Gulag Update

I got an update today from my Internet pal Andrej, who has started his bike ride across Siberia to raise money to fight modern-day slavery. I doubt he knows that both Siberian gulags and world slavery have been in the news lately. I don't think he's been keeping up with the news. It seems he spent a lot of his time at the gateway to Siberia sampling the local seafood and beer and meeting the local talent.

When a man touches a women inapproriately, the women will scream at him "Keep you hands off Honduras!!!"

Though he doesn't say exactly how he discovered this. Why Honduras? Who knows. Maybe because it's steamy and "down there." But now he's made his way up country, and gotten within range of the old gulag archipelago.

At the Regional Museum I got a taste of the GULAG system. I got to see all kinds of fantastic documents and physical objects from the regional slave camps.

I topped all that off with a visit to the Mask of Sorrow, a huge monument to the men and women that perished here under the regime of DALSTROY, the state enterprise that ran the slave camps here from roughly 1931 to 1951.

It's on top of a mountain and the weather was appropriatly erie and foggy. At the rear of the monument there is a statue of a women kneeling covering her face and crying. I offered libations to all the dead homies by sprinkling her with sunflower seeds and beer. I was all very sad.

When I tell the people here about my work on behalf of the AASG they seem to have trouble believing me. The only way to get peolpe to believe you, it seems to me, is to do something really grand and stupid, as a demonstration of personal conviction. The Russians understand this philosophy well.

Go check his site and drop him a tip if you can.