Krasnoyarsk - a city that had a great impact on our trip. Next to meeting Julia's grandma, we hiked through some mountains and skyped with the whole IBS'17 team. We arrived there on the 10th of February and have been picked up by our host Ruslan. He has shown us our home for the next couple of days and went back to work. After we settled down, washed our clothes and put them out to dry, it was time to visit Julia's grandma. Little side note: Julia is a really cool IBS student and half-Russian. Right now she's rocking her year abroad in Finland, yet she managed to arrange a meetup between her nana and us. Typically Russian we have been spoiled with tea, cookies, bread and sweets. As promised we also phone called Julia herself and Ella (her grandma) was totally touched by being able to talk to her grandchild. After connecting these two gems, Ella told us all about her childhood. It was super interesting because actually her parents were German but due to war etc. they were constantly moving. Some stories of hers were quite upsetting, but I think in respect to her and her families privacy, we will not share them here. We must have spent around 3 hours at her house and it was just heart warming. She was so kind and tried everything to make us feel welcome. As it became darker, we decided to leave. Of course we wouldn't let us go without making sure we were prepared - she gave us bread and cake to take with us.
In the evening our host taught us how to play Durak - a Russian card game that we would play from now on, when we've had enough from playing Kniffel.
The next day the husband of Julia's cousin played tour guide through a National Park for us. Even though he is very busy trying to coordinate work, caring for a little kid, taking care of his home and his wife, he decided to spend time with us. We highly appreciated that. How much we would appreciate it, became more obvious later, when we found ourselves in a white winter wonderland. I (Chantal) had never seen something like this before. Snow as high as my hip and no matter where we looked, we were surrounded by mountains, trees and just the winter's beauty. A good idea would be to try to let the following pictures speak for themselves.
We hiked through this magical place for around 3-4 hours and even though our clothes had kept us warm for most of the time, eventually the snow made its way through my clothes and it started getting cold. Since Vitali had to prepare food for his family anyway, we started our journey back. It was crazy to notice that as soon as we were coming closer to the city again, the air (that was so beautiful clean & refreshing in the mountains) became hard to breath again.
On the way back, we decided to visit Julias grandma another time. It would make her very happy as well as us. Just after we had arrived there, we received a Skype call from our Professor. Of course the topic was how we are going to handle this extraordinary situation concerning our studies, not being able to go to China and what to do instead. After that we spent some more time with Ella, we went back home and played more rounds of Durak with Ruslan and his wife. Though we had been practicing a lot, we still lost miserably against the two.
The next day we took the train to go to Irkutsk - the city near the Baikal Lake. On the train we made two friends, Vanja and Slawa. They taught us some "real Russian rules" for going out. Their motto was: Only drink, only fight, only go home. If you don't go home, you lost the fight and most likely ended up in hospital. In general we tried to have some political orientated talks with them, though it seemed like they never really had their own opinion. Literally every sentence started with "In Russia...", eg. in Russia it works this way, in Russia this is normal, in Russia blah blah. It was a little sad to not get something out of them, yet we managed to have a good time with them playing Kniffel and exchanging language knowledge.
Baikal, we're coming! Keep shining,
Chanti & Franzy
Take your Chanzy #takeyourchanzy
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