fry. As we were picking a place to eat the server at the place we chose was asking if we wanted noodles. His English was not very good though and we were having a hard time understanding him. In order to help us understand he pointed up to the banner hanging above the tables and said what we gather to be "You want noodles?" The funny thing was that he was pointing to a sign in Chinese to help us understand his English.

Everyone in the area was walking around with food on sticks. Those sticks held everything from grapes and haw covered in a sugary coating to starfish, beetles and scorpions. Quite a sight to behold. The most popular food-on-a-stick items seemed to be the haw and something that looked like it might have been the legs of a tiny little octopus. Couldn't really say for sure.

Well, here we are on our last evening in Beijing, our last night in China, our last night of the trip! My how these six weeks have flown by! We fly out tomorrow evening at 8:30 and will arrive in L.A. almost three hours before we left. Weird. We'll then be down in Palm Springs for a few days before actually heading home, Elizabeth to Pasadena and me to Portland. We'll be sure to let you know how our travels home go.

We're about to head out to celebrate an incredible journey. And so I will leave you with a quote I saw yesterday and think it is quite fitting in the last 24 hours of this trip: "It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end."--Ursula LeGuin.

Take care..

Pretty Prices

Hello all,

Well, Elizabeth and I have made it to our final stop on this trip. Beijing. Last night we said goodbye to Matt and headed to the Shanghai Train Station. I have no idea where this last week went. It's hard to believe that we will be flying home in less than a week!

Our stay in Shanghai was great. We were able to take it easy and still see a fair bit of the city. We spent one of the days visiting the Eastons (for those of you who know them). The Eastons are family friends who I have know for 10 years believe it or not. Anyway, Elizabeth and I went out to visit them at their apartment and experienced expat-land in Shanghai. They live in a beautiful area, a resort really, that in no way lets on that it is in China. It was an interesting contrast to where we were staying.

A couple of days ago we went to the Yuyuan Gardens. They were beautiful! And surrounding the gardens are markets selling anything and everything you could ever want. It was fun to barter with the merchants. They very much enjoy the interactions and are disappointed if you don't get into it.

My favorite tactic by the merchants was them taking one of us by the arm and saying, "You are beautiful. Very pretty, I give you pretty price." They then made an offer and when told it was too expensive they said, "You give me your high price." So we made an offer (generally 1/4 to 1/2 of their original offer, but sometimes lower) and then they would stick out their bottom lip and say, "Oh no, too low. What your next high price?" If you are persistent with your price you can generally get it or at least something close to it. And if not, you walk away and they say, "okay, okay I give you good price." At which point they will make another offer, not quite as low as you had stated. If you shake your head and continue to walk away they more often than not they will come after you and say, "okay, your price." As you pay (your price) they continue to look at you with that pout and might even say "and 10 just for me." Meaning they want you to give them 10 yuan ($1.25) for them to pocket.

Also fun has been trying to pick up a bit of Chinese. It's not anything like other languages that I have studied. When I was in Russia staying with Elizabeth's family way back when I was able to piece together the Cyrillic alphabet as well as start to understand some of what was being said (mostly vocab, not so much the grammar), it just doesn't work that way with Chinese. There is no figuring out the alphabet like that- there is no alphabet. Instead there are characters which represent words and can be put together to make compound words. The crazy thing is that written Chinese is uniform throughout the country while the spoken language vary greatly. So a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker could read the same book with no problem, but should they try to read it to one another they wouldn't understand each other at all! And then there are the tones, so one word said with the four different tones can mean four completely different things.

One of our train bunkmates taught me about ten words which proved to be quite useful and we have used those as well as a few others that we have picked up along the way, but Chinese is definitely a language that requires more than a passing interest in learning to get very far.

Well, we didn't get much sleep last night so I think I will be heading in to take a nap.

Teradactyls, rhinos and more!

