I have begun my great journey to the east, where I will spend a month with my new wife in her homeland of China before we return together to our new home in Tel Aviv.
Staring out the plane window while flying north the Moscow, you get the sense of the immensity of the Russian wilderness- the forests stretch on endlessly, dotted with lakes and intersected by massive rivers smoking with steam in the morning. Bursts of farmland and settlements erupt from the forest, connected by lines of the roads that have been torn from the earth as by a giant hoe, the mud bled outwards from the earthly wounds.
In my youth we would visit the northern big woods of Minnesota, and I had believed then that it was wilderness. Here though, sailing above the great Russian expanse, I can compare my benign, enchanted Minnesotan wood to this unending haunt. This is the great Russian bear, the winter that defeated Napolean and Hitler.
I can't imagine what the expanse of Siberia must be when that is what Russians consider their wilderness. I now see these people in a different light then before- these are not Europeans, who live in long tamed lands and their shining cities, nor are they the descendants of settlers from my homeland in North America at least a few generations removed from the settling the west-- these Russians are still in the process began in the times of the Kiev Rus, and are little closer to completion!
We begin to approach Moscow, which grows into view, it's unending sprawl seeming to match the forest that surrounds it.
In six hours, I will fly to Beijing, but now I am thinking romantically what could be done here, from hiking, to fishing, or hunting tigers bare-chested mounted upon a soaring eagle; I will have to return some time.
Here are Some photos of the airport- it's fun to see signs written in a script you're not used to.
Staring out the plane window while flying north the Moscow, you get the sense of the immensity of the Russian wilderness- the forests stretch on endlessly, dotted with lakes and intersected by massive rivers smoking with steam in the morning. Bursts of farmland and settlements erupt from the forest, connected by lines of the roads that have been torn from the earth as by a giant hoe, the mud bled outwards from the earthly wounds.
In my youth we would visit the northern big woods of Minnesota, and I had believed then that it was wilderness. Here though, sailing above the great Russian expanse, I can compare my benign, enchanted Minnesotan wood to this unending haunt. This is the great Russian bear, the winter that defeated Napolean and Hitler.
I can't imagine what the expanse of Siberia must be when that is what Russians consider their wilderness. I now see these people in a different light then before- these are not Europeans, who live in long tamed lands and their shining cities, nor are they the descendants of settlers from my homeland in North America at least a few generations removed from the settling the west-- these Russians are still in the process began in the times of the Kiev Rus, and are little closer to completion!
We begin to approach Moscow, which grows into view, it's unending sprawl seeming to match the forest that surrounds it.
In six hours, I will fly to Beijing, but now I am thinking romantically what could be done here, from hiking, to fishing, or hunting tigers bare-chested mounted upon a soaring eagle; I will have to return some time.
Here are Some photos of the airport- it's fun to see signs written in a script you're not used to.
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