Train station at Vladivostok
Now we’re dumped off in Vladivostok, last Russian city on our tour, and it’s the crack of dawn. We’re standing on the platform in the snow, we have my backpack and ripped Adidas bag on wheels and Liz’s two huge green suitcases, she’s dying of something, and it’s REALLY REALLY COLD. And not just cold, but cold with an icy wind that drove the dry, hard snow into every square inch of your skin like a sandblaster. We had a lot of baggage and an enormous flight of outdoor stairs to climb to get to the station. We had no hotel reservation and no transportation arranged, and everything was so cold I couldn’t think. My hands froze to my bags and my brains froze to my skull and I stumbled toward the staircase, hoping something would happen.Luckily the tourist vultures chose to swoop in just then and carry our luggage to a waiting cab. I was so grateful that I handed them a hundred-ruble note. They practically spat on it and demanded more, but I shook my head and shut the cab door. Liz was sitting in the front on the left, and a grizzled old man in a bear skin hat was sitting in the front on the right. Russians in the east buy a lot of used Japanese imports, so most of the steering wheels are on the wrong side. Aleksei had explained all this to me on the train, although he never could get the hang of the English word ‘steering wheel’.
I instructed him to go to a hotel nearby, the Primore. It was pretty expensive for us at $20 a night, but Liz was really sick and we needed something comfortable. I asked him how much he would charge to get us there, and he said 200 rubles. It was a ridiculous price, and I suggested 50. He all but spat in indignation, and I conceded that I could pay 100, but no more. He complained about the high cost of benzin. I said 200 rubles was ridiculous, and he said, “then get out,” and turned away like a spoiled child. Liz said, “Pam, just do it,” and I was stuck. Eight bucks for a ten-minute cab ride is ridiculous anywhere, much less the Russian Far East, and this guy was absolutely taking advantage of us. I cussed him good in English.
He took us to the Primore, and I ran in only to find that the whole hotel was booked. Either that or the staff was feeling lazy, but I wasn’t in a position to argue. They suggested I try the Hotel Vladivostok, which they assured me would have rooms. I knew it would be even more expensive there, but I didn’t know of any other places to try. I got back in the cab and told him the situation. He said, “Yeshchyo sto” (another hundred). I shook my head in resignation. Maybe he needed the money more than we did, but blatantly robbing us and being a jerk about it put a bad taste on the morning.
We unloaded at the Hotel Vladivostok, and Liz stayed in the lobby while I went up to the desk to ask for a room. “Nyet mesto,” the woman said. No room at the inn. She suggested I try the fourth floor, an independent hotel. She said they would definitely have rooms. I’d read in the guidebook that the fourth floor had the top-end rooms with satellite TV, which sounded terribly expensive. But it looked like our only option. I went up to the fourth floor and asked for a room.
“Nyetto,” said the lady at the desk with a fake-polite smile. I said in Russian, in a daze, feeling desperate, “But the first floor said you’d have spaces.” She replied, “The fourth floor administration says we do not,” and again the syrupy go-to-hell smile. I felt at a loss. I had a sick girl and unwieldy baggage sitting in the lobby, I was exhausted, and these were the only two hotels with any kind of reasonable price our guidebook had listed. I dreaded the thought of trying my luck in the cold with another cab in the unfamiliar city. About the time my silence got awkward, she finally said, “Why don’t you try the eighth floor?” and pointed upwards. “A third hotel?!” She smiled and nodded under bangs cut to outline her painted-on eyebrows.
Soon we were sitting in our room on the eighth floor watching ESPN in Japanese. It was clean and the wallpaper was nice. The bathroom was basically a shower with a toilet in it (you could actually go to the bathroom and take a shower at the same time, although I’m not sure why you’d want to), and we never did get any sheets. Napoleon once said, “If you scratch a Russian, you’ll find a Mongolian.” I had the impression that if I were to scratch the surface of this hotel, I would find the crumbling Soviet cinderblocks. Still, not bad for $16 a night.
Vladivostok is much closer to South Korea and Japan than to Moscow, so it does much of its business with these two countries. Cars and appliances are rarely of the second-rate Russian kind, and the faces we saw around town, especially in the business centers, were as likely to be foreign as Russian. Our hotel was one of the big business hotels with an immaculate designer lobby, and it was full of expensive gift shops, cafes, and business centers where you could check your email or send a fax for a premium. We met a few timid, wealthy Americans persistently and vainly looking for services to their tastes, none of whom spoke a word of Russian. When I tried to talk to them or speak to a Russian for them, they looked at me with an odd kind of suspicion. It was strange to feel so little connection to my fellow countrymen.
That day we both just slept and recovered. I entertained the notion of going out and exploring the city, especially the frozen gulf I could see out the window where a lot of people were ice fishing. But then I looked down and saw the evil wind blowing cold sand in everyone’s faces. Even the Russians said no one should go out in that weather, and it would be silly to make myself sick again. So I just slept a while, then watched When Harry Met Sally dubbed badly into Russian. After that I flipped to a towering blond Russian woman with huge hair singing a Beatles medley in approximate English while her back-up singers gyrated behind her in black patent leather catsuits. “Life goes ooooon, braaaaao! Oh blah di blah da… BCË!” It was too much.
When we got hungry we went to the cafe on the fourth floor, and there we met an American businessman named Mr. Thomas. He was a graduate of the U of W and Stanford, retired Army Captain, current owner of a food export company based in Seattle that delivers to the Russian Far East, and bona fide blowhard conservative. He gave me the same Churchill quote the Texan had given me on the train to Petersburg: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you don’t have a heart; if you’re not conservative when you’re older, you don’t have a brain.” I didn’t feel like arguing its groundlessness again, and when he said, “If Clinton had his way, all of America would be brown and queer,” I realized it wasn’t much use anyway. He was nice enough to talk to, though, and excruciatingly American. He would often slap the back of his hand into his other palm as he said, “We need to teach them [Russians] to compete.” And he invited us to a turkey dinner on Christmas. “We Americans gotta stick together out here,” he said confidentially. Whatever, I just wanted some turkey.
Day 12--Christmas Eve Exploring