Now they were standing face to face on the steps, a meter apart. He wondered if was unusual or suspicious for a woman alone to talk to a strange man in public. The capital cities were usually more liberal, but there was no way to know for sure.
I was in Oman last week on a camping road trip down the coast. It was more difficult traveling than I have experienced recently, much harder than developed Russia or Dubai. But I do love the undeveloped countries for all sorts of reasons, and it was really nice to get off the beaten tracks [...]
This book annoys me but I like it. Or it’s a great book which also pisses me off. I’ve always been sort of ambivalent about Paulo Cohello, and I wish I understood why.
The theme is very straightforward. A young woman feels that the rest of her life will hold nothing new for her, and tries [...]
This is the second Russian novel I’ve liked, but probably not as much as I should have.
I always get a little antsy writing my comments about famous books, because there’s so much pressure to agree that these works are indeed classic. If you didn’t like it, the silent implication goes, then you just didn’t [...]
As far as I can tell, most Russian scientists do not believe in global warming. This was a shock to me. It’s one of those things that is obvious when you’re on the ground in a country, yet surprisingly little known elsewhere. I discovered this during an after-dinner discussion with my Russian host. I don’t even remember how the topic came up, except that I half-jokingly proposed a tour of all the great beaches of the world before rising sea levels swallowed them up.
I believe that humans are changing the climate, while Dmitri does not. Both of us can cite references and argue our positions fluently. How did each of us form our opinions, and which one of us is using a more reliable method to find the truth?
There are myths to travel. There are mythic voyages of the ones who went before. A long time ago, somebody rode a motorcycle all through Indonesia, and then spent four months in a crumbling room in Jakarta penning the very first Lonely Planet. We all want to be that person, every last backpacking one of [...]
St. Petersburg is gray and opulent. It’s splendid and magnificent, a beautiful imperial city that even 80 years of communism and eight months of sunless winter can’t completely disguise. It’s also falling apart, slightly shabby, and strangely ordinary at street level. It wants to be grand, but it isn’t, not quite. Something isn’t quite [...]
