Russky Island

A sturdy ferry by the name of Vladimir Rodik makes the fifty-minute trip out to the sparsely inhabited Russky Island every couple of hours. Although the island is now connected to the mainland by an massive cable-stayed bridge, which cost about $1 billion to build, the majority of the inhabitants live on a part of the island not serviced by the bridge. To get to this part of the island, it is still necessary to take the ferry. I paid the 43 rubles (about $1.30) for my passage and stood out on the deck as we sailed off into the Gulf of Peter the Great. The entire waterfront is a rotting industrial landscape. The capacity of the port is laughably small, with old fashioned cranes that would be incapable of servicing the types of large container ships that even we receive at home in Charleston, South Carolina. Indeed, the ships moored in the harbor were all tiny. Of course, the population of Vladivostok is about the same size as Charleston’s, but for a port city that sits right between the Asian powerhouses of Japan, China, and Korea, the port seems tremendously underutilized. From a distance, Vladivostok looked like a city crammed into too little space, the air above it hazy with pollution and the buildings wedged in like boxes of cereal in a supermarket. The two new bridges stand as modern giants against the otherwise unremarkable cityscape. Still, the city is beautiful for its location on a hilly peninsula with views of gulf from every hilltop. The ferry carved through a narrow inlet that then opened up into an enormous interior cove, surrounded by the heavily forested hills of the island. We motored past a crumbling concrete pier where fishermen had congregated around a beached trawler.

We docked at the pier and the passengers rushed down the swaying wooden gangway and onto the shore. There was nothing around except for the shabby passenger terminal and a billboard slapped up against an abandoned building advertising “Brooklyn Pizza.” A decrepit concrete staircase curved up the side of the hill and into a forest. I followed a few people up and after a minute of two came out into a block of residential apartments with laundry hanging from the windows and little girls playing in a flooded playground. A little farther on I found an old industrial site where Central Asians were living in little wooden cabins. I continued down the road and passed a few country homes with old women in headscarves working the dirt or walking with buckets of water from the communal well. A few children were riding bikes up and down the road, dodging the odd stray dog. A tall green stretch of sheet metal fenced off the territory of a monastery. The golden dome of an Orthodox church glittered over the top. I came to the front gate, pulled the chain handle down and walked inside. I was immediately greeted by a middle-aged woman in a plaid shirt whose shoulders came almost up to her ears because of her painful hunch. Monks were running to and fro cutting wood and feeding the cows. A calf was tied up away from his mother and was bellowing loudly until the bearded black-robed monk came with the feed bucket. Inside the church a christening was going on. I stood and watched at the door as the priest raddled off by rote in the old church-Slavonic. The little boy stood with his father, looking around a bit nervously at all of the old monks with their long scraggly beards and funny costumes.

On the far end of the bay I came upon a deserted factory with the year 1940 written in a light-colored brick above the main building. At the main gate a stray dog scared me off. I don’t think it was a mean dog, but I have become rather nervous around dogs on old industrial sites because sometimes they are really trained to attack. I kept my distance and found another way in through the rusty sheet metal fence, which had large sections torn away. Stepping through, I noticed a big carpet of wet insulation, which was probably asbestos. I made sure to step around it, though I am hoping that the particles would be pinned down when wet.

Before long I started heading back to the pier to catch my ferry. On the way, I passed a girl who was leading her horses down to the beach. With time to kill, I leaned up against an overturned boat and read a book. There was a Russian sauna nearby and every once in a while men would run outside and jump into the water. A woman with her small daughter started cursing at one naked man, but he just laughed it off and said “I’m not trying to show her.” Russians have a more lax attitude towards public nudity. I slept in the lower passenger deck on the way back. A cold had been coming on all day and I was exhausted by the time I got back into town. But, it was a day well worth it.

