Bon Apart Hotel Tomsk

I awoke this morning in my bed on the train to find a significant landscape change, the thicker forest has been replaced by a barren plateau covered with a brown grass and pockmarked by thin white trees, strangely reminiscent of the Australian outback, with only the layer of snow and frost giving away the ...

... To travel with no documents. No passport.______________No driver's licence. Not legal. But, not quite illegal? When I have ...

... Here are The Top 5 Worst Things About Siberia: 1. GETTING KICKED OUT OF THE "SINYAYA BORODA" ROCK BAR 2. NO SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY - Russians wish for and spend most of their time thinking about money. They also want sex, power, and alcohol. These are personal desires which, if fulfilled, would provide society with nothing. Most people also want to have fun and friends. Some, though, don't even want friends. The most intelligent Russians use ...

... loves joking and giggling, wore a viking's bra, blond pigtails, and a viking's helmet. She played me in Russian Scrabble, while we ate. Russian tradition also states that your next year will go similarly to how you enter it. "Ty budesh vxodit v Novym Gode, kak luzer!" I yelled in Sasha's face. (You're gonna enter the New Year as a loser!) I spelled, "KNYAZ", for a big 33 points, then ridiculed Sasha. But, she grabbed her viking's sword and held it ...

... good polka-er herself, says her Uncle Mike "kicks himself in the butt", he polka's so fast.) Eventually, each pair of females we danced with swooped their arms over our heads and left us for the next guy. During another dance, slow snake-charming music played. All the guys calmly walked around all the girls, each gender circling in a different direction. And, suddenly, a whistle blew, the music sped up, and everyone-grabbed-the-nearest-person-and ...

... is clean and musical; she's self-confident, and she has a cute and innocent Russian husband with whom she gets along well. Ludmila. This bespectacled teacher wears short, brown hair. She seems full of worry, and she tires easily. She has a daughter my age, who is paralytic and who writes poetry. The daughter and I had wanted to meet, but it never happened. A student of Ludmila's, Anastasia. This seventh ...

... a hair salon by day and hops on one foot by night, mocks people and hillariously plays the victim when people mock her. But, on ice skates, she was the victim of her own tree-like coordination. In serious discussions, she tries to be as adult as possible and wiser than me. As if to convince herself, she often says she's a content person, and that she's never offended by anything. Cute, blue eyes want to protect her. Her burly body usually wears a ...

... if women; and, now that there's capitalism, richer. Some climb heartlessly. Those who possess a certain Russian character (usually, these are uneducated, yet sometimes they're very successful businessmen) are dark and interested only in what's "interesnyy" (having monetary or otherwise very practical benefits) and look like they haven't enjoyed themselves in years. They remember the recent "perestroika" (reorganization) of their country. They remember having ...

... life? Firstly, I wear a lot of clothes when I go out. This creates an inconvenience, because whenever I go inside - to friends' homes, to a beauty salon where I give English lessons, to bars - I have to take them all off and find a place to put them. (Well, I don't take ALL of my clothes off. The beauty salon would have to pay me more.) And now to the second point: my body sometimes weakens ...

... ponder it. It has a periwinkle first floor. Its second-to-fourth floors are perfect white. The long building's windows are simple, proper, square, and perfect. Lights under each second floor window light up the building like a pearl. It stands towards me, with its six columns and slogan on top (it's the region's head judicial building), sure of its perfection. It seems as if everything inside must be perfect, too; and yet, it can't be. I walk to the end ...