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Published: July 18th 2011
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Church in Abakan At 6.30 am my train left for a 24h ride to Abakan. This time I only had three travel buddies – in the first 6-bed compartment they use two beds for storing linen. As every summer, a mom and her 8-year old kid Igor were travelling from St. Petersburg back home to some small village close to Abakan. For the first few hours we had company from a young guy who got a bit obtrusive after a while, so we were happy that he didn’t come with us all the way until Abakan. When travelling in Russia your perceptions of distance and time completely change – in Switzerland riding from Geneva to Winterthur takes about 3.5h and it seems like forever, here you are happy if the guy only rides 3.5h with you 😊 Once the guy left a girl took over his bed until Abakan – she pretty much slept all the way through
. I was talking a bit with the mom, she showed me pictures of her hometown so I can see what to expect there. Igor was commenting: “Mom, do all the people in Switzerland speak Russian?” 😊
6am the next day I got picked up by Nadya – she has never hosted or surfed a couch before, her cousin who lives in Amsterdam told her about it. So she was pretty excited about having me in Abakan
. She lives with her family . Nadya’s little sister has a minor handicap – when they removed a tumor from her brain there were a few complications, the major one - one of her eye lids closed. She has a very hard time finding a job, so she spends pretty much all her time at home. Nadya’s dad has retired and spent most of the time either at their Datcha or in the living room. Nadya and her mom are working – I guess they’re keeping the family up and running. The pension in Russia is about 8000 roubles per month and the handicap support from the government is about 4000 roubles per month – now try to live with that!! Nadya is quite frustrated/ sad about the latter – she would love to help Photo 7
Get out of the wayyyyy!!! her little sister in some way, but she just doesn’t know how or where to start. There seems to be absolutely no integration effort done by the government – on the contrary Nadya told me that in St. Petersburg apparently they forbid people in wheelchairs to access the metro!!! I think Nadya is one of the examples of how Russians deal or put up with everyday life in Russia – she doesn’t even want to think about the government and her sister’s life as she feels incapable of doing anything about it, so thinking or complaining about it just makes her sad. She can somehow accept it by avoiding the thought entirely. I think Russians in general don’t think of what could have been or could be – they rather think of the conditions which have been and in which they find themselves now.
Abakan is the capital of the republic of Khakassia – Khakas people are much closer to what we would call “Asians”, they resemble probably the most to Mongolians. However, nowadays most inhabitants in Abakan are Russians. Nature-wise Khakassia mostly consists of steppes, which is a pleasant change after the endless forests in Siberia 😉 One
evening after Nadya’s work we went off to find the Боярская писаница located about 80km from Abakan – driving there for me was absolutely amazing – nature seemed to be unlimited, just the street in the middle of the steppe . At some point we left the main road to continue for 40min on a dirt road – I had my doubts whether Nadya’s car would make it 😉 Good, that Nadya was so smart to print out a picture of the писаница – we probably would not have spotted it without the picture! Anyway, I was more amazed by the nature 😊
Despite the fact that she was working during the day, Nadya tried to spend as much time with me as possible 😊 We talked a lot about the possibilities and complications of travelling. It seems like the most difficult/time-consuming part is to get a visa. Nadya’s mom is from Lithuania originally, so she still has relatives there, which makes it easier for her
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Sayan Ring at night to get a visa. The easiest way however to get a visa for Russians is to book a packaged tour – this is almost a 100%!g(MISSING)uarantee to get a visa. Nadya did one of those before – 10 European countries in like 12 days – how much can you really see and experience by travelling this way? That’s why many, especially young people, would like to travel in a more flexible way – just book a flight and then decide on the spot where to go and what to do . Many European countries however ask you to come in person to apply for a visa if you haven’t booked a predefined tour. Obviously all the embassies are in Moscow, which means that if you live in Abakan you need to either pay for an expensive flight to Moscow or a semi-expensive train ticket and you lose 4 days in the train. Max and his family from Tomsk hitchhiked to Moscow with the intent to get a visa to go to Poland – they probably spent 3-4 days hitchhiking and for probably
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Peace :) 3 days they were trying to hand in their documents to apply for the visa. After 3 days in queues, they changed their plans and just went for holidays in the south of Russia! And of course, if you do manage to get a Schengen visa issued by Lithuania for example they require you to spend the majority of your days of your trip in Lithuania. Everything is possible in life and many people seem to manage to travel a lot despite the visa regime – but it’s just hard to imagine it when living in Europe where for travelling to most countries you don’t even need a passport!
On Friday once Nadya finished working we took the bus to Shushenskoe . A town who can boast with two things – firstly it was home to Lenin during most of his time spent in exile, secondly Shushenskoe hosts one of the biggest ethnic music and culture festivals in Russia . The latter was the main reason for us going there. Nadya has relatives in Shushenskoe who were happy to offer us a bed for a night 😊 The
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Found the Eiffel tower in Abakan :) festival consisted of two stages where mainly Russian musicians performed, a ‘master village’ where they offered arts & crafts courses as well as sold the hand-made goods and finally an area which was filled with the smell of shashlik. All around – in between trees people randomly parked their cars and put up their tents . In vain I was looking for a beer stand – apparently it was forbidden to sell alcohol in the festival area – according to Nadya people would get too drunk and start fighting. Even though, I usually wouldn’t listen to this type of music, I really liked the fact that a whole festival was dedicated to it. The purely traditional music wasn’t so much for me but there were plenty of artists who successfully merged traditional elements with modern styles! Later at night a DJ was spinning records and some of the artists who performed during the day added some of the traditional elements with their instruments and voices – all improvised, quite impressive 😊
The next morning, after a very short night sleep, we got up early to go to the Museum displaying the village as it was
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Found in every city - Abakan gets the honor of the Lenin statue picture :) when Lenin was still living there . I didn’t have high expectations, given that it was like the 4th wooden architecture museum that I was visiting in Russia. It was really interesting though to see the setup of an entire village and not just individual houses or churches like in the other museums. The guide unfortunately spoke too quickly for me, so I couldn’t quite grasp all the information. After the museum we caught the bus back to Abakan where I had like 30min before I got picked up to go on to Kyzyl.
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