We'll Always Have Rabat

[This is the third and final post about my Moroccan trip. If you haven't read any and you want to do things right, start at the beginning. I decided to add this map of Morocco to my blog, since I would have had no idea where these cities are had I not visited them. Now you can all follow along.]

Early Thursday morning Eric and I went to Rabat, which is the capital of Morocco, to see Molly, Aaron and Nicole. We met up with them on the beach.

Molly is a member of the local surf club, and she invited us to come surfing with her. I had never gone surfing before, but where is a better place to learn than Morocco? We put on wet suits

and headed out to the beach. We were glad to see that we were passing by this very rocky area and to a calmer spot past a breaker. The waves were still big, though.

For awhile we went out and just rode in on our stomachs on the surfboards, then the instructor got us lined up on the beach and drilled us in how to stand up on the board. He made us do the move about 20 times before letting us go back into the water. Getting up was a pretty hard, but there were a few times when I got up long enough to think, "Sweet, I'm really surfing!" before slipping off into the water. None of us looked like experts, but we came in exhilarated, happy, and hungry.



We went to Molly's apartment, which is very close to the beach. The neighborhood is called Oudaya, and a lot of the streets look like this (this one is Molly's street):

Molly and her roommate live on the second floor of an apartment. The central room has no ceiling

and a big hole in the floor so the sun can shine all the way to the first level.

I asked her what they do when it rains, and she said, "We squeegee."

From the roof you can see the ocean and other parts of the city.

We ate lunch at a crepe place near this central street

and did some shopping in the medina. I couldn't resist buying a jalaba; I hope to bring the fashion to America. I bought a tajine (the pot used to cook the dish of the same name) in this little shop.

In the afternoon Eric and Molly left to teach. Aaron, Nicole, and I went to a place in the city called Chellah. This site has ancient Roman ruins as well as remains of a mosque and tombs built by a Merinid sultan in the 14th century. The combination of overgrown Roman and Islamic ruins, storks and their nests covering the trees, stray cats wandering all around, and the heavy scent of flowers and plants gave the place a mysterious and surreal feel.





Soon after this excursion Nicole and I got on the train back to Meknes. We both tried on my new jalaba. If someone gives me like $25 I'll wear this out to a place of your choice.


In the morning we took a taxi to Azrou, a Berber town about 50 kilometers from Meknes. The city is named after this rock:

From there we took another taxi to an even smaller town in the mountains called Ain Leuh. The taxi drivers everywhere we went seemed to have a complicated system for who drives where. Here they are doing their calculations.

This is the taxi stand in Ain Leuh.

For travel within cities there are Petit Taxis, smallish cars that could easily fit four passengers but only allow three, no exceptions. To go from city to city you take a Grand Taxi, always an old white Mercedes Benz as far as I saw. These require six passengers (double that of the Petit Taxis, and certainly not double the space), which means two squeezed in the front and four in the back. This system didn't seem to make too much sense, but the good thing is that the Petit Taxis are metered and the Grand Taxis have fixed prices, so you never had to haggle or feel like you were getting ripped off.

There was pretty much one main road in Ain Leuh and we walked along it, following a guy on a donkey going about the same pace.

We couldn't decipher the meaning of this abstract mural,

but we liked that the internet cafe was reaching out especially to us.

As we reached the outskirts of town we veered off the road and up into the woods. We found this serene grove of flowering trees

and a place we could look out over the town.

We climbed higher, hoping to spot some Barbary Apes which live in the region. Despite our monkey calls, we didn't attract any of them. We walked for awhile until we were looking out over this landscape.

Then we turned around and followed a road back into town. Good thing we were walking and not in a car.

We went back to Azrou and ate lunch at a cafe. Since Friday is the day Moroccans traditionally eat couscous, we ordered that. Here it is, piled high with chicken and vegetables.

