Eating Vegan in St. Petersburg: So Much More than Buckwheat and Picklesby Randi / June 21, 2017
There’s so much more to talk about from St. Petersburg! Russia fun is only just beginning! We had a jam-packed less-than-a-week in the ‘bourg, seeing everything on our must list and most of the stuff on our maybe list. We really enjoyed our time and would happily return one day, maybe for a more leisurely visit, maybe to do all the clubbing we missed out on (“well I wouldn’t say I’ve been *missing* it”). I covered all the main highlights in the previous post, but there’s still so much cool stuff we saw. I want to share the last of the museuming we did in Peterbourg, a few random things worth commenting on (at least from my perspective), and our day at the Russian version of Versailles.
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Like this random street market that was decorated with umbrellas when we were scrambling trying to find umbrellas for sale. No one could reach these to sell to us. So cruel, decorative umbrellas in the rain! This market had a burrito truck, a Dippin’ Dots stand (for real!), and then about 48 matryoshka and wooden whittled goods stands.
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I know I’m a nutter but one of my favorite things was this ambulance. The word on the back is pronounced ‘reanimatsia” – like reanimator. I was cracking up. So morbid!
How do they not have a series of action movies called the Reanimator?
There are statues everywhere, and not just of past rules but of famous writers too. Here is Pushkin all like ‘hey I don’t really know what’s over there but there’s a bird on my head’.
THAT BIRD IS A LIAR
And here’s Gogol being like ‘I’m so morose but in a high fashion way not a depressed way look how fashionable my downward gaze is maybe I should model instead of write.’ First name Hansel.
Gogol. So hot right now.
So St. Petersburg has the deepest subway tunnels I’ve ever seen. Are they the deepest in the entire world? I would bet on it. OK I just looked it up and they have the second deepest in the world and some of the longest escalators. Seriously, on the way to the metro we would be standing on that escalator for like a full four minutes! That’s INSANE! And I thought the tube had some deep lines! I usually run down the escalators in the tube but hell if I was going to even walk slowly down this one when I couldn’t even see the bottom for 3 minutes! It was kind of scary. The metro was pretty easy to use though with really user-friendly token machines. You just put money in and for every 45p (the cost of a one way token) it counts, it spits out a token. So easy, no screens or language barriers or anything.
longest escalators in the world!
Okay so every statue we saw of Peter the Great (and there are a lot) gives him a tiny Beetlejuice style head! What is up with that? Did he have a tiny head? Because he was really quite tall, right? Poor tiny headed tall man
Okay that’s enough Rand(i)om Thoughts, let’s get back to touristing! One rainy morning (cough every morning so far cough), we walked for a while across the Neva to see the original cabin of Peter the Great when he first found the land and was like hey I wanna live here and name it after me! His little cabin was so cute! It was built in 1703 and he liked for it a little but then he was like nah boys let’s make a huge city and have my palaces be approximately 1 billion times bigger than this one room schoolhouse. The cabin was closed the day we went up but I don’t think it’s necessary to go in anyway. Cool to see, cool to see.
Pretty fancy for a log cabin. Ron Swanson would not approve.
When we were up by the cabin, we decided to check out the cruiser Aurora, which served in the Russo-Japanese war in the early 1900s and now serves as a museum. On a ship! Of course, as we’ve come to learn is super common in Russia, the cruiser was closed the day we went, even though the info we had in advance said it was closed a different day. Oh boy, things are always closed on random days. (Wait till you see what we’ve had to deal with in Moscow! Soon.) At least we got to take a picture of it.
Museo warship!
St. Petersburg has some beautiful green space, such as the big central park called the Field of Mars. This park has beautiful gardens and trees, as well as the Eternal Flame, which was lit on November 6, 1957. Ten years later, it was delivered to Moscow’s Kremlin for a similar site near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier there – which you will see in the next post!
IS THIS BURRRRRNING AN ETERNALLLL FLAAAAAAME
Our last museum of St. Petersburg came at the suggestion of friend-of-the-show Liz, who said the Ethnographic Museum was not to be missed. It was a really surprisingly extensive museum. At first the building looks like it has maybe one room but then it goes on literally FOREVER. We were there for 2 hours before I conked out and had to stop museuming. Two hours is really my limit for museuming, especially when we are going to like at least one a day, which is a shame because it really was a very interesting museum. There were tons of dioramas of dress and housing and other aspects of life and culture from literally every ethnic group in the entire region of Central Asia. And best of all, it was the first (and only) exhibit of Jewish stuff we’ve found so far, which made me haps.
yay jews
#4 that Frasier tho |
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my real favorite part of the Ethnographic Museum – a wee wittle baby woolly mammoth!
The greatest thing we did later in our visit, though, was a day trip to Peterhof, like the Versailles of Russia. Peter the Great ordered it to be built in the early 1700s, probably so he could summer there when the Winter Palace/Hermitage just wouldn’t do. Like Versailles, it’s very much a good weather destination, with the outside grounds of endless gorgeous gardens and impressive fountains the real draw. So we were nervous about going when the forecast for our last day, the only day we could go, was rain rain rain. Luckily, our hostel receptionist Anastacia (the nicest person we’ve come across like ever) said it was better to see it in the rain than not at all, because we went, and the sun came out the entire time we were on the grounds. It rained on our journey there and back, but we super lucked out once there. Amazing!
