It seems like a long time since I last wrote an email, it is now nearly t-shirt weather here in Vladivostok, and our lovely Oblomov like existence has been erased, somehow the secret got out that there were two Americans in Vladivostok. Now we have about a dozen people around us who would like to practice their English, which has landed us in the middle of another culture clash, as our South Korean friends seem unable to grasp that everytime a Russian girl approaches us, they are not interested in sleeping with us (we think), instead they run up to us and and excitedly say to us "so you got another one!!" as if Russian women were fish.
Soo You got another one!?!?
We have moved out of our previous Russian classes into a special mini-group, i.e. Levi and I, where we talk just about bicycles, Sibirski Tigre, and what we will eat out on the trail. The woman in charge of the foreign students here even gave us a slingshot so we can hunt duck (at least that was the only thing she felt we were capable of hunting, I agree). Recently we went out to get bear spray in case of trouble out on the road, apparently here in Russia they don't have bear specific papper spray, but fear not, when we asked the man behind the counter he laughed and said that we won't see any bears where we are going, only ducks (again the slingshot).
As you know we are doing this trip trying to be as enviornmentally friendly as possible, so we are always keeping an ear open to any enviormental issues, and besides the cars (according to the gossip I have gathered 1.2 million cars for 600,000 people, a very american suburb sounding statistic) we recently checked out for the second time the wikipedia site about Vladivostok. Now right before this we had been driven around by a very nice guy named Andrei, he was 26 and had a small child. He could not stop telling us how much he wanted to get out of Vladivostok and emigrate to Canada, "It is so polluted here, I do not want my son to grow up in a place like this where you cannot even swim in the ocean.". We of course were skeptical when he pointed out the dirt on the cars in the street saying "look at this pollution, I cannot even wash my car for in 2 hours it looks the same!" "Well I think most anywhere in winter that is the case." we chimed in like idiots. Then we saw the wikipedia on Vladivostok and some other sources as well, yes I had told you that it was a unesco disaster zone, but what does that mean, how bad can it be. Not only does it highlight our campus and surrounding area as the worst in the city it claims "Two thirds of Vladivostok's suburbs are so pollutedthat living in them is classified as a health hazard,". We have been living in an area where arsenic, mercury and lead are more common than soil as far as i can tell. Apparently because of Vladivostok's location in a basin, and because of it's lack of precipitation (i.e. everything that saves it from the harshest elements of the Russian climate) also make it so the pollutents don't seep into the ground like any healthy overpolluted city, but instead they are just sitting around attatching themselves to my lungs and the sides of the cars (sorry Andrei). So the sea that surrounds us on 3 sides gets away scott free? No my friends Vladivostok is not that kind, I believe all 80 surrounding factories have kindly created "unfiltered" outfall pipes so the ocean can get a good toxic "buzz". And of course the sewer system runs straight into the bay. We promptly stopped even boiling the water, (does lead and arsenic boil out) and moved straight to bottled even for pasta making.
I decided a bit before this trip to quit drinking (I hope the emails don't suffer too much from lack of craziness). I thought that a 10,000 mile bike trip wasn't quite hardcore enough for me, I wanted also to try and dry out in the worlds most notorious party country notorious. So I imagine you are thinking, it must be tough with all that hardcore Russian drinking around him, he already said they are surrounded by Russians wanting to learn English, they must want to get the Americans drunk. In what I can say is the strangest Russian experience of my life, we have yet to meet a Russian who drinks alcohol, not one. Everyone we meet, we usually at least offer to take out to a bar or something and inevitably the answer comes back "oh I don't use alcohol". Everytime. We have probably 15 Russian friends, none of them drink, where on earth can you possibly go and meet that many people and all of them say I don't drink, short of an AA meeting. Perhaps when the Soviets sent all the dissedents east to Siberia, they sent all the sober people too, after all there was little more suspicious at a Politburo dinner than the phrase "oh I don't drink". Or a bit more likely they looked around the streets and said, "I don't want to wind up like that". Amusingly enough there is still all the wild street drinking and carousing, the otherday the bus made an emergency stop so some of the guys on board could go grab some more beers at a kiosk, it was a public bus. We also stumbled into a rather disturbing scene one day looking for a coffee, it was simply a Russian cafeteria, or so it said on the outside. Inside it was a preverted version of a teen center, about 150 middle school age kids, fresh from school with backpacks, chain smoking and drinking fruity mixed drinks. It was horrifying, I'd never seen such agressive chainsmoking, despite a woman who went around collecting ashtrays regularly, everyone (particularly the girls) had a full ashtray in front of them, the girls lit one long skinny pink cigarrette after another while helping themselves to the bottle of vodka on the table and mixing it with juice (the russian custon of buying bottles instead of drinks apparently starts at a very young age). I guess the ones we meet are the survivors.
Me with a couple of our tea-only Russian friends
You will be glad to hear that things are progressing rather well in the Russian connections department, we done a few interviews here in Vladivostok, which hopefully will bring us a little attention for our cause and for our safety. We also have gotten to know the people at the American Consulate in Vladivostok, including the Consulate General. They are helping us get connections and hopefully interviews (maybe even couches) all through Siberia. The Consulate General himself, Tom Armbruster, is going to ride out of Vladivostok with us to help us raise publicity. Besides that we have also had two interviews with magazines that we can never read (Must Learn Russian!!), however the "Oh my cousin lives in Irkutsk!" connections have not been forthcoming, I guess we will be in the tents after all.
ellski
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