On Saturday Nicole went back to Rabat and Eric and I spent the afternoon at the sports club for students sponsored by his school for students\. We played soccer, basketball, and football. The kids wore me out pretty good.
In the evening the school was holding their first public speaking contest. I was really impressed by how well the students spoke English and by the topics they chose - things like illegal immigration, pollution, and self-esteem.

On Sunday we had to go back to Casablanca to be there for my flight early Monday morning. It was hard to even find an open and non-sketchy place to eat in the evening, much less to hang out, so we ended up at Rick's. Everybody comes to Rick's.

It was actually a pretty charming place, designed like the one in the movie, with live jazz playing. And in the area we were sitting the movie was showing nonstop, with subtitles on so you could listen to the live music. We were lucky enough to arrive just as it was starting over, and stayed for the whole thing. Here's looking at you, kid.

Having a Moroccan Good Time (gotta give Lanette credit for that one)

[This is post #2 about my Morocco trip, so if you want to start at the beginning, read the next post first.]


On Tuesday morning we all set out for Volubilis, the ruins of a Roman city first inhabited in the first century AD. Volubilis is set among green fields and mountains, near the town of Moulay Idriss. It is well-preserved (for ruins) and you can clearly see the layout of the city.






It's hard to believe this arch has survived for hundreds of years.


I climbed it.

This is an aqueduct.

Here are the baths. Supposedly the lucky people sat in front and got washed by their servants.


The triumphal arch was built in the third century.


This mosaic shows a guy riding a horse backwards. Pretty awesome.


We ate our bread and cheese lunch on the steps of the basilica.


The pillars behind us were topped with nests, inhabited by storks.



Molly had to teach that evening, so she, Aaron and Nicole headed back to Rabat. Eric and I walked up the road to the little town of Moulay Idriss.



We walked around outside a mosque, peeked inside a bakery, and drank orange juice in the main square before going back to Meknes.



That afternoon and the next day I hung out in Meknes. Meknes is a medium-sized city that was once the capital of Morocco. It's a pretty quite and conservative place, and Eric seemed to know most of the shop owners, cafe waiters, and neighborhood kids. Here is one of the main streets at twilight.


Eric's apartment is near this street, and he has a great view from his balcony.



In the afternoons there were always boys outside playing soccer and girls sitting along the ledge.


You can see that some women and girls cover their heads and some don't. I was told that it's a personal choice and people won't be judged for what they choose.

One evening I saw some younger girls out on this ledge playing school; more specifically, "French lesson". One of the older girls was standing in front of them with a stick, making them repeat "bonjour" and the alphabet. Sometimes she would write something on the sign with chalk and point to it with her stick. Her pupils came up one by one to recite things in front of the class, and eagerly raised their hands when she asked questions. A couple of little boys even joined the class later on, after growing tired of fighting over a soccer ball and spitting at each other. They held the class for at least an hour.

There were orange trees lining the streets. Aaron tried one of these but it wasn't ripe yet.

An Arabic stop sign:

Moroccans speak a Moroccan dialect of Arabic, only partially decipherable with standard Arabic. Most of the news and written material is in standard Arabic, and everyone also speaks French.

It was nice to sit in cafes, drinking coffee with milk, eating croissants with chocolate, and playing chess (chess isn't commonly played in Morocco, and girls don't usually sit in cafes, so we got some looks).


This is Eric's favorite rotisserie chicken place. The name says it all.


On Wednesday we walked to Meknes's medina and main square. On the way we stopped inside a mausoleum where someone important (the founder of Meknes? I can't remember for sure) is buried.


We drank orange juice in the main square. Orange juice in Morocco is always fresh squeezed, even when you order it in a cafe.




Eric had to leave to teach class, and I wandered around in the medina. Almost everyone was selling everyday goods rather than souvenirs for tourists. A lot of guys shouted things to me that I couldn't understand beyond "Bonjour, mademoiselle!" On the way back to the apartment I saw these fields. I don't know what they're growing there in the middle of the city.