To get to Peterhof from the city, we walked about 30 minutes (literally everywhere we went was always a 30 minute walk, it was like some kind of weird wizard universe) to a certain metro line, took the metro to a bus stop about 10 stops away, and then took a minibus – really a 15 person van, so weird – that went to Peterhof. The minibuses/vans were indeed legitimate, with numbers of their routes on the windows and full of locals getting off along the route – but it just seemed so fake. But it was fine, and got us there in less than an hour. Once there, we spent about 4 hours at the site. It was so beautiful! The fountains were ridiculous, as were the gardens. The interior of the palace, the fancy af rooms, required a separate ticket, which we didn’t know until we tried to go in. The line to get interior tickets (at the actual palace, not the outside ticket office) was suuuper long, and then once you had those tickets you had to queue in another super long line to get inside. So annoying! The rooms are gorgeous though. No pictures allowed, so you’ll have to go yourself. But I’ll share tons of pictures from the lovely grounds! They went on forever, and even though the site was packed, there was so much of it that you could walk a mile all alone like you were in a forest. Such a great respite.
pretty cool
Peterhof was built right on the water, so after you walk through the acres and acres of gardens you are in the sea amaaaz
a little aviary on the grounds
the pyramid fountain
SQUIRREL FRIEND
Chessboard cascade!
my favorite little house on the grounds! like 1/1000th of the main palace but it’s my fave. These bridges split the water around it into four pools i would LOVE four pools
I definitely recommend spending a day at Peterhof as a break from the city. We loved it, though I must admit we still haven’t been to Versailles, so I can’t say whether you’d be similarly blown away by the beauty if you’ve been primed by Versailles. But I’m going to say that you would still enjoy it because come on so beautiful!
So St. Petey’s was a great real first-stop on our adventure. It felt very comfortable, without any of the culture shock that we are expecting to come at us in the (very!) near future. It is still very European, which explains that feeling. We would probably be happy to return one day, especially because there is still much to see. We really wanted to do a night boat tour, on many strong recommendations. See, at night, the bridges on all the canals lift up from about 1:45am to maybe just before 4am, so there are boat tours that go around the freed up canals and show off all the lights of the city. It’s supposed to be awesome, but there just wasn’t a night that we could dedicate to being up then because we had such full days planned, we couldn’t sacrifice a whole morning (as we would need to in order to recover from such a night!). So we’re sorry to have missed that, but we did so much sight-seeing that we are happy overall with our visit. And now we have a good reason to return! After Peterhof, we had a great final dinner at Ukrop (read about it here!) before getting on the midnight sleeper train to Moscow. Next post!
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It’s Yucatanfastic: Merida, Uxmal, Mexican Chocolate, & More Cenotes
Welcome back to Mexico Central (not to be confused with Central Mexico), at least for the next few weeks! After our wonderful but brief trip through Valladolid and our visits to Chichen Itza, Ek Balam, and our favorite cenotes, we’re ready to continue through the Yucatan – which is, as you saw above, Yucatanfastic – via Merida and Uxmal. And not only are there more cenotes to come, there’s also a museum…of chocolate. It’s all my favorite things, babies! And then a real museum, which as you know is usually not my favorite thing only because for some reason in museums I tend to turn into Dug from “Up” seeing a squirrel , but this museum held my attention. IT’S ALL GREAT. Let’s get to it.
Once we saw all the wonders of Chichen Itza, on that amazing first full day in Mexico, we drove about two hours towards the west coast to Merida (it could take you less but remember we left Cheechee at closing time (5pm), so we were living it up during rush hour! On a Monday! So fun in every country!). As we saw in Valladolid and as I warned you would happen in every town in the Yucatan, our evening arrival was commemorated with half of Merida dancing in the street outside the main square, and the other half watching. It’s so fun and lovely; I love that there are still legit communities out there in the world. Meanwhile we don’t even know our neighbors (but one of them has a Leave (Brexit) sign in their window so we don’t want to know them, obvs). Honestly I can’t even believe there are Americans who don’t want Mexican people to be their neighbors. THEY’RE JUST GOING TO DANCE IN THE STREET AND MAKE YOU AMAZING FOOD, what is your problem?
Now that we’re in Merida, it’s time for our favorite travel segment:
Merida, along with being the heroine of the most disappointing “Disney princess” movie (seriously all she does is turn her mother into a bear and we’re supposed to appreciate the “feminism”? she’s a “strong female role model” because she “decided” to turn her mother into a bear? how many “quotes” can I “use”??), is the capital and largest city of the Yucatan state. It’s also one of the most popular destinations in the Yucatan because of its prime location as a perfect jumping off point to start negotiations explore the surrounding sites, and also because it’s one of the most beautiful cities. It’s been named the American Capital of Culture a few times by smart people who know that ‘American’ doesn’t just refer to USA. Merida is indeed a cultural gem, with interesting architecture that mixes its Mayan roots with European influence, and with strong museums, amazing food, and the aforementioned dancing in the Plaza Mayor. Having the largest indigenous population of any Mexican city means its Maya heritage and history are at the forefront.
So in the 1500s, there were three men named Francisco de Montejo and they were all Spanish conquistadors AND they were all related so it got super confusing but there wasn’t much they could do because there just weren’t that many names back then. To make it easier, they used cute lil nicknames: the oldest was “The Lieutenant” (“hello lootellaaaann” – South Pacific), his son was “The Boy”, and his nephew was “The Nephew”. Cute for you! Obviously these were in Spanish because they spoke Spanish because they WERE Spanish! which means they arrived in Mexico and saw indigenous people just carrying on living their lives and the lootellant, the boy, and the nephew – or just The Boy, actually; I think it was just The Boy but then why did I have to hear about all three of these bozos? – were like “LA LA LA I DON’T SEE ANYONE ELSE I MAKE MY CITY HERE. HERE’S A GOOD SPOT.” Merida was built on the site of the ancient Maya city of T’ho, and stones from T’ho’s/those buildings were used to build the Spanish colonial buildings of downtown Merida, including the cathedral.
