Жизнь Экспатрианта

6/1 14:50, Vladivostok time

Now that it's proven itself in trials, I am proud to display the Maroncelli Ad-Hoc Knee Bandage, courtesy of Aeroflot (pictured below). This morning, my shower opened up my knee wound afresh -- it's a bit deeper than I had thought, and since I had only lighter-colored pants to wear, and wanted to avoid the embarrassment of knee bleed-through, I had to figure something out. What to do in a hotel room with all sorts of toilet paper (I've no idea why, but Gavan makes sure that if there's one thing you're sure no tto run out of, that's it), perfect for bandage manufacture, but no sticky substances whatsoever? Fortunately, my eyes lit upon the Aeroflot business class care package that I used to smuggle out my airplane spoon. My first plan was to use the dental floss therein to construct some sort of sling behind which the toilet paper could be held captive. But, even better, they considerately provided all their passengers with not only toiletries (in sample-sized packages, of course), but a soft, absorbent (certainly not one of their specification criteria, but nonetheless...), elactic-strapped keep-the-light-out-while-I'm-sleeping mask. Superb! And it works, too!

As far as actual Russia updates for today, training proceeded nicely; this last group is the same one with which I finished out last week, so various individual speech differences were not such a big deal. We fairly cruised through the day's offerings, finishing a bit early (as I expect, given the small class size). I was paid a very nice compliment, when the senior mechanic came up to me on the way to lunch and told me that he had already learned from me a number of things he hadn't known before. Assuming all those things are correct (which also means, assuming I explained them correctly in Russian) that's just excellent.

The weather has warmed up today; the sun is out, and the mechanics are starting to complain about the heat. Jus like at home. People are people no matter where you are, I suppose.

This morning, conversing with И Ч on the drive in, I learned that, in addition to the poor maintenance and quality standards left them by the Soviets, Primoriye roads have another strike against them. Apparently, unlike in the States, where the underground city water runs in two channels -- cold and sewer -- the Soviets have huge centralized water heating facilities, and pump three channels -- cold, sewer, and hot. That third channel wreaks havoc with the ground when the cold moves in and the nightly freezes begin. It basically ensures that, rather than the ground going through one freeze/thaw cycle a year, every morning when things start to get moving, the hot water passing through the pulse from the syste, somewhat thaws the ground, then every evening, once people are done for the day and in bed, the idle system allows the ground to cool once again, freezing to some extent. This happens then not once a year, but better than a hundred times a year. Roads freshly paved two years ago are potholed, cratered wrecks. What suck is that whole cities are built around the three-channel delivery system, and it'd be nearly impossible to change it now; for one thing, the infrastructure for delivering natural gas (or even the additional electricity that would be necessary in its stead) to each individual building just plain doesn't exist at this point. Primorye, like the rest of the Russian regions, is for the time being just having figure out better ways to make do with what it has. It means lots of business for road crews (or suspension repair shops...)

How Engineers Do Bandages 

6/1 07:16, Vladivostok time

The change of months, and with it, a larger-than-usual swarm of DPS-niks (that’s the name of the roads and highways division of the militia organization in Russia) yesterday afternoon, one assumes, out to make quotas before the calendar page flips. The car my sometimes-driver, Е, uses, lacks number tags – though otherwise being completely legal, of course... We’ve been pulled out of traffic a couple of times in the past week and a half, during which time, a few words and rubles exchange hands, and we go off on our merry way. I’ve asked Е why he hasn’t gotten the tags taken care of yet, he says he’s too busy to worry about it; the DPS stops are brief, relatively rare (he tells me I must be attracting the DPS-niks; he rarely gets stopped more than once a month), and not terribly expensive. So why bother?

Yesterday afternoon, the sun burned through the cloud cover that has shrouded Vladik since the weekend began. All of the promenade vendors were open again, so I had the opportunity to dine on what is becoming one of my two fair-weather standards – a shaurma, roughly describable as an Armenian burrito – prepared, as is I suppose the case with all outdoor market food, in the most screamingly unsanitary conditions imaginable (only slight exaggeration). Yum yum. The other thing С П turned me on to around here, I keep forgetting the name of. I only recall that it starts with ‘ch’ and ends with ‘a’. It’s an Uzbek (or maybe common to all the southern republics) item that is similar to an elephant ear with meat inside (and no cinnamon sugar). In general, though we are on the sea, I’ve tried to avoid overt seafood, since, due to the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean influence, the local seafood consists of a disturbing amount of nasty parts like shrimp heads, fish tails, and unidentifiable squid and octopus portions. You can’t avoid it completely, so I try to grab other options wherever possible.