Хабаровск (Khabarovsk): The Tidiest City in Russia

Khabarovsk recently received accolades for being the tidiest city in Russia, and it’s true that the city is unique in Russia for being almost entirely devoid of beer bottles and empty chip bags lining the curbs or tossed into the grass. In fact, it is a beautiful city, at least as beautiful as the relatively new Far-Eastern-communist cities get. The main road is the usual Russian hodgepodge of art-nouveau imported from Western Europe at the pleasure of the Tsar, smushed in with turn of the century red brick buildings with decorative masonry in a style unique to the period in Russia. And then, of course there are the typical low-rise blockhouses with their rusting porches and grey-on-grey concrete and mortar facades. Perhaps not so common was the fairly high number of experimental-constructivist buildings. While still extremely ugly, these mammoths break up the monotony with their mid-century socialist-optimism represented in the odd lines, radical curves, overhung shoulders and concave waistlines of their sturdy steel anatomies. I left the southerly Vladivostok in shorts and arrived in Khabarovsk to find the leaves changing with Autumn. The smell of the season hung over the city. The decaying of last spring mixing with the cold air coming in from the northwest made less a smell than a general sensation that transported me back to Thanksgivings in childhood. It is funny how the sun in the afternoon, the season, the smells, the wind can all swell your emotions and send your mind home, even here 6,800 miles away. We had spent the night on the train in the budget wagon, “platzcart.” My friends Maika and Sewon (American and Korean) were a bit anxious for their first trip on Russian trains, especially as their trust in me as navigator and guide had been shaken when we missed our first train. The problem is that the trains in the East are all scheduled on Moscow time, meaning the departure time will read 1:00 p.m. but really mean 8:00 p.m. Vladivostok time. Thanks to my poor math we had to pay to switch to a later train. Our tickets weren’t together so I went to my bed and feel asleep. The next morning I woke with the train still moving and became acquainted with my neighbors: an older Russian lady and two Uzbek guys. The Uzbek guys were unwrapping a big fish from a bundle of newspaper and one of them asked me for a knife to cut it up with. I gave it to him and he cut the fish up into segments, handing me one with a cup of beer.

I had bananas so I offered one to the Uzbek who spurned it, telling me that it was “not real food.” I was eating plain black bread and he asked me if I wanted some “preserves,” which I took to mean fruit jelly. Instead, he pulled out a fat can of beef and bent my knife trying to open it. The beef was suspended in solid fat. I tried to pick it out but it was an impossible task. I cut my finger taking the knife out of the sleeve. The Uzbek guy grabbed a role of toilet paper from his bunk and sat me down to make a bandage. We arrived in Khabarovsk, the Uzbeks gave me hearty handshakes goodbye and one of them handed me the fish head wrapped in newspaper as a token of our new friendship. I carried the fish head around for an hour or two but it ended up in the trash because I couldn’t find any stray cats. We were staying with a Russian couple, Lesya and Yura, who lived in a nice one room flat near the center of the city. They had a hairless sphinx cat named Tiffany who jumped around the room like a naked rat with dangly tits. Sewon was scared of her but I really liked the cat because she was sociable and would stand on my shoulder like a parrot, scrunching up her face like a normal cat, just with no hair! We took in the city by foot, eating street food and browsing the outdoor souvenir shops selling trinkets that had “Moscow” written on them. Down along Amur river the wind was whipping us and I was glad that I brought my winter jacket. From the boardwalk we could see a line of smokestacks and cooling towers exhaling black smoke over the river. That night we spent with our hosts and Maika got tremendously drunk on cheap vodka. He and I ended getting into a semi-playful slapping fight that then morphed into a rant and had both of us pissed off. The next morning he didn’t remember any of it but apologized nonetheless. Sunday and the sky was a pure blue canvas. We spent the hours before our train left in the Lenin square watching little kids roller-skate and talking about the political paradigms of steppe cultures. Typical conversation with Maika.

Our hosts accompanied us to the train station and helped us find the Moscow to Vladivostok train. I was sitting apart from the other two again but quickly became acquainted with my neighbors: an old Russian couple (Sasha and Natasha) and a Kyrgyz man (Misha) in his 50’s. The trio had been together on the train for 5 days already and made me feel very welcomed into their little community. The Russians were interested to hear all about America and to tell their kids that they had met and talked with a real American right there on the train. The Kyrgyz guy was silent at first, but started to open up when I started talking about American politics and economics. He was tremendously knowledgeable about all of it, spouting out figures along with personal predictions about American public finances and the upcoming election. The conversation moved to politics and religion, as it always will when in good company. Here the Kyrgyz informed me that he was a communist. This didn’t surprise me much as his intelligence and education was easy to surmise. He had studied in Kiev and had become a member of the party, which was really no easy feat. Before long Misha was rummaging through his bags and showing off the U.S. Marine Corps uniform he had gotten from a relative who works at the U.S. base near Bishkek. Then he pulled out two bottles of Kyrgyz cognac, a few bags of homemade raisins and apricots, and some toasted apricot pits that I had never tried before. We had shot after shot of cognac and made numerous toasts to our meeting, new friendship, future health, and friendship of nations.

