Post-Peace Corps Adventure

Hello again. In the year since I last posted, I've had some more adventures. I will briefly tell about my big one, the post-Peace Corps Trans-Siberian Railroad Adventure that Anna and I embarked on in July of 2008.

We met in Japan, where her parents live, and spent a few days there, checking out Tokyo and surrounding areas. Japan was great. Everything was clean, efficient, and delightful. We saw Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. We went to museums and walked through the streets. We had a good time.

Next we flew to Beijing. We did all kinds of touristy things there. We walked on the Great Wall, and went to the Forbidden City. We saw the buildings and things they were preparing for the Olympics. We were impressed with how clean Beijing was, but people told us it was just to get ready for the Olympics. One of our favorite things in Beijing was the astronomy museum, which is a funky little old museum, but it had some very cool old astronomical instruments.

From Beijing, we got on the Trans-Siberian railroad bound for Mongolia. It was a fun train ride. We met an American girl studying in Ulan Bataar, and a Mongolian guy studying in Beijing, and the four of us hung out during the long ride. On the border, they have to change the bogeys, or the wheels, of the train, because the tracks are different. That meant we had to spend a few hours out on the platform at about 1 am. But that was a fun time.

Mongolia was beautiful. We only stayed in the capital, Ulan Bataar, long enough to shower and rest up, then we went out to a national park, and stayed in a ger (yurt) at a family's camp there. There were other foriegn tourists there, mostly Swedish, and we all got along great. Anna and I went for a 2 day horse back ride, staying in other gers, and seeing the scenery and a monastary on the way. We also saw a huge, silver, Genghis Khan statue out in the middle of nowhere, that the Mongolian guides were pretty proud of.

After Mongolia, we got on the train for Russia. Our first stop was Irkutsk, by Lake Baikal. We stayed in a hostel, and went to the lake, we also went to a neat wooden architecture museum.

On the train again, we next stopped at Yekaterinburg. This was mostly just a convient way to break up the trip, but it was a nice city. We saw some museums and memorials and walked around in the rain. We stayed at the Museum of Geology Hotel, which sounds a neater than it actually turned out to be.

Our last stop was in Moscow. Moscow felt very European. Everyone was dressed classy, and things were expensive. We saw St. Basil's cathedral, and the Kremlin, we went to the Russian Circus, and we rode lots of subways, which have a lot of art and history themselves.

It was a super cool trip!