The Break-Up

So I told you I'd get around to it eventually. Count yourselves lucky that you didn't have to wait longer. I've just been lazy lately. hee hee hee.

Okay, so sunday afternoon we spent the whole afternoon at the dacha. We got back to the city after 7. We found out that the ice in the river had officially broken up and was moving and so we set off for the village of Tabago to see it. Incidentally, Tabago is where we had our May 9th picnic. One nice thing about the polar days is that even though we set off at like 7:30-8ish we had no need to fear the lack of street lights. It was still really light out.

When we got there, we first drove up a mountain. All over this mountain were these yello flowers that are the first of spring. In Russian they're called Podsnezhniki Literally this means "Under snow" I don't know what the english word for the flowers is. There were all these flowers and Natasha and Tolya picked bouquets while Misha took pictures for me.

From the mountain, we could just barely see the river and the ice floes so it wasn't a very good picture spot. After filling our flower and photo desires, we piled back into the car to find a more picturesque spot. actually, one of the best places to see the ice on the river was through the windshield of the car as we were driving down the mountain. It was so cool! We drove down the mountain and found a spot where there were lots of cars parked, so we got out to see what there was to see.

In Yakutsk, there's no good place to really stand on the bank and watch the ice. We were on a hill and there were trees in front of us. Behind us was a moutain that people were climbing part or all the way up to get a better view. Now, before you think I was doing some extremem mountain climbing I need to explain something.

You see, if I had to use one word to describe the landscape in Yakutsk, it would be prairie. Because that's what it really looks like. The nature around here is not mountainous. You want mountians, go to Vladivostock. That place has Mountians. We do have mountains here, but it's not a dominating landscape feature. It's not like hills all over the place. Instead, it looks like somebody walked across the plains and randomly dropped some loaves of bread. That's the shape of our mountains. They aren't rocky either. They're grassy like the appalacian mountains. So when I say that these people were climbing mountains, I don't mean extreme sports.

We kids decided to climb partway up the mountain for an improved view. Oh my gosh it was a lot harder than it looked! I was hurtin by the time I got to a level place. The upshot is that we sat there for a bit watching the ice, I took some pictures and then we headed back down.

When we got back to the car, we drove to a place on the bank, to see what we could see there, but the view wasn't very good. After that, we finally decided to head home. And that's bascially how the break-up went.