Sproing

These days it really seems like spring has genuinely sprung in Vlad. I was superstitiously knocking on wood every time I made reference to this for the last few weeks. But now -- despite the weird snow flurries that blustered in briefly without sticking, on an otherwise sunny Wednesday this past week, and distracting my students to no end -- I think it is safe to really call it a new season.

Perhaps the funniest (funny-peculiar; not exactly “ha-ha funny”) part about the thaw and spring in Vlad is the way the roads have possibly gotten worse rather than better. As Dan remarked the other day, we thought that the time was nearly passed when we would be thankful for our 4-wheel-drive vehicle every time we drove. Not so. Yes, the snow that was heaped up very high along the roads, and in random large piles in most parking areas (to our chagrin, but that's another story), for the most part has melted. (That doesn’t mean that the drifts that accumulated in the passageway behind our townhouses have disappeared. It must be the lack of direct sunlight, but unfortunately a dusty, dirty wedge of icy snow remains in about a third of the space back there, covering what I recall to have been grass when it was last visible.) But with the snow on the roads gone, and with a few weeks of temps that hovered around freezing, and with the apparently lower quality paving materials that must be used here, and with those honking-big buses that lurch and bounce up and down the thoroughfares, Vlad’s streets are actually an unholy disaster now, minefields full of potholes big and small. Traffic may not be restricted to a thin flow on snowbound roads, but instead everyone slows to a crawl to avoid ruining their cars’ suspension on the craters that have appeared all over the place. A Russian colleague of Dan’s agreed that lower quality materials are used: in fact, she claims they are used on purpose, in order to ensure fuller employment come spring!

We are enjoying our first visitor this weekend: our friend Melissa, with whom Dan worked in Washington, was touring the region and was able to make a stop in Vladivostok before heading home. We welcomed her with a homemade deep-dish pizza yesterday for dinner, and today we hope that the predicted rain won’t appear and the morning fog will clear so that we can take a drive and show her around the city and the surrounding countryside along the peninsula. Tonight we may buy some seafood to cook at home, and tomorrow night we are aiming for dinner with some local friends at a Georgian restaurant that we like. (Hint, hint: all this and more can be yours if you think you can handle a Vlad vacation…!)

Last but not least of the current happenings, I suppose, is our plan to take ourselves and Anya on a short bus trip to northern China late next week. The trip is organized by the Russian government, and Dan was invited as a consulate employee, and family members are also allowed to go. They may regret their decision to allow a Person of Diminutive Stature and as-yet Fewer Than Eight Months of Life on the bus, but we’ll do everything in our power not to inspire such disappointment. Hopefully it will be fun -- the primary destination is Yanji, which is the capital of China’s autonomous Korean province (which I had no idea existed until we got to Vlad -- shows how much I know about anything!). One of the frustrating things about the travel we expected to try to do on our own here in the Far East is the fact that our Russian visas do not allow us to leave the country at exit points other than the airport, even though geographically we are tantalizingly close to the Chinese border. (Russians actually cross it all the time for cheap shopping in border towns -- think Tijuana or Nogales with less tequila and more egg rolls.) All of which means that this bus trip, taken under the protective arm of Russian officialdom itself, ironically appears to be one of the only ways for us to make that relatively short overland journey to China and rest assured we aren't violating our visa rules. Hey, we’ll look at it as a test-drive: if it’s fun and the munchkin cooperates, maybe we’ll fly to Shanghai or something for a little more tourism sometime soon!