And a blog from Irkutsk, where it is sunny and 39 below, Celcius

Trying again with this blog business. Don’t know how to go about it. I think a mere recounting of principle events, arrivals and departures and tourist sights seen and so on, will give very little sense of the experience of the past week. I am convinced that even the pen/keyboard of the most skilled novelist, endowed with all the strength and dexterity and fineness of syntax accumulated by the English language over the centuries, could not explain why the Tea Spoon Blini Cafe at the Moscow Train station in St. Petersburg was such a very, very miserable place at 9:00 Tuesday, Jan. 8, or why the train on which I wrote my last attempt at blogging was such a wonderful one. But if an attempt at literary representation of the week were to be attempted, perhaps it would center around the ever-popular “light and darkness” theme. It would begin, I would say, with Epiphany, the holiday of Light celebrated 8 days ago. I, on this day, was in Helsinki. For a better literary tone, I would have celebrated Epiphany in some more liturgical, high church setting than the Rock Church of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. There would be a lot more deep theological insight and more candle carrying and such, and the complete looniness of the skinny little Scottish-accented pastor, crazy African preacher, bizarre congregation of non-native English speakers at an English service, church architecture like a UFO built in 1970s Protestant Church-retreat-center style, all brown and uncut stone and meant to be cozy but actually just sort of dirty looking, loony “praise songs” sung led by swaying loons at microphones, etc., would be passed over. Ecclesiastical looniness or no, the service, in which the theme of light was discussed, including much discussion of the fact that in Finland in winter there is not much light at all, would play a key role. This lack of sunlight in the north of the world will play an important role in the coming narrative.

Abby and I are now trading off in blog writing. And I see that she is doing a very fine job of writing a detailed and entertaining account of our journey, so I feel free to continue talking about nothing. You can all just skip this and click on the link “former compoundmate” or whatever I called that link.

So. Finland was indeed cold, and there were indeed few hours of sunlight, but I remember the sun that there was generally being bright and fully, cheerfully illuminating of the Nordic Walking Amazingness that was occuring. Open Scene 2. Time: 6:30 am Monday morning, Helsinki time. Place: neat, attractive park with paths along lakes. Temperature: fairly crisp, at the time described as freezing cold. Mood: expectant beginning-of-journey feeling, mixed with regret of parting friends. Light: none. Okay no actual scene will be written, just the stage-direction-y bit.

Train ride. Dark for many hours. Finally sort of light, but on crowded bus, little feeling of sunlight. Arrival in Petersburg. About an hour of week light, I think. By 6:00 pm, when our wandering about waiting for our train the next morning was in full swing, Stygian Darkness in full reign. This is very important. It means that by 7:00, as it had been dark pretty much since 4:00, we felt like it was about midnight, and we had been out much of the night already. Long night, impossible to describe. Perhaps the fireworks we saw with Vanya play a symbolic role of some kind. They were nice. Some light shone forth even in the freezing darkness. Petersburg is pretty. Mainly dark and cold though. The main moment, I think, is when we emerged from the metro at about... I don’t know, some hour of the morning at which it should have been light, at which we felt that night should have ended and we should be getting on with the “waiting around in the morning for our train” segment of our lives and finished with the “wandering around St. Petersburg all night” segment. But it was still pitch black. This experience of St. Petersburg, I now realize, was very literarily appropriate. It was just as unpleasant as I imagined from Dostoveyski. Anyway, if the literary development to this point was effective, the horror of this darkness, after our night of life in the shadows, would be clear to you. As we trudged along the dark, icy streets, somewhere around Palace Square, in an alley of souvenir stalls, I slipped on the icy and as my legs shot out from under me they brought Abby down with me. We untangled ourselves, retreated into even darker shadows and laughed rather humorlessly for a few minutes. Then we ventured forth again. Soon after this was our miserable visit to the Teaspoon establishment. We slept through most of the sunlight that day, in seats at the back of our long-awaited train to Moscow. We slept sporadically, the door next to us slamming shut often and letting in cold air and dirty water. We got to Moscow in the dark, crossed the street in an underground walkway to another train station, and set about waiting for our next train, scheduled for departure at 2 am or something, I don’t really remember. There was a lot of cold and damp and sleazy pelmeni restaurant and tea from thin plastic cups and observing the drawn-out-over-several-hours spectacle of one bum being fleeced by another. It was dark. We thought our train didn’t exist. It did. I have already described the amazingness of that train. Also, the daylight portion of our train ride included the sun streaming over snowy fields for a few hours. The boys who played Marble Blast Gold with us later gave us chocolate, and when we got to Kazan they came back to proudly point out the spires of the Kremlin and such. It was very sweet.
So. Back to the light and dark. Such a treatment would perhaps make use of the drastic white of the ancient Kremlin walls. We got to Kazan at 3, and the sun was already setting. Soon these white walls were rising dramatically from a dark, very cold city. And I mean cold. It was 24 below, Celsius, I think. I’m not sure how many times in my life I’ve been more cold than coming down the huge hill from that Kremlin, looking for any open building to go inside. The odd Mordor-like night club with smokestack and underground chambers with glass pyramidical roofs sticking up from the ground would make the cut in the description of the landscape. I spent a lot of our time in Kazan slipping on the ice. At this point in our travels there was a certain abandonment of economy. We ate in a real restaurant- one in which my entree, for which I felt guilty for ordering when more economic options were available, was 4 dollars. Also when we went grocery shopping we bought cheese. Yeah. I don’t know what that has to do with light and darkness. The warmth and light of the “trakter” in which we ate? Our need for material comfort after wandering in the cold, dark world?
At the end of our stay in Kazan occurred a most amazing adventure involving our luggage, a locked train suburban train station, insights into the world of homelessness in southwestern Russia... I don’t really know what to say about it, so I’ll leave it in the realm of the hypothetical author about whose description we are speculating. There were a lot of hours of dark. Then we met Elizabeth and her friends on the platform, we entered the train, and we headed to Siberia at last.
The train was cold. A woman in our compartment bought some dog hair one of the crazy merchants who sneak on the train and sprint down the aisles selling odd things. I have nothing else to say about it. It was very, very cold.

I’m tired of this entry. We were in Novosibirsk. Even colder there, but we weren’t on the street as long. Mainly we hung out in this boring museum, because it was warm there. There was a crazy floral arranging competition. As we were with Elizabeth, there was a lot more order and less craziness occurring. We slept in a hotel and ate in very reputable restaurants. Left Novosibirsk in the middle of the night, on a much warmer train. Spent the morning watching the very, very pretty landscape near Krasnoyarsk. I love Siberia. Then that night was Old New Year and there were obnoxious drunk men and it was awful. Giving the computer to Abby now.