24 May 2004 - Part 2

Joined: 23 Mar 2004 Posts: 84

May 24, 2004

Temperature: 5 degrees Celsius

Weather: Cloudy

We arrived in Yakutsk and pretty much spent the day getting acclimated. It was one of the weirdest days of my life I think because during the day I got confused about not only what time it was but also if someone told me it was 10:00, I didn’t know if that was morning or night because there is so much light. I didn’t know when to eat, and at one point we all got confused as to what season it was. That was because it is pretty cold here and so it seemed like we were back in winter. So, all in all, I have never felt like I was in a time warp until yesterday. Due to the fact that we all were so confused, we had quite a few laughs.

It took us a long time to get our luggage from the airport. After we picked it up we took this really nifty van that had a little table in the back that we all sat around to our hotel. Yakutsk is in an area that has permafrost, so all the buildings are built on stilts—they don’t rest right on the ground, and a lot of the older buildings look like they are sinking into the ground. Due to the fact that the ground is permanently frozen (that is what permafrost means), they can’t run pipes or anything else underground. So, along the roads and between buildings you can see all these pipes which are wrapped in insulation. It is pretty neat to see all the workings of a building exposed on the outside.

On of the other things that I noticed immediately as we arrived in Yakutsk is that it is really obvious that we moved from the European side of Russia to the Asian side of Russia by looking just at the people. They look more Asian with dark skin and dark hair. So here is a question for you, what separates Europe from Asia?

Yakutsk is also a city of contrasts, there are a lot of really old run down buildings and there are some new really modern looking buildings. This you can also see right from my hotel window.

After we settled into our hotel rooms, Max, Oliver (the American college student) and I went out to try to find some lunch. There are not very many restaurants in Yakutsk at all as going out to eat isn’t something that Russians do very often. Walking around the city was very interesting, even though it was sort of uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable because it was cold, with a pretty sharp wind blowing. It was also very dusty here and the wind was kicking the dirt up and then, even though it was pretty cloudy, it was very bright. So it was cold, dusty, and bright. It feels very foreign to me here. There is very little English spoken, unlike in Moscow where it was pretty easy to find people who at least spoke a little bit of English, and it is obvious that this place does not have a lot of tourists, so people like to look at us a lot when we are walking around. They are perfectly nice about it, but it is just sort of funny to have people looking at you when you are pretty clueless about what you are doing anyway.

There are a couple of funny stories to show what I mean about that. The first happened at lunch yesterday. We were trying to order food from a waitress that didn’t speak any English at all, and we don’t really speak any Russian. Anyway, Max ordered two waters and who knows what he really said because the waitress started laughing uncontrollably and even walked away laughing. We started laughing too even though we had no idea what we were laughing at. My guess is that the waitress and ourselves were so uncomfortable that we were all just laughing because there was nothing else really to do and at least it would be a way we could communicate with each other.

After lunch, we had a mission to find some water without carbonation, since all the water we had come across was all carbonated. We walked into a grocery store (which is sort of like a really, really small grocery store in the U.S.) and you have to go through a gate before you can go into the section with the food and stuff. Before you go through the gate, there was a man that was handing us a carry-around shopping basket just like you would find in the U.S., but there was this other woman who was organizing the baskets. We thought we had to put our jackets and belongings in the basket and hand it to the lady before we could go through the gates. So that is what we did, and the lady and man looked at us like we are crazy because now they didn’t know what to do with our stuff; they were trying to hand us a shopping basket so that we could put the stuff we wanted to buy into something. That is not the end of it though, as the three of us, who already have attracted a lot of attention, then go to the section that sells bottled water. Since we can’t read the labels, we just start shaking different bottles to see if they are carbonated or not. This was a little strange for all the Russians to see in the grocery store too. So, by the time we got out of the store we figured we provided everyone in the store with a story to go home and tell their families about the crazy foreigners who were in the grocery store.

In the afternoon, we all took naps and then we had tea together in Max’s hotel room, talked about our plan for tomorrow which involves going to one of the science offices here on polar research. I’ll keep you posted on what that involves tomorrow. We all then got some dinner (this time we had our Russian counterparts with us, so it went much smoother!!). By the time we were walking back to our hotel it was almost 11:00 p.m. and there was a beautiful sunset in the distance.

So a couple of questions that maybe you could figure out and get back to me on are:

1. What natural boundary separates Europe from Asia that I flew over
on the way to Yakutsk?
2. Yakutsk has what is called a continental climate? What does that mean?

I’m still working on sending pictures out using the satellite phone. We have to make them really small or they are just too big to get across, but hopefully, we will be able to make it work soon so I can show you some things.