From Yekaterinburg to Astana

I left Yekaterinburg early in the evening on this old Uzbek train that looked like a museum piece. In fact, many of the trains I saw running throughout Kazakhstan looked like they belonged on pedestals. The Uzbek train had a schedule showing the old Soviet name of Yekaterinburg, or Sverdlovsk. The train also made a lot of stops that weren't on the schedule; I guess the schedule just listed the major stops. At 10 pm, the lights suddenly went out on the train. Oh, well, I had my cell phone flashlight at least. But then after a while, they came back on while I was asleep, so I woke up and turned off my cabin light. It got fairly cold on the train at night. The Russian trains are usually heated, but this Uzbek one wasn't. And there were no blankets in the compartment so all I had to cover myself was a thin sheet.

The train crossed the Russia/Kazakh border at around 5 am, and stopped for a while, and Russian Authorities boarded the train. When they got to my compartment, they asked me some questions, took my migration pass, and they stamped my passport with an exit stamp. I was waiting for the Kazakh officials, but fell asleep. I woke up later and the train was moving. I realized, in shock, that I was fairly far into Kazakhstan and no Kazakh officials had stamped my passport for entry. I was wondering how that was going to work. But a few minutes later, right before the train pulled into Petropavl, a Kazakh official came into my compartment. He had this odd, retro-looking box with a keyboard on top, and it apparently had a camera inside, because he used it to take my picture. He also stuck my passport into a slot in the box, I'm guessing to scan it. He typed a bunch of stuff on the keyboard, asked me some questions, and then stamped my passport. I had never had my passport stamped so far inland into a country before.

I fell back asleep on the train, and was awakened by a guy who asked me in Russian if I wanted "plokh". Or that's what it sounded like. I had no idea what that was, he repeated it several times, and then said it was soup. I asked him how much it was, he said it was 200 rubles. Oh, good, they were still taking Russian money, because I had no Kazakh tenge yet. So I said yes, and he brought the soup served in what looked like a ceramic teapot, but with no spout. It was a very hearty and delicious soup, loaded with vegetables and garbanzos. When I order soup in a former Soviet country, I never know if I'll get something hearty and substantial, or minimal and watery with no flavor. Usually it's the former, but you never know.

I arrived at the main train station, Astana-1. I was really weary when I got there. Usually I will try to find a bus to the hostel, or just walk, but a taxi driver asked me if I wanted a ride and I accepted. The hostel was about 5 kilometers from the bus station, so the ride was not too long. When the taxi driver dropped me off at the building where the hostel was, I couldn't see any sign of the hostel in the building. I had to walk around the building several times, and ask some people, and nobody seemed to know anything about a hostel. I tried to call them on Skype with the number listed in my confirmation email, but I couldn't get enough signal for Skype to work. Finally, a local guy helped me out by calling them, found out that I had to get in a back door, and then, when inside, push the “4” button on the list of offices in the building, and they would let me in. Man, that took nearly a half hour. I wish these hidden hostels would send instructions with their confirmation emails as to where they are in the building and how to get in.

Astana is the capital of Kazakhstan, and has only been the capital since 1997. All over town, there are large signs that say "Astana 20", left over from last year's 20 year anniversary. Astana is divided by the Isham River into two sides, the New City and the Old City. I was staying in the Old City. Frankly, both sides looked equally new to me. Both sides had a city center that consisted of a whole bunch of buildings that looked like they had been built fairly recently, and put up fairly quickly. The old Soviet style of architecture was only visible in some of the older apartment buildings, and the newer buildings looked quite intricate and complex, though maybe somewhat slapdash. My first exploration was in the Old Town, just briefly. And the first thing I did was search for a Kazakh SIM card for my phone. I found it in a building called the Business Center next door, I went with the carrier Beeline because the guy who sold it seemed to think I'd get the best deal on data with it. I had been using my US carrier, T-Mobile, for roaming data everywhere I had been, and for several years, that worked great, and it was just seamless from country to country that I would receive data, though it was fairly slow most of the time. But I recently got a shocking text from them saying they are going to cut me off from roaming; apparently they have changed their policy so if more than 50% of your use is not in the US, you don't get to roam any more. And, in calling them, there appears to be no appeal, it's just the way it is. Apparently everybody who is a long-term traveler is just getting cut off. Well, this completely sucks for me because now I'm going to have to get a new SIM card every time I get to a new country. Some things I really don't like are that now I'm going to have to watch my data (I use a lot) because the SIM cards I get will have limits. Also, I use my US phone number for authentication for some things, and that is going to be a huge morass once I can't do that. But, on the plus side, the data will be faster, and probably cheaper, in most countries I'm in.

The next day, I walked to the new town, and on my way there, there was a spot that jutted up on the sidewalk, and I tripped on it. I wasn't able to catch my balance, and tumbled to the concrete. I had some minor abrasions on one hand and one knee. They were not too bad, but were actively bleeding, so I decided to try to find a pharmacy. It wasn't that easy to find a pharmacy; I had to poke around for about an hour, but I finally found one by asking some locals, and it was hidden inside a building, with no outside sign at all. I got some bandaids and some hydrogen peroxide, patched myself up, and continued on my journey.

The New City had a long walking boulevard on it called Nurzhol Bulvar that seemed to be the highlight of that side of town. It started along the main road that crossed the bridge from the Old City to the New City, and ended at the Presidential Palace. In between, there was an awful lot going on. It seemed to be the big hangout place for people. There is one tall building called the Ministry for Transport and Communications, but locals call it “The Lighter”. There are three green towers called the Northern Lights, and an assortment of other buildings along the way. There are also a lot of sculptures, and vendors selling food and other assorted items. There is a large tower topped by a round ball called the Bayterek Monument, and it is flanked by two golden towers. The Presidential Palace is at the end of the boulevard, and I arrived there after night fell, so I saw it all lit up at night.

I wandered around the New City at night, marveling at the light show that the city provided. A lot of the buildings are lit up with amazing colors and patterns. I wandered around for a couple of hours, but it was getting late, so I headed back to the main street to try to take a bus back to the hostel. I got almost to the stop, and I saw two buses that I knew headed in the right direction leave before I got to the bus stop. When I got to the bus stop, it was about 10:40 at night, and the schedule on the side of the bus stop indicated that the buses all stopped running between 10:30 and 11. Oh, crap, I had just missed those two buses that were the last ones. Then another bus pulled up, and I had no idea where it went, but I hopped on, hoping for the best, and it was pointing in the right direction. Well, it turned shortly after that, and I did go to the Old City, but in an entirely wrong direction. I asked the conductor if it was going to turn, and she indicated that it would, but it didn't turn far enough to go anywhere near where I wanted to go. But a woman on the bus saw my predicament, and motioned for me to get off the bus at the next stop. So I did, and she got off with me, and walked over to a cross street. I asked here if there was another bus there, and she said, no, we were going to take a taxi. In Astana, “taking a taxi” is not actually taking a taxi. It consists of putting your hand in the air to basically hitchhike from every passing car, and then bargaining for where you want to go and the price. But it is a very successful strategy. She put her hand up, and it was the second car that stopped. She talked to them in Kazakh, pointed to me, and told me they had arranged to take me for 500 tenge, or about a dollar and a half. I agreed, and got in, and she got in too. They drove me right to my hostel, and when I tried to pay them, they refused to accept it. I tried to be insistent about it, but they wouldn't hear of it, sending me off by saying, “Welcome to Kazakhstan!” in English.

I spent the rest of my time in Astana exploring the Old City some more, and it was interesting, though it didn't seem to have as many iconic sights as the New City. When it was time to leave, I found out the #3 and #10 buses went to the train station, so I headed to Respublika Ave., the main street to take the first one of those I could catch, and it was the #3.

I stayed at: The Barrel Hostel, 9 Imanbayeva Street Kvartira 4, Astana, 010000, Kazakhstan, telephone +7 717 223 9076. Aside from the problems in finding it, it was a nice, comfortable hostel. You just have to enter the back door furthest to the right and push the “4” button; someone will buzz you in. There seemed to always be someone there to buzz you in; at some hostels that is not the case. The bathrooms were nice and clean, and I never had trouble using one. The shower is strong with good hot water. There is a filter tap on the sink for filtered water; I drank it and it was just fine. The beds are nice, with a shelf for your stuff and two outlets. There are very large lockers shaped like barrels with combo locks built in. You have to take your shoes off and leave them at the front.

Sovetsk, And A Little Jarring Surprise

I took the bus to Sovetsk, which is a small village on the border of Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast and Lithuania, separated by the Neman River. But I was soon to find out about something that I hadn't counted on. I got off the bus on arrival, loaded up my backpack, which I had stowed in the bus' baggage compartment, and set off to walk to the hostel where I was staying, which was only a few blocks away. I had walked a couple of blocks when I realized there was a car tailing me slowly as I walked. It was an older model, Eastern European looking car. I tried to ignore it for a bit, but then the car pulled up beside me, and a middle-aged stocky guy got out. He started talking to me in Russian, and I wasn't able to follow what he was saying. His tone was conversational, and not hostile or anything, and at first I thought he was trying to solicit an informal taxi ride. I shook my head and said, "Nyet," and he pulled out a wallet with some kind of identification. So he was some kind of policeman. He kept talking in Russian, and I still didn't understand, so I said, "nie ponimayu," which means, "I don't understand" in Russian. I asked him, "Passport?" because I assumed he wanted to see my identification, and he answered, "Da." So I pulled out my passport, migration card, and registration card from the last hostel in Kaliningrad; the Russian authorities usually want to see all of that, and it is legally required for you to have all that stuff on you. He inspected my documents, then asked me, "Angliski?" which means, "English?" I shook my head to indicate yes. He pulled out his phone, and pulled up an app that was like Google Translate. He spoke into the app and showed me the results. "You are a foreigner in a Special Border Zone. Do you know anything about that?" the words on the phone said. "Nyet," I answered, kind of taken aback. Uh-oh. What now?