For a few centuries, Merida was a walled city, needing such protection because SOME Maya people had the BIG IDEA that the Spanish and their descendants shouldn’t have just up and taken the land so there were some revolts. Modern Merida has since expanded well beyond those old walls. I don’t know much about the treatment of the indigenous population today, but considering they are the majority, I hope they are running things.
I’m going to share Merida hotel and vegan food info in a separate post because there is just SO MUCH to talk about! You may recall we only spent 1 night in Valladolid (and did so much I’m honestly just so proud of my lazy butt) but we have 3 in Merida, so we have a lot of ground (food, really) to cover – as well as a beach day in Progreso! It was not as exciting as it sounded! But you’ll see! In the separate post!
After our first night, we slept in a little because, well because I hadn’t been able to sleep in for like at least a week and I can’t function like that for too long because I have a SYNDROME and the only cure is MORE COWBELL sleep. Also, we had to be ready for another gigantic day! This day was going to be packed with a trip to the site of the ancient Maya city Uxmal, more cenotes, and a surprise chocolate museum that literally took 3 hours and yet was great.
UXMAL
After about an hour’s drive, we got to Uxmal at 11:30am, which is a terrible, no good, very bad idea. See, this was summer, in Mexico. It’s hot. At almost noon, the sun is, like, ready, and boy oh boy it felt like we were in a sauna while we explored the extensive grounds of Uxmal. It was about 102 degrees (Fahrenheit, obvs; see last post for my rant about systems of measurement it’s totally worth it) and we were positively baking. (You’ll be like THEN WHY ARE YOU WEARING A SWEATER IN THESE PICTURES but it is not a sweater it’s like the thinnest material ever made and it just protects my arm skin from burning.) Entry into Uxmal is 413 pesos (about $20) and, like the other sites, a portion of that is a federal fee that has to be paid in cash so you just need to be prepared to pay in cash.
Like pretty much every site we’ve seen so far in the Yucatan, Uxmal is an ancient Maya city and one of the most important archaeological sites in Maya culture. It’s on the Ruta Puuc, a long grouping of roads that lead to endless Maya archaeological sites and ruins. If you are in the market for an entire day of endless ruins, just drive down the Ruta and see however many you have time for, ensuring you end with Uxmal since it’s the grandest and most important. If, like us, you’ve already seen lots of ruins and you don’t want to get burned out to the point where you don’t appreciate them any longer, start with Uxmal, spend a significant amount of time exploring this site, and then treat yo self to a hilarious afterparty/museum.
While everyone visiting the Yucatan will put Chichen Itza at the top of their to-do list, we were impressed with Uxmal and I think we both agreed it was our favorite site in the state. It’s an enormous site like Chichen Itza, but it’s much less crowded, and it’s also much more interesting topographically. There are so much areas to explore and it seems like they’re all on different levels, like various earthen platforms rising in unexpected ways so there’s all this surprising variation in elevation as you explore. This made our exploration of Uxmal much more exciting and fun. Also, there are ZERO touts, whereas Chichen Itza has tons of stalls all around the interior grounds, which I get and it happens at most important sites around the world, but it’s nice to find one that isn’t all commercialized inside.
actually we made about 1000 of these new frens. they are EVERYWHERE.
Despite its popularity and general fame, Uxmal has not actually been studied enough as an archaeological site. I’ve been calling it an archaeological site and I’m going to keep calling it an archaeological site because calling it old ruins sounds like I’m being a bitch to her, but there hasn’t actually been much archaeology going on. Very little excavation or research has been done because I guess archaeologists are too busy in Egypt still? I don’t know where are they? People think that it was founded about 500 AD and was the capital of the Maya state from 850-925 AD before invaders took over. During its height, it teamed up with Chichen Itza to dominate Mayan society; the two together were like Helene Bezukhova, the queen of society, beautiful, barely clothed, plump bare shoulder and much exposed neck, round which she wears a double string of pearls! okay I’m getting sidetracked by musical theatre again (PIERRE THE CUCKHOLD SITS AT HOME PIERRE THE CUCKHOLD SITS AT HOME the poor man).
Like all good ruins, Uxmal featured a enormous f-ing thing that you have to climb. Well you don’t have to, but we always feel compelled to climb whatever is climbable, even though my FOMO (fear of missing out) is regularly outweighed by my FOFO (fear of falling off). Uxmal’s expansive grounds include lots of highly climbable structures, but the highest building, the grand temple, is the Featured Climb. As always, it probably looks like an easy climb in the pictures but it was g-d terrifying to come down. I mean the climb up wasn’t a picnic in 102 degree heat when you are sweating buckets even without moving but I almost panicked to a halt coming down. No I definitely did panic-halt a few times. At the top, we met a really nice English family who were taking a year-long tour around the world. They had a son of about 7 years old and the two of us literally talked each other through the descent. We both went down on our bottoms (as the English say) for a part of it, but I felt better standing and going sideways. Guys it was legit terrifying. It’s so steep that you are basically looking at a sheer drop; the stairs are almost on top of each other and even for my small-ish feet they are TINY. I felt bad leaving my new child friend as he took longer but his parents were waiting for him at the bottom and like, didn’t seem concerned and I had to GET THE F OUTTA THERE before I froze again. Ahhh these descents are scary! I mean I get extra scared because I fell down a similar thing once (okay it was stone stairs at college not at an ancient archaeological site BUT STILL) but it’s definitely not a breeze to do for anyone. (Also not a breeze? The lack of breeze.)
At many of these ancient sites, amid the enormous temples and structures for sacrificial rites and residential buildings and smaller temples and everything, would always be an open field called the ‘ball court’. Some, like at Chichen Itza, are ‘Great Ball Courts’. I honestly saw all these signs for ball courts and thought ‘well it’s nice they also had leisure activities and sports.’
