negev style!

this is a music video starring my class! i find it rather entertaining!

will make detour for epic malls!

the cheapest way i could find from china back to israel was rather circuitous, just the way i like it! a 7 hour flight from beijing to kuala lumpur, malaysia only cost a little over $100! kuala lumpur is famous for being a luxury shopping and eating destination. the malls were copious, spacious and extravagant, and there was lots of cheap and delicious food! and one can stay in cheap parts of town which is nice. though malaysia is almost entirely muslim, the food courts were pretty crowded even though it was ramadan! i went up the "kl" tower for an amazing view, and saw the famous petronas twin towers, which way back in the day used to be the world's tallest. malls and food!

the next day i took a bus to singapore to see more malls! singapore is such a nice place. extremely high standard of living and prices to match. for the most part, they've made their cash off naval trade and science. a fascinating cultural (and culinary!) milieu of chinese, malays, tamils and countless others. and the lingua franca is... english! my friend apurva is going to medical school in singapore, and he was kind enough to let me stay at his place! we ate some more amazing food and i spent a few days riding on one of the world's most efficient public transportation systems and endlessly walking around some of the best malls the world has to offer, such as my personal favorite, a futuristically shaped one called the "ion". one day i took a 1 hour ferry to a nearby indonesian island called batam and back! indonesia is a whole other world, and i'd love to go back sometime. i also hit up singapore's resort island of sentosa for some sneaking into luxury hotel's beachfronts and to see one of singapore's 2 casinos - which singaporians have to pay $100 to get into, but is free for everyone else. an arguably overbearing government is about the only drawback of living in singapore - even the sale of chewing gum is strictly regulated.

the next dirt cheap flight brought me to sri lanka for a 30 hour stop! quickly regained my appreciation for the subcontinental sideways head nod! i found my way to the idyllic beachfront town of negombo, and spent the night in what ended up being a room in a family's house. the next day did some body surfing in the indian ocean and then went to colombo, the capital. being white, i was (rather awkwardly) very much the center of attention in an underground restroom "facility". also in a cafeteria style restaurant where every single one of the dozens of clientele literally stopped everything and stared with rapt attention for the entire 10 minutes that it took the white person to eat a plate of food with his hand. no, don't worry - i was using the right hand. overall a really enjoyable time - there is something about the blunt rawness of life in india and its similar neighbors that helps positively reorient a person's perspective on life if one lets it - even in just 30 hours.

i then traveled back to israel through sharjah, in the united arab emirates, and amman, jordan. that made 8 countries in a week, which is sort of crazy! getting from amman to israel turned out to be more of an adventure than i had planned, as it was the eve of eid al fitr (the end of the muslim month of ramadan), which complicated the logistics in a number of ways. but i made it, and 2nd year, starting with anatomy of the thorax has been really great so far!

yeeeeee-how!

the next leg of the trip was a train through the gobi desert from ulaanbaatar to the chinese border. we prepped ourselves because we had heard horror stories about mongolian trains - people being robbed as they slept and how the sheets would reek of mutton. but it was quite nice - probably the nicest train ride all summer in fact! we arrived in the chinese border city of erlian and spent the day wandering the streets until late afternoon when the sleeper buses starting their trips to beijing. these chinese sleeper buses were one of a kind - i'd recommend trying one if you ever get the chance! very early the next morning we arrived in beijing!! at an unknown location. we allied ourselves with a group of austrian bros and sweatily set out down a dark beijing street. a number of hours later, we made it to our destination - tiananmen square! just in time for the morning flag raising! there were tens of thousands of people there at 6 am, and most of them wanted a picture with us, the pasty whites! i knew i was going to love china!

