Olkhon

Before Leaving for Olhon:

Much can be said about the latest hiking club meeting, which once again was completely unpredictable and unlike all the others, and involved 9-year-old boys running around being really bad at tying knots and getting yelled at for playing with people’s cellphones, and various people repelling about the room, and whatnot, but my favorite part was when Mikhail Nicholaevich, the director, finally arrived, and yelled at everyone for not clearing the table for tea in a timely fashion as he always does, as we sat around and ate cake and tried to figure out why the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia had sent the club a certificate for dedicated work for the furthering of the cause of Orthodoxy. No one ever came up with an answer to this question, nor to the question of how Alexei II had heard of the hiking club of Shelehov. But it was certainly the prettiest certificate I had ever seen. And it came with bouquet of flowers.
I also have to mention the ride home, when Mikhail Nicholaevich found out that people in America don’t go to banyas. His consternation was unfeigned and deep. “But how do they clean themselves?” They take showers. “That’s all? That doesn’t get you clean.”

After Returning from Olhon:
There were really pretty white cliffs, called “the teeth of the predator.” And others called “the Cape of Wishes and the Rock of Love”- they were two cliff things jutting out beside each other, and men had to go to the one on the left and women to the one on the right and throw rocks off them and make wishes. There was some reason, I think, that men were supposed to go to the left, signified by winks from our driver, but whatever vulgar meaning it might have had was lost on us. There were also other cliffs, or large rocks, or whatever these formations would be termed, but I don’t know the names of them all. These cliffs all had really pretty red moss growing on it, and Baikal was its usual blue, and when the sun was out the steppe on the non-Baikal side of the rocks showed some green among the brown, so the cliffs were all colorful scenes. And then there were a few sandy beaches, and a few areas that looked like the desert, with dunes, and a lot of rolling steppe, and then forest, which was almost all larch, at least on the north of the island where we were. I am told that we have larch in America, but I was previously unaware of its existence. It looks like a pine tree but the needles (well Encarta World English Dictionary is telling me that actually it has “clusters of leaves resembling needles”) all turn bright yellow in the fall and fall off. When there are entire forests of the same color yellow, and when the sun shines on the trees, the effect is striking. Also the golden carpeted roads through the forest are nice. Yeah. Pretty place, Olhon. I wonder how I’m supposed to be spelling it. I think Olkhon, actually. But I don’t really understand why we translate gutteral ‘h’ as ‘kh.’ It sounds much more like an ‘h’ than like a ‘k.’ One of our professors here has on occasion spoken of Olkhon with a certain scorn, as a place “that you foreigners always love so much”- actually I have gotten this impression from multiple people - but I defy their anti-tourist rhetoric and like it anyway. Maybe not as much as the hidden, empty beaches we drove around in Buryatia though.

In other news “I wish my baby was born” is a pretty dang sad song. That’s someone’s blood there on his wings; that’s someone’s blood there on his feathers. Also, why does Bob Dylan think of Achilles as being temporary? Oh, I guess Achilles is temporary as in being mortal. Most people are temporary, if Achilles is.

Tuesday morning update:
It’s snowing, and sticking. It snowed some on Olkhon, but really just flakes blowing around, and it’s supposed to be a lot colder there than here. And it’s snowed here before but only lightly between periods of rain or at night. Now the sun’s out, and there’s a real снегопад and the little grove of trees between here and the universtiy are all frosted-looking and the roofs of the houses and cars are white. Only on the actual roads is it still not sticking. This may mean I have to go buy boots today.