April Fool's Day, 2007, I wrote a post on Linfen, China. Although it was written as a joke, the premise is true. Linfen is a royal mess. Its mighty pollution problem has earned it the number 2 spot on the recent "Hells on Earth" list. The air quality in Linfen is so horrific that there is a perpetual feeling of dusk in this coal dust laden city.

Here's the rest of the ten places that have a hellish quality. Perhaps you know of others that should have made the cut.

It's an all England battle for the Champions League title this year. Know what that means?

English soccer hooligans, arguably the world's worst sports fans, will be descending en masse on Moscow on May 21. Some estimates put the total number of English fans at 40,000. While it's not fair to say all English fans are hooligans, that's still a big enough number to have me on the first train to Vladivostok.

But will they really make it?

For European soccer fans, the Champions League playoffs -- which annually pit the best teams across Europe against one another -- is bested only by the European Championship and World Cup in terms of importance. This year, perennial powerhouses Chelsea and Manchester United are facing off in the Cup final.

This year could pose a unique challenge for British fans. Brits in general will travel just about anywhere to support their teams, but they often like to do so on the cheap, renting huge raucous buses or forming decked out caravans kilometers long that take European highways by storm, rather like Parrotheads on their way to a Jimmy Buffett concert on the Cape. But with the final being held this year at essentially the eastern edge of Europe, in the world's most expensive city, the budget options are few, if any. Flights are going for close to $2,000 round-trip, the train ride from London is 40+ hours, and good hotel rooms are running around $200-$300 a night. This is to say nothing of the fact that visas are harder to come by since there is some lingering bad blood between the British and the Russians over the whole Alexander Litvinenko affair (he's the ex-KGB spy whacked in London in November 2006).

Right now, it looks like a daunting trip for the budget conscious, some kind of combination of low-cost flight and overland bus or train, hopping Ryan Air or easyJet to Riga or Villnius and then going on from there.

To be sure, hooliganism is a serious subject. During the 2006 World Cup in Germany, organizers took the extraordinary measure of flying in British police to patrol airports and cities in which the British National Team was scheduled to play. Some 3,500 "known hooligans" were barred from entering Germany. And in one day in Stuttgart, police arrested 200 British fans (and took another 400 into custody), largely for "preventative" purposes. Local authorities estimated that the average fan either drank or threw 4 gallons of beer.

How do you stop a British hooligan? Andy Nicholls, a former hooligan from Everton, tells the BBC, "How to stop hooligans? Take every man aged from 14 to 40, cut their arms and legs off. That'll stop it."

Russians, take note.

Last month, Iva told us about a Russian man who was too drunk to notice he'd been stabbed in the back with a knife.

Now, add this one to the list of bad things that happen to Russians when they booze: A Russian man on an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Toronto didn't quite make it, dying before the plane touched down yesterday.

Passengers say he had been drinking heavily and had picked fights with several male passengers. Flight attendants reportedly broke up these scuffles by moving the man to the front of the plane, where he died.

Police are now looking into whether alcohol contributed to his death.

What strange things have been found on planes?

Click the image to read the bizarre story...

Man, those Russian can really drink! I mean, can you honestly be too drunk to notice somebody stuck a knife in your back? Not figuratively speaking--I know that happens all the time when one is intoxicated--I mean literally: a knife in your back.

As The Irish Examiner reports, a Russian electrician took the bus home from a vodka binge, ate breakfast and slept off his hangover never realizing a kitchen knife had been plunged into his back. The discovery was made by his wife who noticed the handle of the six-inch knife sticking out of his back when she went to wake him.

Yuri Lyalin, 53, said he had been sleeping peacefully before his wife woke him with the bad news. Fortunately, no vital organs were harmed, provided he still has any functioning vital organs left. I don't think he would exactly make the liver donor list.

Apparently, Lyalin's drinking partner is responsible for the stabbing. Why? The answer is engraved at the bottom of a vodka shot glass, my friends. I am sure he meant no harm.

Like so many expats, Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi moved abroad right out of college. But since that time, he's had about the most atypical expat experience you can imagine.

He played baseball in Uzbekistan for their national team, and was kicked out of the country by the KGB for criticizing the government in an AP piece he wrote. He moved to Mongolia and become the leading rebounder in the Mongolian Basketball League, where he was nicknamed the "Mongolian Rodman." He then lived in Russia for ten years, where he helped found the deviously entertaining expat rag, the eXile, a bi-weekly which specializes in spewing vitriol at the deserving, and-- take note-- it is not for the faint of heart.

Personally, I've read almost everything he's written for the last ten years, and what I love as much as anything are his descriptions of his life abroad. Realistic verging on depressing, Taibbi discusses the highs-- in every sense of the word-- as well as the lows, of life as an expatriate:

"The expatriate mentality is a tough thing to explain easily. Any affluent or even middle-class American who renounces the good life of sushi delivery and 50-channel cable television to relocate permanently to some third-world hole usually has to be motivated by a highly destructive personality defect. Either that, or something about home creates psychological demons that in turn create the urge for radical escape.

"I'd moved overseas straight out of college and been a classic expatriate ever since. I had all the symptoms: periodic unsuccessful attempts to repatriate, a tendency to try to make grandiose foreign adventures compensate for a total inability to accumulate money; bad teeth; unhealthy personal relationships, etc. I'd been aware for years that my passion for uprooting and completely changing my lifestyle and even my career was like a drug addiction-- not only did I get off on it, but I needed to do it fairly regularly just to keep from getting the shakes."

