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 August (and a Little Bit of September)

• Saw one of the first big departures from among our small American diplomatic community, as the veteran family with small kids left for California and then Yerevan. A bit of unexpected melancholy (at least for me) upon their departure, and the hole left in their absence.
• The much-anticipated visit of the Grandparents Kronenfeld. Great fun had by small people (walking with grandpa, placing little plastic blue men on grandma's finger, eating Cheerios under grandparental supervision, testing the northern Sea of Japan waters with her parents) and by larger people (catching up with the parents/in-laws, playing 'Oh Hell' for the first time in a long while, showing the finer points of Russian beer and four-wheel-driving, and just generally sharing more commentary on life here in Russia than usually gets fit into an email, a phone conversation, or a blog entry...)
• Some adventures in traveling with Anya -- far: Kavalerovo; and close: Reineke island. We've got photos of these trips on Flickr, and those who've seen them already have a pictorial narrative of the trips. The first was based in a small, Spartan room several hours north of here, near the coast of the Sea of Japan; the second, on a marathon boat trip to an island, about 12 hours long, from door to door. The kid took almost all the naps that were requested of her on both treks, played happily with toys and books, flirted with friends and family (and even new acquaintances who were armed with cookies), and generally behaved excellently for her diminutive size and age. We were very pleased.
• Kavalerovo packed a pretty wide range of weather and restful activities into two and a half days, from moist fog, to light summer rain, to just overcast, to sun-shiny and HOT. We frequented a cafe set back from the beach at Zerkalnoye Bay, and we explored a bit the vacation community that had sprung up there, in the form of a vast sea of tents and ramshackle camping compounds, as well as a handful of ecclectic summer cottages. We poked around the lake on whose shores our recreation base was located, and rented rowboats and skimmed out over the water to admire the flying fish. Several of us went out to sea with an old salt who promised fishing but delivered a sputtering motor and views of some bobbing seals and pristine beaches. We happened upon Russian karaoke night at our tourist base, with the full gamut of performances, from bored to over-enthusiastic. We cooled off from the hot sun in the lake and tried the huge inflated water slide, trampoline and other various water games set up for swimmers. We got stuck in the mud and experienced the curious brand of familiarity and sociability bred among Russians in these camping spots. (Just as at home in the city, where everyone is anonymous and there is little feeling of community, people had no trouble staring blankly at us when they passed on foot on the beach or when we allowed them to pass in the car -- situations that in the U.S. would often garner a wave, a smile or a brief greeting. Yet at the same time, we did experience a little sense of community in the camping villages, for instance, when we got stuck and some men were eager to lend advice if not a hand. Or when we encountered (of course, drunk) college kids at the beachside cafe who were curious to practice their English and quiz us on the NBA and American rap.) We relaxed in a relatively secluded spot on the rocky beach, then returned to the cafe and the rapidly emptying beachscape -- with all of the campers packing up their tarps and tents and the rugs and blankets that formed the walls of their impromptu beachside outhouses to head back home on Sunday evening. Generally a pretty successful trip and fun to see another part of Primorye region.
  (You can read more from a different perspective about Kavalerovo and this grandparental visit to Russia here.)
• The boat trip -- known to some fashion-minded people as the 'banana-hammock trip,' for reasons that I will leave you to puzzle out -- was long, slightly overcast (probably for the best, when you are spending 8+ hours in the open air with few to no trees in sight), and filled with as much Zolotaya Bochka beer as you could possibly want to injest and lots of snacks and barbecued meat. We explored Reineke Island with the tot, enjoyed a chilly swim in the water, and met new people and had a chance to see more of people we had met previously in the local expat community. Unfortunately the evening ushered in the latest round of apparent food-poisoning for us big people; luckily Anya's food supply was untainted.
• Small people had big birthdays: Anya turned one year old on August 21. But on August 20, I started work at the Consulate, taking the half-time job of "Community Liaison Office coordinator," generally reserved for spouses at US diplomatic posts. Not only do I get to "liaise" with the local community, but I'm generally supposed to "support the morale" of the consulate employees, local and American. I'm still feeling my way into how that support can be done, but mainly it seems to take the form of planning social events and gathering and distributing information about what to do, where to do it, what to buy, where to buy it, etc., in the local community. It all sounds very easy, and it will be once I get fully settled. But I find I am actually still in the process of really getting the rhythm down in juggling an external work schedule with the demands of home and kid. And don't know when I'll be able to fit in the writing and research that had been giving me that completely self-organized schedule previously. Well, it will all work out, I know, but for now I am a bit frazzled (and, you see, not finding much blogtime).
• But back to the munchkin birthday. Because of the new work schedule, this was a little bit less planned than some first birthdays, but we did have the big American people we know over, we all drank beer, Anya looked wistfully at us with our bottles, we encouraged her to rip open a few presents, and then we helped her blow out a votive candle placed close to her cake. The kid generally seemed mystified, but that is probably par for the course. We are very much enjoying the fruits of the holiday, though, with lots of new books and toys and clothes to brighten up our play and ensure wardrobe variety and hipness throughout the fall and winter.

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!