Yuri Shamrey lives in the small country of Belarus. One of his hobbies is travel and tourism. He wants to travel to exotic places and collect stories about his friends.

What is "Travels Notes" all about?

Yuri is attempting to collect information about interesting places in relation to tourism. He's making notes on how to overcome problems that may be encountered.

Yuri's also writing about the ways to eliminate some of the risks of traveling internationally.

Site Design

I had to do a "double-take" a few times while reading Yuri's blog because English is a second language for him. He's using translation services to put the text in English as opposed to his native tongue, which is either Belarusian or Russian.

After perusing the design and other items, I only found 2 things annoying. The calendar and the paging mechanism at the bottom of the index page are the only ways to go backwards in his blog, to try to find the beginning. Otherwise, it's a hit or miss with the URL. An archives list or widget of some kind would come in real handy.

Also his "Pages" widget, which includes his "about" page, is wayyyyyy down at the bottom of the right sidebar. In my opinion, it should be above that long list of categories he has above it. There's no contact page, but I think it's okay since he put his email link on the "about" page. Let's face it,; contact pages aren't as useful for stopping spam as they used to be anyway.

Article Content

I found the story about Yuri leaving Thailand and entering Laos, "Picosecond - I went to Laos.", an interesting read. Despite the translation being far from perfect, I understood his desire to leave the house he was living in due to circumstances that made him feel uncomfortable.

There are quite a few stories about his travels spattered across the blog.

My Overall Opinion

I'm going to venture at a guess that Yuri is a Russian, or of Russian descent, living in Belarus. If that's the case, reading his blog is an adventure that any American wouldn't want to miss. It gives a glimpse into what the easterners, as opposed to westerners like me, think about places in the world. I have a feeling we'll find out that they're not much different than we are.

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