We’ll put a pin in that ball court discussion until we get to the Mayan Museum at the end. REMEMBER!
Surviving the descent of that temple was definitely my favorite part, but my second favorite part offers some stiff competition. Like I said (a lot) (yay complaining), it was hot as the balls they used in the great ball court’s non-basketbally game of basketball. When we exited the grounds back into the ticket/welcome building with the toilets and a few shops, we saw THE BEST THING EVER:
ICY DRINKS! PLEASE AND THANK YOU! We shared a mango one and a coconut one and because it was so sweltering out, they were amazing. Icy drinks have never been better. HUZZAH FOR ICE.
What a great place.
After our just-under-two hours at Uxmal, we were definitely ancient-ruinsed out for the day. I mean, all we’d really done so far in Mexico was tour these sites, so continuing further down the Ruta Puuc would have probably made us bitter. Instead, we went across the street from Uxmal to…the Museum of Chocolate.
CHOCO-STORY: ECOPARQUE MUSEO DEL CACAO
We thought the Chocolate Museum, or “Choco-Story” would be a nice little air-conditioned diversion to regroup after our exhausting (but awesome) time at Uxmal, before getting back on the road to find more cenotes. But it turned out to be a HUGE cacao plantation, where they grow and harvest cacao beans and also have an entire museum about the history, growth, use, everything to do with cacao. It was INSANE. We thought it would be like 30 minutes tops and we were there for over 2 hours. But it was SO fun, and so interesting. The museum is spread through the endless grounds in numerous thatched huts, with each hut covering one topic. I fancy myself a chocolate connoisseur and I never imagined there could even be so much information about it.
We learned what healthy beans look like, as well as a lot of (too much) information about all the different kinds of diseases your cocoa beans could catch (omg it was actually very sad). We learned how the very special beans were used as currency in ancient times, and how much they’d be worth. We learned how the Maya would use cocoa beans in their sacrifices to the gods. And we learned about the cocoa gods the Maya people would pray too, like this fine one below who is appropriately but oof sadly covered in cocoa bean…lesions?
90% of what we learned in the Yucatan was about human sacrifices. I mean I’m all about respecting other cultures BUT DAYUM
We ALSO learned – too late – that it wasn’t just a cocoa plantation, but also a sort of animal sanctuary. When I first came upon the cages, I was like OH SHIT OH SHIT IS THIS SOME SORT OF F-ING ZOO? But there are signs all over the animal areas saying WE ARE NOT A ZOO! and explaining that the animals living here have been rescued from abuse, and wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild. Now I’m no wildlife expert, and I’m sure there’s a strong argument that we still shouldn’t interfere with wild animals even if they face certain death remaining on their own. But there’s not much I personally am mad about if this place is giving these animals a nice life that otherwise would have been over long ago.
Another thing I thought this place did well was reinforce the respect that cacao farming deserves, and how we should treat chocolate as something special and not something we are entitled to. And of course, we have to be careful where we buy from and what kinds of practices we support.
My favorite part was that one hut was for learning how to make traditional Maya hot cacao drinks, complete with making and enjoying your own cup! The cocoa on its own is extremely bitter, so there is a bowl of sugar for making it palatable, plus the traditional spice additions of cinnamon, annatto, allspice, and hot pepper. I added everything!
I also really enjoyed the sign on Chocolate & Health. We had a pretty good laugh at how ridic this was.
It was pretty cool but kind of awkward when we were ushered deeper into the forest (it’s like in a forest, it’s nuts) for a traditional Maya cocoa ceremony. Awkward just because we were uncomfortable with these guys performing for us white tourists and we were just like eeeek thank you I really appreciate this but eeeek, but it was interesting.
Obviously, my favorite part of the Chocolate Museum was truly the gift shop. IT WAS ALL CHOCOLATE! and like, things for making chocolate? and soaps and shampoos made from chocolate? The flavors of their bars sounded incredible, but it was so hot and they would all immediately melt before we made it back to London (in like, another week? no chance!). We limited ourselves to two awesome flavors, both with some sort of pepper.
OH NO! HOLD THAT THOUGHT. My actual favorite part was the additional information inside the main building, near the gift shop. There was a “Chocolate Timeline”, and it included such shade, such absolute, gorgeous, sensational shade, thrown at the king of fuckery, Mr Christopher Columbus. Behold the glory:
I CANNOT handle how excruciatingly perfect this is. In so few words it’s basically announcing what a f-ing asshole Columbus was but without saying anything objectionable. SO GOOD. WHAT AN ASSHOLE.
Choco-story was a really fun surprise! It took over two hours to tour, and the toilets are only outside the ticket area (had to do a few reentries), but I’m glad we went.
After the chocolate, you know what it’s time for.
CENOTES
Another day in the Yucatan, another swim in a cenote! We followed our GPS as best we could towards the middle of nowhere for X’Batun Cenote, which eventually led us down a dirt road. We were like, is this right? Where TF are we? We drove through this amazing, quaint little villages with a single small church and like a cow on the side of the road, wondering if we were going in the right direction. Eventually, we saw a small sign up on a big porch, with a few guys sitting in chairs. They were selling tickets and giving directions! They also had toilets!
The men sold us a joint ticket for two cenotes located across the road from each other, X’Batun and Dzonbacal. It’s 80 pesos for both. Unfortunately, X’Batun was closed because of heavy rains earlier that week – the rains made the water too dirty to swim in. We had a peek at it though, and it was very similar to Dzonbacal, where we still could swim, so it’s fine.
