Siberiwhat?

Well, I have been instructed to write about my Siberian experience by my grandmother, and I am definitely not one to let her down. :-)

I went into the school office one day to ask for a few weeks off in March. I asked politely enough, and when the girl at timetabling asked out of curiosity where I was headed I smiled whimsically. For the 100th time I said, "I'm going to Siberia." IN MARCH? Every head in the room turned around, asking me the same question I'd heard already, echoing in my head: WHY? The looks got more shocked when I told them that I was going to Lake Baikal, about the same distance from Moscow as California is to somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. Worse, by train - THIRD CLASS. And of course to top off the perfect madness of it all, I was a single foreign woman, traveling alone with what we could call pathetic Russian language skills.

And yet I went anyways, and of course, as I always, I wouldn't have it any other way. When you travel alone it's much easier to see things from a wider angle, where no traveling companion can distract you from what is happening in front of you. Instead you become so much more part of your surroundings, that instead of being some outsider, you get to participate in a world that is foreign from what you know and understand.