August 10, 1997
Hey all,
Well, it's been an interesting few weeks since I last was able to write, and I must say that it's nice to be back in America. The culture shock of having pancakes and scrambled eggs this morning in a greasy dive in Anchorage after months without a good American breakfast was almost overwhelming...
The last few weeks have been dominated by traveling on Russian trains. We had rides of 50, 13, 19, and 60 hours each. It's strange how those trains work. They run on Moscow time, but operate on local time. Basically, time quickly loses all meaning, except for an occasional opportunity to get off the train in a remote Siberian village to find edible food among the hordes of babushkas violently waving smoked fish. Also, at those stops, it is advisable to avoid the Azerbaijani businessmen waving liter bottles of vodka invitingly...
We spent four days in Novosibirsk with the family that hosted me for 2 1/2 weeks six years ago. It was really nice to stay with a family, see old friends, and save money on room and board for once. Also, I was amazed by how much better my Russian was this time compared with 1991; I was the only person in the house with knowledge of both Russian and English. So, I was doing considerable duty as a translator. It was a lot of fun, but quite tiring. It was very fortunate for us that we knew people in Novosibirsk, because it is an exceedingly boring and ugly city. It was only a village in the pre-Soviet era, so all construction was in the communist era. It will take decades for the architectural resurrection of that city to even make a dent.
One of the strongest impressions we had of Russia was of the hospitality, which sometimes reached near-lethal levels. We stayed one night in Krasnoyarsk, and anything more would have been too much. Our housing was arranged by a friend of mine (Zlata) in Novosibirsk, and we ended up staying with the neighbor of a friend of her sister. As we toured the city with our gracious hosts, we ended up at a scenic lookout where Russian newlyweds traditionally tie a ribbon to a branch of the nearby bushes for good luck with children. I helped a groom back up to the lookout after he had tied his ribbon, and in apparent thanks, he gave Eugene and me 2 1/2 shots of Vodka each. In fact, we were lucky to escape with only that much imbibing: we later found out that we had also been invited to their reception!
That encounter, however, was only the beginning. That evening, the son of the friend of the sister of Zlata had a first date. In this family, couples never go out on a first date alone, so Eugene and I ended up being the chaperones for Andrei and Lena's little gathering. Since Krasnoyarsk has absolutely no social life, the four of us went to Lena's mother's apartment, where the mother was already through a half pint of cognac that evening. Personally, I don't like cognac, but I knew I'd have to be polite, so I had a couple shots of it (yes, Russians apparently shoot fine cognac). Well, that wasn't enough for Lena's mother. She had Andrei buy another liter of Remy Martin VSOP, and we were obliged to help with that, too. If we took too long in drinking our share (after 5 shots, I was sipping it as slowly as I could), Lena's mother asked us "What's wrong? Is my daughter not pretty enough? Is my house that terrible?" Yes, we were being cajoled into shooting the fine cognac of the mother of the date of the son of a friend of the sister of my friend, Zlata. We thought freedom had arrived when the liter bottle was finished, but that was only the sign that a new bottle needed to be purchased. Luckily, two of Andrei's friends showed up (and they spoke English, finally relieving me of translation duties for the evening), I was able to retreat to the relative safety of a beer, and we were able to escape at 3 am. I know that we offended our hostess greatly by not shooting her cognac at the rate she did, but I don't know if I would have survived such an evening. Russian hospitality can be lethal...
We next went to Irkutsk with 2 Britons and 2 Aussies we met on the train (we also shared time on the train with Yuri, a Russian businessman who loved having people touch his large belly and sang Russian pop songs loudly at 3 am, even after the police had been called to keep us quiet). We caught up sleep the first day in Irkutsk, and then went to the beautiful Lake Baikal the next. Baikal is easily the world's greatest lake, and it has a beauty that amazed even this jaded Minnesotan. The true purity of the water, the 2000 species of flora and fauna unique to this lake, and the extreme coldness upon a little swim will all stick in our memory for quite a while.
By that point in the trip, we were tired. We had been traveling for 2 1/2 months and just had nothing left in Siberia that could hold us back from the temptation of IHOP. We went to Khabarovsk, caught a flight a week early, spent a night in Anchorage, and then came to Seattle. This is Eugene's home, and I can finally rest. Thanks to the International Date Line, we had 42 hours of August 9, and I am very tired. I'll be going to my home in Minnesota in a couple days to spend time with my family, and then finally returning to St. Louis to start my life as an engineering consultant. It will be a life much different from backpacking around Europe and Russia, seeing glaciers, beer gardens, palaces, trains, museums, and different strange languages at every turn. I'm going to miss traveling, but I think it's time to join the real world.
Thanks for listening.
Lance
P.S. Take my advice: don't walk through a Siberian nude beach.