And this is across the street:


I couldn't resist, and stopped for an ice cream cone. The weather was really hot. I gotta give the Moroccan McDonald's credit because they serve their ice cream cones in sugar cones rather than cake cones, making them at least three times more tasty than American McDonald's ice cream cones.

That's all for now. Look for more posts in the near future.

Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Morocco

I wanted to see my friends and I wanted to see Morocco, so I decided to go there. I flew into Casablanca on March 8th and Eric met me at the airport. My checked bag, on the other hand, did not meet me. Fortunately I had packed all the essentials, like a Greek New Testament and the complete works of Shakespeare, in my carry-on, and only auxiliary items such as clothes and deodorant were somewhere en route. So instead of leaving Casablanca that day as planned, we were left with the other unlucky folks waiting for a visa to a Lisbon, waiting in Casablanca...

We walked around the city that day, which, despite being the largest city in Morocco, didn't seem to have much to see. There were lots of kids playing soccer,


and of course:

Rick's was proudly celebrating its fourth anniversary, making us wonder why no one had capitalized on this obvious idea for 62 years.

The next day we went to the huge Hassan II Mosque, which is on the ocean and supposedly has the world's tallest minaret, at 210 meters high.



We were allowed to tour it with a guide, but didn't get to witness its retractable roof in action; they only open it up on major holidays.

Below the main hall are rooms for washing. They didn't turn the water on for us either.




You can see up to the main room through some windows in the ceiling.

There are also hamams (bathhouses), which looked cool but had never actually been used. I hope to be back when they are opened to the public. Here's Eric and the pool.

That afternoon we went back to airport to retrieve my bag, having arrived after its leisurely journey from Minneapolis, and got on the train to Meknes, where Eric lives. At the Rabat stop Molly, Aaron, and Nicole got on. We hadn't seen them since June (and Nicole since May) but it felt just like yesterday that we were on a train to Moscow or Vladimir together. We had dinner at Eric's favorite pizza place in Meknes and then had a typical crazy party night playing Set.

The next morning we had breakfast at a cafe


and then went to Fes, which is less than an hour from Meknes. Fes is the oldest city in Morocco and has a huge medina (walled old city) that you could easily get lost in.

The streets in the medina were narrow and windy, lined with shops and filled with people leading donkeys around or holding immobilized chickens by the legs.














Here is a guy carving inscriptions on gravestones.


And a tannery.

There's a beautiful mosque inside the medina.



The traditional Moroccan garment is called a jalaba - it's a long robe with a hood - and we saw lots of people wearing them. The sweet thing about them is that they make guys look like Jedi knights.


We ate lunch at a rooftop cafe in the medina. We had bread with really good lentil dipping sauce and other traditional Moroccan food like couscous, tajine (slow-cooked vegetables and meat), grilled meat, and mint tea that's about half sugar.


The view from the cafe:


After lunch we walked around outside the medina and saw a graveyard and some ruins.







And here's one of the ubiquitous pictures of the king. It is against the law for Moroccans to criticize him.


We came back to Meknes in time for Eric to teach that evening and then hung out with some of his Moroccan friends and a couple who teaches at the same school.

Well, this is only a couple days into the trip but I better publish this post or something will crash and I'll lose everything. More to come soon.

On the Дону

Greetings from the banks of the quietly flowing Don River, 120 km outside the city of Rostov-on-Don. For the past three weeks I've been teaching English to science students from all around Russia. Sara and Eric, my venerable colleagues from the American Home, are with me and we've been having a great time.

The place we're staying is pretty much a hotel, although they call it a "tourist complex". It's super hot here, but we have air conditioning in our rooms (not in the classrooms, unfortunately), and the Don River close by for swimming. Our teaching schedule was pretty relaxed - four classes a day, 50 minutes each. My class was scintillatingly titled "Storytelling through Poetry and Song". I was surprised at how well my students handled difficult poetry (even writing poems of their own), especially considering that they're studying science. When we weren't teaching we spent most of our time swimming or playing volleyball, cards, chess, and ping pong. Yes, I actually did play volleyball, which some of you who have known me for a long time might be surprised by. And I actually enjoyed it.

