The USA's New Lake-Snatching Conspiracy

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian village was left baffled Thursday after its lake disappeared overnight.

NTV television showed pictures of a giant muddy hole bathed in summer sun, while fishermen from the village of Bolotnikovo looked on disconsolately.

"It is very dangerous. If a person had been in this disaster, he would have had almost no chance of survival. The trees flew downwards, under the ground," said Dmitry Zaitsev, a local Emergencies Ministry official interviewed by the channel.

Officials in Nizhegorodskaya region, on the Volga river east of Moscow, said water in the lake might have been sucked down into an underground water-course or cave system, but some villagers had more sinister explanations.

"I am thinking, well, America has finally got to us," said one old woman, as she sat on the ground outside her house.
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Preparations

It's raining and I've been reading travel books all day (I realize that was a run-on). It seems hard to believe that in less than a week Europe will no longer be seen only through the media of guidebooks, hostel websites, and Ricola ads. After booking so many hotels and reading so many travel logs, it seems as much of a created world as Middle Earth or Dune. By creating an itinerary, I have compiled, from snippets of other people's experiences, a set of presuppositions about what we will experience. I hope it is something entirely unexpected.

Disconnect

There are three types of people: those who like to rule, those who like to be ruled, and those who like to be left alone. People in the first two categories understand one another other. People in the third category resist those in the first and despise those in the second.