Novy God (New Year's) tree in the Town Square before it was decorated
The next day Liz was still sickly, but it seemed sacrilegious for her to spend three days in Vladivostok and not see it. So I took her around in a cab for an hour and showed her all my favorite parts of the city. We had our driver drop us off at the Krishna Café in the center of town (he was very friendly, and he tried to overcharge us, as usual, but we politely insisted on paying what we had agreed to pay plus a good tip). We enjoyed a marvelous Indian vegetarian lunch of rice and vegetable curries, teas, breads, and cakes.A guy at the café noticed my Stanford Women’s Rugby T-shirt and stopped in front of where I was sitting. He tried to sound out the words, and failed, and then laughed and asked me where I was from. When I said America, he said, “Oh, cool, you from America! Yeah…” and laughed again. He was kind of gangly and goofy and unshaven, and if his vocabulary had been slightly bigger, I could have believed he was from Southern California. He was infectiously good-natured, and he talked to us for a while in a combination of spacey, mellow, broken English and Russian of the same sort. He asked us if he could meet us the next day with a girl friend of his (he made a concerted effort to make sure we knew she was a girl, and a friend, but not a girlfriend). He said he wanted to practice his English. We said sure, and told him to meet us at the café on the fourth floor of Hotel Vladivostok for breakfast the next morning. “Cooool, yeah!”
After that we headed to the Hyundai Hotel to meet with some women who worked at the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund. Liz made that connection by talking with a woman in Moscow who knew these women, and they agreed to meet with us. They were very nice, and we talked to them about the state of business in Vladivostok for a long time. The Governor of Primorsky Kray (like the governors of most of the regions) is very corrupt. Money and fuel are not getting to the proper places, and power outages are frequent. Meanwhile, the governor has ‘mysteriously’ come into some money and is building a conspicuous mansion on a hill with it. It’s all very bad for trying to develop businesses and jump-start the economy. But at least foreigners are finally allowed in the city. For 30 years it was a closed city because it was the home of the Pacific Fleet.
One woman said she liked the changes since the fall of Communism because now she could interview with companies like Deloitte & Touche, learn and train, and end up in a management position. If Russia were still communist, she probably would have been sent to a remote region to be a teacher or something, and in any case she would have had no choice in the matter. But she conceded that many people’s lives have gotten much worse, especially pensioners’.
She said the worst American influence on Russia is the pace of life they set. They eat fast, meet fast, and talk fast. Russians prefer to have long, leisurely dinners, sit in saunas, talk with good friends for hours, and really know and trust whomever they do business with. In America people tend to treat business partners like pawns in their efforts to increase their wealth, and it’s even considered bad form to have a lot of personal relationships at work. And Americans tend to shovel in dinners they barely taste. She didn’t like the fact that joints selling hamburgers have replaced shops with piroshkis and other traditional Russian food.
Soon it was time to go back to the hotel and meet Mr. America for turkey dinner, and on the way we bought a chocolate fruit cake to take to the party. Before he showed up, I had time to try to use the phone number Nikolai had given me. I tried for an hour to get hold of him, but somehow I kept getting the wrong number. Even that took a while to figure out because the guy on the other end wouldn’t talk to me until I explained in detail who I was, which was difficult. I called information and gave his address to the woman who answered, but she denied that anybody of that name lived there. I still don’t know what went wrong. Maybe he had a new step-dad and the house was in his name, or perhaps his mother moved while he was in Chechnya. I was very frustrated. My chapter in Russia with Nikolai closed right then, and there was nothing more I could do. I was sick at heart because I knew I would probably never see him again.
Mr. Thomas and his beautiful young Russian wife soon met us at the hotel. We drove around in a cab for a while first, running errands and picking up food, and then we headed to the Prestizh Pool Hall. The guy had bragged about his connections at the place and said he knew the bartender and owner, and sure enough we had a small private room in back waiting for us. Liz and I played pool there while we waited for more guests to arrive. A smiling redhead from Kamchatka soon showed up with a beautiful turkey stuffed with kasha and mushrooms. She was accompanied by her reticent fiancée. The bartender came in and took orders for drinks, and I got a Jack and Coke. Mr. Thomas tried to talk to him in loud, slow English, sometimes a bit condescendingly, even though the bartender obviously didn’t speak much English. He just smiled and apologized over and over for his “f**king English.”
Soon we began our feast of turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes, fruit, shrimp, and cake. As Mr. Thomas talked, his narrow and conservative views became more apparent. For example, he firmly believed America should be running the world because we were the pinnacle of civilization, and everyone else should just listen to us. “What, do you think China should be running things? I mean, come on, they eat dogs!” But I bit my lip to keep accord. Besides, it was interesting. This guy seemed to represent what Conservative America stood for. Maybe it would be good for the Russians to know what’s coming up with Dubya in office.
Often Mr. Thomas’s wife would translate what he said to the other Russians with barely concealed distaste. I shook my head, thinking that as soon as he finally takes his wife to America, she’ll be gone in about ten seconds. His other ‘friends,’ too, especially the PK-girl, as he called her, whom he demanded find him the turkey, seemed mildly amused or distasteful of many of his comments. (He called her PK-girl because she was from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, on the volcanic Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia.) Mr. Thomas threw a lot of money around, however, and was entertaining to a point. “What can I say, I’m an extrovert,” he said several times.
When dinner was over, we went back to the bar and ordered drinks and talked some more. The bar was festively decorated in shiny blue and silver and white for New Year’s. Mr. Thomas had given the owner some CD’s, and now Californication was playing over the loudspeaker.
The bartender was a character. He kept doing things like shaking up creamy drink concoctions in suggestive places, which prompted Mr. Thomas to remark in his Chicago gangster-type accent, “Ain’t it great to have a jackass bartender who knows a little bit of English?” It was getting close to midnight, and I needed to get back to the hotel so I could call home, so I made an excuse to leave. He insisted on one more round, so I got a vodka shot with a lemon slice. It hit the back of my head funny and gave me a slight headache. We said thanks, good-bye, and Merry Christmas, and caught a cab back to the hotel.
At midnight I called my parents back in Oklahoma. It was 8:00 a.m. there, and Christmas was just beginning. We talked about comforting things like opening presents, going to grandma’s, and eating pumpkin pie. It was nice to talk to them, but I couldn’t really feel homesick because it was just so far away. It seemed so incongruous as to be almost meaningless, like it was happening in another time or another dimension. And yet I knew that before long I’d be in that dimension. It was a strange feeling.
Day 14--Leaving the Country... Maybe