CESIS: A year in the life of . . .: RUSSIA Day 5

We had originally planned to take the train from Archangelsk to St. Petersburg and then continue back to Riga, our starting point.

After a few calculations we determined it would take about 26 hours to go by train from Archangelsk to St. Petersburg. Twenty-six hours! Next we figured out that we could fly almost as cheap as we could go by train. Lastly, we determined we could fly for 1 hour and 15 minutes or we could go by rail for 26 hours. I never was very good at math but we quickly decided to forgo a night's stay in St. Petersburg (we'll have to see all of the great sights at some later date) and put the money on the plane ticket.

We had a good flight out of Archangelsk, rode the Metro subway to our train station and then boarded our train for our next to last segment of the trip.

We had two cabin mates this time. The first was a Latvian named Aivars. He is a chief engineer on a refrigerator ship that sails between South America, Russia and Europe. Bananas and other fruit are his main cargo. He had been at sea for 9 months and was looking forward to having 6 months off. He lives in Jurmala, a very pretty sea-side town outside of Riga. He was very interesting guy and could speak a little English so we had some good conversations.

The other member of the group takes this rail connection often as he works in the finance business with banks in Riga and St. Petersburg. It works better than flying for him as he gets into Riga about 9:45am, attends to his business and is on the late train back that same night.

In our conversations, the inevitable "How will Obama do in the presidential race" came out fairly quickly. They didn't understand all of our political procedures but had a fairly good understanding of the presidential selection process. The Russian especially felt that a better two-party system would help his own government and the political process. It is amazing how little we sometimes know about other nations but how much they know about ours.

An interesting note was that we were asking him about the new Russian president. He said he didn't really have an opinion about how good a president he was but that he was a good man. He claimed that his mother and Medyev's mother were good friends and he had known the Russian president since they were small boys. I'll take his word for it.

We arrived in Riga, Latvia at 9:40, caught the 10:00 train to Cesis and I was back in my flat before noon.

I'm tired and a little queasy from the hours on the train but really happy that I went on the trip. It gave me another look at this culture and how some countries (Latvia) have changed greatly after their years of Communist rule ended, while Russia still has a very long way to go. Parts of Russia are very modern with a high standard of living but there are many other areas that still lag behind on many basics of life.

We were also able to spend time planning with Nicolay about future projects we could possibly help him with and how he is tackling some of the same issues that continue to plague our church and its efforts here in Cesis. He is a committed pastor that works so hard in a place that has to be hard on a person, both physically and mentally. I will write more on my friend Nicolay at a later date.

We give thanks to God that everything went so well on the trip. We had great weather, no sickness, no problems and we know we were strengthened just by our meetings with Nicolay. We hope we were able to help him and we look forward to a great relationship in the future.

Here are just a few random pictures from the trip: