NOTES, COMMENT AND BUZZ FROM EUGENE KASPERSKY – OFFICIAL BLOG
March 31, 2016
Novorossiysk is also my hometown! I was born here 50.5 years ago. My family lived in this here building – 21, Revolution of 1905 Street – for many years. We moved away in the early seventies to Khlebnikovo in the Moscow Region, which is where I started going to school.
Here’s number 21:
In this yard I played in the sandbox, rode my first bicycle, and climbed the apricot and mulberry trees… Oh, the nostalgia!
March 30, 2016
The other day our executive director (E.D.) received a note with the agenda of an upcoming business trip of mine:
Attached thereto was a receipt for prepayment of rental of a helicopter to get from Krasnodar to Novorossiysk. The name of the company that owned the chopper? Abrau-Durso – the well-known (locally) wine-and-champagne producer!
“Aha. I get it. And you call this a business trip?!” joked E.D. :)
Alas, there was no time for us to fit in a visit to the winery for a tasting. See, it was business, E.D. :)
The views from up above were rather spectacular:
March 29, 2016
I like lists. I like comparisons. So when, a while back, I drew up a list of the cities I’ve been to in Russia, I was rather surprised to discover I’ve been to more US cities than Russian ones! Ok, just two more – 16 against 14 – but still. How so? Why for? Is not normal. (Here’s the methodology for the calculation and the lists of the respective cities.)
Aaanyway, I’ve just added another city to my list of Russian ones visited: the city of Krasnodar.
What can I say? Krasnodar is a real nice place – especially in the center. It’s clean and tidy; it’s bright and colorful; it’s nicely maintained and furbished; while the bright sun up in the clear blue sky imbued the city with a fresh, spring-y mood. In short: my impressions were extremely positive.
February 11, 2016
I find myself in many different far-flung places on this planet, but quite often they’re… predictable: world capitals, business hubs, Must-See places…
But occasionally I also get to less obvious spots. Example: Sviyazhsk. Heard of it? Probably not!
Well, it’s an ancient town, now a village, located at the confluence of the Volga and Sviyaga Rivers.
According to our excellent excursion guide (I normally trust good guides more than, say, Wikipedia), the short history of the town is as follows:
February 9, 2016
Last week I stayed at the Déjà Vu hotel near the Sviyaga skiing complex in the city of Kazan (dubbed the third capital of Russia, after Moscow and Saint Petersburg). And though there was just me in my hotel room, the shower was most certainly designed for two persons. I have to say it was the first ‘erotic shower’ I’ve ever seen out of all the hotels I’ve stayed at. Most innovational. Good idea!
November 23, 2015
Hi folks!
On we go with my journey around what are to me the 100 most beautiful places in the world, all of which I reckon need visiting at least once in a lifetime without fail – so as not to live the rest of that lifetime with regret!
Next up, the world’s largest country!
Russia’s East European Plain doesn’t have anything outstandingly must-see when it comes to natural beauty. Of course, there are beautiful places – and many of them, but none quite make their way onto my Top-100. Then, east of the Urals there’s the West Siberian Plain – a rather plain, er, plain, this time all tundra/taiga/steppe (from north to south, respectively), marshes, rivers, lakes, oil extraction and mosquitoes. Things only start getting Top-100-worthy still further east. But I’ll get to that in a bit. For now though…
39. Red Square and the Kremlin.
Many of our foreign friends who come to visit us here in Moscow tell us that Red Square – with St. Basil’s at one end, the Kremlin to one side and GUM on the other – is the most beautiful spot in Europe, especially at night when lit up. And who am I to argue? I too am a big fan.
Note: St. Petersburg was in the Cities section of the Top-100 series.
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October 23, 2015
All good things must come to an end: that’s it for at least another year. Time to go home.
In all we’ve trekked/climbed/clambered/slipped/tripped around 300 kilometers, been up five volcanoes (though not always quite to the very top), scanned hundreds of square kilometers of phenomenal natural beauty, scared (or maybe just surprised) dozens of bears, and fed a zillion mosquitos. We’ve also used up kilometers of Kodachrome gigabytes of memory cards :).
October 22, 2015
As our An-Kam-2015 inexorably approached its end, we had just one more volcano to check out: Koshelev – actually pronounced Koshelyov (accent on the lyov).
Though the name is in the singular, this isn’t a single volcano – it’s a set of five different volcanoes, each of which erupted at different times, and which together make up a single massive construction of varied volcanism. Since all the volcanoes are old, they’re all partly collapsed. But that’s just what makes them all the more photogenic.
The parts of Koshelyov we checked out (the western peaks) consist of lava stacks (the centers of former craters) colored with multicolored volcanic remains. Various shades of black, white, red and yellow almost glistening in the bright sunlight of the clear day we were lucky enough to be here on.
Read on: It was getting really tough towards the end of the trip…
October 21, 2015
I think Kamchatka’s snow caves and tunnels are worthy of a post of their own…
A lot of snow falls in Kamchatka. A heck of a lot. And in some places infinitesimal quantities – dozens of meters deep. Now, all that snow… some a lot of it of course falls onto the many hot streams here (that is, streams with underground heating – very posh:), and what you get is a maze of tunnels under the snowdrifts. And the snow in which the tunnels are made doesn’t have time to melt during the Kamchatkan spring, and sometimes – even during summer (since there’s just so much of it). Enter us! Who dutifully entered said snow tunnels!
Check out the pics…
The water that drips down from the snow-roof – yum!
October 20, 2015
Though Kamchatka isn’t the most well-known or accessible tourist destination in the world, it still has more than its fair share of ‘touristic meccas’, like the Valley of the Geysers, Tolbachik (especially during an eruption), and the Mutnovsky and Goreliy volcanoes. But it also has less-visited attractions too, for example the Ksudach volcano. Then there are places where a bear‘s paw print in the mud is observed without the slightest increase in heartbeat – as it would be just one among thousands of bear paw prints. And the sight of a human’s boot print similarly calls up zero emotions – as you see humans’ boot prints… never! For no one lives in such places, and only one or two groups of tourists visit… per year! These places are utterly barren, desolate, deserted and silent: Terra Incognita!
Oh, what a shame. For these incognito lands are all must-see!
Two such must-see spots on Kamchatka’s Terra Incognita are the two volcanoes Kambalny and Koshelev.
Alas, we didn’t climb up to the very top of their crater rims as our schedule wouldn’t permit it. We settled instead for strolling about the area, and in doing so worked out our plan for the next Kambalny/Koshelev visit: to walk from Pauzhetka to Kambalny, then down to Kambalny Lake, and then… we’ll just have to see how much energy is left for onward volcano climbing…
Kambalny is a volcano 2161 meters high, but it also has a volcanic ridge some 15km long, which goes straight from north to south right in the middle of lower Kamchatka – directly between the Sea of Okhotsk and Kurile Lake.
Oh my gorgeous. Fantastical spectacles…
