Siberia

I imagine it's not too dissimilar from northern Alaska?

In Siberia all seems to breathe freedom and peace, and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils

Cy Feuer in his auto bio told Cole Porter for the musical Silk Stockings(which Feuer was producing) he wanted a comic song about how horrible Siberia is(you can bet alright that your Christmas will be white.)

Porter told him that he had been there and it was actually very nice. Feuer had to explain to him that most people hadn't and had a terrible impression of it and that's what the song had to be about.

I read Ian Frazier's "Travels in Siberia," and while the place sounds fascinating, I would be terrified of their mosquitoes! He devotes an entire section to the mosquito problem there during the summer months. This Sixty Minutes clip gives you an idea of how bad it is.

The melting arctic permafrost over there is also no bueno.

On a happier note, some of the scenery is pretty..

So the climate deniers are saying that once the weather gets warmer, vast areas of Siberia will be opened up to agriculture. I don't get it though- wouldn't it be tundra soil? I thought the soil was very infertile in these cold places.

I don't often re-read books, but I would do so with Frasier's Russian one.

I've always wanted to see Vladivostok, but apparently it's chock-full of Asian tourists, just like everywhere else on the planet these days, so that's a drawback for such plans for me.

If you get a chance, see the gay movie, "Siberia and Him."

R8, I highly recommend his book! There are moments when he delves a bit unnecessarily deep into Tsarist history, but it's never a dull read.

I read his book a while back when it first came out. Often I recall a sense of how much I enjoyed a book, without remembering all the details, so I'm looking forward to reading it again as though it were new.

only emotionally

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Siberia has the world's largest swamp, the Vasyugan swamp.

Everyone I know from Siberia is fucking crazy. (I know two people from Siberia).

Abandoned Siberian gulag.

The only Siberian I know is actually a pretty cool guy.

Siberian huskies are pretty cool!

Many, many times. But I really want to go to Yakutsk in northern Siberia. In the winter. But I haven't manged to get there yet.

Lake Baikal is simply magical, especially in winter, when it has a six-foot deep layer of ice on the surface. The ice is crystal clear and you can see hundreds of feet down through the ice. They take hovercraft out on it, and trucks drive on it.

The summers are brutally humid. It can get really hot, too. That combination makes for very uncomfortable living.

R19 has played a lot of Risk!

r16 Let's buy it and turn it into a timeshare!

I wonder what Grindr and Scruff are like there. When profiles say will travel how far are they talking?

R21, not a bad idea! I would first have to see a Tasteful Friends tour of the interior first. I'd want to see how much natural light I'm working with...

I've never been there, but I wouldn't mind visiting sometime. Siberia is far larger than the entire United States. So I don't think you can generalize too much about it, other than that the winters are very cold everywhere. There's a large expanse of fairly flat land, adjacent to the arctic ocean and arctic circle, tundra in the far north, and taiga (coniferous forest) south, so cold air can pool there during the 24 hours of darkness in midwinter and get colder and colder and colder. Eventually those cold pools of air get dislodged by the jet stream and head south, which results in misery for central and particularly east Asia. They can also slip east into Alaska and slide down the continental divide into the Canadian and US midwest. But as someone mentioned above, Lake Baikal is surrounded by mountains, and famous for its beauty .It is so deep that it holds far more water than any other freshwater lake, as much as all the Great Lakes in the US combined. Kamkatchka is home to about 200 volcanoes, some of them over 15,000 feet, with perfect snow covered cones, geysers, and hundreds of thousands of brown bears. The Altai mountains are also beautiful in pictures, with lovely glaciers, meadows and dense forests. Southern Siberia merges with the steppes, great grasslands which were the travel corridors for the Mongol Hordes and many invasions of Europe, as well as one of the silk roads from China. You'd definitely want to time your visit to avoid the worst of the mosquitoes, which I suspect would hatch out pretty quickly after the ice and snow melts in May. Probably very late summer or fall would be the best time to visit - maybe in September or early October, just before the first snows.

Let's have some tasteful pictures:

Altai mountains

siberian taiga

Lake Baikal

I thought that was Oprah's pussy, R14.

Siberian steppe

R24, the natural geography of Kamchatka has always piqued my interest. Looks pretty.

Winter is obviously brutal.

Irkutsk is just fabulous, but you truly have not been to Siberia till you've been to Yakutsk.

Of course the Tunguska Event location is a must, as is the darling Baikal Seals, the only freshwater seals.

R29, lol!