He paused for a minute, and it looked like he was uncertain what to say to me. He then spoke into his phone again, and the phone read out the words, "Since you are in a Special Border Zone, you will not be able to go closer to the river than Victory Street. Do you understand?" I nodded my assent. He asked me verbally, "Piatiy Ugol?" which was the name of the hostel where I was staying. So he either knew where I was staying already, or he deduced it from the direction I was walking. I nodded my head to indicate yes. He typed, "Have a good stay," and held out his hand to shake hands, and I shook his hand, and said "Spasiba" (thank you).



I kept walking down the street, and he watched me head up to the hostel, following me a short bit. I found the door but could not open it in my nervousness from him watching me. I tried to walk down the block to see if there was another door, but he motioned me to go back to that door, and motioned that it was upstairs. Ah, I push, and not pull. I gave him a meek wave, and headed in. Well, that went better than it could have, I guess.


I poked my head in several places on the way up the stairs. Nope, that's not a hostel. Neither is that, it looks like some kind of official government office. I got to the top of the stairs, and saw the word, "Reception" in English. I went through the door, and there was a friendly-looking woman on the other side. She said in halting English that she spoke a little bit of English, and I answered in halting Russian that I spoke a little bit of Russian. She asked me for my documents, so I handed them over, and she made copies. She smiled in recognition when she saw the registration from the hostel in Kaliningrad, and said she had worked at that hostel two years ago. She said she was the only one working there, and it was a new hostel, and I was the first American to stay there. She showed me my room, which had five beds in it that weren't bunk beds like in most hostels, and was quite spacious. I was the only one staying in the room, so I had my pick of beds; they all seemed about the same, so I picked one by a window.



I told her that the police had stopped me, and told me about the Special Border Zone stuff. She said, oh, yes, you can't go down by the river, but as long as you stay away from that area, you will be OK. So it was common knowledge. I wonder if I strayed into the forbidden area, everybody would be looking at me, like, "he's not supposed to be there." Maybe.


I got settled in and went out for a foray into the town. I pulled out my phone to check Google Maps to see where Victory Street was, so I could stay out of the forbidden zone. First, I had to look up the word "Victory" on Google Translate because I had just seen the word translated on the cop's phone. The word that came up was, "победа" or "pobeda". I searched for thst street on Google Maps and nothing came up,  but I found it later under a slight spelling variation by eyeballing the map. It turns out that street is the town's main street, with a lot of businesses on either side, and set up as a pedestrian street, with benches right in the middle of the street for relaxing and people-watching. Also, the street is not a uniform distance from the border, and kind of went diagonal to it, and I was unclear on how far I could be from the border outside the length of that street. But I tried my best to comply with the order I'd been given, and constantly checked Google Maps to make sure I wasn't in an unapproved area. The street was several blocks away from the border at the farthest, and about a block away at the closest. But a good chunk of the center of the city was off limits to me, including a Lithuanian pancake restaurant that I really wanted to visit but couldn't since it was in the forbidden zone. There were a lot of people walking around the town with camouflage uniforms on. But I don't want to know anything; I just want to keep my head down and be a compliant tourist.


The first day I was there, I walked through my officially approved areas, looking for a restaurant. I found two restaurants on the main street that I wanted to try on Google Maps, but both of them had the area where they used to be emptied out, and workmen preparing the space. I was bummed, because I was starving as I hadn't eaten all day yet. But finally I found a restaurant called Mama Mia that was awesome. It was mostly Italian, but also had local dishes, and, to my surprise, their menu was not only in Russian and English, but also about a third of it was dedicated to vegetarian and vegan dishes,  and not just for show, but good, solid fare. And there was a lot of variety on the menu. It's very rare to see that in a restaurant in a small Russian village.


One thing I hadn't seen in Kaliningrad Oblast are the stolovayas, the ubiquitous cheap cafeteria-style restaurants that are plentiful throughout many areas of Russia. One of the closed restaurants I went to was a stolovaya, but I didn't see any others, and I didn't run into any in Kaliningrad, though I didn't look very hard there.


I walked throughout the parts of the village that were available to me, and there wasn't a lot of it. It's a small village with a little over 40,000 people, so the center is not very big. But there was a nice, spacious park at the heart of it. I was really only here to wait for the bus to Latvia (see my post on Kaliningrad for details), but I made the most of my time. On my way walking to the bus station to leave the village, there was a police checkpoint about a block in the other direction. I don't want to know.  I'm just glad I wasn't walking that way.  When the bus was heading to the border, I got to see some of the forbidden zone for the first time. Crossing the border into Lithuania was no big deal at all; I didn't get asked a single question on either side if the border, but there was a lot of waiting on both sides. All in all, with the waits on both sides if the border, the bus was stopped for about an hour and a half. But then we proceeded through smoothly, and we were onward to Riga.



In Sovetsk I stayed at: Piatiy Ugol Hostel, 1 Ulitsa Zhukovskogo 3 этаж, Sovetsk, 238750, Russian Federation. The hostel was nice, it had single beds (5 in the room I was in) instead of bunk beds, and my room was very spacious. No lockers, but there was plenty of storage space. I was the only guest in the entire hostel the whole time I was there, and was often the only person there, as it was the type of hostel where the manager is not there most of the time. There was free breakfast along with the room, and it was prepared just for me since I was the only one there. It was a great deal at a little over ten dollars a night. The room was up two flights of stairs, so we would call that the third floor in the US, and the second floor most other places. No doors were locked from the street to the room, but the manager gave me a key to the hostel's main door late on the first day of my stay. I never ended up using it; I tried it on the wrong keyhole and it didn't work, and the manager showed me the right way to use it later, but I was leaving shortly after that. The manager was very nice and helpful when she was there, and when she wasn't, she left her phone number, which I never had to use.

Kaliningrad During The World Cup

After visiting Minsk and returning to Lithuania a second time, I decided to go to Kaliningrad, Russia. Kaliningrad is an exclave of Russia, which means it is in bya piece of land that is completely separated from the rest of Russia. Up until shortly after World War II, Kaliningrad had been Königsburg, and had been part of Germany.  So there is this rich Prussian and German heritage there in this small, separate part of Russia. And it was also hosting World Cup soccer matches while I was there. I don't follow soccer much, but it was interesting to see the bustle going on from all the foreign tourists, which it seemed the city was not used to.


I took a bus from Vilneus to Kaliningrad. When crossing the border to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast, we were all herded off the bus to wait for a while. The bus driver collected all of our passports in a pile. One by one, they called each passenger up to the window, and then when they were done with that passenger, the passenger would call the name of the next person. I figured I would be last, because the passengers did not speak my language, and would have difficulty summoning me. I was half right. After each passenger had gone up to the window, I waited a moment, and then approached the window.  But the guy behind the glass shook his finger to motion me not to approach. I waited a few minutes, but nothing happened. Then the bus driver motioned me to get on the bus. I never did have to go up to the window. Then everybody else got in the bus, and the bus driver divided up all the passports among four or five passengers to pass out to everybody. They called out names, and passed out the passports, but mine was not among them. We waited a little longer, and some official motioned the bus driver to walk up to the window. He returned with my passport, and started the bus.


Well, that wasn't so bad, I thought. It took a while, but it was mostly waiting. But it turned out that was just the Lithuanian side. We approached the Russian side, and we all had to get off the bus again. They barked out some commands I didn't understand, and motioned us toward metal detectors to walk through to go inside. The bus driver came up to me with my backpack; apparently I was supposed to bring it with me. I walked through the metal detector, and put my bag on the belt to go through the machine. Seemed like fairly standard procedure to cross a border. A wonan came up to ask me some questions, but she didn't speak English. I couldn't answer her questions with my limited Russian, so she went and got a piece of paper with English questions written phonetically in Cyrillic script, and haltingly asked me the questions, to which I responded iin Russian when I could. She finished, and I waited with the rest of the people. Then a guy came up to me, flashed a badge, and said he was a federal marshal and he needed to ask me some questions. He spoke pretty good English. I was escorted into a room, and he closed the door.  He asked me some questions for a bit, and seemed satisfied with my answers. I'm just a tourist with nothing to hide, so hopefully it was routine. Then he welcomed me to Russia and I rejoined the other people waiting. Soon we headed back to the bus, reloaded our baggage, and got on. I was in Russia again. We headed towards Kaliningrad.


Russia has created a special deal for those who are arriving for the World Cup. For those who bought at least one match ticket their ticket serves as their visa, and they are issued a fan ID that gives them all kinds of perks as well. For instance, they got free public transportation on match days. One perk that I benefitted from was that  T-Mobile offered free 4g in Russia for the World Cup. I use T-Mobile because they give me free data in most of the countries I go to, but it is usually 2g and very slow. So, strangely enough, I had the fastest internet I've had anywhere, and I was not as dependent on wi-fi.


Kaliningrad doesn't have a metro, but it does have trams, buses, and small private vans called marshrutkas. All of these options are pretty much dirt cheap. The buses are twenty rubles, which is about thirty cents at sixty-three rubles to the dollar. There is a conductor on the bus on addition to the driver, and the conductor will approach you shortly after you board to take your money, in exchange for a ticket. I didn't take any trams, but I assume it works pretty much like the buses. The marshrutkas are only twenty-two rubles, and you pay the driver when you get off.


There are sellers of kvass in little booths all over the city. Kvass is a fermented beverage made from rye bread, and it is supposed to be high in probiotics. I'd describe the taste as being that of rye bread soda. It's not too sweet, and fairly pleasant. The price goes down the larger of a quantity you buy. I bought it several times, and the largest quantity I bought was a liter, but I could have bought much more. Just a cup of it was about 25 rubles, or somewhere around 40 cents in US dollars.


