Archive for Vladivostok

a journal of the conquest, war, famine, and death year

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 11, 2023 by xi'an

Read Les chiens et la charrue (Le cycle de Syffe, tome 3 ) by Patrick K. Dewdney, which came out after a long hiatus (esp. when missing the parution in September 2021!). It thus proved hard to remember the complex structure of this universe, as well as the names of characters from the earlier volumes. But after one slow third of the book, including an endless river slog, the right pace set in and I read the remaining 400 pages quite quickly (the trip to Jeddah helped!), with a climactic ending, despite a few too many coincidences. Looking forward the next tome, next year maybe?! While still being stuck in the (disappointing) last tome of Christelle Dabos’ The Mirror Visitor, I read another Max Gladstone’s, Dead Country (The Craft War I), within a few days, despite some weaknesses in the style (heavy infodump disguised as teacher/pupil conversations) and in the story. Unsure I will pursue this series.Had an enjoyable early dinner at Otto, a Rue Mouffetard izayaka. Despite some highlights of the menu being unavailable, the remaining dishes were worth the visit! (And the bet that there would be a table available on a warm Saturday evening.)

Watched Korean Money Heist, which, I am told, is the K clone of La Casa de Papel (I had not watched). Very light and requiring a high tolerance for unlikely so unlikely twists, but with very good actors who managed to keep the pace till the last episode. With a appearance supposedly of the martyr city of Kherson, even though it is actually Hallstatt, Austria. (Just why would a North Korean student read Mayakovski’s poems in a Latin language while in Vladivostok?!)

Байкало-Амурская магистраль/БАМ

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , on April 15, 2018 by xi'an

While in Chamonix last month I dropped by the Guérin editions bookstore, always full of tantalising books on climbing and mountaineering, travelling and travellers. I managed to escape with only two small books, one on a young climber stuck for 100 hours at the top of Aiguilles Vertes [not far from my last ice-climb!] and the other one a railway trip along the Baïkal-Amour Mainline (BAM), which goes from the Baïkal Lake to Sovietskaïa Gavan, north of the Trans-Siberian line. The book is not the ultimate travel book as most of the pages are about historical features surrounding this line, first and foremost the constant reminder that Gulag prisoners were relentlessly exploited to build this line, which follows a macabre route along Siberian camps. The trip finishes not at the end of the BAM line or in Vladivostok, but on Sakhaline Island, which was a penitential colony from the mid-1800’s, as covered by Anton Tchekov in a statistical study and a short story, The Murder… (Comments about characters crossed throughout the trip are rarely to the benefit of these characters.) While I do not make this travel book or the places it crosses sound particularly exciting, it still carries with it the inducing whiff of faraway places, which makes me wish I could see Lake Baïkal or Vladivostok one day in the future, if not travel the entire line. And it also brought back memories of Corto Maltese in Siberia, which remains one of my favourites…