Yesterday after training (which finished early due to a claimed lack of tools – more on that in a moment), I got a bit more of the Russian experience. I headed back to the scrap warehouse to see if I could scrounge up a couple more parts that I figured might have been useful the first go-around. While there, I found an air pressure gauge – the very thing that I was assured by the mechanics they did not have. I took my finds back to the machine shop to get them chopped apart for display. While I was there, I chatted with В В, the aged master of the shop. After we finished disassembling the parts, and just before we began cutting, he asked me how I like Russian vodka (a standard question for foreigners, it seems), then what I though of the Chinese variety. I laughed and told him that was a good joke. No, no he says, here – and pulls out a bottle of Chinese vodka from under his workbench. Then proceeds to offer me some and drink some himself. And then we went to use the steel-cutting tools. I checked – he does still have all his fingers (assuming he was born with the standard ten). Unbelievable.

While I was putting together my pressure-testing rig, I ran into the mechanic who had told me (even made a call on his radio to confirm) that the shop had no pressure gauges. I mentioned to him that he had “told me they didn’t have any gauges”, holding out the one I had found in less than thirty seconds’ searching. His response? “..and then we will have one.” Argh.

Today I kick into my last training session.

5/31 11:52, Vladivostok time

Well, it finally happened. Scant minutes ago I wrecked a pair of pants. One out of the five I brought isn't too bad, though, and it served as a good lesson for me. Here's how it happened:

As is my tendency, I was pacing while explaining the functioning of some valve or other. This time, as I have in the past days, I was pacing along the top of a ~5'-tall concrete beam which, with its partner, serves as a ramp/pit for working underneath trucks at the dealership. As is also my tendency, once I got cruising, I stopped really paying attention to where I was going. You can fill in the rest for yourselves, I'm sure. Suffice to say I tore out one of the knees of my [brand new, before this trip] black pair of cords, and some of my own knee beneath it. The commentary I received from the mechanics was limited to 'You're alright?' and 'That happens all the time in the winter'.

Which brings me to my subject for consideration today: safety. The Russian attitude towards it is pretty much the same as the Russian attitude towards most everything else -- look after yourself. Although they have a safety officer on site, and loads of safety manuals and regulations, I've yet to see any kind of enforcement of the rules, or even basic infrastructure (like handrails on staircases in some instances - or even all the steps in a staircase being there at all!) so prevalent in the States, I've come to not even notice it at home. On a daily basis, everyone here does numerous things, any one of which would get them fired in America; jumping over open pits, jacking up trucks without using parking brakes or wheel blocks, working with compressed air without safety glasses, and so on. I've yet to see anyone hurt, though. It seems of a type with the do-it-yourself drugstores, where everything is on the shelves, in chemical-name-labelled bottles, and the customer is responsible for getting the right stuff (or the right cheaper alternative) for himself. Doctors provide prescriptions, but you've got to fill them yourself. So many more things here are in the hands of the individual than we would find back home. And yet they all get by just fine.

The need to develop a stronger sense of proactive self-preservation seems to have made Russians more mature and responsible than your average Westerner. Is that all it takes to grow a cultural sense of personal responsibility? An environment that requires it? And how much of this was around before the fall of the Soviet Union, with the need to utilize the grey and black markets for much of your daily basic needs. Thoughts for the day...

5/30 21:01, Vladivostok time

Training wrapped up adequately for the day. This class, for sure, won’t run out of material before the time gets close to ending. Then only one more to go. I ran into И П today on my way to the service office after class, and got a major high-five and thanks for doing the work for them. So good to be appreciated.

Today, at dinner in a restaurant on the promenade near the water – I’m saving money for now, which means in this context going to the more expensive places which actually take credit cards – I got to thinking about the foreigners I tend to see around here. Vladik really isn’t that picturesque of a city, or in any other way much of a tourist destination, particularly this time of year (which stretches from the beginning of September to the end of June) when the weather is so crappy. This is a city of Chinese and Korean tourists (for whom it hardly represents tourism, being only a couple hours drive from their respective borders) and North American business travelers. As such, the caliber of foreigners that you tend to see here really isn’t particularly high. The managers of the Canadian hotel were pretty typical of what you see here: guys who live in their own native-language/culture cocoon, only stepping out occasionally to drink and/or screw local women. Encountering that type of antics, after the first time (which is mildly amusing), hovers somewhere between sickening and depressing. I begin to understand the attitude of the drunk Russians I ran into in the hotel bar the first time I was here. Having to put up with those sort of people is insulting, even if the money is good.

