So we just got back (well 3 days ago) from our weeklong program-provided trip outside of Irkutsk. The first few days took place in Ulan Ude, a big city located on the opposite side of Baikal. We spent the rest of the trip very closely in touch with nature around, on, and in Baikal.

Ulan Ude has a population similar in size to that of Irkutsk, and located 10 hours away by train, is its next-door neighboor by Siberian standards. It serves as the capital of the Buryatia Autonymous Republic....When an ethnic minority makes up significant portion of a region's population, Russia bestows upon it some sort of autononomy (I think its allowed to hold its own parliament) that somehow distinguishes it from the Oblasts, Krayas, and other administrative subdivisions with funny names. The Buddhist Buryats make up only around 30% of Buryatia's population, but despite their minority status in their own republic....they've left their imprint on the land with a lot of pagodas or temples or monasteries whatever the technical term is for large Buddhist houses of worship that always contain a statue of Buddha, places to leave food and money, a square of tables with lots of golden wheels behind which monks study and recite from the sutras, and ocatagonal prisms that you can spin to grant yourself whatever is scrawled in attractive but unreadable Buryat Calligraphy of on the exterior. We saw a few places like this. One of our guides enthusiastically expounded the meaning and purpose of every spinning toy, wheel decoration, and painting, but we became skeptical when he claimed some sort of prayer mat was designed for push-ups.



Coexisting with the buddhists in Buryatia are members of another religious minority...the old believers. I'm not sure what old beliefs they hold because I was five minutes late to my baikal studies class the day their importance was discussed...I think they disagreed with reforms in the Orthodox church in the seventeenth century. Most of them live in isolated communities throughout Siberia, maintain little contact without the outside world, and, alongside their religous practices, have reformed few aspects of their daily lives accross the past four hundred years. From observation I know that the men have long beards...anyways, I'm sure wikipedia could provide a much more detailed and accurate description than than I am right now.


Well, we visited one of these villages. It had a museum that contained mammoth bones, money from around the world, and a big scale, religious icons, and some other things I don't remember because I was too busy playing with my camera. I didn't really know where we were until the musem guide revealed the true extent of his lifelong unshavenness. His beard already looked amazingly, rasputinesquely long before his modesty gave way and he showed us the three fourths of it concealed behind his open-air-historical-musuem-character style robe. I think I remembered something Mrs. Kokernack told us in Western Civ about the pride the Bouyars or sixteenth century Russian men in general held towards their beards....so I made an assumption about our location....or maybe I just intuitively associated beards with oldness because I mistakedly asked one of the other students standing directly next to the guide if we were in a village of Older/Elderly Believers.

Our whirlwind tour of Siberian religious diversity continued the next day when we observed a baptism at a contemporarily believing Orthordox Monastery. The priest told that people should stop attempting to view buddhism as more progressive than Christianity because Jesus was born several hundred years later than Buddha and his religion is therefore more contemporary.


We saw very little Ulan Ude itself beyond the central pedestrian street and square whose major attractions are the world's largest head of Lenin and a rundown late-night carnival with broken bumper-cars.


Because showers run in short supply in Siberian villages, we went swam several times inBaikal...an experience supposedly so body-numbing it will add ten years to life. It really didn't feel much colder than Maine ocean water in June, but we could drink directly from it...and at one point cows from a nearby village arrived to wade in the water in front of us! I think that was the highlight of my Siberian experience thus far. When I entered into one of once hourly my photo fits that occur when I delay the rest of the group because I frantically capture around 16 pictures of the same image...none of which will be of interest to anyone later, one of the guides laughed at what appeared to be an urban american seeing farm animals for the first time. I tried to explain to him that cows definitely have they're place in Northern New England society...but that it was just so neat to one roaming free along a beach...and that later that night it'd know how to meander back to its owner's front yard to be milked. New Hampshirites don't place that much trust in their livestock.

We also saw a few villages, the the lake's largest peninsula (though I'm not sure where this classification comes from because we rode a ferry to get there), and 967543214 birch trees. Here birches don't induce that childhood thrill of discovery in finding something light in the middle of the dark and scary forest....because they often make up the enitre forest. For this reason everything in the woods brighter and happier and theres no feeling that your leaving something behind when you enter.

It was also fun just to spend time in these villages. In my life as a tourist, I think I've only visited folksy villages free from twentieth century architecture when the village has instituted zoning laws to prevent the contruction of twentieth century architeture in order to preserve the folksiness that attracts so many tourists. But these places were authentic. Because they are located directly next to Baikal, I'm sure they see they're fair of visitors. But from the lost goats wandering up and down the dirt roads, to rusting fishing boats parked permanently on the beach, I felt like I was observing living, breathing rustic country-villageness that hadn't been recreated for revenue.

Tourism is obviously messier and less efficient here. Though we were on an official tour, it seemed the only official daily policy followed was to ignore anything written on the official schedule, and our official guides were much more interested in the girls in our group than drawing the american line forbidding relationships between um...tour guide and guidee? But the trip definitely surpassed any great outdoor excursion I've experienced in the US....or maybe I'm happy to have finally found a culture that openly embraces disorganization.