Georgia

All things considered, Georgia is the coolest place I’ve ever been. It’s like a 13th century Europe with a pinch of communist ideology and a twist of mountain culture that is overtly welcoming but with an almost vitriolic current flowing somewhere beneath. The food is some combination of Indian spices and sauces with the fresh herbs and light vegetable dishes of Levantine cooking, resulting in a cuisine unparalleled in flavor and incomparable to any other food I’ve ever tasted. It is hands down my favorite food in the world. Dry wine growing lands give way to rocky foothills and fast flowing streams that swell in the spring with the snowmelt. The northern borderlands are formed by the desolate peaks of the Caucasus Mountains where the snow remains all year like icing on some wild spine of the earth. I landed in Tbilisi around midnight and found a taxi to take me to an address that I had scrawled on a piece of notebook paper. The driver dropped me off in a square where I found some more taxi drivers and asked to use one of their cellphones to call my couchsurfer host, an Estonian named Mirja. Thanking the drivers with my single word of Georgian (genatsvale), I stood outside on the curb for her to come. Back at her apartment I had a few hardboiled eggs before collapsing on the couch. The next morning I got up early because Mirja said I couldn’t hang around in the morning as her roommate wasn’t so keen on having a stranger in the house, even one so endearing as me. I headed out into the city and decided to hike to the top of a mountain overlooking Tbilisi. I picked a spot on the mountain and took what seemed like the best route through the cobblestoned alleys up the hill. I walked up until I was above all of the houses and from there I found a well tread dirt path heading to the top. The air in Georgia is clean and free of industrial pollutants, which makes it unique in the former Soviet world. At this high altitude the sun beat down especially hard and I was feeling the tips of my ears and nose starting to redden under the celestial broiler overhead. I stripped down and bathed in an icy spring that was trickling forth from some crevice in the side of the mountain. On the way up I found a makeshift gym situated in a grove of trees. I did a few chin ups and dropped down with my hands covered in rust. There was a bench press where the weights were two car rims welded to steel rebar. They had this sort of outdoor gym in Kiev as well where big Ukrainians would go and lift old car parts.

