пропал человек!!!

So, after a couple of days without updating the blog, and, considering as Monday has been the first day of the maslenitsa week, I believe it is about time I updated the blog..! On Saturday, I went out scouring the town for presents for Dries's birthday (Monday), and on the way also topped up on some things for myself - I got myself a case for the balalaika, some new strings, screws and a couple of books of 'teach yourself to play the balalaika' (all in Russian, which will hopefully work wonders in several fields!). In the same trip, I also bought a couple of presents for Dries' birthday.

Baikal's endemic freshwater seal, the nerpa

Gloria by the mouth of Angara

Sunday I decided to go to Listvyanka with Gloria, and, after receiving a message from Guillaume, and inviting him to come along, we agreed to meet up there. Gloria and I caught the marshrutka at about 11am (Guillaume and the others said they would come later as Guillaume was going to mass first). As we sat in the marshrutka, we realised the people we were sitting next to were also foreigners. By and by, we (naturally) introduced ourselves - I assume that the Russians were all fairly taken aback by this - one of the two of them was a German man who has been living in Irkutsk for 16 years, having set up a company here. The woman was Swedish - she has met him last year and had left her job in London to come out here to see him and work for a few months, however she hadn't managed to pick up any Russian over her brief stay (she arrived in July). We decided that we would all go to the lipographical museum at the start of Listvyanka, almost in the nearby village of Nikola. Gloria had been there before and seen the Nerpas in their aquarium, but I had never been there and was quite keen to go. The first part of the tour was fairly boring, a woman showed us around and told us a bit about the general history of the creation of the world - volcanoes and so forth. However it soon got far more interesting as she showed us the seismographical equipment (just a computer, nothing fancy!!) and a room full of Baikal wildlife, which she explained to us. After she left us, we cheekily decided to go and see the aquarium section, despite not having paid for it. They had 5 rather normal tanks with some of the endemic fish of Baikal in them (some of these were, admittedly quite cool). However, the main attractio of the museum was in the following tank - two big, fat Nerpas (the freshwater seal endemic to Baikal), who happily played around and continually teased my camera, making it extemely hard for me to get a good shot of them!

Guillaume, Suzanna, Gloria and Frederick

Leaving the aquarium, Gloria and I walked all the way into Listvyanka, stopping a couple of times along the way to take photos of the frozen lake and the semi-frozen section of the lake closest to the mouth of the Angara. It took us the better part of half an hour to get into Listvyanka on foot, and, knowing that the others would soon be joining us, we hurried off to the café to get ourselves some food (there was no space to sit - everybody seems to have chosen this weekend to come to Listvyanka!) and then hurry back to the bus stop to meet them. Eventually, Guillaume had managed to convince Frederick and Isi to come along as well as a new Austrian girl, Suzanna, who has bee studying in Spain for the last 5 months. We took a quick stroll around the new ice sculptures which have been erected, possibly the winners of the several competitions to get the 'silver nerpa', the prize for the best ice sculpture in the competition on Baikal. At the end of it, we saw, where the hovercrafts were two weeks ago, a couple of cars dragging plastic dinghys behind them. So, after waiting for our turn, we all got into one of these contraptions and got dragged off at high speed along Baikal, whirling in moderately terrifying circles over the ice. After this, we ran straight to another bar, where we managed to get seats and warm up before going back out. Once outside, we went along the shoreline, glancing down through the ice as we walked over it, and watching crazy people dog-skiing along Baikal, until eventually we decided it was getting late and headed back to the marshrutka (where, by coincidence we shared a marshrutka with Joachim and Arlen, the two other foreigners we had bumped into before) and went back to Irkutsk.

Today was Dries's birthday, the first in a series of celebrations this week, so we agreed that several people would be coming round for an evening meal. However, first I had to go to university. Sadly, university was very frustrating today. The deacon of the university is an extremely unpleasant woman, whose acquaintance I wish I could have avoided. However, she called me down to her office during the lesson, so I went, and chatted with her. Despite my making it absolutely evident that I had no interest in doing the presetation and giving a conference which she asked me to give, she carried on and on insisting. Eventually I gave her an 'I'll think about it' before leaving, but was in such a fury that I asked to be excused from lessons and came home to vent my anger here instead. I'll be going in again tomorrow and if she doesn't take no for an answer I'll go and talk to Iraida about it - I have no intention of letting this wolf in sheeps' clothing tell me what to do. Either way, JungHeum and I have now nicknamed her the Anaconda, just because she's ever so slightly worse than the Cobra...

Olivier, Lara, JungHeum, Danya, Dries, Maria, Tamara, ChenChen,
Dasha, Aliona and Eugenia 20.02.2012

Back at the residence, we prepared for Dries's birthday fairly stylishly. Quite a few people were invited, which meant quite a lot of food, which was more or less prepared by the time I got back. Lara and Olivier were also here (they all got back on Sunday, and had a great time in Olkhon, or so I'm told!!), so we waited for everyone else to arrive. Eventually, apart from the five of us on the corridor (Emily not being here with us because of being busy with her family, who arrived this weekend and will be here for a few days visiting her), we had invited Aliona, Eugenia (who got back yesterday from Spain), ChenChen, Dasha, JungHeum, Olivier, Tamara (Dries's bayan teacher), and two girls from Dries's Polish classes, Katia and Natasha, so we had a fairly large gathering. After the meal, we indulged in a Treasure Hunt which Dries had prepared for us - I was in a group with Aliona and Eugenia, and we came second of the four groups. After this, numerous other games and present-giving ensued, until eventually everybody left and those of us that remained went to bed.

On a slightly more serious and sad note, I thought it might be an idea if I added to my blog a little mention of the fact that 8 people - 6 men and 2 women between the ages of 20 and 65 have disappeared in Irkutsk over the past few months. These signs have been flying all around Irkutsk, and people are fairly worried and keep warning us not to walk the streets of Irkutsk on our own any more, especially at night..!