I spent several days taking in the sights in Kaliningrad, but the highlight was a tour bus to the Curonian Spit. I set up the tour the day after I arrived in Kaliningrad, but the tour was a couple of days later. On the day of the tour, I woke up with intense pain in my right pinky toe when I put on my shoe. The pain was so bad I could hardly walk, but I had set up the tour, so I wanted to do it anyway.  The tour guide was talking a lot, but it was all in Russian, so I didn't understand what she was saying. Most of the stops were short walks, but walking was staggeringly painful. Most of the time we were on the bus, I took my shoe off to avoid the pain.


The first stop was the Dancing Forest. This was a forest where the trees grew in strange, twisty ways, seemingly randomly. I was in a lot of pain, but walked around the whole loop pathway through the area.


At one point we stopped for two hours so people could walk to the beach on the Baltic Sea on the west side of the spit, which was not far, and walk to the lagoon on the east side, which was a couple of kilometers away. I was in so much pain that I figured I would skip the east side. I hobbled toward the beach, and stopped to sit on a bench to take my shoe and stick off to see what was going on with my toe. My toe was about twice its normal size, and bright crimson red, and so painful to the slightest touch that I could barely even touch it. Great, I probably had an infection. I tried to play out in my mind what I would do in Russia with a painfully infected toe. I kept my shoe off and walked toward the beach. The pain was hardly noticeable with the shoe off. I got in the salt water of the sea and stayed there for a while to soak my toe, hoping that would help.


After the beach, I sat on a bench again to massage my toe to see if it would help. At first it hurt like crazy just to touch it, but i started kneding it firmer and firmer, building up my tolerance, until I was applying some fairly strong pressure. And that seemed to help a little. Screw it, I thought, I'm going to put my shoe on and walk to the east side of the spit. I only had about forty minutes left to walk about two kilometers and back, but I figured I would make it if I walked briskly. And I was on the other side if the world, and when would I get this chance again? So I put my shoe on, blocked out the intense pain, and walked the two kilometers. But it was worth it. The dunes on the lagoon were beautiful, and the forest on the way there was amazing.


The last stop was the bird sanctuary,  where there was a big net to catch and band migratory birds, and there was a presentation where a ranger showed the different bands for the different birds and explained the procedure. He also banded a bird and set it free.


Though I was worried about the infected toe, I kept it monitored and massaged it frequently. If it had gotten worse, or if i had seen any radiating red lines leading away from it, I would have sought medical help. But it resolved itself on its own within a couple of days, thankfully. By the next day, most of the swelling had gone down, and while it was still painful to walk, it was much more tolerable, and by the second day, the pain was even less. I'd say three or four days later it was completely back to normal.


One of the highlights in Kaliningrad was the House of Soviets. This was a building that was built in the 1970s on the ruins of the former Konigsberg Castle. It was never completed and it was never occupied because it was structurally unsound. There was a fan area for the World Cup matches that was set up right in front of it. You could also see some of the walls of the demolished castle in front of it, tiward the street. There was also a really good vegan restaurant right down the street from it.  Fairly close to there was the Museum of the World Ocean which was spread out along the river.  I thought there would be a display of aquatic animals there, but it was mostly devoted to military maritime transportation. The was a submarine there, the B-413, that people could board, and that was interesting to see.


Right in the middle of the Pregolya River is the Island of Kant. This has a big park called Sculpture Park filled with sculptures. Before WWII, the whole island was covered with buildings and activity, and there are placards all over the park showing that was there before. On the island also are Königsberg Cathedral and Immanuel Kant's tomb, connected to the back of the cathedral.

There are a lot of forts around Kaliningrad, but many of them are not open to the public. One that I went to that was open was Fort Friedrichsburg, or rather, Friedrichsburg Gate. Most of the fort had been demolished, but some of the rooms in the entrance way and the courtyard are still there. There are also a lot of gates still around from the city's defensive walls all over town and I visited several of them. One of the weirdest and eeriest defensive structures was Grolman Bastion. The main building is not open to the public, and I got run off by a guard when I tried to go in one of the gates. But I went into another one, and nobody stopped me, though I couldn't get far, and only around to the back of the building for a bit rather than inside. There were some businesses that were installed in parts of some of some of the ancillary buildings. To the north and south, stretching out on lines like walls, were these long, fortified hills that had paths along the top of them and were wooded like a forest. I walked on the paths, and it was really creepy up there. There was nobody up there for a while except for a few kids running around, and quite a ways down the path, in the middle of the forest, I saw a couple of cops just incongruently sitting there. They were facing the other way so I just backed away quietly so as not to attract their attention. All along the hills stretching either way from the bastion, there were patially buried brick buildings, and vents to stuff that must have been underground. I could glimpse a walking path on the other side of the bastion down the back side of the hill, but it was too steep to get down in that direction, and I couldn't find any path down the hill to get there.


My plan was to go to Riga, Latvia from Kaliningrad. I went to the bus station in Kaliningrad to look at the bus schedules. But I found out there is only one bus that leaves every day from Kaliningrad to Riga, and it leaves late at night and travels overnight. I am not terribly keen on overnight buses, but I kept it in mind as a last resort. I saw there's another bus that leaves twice a week, but it departs really early in the morning, which I preferred not to do also, since I'd have to get to the bus station from the hostel really early, but it'd be better than traveling overnight. Also, since the bus only leaves twice a week, I would have had to extend my stay in Kaliningrad for three nights longer than I had planned. Now all of these options were doable, but not preferable.  But I cobbled together another option. There are domestic buses that go to Sovetsk, a town in Kaliningrad Oblast right on the Lithuanian border, just about every half hour. So I figured I would just go to the bus station and get a ticket on the spot when I was ready to leave, rather than reserving one in advance, I'd stay in Sovetsk for a couple of days, and then I'd catch the early morning bus to Riga from Sovetsk instead of from Kaliningrad, when it would arrive later in the day and not super early. That option would require me to either spend three nights in Sovetsk, or extend my stay in Kaliningrad another day and spend two nights. I chose to stay in Kaliningrad one more day, since Sovetsk is a small village and I figured Kaliningrad would be more interesting (though a woman who worked at the hostel told me that Sovetsk was an interesting town with lots of history). And this was a rare moment in my trip when I had absolutely no future plans already reserved.



So, with that plan in mind, I made some future plans in for the next few weeks, except for the bus to Sovetsk, which I planned to get at the bus station right before leaving. That was a bit risky because the buses could be full, but with buses leaving multiple times in the day, I figured there would be one that had space. And, in fact, when I got to the bus station, they sold me a ticket for a bus heading in three minutes, so I got on the bus and left immediately.


I stayed at: Hostel Akteon Lindros, Ulitsa Svobodnaya 23 apt 22, Kaliningrad,  236000, Russian Federation. The hostel would have been nice, but my room smelled horribly of pesticide, and it was nauseating. The place was otherwise decent. There were only Russian speakers staying there, and only one staff member spoke a little English, but she spoke Spanish much better, so we conversed in Spanish much of the time. About half of the people staying there seemed like workers rather than tourists. The hostel was easy to find and only up a few steps. You have to be buzzed in to get in, sometimes it takes a while, but there is staff there 24 hours. It had a nice kitchen, and refrigerator space seemed available the whole time I was there. Also there was little problem using the bathrooms though the were only two of them.

Down And Out In Astrakhan

I arrived on the train in Astrakhan, Russia, fairly late at night. The hostel had emailed me and asked me when I was going to get there. I looked at my ticket and it said I was arriving at around 9:30 pm Moscow time, so I figured it would be about a half hour walk from the train station, and I told them 10 pm. But, actually, it was a little blip of time zone that was an hour later than Moscow; I had just assumed it was the same time zone, since all the other cities I had been at close to the same longitude had been in Moscow time. Let the lesson be here, always check. All train tickets are issued in Moscow time, regardless of local time zone, so you always have to translate. I guess I just got lazy about it.

I realized just as we were coming into the station that I was going to arrive about an hour later than I had told the hostel. No sweat, I figured, they are probably used to people who give estimates that are off a bit because shit happens. When I got off the train, I checked Google Maps for the way to get to the hostel. The first five blocks we're no big deal, just walking on well-lit commercial streets. But then I had to turn into this dark, overgrown mudpit with a lot of abandoned houses that looked really sketchy late at night (and even in the daytime it looked sketchy, as I found out when I went back to the station), and it was so dark that I couldn't even see where I was stepping, and there were a lot of deep ruts. Plus, parts of it looked like I was just walking through someone's back yard. I'm not all that crazy about getting into a strange city late at night anyway. I prefer to walk to where I'm staying, or if it's a really long way, I'll try to get public transportation. I've only gone by taxi a couple of times. So I had ignored all the taxis that tried to hawk me at the train station, in favor of hoofing it. Also, I never know whether taxis in a foreign place are crooked or dangerous, which they sometimes can be.

So after I came out of the dodgy looking stretch (it wasn't all that long, maybe a half a kilometer or so, but I had to take it really slowly because I couldn't see a thing), I came out, and saw there was a large police vehicle parked right near the road there, maybe to catch people who have just gotten off the train coming into town. There were five cops standing there, and they were busy with some other traveler, going through his stuff, and asking him a bunch of questions. Nothing to see here. Just pretend you don't see it and keep going. So I just averted my eyes and kept moving, and I had just about thought I had passed the engulfment zone, when I heard a shout in Russian behind me. I just ignored it at first, but then I heard more shouts that we're more insistent. I turned around and a Russian policeman was hurriedly approaching me. He motioned for me to go back to the car where the others were waiting. He seemed a little pissed that I had ignored his commands and that he had to come after me.