We still have to get there though! This ticket porch is still miles away from the actual cenote! They directed us to drive to the end of this road, turn right past a certain tree, and then drive 3 kilometers down a random suuuuper dirt/off-roady road till there’s a split in the road, indicating the two cenotes. We peeked at the one and then drove to the other, where the parking area had toilets (!) and a shower stall. The toilet was the foulest one I’ve seen yet in the country, and still no hooks were to be found (Mexico like doesn’t do hooks in toilet stalls), so changing in it without letting any of my stuff touch the gross floor was A CHALLENGE. We rinsed off with the shower stall/bucket as you should do (really as you should do not just with natural swimming wonders of the world but in public pools omg the gross men at my London pool don’t shower beforehand even though it’s IN THE RULES and they all reek of cologne HOW MANY EMAILS DO I HAVE TO SEND BEFORE THEY ENFORCE THE RULES) and then we enjoyed this cenote! It was beautiful, like half in a cave half outside.
Such a great cenote. There are decent signs advertising X’Batun, so you shouldn’t have a hard time finding it (or at least finding the right village) if you include it with your trip to Uxmal, which you should do. Hopefully for you X’Batun won’t be too dirty to swim in!
Since we were already in wet bathing suits when we got back to our hotel, we enjoyed our hotel pool after our cenote time. Double swimming days are the best. But more on that in the next post!
Aside from our beach day in Progreso, we have one more sight to share from our time in Merida, and one of the most important: The Mayan World Museum of Merida, or the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya.
GRAN MUSEO DEL MUNDO MAYA
The Mayan Museum is the big thing to do actually in the city of Merida. It’s off one of the main expressways of the city leading north out of it (so it makes sense to visit the museum first and then continue north to Progreso for a beachy day trip, if you are planning things for yourself). It’s a huge, modern, shiny building with a gigantic, new, shiny, modern parking garage underground. It costs 80 pesos to park in it, which is $4, and worth it to keep your car out of that sun.
When you get to the huge shiny lobby of the museum, you’ll be (I was) happy to see water dispensers for refilling your enormous water bottles! Honestly my favorite part.
It’s 150 pesos per ticket, about $7.50 which is not bad considering how much this museum has. The exhibits are great, but there isn’t very good signage, at least in English, which was a little disappointing. Still, you can learn a lot from what what signs there are and from just looking at the displays with a modicum of critical thinking.
There’s tons of information about indigenous cultures, their ways of life, and what they were like in ancient times, in every aspect. There’s tons of archaeological finds, including ancient statues and all kinds of pottery.
But you’re here to finally learn what the big ball courts in all the ruins sites are about. All over Mesoamerica, these ancient cities have these huge ball courts, and like I said before, it’s not just for old-fashioned forms of basketball. Archaeologists believe that the game was played by hitting the ball with one’s forearm, or a bat-like device, to try to pass it through those rings we saw above, in Uxmal, on the side walls of the playing field. Hitting it with your forearm sounds like it would hurt, because the balls were HEAVY. Yikes! That’s probably as bad as it gets, right? Pain-wise? Noooope. Scenes carved on walls of the spectator benches show players wearing protective gear as well as carrying tools that could be used for striking the ball, so who knows what the right way to play is. It shouldn’t concern us too much, though, because REGARDLESS can we just ALL AGREE as a society NOT to play this game? Okay so after you play and try to get the ball through the hoop, there would be a winner and a loser, as there are. Seven players on each side would parade toward the center of the field, and the captain of the defeated team would kneel. Then the captain of the winning team would DECAPITATE THE LOSER. The winning captain/murderer would hold his knife and the severed head of his friend up before the probably cheering crowd. This, like almost everything else in these ancient cities, existed as a way to offer human sacrifices to the gods but in a more communal and fun way, I GUESS. And I thought football sucked.
I won’t leave you with ‘horrible sports gone wrong’, though. Elsewhere in the museum, there was an interactive screen display that, if you entered some personal information about yourself, would tell you sort of your Mayan fortune – what your personality is like and what jobs you’re equipped for. I’m sure it’s a way for the government to collect private details about its guests but we really wanted to know what it would say so we did it anyway.
As you can see, my color is black and my direction is west, so I’m kind of like a Kardashian in Mexico. I’m like IN AWE of how accurate this is. I DO live between day and night (like most people…because they just mean like…daytime, right?). I am GENEROUS with my ADVICE (/extremely judgmental and bossy). I TAKE TO THE ROAD IN BOTH HAPPINESS AND SORROW! this is amazing. Although apparently I should be a road guide or a…a marriage spokesman?? what job is that and how do I get it? LOVES IT! WORTH THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT HAVING MY EMAIL ADDRESS!
So that’s it for Part 2 of our trip through the Yucatan, but there’s much more to come. Like, the hotel (and its pool) and all the vegan food, plus a beach that I did…not…love. So fun! Stay tuned.
Olkhon Island & Lake Baikal, Siberia: I Don’t Think You’re Ready For This Jelly (me)
After three weeks of exhausting, nonstop activity in our big summer travels, we planned for four days of just pure relaxation in a presumed idyllic spot, Olkhon Island on the famed Lake Baikal, a tiny fishing village that is hard to reach and so we simultaneously assumed two incongruous thoughts: 1) that we would be two of very very few visitors (pretty true) but 2) that even so the island and village would be equipped to deal with visitors (hahah no). Can’t have it both ways. Really, parts of the island, like the lake itself and the cliffs and rocky terrain along the northern parts of the island, are beautiful, but getting there and for the most part being there is too stressful to allow for any relaxation, or, honestly, to allow me to recommend a trip here.
it’s like a little baby Azure Window! Oh Azure Window, RIP! (read the Malta posts on the main Travel page)
Through the Hostel Baikaler in Irkutsk, we booked a trip to Olkhon Island up on Lake Baikal. Most people in Irkutsk are indeed stopping there in order to venture out to the lake, which is the biggest freshwater lake in the world. The guidebook says that if all the other freshwater in the world disappeared, Baikal would be able to fill our needs for forty years. That’s a big ass lake. So the Baikaler people booked us a minibus ride to Olkhon and a 3 night stay at Olga’s Guesthouse in Khuzir, the tiny ‘town’ on Olkhon. When I say to you to never, ever use Baikaler or Olga’s people to book anything, I really, really mean it.