Hello friends! Here we are in Shanghai. We arrived in Beijing on the train on Monday (a full 20 minutes early!) and were very pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get down to Shanghai. In the last hour or so of our train ride Elizabeth and I were putting together a plan (rather plans- plan A, plan B, plan C, etc.) for accomplishing all we needed to in order to get down to Shanghai. Get off the train, change some money, find out where the airport is, get to the airport, buy plane tickets, and finally get on the plane.

Well as we came out of the train station I noticed a "Air Ticket Office" sign. So we walked up to the counter and told them where we wanted to go and bought tickets for a 5pm flight (it was just before 3pm at this point). They even wrote down the name of the airport for us in Chinese so that we could give it to a taxi driver. So we got a taxi, went to the airport and caught our flight down here to Shanghai.

We are staying with Matt, one of Elizabeth's friends from college while we're here. He has been in Shanghai for about six months teaching English. Right now Elizabeth and I find ourselves sitting in City Diner with the full repertoire of Michael Jackson's career playing somewhat loudly in the background. I seriously haven't heard this much Michael Jackson in well over 15 years! It's cracking me up.

So what have we been doing for week since we last posted? Traveling. Lots of traveling. Traveling in the form of sitting on a train. After nearly a week on the train I thought I might never want to see another train in my lifetime. That is not at all how I feel though.

The train ride was absolutely incredible. We saw so much! From Moscow through various cities and villages in Russia, past the beautiful Lake Baikal, into Mongolia and through the Gobi Desert with wild horses and camels at watering holes and yurts dotting the landscape to the corn fields and sunflower patches and enormous canyons and gorges of China. Standing at the window staring out at the incredible sights hours could pass by without seeming like more that a couple of minutes.

The first couple of evenings were filled with games of Scrabble and Monopoly with our three British friends who we met at our hostel in Moscow. Generally not a fan of Monopoly because of the sheer ridiculous length of the games I was pleasantly surprised to find that we had finished a six or so hour game without having felt like we had spent a whole day playing. Somehow time on the train disappears as the thousands of kilometers pass by. Changing about an hour a day due to time zones has an odd effect on one's sense of time as well.

We are heading out, enough Michael Jackson for one sitting, but we will report back soon. Perhaps more on the train ride as well as our very interesting bunk mates (and their snoring and toenail clippings) next time. Definitely more on our Chinese experiences though. Be sure to ask Elizabeth about spitting food on the floor in the nice restaurant we went to on her birthday!

Take care.

Suffering in Silence

Don't let the title of this blog entry scare you. It's from a magazine article about the Trans-Siberian Railway. This particular portion of the article was talking about the bathrooms on the trains and how they are closed when the train is stopped at a station (since flushing the toilet is essentially opening a hole to the ground. The quote was something to the effect of "memorize the schedule or suffer in silence."

That is one of the many things we have to look forward to in the next six and a half days. We leave tonight at 9:30pm and are scheduled to arrive in Beijing at 2:30pm on Monday. Getting to the train station tonight ought to be an interesting experience as we each have our backpacks, smaller day bags and also have a large duffel bag full of food. Shopping last night for food for our journey it really sort of hit me that we will be on the train for a week. Elizabeth was quick to point out that it isn't a full week because we will be arriving at 2:30, plus there is a five hour time difference between Moscow and Beijing. So we'll be on the train for six days and 12 hours. I'm still going to call it a week.

Since we will be on the train we will not be posting on the blog in that time, so you'll have to wait a whole week to hear from us again. My how things have changed that not hearing from someone overseas for a week is a long time! I'm sure we'll have plenty of adventures from the train to share with you all. There is so much from Moscow that we haven't even had a chance to cover here. I was a bit worried that keeping a blog would leave me with nothing to say when I got back, but that most certainly hasn't been the case so far. We have a couple more things to take care of before we head out, so I'm off.

China here we come...

