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.