erraterums
Other stuff:

What I wouldn't give for a Starbucks.

Russians do love their sugar. Tea and coffee generally comes with three or four thick packets, or sugar cubes 3x Western size, and at a picnic on Olkhon I saw a couple fellow-Russians using a bowl of sugar as a dipping sauce for their vegetables.

Said vegetables are usually tomato and cucumber. My travelling companion M. spent a month in The Stans and reported that as far as he could tell, no other vegetables had yet been discovered there. Here they're at least occasionally leavened with carrot and beet(root¹).

Lake Baikal is home to a whole bunch of unique species, including the very tasty omul fish and nerpa seal subspecies. Presumably they're all well-adapted to the cold; the lake freezes a metre deep in winter, when the ferry to Olkhon is replaced by an ice road. (And there are a few weeks every six months, when the ice is forming or melting, when Olkhon is completely cut off.)

Many places in Omsk, Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk display credit-card stickers. In our experience, only about half of them actually know how to handle them. ATMs, however, are ubiquitous in the cities, and come with cool "000" buttons for withdrawing thousands of rubles. East of Moscow, Internet cafes charge by the megabyte as well as the minute, so I turn images off. Lots of them have Opera, but this is the only one I've found with Firefox. I have also discovered, the hard way, that ALT-SHIFT switches you from Latin to Cyrillic and back.

Public transit in all Russian cities is frequent, efficient, and cheap, although the rolling stock is often shabby and rusty.

Off to Ulan-Ude tonight. "Ulan" means "Red"; not sure about "Ude." Then across the border to Ulan-Bataar, where I intend to spend a couple of days indulging in traditional Mongolian pursuits such as drinking Czech beer, watching Hollywood movies, and reading the IHT, before hopefully wandering out to the Gobi Desert for a few days.

I'm considering taking the new, ultra-high-altitude, glacier-spanning, pressurized train from Beijing to Lhasa once I reach China. Probably not likely to actually happen, as a) it's a 50-hour trip and I only have ten days in China, and b) iirc Tibet visas are a time-consuming hassle. Interesting notion though. I will, however, definitely be taking Shanghai's magnetic-levitation train to the airport when I fly out.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I've been given the green light to scrap or shelve Book Four, if I so desire (which I think I do) and start a new one afresh. Of course this was always my call; I mean that agent/UK publisher have said they'll fully support this decision if I make it. It'll be a financial hit, but I have the nagging feeling it's the right move regardless. I know I can rewrite what I've got into a pretty-okay book - but this is not a good time, careerwise, to release something merely pretty-okay.

Also: there's a very nice and thoughtful review of IA in Edmonton's Vue Weekly. I am pleased to note that I sound less like a twit in the quotes. Maybe I'm finally getting the hang of being interviewed, at least by email.

¹for all y'all Brits/Aussies/Kiwis.