At the same time, being a North American – and it is refreshing to see that Canadians can be just as bad -- of the more civilized type here wins you a lot more brownie points than it does in the western parts of the country. Just initiating an exchange in Russian, even if haltingly or incorrectly, gets a much more polite reaction than you see foreigners getting in general. On the way back to the hotel, for example, I grabbed a likely-looking bus, hopped on, and asked the driver (close to a grammatically direct translation from my Russian), “You are walking to nearly of Hotels using Gavan?” Rather than the vague grunt you would expect from bus drivers (and which I saw this very driver give a guy who hopped on at the next stop and just said the name of where he was going), he very clearly answered me, “That’s exactly where we are going”.

Maybe you have to be here to understand how amazing that is. Trust me, it’s big.

5/30 12:36, Vladivostok time

Munching down my pelmeni (the little kuldunas-type thingies, which the Korean caterer here makes really really well), I sit at the halfway point on this second day of solo training. What practice I was willing to do over Sunday has paid off quite well. Being sans translator has also done me quite a bit of good in terms of liguistic capability. For all I enjoyed his company, С П too easily became a crutch for me when it came to getting by with the natives.

Being incapable of self-control on such matters, I finished the last of the books I brought with me on Saturday evening. Sunday, then, I picked up a book at one of the stores in town, figuring it should last out the week, even if I only understand half of it. The title is, "Глобальная Империи Зал -- мировое господство США" [The Global Empire - the world-spanning rule of the USA]. I grabbed it mainly since I saw it on one of the very few prominent displays you run accross in bookstores here, figuring it must be expected to be a mainstrem seller. It's always nice to get other peoples' perspectives on the Big Picture, particularly when you are residing on their territory. So far, I've made i through the introduction and first couple pages of the first chapter, dealing mainly with the rise of the global economy and the various ecological downsides experienced in the latter half of the 20th century. I suppose if I run across anything mind-blowing, I'll mention it. As it is, political vocabulary, like technical, is cognate- and root-rich. I'd never make it through a novel (though a series of them I've seen all over the place, Spetznaz, looks intriguingly like a Tom Clancy-type genre...).

Today, time permitting after work, I plan to get down to the lighthouse at the end of the peninsula. Surely, there will be pictures when I return.

5/29 16:25, Vladivostok time

It turns out the barbeque I was invited to was going to be on И Ч’s friend’s boat, out in the Ussuriski Bay. That explains why I wasn’t completely clear yesterday on whether we were having lunch or going fishing. The answer was – both.

But then today, the weather was crappy and the fish weren’t biting, so after a few berrs onboard, docked, we called it in and И Ч, his wife И-а, and I went bowling instead. This is likely the first time in my life I’ve ever seen a third-floor bowling alley. After getting trounced three times in a row, we decided to bag it completely, and I headed off to wander the city a bit more.

I did end up finding some more books for G and Z, as well as some shotglass-sized wooden vodka cups for A’s uncle, who collects those sort of things. I also managed to stumble into the Russian equivalent of a shopping mall whose presence is wholly undetectable from the street. To further complicate things, the floorplan on each floor roughly resembles what you would expect in an ad-hoc outdoor market. Even moreso, the floorplan differed on each of the six floors. Plus, the signage inside was less than excellent. I could see a less determined person than myself thinking they had explored the whole thing, and that the store carried nothing aside from women’s clothing and mobile phone shops. Even the locals spend a fairly large amount of their time shopping wandering around hoping to run across the right place. The vendors take advantage of this by having a disproportionately large amount of product overlap from shop to shop. It’s almost enough to drive insane a guy accustomed to parking next to the Sears entrance, walking straight to what I need, buying it, and walking straight out.

Six days and counting...

5/28 21:00, Vladivostok time

Today was a bit more realistic of a training session. I started out meeting four completely new mechanics, all of whom are pretty green, and two of whom speak really, really quickly. Then, (for some reason) I decided to try my hand at a brief talk about hydraulic brakes. As if my experience yesterday with hydraulics wasn’t enough to teach me a lesson. Some people!...