On the way back down I stopped at an old church up on the hill. The good thing about churches is that they are always cool in summer and always warm in winter. I walked around the territory and started to walk down into what was apparently someone’s back yard when some funny looking bearded guy yelled at me not to go there. I retreated back saying I was sorry and the guy noticed that my Russian was a bit funny so we started chatting. He ended up giving me a ride back down into town with his wife and infant daughter. That night I met up with Mirja and some of her friends (two Germans, and a Spanish guy) and we all had an excellent, delicious, fantastically tasty meal at a hole-in-the-wall Georgian cafe. After that we went to someone’s apartment to watch football and get drunk. Mirja ended up traveling with me around Georgia quite a bit. After a day or two we went to a town called Kazbegi high up in the Caucasus Mountains about 3 hours north of Tbilisi. Mirja and I crammed into the very back seat of a minibus where we didn’t have a view out of the window. Squeezed in next to us were a group of Peace Corps volunteers and a British guy named Mashood (he was half Ugandan, quarter Pakistani, quarter Iranian). When we pulled into Kazbegi there were a bunch of locals hanging around the little bus stop with signs advertising their guesthouses. An old man came up to me and asked “English?” as he flipped through a worn out notebook to a page where some former guest had written a little description of his house for future clients. I had read about one of the ladies who was standing out there so we decided to stay with her along with the group of peace corps guys. Mirja and I stood out on the road as the owner’s son ferried the others to the house and then came back to pick us up. The guesthouse was really just the home of a family who vacated their beds when people showed up. We slept in their beds and they slept in the living room on couches. The grandmother worked out in the garden during the day, the high peaks a beautiful backdrop. The older son was a border guard and the other was around my age and worked at home. The older one spoke neither Russian nor English save for a few words like “devushka” ([young] girl), “America,” “Russia,” “Putin,” “Obama,” and “M-16.” But, he was very talkative and would say these words over and over again in creative combinations, so a conversation was something like: “devushka, America, Obama (thumbs up and smiling). Russia, Putin (sticks out his tongue and shakes his head in disapproval).” I spoke quite a bit with the grandmother and one of the sons in Russian. The younger son said that I was one of the only guests to have ever talked with them beyond just asking, “where are the towels?” The food at the house was decent, but a bit less spectacular than the restaurant food. Georgians usually just eat fried potatoes at home and save the really good stuff for special occasions. We hiked up to some ancient stone church perched high up over the city. The going was steep and I slipped a few times, but the view up top was fabulous. On the backside of the hill a mini glacier had formed where a big water hose was spewing out high-pressure mist. I climbed down to the now melting glacier and tried to fill up a water bottle with the clean melt, but I came back soaked as the wind changed and sent the mist my way. Mirja and I got a bit bored with the Peace Corps folks who were none of them too enamored by the country after living in impoverished villages and being hassled by locals for 2 years. Mirja and I were glad when we ran into Mashood and his Georgian friend walking through the village and invited them to come along with us up to the Russian border. We hired two drivers to take us along the dramatic mountain road to the border with Russia to have a look. A monastery was being built on the Georgian side, a masterpiece of churchy kitsch. These kinds of buildings are beautiful when they are 1000 years old, but a new stone monastery looks like it belongs at Disney World even if it is done tastefully. The border was uneventful so we went back. From the village Mirja, Mashood, the Georgian guy decided to hike up to a waterfall near one of the neighboring villages. We took the gravelly path across a boulder-strewn field where hundreds of cows were grazing. After about an hour of hiking and wondering where this waterfall was, we flagged down a passing car and asked for a ride. The Georgian guys driving didn’t say a word to us the whole time, but just stared on at the road as if picking up an American, Estonian, and Brit were something they did every day. I thanked them as they drove off with my one word of Georgian. At this, our Georgian friend started laughing and he explained to me that this word, genatsvale, while loosely translating to “thank you,” actually has a much stronger meaning. It is a word of tremendous thanks and connotes something like “I am so thankful that I take your burdens and sins onto myself.” Some strong religious imagery. I had been using this word to thank shopkeepers when they handed me my change, so I felt kind of silly. The waterfall was fantastic and from the top we held a vantage point of a neighboring village and huge mountains.

On the way back to Kazbegi we tried hitchhiking again. First I tried to flag a car and then Mashood tried, but no one stopped. Then we prodded Mirja to try and what do you know, the first car stopped! We hopped in the back and the driver drove on and didn’t say a word to us. When we came up to town the road was blocked off because president Sakashvili was apparently coming through. Our driver was cursing him as we climbed out to walk the rest of the way. We shared a taxi back to Tbilisi with Mashood and the Georgian guy. On the way back we stopped to help an older man whose car had broken down on the side of the road. Our driver climbed out and started looking down at the other guy’s engine as men tend to do whether they know anything about cars or not. Before long our Georgian friend hopped out and then so did I. We decided that we would have to push the car up to the next town, so we dug in and pushed. First up the hill and then down with the old guy steering. That night in Tbilisi I met up with another couchsurfing host named Robin. He was from New Zealand and lived in a luxury apartment in downtown Tbilisi. Robin was in charge of a lot of the legal work for a bunch of international corporations operating in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Basically, he was a big shot bachelor who thought it’d be fun to host some traveling folks and show them a good time. And that he did. Robin and I had an early dinner at some Georgian place not far from his house. An American girl came and met up with us to eat, Robin called her “Babs,” and she said she had taught English in Iraq for a while. We had a pretty good time drinking beers and vodka at the restaurant. I ended up doing most of the ordering in Russian because Robin doesn’t really speak Georgian. The next day I got up and met Mirja again and we headed to Stalin’s birth town, Gori. At the end of Stalin Avenue sits the house where Stalin lived as a child. Behind it is a palatial museum, erected during his lifetime I think. However, we had come on Orthodox Easter, so the museum was closed. Even the giant statue of Stalin had been ripped out of the ground- for renovation. We hiked up to the top of a hill overlooking Gori where some castle ruins remain. There was a sort of cellar structure remaining, but as I climbed down into it I noticed a weird stench. On the ground there was lots of bunched up paper and it wasn’t long before I realized that I was walking around in human feces. Mirja and I climbed around on some enormous bronze statues of armored soldiers down at the base, and then went into a neighboring cathedral to watch some Easter goings on. We found a taxi to take us outside of town to this ancient city carved into sandstone. The rooms and halls of this palatial underground complex had all been exposed after an earthquake a few centuries ago. It had lain in ruins for years until a few years ago when someone up top realized the obvious potential for tourism. Now the place is well set up with lots of handrails and wooden stairs. Still, the modern stuff doesn’t really detract since the place is so spectacular in its own right.

