Archive - January 12, 2012

Jeffrey Tayler (Morocco 1988-90; PC/Staff Poland 1992; Uzbekistan 1992-93) is a PCV writer who never came home but has kept writing. He is the author of such travel books as Siberian Dawn and Facing the Congo, and has published numerous articles in The Atlantic, Spin, Harper’s, and Conde´ Nast Traveler, plus being a regular commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”  Tayler lives in Russia and in the current issue of The Atlantic has a piece on a remote archipelago of Russia, one of county’s holiest places, the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral. It is located on the largest of the Solovetsky Islands and “amid the gale-lashed White Sea, just outside the Arctic Circle,” Jeff writes. Tayler lives in Moscow and Solovki is 650 miles away by plane. (And you thought it was a long way to your site!) The Soviets opened the Solovetsky Monastery back in 1967 as a museum and the monks returned there in 1990. It has taken this RPCV a little . . .

The accepted supposition is that there are only six degrees of separation between any two people on Earth. But, I think, if we are talking about RPCVs that ratio tightens and it is more like 4 connections between you and anyone else in the world. And if you add growing up in the rural Mid-West in a town of less than 100,000, and being the same age, well, then, maybe, for all practical purposes, you’re kissin’ cousins. So that is why it is not so strange that Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) has a piece in the January 9, 2012, New Yorker about a guy named Jake Adelstein–who Peter knew as a kid in Missouri–and who went to Tokyo five years ago not knowing a word of Japanese, became a crime reporter for the country’s largest newspapers, and now lives in Tokyo under police protection because of his articles on the yakuza, Japan’s version of . . .