Nonetheless, I pounded quickly through what I could manage there, then moved on to pneumatics – the subject for which I actually prepared. All told, I did a lot better once I got back into my zone of experience. The vocab I’d cribbed off С П before he left came in real handy, and by the time I’d gotten to that point, the mechanics were pretty good at guessing what my hand gestures meant. One interesting (when it’s not happening to you in high-stress situation, that is) thing about learning a language the trial-by-fire method is that you can comprehend way, way above your speech competence level. I’m actually able to understand what the mechanics are guessing, even when I’ve never heard the exact word before, since the roots of the technical terms are all either related to other words I do know (such as the word for ‘to purge’, which shares its root with the adjective ‘clean’) or are cognates I didn’t expect (my favorite so far is ‘функция’ [funktsiya] – ‘function’). My big challenge for the next week is going to be making sure I pace myself properly. I’ve never been particularly good at that. A brief bit of excitement (not at my expense) was had when the Big Boss at the dealership, В С – the guy who is the head of the city council – stopped by to observe a bit. Right after his steps faded down the corridor, I thanked god in front of the class that he hadn’t stopped in fifteen minutes earlier when I was struggling to hand-gesture my way through “periodic hydrostatic shock-initiated fatigue damage”. Good laughs at that one.

Afterwards, И Ч taking me back to the city invited me tomorrow to a barbecue over at a friend of his’ place tomorrow. Of course, yes. Then, when we stopped briefly for him to take care of some college stuff (involving money, of course) with В, she invited me to come and watch the Kray (State-level subdivision) volleyball semifinals. The boyfriends and husbands of several of her friends play on a team sponsored by a company specializing in servicing refrigeration units on train cars. I got suspicious that this might be the case when I noticed that, according to their jerseys, every guy on the team was named “REFSERVIS”. Surprisingly, the team of relatively short, relatively old guys kicked the asses of the actual college-sponsored team they were playing against (ВГУЭС – Vladivostok Gosudarstveniy Universitet Ekonomicheskiy Centr [Vladik State University School of Economics]). As for small talk during the game – except for the end, when everyone was watching and cheering – I had roughly the same experience as I did with the mechanics, understanding about 75-80% of what I heard, but being able to speak at what felt like just a hair above the “Hola, me llamo Carlos” level. One thing was quite clear: В is getting the hell out of Primorye as soon as she graduates. She says she’s thinking Peterburg – who wouldn’t? – right now, but hasn’t any particular destination in mind. I wonder how common that attitude towards the hometown is among Primoryeviks, relative to the rest of the world.

Ending the day, I strolled the city center myself a bit, then finally took the hike to the top of the hill jutting out into the bay just behind my hotel. If the city hadn’t been socked in with low clouds, I’m sure the view would have been amazing. As it was, at least I got to look at the ocean standing between me and my home. See photos below.

Looking East 

Looking Northwest 

5/27 16:32, Vladivostok time

See how boring I am? I’ve been without a motivator for less than six hours, and I find myself already back here behind the screen of my laptop.

My hubris caused the first class to end on an embarrassing note. For some reason, after completing the practical work, which went down fine on my own, I decided to call the mechanics back into the training room to go over some more detailed maintenance procedures regarding power steering. Immediately, I should have recognized something was wrong and cut my losses when, trying to log into The Company’s online workshop manuals, I discovered that the servers in Portland must have crashed. Instead, I forged on, without any kind of supporting materials (or any kind of vocabulary prep). Somewhere around the first clause of my second sentence, I abruptly realized the gravity of my error. W remained stuck on that second sentence, with my conscious resistance to simply answering suggestions with a random sequence of ‘da’ and ‘nyet’ being the only thing keeping it from becoming complete farce. As luck would have it – and luck was all I had left, having become almost immediately far too flustered for rational analysis – one of the mechanics hopped into the shop and grabbed a new hire here who had lived for a couple years in Canada. Between the two of us, I skimmed my way through the power steering information, then cut my losses and ended the class.

