LISTVYANKA/IRKUTSK — Our experience in Listvyanka on the beautiful Lake Baikal is better described, at least today, by photo. (And if you're wondering why all my photos look a little off, it's because I'm using my iPad to take photos of Kristina's digital camera screen. It's not the best, but it's working for us.)
At the town center there is this hotel, which is also a cake.
Coming and going constantly from the small piers were the most oddly-shaped tour boats I'd ever seen. They looked more like space craft. The boat you see above was actually surprisingly fast, and looked to be at least 100 feet long and very narrow. Here's another view of it:
Then there's this:
Oh no!
And of course, we couldn't go to the lake without eating some smoked fish. This was also lovely. I could have eaten it all day.
By late afternoon, it was time to charter another break-neck bus ride back to Irkutsk. When we arrived we were able to find our next destination, Hostel Irkutsk, on foot. While the hostel desk attendant seemed fairly nonplussed by our arrival, she did hand over the tickets for the next two legs of our journey. Irkutsk to Moscow, then Moscow to St. Petersburg.
Kristina would like me to note that "nonplussed" does not begin to describe the crappy attitude the receptionist decided to throw at us. Our very different reactions to this situation gave me pause. Usually I'm the one that's hyper sensitive, and Kristina is the one that couldn't care less what people think. But in this case, we'd changed places. After some discussion we determined that our reactions were based on the root cause of the young woman's displeasure. I get upset if I feel people are reacting negatively to me specifically (or people I'm with), or something I have done. Sometimes the scenario is one I've concocted completely out of my robust paranoia, but that's neither here nor there. Alternatively, Kristina gets upset if people are rude for no reason, particularly in a situation where their job calls for some measure of professional public interaction.
I felt the receptionist was being rude because she was in a bad mood, didn't like her job or was just kind of an unpleasant person. Either way, we had had no prior interaction, and I knew it had nothing to do with us. Therefor, I didn't care. Kristina, on the other hand, felt that the ethical code of hospitality demanded a baseline of polite behavior, one which the girl didn't seem to give a rat's ass about. So Kristina cared a lot.
I wondered at our different reactions. Did it point to our most basic emotional priorities? Mine, to be liked; Kristina's, to be respected? I am concerned about the fact that my reaction to people revolves so tightly around their opinion of me, and that I can disregard it so completely once I know I am not a factor. This indicates that I am, as I've long suspected, hopelessly self-centered. This is a character trait that surfaces everywhere in my life, serving as both help and major hinderance. Especially as a writer, employee and friend. That being said, I'm pretty sure self-centeredness is rampant among the humans, so, there's that.
The desire to be liked falls into that same category. A woman named Elena was sleeping in the same room as we were at the hostel. She came from Yekaterinburg, a few days train ride west. She spoke a fair amount of English, and chatted with us about our trip. We lamented that it wasn't long enough, that Russia was so vast and interesting, and we had only a short time to explore it.
"Well, it is enough yes?" she said.
"Enough for what?" I asked.
"Enough that you see it is nice," she replied. "That we are friendly, kind people, and not mean people like they think of us over there."
It was a sad statement, and telling. She had been nice. So had a lot of people. And everywhere we went, despite signs of poverty and struggle (less so than in China), there was also plenty of thriving, vibrant faces. New homes, healthy gardens, laughing children. Of course, I hadn't expected to find a cold and unforgiving land full of cruel people, but I'm also not surprised that she was so sensitive to this common caricature that the American and European West often paints of the Russian people. It has its roots in a very real and turbulent history, certainly, and our respective paths have created differences in life and temperament. But that image does not necessarily represent the spirit of the people in general, whose basic needs and wants for safety, sustenance and joy are the same as mine.
This is an obvious statement, I know. People are people, yes. But Elena's concern that I wouldn't feel this way was real. Much like my concern for how Americans are perceived. I don't have a conclusion here. And I have no idea if humanity is capable of creating a society in which competition with and mistrust for one another can be kept below lethal levels. We are animals focused on survival after all. The only answer to this, for me, must come from beyond our physical world. But that might belong in a different piece of writing, or not in my writing at all.
MOVING ON:
Once we stowed our backpacks, we took the energy we had left to explore Irkutsk.
We stopped at Lenin Street Coffee not once but TWICE during our 24 hours in Irkutsk. 
A yellow trolley. (I was never gifted at writing cutlines.)
A movie theater.
Though I covered my head before going into this church, I forgot about the no pants for women rule. So as I stood in the back watching the lovely service, a woman came up to me and was clearly very upset by my presence. I left very disappointed in myself, having known the rule but just forgotten it, and having no interest in being disresepctful of custom. Not my best moment. But the church was beautiful.
Obligatory Lenin statue. 
Karl Marx Street. 
Residential street. Irkutsk was a much larger city than I'd anticipated, and seemingly more European in its city center than I'd expected this far east. Someday I would like to travel to Russia's actual Far East, but that wasn't in the cards for us this trip. And tomorrow we board the train again, for the long haul west, moving simultaneously closer to and farther from home.
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