On the last two days of the camp the students did presentations on their scientific work. Most things I didn't understand, but they did a good job.

Tomorrow we're leaving for Chisinau, Moldova to do another camp like this, only shorter and with more experienced scientists. I'll try to keep up my diligent blogging there if we have internet access. Until next time...

We'll Always Have Vladimir

I'm leaving Vladimir in about 2 hours. Yeah, talk about putting blogging off to the last minute. But it's been such a nice summer that I didn't want to sit inside on the computer. I taught one class - it was my favorite level and I had a great group of students. The weather was really hot for a couple weeks and we spent a lot of time outside; on picnics, throwing the football around, swimming, or just grading papers in the sun. I took a day trip to the monastary at Sergeiev Posad, a weekend trip to visit a friend in Nizhni Novgorod, and a weekend trip to Moscow when my family was there (they were also in Petersburg and Vladimir, and it was great to have them here).

Of course, it's hard to believe I'm leaving. I don't really have anything to say about it, other than that I had an amazing time. Maybe when I get home I'll be able to reflect on it more. I'll probably just sit around for a few weeks in a melancholic state drinking tea and listening to Кино.

But I've got some things to do before that. Tonight Eric, Sara, and I are getting on the train and heading 24 hours south to the city of Rostov-on-the-Don. We're going to teach English there for three weeks to Russian scientists. Then Eric and I are heading to Moldova to do the same thing for 10 more days. Next we're flying to Tblisi, Georgia. We should get there on August 2nd, and we have tickets from Istanbul to New York City on the 18th. We're planning on spending a few days in Georgia and then traveling around the eastern part of Turkey before going to Istanbul. From New York I'm planning on heading to Boston for a few days before flying home on August 23rd. I'm not sure how good my internet access will be this summer, but I should be able to check my email sometimes. So please write to me, and maybe I'll even blog if I get ambitious. To those of you in Russia: goodbye and I'll miss you a lot, to those in America: I hope I can see you soon. Here's one last picture of a wonderful lunch we had at the American Home. I hope I'll be back to Vladimir again before too long.

Spring Break, Part 3: Odessa and Tiraspol

Finally, over three weeks after we came back from vacation, I'm finishing my blog posts about my trip. Better late than never, as they say. Well, we came into Odessa on the train at around 5 in the morning. This is the train station:

In the other two cities we visited we went with the person who was renting apartments, and we stuck with the tradition this time. Here in Odessa it was a very old, stooped over, amiable grandmother. "Come with grandma," she said, "Grandma will show you a good apartment. Grandma has good apartments." "Is it close to the train station?" we asked. "Close," she assured us, "Close." We followed her onto the trolleybus. After riding for about 40 minutes we realized that Grandma's apartments weren't so close after all. We rode to what I think was the end of the line, to a very quiet neighborhood near the sea. We followed Grandma to a yard where we were met by her much less amiable daughter, who showed us a nice two-room apartment. I asked if it had hot water and she said, "Of course" like I was a complete idiot for asking. She was pretty pushy and was asking for more money than we wanted to pay, but we were exhausted and agreed. We only paid her for one night, though, secretly planning to get a new place. We slept for a couple hours and then Sara took a shower, and soon realized that the hot water lasted for approximately 5 seconds before turning cold. We asked the irritated woman about it and she said that you just had to keep turning the water on and off. Even that didn't work.

We left our place and walked down to the beach. It was deserted except for fishermen and workers getting things ready for beach season.

Next we got back on the bus for the long ride back to the center. We spent the day just walking around the city. The center is a maze of cafe and shop-lined streets, decaying art noveau-styled buildings, and funky monuments. This is near the central Cathedral Square.

The Opera House and trees around it are beautiful.