Monday Evening

Tomorrow is our last day in Moscow! I am sad to go, but I'm ready to get on the train again. I'm definetely not tired of the train yet; in fact I feel as if our great train adventure is just beginning (which it really is since we will be traveling until next Monday). We've met these three great English guys in our hostel who are also traveling on the same train and will be going with us to Irkustk. One of them is in a choir and will be doing a concert in the Forbidden City the same weekend we'll be Beijing!! How crazy is that? Unfortunately they are in the 3rd wagon and we are in the 15th, but I'm sure there will be much going back and forth between our wagons, especially since they saw the food Katie and I purchased today for the trip:) I don't think they've thought about food yet, although they will only be on the train for 3 days instead of 6. I could probably eat noodles for 3 days, but not for 6 days straight! It's so great to have met friends already and in fact i can hear Katie laughing and talking with them now in the other room! We've actually met quite a few friends, all of whom we refer to as "our friend..." (followed usually not by their name - names aren't always necessary among travelers, but by some descripter like "our friend the English teacher" or "our friend the German Austrian". Some we'll never see again but some we'll meet later on in the trip, like our English friend in the choir.

Certainly if I would have had more time here there are more things I would have liked to see or do, but I feel satisfied with our time here. Going to Ryazan would have been great, but I think it was really important that I stay in the once place for a few days and not be traveling or moving. Today we visited Christ the Savior Cathedral and we did make it to Novodevichy as well. The convent has a fascinating history, which we caught bits of pieces of by readings an excerpt of a book I'm reading called "Around the Bloc; My life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana" and eavesdropping on English tourguides, and remembering a bit of Russian history that we both have studied at one point. We of course did not pay to have our own tour and in fact we didn't even pay what we were supposed to as foreigners (it's better not to read the signs but just walk up to the cashier and ask for a ticket). The cemetary was free; however we paid 50 rubles (2 dollars) for a map telling us where to find all the famous dead guys. This came in handy as it's a very large cemetary and we didn't want to miss anything. I could have spent hours walking around just looking at the ornate gravestones and decorated plots. Some of the more famous people we found were Tolstoy, Gogol, Breshnev, Chekov, and Yelstin.

Katie did not mention the two highlights of our trip to Izmailova; the vodka museum and our soviet propoganda posters. We both saw an add for the museum and knew that our trip to Moscow would not be complete without visiting it. It gave a very fascinating history of Russia's most famous drink. I'm coming up with some "fun facts" that I learned so if you're interested i can share that with you. The second highlight for me was the posters we purchased. We were both looking really without any intention of purchasing anything but ended up coming away with with tw0 large envelopes containing about 24 posters each. The guy who sold them to us was so sweet! When he found out that we were continuing on our train trip to China he rushed to the back of the stall and pulled out this set of posters all celebrating the friendship between Russia and China during the Soviet period. Some of them have pictures of a Russian guy and a Chinese guy holding hands and they say something like, "we celebrate friendship for the sake of happiness and prosperity" or "Those who strive together, stand together", or "We seek true communism".

It's getting quite late and I haven't packed my things yet. We may be able to post again tomorrow otherwise the next one will be from Shanghai!

Monday Morning

It's Monday morning and it's pouring outside. Although the rain is extremely welcome after such a hot spell in Moscow, I have to say that I'm a little disapointed. We had planned to walk to the forest around the area where I lived when I first moved here. It's a beautiful walk through the forest to an underground spring there with pure water that i'm guess has been blessed by an orthodox priest at some point in history. Our plan was to load up all our water bottles and fill them up for the train while enjoying the natural beauty of the forest (wonderful - aside from the heavy water bottles and mosquitos!).