If you are presently on the market for a town, you might want to buy a ticket to Moscow right about now.

The Russian army is auctioning off property ranging from mansions to barracks, and even whole towns, to raise cash to build modern housing for its officers, writes The Guardian. Izvestia, the Russian daily, said that more than 20 army properties near Moscow, St Petersburg, Kaliningrad and Vladivostok would be offered to the highest bidders in the first auction on April 8.

Among the properties for sale are "fabulous mansions and guest houses, dilapidated garrison towns, unused shooting ranges and vast tracts of neglected land on which no human has set foot for years". Izvestia claims that the army occupied more land than the territories of Greece or Austria.

Well, what do you think? I could be a great dinner party conversation. "Buying a house in Provence is so bourgeois, Herold. I just bought a town in Russia last week."

It has happened. Moscow has beat New York as the city most packed with billionaires, according to this Forbes research. Whereas New York has only 71, Moscow is now home to 74 billionaires (and probably also 740,000 starving people, but that is beside the point.)

1. Moscow - 74
2. New York - 71
3. London - 36
4. Istanbul - 34
5. Hong Kong - 30
6. Los Angeles - 24
7. Mumbai 20
8. San Francisco - 19
9. Dallas - 15 (tie)
10. Tokyo - 15 (tie)

The one that got me was Istanbul. Istanbul? What's so lucrative going on in Istanbul? Why not Dubai?

What strange things have been found on planes?

Click the image to read the bizarre story...

Let's face it. the relations between Britons and Russian have always been complicated to say the least. Olga Freer's new book is apparently not helping.

Freer, the 23-year-old Russian author, who lives in London, has published a book called The UK for Beginners. Among other things, she describes Britons as a bunch of people who scratch their bottoms in public, don't iron their clothes and are obsessed with television shows about buying and selling houses.

In an article entitled: From Russia with bile – you British are drunken oafs, the Sunday Times called the book the latest outbreak of Russian hostility. Freer apparently declares the Buckingham Palace "uninteresting", British women fat yet confident enough to wear short skirts, and the conversations generally shallow. In Russia, even taxi drivers apparently talk about literature; in the UK here all people talk about is football.

It is the last point that particularly struck me. Isn't it a little sad that all those educated (or at least well-read) people can hope to achieve in Russia is driving a cab?

Closing Russian polls this Sunday are indicating that Dmitry Medvedev, long preened to be the next Russian President has won in a landslide victory over the opposing candidates. Putin, in the meantime, is taking up the newly coined role of "Prime Minister", which, shall we say, is Russian for "Medvedev is my bitch".

Rather than give you the straight news that you can pick up on msnbc or Reuters, I've decided to sum up the election in a series of sarcastic statements. I'm from the Midwest -- what can I say -- it's how we get through our cold winters.

• See? Russia isn't heavy handed
• I'll bet you that Medvedev's Moscow is going to be a new, fresh leadership, corruption will plummet and Putin will wile his days away in a hunting cabin in the St. Petersburg countryside.
• At least the KGB isn't running the entire Russian government!
• I'll bet that the new cabinet and Kremlin officials won't be identical to Putin's outgoing staff.
• Hey, as long as Russia's economy is booming, who gives a rip about who's in charge?
• I mean, who isn't nostalgic for another era of secret police and mass paranoia?

Wellll, crap. I suppose things could be worse. Although Putin's administration seriously creeped me out more than a few times over the years, Medvedev seems like a pretty nice guy. They let Kosvo declare independence, right?

The real question is how much power Putin will retain in his Prime Minister position. If Medvedev actually steps in and begins to rule the country like a leader, things could be interesting. But if the Putin era continues, we're probably in for the same old heavy handed Russia of yore.

There's an adventurous ring to the Trans-Siberia Railway--the train that takes seven days to get from China to Mongolia and onto Russia. There's a certain connotation that evokes images of glamor, the exotic and mysterious. Perhaps that's why it's the backdrop for a thriller in the tradition of Hitchcock and Agatha Christie due out this summer. It has Monika Bartyzel on Cinematical eager for its release. I have to agree. It sounds like the perfect blend of travel and intrigue.

In "Transsiberian" Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer play a married American couple, Roy and Jessie, who hop on the train in Beijing (then Peking during the time period that the movie is set) with an aim for a little excitement on their journey home from a stint as missionaries. As what can happen with any travel, but more so, what they envisioned doesn't even come close to reality. Their personalities and missteps get them into less than stellar situations. Sure, they get the initial fun of a train ride and the expansive scenery of this part of the world in the winter, but they also get murder, drug dealing and deception when they settle into their train car with two other travelers. From the summary, here are missteps not to take that could help you avoid a big fat mess:

1. Don't get off the train (However, that puts a damper on sightseeing)
2. If you do get off the train, don't get off the train with the travelers you just met
3. If you do get off the train, don't one of the two of you miss the train and the other get off on the next stop
4. Don't kill anybody if you can help it.
5. If you do kill someone, it might be better to come clean, particularly if the person might be a drug dealer and left a little something in your luggage.

When I've shared train cars with people I've been fairly lucky to not have anything overly weird happen. One guy , though, kept wanting to rub my foot--seriously, but other than that, I've shared food, conversation and slumber without hassle. I'm interested in seeing this flick for sure. Partly, I want to see what parts of Beijing, Lithuania and Spain ended up in the film. Also, I'm hoping Ben Kingsley who plays the officer looking to solve the crime is able to help Roy and Jessie have a happy travelers' tale ending. Somehow, I don't think so.