A dead nerpa. Unknown photographer. The only one of Baikal’s endemic seals, called nerpa, that I saw in the wild was dead. It was on a beach near a town called Ust-Barguzin, a settlement on the edge of Lake Baikal. To get to Ust-Barguzin from Ulan-Ude was a two hundred and sixty five kilometer slog […]
Our coupe on the Trans-Siberian. Owen Yager photo I’m starting to write this post on the first morning of a train ride that will take us from Irkutsk, on the western shore of Lake Baikal, to Moscow. We got on this train some twelve hours ago; in total, we will be on this train for three […]
When we flew in, seven and a half weeks ago, Moscow was still in the throes of winter. Playing fields that we walked past on the way to our classes were shrouded in a foot of snow, still. The sun set early and the fashion that people were flaunting was one of coats, leather or […]
Our first day in Moscow, we all went on a tour of the city’s subway system and I remember looking around at it and reminiscing on the ease of waiting outside of Willis for a Northfield Lines bus to the Minneapolis – Saint Paul airport. I’d spent time in cities before this, but never enough […]
As I’m sitting down to write this, the TV in our dorm’s common room is playing a Russian news clip in which a journalist with a microphone goes walking down a line of people waving Syrian flags and holding pictures of President Bashar Al-Asaad – a contrast from the rebel-centric media that we see […]
Moscow State University’s main building at night. Owen Yager photo. On the top floor of Moscow State University’s main building, a 790 foot Stalinist behemoth, sits the Earth Science Museum at Moscow State University (Muzei Zemlevedeniya MGU, in Russian). I realize, as I walked around the museum, how odd it was be looking at something […]