beijing is an amazing city! a few highlights:
-ate 5 inch-large scorpions!
-bubble tea!
-great wall of china! (my sister got groped on the bus, had a very uncharacteristic yet retrospectively funny hypoglycemic breakdown because we didn't get a chance to eat for 13 hours, and i had some very serious and very unfunny issues of my own that resulted from chugging 3 liters of water immediately before a long bus ride, but overall still a pretty good day!)
-some gritty punk rock live in some underground venue in some suburb that took me 4 hours to get to, but it was worth it!
-temple of heaven
-finally tracking down the elusive peking duck!
-oriental plaza shopping mall: kind of - i know i overuse this word especially regarding malls but its because i mean it - amazing!!!
-food, food, and food! 
-hanging out with some of my sister's friends who are in china to teach english - it was a lot of fun!
-forbidden city!

basically beijing was super enjoyable and compared to the locales we had spent the rest of the summer in, quite luxurious and very easy to get around! i mean, subway stops labelled in english? beijing 1, moscow 0! it was wonderful and 30 days would have been better than 4, but life must go on!

mongolia: where the sky is closer!

continued from russia: start here.

the next leg on our trans-siberian journey was an extremely warm and slow bus ride to mongolia! the bus was much cheaper than the train. i sat beside a girl who spoke perfect english who was from yakutsk, a republic in the far north of eastern siberia - she told me all about her homeland! traveling up there would be an epic trip - the road is called the "road of bones" because so many people die en route! anyway, a few of mongolia's superlatives: coldest capital city in the world (but it gets pretty darn hot in the summer); lowest population density of any country in the world; fastest growing economy in the world (mining, mining, mining). a fascinating place! the real mongolia is out in the steppes, where nomads herd yaks and drink their fermented milk in their yurts. but because we didn't really plan things out as well as we could have and didn't have tons of time, we spent most of our time in the capital city, ulaanbaatar.

the night we arrived, there was a huge party in the street around a massive television screen because a mongolian was about to win a very rare olympic gold in judo!! but then he lost to a russian. the crowd dissipated rather fast. mongolians don't really like the russians, partly because they used to have an ancient tibetan-like vertically written script of their language, but the soviets forced them to start using cyrillic. unlike russia, where we went for 2 weeks without meeting another western tourist, ulaanbaatar was hosting a very large quantity of tourists, mostly of the dreadlocked, spiritual pilgrimage type. indeed, literally most of them were israeli. we spent an enjoyable entire day looking for a place to do laundry (the sink in our hostel wasn't an option as there was one sink for the 80 people staying there = craziness). we also went to a mongolian "cultural" show, which was actually one of the most entertaining things imaginable! they did a bunch of dancing, some contortionism, and what everyone comes to mongolia to hear - throat singing! we found a huge buddhist temple with lots of pigeons and prayer wheels and a three-story high buddha. we also went to the movie theater for some mindless indulgence that i craved all year as i was studying microbiology - it was the new batman and everyone cheered whenever batman saved the day and it was amazing! ate lots of meat soup and thick noodles.

we ended up staying an extra day in mongolia because the trains to china were sold out, so we decided to make our way to a national park outside the city called terelj. we were too cheap to go any way other than public bus, but were getting all kinds of conflicting information in mongolian about which one was the one, so we chose one at random and hoped it would get us close. it kinda got us sorta in the right direction! because we didn't have any idea we'd be going there we had no idea what to expect, but it was very beautiful, with jagged rocks jutting up out of the steppe! we eventually found a huge rock that resembles a turtle and hiked for a few hours to a buddhist monastery on top of a mountain, and i had a terrible fever and barely made it, but thanks to maria we survived! we found the correct bus for the 2 hour ride back to ulaanbaatar, and it ended up being quite a memorable time. all seats were taken so we had to stand, no problem. but every minute or two the bus would stop to pick up another 4 passsengers, or 12. it became unbelievably crowded, with 3 or 4 people in a seat and literally about 100 people squeezed into the isle. i was standing at the front, right between the driver and the gear shifter that he had to grab every 15 seconds. memorable!

next up: china!

russkiiiii summer! part 2

continued from part 1: here.

