Turning the November Leaves

We're back to regular old fall, after the snowmelt.



Last weekend we had a really great visit with our old friend Laura, from Berkeley grad school days, which included a little bit of exploring on the nearby peninsula "de Fries." This spit of land is a relatively prominent feature of the local map, but for whatever reason we hadn't driven there before. We were inspired in part by a meeting with a Washington State University historian who studies the cosmopolitan late nineteenth century Victorian world of Vladivostok, especially through the lens of letters written by a New Englander, Mrs. Eleonor Pray, who lived here with her family from 1894 until 1930. The Prays and the Smiths and apparently many other foreign traders and merchants in the city took their holidays on de Fries at a large complex that burned down in the early twentieth century. Our visit to the peninsula didn't really have a lot to do with the history, except that hearing about these old foreign families and seeing some old photographs led us to drive out there.



Now we're heading into a few weeks of work before heading to Thailand for Thansksgiving weekend! Hooray -- the vacation we have been waiting months for! We're meeting a friend from early DC days who is now stationed in Calcutta. Staying in Bangkok at the hotel this friend is fond of, and making at least one day trip to the beach. And hoping that all will go well with baby travel!



I'm going to try again to write more briefly and more often here -- we'll see how well I do. Maybe a little list of current likes and distractions will help in that...



what we're listening to

the latest Bruce, Magic

Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Suite (featuring fun cannon shots in our Deutsche Grammaphone version)

a homemade mix Dilon Djindji's mellow Afropop, c/o Sir Landau (some may recall that this featured as the recessional music at our wedding...)



what we're munching on (you guess which describes the big people's menu and which describes the small person's...)

a yummy Mexican chipotle pork and potatoes stew

dried cherry scones (although beware of Bittman's recipe in How to Cook Everything; we are still in search of a better one)

well-cooked pasta shells with mushed kidney beans and melted cheese

stiff mashed potatoes with bits of ham

bite-sized broccoli

Impressions From a Spring Drive

What a great day for a drive yesterday!

Went out to work at my usual research haunt right now: the Central Library of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Sounds quite impressive, but in fact it occupies just a small part of the Geology Institute building, and the reading room is a cute little space where rarely more than one or two other people are working when I am there. I've settled into a nice rhythm, going there 1-2 times a week, and the ladies who work there (and one man, in the reference section) know me now and are very friendly.

Drove the one route out of town (for some reason Vlad is laid out in an awkward way in a lot of places, with only one route between points A and B, or a route that makes drivers do some strange maneuver, which easily causes bottlenecks on the road*), "Vladivostok's Hundred-Year Anniversary Boulevard." Used the informal, semi-legal "diplo-" and "VIP-lane" when the traffic got messy -- this is how the left shoulder gets used when there are back-ups. (Yes, I probably shouldn't participate in this assertion of grey-area privilege, but I only do it every once in a while.)

Out beyond "Spark" shopping center, I passed those grass dividers that have gotten covered in fuzzy yellow dandelion heads in the last week or so. Was disappointed to see the hard-working road and landscaping crews cutting the grass and clearing away the carpet of yellow. At least the recently planted tulips are still there, still adding a surprising and somewhat incongruous decorative touch to a few of the main thoroughfares in town.

Found myself very easily anticipating specific potholes that I've come to know with some precision. Some of them by now are repaired (poorly, for the most part), which tends to puncture that feeling of satisfaction you get when you maneuver just right to avoid the phantom rough patch.

Lowered the windows and turned up the Shins and sang along.

Raised the windows and switched the air to "recycle" as I passed a truck spewing terrible exhaust my way.

Made the scary lefthand turn into the Academy of Sciences campus off of "Anniversary" Boulevard once it turns into more of a highway (but without the comfy exit structure), where you have to just hope that the people approaching you from the rear are looking ahead of themselves and can merge in toward the right in order to pass you as you hang out waiting for a break in oncoming traffic. Almost thought I'd made a wrong turn when I didn't recognize the road right away, with the explosion of new growth on the trees, a combination of leaves and blossoms. The fuller boughs hung over the little descending road toward the library and made that short drive feel very different.

