ALIVE IN KYOTO.

But soon to be alive in Nara.

I don't even have time to check nmy email, we are about to scamper off, but we had the best day in Kyoto yesterday -- we rented bikes and went all over the place and then hiked up to the top of this gorgeous shrine -- so needless to say I was exhausted and fell asleep immediately upon arriving back to our hostel.

So, Nara today, train to Tokyo tonight, seeing Sam Dean tomorrow??!

ALIVE IN JAPAN! (Osaka specifically)

And using the most difficult keyboard of my life so if there are a lot of mistakes please ignore them, I am quite tired. The heat makes me a zombie at night, I need to go to bed in the next ten minutes.

So, first off, the boat was amazing. AMAZING. We were in 2nd class "Japanese style" which meant we were in a huge, spotlessly clean blue carpeted room (no shoes allowed! slippers provided!) meant for 16 people but there were only 3 of us in the room! We had so much room to spread out Meri did yoga and I repacked my entire backpack! Yes!

The boat also included FREE breakfast and FREE laundy! It was great to do laundry for the first time in over a month now, my t-shirt smells so good right now. Actually, no. It smelled better earlier before I sweated off my weight in water today (JAPAN IS EVEN MORE HUMID AND HOT THAN SHANGHAI, WHO KNEW), but that is besides the point.

We also met the NICEST JAPANESE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD on the boat. A girl named Marina who was teaching Japanese in Uzbekastan and an elderly man with a pet toy poodle named Ellis and a 30-something year old guy who was a hippie who had studied abroad in Seattle. The niceness continud through finding our way to the train station (another old man navigated us personally, leading us there, even though he spoke no English) and buying the actual train tickets (compare to buying trans-Siberian tickets in St. Petersburg) and dinner, served in a little grandma/grandpa place where they gave us wonderful peach for dessert and complimentary soup. Ahh, the nicest people. It:s such a good BREAK after dealing with so much rudness and pushing and aggressive behavior in so many countries. People actulaly care here. People actually want to help you here. I am at much more of an ease here than I ever was in Russia. It is wonderful.

Today we walked around mostly )thus the sweating) and went through a park and two temples, one of which had a huge pond of ONLY TURTLES. A hundred at least! It was the best day. The BEST day. A pond full of my spirit animal. Wonderful. I finished a 4GB memory card taking photos of the little guys. And what a day for turtles, look at the article Ms. Janna Herman shared with me via Facebook (which I have access to again in Jpaan, woohoo! as this blog too! updating it myself!).

Anyway, it:s been past 10 minutes and I need to sleep majorly, but our plan, for those of you concerned slash tracking our progress....

TOMORROW (7/14) -- early morning train to Kyoto
night of 7/14 in Kyoto
day of 7/15 going to Nara and back
night of the 15th we'll be on a train to Tokyo
nights of 7/16 and 7/17 we:ll be in Tokyo
7/18 -- FLIGHT OUT OF JAPAN IN THE MORNNINNNG TO FURTHER ADVENTURES.


as you can see I am losing it, so, good night.

Next stop: Japan!!!

"It is blowing my mind how we are already going to Japan tomorrow on our 2-day ferry. That's really nuts. I still can't fully believe we got all the way across Eurasia and are almost to our farthest non-airplane-flying point of our trip already. It seems like it should have taken us 6 months to cover that much distance. But it hasn't, thank god, and tomorrow we get on a boat to Japan, and we will be on it for two nights, arriving the morning of the 13th in Osaka.

As for Shanghai, it has been good, but I won't be that sad to leave. The heat here is unbearable. Meri is more used to it from living in DC for three years, but I have become used to colder climates, especially after Russia. The air is so hot and humid you can feel it sitting on your skin. It's pointless to shower because you sweat so much the minute you get out it's like you didn't even try. We've had a nice time walking around though -- there isn't a ton much else to do in Shanghai besides shopping.... it's a very Western, European/American kind of shopping, materialistic city full of expat business men..... but it's beautiful and flashy and colorful and last night we went to the top of the Jin Mao Tower (home of the highest post office in the world) and saw the view of all the lights. So that was snazzy.

Anyway, you'll hear from me next in Japan where hopefully I can update my blog myself again!"

-- e.b.

e l i z a b e t h a n d e r s e n b a r t e l sr u s s i a n l a n g u a g e & s t u d i o a r t