I got back to where the vehicle was, and two of the cops were busy with the other guy, but one cop started interrogating me in Russian. I just meekly said, "Ni ponimayu", which means, "I don't understand". The cop then asked me, "English?", and I nodded. He asked me, "Passport?", and I nodded again, but made no move to produce it. He then motioned me to open my big backpack. I had a lock on it, so I had to undo it, and it was so dark I could hardly see the combination dial. But I got it undone, and he went through every single thing in every pocket, leaving it all in disarray. Then he asked to go through my little backpack, which I carry on the front, and then my fanny pack. He was very thorough, and went through everything, leaving my meticulously packed stuff just scattered all around in the dark. They seemed frustrated that I couldn't answer any of their questions, and just gave up on trying to question me. Then they just waved me off and told me I could go. I had to shove everything back in to my backpacks haphazardly and get them closed, which wasn't an easy task, since they were overstuffed anyway even with everything neatly packed. The funny thing was, they never did check my documentation. I headed down the road, a little shaken by the experience, and since this confrontation had taken about a half hour, I was now an hour and a half later than I had told the hostel I would be.

Finally I found the hostel, and it was well-marked on the outside, which sometimes is not the case when it comes to Russian hostels. I followed the signs up one flight of steps, and the door was locked. So I tried what I thought was a doorbell, but I don't think it worked. Nobody was answering the door at all. I tried knocking several times, and nobody answered. Great, it looked like I was going to have to sleep in the hallway. So I set up my little backpack as a pillow, and lay down on the floor outside the door for a while. Well, that verily sucked, so I got up and tried knocking on the door one more time. Finally a woman answered the door. She was just a tenant, but she spoke really good English, and she said the owner was not there. She asked if I had told them I was coming, and I said yes, but I was a little late. She had the owner's phone number, so she called him, and he approved letting me in, so she did. Well, I had to figure out where the room was, and just pick a bed for myself, and then figure out where everything else was, like the bathroom and the kitchen. Usually someone will show you all that stuff. But I was glad at least that I had gotten in and had a bed for the night. There was one other guy asleep in the big room filled with bunks, and she and her boyfriend were in a private room to themselves.

The TV in the common room was on, and right as I got settled in, the show "Big Love" was starting, dubbed in Russian. I watched it for a while, but couldn't really understand it, so I blew it off and just started channel-surfing. The TV was hooked up to some strange glorified internet-dongle-slash-cable-box with a ton of channels from all over on it. I watched a French channel for a while, but then finally turned in, as it was getting late.

The next day, I woke up, and a hostel manager was waiting for me to collect my money and give me a key. That was all I saw of management there, except for the owner dropping by briefly later that night, which was great because he was able to fix the wi-fi, which hadn't worked at all up until that point.

I walked around the city, and toured the Astrakhan Kremlin. Astrakhan is in southern Russia, close to the Kazakhstan border, right next to the European part of Kazakhstan (it sounds strange to talk about European Kazakhstan, but about 10% of it is in Europe). I wanted to visit the Volga River Delta, but I found out you need a special border permit to do that, which is a bureaucratic mess and will take days at the least, maybe even weeks. So I didn't have the time, as I was only in Astrakhan for two more days.

When I returned from checking out the city of Astrakhan, it was just me and the other guy in my room.  He checked out the next day, leaving me the next night as the only person in the whole hostel, which was kind of weird. I went out for a second day of city exploration, mostly walking along the Volga River, but also checking out other parts of the city I hadn't seen yet. When I got back that evening, it was to the freaky ghost hostel, where I was the only restless spirit there.

Hot Times At The Hot Springs In Tyumen

I arrived in Tyumen on the Trans-Siberian train very early in the morning. I got my stuff together on the train, loaded up my backpacks and proceeded to walk about two kilometers to the hostel​ where I was staying. When I got there, the room was pretty full and all they had available was an upper bunk. It had been a while since I had been assigned an upper bunk. In the last few hostels I had stayed in, they been empty enough that only lower bunks had been available, or I had just gotten the lower bunk by the luck of the draw. It was no big deal though, of course, I prefer lower bunks. But you gotta build some bunk karma, so every once in a while you get an upper bunk to take one for the team. Funny, when I was a kid, I always liked the upper bunk better.

As soon as I checked in, I wanted to look around the city. The city looked more modern than most of the other Siberian cities I had been in, and had a much more European vibe, even though I was still in Asia. So I walked around the town and just checked things out.  In the early evening, I ended up stumbling across a pre-Victory Day parade, so I made a video of part of it. After I had finished my wanderings through the city for the day, I got back to the hostel, and there were a bunch of friendly, talkative Russians who were curious about this American guy who didn't seem to fit their stereotypes at all. We had an amazingly broad range of conversation, considering that I know very little Russian, and each of them only knew a few words of English. But I really hit it off with my bunkmate, the guy in the lower bunk. I wish I could remember his name. I also wish that I had gotten some contact with him on social media; I realized a few days later when I was leaving the city that I hadn't. I find that a lot of Russians are not on Facebook, but Instagram is really big here. I started using Instagram just recently; I joined a few years ago but never used it and never took the time to figure it out much after the first couple of times that I had tried to do stuff with it. But I hadn't taken​ enough time to figure it out, so I didn't get far with it. Later in the night, a Russian guy who spoke English really well showed up with his girlfriend, and he kind of acted as an interpreter, which made the conversations easier. But he only stayed that one night. I asked him how he learned English, and he said it was almost all from movies and TV, and that he hardly ever had opportunities to speak English with anyone. He said he appreciated the chance to practice, though he spoke really well.

Over the next couple of days, my bunkmate and I had some remarkable conversations considering our linguistic differences. We discussed things like JFK's assassination, our respective countries' involvement in Syria, the situation in Chechnya, and so on. He was very surprised to find out that there were homeless people in the US, and that they could be found on street corners in cities holding signs asking for money. He asked me how much people made in the US; I told him I thought most people probably made between about two and three thousand a month, and he was surprised that it wasn't more. But I told him that many people made a lot less, and maybe had to cobble together several part-time jobs, and that jobs might not pay as much or have as many benefits as they used to; he made a wry face and said it was the same in Russia. He said he thought we were a rich country, and I told him we are, but the rich people have all the money. He laughed, and said, "Just like Russia!"

While in Tyumen, I wanted to visit one of the many hot springs in the area. I found that there were many hot springs within a fairly short distance, so I looked into trying to get to one of them. I found that some of them were attached to expensive resorts, and most of them were some distance out of town, and I couldn't find any information on transportation to get to most of them. Finally, I found one hot spring, Yar Hot Springs, that was right on the edge of the city, and there was a city bus that went there that only cost twenty-five rubles. What a deal!

I started walking towards the bus stop, and stopped to look at some plants popping up in a garden. The Russian spring is just starting, so green stuff is starting to come up. I was trying to figure out if some leafy stuff that I had seen elsewhere was a weed or some kind of cultivated plant, when I saw a gentleman with a sour-looking face approaching me. He stopped in front of me and unleashed a barrage of hostile-sounding Russian at me, ending in a question that it sounded like he wanted an answer to. I did not pick up on anything he said, since my Russian is still fairly terrible (though I'm studying every day hoping to get to at least a moderately communicative level), so I answered him with, "Izvinitye, ni ponimayu", which means, "Sorry, I don't understand". Well, I understood his response. He asked me, "What don't you understand?" OK, this is definitely hostile. I thought about answering him in English, and then saying, "Did you understand?", but I thought better of it and just gave him a half-smile and a wave, and scurried on my way.

I arrived at the bus stop, and waited for the bus. I was looking at the bus maps, and they didn't reveal much information. Many countries I've been to put their bus maps on straight lines with the names of the stops, and that's the way they did it here. But I sure wish they would draw actual maps. I wouldn't know where the listed stops were even if this was in English.

It turned out the bus I had to take was one of the big van type buses packed with seats, with a partition separating the driver. On most Russian city buses that I've taken, there is a conductor circulating among the passengers who takes your money and issues you a ticket at some point after you board (they use this same model in Vietnam). But there was no conductor in this bus. Usually I try to see what the other passengers are doing for payment, but I guess I didn't notice anything about that when I got on the bus. So at the next stop, I just passed twenty-five rubles to the driver through the window in the partition, and that seemed like the correct method. Every country does buses differently. Who do you pay and how? Some places have a driver and a conductor, others just a driver. Some places make you buy a ticket beforehand. On some buses, you pay at the beginning, and on some, at the end.

I missed my stop, even though I was monitoring Google Maps for where I had to get off. But Google Maps was doing a thing it does sometimes where it takes a minute to catch up, and suddenly the dot shifted to a place past my stop. Oh, well, I figured I would just get off at the next stop and walk a little farther, no big deal. The next stop was right outside the sign marking the city limits, and I got off there. On the way walking back into town, I passed a stolovaya, which is a cafeteria-style canteen with cheap food. I like to eat at these places because they are very cheap and popular with locals. Though all of the main courses are usually meat-based, (why did auto correct just change meat-based to near-impossible? I just changed it back) there are a lot of tasty side dishes that I cobble together a meal with. I had buckwheat groats with a cabbage-filled salad, tea, and a tasty onion piroshki. A piroshki is a bread roll filled with some filling, usually cabbage (kapusta) or potato (kartoshka), but occasionally with mushroom (gryb) or onion (luk). They are all over the place in little restaurants and street stands.

After eating, I moved onward toward the hot springs. Yar Hot Springs only charged 250 rubles to enter, but they also had little cabins there for rent that you could pay modestly more for. So, if you're thinking about staying in Tyumen, that's an option that would let you use the hot springs whenever you want during your stay. It looked like the price was about twice as much as the hostel where I'm staying, but still a deal for a single room, though the rooms looked tiny, and I have no idea what amenities the cabins have.

There was a changing room with a shower, but no place to lock up belongings, so I just hung a plastic bag I had brought a change of clothes in along with my wallet and phone on a hook near the hot spring pool, and kept my eye on it. It seemed like people were mostly just leaving their stuff laying around, so it seemed pretty safe. But you never know, there could be opportunity snatchers anywhere.

