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Hey guys and girls,
In the middle of deep siberia at the moment. Not to far from Lake Baikal (which is the largest fresh water lake in the world holding 20% of th w rolds fresh water, for all you stat's geeks out there)but other its very large indeed!
Anyways from last time we left you. We had a good time in Moscow, done all the main site seeing things like red square, looked inside the Kremlin and also saw Lenins entombed body. We also got a great guilded tour through some of the lesser know parts of moscow which was interesting, and learnt alot about russian life and some of the politics here.
We then spent about 36 hours on board a train to Ekaterinburg, which is a medium sized city (1 million people). This is famours for being the last place the Tsar (kings and queens of russia) were before being assainated to make way for the revolution in the early part of 1900's. Ekaterinburg is just past the Ural mountain range, well it's more like a set of hills, but this defines the boundaries of Europ and Asia, also Just East of the city id the boundary for Siberia, aparenty this used to be quite significant because it marked a different set of rules where people could pretty much do whatever they wanted compared to the civilised western world, therefore we decided to spend a day visiting a siberian country side village. This was about 2 hours east of Ekaterinburg. It was an entertaining day, as we had a guild to ourselves who showed us around a tiny village and how villaged life worked. They dont have running water out here because the temperature gets to -30 in deep winter and the pipes freeze and split. We then had a typical russian lunch which consisted of soup, salad, meat dumplings, and then pancakes in honey. It was really good! There was also a toasting drink called Samigon which was very strong! Russians also drink lots of tea!
We left Ekaterinburg and had a very long train journey to lake baikal. It was about 2 and half day and the train times ment we had 3 nights on board!
Going deeper in to siberia the weather has been getting a lot colder! Sam's thermometer on his watch broke at -10 and we think it got to about -20 at night! We arrived at a home stay on lake Baikal, which is where we have just left, We spent a few days doing some activities, like quad biking whihc was cold, but as there wasnt enough snow, we couldnt do the snowmobiling :(
At Present we are just waiting to board a train in a few hours which will take us to the mongolian capital of Ulan-battar, where we will spend a few nights before completing the trans-siberian in Beijing!
Sorry its been a bit short, and there loads of storys and details I've missed out, but would rather be seeing things then telling you lot what we've been up to!
We will have quite a bit of frfee time in Beijing so hopefully get more photos and updates up then, which is about a week away (13/14th Nov?)
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