Speaking of War...

To expand on the quote about Vladivostok in the previous post ("the town everyone know here because it's main 'purpose' in the planet is to be used as an attacking point to Alaska in 'War'"), I actually hear this Brazil quite a bit. "War" is the Brazilian version of "Risk". Don't ask me why English "Risk" becomes "War" in Portuguese (note, not "Risco", nor "Guerra", but "War"). The point is that while in Risk that far North-Eastern part of Asia is called "Kamtchatka", in "War" it is labeled "Vladivostok".

This is about what a typical Brazilian knows about Vladivostok, and I get told this story quite often. Note that as my friend mentions, Vladivostok-the-city might not be the best place for attacking Alaska, since it's actually quite far. (Instead, it happens to be a bus-ride-away from China.) On the other hand, the territory of Vladivostok corresponds quite closely to Russia's Far Eastern Federal District:

(Alas, the small and utterly unimportant town of Khabarovsk was chosen as the administrative center of the District.)

Anyway, there is something deeply fascinating about the fact that one man's home town is another man's "attacking point to Alaska in 'War'". And guess what, we respond in kind. Ask any Russian the the first thing that comes to mind when they think of Rio de Janeiro, and they will say, "white pants". Russian's image of Rio seems to be almost exclusively shaped by a single Russian book, entitled The Little Golden Calf. The action takes place exclusively in Russia in 1930s and while Rio comes up quite often, it does so only because the main character is obsessed with the dream of going there. Of course, he draws his knowledge of Rio from a small clipping from the Small Soviet Encyclopedia:

“Why do you need so much money... and right away?”

“Really I need more.” said Ostap. “Five hundred thousand is my minimum, five hundred thousand full-strength approximate rubles. I want to go away, comrade Balaganov, go far away, to Rio de Janeiro.”

“Do you have relatives there?” asked Balaganov.

“Do I look like the kind of person who would have relatives?”

“No, but I...”

“I don’t have any relatives, comrade Shura. I am alone in this world. I had a father, a Turkish subject, but he died long ago in horrible convulsions. That’s not the point. Ever since I was a child I have wanted to go to Rio de Janeiro. You, of course, weren’t even aware that such a city existed.”

Balaganov nodded his head dejectedly. Of all the centers of world culture, other than Moscow he knew of only Kiev, Melitopol' and Zhmerinka. And anyway he was convinced that the Earth was flat.

Ostap tossed a page torn out of a book onto the table.

“Here is a clipping from the Small Soviet Encyclopedia. This is what they say about Rio de Janeiro: ‘1360 thousand inhabitants...’ Let’s see... ‘A significant number of mulattoes... by a wide bay on the Atlantic Ocean...” Here, here! “The city’s main streets are every bit the equal of the greatest cities in the world as far as the number of shops and the beauty of the architecture” “Can you imagine, Shura? Every bit the equal! Mulattoes, the bay, coffee exports - or coffee dumping, as they call it – a Charleston entitled ‘My little gal has a little thing’, and - what more is there to say? You can see for yourself what’s going on. One and a half million people, and every one of them dressed in white pants. I want to leave here. Over the last year some serious differences have arisen between me and the Soviet government. The Soviet government wants to build socialism, and I do not. I find building socialism tiresome. Now do you see why I want so much money?”

“Where will you get five hundred thousand rubles?” asked Balaganov quietly.

[...]

“How did you say it? They’ll bring the money on a little blue-bordered saucer?”

“Mine on a little saucer. Yours on a little plate”

“And what about Rio de Janeiro? I want to wear white pants, too!”

“Rio de Janeiro is the crystal dream of my childhood,” the great combinator replied sternly, “keep your paws off of it. Let’s get to the point. Send out troops under my command. Units are to arrive in the city of Chernomorsk as soon as humanly possible. Dress code is casual. Well, sound the march! I will lead the parade.

(from Chapter 2 of "The Golden Calf", by Ilf and Petrov, translated by Maciej Ceglowski and Peter Gadjokov)

This passage summarizes what most Russians know about Rio. On the other hand, this chapter is one of the best known in the XX century Russian literature and gives rise to no less than a dozen of super popular catch phrases, including "the little saucer with a blue border."

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Vladivostok Sunset and S-56 Submarine

   
   

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The submarine above is from WWII. It it now sitting on the fround serving as a museum.

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Soviet Food

While we are talking about Russia, a couple of anecdotes that I remembered recently while talking to Luisa about food in Russia.

