Sunday, July 29, 2012

From Kazan to Omsk (part 1)



Yes friends, I made it to Omsk! Now I'm in Asia and another (time zone) hour away from home and only one hour from Beijing. So that's the good news, the bad one is that I'm having a bad conscience because I'm terribly delayed with my photos and also it's 0115 in the morning and I'm tired. I 'lost an hour today and I drove 7 hours basically non-stop from a place about 500 kms from Omsk. Don't ask me for the name, it was a truck-stop 60 km after the previous one and about the same distance from the next one... So now not only am I in Asia, I am in deepest Sibiria.

It's hard to describe, but I get the feeling the further east I get the more hospitality I experience. This in fact is an unfair statement to my previous hosts because their hospitality was incredibly nice, but I'm just trying to make you understand how welcoming everybody I meet is. But for tonight let me just tell you that much: I'm just 'home' from an extremely nice dinner and evening city tour with Lev (our local branch manager) and his wife Svetlana and their son (and some of their friends later on). Yes, and I'm still ok and so is 'Datcha' despite some incredibly bad sections of  road but thank God those were literally few and far in between. Well, and the Russian drivers aren't particularly easy to deal with, but I'm getting used to their Kamikaze attitudes.

But now let me recover as tomorrow I'll have to do some more sightseeing and some 'housekeeping' before I set off for Novosibirsk and Irkutsk which will be long driving stretches...

So hopefully I can get into some more detail about the last eventful week tomorrow... till then stay tuned!

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