“Lake Baikal near Irkutsk … holds one fifth of the total fresh water in the world and its length at 636 KM is more than the distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco!
…the Mirny diamond mine in the Sakha region of Eastern Siberia. This is one of the deepest open pit diamond mines in the world where temperatures can go down to a piercing ‐57 °C.”
The bodies of the Romanov family were then taken to the Koptyaki forest where they were stripped and mutilated before dumping them in an unused mine shaft.
It is near dusk and soon it will get dark. My train will not arrive till 9:30 pm and stop in Perm for about 20 minutes. “Listen, Olga, as much as I’d love your company until it’s time for me to leave, I am also conscious of your precious time, and if you can’t stay for an early dinner, perhaps we could have a quick coffee and call it a day?” She considers briefly, and then demurely suggests, “Or early dinner, and THEN coffee” with a grin.
Before our story begins, our mother is five, and to protect her from the blitz in London, she is sent to her grandparents in Wales. Around the same time, in Morocco, Fatima Mernissi is born in her family harem, surrounded by women, her mother, her grandmother, and her aunts. From them, she learns to treasure education and decisiveness while retaining a sense of humor.
I encourage you to people-watch more consciously, and hopefully by doing so you can begin to see as I have that we are in this world together, and are simply different expressions of one human race, on this planet we call Earth. People aren’t people without other people. We are all one.
I do, eventually, reach Avila, but not in the death grip of a Simurgh’s claws. The high-speed train, AVE, of Spain is a lot more comfortable and it has a well-stocked café-bar to boot. If this had been an option available to Sinbad, I’m sure he would have done the same.
