The Korean Air flight from LAX to Seoul was reasonably comfortable; we managed to snooze on and off for twelve and a half hours, and as well in the very modern and glossy Seoul airport, where we stretched out on banks of seats at the gate for some of the four hours before our couple of hours flight to Vladivostok. Our arrival in Vladivostok was a trifle more Kafka-esque. We had been given a customs form on the plane but the stewardess seemed very vague about whether we needed to fill it out, as well as another form (migration control) which we more clearly did need to fill out (one half of which was collected on our arrival and one half turned in when we departed), and about which Dan had forewarned us. We disembarked and found ourselves in a small crowded room in one of several lines for several windows (apparently passport control). A gentleman behind me was struggling with filling out what appeared to be an alternate version of the migration control forms; he had apparently not received the forms on the plane, for some reason, but had picked one up from a table--partially filled out and abandoned by a previous traveler. I tried to help this gentleman, as much for something to do while we waited--hot and sweaty, clutching our flight bags and laptops, and almost pressed up against one another--as out of kindness. Eventually the window we were waiting for, and which we were now fairly close to, closed (and I thought of Kafka's parable "Before the Law"--how does it go? This door was meant only for you, and now I am going to close it. ) Our line straggled over to the left and we lost our moderately good position. Eventually we made it through the ploddingly slow passport control, turned in the halves of our forms at migration control, and placed our hand luggage on the conveyor so it could go through the metal detector, while wondering how or when we would deal with that customs form. Then, all in a woosh (and I really can't quite remember exactly how the rest of our luggage appeared, but it was quick!), Dan was there, shepherding us and our bags rapidly outside where we got to kiss our granddaughter and our daughter-in-law and piled into the family's SUV (next to the much-missed Anya in her carseat in the back) and were on our way to their apartment.
внучка That's the Russian for granddaughter. Sounds like vnuchka. I also learned grandfather, дед, which, in the diminutive, sounds like dyeduchka. And I knew бабушка, babushka, grandmother. Not a lot! Barely became able to say "I don't speak Russian." The kids' townhouse--one of a block of them occupied by consulate staff--is on a hill and gated. A guard goes through the ritual of looking underneath the car with a mirror on a long handle every time one returns to the gate. The kids call the road down to town from their place "the goat path" and it's immediately clear why. Rocky and steep and unpaved, it emblematizes the curious mixture of third word and first world that Vlad seems to be. On the one hand, the town seems bustling to a naive Western eye. I went with Lisa to an enormous Chinese baby store which seemed to have even more goods than a comparable emporium in the U.S. I visited a rather elegant market (
complete with lavish fountain) that seemed not all that unlike the ones in France. (See picture-- to the right, I hope.I'm a first-time blogger and
still struggling with various matters, including layout.) We went to several very good and even excellent re
staurants (more on that later).There are some wonderful streets (the one with the Pushkin theater, for example) and buildings that seem to have been carefully restored (the train station, for example). (See the pictures of each of these.) On the other hand, the roads were sometimes in terrible repair, and there are lots of those grim Soviet-style apartment blocks similar to the ones we saw in Posnan, Poland when we visited there from France in 1993. They have ugly, purely functional entry ways, and many of them look like huge hunks of concrete are about to drip off them and crash into the street. And, to give another example, right below the kids' house, there are a bunch of houses that almost seem like squatter's shacks (though I know nothing about issues of land tenure, I'm afraid): patched together out of bits and pieces of material, with metal roofs. Or maybe there are just remnants of the rural style of housing in the city; certainly they looked quite a bit li
ke the rustic rural houses we saw on our trip to the Soviet style "recreation base" in the latter part of our trip.On to that trip to the Kavalerovkii District on the Russian coast of the Sea of Japan! The trip was long (about seven hours each way). The quarters were Spartan (bathroom down the hall, hot water iffy, extremely thin mattresses on wooden cots--David and I piled the two thin mattresses up on one of the cots and crowded in together so our hip bones wouldn't quite so quickly hit bottom) but the scenery was amazing. The recreation base was on a very placid lake; we rowed for a bit before and during a misty rain and the next day took a brief swim in the separate swimming area. The coast was just five minutes away. Beautiful expanses of beaches, some rocky and with interesting rock formations; much Russian camping on the beach--with cars and improvised or actual tents. We enjoyed meeting Dan and Lisa's friend Dima (Dimitri) who works at the consulate and suggested the weekend at this place; he served as a guide. There was a quite beautiful sauna at the recreation base (not exactly my thing, but I tried it briefly) as well. And a karaoke night at the restaurant/bar on Saturday which was actually a lot of fun.
Food: We ate at a couple of traditional Russian restaurants, and a Georgian restaurant, ordered out from an Indian restaurant, had a lavish brunch at a place run by someone from Long Island, and for a final extravaganza, went to a "game" restaurant complete with many decorative examples of the taxidermist's art. There David had wild boar (not stuffed!), Lisa had bear, I had quail and .... hmm, can't remember what Dan had. (But he told me in an email-- it was moose!). All washed down with cold vodka (my first vodka solo, I think!). Overall, I liked Russian food; we both particularly enjoyed a cold soup called okroshka which is made from potatoes and vegetables and something (fermented?) called "kvas" that I'm still unclear about. Much Russian food was reminiscent of the food of my youth (after all, my mom came from Lvov, which is now in the Ukraine!). Blinis were of course like blintzes; borsh was of course like borscht (though we usually had it with the sour cream and minus the meat); and pelmeny was very much like kreplach or pirogen (minced meat wrapped in dough and served in soup or fried up separately; I think in Russia they're called something other than pelmeny when they are, as were pirogen, in my youth, stu
ffed with cheese, or potatoes, or blueberries.Yumm).It was a delight to really get to know the much bigger Anya (whom we'd last seen in the U.S. in February). She's a whiz at putting shapes into her shape box, loves to direct adults into the "proper" walking position (they must walk behind her holding on to one or both of her hands, and not on the side of her), and she has the most endearing smile in the world (naturally!).
