We arrived in Moscow at dawn on July six. We made it through customs in a fairly short amount of time with all our scientific gear intact.

Everybody was feeling pretty ragged as Kate Bulygina met the two minibuses she had hired and we loaded all the gear into one and all the people into the other. Moscow is so expensive and there are so many of us, we would have blown our whole budget if we wanted to stay in the heart of the city. Instead we drove to what Max accurately described as a ‘hotel-like structure’. Our lodgings turned out to be a Soviet-style dormitory north of the city on the greenbelt that surrounds Moscow.

It was raining and warm and green. The landscape was dominated by paper birch and if it wasn’t for the Cyrillic signs I might have thought we were in the outskirts of Boston.

We had lunch (borscht!) but given the 11-hour time change from my home in Bellingham Washington I was a little turned around on mealtimes. We piled back in the minibus and visited a wet and windy Red Square. Several of the students commented that St Peter’s Basilica looked good enough to eat. The weather kept the crowds down and I appreciated the windswept and shinning pavement – it felt lonesome and very Russian.

We returned, had dinner and gathered all the students together to talk about what lay ahead. Each of the instructors on the course sat down with each of the students. During those head-to-heads I was impressed by the intellectual curiosity of and verve of each of the students. Our trip has just begun but I’m excited for what lays ahead. I’m writing this from the airport in Moscow as we wait for my third overnight flight that we’ll take to Yakutsk. The Russian airport computer I’m working on has a tendancy to lapse into Cyrillic so I’ll end it here and let the students take over.