The best thing I saw all that day of the 8 hour minibus – our only big toilet stop
My view for an entire day – this was the best road we took. SO BUMPY
The minibus seemed nice enough, one of the nicer vehicles we’ve seen, and since we were picked up at our hostel early we got the first row which I figured would help with my carsickness (the van fit about 16 people). I was so funny thinking anything could stop the nausea on this ride, even if you aren’t prone to it. After we left, at about 9:05, we picked up a few more travelers at another hostel, before we set off and…nope, we just parked in a busy market square one block from our hostel at 9:15, the driver got off, and I watched as he joined apparent friends to smoke in the middle of the market. At 10:30 (that’s right), he got back on the bus, and we thought jesus christ are we finally leaving, an hour and a half late? Nopeeee, he drove around while on his phone yelling at people until we found 4 other people to pick up outside a stadium. I mean. WTF. I thought okay NOW we’re leaving and it’ll be fine. Little did I know.
The roads on Olkhon
After just under two hours, we stopped for a bathroom break, which is the best kind of break you can ever offer me. Five minutes later, we drove down the road to stop for lunch. It sucked that our two stops in a 7 hour bus journey were back to back; I was so nervous about having to pee, I was having palpitations. When we left the cafe in the middle of nowhere on the side of a dirt road, the real ridiculousness of our journey started. The road to Olkhon Island is not equipped for people to drive on. There aren’t roads, really, it’s just land. And we were not in a jeep or a landrover, we were in a minibus and pretty much off-roading. We felt every jarring bump and throw from the rocky paths that turned into sand dunes that you had to carefully maneuver and then back into rocky again. It was INSANE. We were all looking at each other like ‘oh my god this cannot be the way’, holding on for dear life to the handles above us or on the seats in front of us. It was like being on a roller coaster that also shook your seat violently and spun you around. I’m nauseous just remembering it. Of course that part of the trip was about 2 hours. It was the worst travel experience ever, until the return journey three days later, which was actually worse.
The town of Khuzir (after a terrible rainstorm, hence the road is a pond)
One of the two main grocery stores in Khuzir/Olkhon
When we finally got to Olga’s Guesthouse in Khuzir, it was not the fresh sigh of relief we were counting on. It was a few lackluster wooden shacks, and our room was a small, dank, windowless affair with two college dorm beds with ugly, not very clean looking bedding on them. Windowless was the worst part. We told the staffer that her colleagues who had arranged this for us months ago promised that we would be in a building with a bathroom inside it (I pee at least every 90 minutes and I cannot be walking to another building in the middle of the night that often). The staffer was like, um no none of the buildings have bathrooms, here is our bathroom — two outhouse stalls about a full minute’s walk up the road of the grounds. (One was a western toilet; the other was a beginning-of-Slumdog-style-elevated wooden floor with a hole in it. When I talk about outhouses from here on out (and I’m sure I will), I mean this latter kind.) The sinks were halfway back down the little road. I mean. No. Your colleagues told us you had a bathroom in our building, and that was literally the only reason we booked with you instead of elsewhere, and we told them that at booking, that it was dependent on that! She was just like well nope we don’t have a bathroom so that’s it. We got our stuff from our jail cell of a windowless room and hightailed it out of that shithole. Luckily, we hadn’t paid yet, and luckily the staffer I guess heard from the colleague who made all the false promises (lies, they are called lies) and gave us our deposit back. We walked about 30 minutes in the sand dunes (omg it was so hard I’ve never been that sweaty before it’s like I had some sort of fever) up the road to Hotel Baikal View. It looked like a little string of colorful motel rooms, little log cabins in three rows, but they were so much better than motel rooms and the hotel itself was that sigh of relief we needed. The bed was the most comfortable in the entire country so far, and they had a bar, and a restaurant, and lots of staffers who spoke English and there was a POOL and a SAUNA and omg it was just great. And still much cheaper than the equivalent would be in the west.
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Our multi-colored string of hotel rooms! So cute
I loved that bed. It had clean white sheets and a big fluffy white comforter. The best. And every single room had its own bathroom. I was so happy that I didn’t have to put shoes and a headlamp on in the middle of the night to pee, I didn’t even care that the cabins were full of bugs (log cabins on a lake, man!), I didn’t even care that it was too cold to swim in the pool (we did jump in after our daily sauna use though, which was bracing but amazing hot damn I love saunas), I didn’t even care that housekeeping threw out my retainer/night guard and I’ve been grinding my teeth like crazy every since. (Okay, that’s not true, I cared a lot and cried but once a one-inch piece of clear plastic is gone, it’s gone. Fuckers.) I did love that sauna, hoo boy. And our first night, all night, was the hardest rainstorm I’ve maybe ever heard. I couldn’t sleep for a few hours because I thought our cabin was going to blow away, or at least flood quickly and completely. It was unbelievable. Can you imagine if we had stayed at Olga’s and I had to go out in that to trek to the outhouse in my boots and raingear and headlamp in the pitch black five times in the night??? Thank god we left. I’m so grateful to Z money for that one. I mean he didn’t want to stay at Olga’s either, he’s not a filthy monster, but yay for finding a nice place.
