Saratov Hotel Saratov

My progress is slow because of the famous DPS being very active on Russian highways. Most of the people I know, including myself, have been caught one way or another. Speed limits are straightforward. 60kph in towns and between 80 and 110kph on highways. Simple? Yes. The only problem is they are not often posted so you have to make up your mind what applies where you are and hope the DPS agree! Perhaps I am ...

... concerned, I am as relax and happy as I have been in a long time. Not to say that I will spend my whole life in this bloody train neither... We pass the Russian Ural Region, huge green fields with enough space to feed the whole of Europe, very green landscape with much water and ponds, more hilly and interesting than Eastern Europe. The houses are very simple, mud roads, few or very old cars, this is rural Russia. We cross the Kazakh border on May 1st, by ...

... are wet and incredibly hot. The women laugh as I shriek. I laugh from the hilarity and pain of it, a raucous, belly laugh, the laugh of a girl being beaten and cooked by a legion of naked Russian women. I am turned over, instructed to cover my breasts, and the boiling beating is continued. Just when I think I may die, though still laughing, I am pulled to my feet and dumped into the cold pool. All the women laugh as I emerge from the water gasping, laughing ...

... Saratov is nothing but rough edges. It has barely driveable streets, with kamikaze drivers and rattling old buses. It has garbage strewn about, and tall old communist era flats stretching thier ugliness towards the forgiving heavens. To me these things are comfortable, realistic. I prefer the view of daily life in all it mundane messiness, to the glitzy and too clean views of tourist locales. Today Albina took me along on a trip with her biology students. We piled ...