After I was there a few minutes, a bunch of Russian police in uniform came in, made some announcement that I didn't understand through a bullhorn, and then wandered around the grounds. They didn't mess with anyone, though. It seemed like there were a bunch of police hangers-on, people who were buddies with the police and hanging out with them, or maybe even police in plain clothes. I just try to keep out of trouble and nobody messed with me. The lifeguards seemed pseudo-police-y too. They would occasionally say something through a bullhorn, or release a siren-sounding alert with a stern instruction to someone, stuff like stay off the ropes or telling kids not to run...typical lifeguard commands.

The water was a brownish color and very minerally...I tasted small amounts on my lips, and it seemed like there were a lot of salts and minerals in it. I hung out in the pool for quite a while, and discovered there was a little walled-off section that was even hotter. It was very relaxing, but I realized I'd have to get out of the pool into the cold, windy weather, so I readied myself for that. I got out of the pool, got dressed, and then stopped in the little cafe that they had on the premises.

I just stopped in the cafe to sit for a bit and drink a soda. A few people came in and out while I was there, and there was a really drunk couple who were drinking a lot of booze while I was there. I saw them go through a bottle of vodka, then they ordered another bottle, and invited me over to drink Schnapps with them. I said, "nyet, spasiba," several times, as I'm not really drinking these days, but they were very insistent, and came over to my table to sit with me. I told them, "nyet alcohol", which was about all I could manage to communicate about why I wasn't joining them. They said, OK, then ordered beers. Apparently many Russians don't think of beer as alcohol. Last year, when I was traveling in Eastern Siberia, a guy in a hostel told me that we Americans probably think of Russians as heavy drinkers, but he had a neighbor who didn't drink at all. But in the course of the conversation, he later indicated that his neighbor drank beer.

So they poured me a beer, and I kept begging off, and finally pushed it away. I tried to be gracious about it. Anyway, the wife ended up drinking the beer. They told me their names were Sasha and Olga. After a while, the guy was so drunk I though he was going to puke on me a couple of times, and his wife was hanging all over me and pushing her legs against mine; I couldn't tell if it was flirty or she was just so drunk that it was for support, but I suspected the latter. He started ranting about Obama and giving him the finger.

This drunken, aggressive vibe was getting a little weird for me, so I started contemplating an exit strategy. They kept trying to get me to go with them in their car to their house, but I didn't want to be driven by people that drunk, and I didn't want to go from the edge of town to who knows where, and who knows how I'd get back. Finally Olga went out to smoke, and Sasha went to the bathroom, so I darted out the door to go catch my bus back into the city. But they ended up leaving right after me, and caught up with me, and kept saying stuff about money; maybe they wanted me to give them money, but I just wanted to move on. A guard at the gate asked me if everything was "normalna" (OK), and I smiled and answered, "Normalna". But I used the break in continuity to break away and walk faster, and they didn't catch up.

I walked to the bus stop and caught the bus back into town; that evening was pretty uneventful, but I had more conversations with my bunkmate. By that time, the room has emptied out, and I probably could have changed to a bottom bunk, but I just stayed in my bunk out of inertia.

The next day was Victory Day, May 9. I was planning to go out and check out the activities, but I procrastinated, paying bills and stuff, and ordering train tickets and hostel reservations online, and didn't get out until two in the afternoon. But by that time, it was mostly over. I guess it's more of a morning thing. I walked around the city, but only encountered groups of people in uniforms and wearing ribbons milling around after the celebrations. Oh well. But at least there were fireworks in the evening that several of us watched from the hostel balcony.

The next day, I had to take off on the train. I packed my stuff, said, "Da svidaniya, udachny", to my bunkmate, and left for the train station to take off for Kazan in Tatarstan. I looked at my electronic train tickets, which I had been able to use without printing before, but they didn't have a train number, car number or seat number on then, so I figured I had better get them printed at the train station. So I went to a window, and they printed tickets with all the required info on them.

Finally on this trip, I would leave Siberia, and cross over into European Russia. When I got on the train and got in my compartment, I found that I was the only one in the compartment, and there were even very few in the whole car; maybe only two other compartments were occupied. The pravadnitsa stopped by to offer me tea or coffee; I opted for a coffee. About a half hour later, I closed the door to my compartment for some solitude. After a few minutes, to my surprise, some woman barged in to my closed compartment to try to sell me some shawls. All I could think was, "what the fuck are you doing in my compartment." I kept just saying, "nyet" and didn't let on that I didn't speak much Russian and didn't understand anything she was saying in her obnoxious hard sell. What are you doing, lady, casing my compartment? Finally, I said, "Nyet, nyet, nyet!" very aggressively and waved her out, and she left. That was the first time anybody has ever just pushed their way into a closed compartment I was in and it kind of annoyed me.

Anyway, here I now sit on the train to Kazan, Tatarstan, awaiting new adventures.

May Day in Novosibirsk

I woke up this morning and packed my stuff to take a bus to Tomsk. I repacked my bags and left my big backpack at the hostel because I'll be coming back in three or four days. I'm taking a smaller bag with just some essentials to Tomsk. I knew it was May Day but didn't think much of it. When I got to Red Avenue I quickly found that they were preparing for a May Day Parade. The parade hasn't started yet as of now but groups are assembling on Red Avenue.

I had to pass a certain corner I'm not too crazy about. Often in former communist countries there are barriers along streets dictating where you can go. On this particular corner there are barriers along all four corners of the street. You can cross the street if you go into the metro station underground, but the metro station leads into an underground mall. This particular underground area is fairly byzantine and twisty, and I often come out on the wrong cormer. You immediately have to go the wrong way to cross the street and then through a series of chambers that lead you past storefronts. Also, one of the corner stations is shut down for construction so you just can't come up in that corner at all.

I walked down Red Avenue and watch the various groups assembling for the parade and people getting together by the side of the road to be spectators. As I pull up to a big central square the police are not letting anybody past that point and they pulled me over for a document check and a search. This is not going to be easy now heading to the bus station because a lot of the way there is blocked and I'm going to have to walk a good deal around where I wanted to go. It's too bad that I'm going to miss the May Day Parade though because I have to get to the bus station.

I'm walking around the affected area but constantly finding that there are police blockades so I'm having to walk farther and farther out. I hope I can get back into the bus station without any problems. I left the hostel about two hours before the bus is scheduled to leave and under normal circumstances it would be a half an hour walk to the bus station but now I don't know how long it's going to take.

I walked up to the bus station and saw there was a police blockade right around it. But there was a walkway several meters away that I took and I did not have any problems. So now I'm at the bus station with about half an hour to spare getting ready to take the bus to Tomsk.

Visiting Vladivostok in the Russian Far East

I arrived in Vladivostok on the evening of May 22, 2016, right around sunset.  It was a gorgeous sunset over Amur Bay coming into the city.  The Trans-Siberian journey had been amazing, and I had gotten to experience many different classes of the train in my journey from Ulan-Ude, stopping at Chita, Birobidzhan, Khabarovsk, and, finally, Vladivostok. So this would be the end of this leg of the Trans-Siberian.  When I had arrived in Ulan-Ude, my original intention had been to turn west toward Moscow and St. Petersburg, and end up in Europe shortly thereafter.  But, when I got on the Russian Railways website to buy my tickets for the Russian trains, I suddenly and impulsively decided to go east instead, towards Vladivostok.  I had no idea how this would work out in the long run, and am still figuring out as I go.  But, fuck, here I am in Asia, and there is this vast amount of stuff to see in this continent.

When I had originally started my journey, I had thought that I would spend a couple months in Australia, then head up through Southeast Asia, anchoring in Thailand, and visiting Laos and Cambodia, maybe even stopping in Malaysia and Indonesia on the way.  But the visa requirements for Russia and China soon threw cold water on that plan.  The deal is that for both Russia and China, you can only apply 90 days before you are going to go, and no earlier.  Plus, you have to map out your itinerary for those countries to apply for the visas, and you are supposed to have an exit strategy that you can show them.  But if you enter again at a later time, you don't really have to show all that stuff.  I was lucky in that I got multiple entry visas to both countries; for China, I got a ten-year visa, and for Russia, I got a three-year visa.  But I still had to plan it out and show where I was going to both countries to get the visas in the first place.  Since I could only apply 90 days prior to entry, I had to truncate my trip to Australia (two months came down to three weeks), and I had to completely blow off Southeast Asia, at least before China.  But it was worth it, because the linch pins of my trip were the Trans-Mongolian and the Trans-Siberian Railways; those were the main things that I was planning for.

So I guess the one of the reasons I changed my mind and went east in Russia instead of west, was that if I was going to take the Trans-Siberian Railroad, I was going to check out deep Siberia.  And I could always redouble at some point and go the other way, though I'm still not sure how that is going to play out.  But it will, it'll just be several months later than I originally thought it would.  And my journey, which I originally thought would take a year, is now maybe expanding to two years.  Or maybe even longer.  Hell, I don't know...I'm just going with the next thing that happens. And nothing is set in stone.

When I got to Vladivostok, I set off walking from the train station to the hostel where I was staying.  I stayed at Optimum Hostel, on Aleutskaya Street just a few blocks away from the train station, so it was fairly easy to get to.  The building where the hostel is is called “Grey Horse” by the locals, and is apparently an important landmark in the middle of the city.  One of the distinguishing features of the hostel is that there is a huge statue right in front of it.  Actually, the statue is directly in front of the building right next door, but both buildings are on a hill raised up from the street and are together in the same plot up the stairs from the street.  After a day or so, I went up to look at the statue to see what dignitary was depicted in full metallic splendor, and, to my surprise, it was Yul Brynner.  Apparently, he was born in Vladivostok, so city decided to honor homeboy.  I would often wonder as I passed the statue every day if people ever came up to Yul to ask him questions about their destiny, as he sat there, on his pedestal, gazing off to one side with his arms authoritatively resting on his hips. Yul, dude, should I move into a yurt in the fringes of Mongolia?  Should I bet it all on red? Are the voices in my head telling me the truth? OK, now I'm just having too much fun.

