Russia Trip

I got back two weeks ago from another trip to Russia, which was fascinating as usual. It's great to finally have my blog fixed so I can return to telling you about my travels. The statue above in in the Moscow Metro, Komsomolskaya Station. The Komsomol was the youth wing of the Communist Party.

The good news from Russia is that it is actually quite affordable now, for the first time in many years. A steep devaluation of the ruble means that for foreigners, prices are low. I stayed at a nice small hotel in St. Petersburg, the Kristoff, for $80 U.S. for a room including a generous and delicious breakfast buffet. The hotel is on Zagorodny Prospect, within walking distance of most of the city's attractions. Meals both in Petersburg and Moscow mostly came to $10 or less, which is cheaper than anything except the food courts and fast food places here in Montreal.

Once again, as in 2011, I travelled with Friendship Force International (www.friendshipforceinternational.org.) I stayed with a local host in a lovely home in a Moscow suburb for a week, enjoying some of the famous Russian hospitality and extensive sight-seeing, and met some very interesting fellow travellers from the U.S., the U.K., India and Japan. The local hosts were most accommodating, and the program included visits to two of the centres of the Russian space program. The suburb where we stayed was formerly a closed city, but now it is wide-open and seems to be thriving. Traffic was amazingly heavy, and within just a couple of blocks of my host's home, which was new and very comfortable, a series of five luxury hi-rise condo buildings is going up.

Keep reading in the next weeks for more information on my trip. It's nice to be back, but I miss Russia already.

Amazing Siberia

I just returned from three weeks in Russia, including my first visit to Siberia, storied land of suffering and exile. I can report that there is a lot more to the place than those old tales, however true and valuable they may be.
Irkutsk, capital of eastern Siberia, is a booming cityof about 600,000 inhabitants with lots of traffic and new building. Made famous by the Dekabrist revolutionaries of 1825, it has long been considered the pearl of this vast, underpopulated region. The noble revolutionaries of the 19th century and their wives who voluntarily joined them in exile brought cultrue to this remote, forbidding area. Some of the mansions they built here still survive, along with numerous old churches and even a large Roman Catholic church built by Polish exiles.
Today Irkutsk is home to a large academic community and appears to be benefitting from some of the wealth generated by Russia's oil, gas and mineral development. There is still poverty, but the general mood seems upbeat.
I travelled to Irkutsk as part of a tour organized by Friendship Force, (http://www.friendshipforce.org) an international organization that brings together diverse groups of people who visit one another's homes. My host in Siberia was very generous and welcoming and did a lot to make my stay very pleasant. The same applied to a different host in St. Petersburg. I'll tell you more about the trip with pix in the coming weeks.