Earlier in the week we got bounced from the original
apartment where we were staying and moved to another in the Leninski district. As
in every large Russian city, once you get away from the city's center you are
confronted with miles and miles of huge concrete aparment buildings that house
hundreds of families. One after another they form enormous square city blocks.We took a break in our editing to go out and get some comments on Chechnya. We were interested to hear people's reactions here in Kazan , the Capital of Tartarstan.
Similar in many ways to Chechnya, Tartarstan is an autonomous republic on Russian soil whose people, Tatars, are predominantly Muslim. Anya and Sergei, Irina Pavlovna and Sergei Petrovich gave us the views on the situation in Chechnya.
We also spoke to our new host Milyausha, a Tatar woman whose husband, Ivan, is Russian. We hadn't really seen that much of them until tonight since we were gone over the weekend and they spent yesterday at Milyausha's mother's home. It was nice to finally get to sit down and have dinner and get to know them, even if Lisa or I did have to leave the table every half hour to check how our upload was going in their neighbor's apartment. Milyausha and Ivan are still waiting for a phone to be installed in their apartment.
I had really hoped to be on the train to Moscow tonight. It's been one hell of a
long trip and while Moscow is not quite the finish line it is will definitely be
a major milestone in our project. I am almost embarrassed to admit that lately we
often find ourselves fantasizing about going to McDonalds and wolfing down a few
Big Macs. Unfortunately we couldn't buy tickets because today, November 7th is a
holiday--Constitution Day--and the ticket office was closed. In former times this
same date was the day when Russians celebrated the Great October Revolution. It
was by far the biggest holiday of year so when the Soviet Union fell the new
government had come up with a new holiday to fill the void.