From Gori, Mirja was heading back to Tbilisi and I was going on to Mestia in the Svaneti region. But, since I had lots of time to kill and didn’t want to spent hours by myself in the rather dull city of Gori, I changed my ticket and took the local train back to Tbilisi with Mirja. The local train was absolutely packed and there was no sitting room left so Mirja and I stood in the aisle crammed in with a bunch of Georgians and a few friendly Iranians, as it so happened. The Georgians were infatuated with Mirja since she is tall, fare, and blonde. One soldier guy was really talking with her a lot in spite of his very broken English. I think he was asking her what the patron saint of her city was. In the Georgian Orthodox tradition people visit the graves of relatives and have a big picnic with lots of homemade wine. On our holiday train back to the city people started to pass around cups of wine and apples, so we happily imbibed. An old man next to us pulled out an accordion and started playing some American blues. Back in Tbilisi Mirja and I ate at a café where we were ripped off because we are foreigners and speak no Georgian— typical experience. We said our goodbyes and I went to go catch my train. I was exhausted and went right to sleep on the tiny bed in the stifling little sleeper car. I woke up covered in sweat as we were pulling into the town of Zugdidi, from which I would find a little bus to make the 6-hour drive to the remote Svaneti region. I came out of the train station and asked a police officer where I could find the bus. I found the bus and asked the driver when we would be leaving. He told me we would head out as soon as the bus filled up- about eight seats. It was 7 a.m. so I went to go find some breakfast. There was an open-air market up the street so I headed that way. I stopped to use the pay bathroom where I saw an old man taking a big shit in a squat toilet with no door. Having more or less lost my appetite, I went to browse the bookseller stalls and bought a Russian learning book for Georgian speakers. Back at the bus station I sat around waiting and trying to take a nap. A skinny guy who looked a little like Al Pacino in Scarface except much more pathetic was already drunk when he showed up at 9 a.m. He sat in the front seat sipping on homemade liquor and kept turning up the radio. The driver would come and turn it down and yell at him, and then he would turn it back up, and the whole game continued for hours. A Russian mother and son from Yekaterinburg showed up and the drunk Georgian started talking to them in Russian and telling them how great Vladimir Putin is and what an American puppet Sakashvili is. After a while I chimed in and told him I am an American, to which he started ranting at me in slurred-drunk-Georgian-accented Russian. Around noon we started off towards Mestia, but now before we loaded up the back of the little bus with boxes of dry goods to deliver. The driver was hauling along the narrow mountain roads, we passengers all bumping up and down and sliding into one another on the sharp turns. We had to dodge big boulders in the road fairly often, which made one think what would happen if one of those boulders came loose as we were passing. That and the cows in the road. But, the windows were open and the air was cool, so I was happy the whole way up. Georgia feels old, maybe even ancient. In the remote Svaneti region locals live in stone houses dating from around the turn of the last millennium and trudge up the muddy hillside in soiled smocks. The water from the sink is always running as it is fed by a spring from further up the mountain. At the house where I was staying I was served fresh milk each morning from the cow in the backyard and bread baked in the wood stove that heated the kitchen. I stayed with Svans, a Georgian people with a different language and culture. The woman spoke some basic English, her aunt spoke a bit of Russian, and her uncle and brother spoke only Svan.

