ASIA

Two young people reading in the Purple Bamboo Park of Beijing, 1957-59.

I finally have some time to myself so here are some pictures of lake Baikal. 💙 This was a bit of an impromptu visit - we did a day trip to Listvyanka, a village on the Western side of lake Baikal. It was surprisingly chilly there (about 10 degrees C lower than in Irkutsk which is 70 km from Listvyanka. Our hopes of bathing in Baikal were quickly shattered - the water is only 5 °C and icy cold!

Baikal smelled of bird cherry bloom. It's such a lovely smell, one of my favorites. Interestingly, where I live in the European part of Russia, bird cherry trees were done blooming a month ago already. It was like going back into spring.

Lake Baikal is often said to be as big as a sea. Because I'd that, I didn't expect to be able to see the other side, but you can actually see the mountains on the other side! They're covered in snow. The lake is about 40 km wide in Listvyanka.

The lake is over 600 km long. I didn't know that and it's crazy to think about. It's like if the whole way from Moscow to St Petersburg was covered in water.

“Indian tennis player Sania Mirza plays pool as she addresses media representatives in Bombay. Mirza became the first Indian woman to reach a Grand Slam third round in which she lost to US player Serena Williams at the Australian Open in Melbourne.”

Photographed by Sebastian D’Souza.

“She was a Chinese lawyer, judge, revolutionary, and legislator. Zheng was the first female judge in modern Chinese history. Zheng participated in Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary movement leading up to the 1911 Revolution. She then went to Paris and studied at the Faculty of Law of Paris where she earned a doctorate in 1925. Shen then returned to Shanghai to practice law. She She was president of a court in the French concession and then served in the national Legislative Yuan, helping to draft the Chinese Republican-era civil code. In 1919, she served on the Chinese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. From 1931 to 1937 she was president of University of Shanghai school of law.”