Trans-Baikalin' it

Along with about 600 other people, literally, I got off the electrichka yesterday at the stop “Dark Valley” and headed toward Baikal. It’s probably the last weekend it’s safe enough to cross the ice, and I think most of the city of Irkutsk was taking advantage of it. Skiers had been getting off at the 4 or 5 stops before mine, and later trains brought new crowds of people. It was quite the colorful party on the half-hour or 45-minute descent to the ice: there were dogs running around in windbreakers, and old women in bright purple jogging suits, and teenagers blaring music, and groups of middle-aged friends loudly singing songs from their youth, and young women in their usual leather boots and fashionable jeans, and young men in the camo that they for some reason find it necessary to wear every time they are involved in outdoor activities of any kind. My favorite members of the parade were the fur-coated women pulling small children in brightly-painted sleds; the best was when the kids would stare at the snow-covered ground intently until they could reach it, grab a handful of snow, and, laughing hysterically, throw it at their mothers’ behinds. This is apparently the official pastime of children in sleds. The official activity of everyone else was basically falling down: it was a long, steep, slippery way down to lake-level.

Towards Baikal somehow the huge swarms of people disappeared- before the lake groups gradually pulled off to make campfires and cook hotdogs or something, and then as soon as we got to the shore the hugeness of the lake just sort of swallowed everyone. I saw some old bridges and tunnels of the Circumbaikal railroad, and had my first picnic on a frozen beach, and then started out across the ice. It was a bright, sunny day, and the snow on the lake glittered in all the colors of the rainbow, and the jagged mountains on the other side were skirted in neon-blue clouds, and often forest-green trains could wind along the mountainsides on the shore. Overall, it was sort of like a Lisa Frank notebook cover, only it was real life, so rather than being horrible and cheesy it was just pretty. And there were no rainbow-colored unicorns involved, just long strings of skiers in the distance.