The rest of the time went much better. I found И Ч and explained to him that I wanted to destroy some spare parts to make training materials (air valves don’t work too well after they’ve had a chunk cut out of them for viewing). We went into their scrap parts warehouse, I was able to describe to him, and find what I wanted – the advantage of having actually worked on vocab for this material – and then, working with one of the guys in the metal shop, get the parts put prepared for tomorrow. Even, a couple of curious mechanics wandered into the shop while we were working, and I was able to give some brief explanations of the valves I was working on. Not only do I feel much better about my abilities on that subject, but I was able to identify in a stress-free situation a couple of words I forgot to include in my study material. Tonight I curl up with my Little Red Russian/English Dictionary and cram for tomorrow. That’s for sure.

5/27 12:34, Vladivostok time

С П has been gone for two hours; I've avoided so far getting thrown into a prison camp, getting challenged to a duel, or getting whacked by mafia. It seems I'll make it home after all.

5/27 08:26, Vladivostok time

I painstakingly type this from the back seat of И Ч’s car as we hurtle along the (for now, at least) nearly traffic-free streets of Vladivostok. Regarding driving, it is certain that Russians throughout the country drive aggressively, but they are far from careless. Being in a car here feels a lot like being in a taxi in Mexico, but one hardly ever sees road accidents or the ubiquitous smashed-in bumpers and side panels that characterize the Mexican automotive population. Nonetheless, riding with a local driver is usually a hair-raising experience at least once each ride. Yesterday, though, was an unexpected exception. С П and I finished up a bit early and were offered a ride back to the city by one of the salesmen. Better than three-quarters of the way back, the both of us noticed, nearly simultaneously, that we had not even once been tempted (or been forced by reflex) to grab at the chicken bar, dash, or seat in front. Complimenting the salesman – as ‘perhaps the only sane driver in Vladivostok’ in my case – we learned that eight years ago, he was the driver for the head of the city council (who also happens to own the dealership here.... hmmm...), and in the interim time and made his way into the technical side and up into the sales force. That’s the way it works around here; driver is actually a really good entry-level position into a serious business.

Today promises to be an exciting one. С П is leaving for Moscow just a hair after noon today, and from there I fly solo for the next week. In these last remaining hours, I am pumping him for technical vocabulary. Today will be a practical day in training, and so relatively vocab-light; tomorrow is when it really gets cruising.

С П is actually doing more than just heading back to Moscow, in fact. At the beginning of June, he takes a new job in Warsaw, Poland. Though I (along with M D, and our Portland salesman, P R) fervently hope to convince the Powers That Be in The Company to buy him back, and he has expressed interest in returning once The Company’s political situation is resolved – a subject I’ve avoided touching on for more than one reason, not the least of which is how embarrassing political strife is to me personally – there exists a very real possibility that today is the day on which I and my Constant Companion from the beginning of my Russian sagas part ways for good. We’ll stay in touch, of course, and the truck business is such a niche, relatively speaking, that we’ll be practically sure to bump into each other again at some point. In the interim, I’ve asked him to send me a solar-powered flashlight from Warsaw (then had to explain the joke to him; ah.. the joys of cultural differences).

I’ll close with a joke from Communist times – which would have earned the teller and listeners who didn’t report a stint in prison back then – which С П related to me yesterday:
A young boy comes to his uncle and says, “Uncle Andrei, Uncle Andrei, tell me about Lenin!”
His uncle replies, “Well, I lived as a boy in a small village in the countryside. One year, in the middle of a serious famine, a huge car pulled into town. We had never even seen a car before. I was so little, not knowing better, I went up to the car. Inside, I saw a man eating cookies. It was Lenin! I knocked on the window, and asked him if I could please have some cookies for my family.
“He looked straight at me and said, ‘Get the fuck away from my car.’
“But he had the kindest eyes...”

5/25 22:00, Vladivostok time

The first session of the first course ended even better than it started. We spent the whole day tearing around the three trucks I had picked out, the work went without a flaw, and С П and I even avoided getting our clothes all greased up! It’s quite a tall order, but I hope this situation maintains...

