I've got quite a bit of catching up to do. The rest of the Middlebury students left town around December 20th, after our final exam of the semester, so it's just been me and a Virginian named Robert Frasco and a steadily expanding circle of Russians and internationals here through Christmas, New Year's, Orthodox Christmas, Old New Year, and now the start of a new semester. A history built on two calendars means twice as many holidays, and Moscow essentially shuts down, or stays up all night for two weeks straight, depending on how you look at it. I labored under cloudy skies on applications and projects and reading novels and when the sun set went off looking for other stuff to do. Eleanora Viktorovna and I have become quite good at telling each other stories. On Jan 7th, Orthodox Christmas, I flew out of Moscow at 5:30 am and arrived in Vienna at 6:30 am. After taking a bus into town, wandering around the train station's neighborhood for a few hours, and lamenting how deplorably I have let my German deteriorate, I checked into my hostel, which was called Wombat's and must certainly be one of the nicest hostels in the world. It kind of reminded me of a college student union. I spent three days in Vienna walking around very clean streets and museums and meeting other world travelers at the hostel before taking a bus to Split, Croatia overnight. From there, in short, I took a ferry out to the island Hvar, slept in Stari Grad one night and Hvar Town the other, and took another ferry all the way down the coast to Dubrovnik at the southern tip of Hrvatska, the most singular city in the world. I took a room in Dubrovnik for 100 kuna ($20) from a crazy guy named Ivo Gugic, who told me a lot of great stories about the travelers that have come through his place and was in all the best host you could ask for. Croatia's Dalmatian coast is founded on tourism, so first of all nearly everyone speaks English, and second of all in the winter, when the water's too cold to swim and you can't lie on the beaches, nearly all of the infrastructure built up to accomodate all of the tourists is very inexpensive. So although I didn't get to swim in that azure water, the weather was fine compared to Moscow's and I traveled very inexpensively. From Dubrovnik I took another overnight bus to Zagreb, the capital, whence I took a train back to Vienna and flew back to Moscow. Zagreb must be the most heavily-graffitied city in the world. I didn't spend enough time there to do the city justice, and I would like to go back when I learn Serbo-Croatian. I arrived in Moscow Friday night, went shopping Saturday for stuff like a headlamp and ski pants and gloves, and left late Saturday night for Appetiti, a small mining town just south of Murmansk. An astounding 33 hours later we (5 Americans and a British girl) arrived, dressed in heavy layers, and met up with our Russian guides before heading out to the wilds. I have never met a person like Igor Vladimirovich Arkhipov, our guide, and I will never forget him. He was more full of life in his calmest moments than most people are when they're ecstatic. We lived for a week in a tent, skiing up and down white-clad mountains on cross country skis, eating pasta with ketchup, freezing our hands while putting up tents and then warming them again by the stove. These guys were as hard as nails, never complained of cold feet, and could work without gloves for 30 minutes without feeling the frost while my hands went dead after 30 seconds. When they aren't slogging up mountains on 1000 calories a day and cutting down trees with their bare hands they're back at the base slugging vodka and belting out Russian songs over feverish guitar. They were times when I cursed my decision to go, especially when it fell to me to prepare breakfast and I had to get up at 6 in the -10 C morning to fetch water from the stream, but this was really one of the most authentic experiences of my life. In the north, angling your skis up a mountain pass, all of the self-consciousness of the city vanishes. On the last day we packed all of our stuff on sleds, climbed on, and were towed behind snow-mobiles at 40 mph through the tundra, terrified the whole damn time of falling off and fearing frostbite from the wind chill tacked onto a frost of -20 C ( -2 degrees F). As we swung through the last pass into the Khibini Mountains, the afternoon sun just above the red horizon, I caught a glimpse of Arkhipov swinging out slalom-style behind the snow mobile: he had decided to put on mountain skis and be towed like a water-skier into the city and was yelling "My soul is singing!"
I'll have pictures in a bit. Right now my internet is too slow for the file sizes.
