A Couple of Days in Siberia

KUNMING: Blogger is being spectacularly recalcitrant in China at the moment and I had a long detailed post on our adventures at a Siberian birthday party but that seems to have been lost to the winds of time. What else did we do in Siberia? In Irkutsk we visited one of the Decembrist Houses. The Decemberists were revolutionaries exiled in the 1820's. Many of their wives went East to join them and they ended up recreating the culture and society of European Russia in the boonies of Siberia. The houses give a wonderful idea of what life would have been like in an upper class Russian house last century.

Afterwards we visited a bustling market and bought some fresh honey still in the honeycomb. Note to self: the honeycomb doesn't taste particularly good and has the consistency of old chewing gum.

The following day we got up early to catch a martrushka down to Lake Baikal, the world's largest freshwater lake. (If it's not the largest it's certainly the deepest!) We were going to go either ice fishing or dog sledding but dog sledding seemed a little expensive and the lake had frozen so instead we were able to charter a boat for an hour to takes on a scenic, but freezing, cruise across to Port Baikal. We spent the rest of the time eating the smoked local fish and visiting a Russian birthday party, but more on that when I find my missing opus.