The FINAL post

This will be the last post that I put on this blog, and that kind of sucks because that means I am officially back to my normal life this week… with all of the schedules and overtime and hassles of real life.

I will start by getting to the actual trip stuff. I took around 1800 pictures and 300mb of video during my trip. I just took a bunch of pictures and planned to sort it out when I got home. I did manage to pare down the set to probably around 850 pictures and put them on a website. I hope to get around to selecting like my 30 favorites and putting them in a separate folder in the next week. I only posted the pictures online at half of their original size (each is still roughly 1mb or more), and I will be happy to supply a good copy of any that you want… just email me. I am slowly trying to go through and put some labels on some of the photos, but that will take a long time.

Each library that is destination specific has a number before it. This lets you know the order of each city, and each library also has a map associated with it (and my next priority is to map each photo... some may not have street maps, but the aerial view on Google maps will allow me to place the photos). I also eventually plan to upload all of my older pictures (mainly from Europe in 04-06) but that may take quite a long time (and money for the storage space).

Well… the link is as follows:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ericdues

and if you care you can subscribe so that you will get an email when I do eventually upload other pictures

And as always, this site will remain at:

http://trans-sib-07.blogspot.com/

until the host decides to take it down due to inaction.

In other news: I am busy at work and I just put in an offer on a condo yesterday. I have only actually been looking for 5 days (since last Thursday), but I think I found what I want so I hopped on it! With the (hopeful) condo closing and painting/moving in January many of the above updates will likely not happen too quickly. After the move I may be in Arizona for a while for work, so my productivity on getting these picture sorted will be very slow. This whole condo thing is expensive too… so I will not be taking any large trips like this for some time.

And one last rant… Russia took another giant leap towards a totalitarian government last Sunday with Putin’s victory in the most unfair election in the world in recent memory (he is also escalating military training back to cold war routines). He basically secured his own power indefinitely and the place will be on even worse terms with the rest of the world because of their fuel reserves. One random story that I keep thinking of when I think of how messed up their political process is the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya last year outside her apartment.

She was the last true journalist that was openly critical of the government and their policies and the war with Chechnya. All of the evidence points at the KGB/Kremlin/Putin as the reason behind it. One might think that being a journalist in Iraq may be the most dangerous assignment in the world, but more journalist have “died premature deaths” in Russia in the past 5-6 years than in Iraq. Those journalist that are outspoken against the government or their actions have mysteriously died off very quickly since Putin took office.

Well, one night in a hostel in Moscow, a young Russian girl majoring in journalism, a journalist from the UK doing research in Moscow, and myself were solving the world’s problems while drinking a fair amount. Eventually we began to get the Russian girl (who’s English was not great, but manageable) to talk about what she did. After a while we found out that she actually had no intentions of really becoming a journalist, but she just hopes to find a man and get married. It is not because she does not want to be a journalist, but she realizes that it is just too dangerous. While she explained this she looked both sad and scared, and I think if she would have had another drink or talked for any longer she would have actually cried while talking about it.

Putin has not only given himself much of the control of the country for the foreseeable future, but during his presidential term he has also managed to eliminate any true critics and deter people from being critical. He controls the TV and radio much in the way Hitler and Stalin controlled their populations media and used it for their own propaganda.

Well, perhaps after all of these negative blog posts about Russia I may not be allowed back into the country, but I don’t think I would go back until the Putin regime is replaced (hopefully) by a younger generation that actually desires true freedom of press, economy, and politics. I visited 2 true communist countries on this trip, and Russia still seemed the most communist.

Well, I could go on for a long time over some of this stuff, but I will just leave it at that. I do hope to have a bunch more pictures put up in the course of the next few months, so check back on my photo site if you wish.

Peace Out,

- The Dues