When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke?

I went to graduate school with a nice but very strange man from Vladivostok named Rostislav. He wore huge glasses and ordered dessert for dinner at restaurants ("This is nonsense," he'd say if he didn't like his entree/brownie sundae) and once I ran into him at the liquor store wearing little tiny shorts and buying champagne. Given that one data point, I had no idea what to expect of this long-closed city on the other side of the world.

It's lovely. It's hilly and the bay is full of sailboats and even though they say it usually rains for all of June, the weather today is pretty much perfect. And. The people here are so friendly that I don't quite know how to act. The taxi driver I asked for directions to our hotel was as helpful as one could possibly be. The woman who sold me a bottle of water oozed nice. We took a boat ride around the bay and the man standing next to me maintained broken conversation for almost the whole trip; he kept saying how how glad he was to meet me. A whole series of people, including a big scary shirtless guy and some kind of millitary dudes, helped us find the ferry terminal, some without even being asked. Our lunch waiter spoke good English and told us how much he'd like to visit New York one day. Our dinner waiter kept smiling. Almost every single person we've encountererd here has been not at all surly. It's very strange.

Also, none of the kiosks near the water sell beer. It's almost as if there are some kind of enforced alcohol regulations designed to help prevent people from getting drunk and falling into the bay. No beer to be found, but Vladivostok does have its own little muscle beach in the form of some grungy athletic equipment near the bay. Aside from the old dude doing dips in nothing but very snug little underwear and the other guy hitting a tire with a huge mallet, over and over and over, this place doesn't much feel like Russia at all.