A Trip Around the World, Part 5

by with 9 Comments RussiaTravel
[caption id="attachment_2631" align="alignright" width="300"] Yaroslavsky Station, Moscow[/caption] Tomorrow morning, if all goes well, my friend Chris and I arrive in Paris, and our long train journey from Vladivostok will be over. We’ve been pretty fortunate on this trip: almost everything has gone well. We’ve stayed healthy; Chris and I are still fast friends after being together night and day for 11 days and over 8300 miles; and even the weather has cooperated, gifting us with mild temperatures and pretty skies whenever we actually had to be outdoors. But yesterday we were in Moscow, and it was without a doubt the low point of our trip. ...

A Trip Around the World, Part 4

by with 6 Comments JapanMarriageParentingPoetryResearchRussiaTravelWritingYosano Akiko
[caption id="attachment_2568" align="alignleft" width="300"] Writing on train. (Photo by Chris)[/caption] It’s Sunday, July 2, as I begin this new entry, and my friend Chris and I are back on the Trans-Siberian Railway, having traveled from Vladivostok to Irkutsk and spent a day and a half in the town of Listvyanka on the shores of Lake Baikal. It seems like we’ve been traveling for days, yet we’re not even halfway between Vladivostok and Moscow. We’ll pass that milestone sometime this afternoon. Akiko didn’t write that many poems about her train trip from Vladivostok to Moscow. But we do know about her Trans-Siberian journey from her account Pari made [パリまで、To Paris], which was published in four installments in the Asahi shimbun newspaper.* And I’m really struck by the differences between our two journeys. ...