yekaterinburg to novosibirsk was supposed to take 30 hours, but it ended up taking closer to 45! for a reason unknown to anyone on the train, we turned around at some point and took a very circuitous detour... through kazakhstan!! so i'm not complaining; another country! they even gave us an assortment of complimentary carbs for the trouble: bread, instant mashed potatoes, ramen noodles, and biscuits. and the train was full of little kids which made it more exciting! there was a little girl in our bunk area named dacha. we knew because mom kept yelling at her "dacha!"; "dacha!". upon our almost sunrise-arrival in the smoggy, uninspiring city of novosibirsk we sweatily lugged our backpacks and 10 liters of water >1 hour to a soviet era (lacking the kitsch) "hotel", thinking "wasn't this supposed to be a holiday?", but then we woke up, went on some runs in a theme-park themed park with camels and got some subway sandwiches for breakfast and guzzled some amazing rye bread-based liquid called kvass and thought "there's no where else i'd rather be right now than in siberia!" then we rushed to the train station ...

the next train to irkutsk was another 30 hours. by this time we were getting used to being on trains! irkutsk is a fascinating city: the de facto capital of siberia. we learned about the white army and their eastern resistance against the bolsheviks during the russian civil war, led by kolchak. a statue of him was recently erected in irkutsk: they had to make the sides of it super steep so that modern day communists wouldn't deface it. also, much of the city's rich cultural history can originally be attributed to the decembrists, political exiles to siberia in the early 1800s. we found a nice monastery and stuck around for a service. everyone stands the whole service in a russian orthodox church... also, you come and go as you wish as the service is happening. our second day we got up early to attempt to travel to lake baikal but trying to find a certain very-hard-to-find hydrofoil station ended up being an epic fail that involved many hours of hiking and eventually severe dehydration and hypoglycemia. the problems for me reached a vivid climax when, after purchasing a bottle of fermented sour goat milk that had become a personal rehydration favorite, the entire bottle exploded into my eyes and all over my body because i didn't know that this particular product happened to be carbonated. yes, carbonated fermented goat milk - only in russia.

the next day we did manage to find our way to lake baikal - on a minibus. the night before i happened to be bitten by 1 million bugs in my sleep; thankfully maria did not desert me despite my unsightliness. lake baikal is the deepest lake in the world!! we love superlatives! a few facts: 2600 species endemic to the lake. including a species of tapeworm that eats entire fish from the outside! the only freshwater seals in the world, the nerpas (they're really cute!). 20% of the world's freshwater finds itself in lake baikal at any given moment in time! we hiked along the shore to a tourist-oriented and garbage-strewn town called listvyanka, where we ate some freshly smoked omul, a fish that lives in the lake. absolutely unbelievably tasty! we then climbed around with a super friendly russian preteen in some mostly destroyed communist era warehouses where we found some nice views of the lake! we climbed a mountain... to discover that there were so many trees up there that there was no view, but it was still fun! to get back to irkutsk we took the hydrofoil. those things are exhilarating! we chilled on the roof with the wind while a chubby, gold-necklaced guy who apparently avidly hunts wolves and used to be a kgb agent shared a bottle of fine moldovan wine with us. it was nice! :)

our final russian train ride took us around the bottom of lake baikal, where a 2 minute stop was enough time to frantically fight back the restraints of the provodnitza (carriage attendent) to buy some last smoked omul through the train door, and on to ulan ude, the capital of buryatia. made some friends on the train, including a pro boxer and a guy named sergei who shared exactly zero common language with me, but we still managed to have a 2 hour conversation! something i didn't really know about russia before: there are 160 indigenous ethnicities or "nationalities" in the russian federation! indeed, that's why they call it a federation, because many of its parts are relatively autonomous republics. the friendly owner of the hostel we stayed at was ardently "not russian!", rather buryat. the buryat people are related to the mongols and are big into shamanism and ancestor worship and the like, which made ulan ude about the most exotic place we had been to yet on this trip. we learned that the most revered site in shamanism are some random rocks on an isolated island in lake baikal - people make pilgrimages there from all over the world! the biggest thing to know about ulan ude: it is home to the largest lenin head in the world! the buryats also make a mad tasty version of dumplings that they call booze. overall a pretty good time in the republic or buryatia!