We ate a few times in the restaurant at Baikal View, because it was about a mile on the sand dunes to the ‘town’ of Khuzir and we were usually so tired from our day of exploring that we didn’t feel like trekking there and back (there’s like one taxi and you have to either be very lucky and find him randomly or get someone to call him, and it usually takes like 20 minutes for him to come anyway so no). The restaurant was fine, full of all the Baikal specialties husband was supposed to get. It was harder for me, but they had a really good pickle plate and good potato dishes (I say that like I’m not just talking about French fries and potato wedges). We also tried this weird kind of pickled mushroom that was interesting. I know the deathly gray color is unappetizing but they were decent.
oh I’ll have my usual thanks I guess |
like the most colorless plate of food ever |
Then, one night, the waitress was the first one (they all only spoke Russian) who understood really what kinds of things I was looking for and tried to help me get something that wasn’t just pickles and potatoes. She said what about this soup, otroshka? I had read about that soup before, and knew that it was cucumber, potato, egg, meat, sour cream, and kvass, that beer-like soda-ish dark bready drink that I for some reason like. She said this version was vegetarian, and they could do it without the egg and sour cream. I was skeptical but excited to have a soup. Lol again.
my kvass soup I can’t believe I ate this for dinner lolol
It was literally chopped up cucumber, potato, and a shittonne of spicy radish in a bowl of cold kvass. I mean. What. We were CRACKING up. It was…not bad, but it was incredibly strange and like WHAT. Imagine cold chopped veggies served in a bowl of undiluted, unadulterated soda, that’s what it was. I mean I ate it. It was still raw veggies. I still can’t get over it. I think the waitresses were laughing at me, having dared each other to see who could get the weird Americans to eat the craziest thing. I said to Husband that it’s usually with sour cream and egg and maybe that makes it less like a soda bath of cucumber and he said actually that sounds like it would be even stranger, and truly revolting. I guess the idea of soda and sour cream and egg mixed into a broth really is disgusting oh man alive Russia.
literally main street Khuzir
We did eat several meals in Khuzir, too. There were a lot of fish shacks, and a lot of small cafes, and a few decent ramshackle places with some things I could pick out. We went twice to this hopping cafe on the main drag (the name of it was just its address, and there’s like one street, so just like…it’s there) that had salads in a glass case (not refrigerated…I am living dangerously) and so I picked out a cabbage-y cucumber-y looking salad and another carrot-yuba salad! I had that yuba salad twice at this place, I was so happy to find it again, my favorite dish of Siberia. I really hope this yuba looking stuff I keep finding in Siberia (also had some in Yekaterinburg) really is tofu skin and not just some weird part of a fish (or worse) that I’ve just never seen before. That would be bad, and embarrassing. Let’s say it’s yuba before my stomach starts to hurt.
I love that this carrot-yuba salad was everywhere in Siberia!
We also went to Kafe Olkhon on you guessed it the main drag, which I really liked the look of. It was a proper old dark wooden pub-sort of place, full of Russian people and travelers. They had a menu with pictures and some English translations, and I got a giant plate of plain kasha (love it, I’m sorry) and a carrot-cabbage salad. It was a great meal for me if totally boring and plain to everyone else. I love that kind of meal.
There were a few sad grocery stores in the town, one less sad that had a few fun chocolate treats we found. That less sad store also had a fellow customer wearing the best shirt I’ve ever seen. I tried to get a picture of her without being too obvious but I failed. Anyway, the shirt was red and in white block letters it said “Puberty Silent’. WHAT. IS. WHAT. We’ve seen the most incredible tee shirts with things in English written on them. I guess this is how Chinese people feel when they see the nonsense character-tattoos of westerners.
ate the entire bag of chocolate-strawberry things on the walk home. should have gotten two of them. yummm
Wandering through the dirt roads once with new French friends we met, we passed a house that had a ‘homemade bread’ sign out front. So we rang the doorbell , it started to pour, and the lady came out to the gate, in that order. We said ‘you have bread?” and she said yes how many? and we said um, I guess two? and she came out with two enormous loaves of bread. like, enormous. 50 rubles each, so pretty cheap. We were cracking up. She didn’t even let us in, we just bought bread from a random lady at her house on the side of the road. It was hilarious. Almost as funny as trying to break into that bread itself, which took not joking all of my strength to break apart. Inside, it was really nice and fluffy, delicious really, but that outer shell was f-ing armor.
“homemade bread” |
the bread lady’s house. she didn’t let us in |
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Okay, that’s enough about the food!
Olkhon itself is interesting. The town of Khuzir (and, consequently, the entirety of the surroundings for miles and miles considering Khuzir is the most built up touristed part, despite it being literally two dirt roads) is not really ready for tourists, at least not a lot of them. It doesn’t not have the infrastructure to support tourism. Does it even have infrastructure? That bus ride, I’m not exaggerating, it was horrendous. We really can’t recommend going to Olkhon because this ride was so hellish and it takes up two entire days. It’s just not worth it. Once there, the guesthouses all seem to be like Olga’s and the very famous Nikita’s, complexes of small wooden shacks with shared outhouses (oh p.s., the entire island except for our hotel was outhouses. The restaurants too – you were lucky if the restaurant you chose even had a key to the nearest outhouse shack down the block. It’s fine when traveling (used to it by now) but like not in the place you’re staying for days). (Nikita’s charges hourly for wifi, so glad we didn’t book there.) It’s cool to be at a place that is so remote and raw, but it really cannot handle the tourist trade in its current state. It’s a shame because parts of the island are beautiful, but I just don’t know how people can really go to see them. There is a hydrofoil boat that might go once or twice a week, saving most of the minibus ride, but then even getting around the island for the tours (which is the most important and best thing to do on the island; you’re not there to stay in the ‘town’) requires driving in minibuses on the same and even worse roads! The entire day! It’s just a mess there.
the roads we drove on for like a whole week
Let’s talk about those tours. We booked a tour of the north cape of the island, called Cape Khoboy, with our hotel. Every hostel or hotel books the same tour, with the same sort of driver and Soviet military-looking 9-person van, the same fish soup cooked for lunch by the driver (smelled great but I wasn’t going to eat even if it was vegan when we were driving all day on those obstacle sources of rocks, dunes, and tree roots), and the same collection of sights before and after Khoboy along the way. It cost 1100 rubles per person (100 of that was a random charge that we weren’t told about in advance and I kind of think was the driver and his friends tricking us but what could be do), which is like 15 pounds, so not bad for an entire day of sightseeing. And the landscape really is beautiful.