Did my hour and a half of reading, especially enjoying a new document I had ordered on the 1930s investigations into tick-borne encephalitis, which at that time was a mystifying new disease (I know, fascinating!).

Left and made my my return trip along "Anniversary" -- even though you make a right turn this time to enter, you still kind of have to find your inner tough-guy to peel out into the quick-moving traffic and then avoid the slow-moving bus on your right, etc. Cruised into the outer limits of the older part of town, after crossing the gully where the First River flows, and sped toward the mini cloverleaf where Gogol Street begins, Red Banner Prospect rises above on stilts, and a crazy patchwork of pedestrian stairs and overpasses crisscrosses all the streets. Felt the exhilaration of making a smooth left turn and corkscrew entry upward onto Red Banner, and successfully navigating of one of those merges into ongoing traffic where the drivers doesn't appear to notice you or slow down at all to help.

Made a brief stop at the grocery store on the way home, and pulled up to the "shlagbaum" (lifting gate) that controls access to the diplo-townhouses with a few minutes to spare for putting away the food and grabbing myself some lunch before Marina's nanny shift ended. Whew! What a good morning -- I guess not all of that description means much if you haven't seen the city, but hopefully soon some of you will be able to imagine what I am talking about here...

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* Not to mention the lack of traffic signals in this town! That really is a topic deserving of a whole 'nother post, as they say.

A Polar Bear Explores the World

Closeup On the Bear
Originally uploaded by lkwalker71.

I guess the most recent photos I uploaded to Flickr probably deserve at least a little explanation, since everyone who has commented on them to me has said "it looks so cold!" (You can see these photos as a group if you look here. And if you want to see where this afternoon walk took place, click on "map.")

So, for orientation's sake: if you have looked at any general map of Vladivostok with much detail, you will have noticed not only that the city is situated at the southwest tip of the Murav'ev-Amurskii Peninsula, but that it also has a tantalizing finger of land dangling from its own southwest edge, which in effect sort of shelters the mouth of the Golden Horn Bay from the open water of the Amur Bay. That finger of land is "Scott Peninsula" in geographical terms (poluostrov Shkota); as a neighborhood of Vladivostok, its administrative name is “Egershel’d.” And that peninsula in turn has an even tinier spit of land (or probably just a spit made up of beach glass and other random detritus), a thin curving sliver extending off of its end, much like an accumulation of, well, spittle that might dangle from a five-and-a-half-month-old's lip. (Here are a couple of other good ways to view all of this geography, and the little spit of land in particular, whose name is actually Cape Tokarevskii: a picture of it in what appears to be summer is here; and "Wikimapia" has pretty good detail on that particular part of Vlad, too.)

I have to confess that these places really didn't hold as much fascination for me personally as it apparently did for Dan when we first got here, and especially when we first received our car. But his interest can be surmised from the fact that the finger, and the sliver, were our very first destinations after we had our wheels. And that fascination can be even better understood (I think) if you realize that that first trip was taken at about 7:30 in the evening, in the dark. He really wanted to see that spit of land -- even if, in going there, he couldn't even see it!

Since then, it actually has become kind of fascinating to me. We've gone a couple of different times (all in the light, I am glad to say). And I find it a really interesting end-of-the-earth kind of place, yet an easy drive for us from our house. There is a lighthouse there: always makes a place slightly more picturesque. And the light out there at the end of the day, especially with all of the ice and snow right now, is really beautiful.

The pictures I posted do look cold, but in fact the reason we went out to Egersheld last Sunday was that it was a beautiful, sunny day and relatively warm. Everything just seemed like it was melting -- in fact, it is kind of gross here when it gets as warm as it has been this past week, with temperatures as high as 3 or 4C, with all the ice and snow on the streets and sidewalks melting and spattering the car, and puddles of mud and goo everywhere. Last Sunday out on Egersheld, Dan and I were wearing our fall jackets, and the sun really did warm everything up considerably.

But I guess the interesting thing about Egersheld is that it still looks pristine and white even in that weather, and the ice is only partially melted in the water out in the direction of the Amur Bay. There were several other people who had also decided to drive out there and take a walk around the lighthouse and enjoy the nice weather. We suited up the munchkin in the car when we got there, in her little polar bear-like snowsuit, and she didn’t seem to mind much at all. I think she got hungry at the end, when she started to fuss a little bit, so we wrapped it up and headed for a nearby café where we had a late afternoon snack and some coffee.