ALIVE IN SHANGHAI

Meri and I almost had a heart attack last night, certain we must have died somewhere along the way from Mongolia to China because the train last night was heaven. It made my head explode, the stark comparison to the Russian trains we'd been riding on. THE TRAIN LAST NIGHT WAS NICER THAN MOST AIRPLANES I HAVE TAKEN. Everything was WHITE and CLEAN and NEW and smelled good and was synthetic duvets and not 8,923,979,238 goose feather mattresses that smell of the babushka who slept on it before you and it was COOL and they a gave you complimentary water and slippers and there were MINI TVS WITH HEADPHONES...????? We were in a state of hysterical shock. China is nuts. But I love it. We've met a couple of people -- one guy from Maine, about Genny's age -- who have just up and moved to China without knowing any Chinese and they love it..... new life plan for after Wellesley??? I could probably use my Russian in China somewhere, right? We've now seen a total of SIX Russian tourists here and each time it blows my mind -- two women in a nail salon, one of whom was of Chinese descent, then an old man climbing the Great Wall by himself, and then a younger shirtless (of course) Russian man on the top of the Great Wall who asked us to take his photo for him and then we got him to take our photo (ON TOP OF THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA AND OUR PHOTO WAS TAKEN BY A RUSSIAN, HOW APPROPRIATE) and before doing so he didn't know where to put his empty water bottle so he just chucked it over the side of the Great Wall (typical) and then three women in the Summer Palace, strolling and chatting in Russian.... anyway, now we are in Shanghai, as I said. It's different from Beijing -- fewer Russian-Soviet vibes, much more vertical, much more like New York or a big Western City, while only parts of Beijing were like that while the rest was one storey small houses like Irkutsk or Ulan-Udye -- and full of banks and seems less artsy, but it should still be good despite the fact that it is even HOTTER and even more HUMID than Beijing. After Russia, this is a huge huge HUGE change. Anyway, that is all for now. Thanks again to Mr. C.R. Bartels, Jr. for posting again... soon enough I'll be out and then can post again on my own, seeing what they are like in Japan...

-- e.b.

Next stop: Shanghai!

After three wonderful, busy, insane days in Beijing, we are leaving on a train for Shanghai in an hour -- I have to go soon! But we had a great time -- just some activities included seeing the Great Wall, Chairman Mao (as part of our tour of "Dead Communist Leaders Whose Bodies Are On Display"), the Summer Palace, chinese massages, and the Forbidden City. There was so much more we wanted to do as well but ran out of time. I guess I'll just have to come back to Beijing. Until tomorrow night in Shanghai --

--e.b.



e l i z a b e t h a n d e r s e n b a r t e l sr u s s i a n l a n g u a g e & s t u d i o a r t

ALIVE IN BEIJING

So, funny story how China has this thing called "censorship" which seems to prevent you from reading news articles online like "tibet, story of tragedy" or go to free-speechy-websites such as..... blogs.So let's all thank my tech-savvy father, Mr. Rich Bartels, for posting this for me via-email.BUT BESIDES THAT BEIJING IS SO COOL!We got here this afternoon after spending 30 hours on a train from Ulaanbaatar. Getting out of Mongolia was an experience, including our (and by "our" I mean "my") one major fuck up so far which was having my wallet fall out of my pocket when were were in a slightly chaotic rush getting to the train station.... at least there was only about $5 of Mongolian currency in it... and my debit card.... but my lovely parents have already taken care of canceling that shit for me and I have a back up. So, it pays to plan ahead. Getting out of Mongolia was also interesting because Russia and Mongolia have special train tracks that are slightly wider than the rest of the world's, so we spent easily about 6 hours of our train "ride" just sitting at the border as hammers and things slammed and our wagon was crashed repeatedly into the one before it and after it to reconnect it after changing the wheels (you would think they would let us get off for that experience, but apparently not).... when we finally reached the Chinese border at 1:00AM (1:00PM your time, still exactly 24 hours ahead) there was strangely nationalistic muzak-like music being piped through speakers and a weird dark calm. But arriving in Beijing today was NUTS. We stepped off the train and it was like getting off of a plane to the Carribbean. This wall of HEAT and HUMIDITY smacked us in the face and we sweated off about ten pounds of water weight just getting to the taxi that navigated us to our hostel. And compared to Beijing, Ulaanbaatar was all Russia. Beijing is just a whole different story.... huge and modern and CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN and bicycles everywhere and green and trees and another huge fucking rain storm we got caught in (now our 3rd, one for every country so far) and everything is just so DIFFERENT. I love it. It's great. And it's so crowded and crazy! This whole city is St. Petersburg at rush hour, or on any given holiday. Anyway, Meri and I had a great first evening. We just wandered a bit, had a really delicious dinner of Peking duck (seemed appropriate) as recommended by this awesome Indian man who we got to know as he and his extended family were on both of our trains to and from Ulaanbaatar, and we ran into them at a pizza place at Ulaanbaatar on Friday night. It's going to be great though. CHINA. I can't believe we made it all the way from ST. PETERSBURG, COMPLETELY ON THE GROUND. NUTS. Man, and Mongolia was awesome. Mongolia seems all Russia now in comparison to this crazy, amazing place. SO EXCITED.Ok, that's all for now. Another post via-Rich before we take off.-- e.b.e l i z a b e t h a n d e r s e n b a r t e l sr u s s i a n l a n g u a g e & s t u d i o a r t

Next stop: China!!

Our train to Beijing leaves tomorrow at 8:05AM and we arrive at 2:05PM on July 5th. So we will be celebrating our nation's birthday by wearing red, white and blue on the train. Maybe drinking an American brand beer if we can find one. We'll see.

ALSO, a time update: Lonely Planet, that sucky book, LIED to us. Ulaanbaatar is Moscow time plus 4 hours, meaning we went back an hour from Ulan-Udye and are exactly TWELVE hours ahead of you now! Who knows what the time will be in China though! Lonely Planet certainly hasn't a clue!