Okay, so this is a little terrible, but the name of the cape is pronounced like ‘ho boy’, a little phlegmier, but still close, so the entire week not joking (and still) Z and I were repeating to each other our favorite bit of SNL weekend update:
it’s when your whole body goes
hoo boyyyyy
Khoboy itself requires a decent amount of time for a hike down and up through all the twists of the mountain. We ran into our French friends there, which was hilarious. It was a beautiful place, which makes me sadder about how weird it is to be a tourist there. Seriously if they just paved the road and excavated the outhouses once in a while (it had been a too-long while for most of them) it would be oodles better.
All over Siberia, we have seen trees and bushes covered in scarves and pieces of colorful cloth. It’s like a shaman thing, I think. Shamanism is big in this part of the country. The trees are really fun to see.
Khoboy had an outhouse (worst condition of whole island), so that was lucky, since this was another of the three days (out of four) where I was a ball of nerves all day about having to pee. I’m so dehydrated.
The driver also took us to other outlets along the north side of the island, beautiful rocks jutting out over the lake that we climbed up and hiked down (some of the pics above are those other parts of the cape; I can’t tell which was which part). It was exhausting but really worth it, so beautiful.
But again, the roads. My god. I bet you think I’m being dramatic just for the sake of drama, exaggerating. Here is another picture I took on the route when I WASN’T hanging on for dear life.
These are not roads, and our little bus, my god, it’s a miracle that it made it through. All the tours are in identical buses and I just do not understand how they operate after driving through this. We spent almost 45 minutes driving through WOODS. Like, without a road, just making our way in the woods. In a bus. Here’s a picture of us going through the woods behind another car. The one in front of us really gives you the perspective I need you to have in order to agree with me on how insane this all is.
pretty scary right?
Another day, we went on a hike along the lake with the French people. It was a cold and rainy day, but we said hey let’s be outdoorsy. But then it started to really rain, like buckets, like pouring freaking rain, and the ground/sand was incredibly muddy and I started to have trouble making my way up without slipping backwards, which is a really scary feeling, and the ground just kept giving way instead of letting me progress and it was miserable. Beautiful, but miserable. Luckily, the foggy weather really reflected that state.
that’s a boat!
It totally looks like Japan, or a scene out of Avatar, right? That fog was insane. The farther we went, the harder it got to see where we had come from, and with the rain getting harder and harder and the ground getting wetter and wetter, we all decided to stop and head back before too long (too long for me though). Our shoes were so disgusting. Not to mention our pants. We’re just always dirty this trip, it seems.
I know right now you are like…dude…all of these nature scenes look gorgeous! Why are you complaining so much! But see it’s just because it’s been a minute since I wrote about the driving conditions. After all this beauty, we still had to get back to Irkutsk/civilization. And when I tell you that the return minibus journey was BY FAR the worst bus trip yet, I really mean it. The van was not nice this time. Instead, it was over-crowded, and the door was broken. There was no trunk area for luggage, so 20 people all with giant backpacks and suitcases had to sit WITH their luggage either on their lap or in the aisle next to them, making this the most unsafe bus ever, not to mention impossible to get on and off of. The driver was awful and refused to stop for lunch. The whole thing was so bad that, when we got to the ferry crossing (where we got out of the car) (after about 1 1/2 hours), Z and I actually knocked on the windows of every car on the ferry and asked if they could take us the rest of the way for whatever money they wanted. Unfortunately, the only ones who had room for us were not going to Irkutsk. Seriously, that’s how bad it was. Thank god we made it back in one piece. When the driver started letting people off in Irkutsk, we got off at the first opportunity even though we were like 20 minutes walk from our hostel. We didn’t care we just needed to get off that death machine.
minibus from hell
Luckily, we got off in Irkutsk right near our favorite place, Engineer Coffee (or something like that), with the best, nicest staff and the best coffee (according to the coffee drinker of the two of us). They also had clean bathrooms, free water, and good wifi. It was a godsend.
After we dropped our bags back at the Hostel Baikaler for the few hours we had until our sleeper train to Ulan-Ude, we went in search of food. We decided on the great-named Sushied, with the ‘sushi’ part in cyrillic and then the ‘ed’ added after that. So fun, and the food was decent. I needed all the vegetables and ordered a green salad, a seaweed salad, a veggie sushi roll, and a veggie noodle stir-fry (to share and granted I gave Z most of the stir-fry but still, lots of food!).
my favorite kind of salad is two salads |
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So, all in all, I guess I’m glad we went to Olkhon? Lake Baikal is beautiful, and it’s cool to be somewhere few people go. But man. The discrepancy between the scenery on the coast and the lake versus the journey there and the roads and the town, it’s drastic. If you had a private helicopter you should take that and try it out for 2 days maybe. It really is so beautiful. But what a mess it all was. Except that bed. My god I loved that bed.
the main intersection of Khuzir, Olkhon Island
that lake tho
honestly I think my fave thing about Olkhon is that they recycle. first place we saw in Russia doing it.