The hostel was a nice place to stay but crowded, and it didn't seem all that social to me, but maybe that was because I didn't speak Russian and almost everybody staying there was Russian. Very few Russians speak English, especially in Siberia...it is not like Europe, where almost everybody you encounter will speak English pretty well.  The common area was also small, and it would fill up fast if five or six people were in there, so if it was packed to capacity, it was hard to hang out there.  But at least it had a nice kitchen to cook in, once again, if it wasn't being used.  It didn't really seem like much of a hangout place, but more of a place to park and sleep at night.  Which was fine with me, because I mostly spent the greater part of my time there checking out the sights.

So, of course, the next morning after I arrived, I set out to explore Vladivostok.  One of the first places I find is the walk along Sportivnaya Harbor on Amur Bay, which I make a ritual of heading down to almost every evening that I am in Vladivostok.  The views of the bay from the shoreline boardwalk are beautiful (especially right around sunset), there are fountains with multi-colored lights that dance to music played in the streets, the cliffs along the edge of the bay are stark and imposing, and there is a whole social scene there centered around restaurants, bars and little snack booths along the bay.  But it is a powerfully peaceful and joyful place to spend your evenings while in Vladivostok.  You can also view it from several levels; there are streets above the cliffs that run along the bay, and even higher up on the hills, you can see the bay from imposing heights.

One of the next places that I found in Vladivostok was the top of Eagle's Nest Hill, the highest point in the center of Vladivostok. There is this freaky labyrinth of steep rickety stairs and goat paths that lead up the cliffs to the top. It is sort of an alternative transportation system, one that requires some discovery and innovation. Of course, I could have just taken the road, but that's no fun. I first discovered the bizarre staircases when I was making my way along the road and I noticed that a whole bunch of people were ducking behind this building and disappearing.  I watched several people do this, and almost just kept moving up the road, but curiosity got the best of me, and I had to see what was going on behind the building.  What was there was a rickety old partially corroded metal staircase that wound its way up the hill.  Once I had gone up that staircase, there were more staircases, and narrow, steep paths up the hill.  I wasn't sure where all this was going to end up, but as long as it kept going up, I figured it was going in the direction I was going in.  And logic would dictate that somebody must have put that stuff there to get to a destination. Actually, since then, I've found these little staircases tucked away in discreet places are all over Vladivostok, hidden between buildings, creeping up behind monuments, winding up hillsides.  Also, there is an expectation that spaces that are often considered proprietary in other countries are used for pedestrian traffic.  But, anyway, I got to the top of Eagle's Nest Hill, and the view of Vladivostok was majestic.  I could see all over the city, both bays that run around Vladivostok (Amur Bay and Golden Horn Bay), and all the way down the Vladivostok Peninsula that juts out into the water.

And that got me thinking about my next quest in Vladivostok.  To walk to the end of the peninsula and see what is there.  But on the way down from Eagle's Nest Hill, I walked through Pokrovskiy Park, a nice little space in town bordering a cathedral, and there were a whole bunch of tye-died hippies and punky looking kids holding an event called the “Freemarket.”  There were a whole bunch of clothes, books, and other stuff, and there were people there making music while the crowd sang along in Russian.  I was wishing that I could get through the language barrier to talk to people about the event, but nobody seemed to speak English, and I know pathetically little Russian.  I had walked through the park on the way up, also, but there was no gathering there earlier in the day.  On the way down, though, I discovered some more alternative staircases and pathways tucked away, including a running path by the park that was sort of part of several apartment parking lots...more examples of how more private spaces were accepted as public walking space.

So the next day I set off from my hostel on my quest to see what was at the end of the Vladivostok Peninsula.  It was quite a walk...I ended up walking about 35 kilometers in total getting there and back, and exploring around the vicinity.  This time I walked more along Golden Horn Bay, which is the other bay abutting the Vladivostok Peninsula.  I had been on Amur Bay a lot on the other side, and this was the first time I had seen this bay.  But a lot of it ran along commercial docks and secure harbors (lots of areas with security guards that I didn't really investigate because I didn't want to deal with security hassle), and was also on the other side of the railroad tracks from where I was walking, so it was quite a while before I was able to meet up with the bay.  Some of the roads on the outskirts of the city were not terribly pedestrian-friendly, but I trudged down the street anyway.  And what I found at the end of the peninsula was a little harbor park that connected to a path that went way out into the bay to the lighthouse at the end.  The path was the only thing sticking out of the water, and the lighthouse was closed and locked up, but still a worthy destination, jutting way out into the water from the land. On the way back, there was a large hill that I wanted to get to the top of, because I figured there would be some nice views there.  But it was mostly covered with private estates that barred entry to outsiders.  I kept going up different roads, trying to find a road that would break through to the top, but always found some gate or guardpost that would not let me pass.  I found one that was just a bar across the road, and I was able to walk around it, but then I got sent back by a guard who told me that I shouldn't be there after walking a short bit. So I was never able to make it up that hill, much less to the top.  But it was a worthy bit of exploration to see what was going on around there.

The walk took up much of the day, and I had built up an appetite, so in the evening I went to a столовая, or "stolovaya", to eat dinner. If you are ever in Russia and want a cheap, solid meal made up of good Russian cuisine, be sure and visit one of these places. These are cafeteria-style, amazingly cheap restaurants left over from the days of the Soviet Union, where you can easily get a lot of food for between two and four bucks. I just had a huge, tasty meal there for really cheap.

The morning fog at times is really spectacular.  The fog and the steep slopes in Vladivostok are part of why the city is called “Russia's San Francisco.”  I just sat in front of the hostel one morning and watched the fog roll through the city.  It envelops the hills, and creates a smoky background to an already beautiful city.

There are statues of Siberian Tigers all over the place.  I think there are a couple of likenesses that are famous, and then there are a whole bunch that are just there but don't have as much renown. The Siberian Tiger is the biggest fucking cat creature in the world.  Their habitat mostly covers Khabarovsk Krai and Primorsky Krai (which is the Krai that Vladivostok is in). People around here seem damn proud of their Siberian Tigers...also called Amur Tigers because their habitat runs along the Amur River and Amur Bay.  They used to cover a lot more territory, but hunting, poachers, and the encroachment of civilization has driven them into either a small habitat in Siberia or zoos. But, damn, it looks like there are less than 600 of these fuckers left  in the wild in Siberia.  I'm just happy that I haven't had to stare one down in the field (yet). Because you know who would win that confrontation.

Vladivostok is not too far from North Korea.  I thought about trying to make a road trip (or a boat trip, that would probably get me there faster), but then found out that it is damn near impossible for Americans to enter DPRK from Russia.  Oh, well.

Then the next day I ended up meeting with my new friend Denis.  He is an American who has relocated to Vladivostok and lived there for several years, and is a friend of a friend.  We had a great lunch together, and I got to hear his interesting stories about Vladivostok and his experiences in Russia.  It was good to meet up with somebody who could speak the same language as me, though I had been trying to pick up as much Russian as I could while I was in Russia.  But it was hard for me to converse with the people at the hostel, because most of the people there did not speak English (or any of the other languages I speak).
My next destination in Vladivostok was the S-56 submarine.  It was not too far from the hostel, along Golden Horn Bay. This was a submarine that was under active duty during WWII and is now beached as a museum.  It was interesting to crouch my way through the different chambers of the submarine, see the torpedo chambers (and there are even some torpedoes contained therein), and read the histories of the people who inhabited the submarine.  There is a square nearby (Admiralskiy Skver) with memorials to war dead...the Soviet Union had a staggering toll of people who perished, probably more than any other nation involved in the war.  There is a giant, Neptune-like figure in the square holding a huge trident.

There was an open market in the big square down the street from the hostel over the weekend. I bought some veggies and fresh dill there, and also some little Russian pastries, and made some lunch back at the hostel with buckwheat groats. There was some music playing there, and it was a pleasant place to hang out and see all the goods for sale.  Mostly it was food...it was pretty much a farmers' market.  But there were some other goodies as well.

Denis invited me to go with him and his wife Lena to Russkiy Island.  Russkiy Island is a beautiful, mostly wild place with a lot of spectacular views of the sea.  It has a catacomb of tunnels built all through it that were used for the Russian Military for many years, but are now a museum on the island.  I didn't enter the tunnels, but Denis told me that they went all over the place, and it was easy to get lost there.  Also, near the bridge that enters the island, there is a major university; I think is is called Far Eastern University.  We drove on some of the dirt trails on the island and found some great vista points. I wanted to go back and explore the island some more, but never had the chance to do so before I left Vladivostok. But Russkiy Island is a great place to spend the day hiking and there is so much to see there.

And then my next destination was the Vladivostok Funicular.  The Funicular is sort of a cross between a tramway and a streetcar, and goes up a very steep slope, almost like a ski lift.  It has two cars that are cantilevered against each other; one is red and one is blue. When one car is going up, the other is going down, and vice versa; since they are counterweighted it saves some energy in motion. They run on the same track, but in the middle it diverges into two tracks long enough for the two cars to pass each other.  There is also a stairway that goes alongside it if you choose not to take the Funicular.  It is not terribly long, but it is an interesting ride, and it is fairly cheap. After I took the Funicular, I ended up walking down the staircase to the same place I had started. It was really about the experience rather than the transportation.

All in all, Vladivostok was a really cool place to hang out.  I spent 11 days there in total, and up until this time, it was the city I had stayed in the longest.  But it was worth it.  I took a bus to the airport, and prepared to fly to Korea.

