(Written on the day.)
Last night we had a fabulous dinner! Nikolai made hot smoked omul (like we'd had for lunch) with mashed potatoes, green beans and a side salad of tomato and cucumber. Dessert was a fantastic cowberry pie. After dinner I sat downstairs with Denise, Rod, Wayne, Fi, Stuart, Shelley and Bruce and enjoyed a glass of wine and some Baileys.
This morning we were able to sleep in since breakfast wasn't until 9am, but I didn't have a very good night. I woke up about four times needing to pee, and since my bathroom was across the hall, I kept opening my squeaky door worrying that I might wake Anna and Bruce. We had cottage cheese pancakes (not my favorite) with sour cream and the other traditional breakfast items we'd eaten the previous morning. We had some free time after breakfast since we decided not to venture to Port Baikal (due to the weather) and Anna did some research on visiting Taltsy, an an impressive outdoor collection of old Siberian buildings set in a delightful riverside forest. She determined we could travel there by public bus and return by private van; everyone agreed and we headed out in the cold to the tourist office to pick up the 11am bus. Fortunately we all got seats, but there were tons of people (locals and backpackers) standing in the aisles since the bus destination was Irkutsk. I was in the front row with Anna and two women squeezed themselves in our legroom. Steph, sitting behind me, was getting completely squashed by the man standing next to her. Thirty minutes and 940 rubles (paid by Interpid since we didn't take the boat) later, we were all happy to disembark - about half the bus needed to get off in order to let us out. Our fearless leader lead us across the nearly empty road to the entrance of Taltsy. The first section of sparse teepees didn't give me much hope for the rest of the museum, but after the series of wooden watermills was a large area of renovated farmsteads, two chapels, a church, some Evenk graves and a 17th century Iliminsk Ostrog watchtower. Anna, quite the naturalist, found a few varieties of mushrooms in the plants and was keen to point them out to us. What a great tour guide.
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| Coffee, vodka, beer... what else would you want at 4pm? |
We returned to Listvyanka via private van (500 rubles, almost half that of the public bus) and ate lunch at a small cafe. I shared a meat pastry with Bruce and ordered the fish soup. More omul, which is very tasty, but I was definitely omuled out. Walked to the hotel to use the internet and spent 2.5 frustrating hours unable to log on to my blog or gmail even though it was working on my iPod touch. Got a latte and chocolate dessert and was sitting with Stuart, Shelley, and Steph when two Russians bought us a round of beer. LP says you must never refuse a drink from a Russian, so we accepted. But next thing we knew, four shots of vodka were delivered to the table. And that's when the trouble started. I managed to get down the vodka, with a bit of Shelley's honey cake as a chaser and slowly worked my way through half of the beer. The men seemed very interested in Stuart, and his head was rubbed by the pot-bellied gray haired captain making him reluctant to use the men's room. Stuart finished two of the vodkas and three+ beers and was pretty drunk walking back to the homestay.
Dinner consisted of chicken, rice and a side salad of cucumbers, not nearly as good as last night in my opinion, but still tasty. After dinner, Kristy taught us the card game Mafia which we played for a few hours before going to bed. I didn't enjoy being the mafia (preferred to be a townsperson or the angel) and got to play two rounds as the spokesperson. As Susie pointed out, I have a terrible poker face and am bad at storytelling. Thank you, I know. Off to bed.
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