From Russia with Gloves

I'm in Siberia and it's nowhere near as cold as I thought it was going to be. So cold I didn't thik twice about jumping in Lake Baikal, although to be fair, once in I didn't think about anything other than getting out again. Very cold. Very big too, apparently there's so much fresh water there that if everyone in the world tried to drink it it would take 44 years.

Top three things that I've done since being in Russia that I hadn't done before:

Dog-sledding - More fun than I'd feared it would be, although my dogs seemed intent on taking short cuts which meant I spent more time than I'd like being dragged along behind an overturned sled.

Driven a skidoo - I think I can add that to the list of things I'm not that good at.

Sauna - yeah I've been into a sauna before but I've never done it properly. I've never stayed in it til it hurt. I've never run straight out to roll around in the snow all scantily clad. And I'd never been whipped by a slightly overweight Russian man.

The first leg of the Trans-Siberian was relatively painless. Although the border crossing took the wrong side of ten hours, for most of which our carriage wasn't connected to anything even slightly resembling a train, which got enough Weird Points to pull me through the wait. It didn' get as many Weird Points as the hat Kim bought in the Mongolian black market. It had legs. Not enough hats have legs nowadays.