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NB! We are taking our big trip to the US over the next two and a half weeks, so don't think that I have abandoned the blog if I am not able to add any tidbits until we are back, basically at the end of February.

(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…

Mapping Vlad (and Vlapping Mad)

For a couple of weeks I have been wanting to write and describe better our surroundings and the day-to-day activities that have been keeping us (or me and Anya, at least) busy. I’ve described the trip straight down the goat path, but I wanted to describe a bit more the world surrounding us as we know it – Anya and I most days know it by traversing it on foot (well, one of us on foot, the other in Snugli), and on some other occasions we have traversed broader sweeps of that world in cars.

The trouble is -- or maybe this actually has been an inspiration to recreate the outside world in word form -- I haven’t been out much lately. From colds that struck all 3 of us (making it Anya's first), to other minor health problems, to the sheer complicated nature of getting out with the baby while also keeping the necessary feeding and napping schedule, I will be honest: the specific location of our housing combined with Russian conditions more generally have me very nearly housebound for the short-term future, and not very happy about it. If my posts to the blog are a little sparse at this point, it is in part because there hasn't always been a lot of material for "good-natured missives from the field," but I'm trying to keep my spirits up and the writing coming, so I don't lose anyone who's still reading.

In any case, let me try to draw you a mental map of the world around me that I was beginning to know and will hope to continue to explore when I can manage it…

For starters, here is a real map of it; if you see the designation “Leninskiy district” and the diagonally-situated building a little to the right of that marked “1-5,” that is those very townhouses I keep talking about. The Consulate building is at 32 Pushkinskaya Street (running roughing parallel with the bottom of the map, below the townhouses). The lower part of the Goat Path, at least, has a name: “Ulitsa Metallistov,” or “Metalworker Street.” (Sounds so industrialized and modern, no? Yeah, don’t get any big ideas….)

So, basically you can imagine that Pushkinskaya Street and, one street below and closer to the water, Svetlanskaya Street are both at lower elevations than our house. These streets, starting from about the Consulate and extending west, just skirt the edge of the harbor and Golden Horn Bay, forming a little arc draped across the northwest curve of the bay. When I talk about “downtown” (if I ever have reason to again…), this is basically what I’m referring to.

[By the way, ignore the discrepancy between how I am spelling Russian words and how they are spelled on the map I referred you to. It is a good map, but not made by linguists. I’m a stickler who won’t give up the transliteration system I was trained with, and these people who made the map are using some other crappy rules to render Cyrillic alphabet into English.]

If you open the above link into a new window, and if you then click on “open the map” directly above the map image that resulted, you'll get a third window and a fully manipulable map of Vlad. Zoom out a little and scroll west, and you’ll eventually find the harbor and the pedestrian street Ulitsa Fokina and the train station where we took those pics of our Sunday outing a few weeks ago. (Or, you can see what else I’ve been up to in my “fun with maps” on Flickr. Since Vlad’s GoogleMaps coverage is so spotty, these are probably more interesting viewed in Hybrid mode than in simple Map mode -- look to the upper right of the linked Flickr page for that feature.)

Since, as I’ve alluded to, the descent via Goat Path is doable but not exactly a party (or, really, it’s the ascent that’s not winning any awards for fun), I haven’t been spending every day strapping Anya to me and bounding down to that part of town to explore. (Not to go on too long about it, but another issue here is the fact that nursing a baby actually takes a lot out of you physically. So, I really find I only have the strength to make one outing per day with Anya strapped to me. Some have asked me whether I’ve made it yet to the archives; imagine my wistful smile when I say ‘no’ and contemplate the small steps into the outside world that are really within my reach at this point.)

The way my typical days together with Anya have shaped up, we spend them more often in domestic, mundane activities than in doing the special kinds of outings for which “downtown” is reserved. (E.g., jazz concerts, the first of which, among those I’ve described -- in this post -- was at Gorky Theater, set back from the city’s main downtown drag at Svetlanskaya 49. A second one was held just southwest of that, at Svetlanskaya 48.)

