By Mike Frumin , June 2003

subject: in a bowling alley one usually rents shoes anyway, right?

But what if the place doubles as the biggest nightclub in siberia? Well, if your sneakers won't cut it at the door and the local you are with negotiates the transaction, i guess you rent shoes anyway even though we never got anywhere near the lanes. Amazingly enough, the coat-check guy had a stash of shoes for hire, and one pair fit me rather nicely. The much classier/cooler places we went in Moscow didn't say a word about our footwear there, but i guess they do things differently in Asia. Though inside the club there were plenty of svelte, pointy-shoed dybushki (ahem, females), blockheaded goonish guys, and neon-appointed stage dancers, just like in European Russia. Fortunately, the girl from Irkutsk who brought us there (friend of one of the San Franciscans who we have met here) decided to try out her English on us, so we had some interesting conversation with a real Siberian.

Tonight we are on a train to Mongolia (only 33 hours -- pittance!) and I'm nursing my best vodka hangover of the trip so far. All told, I think the week we have spent in Siberia has been our most action-packed week so far. I will try to be succint.

Our mother of all train rides was extremely uneventful -- 77 hours, double-digit naps, boxes of cookies, lots of pork, and a billion glasses of tea. Our car was basically empty (I swear the one other guy in the cabin next to ours sat and looked out the window for the entire ride) and passengers (i.e. me and Nick) never even came close to outnumbering staff in the dining car so we spent too much time deliberating what to do with ourselves in Siberia. After arriving in Irkutsk very early in the morning and taking freezing showers in a hotel where they scream at you in Russian if you ask about hot water, we find that the plane tickets to the northern area of Lake Baikal which we had failed to secure before departing Moscow were in fact waiting for us. Siberian air transport in fact proved to be as unreliable as our books had made it sound.

We actually made it to the airport and thru check-in (a big funnel of people and one tiny door) and security (beep beep) and onto the plane. Then we got off, something was wrong, I think only one engine would start. Here they don't delay flights, they delay announcements as to what may or may not happen to your flight. Apparently, the fact that the announcement about the (initially 1:00 pm) flight was delayed until 8 pm is cause enough to get a refund. I must have worked some serious Frumin magic because without a lick of Russian I got all our money back, including the 10 rubles we paid in cash for checking baggage.

After the airport, we checked into our second hotel of the day (no more cold showers for us) which happened to be the nice, clean, renovated apartment/hostel of the travel agent/tour guide who got us our plane tickets in the first place. From that point up until me and Nick got seperated in the Siberian wilderness, it was pretty standard Lake Baikal stuff. You know, like somehow finding minivan to tiny fishing village on the coast where american guy who's been there for 15 years ("what if we can't find Hank in the village?" "no no, you will find him.") puts us up for a night and then sends us on our phenomenal 3 day 60 kilometer trek down the lake shore over mountains (ok, hillish things), around cliffs, scrambling across rocky hillsides, and through woods and vallies.

I've never done anything like that -- hike and camp for 3 days straight -- let alone in siberia on the worlds largest lake, so I was loving life. Fancying ourselves real Taiga-men, we somehow decided it was wise to split up for a moment. Fuckin stupid, lesson learned. Fortunately we were only about an hour of rugged terrain away from our destination so after waiting for 2 hours at the point where we split up, I hightailed it on home once my logic approached the decision that Nick was either waiting for me there, or dead on some rocks along the way. His conclusion was basically the same, but he took much less time to arrive at it, so he beat me to Listvyanka with just enough time to fail to put together a rescue expedition (despite the help of a local camo-wearing, pickup-driving, Belomore-Canal smoking, boat-repairing hotel owner) and decide to come back into the woods solo to find me. Fortunately the woman selling dried fish at the end of town where I rolled in meta-explained to me that nick was already there, so I found him before he went looking for me. Our hotel that night by the lake had a sweet Banya (the sauna/steamroom/branch-thwapping thing again) so all's well that ends well, but running alone through the woods screaming "Nick" felt like a pretty bad trip.

Anyway, yesterday we came back to Irkutsk so that nick could get some shots because some of the ticks here have encephalitis and since he had 3 of them he thought the odds were not in his favor. Back at our hostel were 2 San Franciscans, one of whom had been here before and knew that Russian girl who took us out and now I'm back to the whole bowling alley/club/rented shoes thing again. I guess I failed miserably to be succint so please forgive me.

Mike