I have to admit that the first time I saw Lake Baikal, I wasn’t as overwhelmed as I expected. We got off the bus after a few days traveling through steppe and walked down from the road to a rocky shore. I was very happy to be there, but my first thought was surprise at the […]
During our week and a half in Siberia, we got to experience a very different part of Russia from the metropolis of Moscow. We traveled throughout Buryatia and to Irkutsk in a bus, visiting as many places of interest as we could. With this different setting came a very different routine and diet for us. […]
The bridges over the Neva River in St. Petersburg go up every night to let oceangoing ships pass. I’d heard that staying up until 1:30 a.m. to watch them was a magical experience. But the night I went, we were inexplicably out of luck. There were plenty of other people standing on the embankment, also […]
As a small town kid, living in the city has been pretty different for me, not least because I’m used to being surrounded by trees and grass all the time. I was excited when I heard that Moscow State University has its own botanicheskii sad or botanical garden. (MSU also has another botanical garden farther […]
Coming from gigantic Moscow, which you could live in for years without seeing all of, Suzdal was another world. Suzdal is so small that you can easily walk across the whole town, and our four-hour walking tour covered most of it while stopping frequently to look at historical sites. There are five monasteries in Suzdal […]
After a couple of weeks at Moscow State University (MGU in Russian), I still find it crazy that I live in a skyscraper. Our dorm rooms are in the massive 31-story “Glavnoye Zdanye” (GZ), or Main Building, of the university. I was convinced for the whole first week I was here that the path between […]