Fallready

Just when I started to get used to the summer... what do I see? Leaves that turn yellowish, signature of the fall season to start. This was a short summer. If only I had known, I would have spent more time outside rather than on my computer pretending I am writing something informative while I am only procrastinating.
Bye bye summer... Thanks for passing by. Just give me a ring next time so I make sure I don't miss you. Here's a short salute to the new season:

Ferns are getting brown,
Mama deer has abandoned her fawn
Squirrels are busy getting the last nuts off the ground
Fall has arrived and I am feeling down...yawn.

-B. L.

Always too soon for tarasoon

I realized I closed a bit prematurely the chapter about my vacations on the lake Baikal, so allow me to come back to it and relate some stories for you, even if it is already 10 days old. Today I will tell you about one of the worst experiences I ever had under the sun: trying tarasoon.

Tarasoon is a drink that may look harmless when presented in a small innocent glass... and since it is a buryat specialty you have to go to a yurta to go drink it, and the whole thing is almost attractive and you would be tempted to try. Even when the locals tell you that it is made from milk of a mare, that has been curdled and then distilled, you may still think "Well, why not? Curdled mare milk might just be a source of nutrients that has been mistakenly overlooked in the western world..."
Mares can sleep quietly out of Buryatie. Tarasoon will never be popular. Proof? Type "tarasoon" in google and nothing will come up. Only under "tarasun", it comes listed in the 3rd page. And what does it say? Here you go:
"Prayers are offered and sacrifices made to all the Heavenly Burkans [...]. People [..]ask the spirits, especially Sagadé U!gu!gun, for rain, good crops, and children. When they ask the gods for children they offer Sagadé U!gu!gun twenty pots of tarasun [...]"
(from http://www.sacred-texts.com/asia/jss/jss14.htm)
See? Even the buryats don't drink it! They give Sagade U!Gu!Gun 20 pots of it! And I can tell you that Sagade U!Gu!Gun must be sorry. I am sure he regrets not having applied as God in other places such as Scotland or France. I tried Tarasoon... from the glass you see on the picture, I drank about 1/10th. From the face I made after drinking it, I kept wrinkles that will never disappear. Describing the taste while remaining polite is a challenge, so I will just say that it tastes like someone already drank it before. I guess it tastes like distilled curdled mare milk is supposed to taste like.
May this blog serve as warning to all tourists who feel adventurous enough to try Tarasoon. Let Sagade U!Gu!Gun have it, and have a Stella instead.

Tough time for Niva

I have not talked about my Niva for a while, so i thought I'd mention it again today. Niva had some small issues with the transfer case when, in an attempt to show off the 4x4 abilities of Niva to my parents, I must have inadvertently damaged the transfer case over a stone in the Altai mountains. I also inadvertently drove about 800km with it before going to the mechanics, which apparently did not help. No matter how much progress i made in Russian these last 4-5 days, it was still difficult to convince the mechanics that breaking the transfer case and driving the shortest distance that was separating me from him should have been covered by the warranty (the same warranty that did not cover filling up the car with diesel... I definitely should have read between the lines when I signed up).

Well, anyway, I figured that, since my car breaks down so often, I should enjoy it to its full potential in the short periods when it is good shape... So I went out with my friends Tim, Cedric, and Mandy, all of them enthusiastic owners of Niva, and we kicked around some mud. My Niva definitely showed better performance than theirs, mainly because of the new roof rack that I installed and which looks pretty damn cool.

Below, a failed attempt at going up a muddy hill. I wish the movie showed better how steep that was... It was so steep, and I was going so fast, that when I finally passed the hill (not shown, for some reasons) I literally experienced zero gravity for a few seconds. That's how bad that was.

Si c'est si bien, Baikal les voir!

A place like lake Baikal deserved a good French pun as a title for my short section about it. Enough poems, songs and legends have already been written about Lake Baikal and there is no need for one more stylish account of how nice that is. So I'll get to the point: The lake is nice and big, and there is a shitload of beautiful sceneries of landscape not yet spoiled by man.

During the 4 days we spent there, our HQ was located on Olkhone island, where we (we=my parents and me) had all the comfort we needed: a room for three, a bania at 2km for our daily session of sweating and exfoliating, and ecological restrooms across the potato field. We lived like kings. Food mainly consisted of omoul, the infamous fish from the lake: so we had raw omoul salads, steamed omoul, grilled omoul, smoked omoul, dry omoul, fried omoul with potatoes and finally, omoul soup. When omouls are not on a table or in someone's stomach, they roam freely in the lake where they serve as food for the "nerpa", the freshwater seal from the lake Baikal. Nerpas have it easier than the omouls: There is no dish based on nerpa, whose goal in life is mainly to serve as an attraction for tourists like me who cross half the lake to see him behaving like a regular seal, except that it's a big deal because it is the only seal leaving in fresh water.

Well, I have tried to be very down to earth with my post, but I need to be honest... I still have very vivid images of the lake in my mind, because it is such a wonderful place. Here is a small movie that should convey better how great it is there... (I recommend to pump up the volume)


By the way, if you want to go there, I recommend you to contact the agency "Baikal Nature". They are cool, young, knowledgeable and flexible...and they also speak French...what else can you ask?

The woolly mammoths of Akademgorodok

It took me about 9 months to discover the mammoths of Akademgorodok, hidden in the back of the building across the street from Traveller's coffee (that building is sometimes referred to as the Institute of Acheology and Ethnography... still, if you are looking for it, it is easier to ask about "the building across Traveller's"). That is about 6 months to even know that there were mammoths in my town, and 3 to motivate myself to go see them.
2 specimens of Mammoth primigenius are exposed in the hallway of the institute, and displayed free of charge for the people who enjoy a bit of culture over a double fat free latte. I believe they are woolly mammoths, but the wool has long gone off the skelettons of these guys, so it is hard to tell. So is the trump, which probably drifted away from the mammoth's nose along with the melting glacier at the end of the ice age (that is pure speculation from my part, don't quote this as a scientific fact).
Note the extra effort by the zealous staff to make them look more realistic by placing plastic dinosaurs and alligators at the feet of the giant beast.

The eclipse

Unless your only source of information about Novosibirsk is this present blog, you should have known that a total solar eclipse was planned in Novosibirsk on August 1st 2008. A good occasion to go for another boat tour on the Ob and watch the eclipse from a place with no risk of anything hiding our sight.
I thought I had been in a total eclipse before (1999, France). Either I was not at the right location, or maybe eclipses in the western world are not that impressive, but in the end, my expectations were not that high. I was expecting something like that:
What you are looking at is a picture taken proactively prior to the real eclipse. It is my right-hand side finger, the tip of which happens to coincide with the diameter of the sun. I thought this was similar to what I was going to experience, so you'll understand that I joined the boat expedition more for the shahsliks and the beer than the astronomical experience.

Well, what we saw was much more impressive (if you don't believe me, ask the other 10,000 tourists flocking to Novosibirsk for the occasion):

That's what we saw... but the eclipse is in fact much more than the Moon going in front of the Sun: until the sun is 100% covered, the light is pretty much normal. But then, at once, it is like someone switches off the light and you can see the stars. And everything goes dark:
On the left, this is minutes before the eclipse (no photoshop). On the right, this is during the 2 minutes of the full eclipse (no photoshop).



In the end, this turned out to be a magnificent experience, almost spiritual... And I also had beer and shashlik on the boat so I really had a great day.