I would still like to visit the Novodevichy Convent and so hopefully if the rain subsides a little we will be able to do that. In every country I go to I always try and visit a cemetary or a graveyard. I love the history, the symbolism, the beauty, and the peacefullness. There are several fascinating cemetaries in Ryazan (the city where I spent the last 3 years living) that I would have like to take Katie to, but unfortunately we won't be making a trip there this time. There is a WWII cemetary there and I love to walk up and down reading the plain white gravestones. It's not hard to calculate the ages of the young men when they died because they were all around 18 or 19. Anyway, I'll tell you more about Novodevichy a little later. I have to get off the computer and eat some breakfast!

It's a small world

I can hardly believe that we only have two days left in Moscow. Our time here has passed by so quickly. After the adventure of getting our tickets things have gone far more smoothly.

We spent an afternoon/evening at Red Square and the surrounding park. We were there early enough that it was still light out, and we stayed until it got dark and the lights turned on in the square. It is beautiful at night. There is a completly different feeling about the place. Yesterday we went to Ismailova which is basically a souvenir market, but there are all sorts of wonderful things to see. Basic souvenirs, art, antiques, etc. Elizabeth and I both decided that if we weren't traveling by train we would have each bought a samovar.

We had planned to go to Novodevichy Convent after Ismailova, but realized that it had closed by the time that we were done. So instead we went to Victory Park which is a HUGE war memorial with really fun fountains. It was nice to just wander around and do lots of people watching. The current fashion for men in Russia seems to be capri pants and a pseudo-mullet hair cut. Slightly frightening.

As we returned to the hostel last night I had sort of a weird moment of confusion. The gal sitting at the counter looked very familiar to me, but she was totally out of context. As I fully entered the door she smiled, laughed and said, "I work at this hostel." She had been one of our roommates at the hostel in Prague. It's a crazy small world.

Today Elizabeth and I headed in different directions. Elizabeth went to see her friend Boris and his family (she never actually saw him, but I'll let her fill you in on that) and I was able to spend the afternoon with my dear friend Masha. I met her family and we spent some time catching up. Masha is one of the people I became closest with when I was in Russia last (eight years ago).

As I was on the metro on the way back to the hostel I was doing some thinking and realized that I could stay here in Moscow. I'm definitely excited about the rest of our trip and can hardly wait for our continued adventures, but I could stay here if we weren't continuing on. I'm not sure what will become of that, but I see more time spent in Russia in my future- not that that will surprise anyone.

Some things don't change

It's been quite interesting for me to be back in Moscow. It's been six years since i was here last and so many things have changed, but somethings have changed at all. We arrived very early on Thursday morning and went straight to the ticket counter to try and purchase out tickets to Beijing. I met a really nice lady on the train from Kiev and she has told me which train station we needed to go to, which was really helpful because there are several major stations in Moscow (each one has trains going to a different region or in a different direction). We hopped on the metro and arrived at the Yaroslavsky station where i preceded to wait in line at the ticket counter. There's no way for me to explain how intimidated i am by the whole experience of buying train tickets in Russian! this is one area of area of Russia that has not been affected by the new effort to provide better customer service. If you don't speak the language it is impossible to accomplish anything. The ticket sellers are for the most part, extremely impatient, extremely rude, and extremely unhelpful. I have decided that the fact that i can sometimes pass for a russian (something i am actually quiet proud of) is really a hinderance to me when attemping to communicate to the ticket sellers. I know the right way to ask for what i need, and the woman behind the counter assuming that since i can speak Russian (they would refuse to deal with me if I didn't) that I can understand everything usually procedes to speak very quickly and impatiently with me. This time after waiting in line i stepped up the counter and asked the woman very nicely if I could buy tickets to Irkutsk and then from there to China. First she glared at me and then proceded to yell at me and tell me i was a stupid girl, didn't I know that the international ticket counter was in a different place (and she waved her hand in that general direction). Katie and i found the international ticket counter in a building across the way but they didn't open for another hour so we decided just to sit in the station and wait. Although there is a large waiting room with lots of chairs, almost all of them were taken up by people sleeping. Some were homeless and some of them just waiting for trains. At this point i just broke down and had a good cry. it wasn't that the woman has just yelled at me instead of kindly telling me where to go (this happens quite frequently here) it was that fact that my first encouter back in Russia had to be such an unpleasant one. It was also such a strange experience for me being back in moscow but not really knowing my place here. I was having a bit of a identity crises because I don't live here anymore but I'm not a tourist either. Anyway i felt much better after having a good cry and then by that point an hour had gone by so we went to the international ticket office. That experience went much better - first of all the place was pretty empty, and it was air conditioned!! The woman at the counter was more patient with me and after a few minutes I as able to purchase our tickets from Moscow to Beijing. i'm just thankful there were tickets still available on the train we wanted (train #43 only runs once a week). It probably would have been possible to take another route, but then we would run the risk of getting stuck in irkutsk or Ulan Batar for a week. Although this would have been an adventure it could have turned ugly pretty quickly because our visas run out on Sept. 5th (my birthday). Katie pointed out that either we would be leaving the country on my birthday or we would be going to prison! The prison part is not a joke!