Khabarovsk and the Stinkfoot Witchhunt

I got to Khabarovsk on the Trans-Siberian after traveling from Birobidzhan. The train that I took was the first platskarny  (third-class) train I had taken, and my car was packed to the brim with Russian soldiers. It was not bad at all. They were very courteous and treated me well, even though a few of them whispered, "Amerikansky," and burst out laughing, when I first got on the train. But one guy even helped me with my bags on the train; I tried to beg off, but he was insistent. Third-class differs from second-class in that the compartments have no doors and there are more seats on the other side of the aisle, so they can pack more people into the compartment. It was a pleasant ride and many of the soldiers bided their time by playing cards.

Once the train crossed the Amur River, we were out of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, and into Khabarovsk Krai. Khabarovsk Krai is one of the last remaining habitats for the Siberian Tiger, which makes its home near the Amur River.

When I arrived in Khabarovsk, as soon as I got off the train, it started pouring rain big time. I had looked at the weather before I left Birobidzhan, and it looked like the rain that had been there for the last two days was clearing, and the forecast said no rain. But now the forecast had changed in the meantime. Since I saw that there was apparently going to be no rain, I had packed my umbrella and the rain flap for my backpack away deep in my pack. Big mistake.

I had planned to walk to the hostel.  It was almost 3 kilometers away, which would have been a manageable walk in full gear. But now that it was raining, there was no way; all my stuff would have gotten soaked. So I hailed a cab and scurried to get my stuff in it quickly in the pouring rain. I had the address, and it was easy to find where the hostel was; the only thing was neither the cab driver nor I could find a hostel there. I had to look up the hostel's phone number from the confirmatory email, and then let the cab driver talk to them. Soon a woman peeped her head out of an unmarked door, and I followed her up the steps to the hostel, which was on the second floor.

I was there in the hostel, sitting in the common room, when about a half hour later, another guy checked in. At the front of the hostel, there is a place to leave your shoes. Once the guy checked in and took off his shoes, there was an ungodly stench that permeated the entire common room. I mean, this was some of the worst stinkfoot that I had ever smelled in my life. I was on the verge of retching, and could not even stay in the room any more; I had to go back to my bedroom. After a while, I just went out to explore the city; it had stopped raining and the weather was nice. This made me realize that there are things you can do about sights and sounds you want to block out (earplugs and eye masks have worked pretty well for me), but not much you can do about a putrid smell, except to maybe open the windows or spray some air freshener.

After going around the city for a while, I came back into the hostel, and some guy looked at me accusingly, and said in broken English, "Do you smell something?" in a rehearsed fashion. Oh, shit, I thought.  They think it is me. Probably because I am the most unruly-looking guy there. I couldn't speak well enough  Russian to explain that it was another guy. I just murmured, "Not me," and went straight into my room.

But then I got paranoid and thought that maybe it could be me. I took off my socks and stuffed them in my face and inhaled deeply. Nothing. I couldn't smell any scent, bad or otherwise, at all. And with the putrid smell I had smelled before being so unmistakable, I'm sure I would have smelled something. I smelled my armpits.  OK, a little odor, but not overwhelming, and not any more than you'd expect from your average traveler. Next I had to smell my shoes, but I didn't want to do it in front of everyone. So I went out again, took off my shoes outside, and smelled them....once again, no bad smell.

Anyway, I got back again later, and nobody was saying anything about it to me. Whew. It was just a stinkfoot witchhunt, and I was pretty sure I was now in the clear.

Khabarovsk is definitely the coolest place I have been in Russia. It's a vibrant, big city, and there is lots of open space and a multitude of walking paths. It feels like it wouldn't be out of place in Oregon or Washington. I asked the woman working at the hostel what rents are like here, and it looks like they are in the $250-$350 a month range for the most part.

After walking around for a couple of days, I looked in the Lonely Planet Trans-Siberian guidebook on my Kindle to see if there was anything they could recommend in the city. It turned out that I had already found the main three things they mentioned that I would be interested in; the main boulevard, the walk through the long greenspace park, and the walk along the Amur River. I guess I'm just a magnet for the good shit.

Birobidzhan and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast

I almost feel like I'm getting ready to tell you about "James and the Giant Peach," or "Sigmund and the Sea Monsters" here. But, no, this is about Birobidzhan and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Whether or not you can pronounce it. Try it now: Биробиджан, Еврейская автономная област. See, wasn't that easy?

Once upon a time, there were a shitload of Zionists (there still are, but this is relating to their initial quest). This shitload of Zionists wanted to establish a homeland in Palestine in the 20s and 30s, because their whole deal said they were originally there many, many moons ago, and because the shit was really getting ready to hit the fan where a grand bulk of the shitload of Zionists lived. And besides, God.

One day the Mighty Emperor Stalin decided that maybe he could somehow corral the shitload of Zionists. So he offered them, before they even started taking over a chunk of Palestine, a righteous slice of virgin land in the Glorious Kingdom of the Soviet Union, which he was the boss of. He told them they didn't have to take nothin' over; they could just move there and live long and prosper. And he told them that they could speak Yiddish, not Hebrew, which many of them spoke already. And he told them that they didn't even need to be from his Glorious Kingdom that he was the boss of. They could be from anywhere. And they could even be from under the sea if they wanted (OK, he never really said that, but it probably would have been cool).

"Hmmmm", said the shitload of Zionists, in seven-part harmony with phasal diatonics, all stopping on cue (no, not really...there were no harmonies, they didn't all stop to ponder at the same time, and there is no such damned thing as phasal diatonics. Now, PHRASAL diatonics, that's a different story). "Sounds interesting...but can ya sweeten the deal?"

"Sure," said Emperor Stalin of the Glorious Kingdom (even though he would be pissed as shit at referring to the Proletarian Workers' Paradise of the Soviet Union as a fucking 'kingdom'.) I'll throw in private land ownership, and a free pony (no, there was no free pony. People had to wait for Emperor Vermin Supreme to come along for that to happen. But the private land ownership thing was for real).

"Hmmmm," said the shitload of Zionists again, this time in thirteen-part harmony with modified tonal structures relating to ambiguous polyphonous metafiltered structures of fractally limited submetabolic fields of perception (No, not in the least, but whatever). "Tell ya what, Mighty Emperor dude. What if some of us give it a shot and see how it goes?"

"Ok, here is my final offer. I'll throw in no anti-Semitism. There, at least. And, to sweeten the deal, I'll make it an AUTONOMOUS oblast, which doesn't even exist up to this point."

Well, this sounded like a pretty good deal to many of the shitload of Zionists. But not to most of them. A lot thought that this Mighty Emperor dude had a pretty, pretty, pretty spotty record on being cool throughout his Glorious Kingdom. And, God. He wasn't even diddly-squat on God. So most of them went with Plan A, which was the Palestine thing. We all know how that turned out.

But a significant number of people decided to spark up the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. So, in the 1930s, many started moving there. And some Swiss architect dude created The Matrix that they all lived in. But, the deal was, this was a mosquito-infested swamp with bitterly cold winters, even if The Matrix looked super-bitchin'.

So, word got back that this was one harshy buzz. But not until 1948, when tons of people had moved there, which was the height of the Jewish settlement into this God-forsaken frozen hell-swamp (OK, it's not really that bad. Really. I'm there now.). And, coincidentally, that was the same year that most of the shitload of Zionists made an Israel thing out of Palestine. And it was, like, warm there.

So most of the shitload of Zionists slowed down on moving to Биробиджан, and decided to move to the new Israel thing instead. And Биробиджан never again reached what it had been at its peak of Jewish population. But, true to his word, the Mighty Emperor Stalin didn't fuck with them at all there, though he fucked with them just about everywhere else that he could.

Like all Mighty Emperors do, one day the Mighty Emperor Stalin took a shit and died. His deal with Биробиджан, Еврейская автономная област, lived on, but in the 1950s, people pretty much stopped settling there. It picked up a little for a while, but it's been hemorrhaging people, and now only five percent of the people living in Биробиджан are Jewish, though the culture is protected and encouraged. 

So everybody living there is living happily ever after (whatever the fuck that means), though one day they will all take a shit and die. Probably not at the same time. The end.

Two Days On The Train

This is the longest leg of the Trans-Siberian train that I have taken yet.  It is the section from Chita to Birobidzhan, and I am spending two nights on the train. Siberia is big, and this is just a wee slice of it.

This is also the first time I have reserved an upper berth. It is really not too bad. There is a ladder that folds out of the wall to get up there, though originally I wasn't aware of that. There are also all kinds of amazing little secret nooks and crannies to keep your stuff in the upper berth, I guess to make up for the lack of space that you have otherwise. But after taking the Trans-Mongolian train and several legs of the Trans-Siberian, now I'm a train veteran. I know where the outlets are, so I can charge my device. There are only two in the car, in the hallway, and they are in high demand. Or, that is, until I discovered the secret third one by the bathroom that nobody had been competing for.  But now that everybody knows about that one from seeing me there, I bet it will be hard to use that one, too. Quite a contrast from the Trans-Mongolian, which had outlets in every compartment in the car. The provodnitsas and provodnitsas have extra outlets in their compartments, and I hear if you ask them nicely, they will let you charge your device.

I shared a compartment with Tatiana and Ariana, two lawyers from Ulan-Ude with Buryat features, and a Russian guy who wasn't very talkative, but was helpful when he could be. He got off fairly early from the train, so for the rest of the journey, there were only the the of us in the compartment. At least I didn't get put into a compartment with a bunch of vodka-crazed soccer hooligans or nationalists. Tatiana spoke a little bit of English, but her English was heavily broken (but still much better than my Russian). Between her English, my terrible Russian, a little pantomime, and Google Translate getting whipped out occasionally, we managed to communicate pretty well. Both of the lawyers were on the way to Khabarovsk to undertake some further lethal training. Unlike in the US, where lawyers have to take continuing legal education every year, they told me Russian lawyers have to undertake further study every five years. So they were on their way to do that. Tatiana told me her mother was a judge, and was retired, but there was no way she had the resources to travel around the world on the pension she had.

