November 23rd

The Wooden Architecture Museum at dusk, Irkutsk

Anton proving his greatness by saving a kitten by the shore of Baikal

Admiral Kolchak on his huge pedestal looking vaguely annoyed

This is mostly an excuse to put up more photos, but I figured I could finish off the wild tales of our journey as well. So, as soon as we left the town where our hike ended we went to Taltsi, the local wooden art museum (I think I’ve misspelled museum just about every time I’ve written it for the last three months on this blog. Like misspelled so horribly that MS spell check suggests words like ‘missile’ or mausoleum. Truly frustrating…). It was really cold and we were all really tired, but we still had a great time and Anton was incredibly knowledgeable about everything, easily cementing him as world’s coolest guy ever (did I mention he saved a kitten from a tree then fed it the last of our food? The guy’s practically a saint). We finally returned to the hostel to find an utterly ridiculous Australian there from Melbourne. He’d quit his job as the guy who calls people and tells them that despite being injured they can’t get worker’s comp (I can’t imagine why he quit…) and was travelling from London to Hong Kong by train. He ended up staying four days in Irkutsk with us and I think he made it into town once at our insistence. He was supposed to leave a day before he did, but we had something of a bender the day he was supposed to leave at 5 AM to Mongolia but I’m not sure we were even back to the hostel by 5 AM and anyways, it was best that he slept that one off… Good fun anyways. He was one of several people we met on their way through Irkutsk on the Trans-Siberian railway. Oddly, most of them had quit terrible jobs and were just kind of on a train to anywhere until their money ran out. Two British girls we met actually ran out of money in Irkutsk and used the last of their money to buy their way to Japan where they were going to soy farm until they had enough money to go home. I can imagine worse things in life! It was funny because we were essentially co-owners of the place by the time we left. The owners would leave and put us in charge for whole nights because we’d been there for so long and they trusted us for some reason… Anyways, we spent the rest of our time there going to the local art museum (yep, spelled it wrong again…) which was quite nice for a city of that size and seeing the houses of the Decembrists, the exiles of the failed coup against the Tsar in the 1800s who made Irkutsk the Mecca of learning and art that it became. There was also a super intimidating statue of Admiral Kolchak, the White leader during the 1917-1921 Civil War who was executed in Irkutsk then dumped unceremoniously into a hole in the ice on the Angara River. It was erected in 2006 amid great controversy (the guy was a brute and Russia may not be communist but it certainly isn’t hankering for a return to the heartwarming Tsarist times) and the statue is on a huge pedestal to guard against vandalism. Interesting… Tomorrow: Brendan’s Hospital experience (hint: it’s not like the Orange Park Hospital emergency room).