My time is running out on the computer, so i will update more on our activities in moscow soon!

For no apparent reason

Hello from Moscow! Elizabeth and I arrived at the Kievskaya train station here in Moscow at about 5:30 this morning. After spending three days and nights on the train we were glad to be standing on some solid ground.

Monday evening we headed out from our hostel in Prague to catch our train to Kiev as I had mentioned in the previous post. The tickets we purchased were for a kupe (2nd class). On this particular train the kupe had bunk beds three high. On the bottom bunk in our kupe was a mother with her 2 year old daughter, Elizabeth had the middle bunk (once we determined it was safe to sleep on despite missing a piece) and I had the task of climbing to the top bunk.

The trip was long and extremely hot, but fun as well. We met a couple of other Americans who were also heading to Ukraine. The four of us entertained each other helping to keep our minds off of the tremendous heat in the train.

Oh yeah, that 10 hour border stop that I mentioned before, the one where they change the wheel sets on the train, yeah that wasn't exactly what happened. We reached Krakow, Poland at about 6 or so in the morning on Tuesday and just didn't move anywhere for 7 hours. For no apparent reason. We weren't even at the station platform, we were in the middle of the train yard with nothing in sight other than concrete cable poles and car trains. The actual border crossing and wheel change only took about two hours.

Once we got into Kiev on Wednesday morning we went straight to the ticket counter to get tickets on to Moscow. Elizabeth stood in line and worked on getting the tickets while I went back and forth to the currency exchange counter trying to get the right amount of Ukrainian Grivna to actually purchase the tickets. We were able to get the tickets for that evening and the woman at the counter even assured Elizabeth that she was giving us the least expensive tickets available. As we boarded the train we realized that the least expensive available was not the same as the least expensive. We once again were in a kupe car. This one was much more roomy and even had A/C! The ride to Moscow seemed to fly by.

And so here we are at the Lenin Hostel. We just finished dinner and are contemplating evening plans. So there you go. More later...

Back in the game

After a couple of days of sleep I am feeling much better and actually got out today. This afternoon I headed out to the house where Mozart lived when he was in Prague. It used to be a country house, but as the town has grown it has all but over taken the property. Even so, from the backyard there was an incredible view of the city. The property is on a hill and as you move further back in the yard the hill slopes up. I climbed to the top and found a neat little spot with a stone bench and spent some time writing in my journal.

Even just walking from the metro station up to the house had winded me, reminding me that I am still on the mend. It turned out to be the beginning of a music festival today, so I stayed for the afternoon concert by an incredible quartet. The concert was supposed to be a garden concert, but it was too hot and sunny so they moved the concert inside. It was in a small room and there were about 35-40 of us there. The music was incredible. That was perhaps the best concert I've ever seen. They played Mozart, Schubert, Dvorzak and one other that I can't think of at the moment. Sitting there enjoying that music and the beauty around me (in the house and the garden) was exactly what I needed today. I got out, but for the most part the day was pretty restful.

