“Oh no,” my friend Christy and I chorused. She was an elegant Buryat, middle-aged, with impossibly round, prominent cheekbones, like half-plums. “Congratulations on your new president,” said our guide for the day. The Buryat desk clerk grinned, not meeting my eyes. Ulan-Ude also has the world’s largest Lenin head, something to put on your list.įirst post-inauguration Donald Trump sighting: On a TV in the lobby of the Hotel Geser in downtown Ulan-Ude. Buryats, a Mongolian people, make up close to a third of the population of Buryatia, and Ulan-Ude is an interesting-looking city, with its mix of Mongolian, old Russian and Soviet architecture. Shortly after that, we arrived in Ulan-Ude, capital of the Buryatia Republic. When I woke up, there were notifications on my phone (it turns out you can get internet over data along most of the Trans-Siberian Railway route), informing me that “Donald Trump Has Been Inaugurated 45 th President of the United States.” I didn’t want to use the data to click on the articles. I slept through Trump’s inauguration, as our train rumbled through snow-covered villages, a modest city or two. Siberia, you should know, is beautiful, at times breathtakingly gorgeous, from our train a succession of little towns with brightly painted, steep-roofed wooden houses, onion-domed churches, frozen rivers, endless birch and pine forests frosted with snow, vistas of ice, all under a bluebird sky. Ulan Ude and Irkutsk were two of those places, on opposite ends of Lake Baikal, so those would be our stops between Vladivostok and Moscow. The idea of this trip, besides taking the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way from beginning to end (or maybe it was the other way around, given we started in Vladivostok), was visiting some of the places Olga’s family had lived and worked in. I traveled with a good friend and her mom, whose parents were both born in Russia. Dealing with the cold would give me something to focus on other than the reality of a President Trump.Īlso, there was the whole Trump/Putin bromance, Russia hacked our election deal, and I’m a sucker for cheap irony. It was far away, a place associated with cold, exile and gulags, with a potential for isolation - could we even get the internet on the Trans-Siberian Railway? I liked the idea that we were going at the coldest time of the year. Spending Inauguration Day in Siberia seemed like a great idea. I sure didn’t want to see Donald Trump’s inauguration. I did not want to accept that an extremely accomplished, strong, smart woman had lost to a sexist, racist reality TV star. 8, when it became clear Trump would be president, I raged. I’m not going to pretend to be neutral here: On Nov. But there was always YouTube, I told myself, and when opportunities come up to go someplace like Siberia and take the Trans-Siberian Railway, the world’s longest railway route, all the way from Vladivostok to Moscow, I take them. Seeing the first woman president of the United States sworn in, it was a moment in history I hadn’t wanted to miss. I just thought I’d be missing Hillary Clinton’s inauguration instead. Which is to say, I’d known for a few months that I’d be in Siberia on Jan. I did not expect to be in Siberia for Donald Trump’s inauguration.
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