As I was growing up, USSR seems to experience increasing problems with production of just about everything, which translated into shortages of rather basic stuff, food among other things. Just to be clear, there was never hunger, i.e., you could always get enough food to eat, but specific things were often missing, and the set of such "specific things" grew from one year to another - once a product became rare it almost never came back in abundance.

During my childhood, I remember only one or two times when I saw cheese in a store. (I mean the swiss-like yellow cheese, cottage cheese and some other white cheeses that were similar to feta were quite easy to get.) I remember visiting Leningrad when I was ten and being really surprised upon seeing ten types of cheese in a store. Another item in short supply was mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is very popular in Russian salads, so this shortage was always especially painful. I remember my parents deciding whether to make a particular salad for this party or the one next month - the two jars of mayonnaise that we had needed to be budgeted for the next few months. Another amusing thing about mayonnaise is that I now know how trivially it can be made at home from products that were readily available. However, nobody knew how to do that, and in fact the idea of making mayonnaise rarely occured to anyone. (Being a "scientist", my dad did try to make mayonnaise at home once, but it didn't come out right - the 1985 equivalent of Google failed to retrieve the right recipe.)

While some products were short throughout the country, some were missing just locally. At some point, my American-born grandfather told us about "banana-split" - supposedly the greatest food that existed. It took some time before we could try bananas together with ice-cream. Vladivostok never had ice-cream, except in cafes. Dzhambul, where my grandparents lived, had ice-cream in abundance, but never had bananas. (Of course, Vladivostok only had bananas rarely.) We did eventually manage to buy ice-cream and bananas at the same time in Vladivostok.

Starting with early 1980s the list of items in short supply started growing fast. After 1985, it got to a point where you could hardly find a recipe for which you could gather all the ingredients. You couldn't do this one because you didn't have eggs, you couldn't do thas other one because you didn't have milk, etc. Recipes that used fewer ingredients were becoming popular, and some point I remember a neighbour giving us a recipe of a cake that used only three ingredients. (I am not sure what they were but I think it was flour, sugar and sour cream.) We called the cake "Perestroika" and it was quite popular until sour cream dissappered around 1990. After a year or so without it, Yegor Gaidar's price liberalization brought sour cream back in February of 1992 - at roughly 50 times the price it used to be, so the idea of making a cake that used it as a primary ingredient stopped being attractive.

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Mine City, Vladivostok

Just a block away from the house where our family lived since I was five there was a large park which was called "the Park of the Mine City." The park was surrounded by a stone wall, partly decomposed. The story goes that Mine City was a mine factory in the beginning of the century. Not much is left now, other than a couple heavy-set storage buildings and a few entrances into the underground. When I was a kid we would go into one of those entrances after school and take a path to the nearest other entrance. On the way we passed a side tonnel that we never dared to enter. Kids said it went all the way to Port Arthur in China. There is also a sequence of three lakes, which was supposedly used for testing mines and torpedos.

A few years after we moved to the neighborhood the center Mine City was converted to a "Park of Culture and Recreation" constructed through "popular construction method" which means that people got "volunteered" to go work on park improvement. Among other things, a small movie theater was built which was dedicated to just kids movies. As we discovered, the park has fallen apart, since then. The movie theater, in particular, is now in ruins.

   
   
   
    

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Russian Drinking Verbs

While we were in Russia, Luisa took the opportunity to learn more Russian. At one point, I figured that she had learned enough verbs that it would be useful to explain the "system" behind them - Russian has a rich system of prefixes, which can be used to form numerous verbs from each verbal root, a bit like the English phrasal verbs (like "run off" or "write up") but more extensive. I showed her the basic prefixes, explained their common meanings, and the showed how some specific verbal roots can be combined with them. Of the three examples I gave, somehow the variations on the verb to "drink" have become most memorable.

Below are some of the Russian verbs that can be formed from the root "пить" (pit', to drink). Note that "-ся" ('-sya') suffix is reflexive (like English "... yourself") and "-ва-" ('-va') suffix signifies habitual or continuous action. (All the verbs below have a habitual or continous form, but I am only including those for which the habitual form has a specific meaning).