This evening Elizabeth and I met up for some Czech pizza. Not much different than ours other than it was such thin crust that it was nearly non-existant. After that we went out for coffee and ice cream. The waiter asked us if we wanted a small coffee or a large espresso. We both answered small coffee, wondering what was going to show up when he brought it. Sure enough he delivered two cute little demitase cups with a shot of espresso in each, accompanied by cream, a packet of sugar and some mineral water. So we drank espresso (which was quite nice) alongside our pistachio ice cream at the cafe that Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein and various other intellectual types used to regularly meet at. It's a wonder they let us in.

As we sat at the cafe we began to hear thunder and see lightening. As we left the cafe and began the walk to Charles bridge the skies opened up. Luckily both Elizabeth and I are Oregonians at heart (even if southern California is borrowing her for now) and we continued our trek. And then it just flat out poured. At this point we stepped into a little market where many others had run into before the deluge began. Soaking wet, we wandered through the maze of souvenirs (everything from magnets to shot glasses to t-shirts and of course the famous bohemia crystal) we dried off a bit. About that time we came to the other end of the market and the rain had subsided. We continued across the Charles bridge, which is incredibly beautiful and amazingly uncrowded at night! And again with the rain. At this point we stepped into a little pub to sit out this round. After about half an hour the rain calmed again and we made a dash for the metro.

And that brings us to now. Tired and hungry we are heading upstairs to take care of both of those issues. Tomorrow evening we head out for Kiev. And the train adventures continue...

Katie not feeling well:(

Katie has not been feeling well, so I would appreciate your prayers for her quick recovery. It started two days ago on the train when she had a bit of a sore throat and then yesterday that progressed to something worse and today she is feeling quite unwell. She is in bed resting now and I am off to explore Prague by myself. I left her my ipod so she can watch movies if she gets bored!

Next stop Kiev

Yes, I know Kiev isn't on the itinerary. And Elizabeth and I are hoping we aren't actually going to have to stay there. Not that Kiev isn't a lovely city, I'm sure it is, but we really want to go to Moscow. We went to the train station first thing this morning to see about getting tickets to Moscow from Prague. They were only able to get us to Ukraine as you have to get a reservation for the train to Moscow from Kiev. So we bought the tickets to Kiev and (one again) hopefully we'll be able to catch the overnight train from Kiev to Moscow on the 22nd, which is the day we will be arriving.

A brief recap... We will be in Prague until Monday the 20th. On the 20th we will catch the train to Kiev which will not get us there until Wednesday the 22nd. We're not entirely sure why it is going to take that long as generally the trip from Prague all the way to Moscow takes only 36-40 hours. I guess we're on the slow train. Plus, we get to hang out at the border for 10 hours (yes, 10 hours) while they change the train bogies.

The gauge of the tracks is about 3 1/2" wider in the countries of the former USSR than it is in the rest of the Europe. So when crossing borders into one of those countries, in addition to checking passports and visas they change the train bogies. Essentially, they separate each of the train cars, jack them up and replace the wheel sets. And apparently this process takes 10 hours.

That's the latest. We are off to explore Prague. Have a great day!

24 hours and 8 trains later

We made it to Prague. We were wondering there for a bit though. Yesterday (was it really only yesterday?) we missed our train out of London and that began a long series of train hopping to eventually get us here to Prague. We traveled through the night and changed trains literally 7 times. Tomorrow we will be working on figuring out how we will be getting to Moscow, which after talking to a woman at the train station today, sounds like it too could prove to be a bit of a challenge. After that though we plan on spending the afternoon exploring Prague and just relaxing. Our hostel is great and so we are looking forward to getting a good nights sleep. Because there is a long line for the computer and because this keyboard is not anything like the one that I'm used to I'm going to leave it at that for now.

We'll let you all know more when we get the train stuff figured out.