After class today, we went into the sales office and conversed with the sales manager and two of his salesmen for an hour or so before quitting time. Being the type they are, most of the talk was shop. This was quite fortunate for me as that subject is the one for which I have the best Russian vocabulary coverage. I even got to swap my ‘kangaroo-corpses-on-the-road-to-Charleville’ story with a ‘sped-up-over-a-hill-into-a-flock-of-sheep-in-Uzbekistan’ story. A Huge amount of trade takes place here and across the Chinese border; the zone extending 300km to each side is a free-trade zone. In fact, shipments from Mongolia to points east in China frequently head first north into Irkutsk, then down the Russian highway (called M5 and / or M7 on maps, depending on what section you’re interested in) to Vladivostok before crossing back to China – all to take advantage of the Russian cops’ relatively lax attitude towards law enforcement. Similarly, in the wintertime, when the Russian highway out in these parts has all gone to hell (I’ve got photos of a trip they took down it), the relatively-better-maintained Chinese highways become the route of choice for drivers with time on their minds. They joke about the Chinese here – some 1/3 of them in Primorsky are illegal immigrants – but all in all seem to be pretty good neighbors.

It’s easy to forget exactly where on the globe we are located (everyone looking and speaking Russian here just as in Moscow, after all). Every once in a while, one is abruptly reminded. И Ч, С П, and I were walking through a marina this evening after dinner, and И Ч commented on a couple of boats that they had just recently come in from Australia. That’s right, I think, we are pretty damn close to Australia out here. So I asked И Ч if he had ever been to Japan, and he answers, “Frequently”. He even speaks a smattering of Japanese (about as much as your average Arizonan speaks Spanish, I suppose). This is a big, big place.

One further detail: I noticed yesterday on the drive back from the dealership that the terrain looked somehow – different. It was after a couple minutes’ pondering that I realized, all the leaves had come in on the taiga, pretty much overnight! Literally! When we landed, the forests were as bare as the dead of winter, and here, only a handful of days later, the leaves were too thick to see through! С П tells me that all of Russia is this way; the leaves appear in an instant. It is really something else. If I had known, I would have taken before/after photos. –sigh- Next time...

5/25 09:42, Vladivostok time

In lieu of my actually being there, I hope the following photos will be adequate to celebrate a very important day (which hasn't arrived at home quite yet). Or at least hold over until I'm home.

Happy Birthday 

Flowers for A 

5/24 19:56, Vladivostok time

Training began well today. We’ve got three mechanics in this first half of the week, and another three for Thursday/Friday, which tends to keep things from binding up, time-wise. I have good expectations (as, of course, I knew I would once things got moving) for these two weeks. I’ve an ambitious schedule, training all day, every day (except Sunday) until I leave for the airport on Saturday next, having worked even a half day then.

С П and I lunched in the cafeteria again, this time on the mechanics schedule – we ate yesterday well after they were finished – in fact a hair ahead of the bulk of the mechanics, since the training room is located right next to the mess room. I got to meet the caterer/chef – a korean guy, almost certainly an illegal as are most of the koreans and chinese here – and get to pick from a much wider variety of stuff than was available when we showed up yesterday. Speed has its privileges. A nice detail from lunch was overhearing a fair number of the mechanics cursing, among themselves, their ‘asshole boss’ for not sending them to my certification training. It’s very gratifying to be in demand.

Last night, С П and I, having nothing better to do, rang Н (friend of И П’s wife, who we met that night at his баня) to invite her and any interested friend to help us find somewhere interesting for dinner. This ended up being К-на, and the restaurant atop the 12th floor of the Hotel Hyundai, located in the center of the peninsula on which half of Vladik is situated. No worries, by the way, both ladies are married; we even had a brief discussion on wedding ring hands in our respective societies. From the restaurant, we had quite a view of both bays, the food wasn’t bad, and they had a Georgian wine (the best wines in the world come from there) which I hadn’t been able to get since I arrived. Food was decent, and since the music wasn’t constant, I was able to participate in the conversation fairly regularly. When it was going, even though I could hear the words people were saying, I just couldn’t make sense of the sentences. Oh well. At least I didn’t get much sleep last night – Vladik, and much of Russia it appears, works late. Dinner didn’t start until around ten and didn’t finish until after one in the morning. No power on earth will be able to wake me up before tomorrow morning, once I go down tonight. That will be pretty soon now. In fact, as soon as I finish typfkdjvcx.,...zzzzzzz........zz.

zzzzz.....

5/23 15:06, Vladivostok time

Finally, I am up and online again. This morning, I spent scouring the sales lot for the perfect three candidate trucks for this week's training, while С П and И Ч went back to town first to get the projector for the class, and next to make problems for the good folks at Mobilniye TeleSistemy. They are now saying that we should check back in two days, as the Moscow offices don't open until four PM, Vladik time, and they will need at least a day there to get things straightened out. What a pain in the ass.

