Things about trip

I have given up on ever writing a full account of our group trip, and it would mainly involve over-enthusiastic descriptions of trees and hills that would probably not be very interesting anyway, so just a few things that come to mind right now:
1) Russian trains are really pretty, and Irkutsk is pretty at night from a train window with a full moon over the Angara River, and the Irkutsk train station is also pretty. And the cups, glass in decorative metal holders, that they give you on the train are also pretty. I loved our little sleeping car, and turning out all the lights in it and sitting in the dark and looking out at the moon-lit world. Elizabeth (our coordinator) made us peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, which was very, very nice of her; I have no idea how she got the peanut butter.
2) We saw an Old Believer church, and the museum across the street that is the private collection of this one Old Believer dude, and both were very cool. The museum consists basically of stuff this old guy picked up around the village, from the trash, or when people got rid of stuff or found something interesting and didn’t know what to do with it, so the collection was amazingly varied. There was a beautiful 17th century iconostasis, and old hand-written books about the appropriate construction of churches, and lots of old farm implements, and old clothes and quilts, and a piece of petrified wood, and some mammoth and woolly rhinoceros bones (!), and a bunch of old hinges, and this amazing huge old wooden hanging balance that very dramatically registered the weight of the plastic cigarette-lighter our long-bearded host put on one side. There was pre-revolutionary money, and old Chinese coins, and for some reason an American dollar.
3) Driving around the woods in the fall is very nice.
4) Singing along to Aqua in a van is very fun.
5) Old vans break down and get stuck in sand a lot. One should not attempt to use them as beach buggies.
6) We climbed a large mountain with snow on top, and it was very pretty. Then for some reason we ran down it.
7) We ate a lot of... cedar nuts, I guess? Like pine nuts but from cedar. We got them straight from the cedar cones, and cracked the shells with our teeth, and there was the delicious meat. Unlike the pine nuts Jack and I bought in the Sierra Gorda one time, these shells one could crack without breaking one’s teeth, and keeping a bunch in one’s pocket provided a good activity for when one was standing around on ferries or waiting for ferries or waiting for one’s van driver to come back from randomly pulling over and going swimming in Lake Baikal, which happened a lot.
8) Lots of other fun and interesting and memorable things happened.

Now I have a quiz for you all. It is called Полезьно для здоровы? or Useful for the Health? This is a phrase we heard a lot. So, these are yes or no questions- are these things good for you or not? You might wish, before taking this quiz, to research the life expectancy in Irkutsk. Ok, here goes:
1) On a cold day, running into a freezing cold lake.
2) Drinking beer, on any occasion.
3) Drinking homemade hard liquer offered to you by unknown persons.
4) Eating sausage consisting of 60% fat at every meal.
5) Drinking tea with large amounts of sugar and 6% milk at every meal
6) Covering all food in mayonaise or sour cream.
7) On a hike, drinking water.
8) When with large groups, having everyone drink from the same mugs, and occasionally all eat from the same spoon, passing the dish in question around in a circle.
9) On a hike, eating trail mix along the way.
10) When climbing a mountain, choosing as an eating location the snow-covered peak.
11) Eating large handfuls of raw cranberries.
12) Sitting on a rock.
13) Eating snow on a remote mountain.
14) Sitting on a folded-up pair of jeans, and a sweatshirt, with a rock under these.
15) Not having any shock-absorbers in one's van.
16) Running very quickly from freezing lakes to boiling hot springs, many times in succession.


I think there were more amuzing things than these, when we were on our trip, but now I don't remember them. Anyway, here are the answers:
1) Obviously healthy, especially if said lake is Baikal, which for some reason seems to be especially healthy
2) Especially healthy after swimming in Baikal, and when one is driving a van.
3) Alcohol is almost always medicinal, the higher the concentration the better. Homemade liquer is probably more natural, and therefore probably more medicinal.
4) Meat is natural and healthy.
5) Tea is also very healthy.
6) Dairy products are very healthy.
7) Very bad. Weighs down your body, slows you down. Does various other bad things that I don't understand. Carrying metal thermoses of tea with sugar in one's backpack, on the other hand, does not weigh one down.
8) Not distinctly polyesna dlya zdoroza, but there is no question of it being nipolezna either.
9) Bad. Still don't know why.
10) Good. Where else would you eat?
11) I guess it's true that this is healthy. But it still seems like an odd thing to do. Actually the cranberries we ate were pretty good, if still requiring a certain stoicism.
12) This is the worst thing you can possibly do, especially for women but for men too. People who do this will never bear children. Refer to the birth rate in Russia. Also to the answer to number 1. Our attempts to bring these things up to our guides were uncomprehensible to them. But, for serious, for all Russians, this is very, very bad.
13) Bad. It will make you urinate too quickly or something. I'm not sure why this is bad.
14) Refer to number 12. Bad. One's childbearing potential is still sucked through the clothing into the cold rock.
15) Apparently not a problem. We started referring to one of the vans as the marshrutka of death.
16) Despite the concern over the cold involved in number 12, same as answer as number 1.