The men spent the day working wood as per their profession. The house was full of elaborately carved furniture, all hand made in the shed up front. To reach the house you have to walk on a couple of logs over a swiftly flowing stream, all with a cow or goat looking at you and the two little dogs barking. I took a walk around the territory, which stretched up onto the side of the mountain. I saw the uncle and brother and stopped to help them shovel manure into a wooden sled that was being pulled by a horse. Horned cattle wandered the streets of the town, stopping and staring at the odd human passerby. Mestia is the capital of the Svaneti region, which is notable for its centuries old stone defensive towers (built mostly in the 9th-12th centuries) attached to most homes in town. I heard some other Georgians joking that the Svans built the towers not to protect against invaders, but to protect themselves from one another. The Svaneti region is home to the highest inhabited place in Europe, the village of Ushghuli, which is only reachable by off-road vehicle (and usually not in Spring on the muddy roads) or by four day hike. The Soviets didn’t come to Svaneti region until the 1960’s and tourists didn’t start flowing in until the mid 2000’s when the incoming president Sakashvili sent in army troops to kill the bandits who routinely terrorized and robbed tourists and locals alike at the point of sub-machine guns. There was a shoot-out in which the leader of the bandits and his two sons were killed. Like the rest of rural Georgia, Svaneti was essentially lawless until the ascension of Sakashvili who has brutally and speedily modernized the country. Perhaps too brutally as he just failed to be re-elected thanks in part to some leaked videos of prison guards beating inmates and sodomizing a guy with a broom. Georgia has one of the highest per-capita prison populations in the world, but also one of the lowest crime rates in Europe (on par with Holland or Switzerland). With Sakashvili came a rapid economic modernization and a complete purge in the government and police force to get rid of corruption. This was all heavily assisted by the American and European cash and credit. The signs of this money are very visible with new police stations in every little town and a big new highway named in honor of George W. Bush. In terms of resources, Georgia has relatively little to offer itself. Its value to the U.S., and more particularly to Europe, is its geographic position as a gas corridor. The position is fabulous for two reasons: 1) it is close to gas-rich Turkmenistan; 2) it bypasses Russia and Iran. Basically, Europe is incredibly anxious a out being so dependent on Russia for its natural gas consumption and it is desperately trying to diversify away from the screwy Russian state-monopoly supplier. Turkmenistan offers an alternative if a pipeline can be constructed through the Caspian Sea, into Azerbaijan, then Georgia, then Turkey, and into Europe. Russia is vehemently opposed to this, as the construction of this pipeline would be the kiss of death to state-monopoly Gazprom, who is already struggling on many different fronts. Russia stands to stop the construction of a pipeline by force, using its status as a Caspian Sea border state to conjure up some pretext for intervention.

For the time being, the Caspian pipeline is off the table. The 2008 Russo-Georgian war solidified this, probably at least for the next decade. The U.S. is unlikely to throw its full weight behind Georgia and the pipeline for fear of becoming embroiled in a Caucasian-Caspian conflict over European gas, especially as American shale gas stands to enter the European gas scene in a big way. Back in Svaneti, I was trying to find things to do in the cold and drizzly weather. I took a few hikes into the mountains and one time came up to some kind of camp that was being guarded by two kids with AK-47’s. I walked up to them, which I think they found rather surprising, and we had a time of it since they spoke neither Russian nor English. It was quickly understood however that I couldn’t go along any further to the little encampment where older men were playing volleyball and having a picnic. Up the road a bit from where I was staying was a brand new wooden chalet with a guard perched up on the driveway. I had been told that this was Sakashvili’s vacation house and I asked the guard whether it was true. He gave a non-committal answer, which basically confirmed it. A few days by myself in Svaneti with bad weather and I was feeling a little lonely and bored. I had read about a charter plane that sometimes flies back and forth between Tbilisi and Mestia, so I walked down to the airport to find out about it. They told me that the plane would probably be flying the next day if the weather held up. The next morning I called down to the airport and heard that they would be taking off. The brother gave me a ride down to the runway where I bought my ticket from the cute girl. A Canadian company owns the plane and the pilots were two tall blonde Canadians. I was in the plane with a family of Georgians and their kids, all babbling on in Georgian. The pilot turned around and hung out of the cockpit and gave the safety presentation: “welcome aboard, exits are behind you, put on your seatbelts.” The propellers started whirring and we were taking off over the stone towers of Mestia. From the air, Mestia looked like something out of Lord of the Rings, an embattled settlement perched high up in the mountains with the locals going about with their daily subsistence. The flight was about an hour long and we stayed low enough to not be pressurized. We flew right through the peaks, the pilots navigating entirely by sight. At times we passed just a few hundred feet above the snowy crags. The plane came out of the mountains after a rather jerky half hour. Heading for Tbilisi, a rolling emerald landscape stretched out like a doormat to the Caucasus, dotted by the occasional farmer’s field. Back in Tbilisi I took a taxi back down George W. Bush highway and headed to another couchsurfer’s house. I stayed the night with this really nice German couple who were both medical students. They rented the bottom floor of a Georgian family’s house. We told the Georgian family that I was a cousin visiting from America. I spent the next night at Robin’s apartment again and we had a good time drinking beers out on his balcony overlooking downtown Tbilisi. We talked about politics, his two Hungarian ex-wives, and the path a young man might take in life.

