23) The Odyssey Continues

   
This is a message to all friends, relations, and people I have met along the way…

As is the case with most stories that you write as you go, I am going to have to end my journey in Egypt with no solid conclusion. I am currently writing this from Minsk, Belarus. It’s certainly a change from the cultural climate of the Arab world, but that is my current situation. To make a long story very short, in March I spent two weeks in Alexandria, then took a plane to Germany. It took me two weeks to make my way across central Europe, lugging bags that were half my weight on and off of a dozen different trains. I passed a snowy and frigid Easter in Poland, and finally crossed from Warsaw over the Belarusian border and onto Minsk.

Belarus, also known as White Russia, was my place of choice to learn Russian. It is a little republic that broke from the USSR in 1991 so that it could remain communist. It has an economy of which the central government owns 51%, all of its staues of Lenin and other heroes are still around, and all of the architecture was built in the Stalinist style in the early fifties after the city was wiped by the Nazis during the war.

In Belarus they speak Russian. But they have a far smaller population than Russia, the prices are cheaper, and the people are much more polite and don’t prefer to be identified with Russia. Belarus is to Russia what Canada is to America. I have been here for two months and I love it; it’s an excellent place to learn the Russian language; the Soviet Union with cell phones.

Now, in order to fully commit myself to these lessons, and to do a bit more traveling, I am going to have to drop work on the blog and the mass emails until sometime in September. This is the first summer in five years that I have not spent in the wilderness of western Canada, slaving for school or travel money. Instead…I am going to spend this summer in the wilderness of Siberia.

The current plan, if I am lucky enough to pull it off, is to take the longest railroad in the whole world…the Trans-Siberian. I plan to spend time in Siberia and Central Asia…the empire that Russia never lost. I will go to Mongolia, and onwards to China and beyond. When I finally find another place to rest my feet for a period of months, I shall hopefully have another story to forward to all of you, piece by piece.

I want to thank you all for reading my emails and my blog; it has been a pleasure writing them. I thank you all for your feedback, and I have tried and almost succeeded in replying to every one of you. If any of you want to write me, I would of course love to hear from you and unless I am forcibly away for the net for a period of time, I will write you back.

I hope you have a fantastic summer. Inshallah, I will be writing to you again when the days get shorter.
Kieran