Adventure of the day

"What many of us want on the road in adventure. And what is adventure but a moment, or a series of moments, that you never could have predicted before you left home?"
     - Ira Glass on This American Life


Things I could have predicted before I left home today (thanks to the blogs of the explorers who went before us):
     - all the fancy buildings and rooms I had already seen pictures of
     - artifacts of Inglourious Basterds filming there just a few years ago
     - a frighteningly authentic mosaic featuring an eagle surrounded by swastikas
     - wind and rain
     - a very random, larger than life-size plaster statue of a rhino

Things I could NOT have predicted before I left home today:

     - letters
     - photos
     - job recommendations
     - military ID forms
     - inventories
     - a passport
     - newspapers
     - maps of the world

...all in Russian. All from between 1971 and 1992. All sitting there, left in and around a desk in a room on the top floor of an otherwise not-extraordinary-looking building, for 20 years.


AWESOME.