I hope those mafia guys don't speak English

Shane: "Sam! Get out of there! It's some kind of private party, there's mafia guys everywhere!"

...Guess that nice-looking Armenian restaurant was a little too nice.

And, an uneventful train trip from St Petersburg back to Moscow. After Siberia, five hours on a train is nothing.

More English, fewer bears

Moscow in 2011 didn't seem all that different from what I remember from being there in 2004. But St Petersburg feels a lot different. St Petersburg has always been the most European part of Russia, but it feels a lot more European now than it did seven years ago. People still don't speak much English, but there are a lot more translated/transliterated signs. All of the subway signs have English versions, and a lot of street signs are written in both English and Russian. From my last trip here, I remember usually being a little afraid to cross the street and often waiting until I could follow someone because there mostly weren't cross-walks and the the cars would run you over; now there are cross-walks everywhere. The air is cleaner: I'm not constantly blowing black stuff out of my nose like I was then. The water seems cleaner, too. I'm still not drinking it, but at least it doesn't smell terrible like it did last trip. And I haven't seen a single live bear. There's a tapas bar called Barcelona on our hotel street, and there are sushi bars and hookah bars and martini bars everywhere. And more American fast food chains. There are two Zaras on Nevsky Prospekt.

Slightly kinder, slightly gentler, but it basically still feels like anarchy here. Horrible lines and terrible queueing behavior at the Hermitage, a thousand personal injuries waiting to happen from sinkholes and loose railings and rusty nails, the occasional blacked-out dude with some kind of open wound. And, the architecture is still stunning in its sad, neglected way and and the Hermitage still has rooms full of Picassos and the Church on Spilled Blood is still my favorite church in the world. As long as you can still drink beer in the streets, I promise I won't wring my hands too much over the Carl's Jr.'s and the Burger Kings.

It involves a boat

Peter the Great wanted a navy. "Peter, " they said, "you don't have any boats." He said "Fuck you, I'll build them." They said "Peter, you don't have a port." (At the time, Russia's only port was Arkhangelsk, which is so far north that it's usually frozen.) He said "Fuck you, I'll get one."

And he did.

He took an entourage of friends and hangers-on and giants and midgets (he loved midgets) to Holland, the world navy power at the time. They left epic mass destruction in their drunken wake, but somehow amid the debauchery Peter also learned how to build ships. He fought a war with Sweden to get Russia a better port. Not that wars are so great but man, talk about determination. He sort of built the Russian navy with his bare hands. Before Peter the Great, people made change by cutting coins into smaller pieces until eventually there was nothing left, and infanticide was fairly common. (I hate babies, but I don't actually condone killing them.) He was nice to the Old Believers, who had previously been persecuted horribly for not playing along when the Orthodox Church decided to change how many fingers are used to make the sign of the cross, and to his sickly half brother Ivan, with whom he technically shared the throne until Ivan died. And I already said he loved midgets, right?

Ok, so St. Petersburg was built largely with slave labor and thousands of people died in the process, and he he may or may not have had his own son tortured to death. A saint he was not, but he's the closest thing to a(n?) historical hero I have.

Vladivostok -- St. Petersburg

The Vladivostok airport is about 40km outside the city. In a taxi on a Sunday morning with no traffic, it took over an hour to get there. Because there is no road. There's a way to the airport, sort of a path, but it's not a road. I guess probably there was once a crappy road and now they're building a better road, but for now it's a slow dirt/rock dusty hole-y path dotted with bulldozers and hitchhikers and stray dogs. Maybe I overuse the word postapocalyptic, but I do think it applies here. Anyway, we made it to the airport and nine loud, rattle-y, bored-adolescent-dominated (I guess they were a school group or something, restless and basically in constant motion--by the end they were having a pillow fight) hours later we were back in Moscow and had undone our two weeks of train travel. And a long layover plus another, much calmer flight after that, we're in St Petersburg. It's one of my favorite places. I'll tell you all about it when I'm not so damn tired.

Working on a building

Man, we are so close to North Korea. There is a group of North Koreans staying at our hotel (some kind of athletes, I think) and I really wish I could talk to them.

Anyway. Vladivostok is in many ways very pretty, but it's also very under contruction. I've never seen a place this under construction. They are building two huge bridges and several big hotel-looking buildings on the bay. It looks like construction on some of the buildings goes on 24 hours a day. There's this huge ditch, about four fweet wide and maybe six feet deep, that runs like a gaping wound the whole length of one of the roads just inland from the water. There are open manholes everywhere. APEC, a pretty big-deal economics conference, is happening in Vladivostok in 2012. I dunno if the city will be ready for it, but it's definitely trying.

Speaking of trying, a lot of Russian women dress up, a lot. Skirts and make-up and stripper shoes everywhere. The ones who pull it off look hot, and the ones who don't look ridiculous. Even by Russian standards, the women here in Vladivostok are especially hot and well-dressed. (The men are the same.) I keep wanting to get uptight about all the injury potential that comes with the city's basically being one big open construction site, but then I remember that for every big ridiculous hole I have to leap over, the local women do the same thing every day. Mostly in stripper shoes.

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.

Khabarovsk -- Vladivostok

I forgot to tell you another thing about Khabarovsk. Vlad showed us the United Russia (Putin's party) building and it is pink. Pink. Really light, delicate pink, the kind of pink that gets used for frilly dresses and is not remotely terrifying.

Anyway. Our last leg of the Trans-Siberian was the first where we've had other people in our compartment. The Russian woman seemed nice, but saw that we don't really speak Russian and so didn't say much; the Tajik man was a talker, and so didn't much care that we didn't share a common language. Once I found out he was Tajik I thought I would instantly endear myself to him by hacking together the Russian to tell him that I have a friend who is in Tajikistan now learning the language. (She's not actually there right now, but I don't know how to use the future tense in Russian -- close enough.) He seemed uninterested and asked if I was going back to New York after Russia. "No, to Spain," I told him. He looked at me for a minute and then said, in English, "Papa millionaire." Fuck. My first reaction was to be sort of offended. No, I'm not some spoiled rich kid. "No, I work a lot," I said as indignantly as I could in bad Russian. But as I said it I realized that he probably works a lot; he probably works a lot harder than I do, even when I'm not running around the world on vacation. And no matter how hard he works, he'll probably never get to take a three-month vacation to travel around the world; probably not even a two-week vacation. That my trip is self-financed suddenly became sort of tangential. While he complained about us to the Russian woman (who must have felt sort of awkward and mostly just looked out the window), liberal guilt took over and I decided I needed to make things right with this man who probably hated me and with whom I could barely communicate. I thought things got a little better when I asked what he thinks of Moscow (he hates it), but then he wanted to know if Shane and I are married and if I have babies, and was not happy with my replies. (I'd rather not lie about stuff like that, even if it means making people angry, and lying in Russian would have been too complicated anyway.) This man and I were clearly not going to be friends. I made one last half-hearted attempt, saying that the scenery out the window (which happened to be in the direction of the Chinese border) was beautiful. (Most of this leg of the trip runs not far from the border and apparently that's why the trains go at night. According to the guidebook, the blinds used to be locked shut for parts of the trip.) "No," he said firmly and pointed in the opposite direction. "That is beautiful. Russia is beautiful. That," pointing back at the window towards China, "is like Africa." I'm not sure what he even meant, but I was done trying to make nice, anyway.

We finished off the Schweppe's bottle of cognac/moonshine from the mean-looking woman in Irkutsk, closed down the cafe car, and got maybe four hours of sleep before arriving in Vladivostok dizzy and hung over. Our Tajik friend probably didn't approve of that, either.