So we're comfortably settled at an internet cafe in Irkutsk, tickets in hand and a good meal in our stomachs. Therefore Irkutsk seems like a delightful town at the moment. It seems to be in the midst of a heat-wave, so we really don't want to be outside carrying our backpacks around. We do have to stock up on some food for our next 34 hours on the train--we're taking the "telephone pole" (it stops at every one) tonight to Ulaanbaatar. As far as we can tell, the train will hardly move from tomorrow early afternoon until late evening--it's projected to take seven hours to leave Russia and three hours to enter Mongolia. It looks like our tickets are first class again, even though we ordered second class (this explains why they were so expensive!) but I think we'll be sharing with two others anyway. We're hoping the price of the tickets will weed out the worst drunkards.

It's typical, but unfortunate nonetheless, that just as we're adjusting to Russia, we leave. I was totally intimidated here at first--I even refused to jaywalk (cars or no) in case there was a policeman waiting around the corner somewhere to give me a fine. We were repeatedly warned that many police in Russia supplement their incomes by making up fines to charge foreigners so we should have copies of our visas and passports (which we never got around to making) so that they wouldn't make off with the originals. Given how smooth our interactions with officialdom have been (nonexistent, in other words), it seems like I was a bit overly worried. Olkhon was much more relaxing than Moscow and St. Petersburg, though, because you could tell that no one cared what you did on the island. You could go anywhere, do whatever--no one is watching or minding. Irkutsk is such a mix, what with those downtown wooden houses, occasional gorgeous late 19th century buildings, and new malls housing hipster restaurants for the new Russians, found here as everywhere else, who are growing fat (or, in the case of young girls, alarmingly thin) on oil money etc.

That's something I've been meaning to comment on for a while. Russian girls must be the thinnest Western girls in the entire world. Seriously, Norwegian girls look pretty plump in comparison. It's strange, because the girls are so thin (average size is probably 2--32/4 in Europe), but the women are not. The girls are also so very fashionably dressed! Actually, I haven't followed what's hip for a while, but the girls in Moscow and P'burg looked just like the girls in New York and Paris--or even better in many cases--while here in Irkutsk they look much like the girls in Oslo. I guess the Siberian girls who have set such trends in modelling maybe had a trickle-down effect?

Russia has been such an experience--a real mix of the familiar and delightful with the totally strange. I suppose any country of this size must be like that, but it is also unexpected: so many things are similar to Western Europe that I'm much more surprised when something is genuinely different. And at the same time, nothing is ever so similar that there isn't an undercurrent of strangeness that always keeps one a little off balance.

B finally was able to shave his head and beard yesterday. He borrowed a hairclipper from a German guy and now looks suitably like a Buddhist monk. He shaved his face in the banya. Russian banyas are quite nice, especially when the shower you've been promised in your homestay is nonexistent and people keep telling you that it works fine, but no water comes out! Banya and internet were both quite expensive on Olkhon--$8/hour each--but both seemed quite important. The banya is much like a standard sauna or Roman bath, but after our Sunday evening "bath"--I had a lovely dirt tan from the bike ride, and we bathed in two buckets, one cold and one warm--a real banya was just the ticket. It is of course far too hot to bear inside, so you throw buckets of cold water on yourself and gasp. The banya is heated with a genuine wood fire--wood is one of the things there is plenty!! of here--and, although I don't think I would bother to do it often, given that there was no running water on Olkhon it was an absolute necessity.

It looks like our Gobi trip may be a go--if so, we fly down there on Friday. I think the guy is picking us up from the train station Thursday morning, so we'll get oriented in UB on Thursday before we head down to the desert. The guy wants payment in cash for the tour--I'm not sure how we're supposed to be able to take out $1000, but maybe he knows of an ATM in UB that dispenses dollars?--but he seems pretty reliable although very slow on e-mail. We'll see. My diet in Mongolia is going to be very bland, and I'm already driving B crazy by meditating out loud on how delightful food in Beijing and Vietnam is going to be. Chili! Lime! Fish sauce! Garlic! All elements that have been sorely missing from our diet here. Even the good meals--and the food on Olkhon was quite nice--just don't have as much flavor as we're used to. The fish on Olkhon, which was served twice a day, was delightful, however. It is a small white fish called omul, and you could tell that it was pretty much still wriggling on the plate as you were eating it. Delicious!

Tomorrow will be a pretty hellish day. We expect to spend the entire day hanging around train stations waiting to pass customs. BORING! But we have reading material, so hopefully it won't be too bad. We don't know if we'll have any trouble with our visas when leaving. Our hostel in St. Petersburg claimed that they registered our visas, which is required within 3 business days of arriving, but we're pretty skeptical that they were telling the truth, as every other hostel has had a notice about payment for visa registration. However, we stayed in hotels in Veliky Novgorod and Vladimir (even typing Veliky Novgorod gives me a bit of a pang--the old part of that town was so beautiful!!), so they may well have registered us (as they are legally required to do). Since then, we've been on the move all the time before three business days pass, so we haven't needed to register, and we decided not to on Olkhon because there is supposedly no way for the authorities to check. I think the fine is only 1500 rub ($60) if we have trouble, and it only applies if you try to get a Russian visa again, but I would still prefer not to have problems. So we've saved every receipt and train ticket to show them if they want to know where we've been. We shouldn't have trouble in Mongolia or China, as we both have visas for the latter and I for the former (B doesn't need one--a concession demanded by GWB for agreeing to trade with Mongolia).

So much for the "miscellaneous" post I've been planning to write for a while. Next post from Mongolia (I hope!).