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.