How a modern-minded German businessman ended up in the Urals, Russia.

You would probably never guess that the owner of that brightly painted peasant house along the muddy main street of this remote Urals village could be a jovial, modern-minded German businessman.

But such a person, Stefan Semken, did, in fact, transplant himself to this formerly closed Russian military-industrial region several years ago and marry a local woman. Today they run a moderately successful, off-the-beaten-track tourist enterprise out of this very cottage, or izba, as the traditional Russian peasant house is called.

But that doesn’t begin to describe the complicated life of Mr. Semken, who closed his lithography business in Bremen about 15 years ago to pursue what he says was his life’s dream of visiting Russia.

He somehow washed up in Yekaterinburg, a grim industrial city straddling the boundary between Europe and Asia that was about as far from the familiar Western consumer life as he could get. There the gregarious German met his future wife . . .

Read the full article here: Call of the Urals? German Transplant to Russia Finds the Adventure of His Life.