Staying In

Today we finally encountered some of Siberia's more renowned weather.
Because of the fog and the cold, our twenty (!) kilometer hike on the
newly-built Great Baikal Trail was canceled. Instead, Tatiana from the
local Rotary club and Svetlana, who works for the GBT, spoke to us about
the merits of ecotourism in helping preserve the lake. Over
four-thousand volunteers (likely the biggest such initiative in Russia)
have engaged in over 150 different trail-building projects to make the
lake more accessible to environmentally conscious visitors - no small
feat in a country where volunteering is almost non-existent.
In the afternoon, still housebound, we had a discussion with Alorah, an
alumna of the 2009 Baikal course, about different approaches to science
and the intersections between science and the humanities. Taking our
conversation a step further, the Russian students from Irkutsk State
University told us about their perceptions on the differences between
Russian and American scientists: "We are not nerds. We're just regular
people, only slightly more clever."
We will make it an early night, because tomorrow we will set sail to
Baikalsk at first light...
Meredith and Katja