We went to the Potemkin Stairs, well known from a famous scene (people being massacred and a baby carriage bouncing down the stairs) in the groundbreaking movie Battleship Potemkin, directed by Sergei Eisenstein.

This statue, at the top of the staircase, is the Duc de Richelieu, who was the governor of Odessa and is considered a founding father of the city.

And here's an example of one of Odessa's many mystifying statues.

Along one bridge we noticed lots of locks with lover's names written or engraved on them, locked on to the rails on the edge of the bridge. This one is dedicated to Vova and Sveta.

Not only are there a lot of churches in Odessa, but we also saw this new mosque, which is actually, interestingly, called the "Arab Cultural Center for Justice and Democracy".

Here it says, "God is One" written in Arabic-style script, but actually in Russian.

We visited a book store and bought some Russian classics, which we started to read in what became our new favorite restaurant, Top Sandwich (it's amazing how hard it is find a real sandwich in Russia, especially in Vladimir). We also booked a room in a hostel, which was more expensive than we had been paying, but in a very central location.

At night we headed out to our suburban apartment. Before going all the way there we took a detour to the beach, sneaking through a gate. There were a couple guards who saw us and chased us down. We were a little nervous, but when we told the old guard we just wanted to sit on the beach, he said, "Why didn't you just come and tell me? That's fine, just tell me." We stayed out there for a long time, watching the waves and looking at the stars.

In the morning we told our host that we were leaving her and to our surprise, she wasn't upset. We went into the city and checked into our hostel, which was filled with the usual assortment of quirky characters - a very talkative English girl who told us the same two stories over and over, a Canadian day-trader who works one hour a day and used to be a fruititarian, a Japanese guy who didn't speak English but constantly spoke Japanese to himself, an old Polish guy with a very creepy smile, and the typical middle-aged Australian owner who does nothing but sit and talk with his hot Ukrainian employees.

After checking in, we (and the English talker) caught an excursion out to the catacombs. There are hundreds of miles of catacombs under the city, and during WWII partisan fighters lived, cold and hungry, in them for over two years. This is their slogan: "Blood for blood, death for death."
Here is a reproduction of the partisans' kitchen.

And of course, pictures of Lenin and Stalin.

The tour was interesting, and it was amazing to hear about how people (even children) lived in such horrible conditions for so long. We learned that Fidel Castro had also taken this tour and was also impressed.

The next day we decided to take a trip to Transniester (sometimes spelled Transnistria), a territory that is technically part of Moldova but considers itself an independent republic. The English girl had gone there the day before and had gotten in (on her second try) by paying the border guards 10 dollars. We bought a bus ticket to Tiraspol, the capital, and hoped that we could cross the border without any problems. But at the border a large, scary guard took our passports away and told us to start filling out some forms. He asked if we had visa invitations to get in, and we said no. He told us that we couldn't get in without invitations, but told us to keep filling out the forms anyway. We filled them out and then waited for a long time. Finally someone else came and told us again that we couldn't get in without invitations. This began a long process of standing around, talking to different guards, and trying to see if there was any way they would let us through. Our bus waited awhile for us but finally left. We made friends with the guards who were checking passports as cars drove through. They told us that they would gladly let us go across the border, but it wasn't their department - they were passport control and the people who weren't letting us through were migration control. But eventually, when no migration control guards were in view, we ended up just walking across the border (this was over two hours after we arrived). We caught a taxi to Tiraspol, glad to finally be in a breakaway region, but a little nervous about our illegal status there. We changed our money to Transniestrian rubles, which are obviously only good in Transniester. Then we ate lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon strolling around. As we had heard, the city was just like what you'd imagine a Soviet city to be like - clean and quiet, with lots of Soviet monuments. Here are two billboards celebrating Transniester (its full name is the Transniestrian Moldovan Republic, which is what those three letters stand for).

Transniester was part of the Soviet Union longer than the rest of Moldova, and the majority of the people there are Russian and Ukrainian. The main language is Russian, so we got around fine. Of course Lenin still makes his presence known there.

