Monday, April 14, 2014

The PC: My shoes are filled with Volga mud: (3) Beer hunters lurking nearby.

(Published at LouisvilleBeer.com on April 14, 2014)

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My shoes are filled with Volga mud: (3) Beer hunters lurking nearby.

A 1999 travelogue in three parts.

March 31: (1) A tale of a fateful trip.
April 7: (2) The future is the past.
April 14: (3) Beer hunters lurking nearby.

(3) Beer hunters lurking nearby.

I awoke groggy and disoriented. We had retreated indoors quite early the previous evening, aiming to avoid mosquitoes of Biblical proportions, and sat inside talking and drinking Baltika Porter in the odd glow of a never quite black summer’s night.

Allan’s local helper had been commissioned to prepare fish soup for a midday meal to be consumed just prior to making the drive back to Moscow, and this left us with several hours to explore. Allan proposed a drive to a nearby town.

Armed with bootlegged Jackson Browne and Bad Company CD’s procured for next to nothing at the thriving music market back in Moscow, we set out for the scenic trek to Kolyazin, a dusty and isolated nowhere town that has the eternal good fortune to be dusty and isolated less than four hours away from Moscow – this being “good fortune” because a brief look at any reputable map of Russia will reveal there to be hundreds of Kolyazins, most of them located in places that are so lost in the middle of nothingness that they might as well be on another planet.

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