Signing on with a traveling circus will take you to some odd places, and the city of Vladivostok definitely fits this bill. There we were, booked in for a full engagement of seven days and six nights in Mother Russia, with the September air already turning frigid and me with no winter clothing packed in my duffel bag. All of the local hotels seemed to be unavailable for some reason or other, but our ever-resourceful ringmaster had managed to find us bunkspace within a recently-renovated college campus. The dorm rooms were so new that they still smelled of wet paint, and the gentle sounds of heavy construction lulled me to sleep after work each night. My room’s tiny television streamed eight separate channels of static, and as I unwound by eating Saltine crackers and watching the latest dispatches from Russia Today, I felt just as pampered as Gregori Rasputin must have been in the court of Tsar Nicholas II.
The Russky Island (no joke- that’s the actual name) campus made for a nice enough spot to pitch the big tent, but it was only a few days into the booking before the geographic isolation began to wear on me. It didn’t help one bit when somebody in our group found a weak Wi-Fi signal and Googled the island’s backstory: apparently the idyllic college campus had a been a Navy base back in a previous life, but it was essentially forgotten when the USSR collapsed. As a result, a small group of sailors actually starved to death! It was against this backdrop that, on our last day in town, a handful of intrepid carnies decided it was high time for us to make a break for the mainland.
Our goal, if we had one at all, was to sneak a proper peek behind the Iron Curtain and glimpse the real Russia. To look past the well-heeled bourgeoisie who’d been turning out for the show, and rub elbows with the true proletariat, But as it turned out, the city streets were mostly deserted on this crisp and clear Sunday afternoon. Our small group was one of the few walking about downtown, and it was a continual strain to ignore the trio of well-dressed gentlemen who always seemed to be lingering half a block back. Vladivostok’s central business district didn’t seem like much of a tourist draw, and there honestly wasn’t much else for us to do but hit up a Chinese restaurant, buy overpriced Matrushka dolls, and take in the unique architecture. Yes, it was a little boring, but like every other time I’ve blown off work for a few hours, the detour was well worth it.
When the afternoon began getting late, we finally realized that we had absolutely no clue how to make our way back out to the big top. Thankfully, after several painfully inept attempts at hailing a cab, a kind old Russian policeman noticed and took pity on us. He strode out onto the highway blacktop and, twisting one end of a massive, stereotypical handlebar mustache, stood in front of a cab and “requested” that the driver take us back across the bridge. And so even though our brief excursion into Vladivostok was kind of a dud, at least now I could say that I’d been to Russia, if only for a few hours. In fact, only a bottle of cheap vodka could have made the trip more authentic… but as it turned out, there were more than enough of those being passed around the coach seats on the 9-hour Aeroflot flight on to Moscow…