And this is the Russian general Alexander Suvorov, who founded Tiraspol and appears on almost all of the Transniestrian ruble bills.

This tank says, "For the motherland!" on it.

The streets were very quiet...

...but there were some kids out (quietly) playing with goats.

We walked by the Dniester River and also saw the Kvint brandy factory, which is so important to the city that it is on the 5 ruble note. We also took a taxi ride to the outside of town, where a new stadium complex has been built for the Transniestrian soccer team. The huge sparkling complex, with a Mercedes dealership attached to it, looked very out of place in a city of Soviet apartment buildings.

We were planning on taking a bus back to Odessa, but when a taxi driver offered to take us back for a pretty good price, we agreed, not knowing how things would go over when we crossed the border back into Ukraine. We told him our situation and he suggested that we get our passports registered in town or the guards would try to bribe us on our way back. We had no trouble, and only had a pay a couple dollars, to get our passports registered. No one asked any questions at the border and we got through fine. On the way back the driver, who had lived in Tiraspol for over 50 years, told us about life in Transniester (he confirmed things we had heard about it being completely controlled by mafia). When we got back to Odessa we tired and hungry, but happy and relieved not to have gotten into any trouble for our excursion into a lawless republic.

The next day in Odessa was our last, and we wandered around the sunny streets, eating ice cream and buying some souvenirs. We made one last trip to Top Sandwich and got on the train to Moscow. Altogether, it was an amazing trip and I recommend everyone who's at all interested to visit Sochi, Yalta, and Odessa (and even Tiraspol).

Spring Break Part 2 - Yalta

So, we caught a bus to Port Kavkas. It's not a very long distance from Sochi to Port Kavkas, but it's a long bus ride because of the winding mountain roads. We were on the bus all night, and at one of our stops we saw this winner: the Fart Casino.


Unfortunately we didn't have any time to play slots there. We arrived in Port Kavkas around 5 AM and realized that it's not really a city at all. There were concrete walls with barbed wire all around, and not much else. It was a pretty intimidating sight, especially since it was still dark out, but soon we spotted the "Морской Вокзал" sign and headed that way. We were able to catch a ferry across the water as the sun was rising.


We landed in the city of Kerch and went through Ukrainian customs. One guard started chatting with me after he realized I was a foreigner who could speak Russian. He asked me where in America I was from and when I said Minnesota, he said, "Oh, Minnesota Timberwolves!" It was nice to know that a guy in Kerch knows something about my beloved state.

From Kerch we caught a bus to Simferopol, a transportation hub, and then finally made it from there to Yalta. We rented a nice two-room apartment from a girl who studies in Kiev and then headed out to explore the city. Yalta is beautiful, surrounded on three sides by mountains and overlooking the sea. There are shaggy trees and vines crawling all over, giving it kind of a mysterious feel. There are lots of fruit stands and little shops, but no big supermarkets (none that we saw, anyway).

The next day, our only full day in Yalta, was absolutely beautiful. We spent most of it on excursions outside the city. Our first stop was Livadia Palace. It was owned by Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, and was the site of the Yalta Conference in 1945, attended by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. The palace overlooks the sea and is surrounded by beautiful gardens and woods.


Here are Sara and I solemnly remembering three great leaders.


The inside of the palace is a museum that contains information about the Yalta Conference and the tsar's family. This is one of the rooms where Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill met:


And this is the courtyard where they had the famous picture of them taken:


After eating ice cream and blini, we caught a bus back to town and another bus out farther from the city to Alupka, where the Vorontsov Palace is located. We didn't know anything about the history of this place, but wandering around its beautiful grounds and gazing out at the sea, we didn't care.





On the way back we hit up another famous castle, called the Swallow's Nest. It's in a stunning location, but even though it was built almost 100 years ago, we thought it looked like something out of Disneyland.



On our last day in Yalta we went down to the main square near the sea. Overlooking the square are both Lenin:


and McDonalds:


We took a ride on the cable cars and got a good look at the city.