• пить (pit') - to drink
• распить (paspit') - to get started on a bottle
  • рас- (ras-) generally signifies opening or distribution
• допить (dopit') - to finish drinking (e.g., to finish the bottle)
  • до- (do-) generally signifies finishing or reaching some specific place or result result
• недопить (nedopit') - to drink insufficiently (lit. "to underdrink")
  • недо- (nedo-) generally means failing to reach a result
• перепить (perepit') - to drink to much or to drink more than others (lit. "to overdrink" or "to outdrink")
  • пере- (pere-) generally means crossing a limit or a barrier
• выпить (vypit') - to get a drink or to have drunk
  • вы- (vy-) generally means outward movement or emptying
• выпивать (vypivat'sya) - to get drunk habitually
  • -ва- (-va-) suffix signifies habituality
• попить (popit') - to drink a little bit (not alcohol)
  • по- (po-) usually means "a little bit" or "along"
• попивать (popivat') - to drink a little habitually (or to sip)
• напиться (napit'sya) - to get drunk or to have quenched thirst
  • на- (na-) generally suggests filling a container
• упиться (upit'sya) - to get totally wasted
  • у- (u-) generally refers to movement away, so this is more like "drink yourself away", i.e., to a point where you are "gone"
• запить (zapit') - to wash something down with a drink or to go into a drinking binge (lit. "to drink in")
  • за- (za-) generally means "behind" or "into closed space" (this might refer to the fact that binge drinking usually implies disappering behind closed doors for a long time)
• допиться (dopit'sya) - bring yourself to some unpleasant result through excessive drinking, e.g. delirium tremens (lit. "to drink yourself upto something").
  • same as допить above, but with a reflexive suffix
• пропить (propit') - to lose something through drinking (e.g., by selling it to buy alcohol)
  • про- (pro-) often means "through", in this case to drink "through" or "all of" ones property
• спиться (spit'sya) - to destroy ones life through drinking (lit. "to drink yourself down")
  • с- (s-) often means downward movement from the top of something

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Vladivostok Cemetery

While Russians were quite "collectivised" during times, a strange inversion occured at death. Unlike the American cemeteries that are just fields with tomb stones, Russian cemeteries have typically been subdivided into small fenced plots, privatelly tended by the relatives of the deceased (or allowed to grow over with grass if they had none). They are thus the exact opposite of what one might expect "communist" cemeteries to look like.

    
   

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It makes you wonder if this expresses some deep desire to have - at least in death - a private plot of land. It more likely has to do with the habit of "visiting" relatives. It is customary to "visit" dead relatives as if they were still alive. People usually bring some food and have a small snack at "grandpa's place", hence the need for a small table inside the fenced area. Some of the food is then left on the grave, not as an "offering" but simply as way of including the dead in the meal.

In death as in life, the Russians are becoming increasingly unequal. Some tombs are decorated by marble stones of increasing size. Others are still marked by a simple steel boxes.

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A Street I Grew Up On

On of the days we took Luisa to the street where I grew up. We moved there when I was five and stayed there until I went to college. My parents moved to a more downtown location right after I graduated and I actually haven't been to the area since then. The area is what they call a "microrayon" in Russia (lit. "microregion"). Those are usually neighborhoods constructed around the same time and meant to be reasonably complete. (I.e., they design them with stores, schools, kindergartens.) Instead of being of having a grid of streets, they typically have scattered highrises and a tree of roads that branches until to the highrises. (It's a lot like Escondido Village at Stanford.) The microrayon's had numbers instead of names - ours was

64 if I remember correctly. The street, however, had a name -

"Patrice Lumumba". It has since been renamed - there was some excuse, but I think people largely just didn't like the African name. (A Patrice Lumumba street in a different city was renamed because the name of "the Latin American revolutionary" was found "hard to pronounce" - so, American's aren't the only geographically- and linguistically-challenged people on this planet.)

    
   
   
   
    

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Friends who bought my parent's old appartment from them invited us in, so I also took some pictures of the ocean view that we enjoyed for over 10 years. (See the third row.)

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Suburbs of Vladivostok

   
    
    
   
   

[slideshow] [album 1] [album 2] [album 3] [album 4] [album 5]

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A Walk through Vladivostok

    
   
   

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Russian Food

I am finally getting to documenting our stay in Vladivostok. To start off, here are pictures of a variety of Russian foods that Luisa tried. When we got to Vladivostok I handed my mom and grandma a list of dishes that I could think of and we then checked items off the list, making sure most food groups got covered. Mouse over the pictures to see the names.

   
   

[slideshow] [album 1] [album 2] [album 3]

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