(Almost) Gone With the Wind

OK, here is my pre-New Year’s resolution: I want to start adding something shorter more frequently to the blog. I can’t promise that I’ll keep my resolution immediately or even stick to it routinely, but I hope to start inching my way towards the goal.

So, for today: cold wind. Dan, the chief surveyor of the Goat Path in our family, can surely comment on this more thoroughly than I can. But I'll try. After being greeted here in Vlad by a long and unseasonably warm autumn, and then experiencing one truly warm December day this past Tuesday, during the night between Tuesday and Wednesday the weather really turned! We could hear the wind whipping up around our house and buffeting our windows that night, and it hasn’t really let up much since then. Today, Thursday, it started out around -15C and the warmest it got was -11C. I knew it was really bad when our nanny decided to forego her usual mid-day walk outside with Anya all bundled up in her stroller.

Yesterday I had to go to a holiday event at the American Consul General’s residence, which is located high up on “Tiger Hill,” on the spit of land that runs between the Amur Gulf and the Golden Horn Bay that is Vlad’s harbor.

(I know that my earlier attempt to use online maps to show where we are didn’t work out for everyone, but I will try again. If you go to this site: http://map.primorye.ru/default.asp?l=eng and type in “1 morskaya” for the street and “14” for the house number, you should get a map that can be opened in a new window and fully manipulated, and which will show you our approximate location.)

Out there on Tiger Hill, the wind was unbelievable -- I was dressed nicely for the event and wearing heels, but had to park near the Hotel Vladivostok (at 10 Naberezhnaya) and walk uphill about five minutes to get to the house. Afterwards, on the way back down to the car, as I walked with my friend Branca, the wind blew so hard that we both felt like sailboats. We were literally pushed downhill so hard that I thought I was just going to lose my balance and control of my feet completely and tumble down! It was the strangest feeling, and not altogether pleasant. Definitely the hardest wind I’ve ever experienced. We latched arms to try to make it down the hill in one piece, and we did make it down safely, but I was actually afraid that with the increased surface area we’d really become a sail and be blown out into the bay!

Our other big news since we’ve last written in: the remainder of our household effects has arrived! And on Christmas Day evening, which made for a very welcome gift. We are now in the thick of unpacking and making our home much more familiar and comfortable to us. That is a lot of fun -- I think we are enjoying hanging the pictures the most out of everything. (Dan is at work hanging that huge, 4-part map of Russia "and contiguous states" that used to hang in our guest room back in Bethesda as I write this.)

I still have a partial draft of an entry that describes the general feel of shopping here in Vlad, and I assure you I will finish it soon and post it. Until I get the chance to do that, I’ll try to write in more often with the tidbits that I can manage…