Irkutsk, Russian Federation, Siberia - September 7
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| Irkutsk, Siberia, September 7, 2014 - A chilly fog hovers over the city. |
And that's why they call it Siberia...OK, like most people, you associate the word "Siberia" with isolation, Gulags, exile, cold and more cold...Most of your preconceptions are incorrect. It is a vibrant, exciting, culturally diverse place. The one thing you got right is "cold." Winter hovers over this place. Never far away. The stories are about Lake Baikal that freezes damned near solid, railroad workers who stopped working at -40 degrees Celsius because their tools would shatter, and those same workers being buried in the tunnels they were working on, their bodies stuffed between the supporting cribbing and the tunnel walls. Every house has a mountain of firewood in the yard. We scheduled this trip to slide it between the mosquito season (and tourist season) and winter. It worked as we've not seen or heard or felt a mosquito (what are we going to do with all that repellant?) but winter's knocking at our calendar.
Yesterday it was cold out on the lake as we motored along the shore -- and yes, we spied one of those Lake Baikal seals. This morning it is foggy here in Irkutsk, and my handy-dandy thermometer reads 38 degrees F.
Coming to Siberia? (And you should...) Bring long underwear.
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Temperature outside our window at 7:30 AM, September 7.
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| Temperature inside the hotel room refrigerator. |
Today we're off to see an outdoor ethnological museum. Gloves, long underwear, hats, hoods will be the order of the day.
We're home soon.