But this sign made it very clear to us that you can't just stay on the cable cars and ride forever.

That afternoon we caught a bus back to Simferopol and from there an overnight train to Odessa. Next time: Odessa and bonus: the breakaway republic of Transneister.

Spring Break, Part One: Sochi

For the small handfull of people who actually read and enjoy my blog, I'm sorry I haven't posted for so long. We had a crazy last week of the spring semester, then break, and now we're in the first week of the summer semester. I had a great spring break trip to Sochi, Yalta, and Odessa with Sara and Eric, but it's a lot to write about, so I'll start out with Sochi.

Sochi is the main Russian Black Sea tourist destination, and a canditate for the 2014 Winter Olympics. The train ride from Moscow to Sochi was about 27 hours long. 27 long hours long, because our whole train car (we were in the lowest class, without separate compartments) was filled with a children's folk dancing group. At best, they were playing endless games of Go Fish, at worst, they were running around, yelling, and playing one song over and over on their cell phones. We did meet one couple from Moscow who were not associated with this group, and they invited us to join them for a little party in a tiny compartment at the end of the train car, past the bathroom.

That thing the woman is holding is a whole dried fish. We were originally wary about these fish, which many old grandmothers were selling at every stop, but it turned out to pretty good, just really salty.

When we started out on our trip, we really didn't have any plans, hotel reservations, or bus tickets between cities. But it never turned out to be a problem. When we arrived in Sochi we went with the first guy who said he was renting rooms. We turned down the first place he showed us, but the second one was great -- a nice room with a little outdoor kitchen and patio. This was our view:

Here are Sara and Eric out on the patio, deep in concentration. Chess and the aptly named card game "Oh Hell" were our entertainment staples on the trip.

The first day in Sochi we just walked around near the sea. Sara and I did a little Russian-stlye photo posing:
And here's me with Posiedon:

I also joined a delightful statue band.


The best sites in Sochi are actually outside the city, so we wanted to take some excursions. We looked around for an excursion company and found this winner:

We asked the Excursion "TIT" representative if we could take one of their excursions to the breakaway region of Abkhazia, but unfortunately, they don't take Americans there because it's difficult to get them across the border (Russia supports this region's independence from Georgia, so Russians can go there). So we settled on the standard Krasnaya Polyana excursion that's advertised in this picture (don't worry, our desire to visit a breakaway region was satisfied later on the trip, watch for the story in future posts).

The day of the excursion was rainy and cold, but we had a fun time. We were in a van full of Russians and a tour guide who got very angry if anyone started whispering amongst themselves and wasn't listening to him. We drove past numourous decadant sanatoriums and then outside the city into the foggy mountains.

At one stop I got to demonstrate the power of my famous oxen legs.

After a visit to a bee farm and lots of honey tasting, we came to Krasnaya Polyana. There were a couple pricey options for going up the mountain: the ski lift, which wasn't worth it because the fog would obscure all the nice views; and driving around in a Jeep. All the people in our group chose the Jeeps, but we cheap Americans chose to go as far as we could on foot, in the rain. It was a nice walk, despite the rain, and we felt a sense of accomplishment when we got high enough to see snow.

The next day, our last in Sochi, was May 1st, Russian Labor Day. We caught a gathering of Communists in front of a Lenin statue.


The day was beautiful, and we went outside the city again to a see a series of waterfalls called "Змейка" (snake). We bought a bottle of homemade wine at the bottom and started up.

There were lots of different waterfalls and places to explore. We took our time, enjoyed the weather and the scenery, and it ended up being one of our favorite times from the whole trip.




After the waterfalls, we had an obligatory McDonalds stop (Sochi has a beautiful McDonalds), and then got on the bus to Port Kavkas. We didn't know anything about Port Kavkas, but it looked like the closest place to the Crimea that we could get to. Stay tuned for part two of the spring break posts: Yalta.