Speaking of those jazz concerts, and the few outings I’ve had without Anya, I did make it a week and a half ago to that second one, which constituted the latest big event sponsored by the Consulate Public Affairs section: a visit from the US Navy 7th Fleet Band’s “Far East Edition,” for opening night of Vladivostok’s 3rd annual International Jazz Festival. It was fun, and the band was extremely entertaining -- so much energy. They were talented musicians, but I think what was more remarkable to me was their energy and ability to entertain and really put on a show.

But the nature of our everyday existence means that Anya and I are more often than not found uphill, basically on the ridge along which Prospekt Vsevoloda Sibirtseva runs. (That’s essentially “Sibirtseva Boulevard”; evidently the locals really call it Prospekt Krasoty, which translates as “Beauty Boulevard.” I have to believe that this is meant not tongue-in-cheek, as it would if it referred to the actual stuff located on the thoroughfare, but seriously, and in reference to the spectacular view of the harbor and the spit of land that forms its southern jaw, that this street affords especially at night, when all the lights are twinkling.)

The other place that we tend to go when we have explored town so far, and which I'll pick up describing in my next post, is the sort of valley to the north of what I have described here so far. This is the area where I guess the “first river” north of the harbor runs west into the Amur Gulf, and hence named “First River” or “Pervaya Rechka.” This is where one of my favorite shopping markets is located (and what do you think it’s called? That’s right, “First River,” or “Pervorechenskii” rynok).

But I have to save something for next time, so stay tuned for Pervaya Rechka and a more general description of our experiences with shops and markets this time around in Russia...

View of the Golden Horn

View of the Golden Horn
Originally uploaded by lkwalker71.

The row of townhouses where most of the foreign service officers in Vlad live is situated on a high hill, overlooking the city and the bay --the “Golden Horn” -- on which Vladivostok is situated. This shot is taken from our windows and shows the downtown in the lower right of the frame. The district to the southwest of downtown, on a little peninsula that juts out into the Amur Gulf, is on the left in the frame.

Regarding the reported air pollution here: it’s true that, from where we sit, the atmosphere directly above the downtown and the port is pretty hazy. But up where we live the wind clears things out and the air is really quite nice and clean. One drawback to our location is the fact that it really is difficult to get around and to get anywhere of interest or use without a car. This is actually kind of unusual for Russian cities, but Vlad has quite a unique geography for someone with western Russia as a frame of reference.

The consulate is a ten-minute walk away, but that walk is down an extremely steep, rocky dirt road (the "Goat Path," to the diplo-crowd). In present weather, that’s just a slight inconvenience, even with a ten-pound baby in a harness on your chest. (Just hypothetically speaking, of course.) You just have to be a little careful with your footing on the way down, and you get pretty winded on the way back up. But I can see that once it snows and/or ice forms, walking down that path will pretty much not be an option, especially carrying Anya. Hopefully our car will arrive before then! (And it goes without saying, grandparents: yes, we will be extra careful in the car when it's icy and snowy, too!)

We have already received suggestions of people who are willing to help us out for a fee, including a driver whom we can hire to take us where we need to go in the interim before the car arrives. We’ve also been offered some babysitter options, and possibly a person to come in once or twice a week to help keep this cavernous place clean! My hope is to interview a few people over the weekend and get set up in the next several days with a babysitter and perhaps even a regular schedule of getting out for a few hours each week.

Speaking of getting out, I’ve taken Anya down the Goat Path a couple of times this week, both to visit Dan and meet folks at the consulate, and to explore some of the main streets downtown. Last night Dan gave me a real treat: he took care of Anya while I used our tickets to the latest in the consulate’s Public Affairs Section-sponsored music series, a jazz concert with an American vocalist and local Vlad and Khabarovsk instrumentalists. I know it wasn’t much of a sacrifice for Dan, but it was amazing to me how I hadn’t had a chance (and hadn’t noticed) in so long to just sit and enjoy some music, and let my mind wander to anything at all, beyond Anya!

OK, next time I will post some impressions of other things we've seen in town...