First impressions of Vladivostok.

The first few days arriving in a new place are always a rather lonely period of adjustment as you try to make good first impressions and find the right people to spend time with. There’s a small window of opportunity to brand yourself, so to speak, so that you aren’t pigeonholed into a crowd with no good-looking girls and weird guys with a really bad sense of humor. Luckily, my social bone has served me well (or maybe it’s the good looks) and I’ve fallen in with all of the Americans in the group and met a lot of Russians, most of whom I like a lot. Vladivostok is a pretty whacky city because it’s way out by Japan and Korea and has the same kind of mountain terrain and spindly flora that I always picture being in China. It still feels like Russia but with a few exceptions. Firstly, I’ve seen pretty few Soviet cars. In their place people drive used Japanese imports with steering wheels on the right side. Vladivostok was the source of almost all foreign cars in Russia east of the Urals, which is where most of the wealth in the city came from. Recently, a big tax was slapped on imported cars which has really hurt the industry and which brought about big protests that the Kremlin had to put down with special police flown in from Moscow. Secondly, you can find really great Asian food here. Even in Moscow- the biggest city in Europe- it was almost impossible to find decent ethnic food at prices that weren’t absolutely cost prohibitive. The last Chinese place in Russia that I ate in had sweet-and-sour chicken that as breaded in doughnut batter to make it more suitable to the Russian palate (not very sophisticated if you ask me). Because of its proximity to China (5 hours by bus) and Korea (the North’s border is about 100 miles from here), lots of unskilled Asians flow in and do what they do best: open restaurants! The other night we ate at a Korean restaurant with one of our Korean friends. She spoke with the waitress in Korean and told us that the girl was obviously from North Korea (based on the dialect). There is also (allegedly) a North Korean restaurant owned and operated by the North Korean government. I’ll try it out and report back. I thought I’d escaped dormitory life after I finished by first year of college, but no such luck. Six guys share our shower and toilet, though there is no hot water at the moment so no one is showering too much. My roommate, Yaroslav, is a bit of a Russian redneck. He is constantly spraying cheap cologne in the room, playing shoot-em-up video games, putting on bad techno remixes of bad pop songs, and heading to the club. He shines his tennis shoes before he heads out. But, he’s a nice guy and I like him. Yesterday some friends and I went out for dinner and bumped into this drunk ex-cop who bought us all rounds of vodka and told us about how he had gotten drunk with a few American sailors three years ago. I had the best Russian of our group so I was stuck translating everything he was saying, which was interspersed with “…whore…bitch…” every few seconds (those are some of the worst swear words in Russian). It was kind of funny except for his wife who was also sitting with us had bruises all over her arms (a few of which probably came from intravenous drug use, but the rest probably from being slapped around by her hulking toothless husband). The whole time this guy is rambling, the waitresses were looking at us to ask ‘is everything ok?’ We were having a fine time though. There was a family sitting behind us with small kids, so I felt a bit bad that this guy was speaking so filthily. After he left I apologized and the small boy asked me “aren’t you on TV?!” I had to tell him no.