Tatiana asked me if I had been to any of the Buddhist temples in Ulan-Ude. I told her I hadn't.  She said I should go, because it would change my life. She said there were monks there who were herbal healers, and they were better than doctors. She told me about one monk who preserved his body so well that they say he is not dead, but in a state of perpetual meditation. She asked me if people did herbal medicine in the US, I told her that people sometimes did, but mostly on their own. She said she thought that was dangerous. I told her people sometimes consulted herbalists, but didn't often go to folk healers, but some Native Americans did.

The upper berth was really not bad at all. I would definitely prefer the lower berth, but now that I had an upper, it was OK. The only thing was that it got really hot up there. Russian trains are kept furiously hot anyway, and with heat rising to the top, it got insanely toasty up there. Luckily the window in our compartment had not been locked by the provodnik, so I was able to open the window at the top to let the gathered heat out when I needed to.

The train ride was really mesmerizing, even though it was two days long. The scenery was gorgeous, filled with Siberian taiga and steppe, with the occasional horse-riding shepherd or picturesque village filed with log houses and corrals. The restaurant car was a cool place to hang out for a change every once in a while. They didn't seem to mind if people bought anything, but it wasn't the gathering place that it had been previously when I had taken international trains. The domestic trains in Russia are mostly filled with Russians, unlike the trains that cross borders.

The train stopped often for little towns, and they would only let people off the train if they stopped for fifteen minutes or more. Some of the tiny towns only had stops of a minute to five minutes, just long enough for people to get on or off who were scheduled to do so, but there were a good amount of long stops where I was able to get off the train and run around (usually literally) the towns taking pictures, paying careful attention to the time, because the train will definitely take off without you if you aren't back by the time it is scheduled to leave. There was one time I had a little bit of a scare, because I got off the train in one town, crossed several tracks to get to the station, ran around snapping luxuries, but on my way back, another train (a freight train) arrived on one of the tracks between me and the train I needed to board. It was a REALLY long train, too. I saw Tatiana run across the tracks and beat it back to the train, but I was too far away to even consider that.  So I had to wait a long time for it to pass, and I barely hauled ass back to the train before they closed the doors. Whew.

About two hours before I was supposed to get off the train, I had gone to the space at the end of the compartment, because there are windows on both sides and it is a good place to take pics. There were two guys sitting there smoking. They started taking to me in rapid-fire Russian, and all I could do was shake my head, and say, "Ni ponimayu," which means, "I don't understand." Suddenly they realized that I was a rare foreigner on the train, and they asked to take their picture with me (that happens a LOT). I complied, and let them take a bunch of selfies with me. They introduced themselves to me as Sergei and Andrei, and insisted that I accompany them to their compartment for some vodka. My spidey-sense was tingling a little, but what the hell, sure.

We went to the front of the car, and they led me into a compartment that I didn't even know was there before. It was between the provodnik's sleeping compartment and his working compartment. It only had one upper and lower bunk, rather than two of each. Sergei and Andrei were very insistent about the vodka thing. They mixed two bottles of liquid together, one clear, and one tannish, and started pouring drinks. I only drank a couple and then begged off.  But then they wanted to talk about political stuff. They asked me what American people thought about Russian people.  Honestly, I didn't know how to answer that, because I have no idea what most people think, so I told them I didn't really know. They started asking me questions about Barack Obama, to which I just answered vaguely and in a non-committal fashion. Then Sergei and Andrei told me they were both police officers.  I tried to just keep the same expression on my face that I had had before,  and started thinking, "OK, time to start figuring out the exit strategy. "

Then Sergei asked me to trade phone numbers. I was a little hesitant to do that, but did anyway. I gave him my number, one/then the area code/then the number, and he put it into his phone and tried to call me.  It didn't work. I said I really didn't know how international codes worked, and what one needed to dial to get through. He insisted that I enter his number into my phone, and then try to call HIM. So I did. This time it worked. So now he had my number.  He kept saying, "Telefon?" I said, "Da." He asked when, I said,  "Cztery dnia (four days)." Andrei told me he was a boxer, and showed me a bunch of pictures of him in martial arts uniforms and in the ring.  Then he jokingly asked me if I wanted to box and started making sparring gestures.  I smiled and said no, but he kept asking and punching the air. I tried to beg off and leave at this point, because I needed to pack my stuff to get off the train in about a half an hour, but they were very insistent I stick around a little longer. So I did, and they played me a bunch of Russian pop music, asking for my opinion. I made thumbs-up gestures. But now I had to get my stuff together to get off the train....they were getting off a few hours later, as were most on the train. I finally managed to escape back to my compartment, and furiously got my stuff ready to debark. Tatiana told me I must be very careful, because I could be arrested, and I told her, "I know." I got my stuff together, went to the front of the train to get ready to debark, and Sergei and Andrei showed up there again to chat. The provodnik didn't seem to want to have anything to do with them.  I just answered their questions politely, and then when the train stopped, I bid them, "Da Svedaniya" (goodbye), and took off into town of Birobidzhan.

Sexist Fucking Anti-Disneyland in the Train Restaurant Car?

Hopefully, this post will completely horrify you. If so, then I've done my job. Not that I get, like, paid to toss out any of the malarkey I spew, but it's my job anyway, and I try to do it faithfully.

I wander back to the restaurant car on the train. I have enough food to eat, but what the hell, it's the experience that counts. I order some potatoes mixed with onions and mushrooms and other stuff. They are delicious.

There is this older, gray-haired, businessy-looking guy sitting across from me at a booth who is really creeping me out. He is one of these hyper-aggressive Russians, very demonstrative in his gestures, and extremely  loud. He keeps calling the waitress over and getting really physical with her. First he is rubbing on her arm while she is talking to him. Then he is stroking her butt next time she comes over. Then he calls her over again, and he is stroking his hands up the back of her leg and reaching up her dress to touch her butt.  I am doing a double-take, and thinking, what the flying fuck, do I step in and say anything. She is acting stoic about it. She's not, like, smacking him for getting out of line, or trying to move out of the way, or seeming to talk to her colleagues about what an asshole he is. Just acting professional, and trying to take his order. Every time she walks by, he gets all touchy, and she seems to be taking it in stride. None of my business, I tell myself. I don't know anything about the cultural cues here. I mean, I don't know if we have some kind of sixties "Mad Men" situation here where men are just condescendingly treating the women around them as their playthings, and that is embedded in the culture (to the detriment of those negatively affected by it), or if she has some kind of rapport with this guy.  None of my fucking business. None of my fucking business. Stay the fuck out of this interaction in Russia. But I am seriously ready to push his nose up into his brain with the heel of my hand if necessary. And I am really tempted to type a message into Google Translate for her to see if there is a hostage-y deal, and if intervention is warranted. But I don't.

She comes back and sits across from him at the booth. They seem to have some conversation that gets slightly agitated after a while. Both of them seem to be scolding each other. Then it calms down, and he shows her something on his phone. She watches for a while, and then shows him something on her phone.  They finish their conversation, he pays and leaves. I am just sitting there thinking, "what the fuck just happened here?" But, it's none of my fucking business.  And, jeebus, I didn't even want to look behind me to see how any of the other guys in the restaurant car were interacting with the waitress.

Somehow, it makes me flash back to the hostel I stayed at in Melbourne, Australia, in the St. Kilda district. I think I talked a little bit about this in a prevous blog post, but here is more about it, now that I have had some processing time. There were two English guys there that I nicknamed "Predator" and "Sidekick." Predator was the lead asshole, and Sidekick was his Boy Wonder figure. Predator was just treating all the women in the hostel like he owned them. His thing was doing handstand push-ups up against the wall while he grunt-counted loudly. Sidekick boasted how he hadn't eaten a vegetable in ten years (kudos, dude, on your unhealthy lifestyle...your arterial hardening will be a capstone of your misplaced attempts at masculinity). Their latent homosexual bonding consisted of saying the most insulting things about women that they could muster, and expecting the other guys in the room to nod/leer in bro-hood. I mostly tried not to interact with them at all.

Well, of course, this dynamic duo of cringeworthy behavior got predictably sauced later that night.  They stormed back into the room, and spent the night smacking the women awake in the wee hours, climbing into their beds and trying to make out with them, (mostly Predator while Sidekick cheered him on), and pissing them off vigorously, though one woman seemed to be accepting of this behavior, giggling and giving make-out-y cues. I was barely awake as this was going on, or I would have definitely said something about the women who were complaining. One woman recounted the tale to me the next morning about how she told them to back off, and both of them laughed it off and called her a cunt, whereupon she sang it to them with some severe vitriol. I was drifting in and out of sleep while this whole disaster happened. Mostly I remembered this whole night of carnage through the recounting of it to me the next morning by Taylor, the Canadian woman who called them out, as I was not really in a state of full consciousness. And she was really pissed because she had been especially helpful to them in giving them some job leads for their working holiday in Australia, and they repaid her with this reprehensible bullshit.  I think that even if anyone in the room was digging what was going on, it affected others seriously negatively.  To his credit, Sidekick did apologize to Taylor the next day.

Anyway, my whole point on this is I often have no clue as to whether to step in and say that seemingly rapey stuff is not fucking OK, or whether I would be interfering with somebody's consensual kinda dommy-subby thing. Sometimes it's damn clear, and sometimes it's not. And, hey, I am interested in exploring the possibility of having a rubby-nubby thing with someone who wants to touch me in secret places just as much as the next hominid. But I am totally not into doing things to other people that they don't want done to them, or giving my approval to anyone else doing that. 

I get the feeling that even talking about it opens me up to a rash of shit from hell from all sides in a rage-filled, badly askew world, but here it is anyway; let your neurons be rubbed raw with whatever. Cheers.