the journey continues in mongolia: here.

russkiiiii summer!!!! part 1

i was very blessed this summer to be able to go on an epic month-long journey with my sister maria: the trans-siberian railroad! its been THE item on our sibling-bonding bucket list for as long as i can remember! after a very enjoyable couple weeks at home in canada after a study-filled first year of medical school, my sister and i made our separate paths to moscow, me arriving with little more than some short shorts, as airlines recently seem to becoming more adept at loosing luggage. not to worry though, turns out short shorts are the russian way! we spent three glorious days in moscow - perusing shopping malls, grocery stores, the kremlin, subway restaurants, more grocery stores, and a ubiquitous and amazing russian cafeteria chain called mu-mu (they have life-sized, ride-able cows out front if you're ever there and looking for something to get up on!). moscow is superlative central: home to more billionaires than any other city in the world; most expensive city in the world, and... well that's enough! some particularly vivid moscow memories include peering at vladimir lenin's wax encrusted corpse in his mausoleum in red square, being refused entry to the epic cathedral of christ the savior (of recent pussy riot infamy) because i was "immodestly dressed" (the short shorts), and a whole lot of walking! my valiant sister also managed to book us all our train tickets across russia in russian (the agent thought we were insane for wanting to go to siberia)! maria's russian skillz were lifesaving as it turns out absolutely no one speaks any english and you are gauranteed to be indefinitely lost if you can't read cyrillic. thanks for saving my life so many times maria :)  she also taught me a lot about russian history- those tsars, those commies, those oligarchs...  those old believers that nobody knows about...

our first of many train rides was one night to the east to niznhi novgorod, where my sister happened to spend a semester a couple years ago! what a nice little city - it used to be the capital of russia! a highlight there was being invited over for dinner by a middle-aged english teacher who maria worked with when she lived in niznhi. first question asked: "do you like mayonnaise?!?" we ate a lot of mayonnaise that night, and it never tasted so good. this particular woman also had a pet crow in the house and a propensity for telling really interesting stories! also there was a girl who came to learn some english from us, and the english teacher's son who is apparently great at english but refuses to speak it (we bonded over this fact!). over the 8 hours of deep conversation there were many champagne toasts; we all were required to give at least one! we also went to maria's old university, where she regaled me with tales of the horrid soups that the communist kitchen commanders would force them to eat lest they die out in the cold. we snuck into some academic buildings with some stray cats and managed to escape before security locked the place up for the rest of the summer.

the next train ride was a 24 hour one, to yekaterinburg in the heart of the ural "mountains"! most of of train rides we took the platskart, or "most budget" cars, which are 60 people sleeping in one big train car room. actually pretty fun! (at first at least :)  those were sold out for this particular trip though, so we ended up being stuck in a "kupe" compartment with an aging pervert. i'll spare you the details but lets just say i couldn't step out of the compartment for 10 seconds without this guy making maria reallllly uncomfortable. we finally arrived in yekarterinburg, having no idea what to expect, but knowing that anything would be better than the reality on that train. the hostel we booked turned out not to exist, but no problem! our 24 hours in yekaterinburg were quite enjoyable. we chanced upon a real tgi fridays, and decided we deserved juicy burgers! we also found what is probably one of the nicest shopping malls in russia. more uniquely, we visited the church that marks the spot where the last tsar, nicholas, and his family (except anastasia????) were murdered by the bolsheviks. the church was only completed a little over a decade ago, and it and the family burial site have since become something of a pilgrimage destination for those in the russian orthodox church who view the tsar as being a little closer to g-d than the rest of us.

continued in part 2, here.