davethegrinch.net

Dave Says:

I want to love Russia. I really do. It however, is stubbornly refusing to love me. In my formative years, tales would race around the playground of how one could become a millionaire by stuffing fifty pairs of jeans in your suitcase and jetting off to Moscow. There the luxury starved Ruskies would pay ten times your wholesale price for a chance to dress like you. Throw in a Beatles cassette and they would treat you like a tsar (when they liked the tsar that is). Well, now the Ruskies don’t need my jeans and I can’t help but think they’re treating me like the tsar when they didn’t like him. Short of me and my family being taken into the basement, shot and then disposed of down a well, our Russian hosts couldn’t be more icy.

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Dave Says:

72 hours on a train from Irkutsk to Moscow is a long time to be doing nothing. There is no TV, only bad Russian radio and usable conversation between us and our Russian “cell-mates” dried up 1724km ago. I have taken to writing - writing rubbish maybe, but, rubbish none-the-less that you, my captive audience, are now honor bound to read. If I am going to spend three days and nights locked in train compartment for your vicarious pleasure then the least you can do is endure a few paragraphs of drivel.

Style note: I’m writing this in my moleskin notebook - by hand! My middle finger is already rubbed raw from the pencil. Could we have devolved our handwriting abilities in just two generations?

Of my fellow passengers, the Mongolians are still trading, the Russians are sleeping and the Western tourists are all feverishly scribbling in notebooks probably also wondering why their middle fingers are hurting so much. Which, in not so neat cursive, brings me to today’s diatribe: Travel Journals - Why, why not and what’s the point.

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