Regardless, we've mapped out our plan for training this week, which, fortunately for me, will involve running two classes of four mechanics each. This guarantees that I won't run dry (my biggest fear of all -- beyond even the fear of abject incompetence) this week. I'm set up on the dealer's systems, have my notes together, and am ready to start.

Lunch today was at in the dealer's cafeteria. This is a pretty normal setup for Russian businesses: the company provides free lunches and subsidized dinners for workers, and management can partake at reasonable prices as well. I think dinners here run two bucks and managers' lunch about the same.

An amusing note regarding the search for the perfect trucks this morning. The Company puts a label in various locations on the various models of trucks it builds, identifying what they call the 'major components' -- things like axles, engine, transmission, and so forth -- along with the component serial numbers. It so happens that, in Russia, not only a vehicle, but also its engine is registered and duties paid upon import. So, it came as only a mild surprise to me that in most every truck I checked out, this major component label had been removed. Of course, if I had no experience with the craftiness of Russian importers, I might simply assume that the labels had come off at some point in these trucks' previous lives (they're all between three and five years old when they get here); but I know better now. The Russian maxim, I am discovering, is "if something defies expectation, someone is profiting off it". [Yakov Smirnov accent] What a country!

The weekends may be slow, but working days fly by. One day closer to home.

(BTW, Happy late birthday Mom. I honestly have no idea what time it was here when I could have called to wish in person. If it makes you feel better, I woke up this morning thinking for a minute that I was home and had fallen asleep on the couch.)

5/22 22:04, Vladivostok time

С П and I spent the day out wandering the city. Maybe I will get bored here after all. Maybe not. Vladivostok is a pretty uninteresting town in terms of stuff to see and things to do, unless you are interested in (and have the time and money for) the club scene. Needless to say, I’m not.

We spent a fair chunk of time navigating the bus “system” around the city-peninsula. Although the buses are marked, more or less, and follow fairly predictable routes, they are all independently owned and operated, meaning that you pay cash for every bus you get on, regardless how far you are going. Also meaning that the drivers will aim to cram on as many people as possible before moving along, which finally means that the buses run along nothing whatosever resembling a schedule. I’m feeling pretty good about my chances of figuring it out before I’m solo here. Also, see below the next installment in the Commie-Monuments-Still-Standing: and old classic, the Lenin Pointing. You find variations on this one fairly everywhere. This particular one is located in the city center, not far from the main port complex. Lenin is pointing at the seashore as if to say, "Shark! Shark! Everyone out!"

Also, the saga of MTS continues. A tried calling me this morning, only to get a recording of some Russian woman yelling at her. As it turns out – and С П and I discovered this only after a long, long sit at the MTS office we had visited yesterday – my mobile phone sim card is on the account of one of the secretaries of the Moscow office (you need to be registered to live somewhere before you can get a phone account, and I am not registered, while С П is living semi-legally for the time being). In fact, all of the office phones are on her account. Apparently, then, the thousand rubles I plonked down yesterday went on to one of her other accounts. Which one? Who knows? Ask Moscow, they say. Yet again, С П politely flipped out at the clerk; maybe she’ll be able to get something done tomorrow or maybe a manager will be in to get something done. Or maybe the secretary in Moscow will get some answer other than, “We can’t help you, the money was paid in Vladivostok; ask there” when she asks later on in the day. We can hope. For now, I’ve got a five-dollar scratch card stuck on my mobile phone, and am going to have to seriously economize my calling.

I picked up another item while out, a bottle of the aptly-named Русский Стандарт, for one of the folks back in Portland. Two down, eight or so to go. I’m fighting the urge right now to start counting down the days left; there are too many; I’m trying to stay satisfied with ‘over half done’.

The Classic 

5/21 15:38, Vladivostok time

M D and D M are heading out this afternoon, back to Portland and New Jersey, respectively. At the same time, С П and I are checking out of this Canadian hotel and moving over to another place closer to the city center, where I’ll be staying until I head home on the 4th of June. Here’s hoping that I can find similarly good Internet access there...

Last night at И П’s баня was nice. He and his wife Е (though she uses the shorter form, К) live with their five-month-old in a new development beginning to cover the slope overlooking the Ussuri bay, north of Vladivostok. I’ve never done this with women around (Е’s friend Н was there too) before, so that was different. I also took my turn being the thrasher – I forget the proper term for the guy who whacks the other person with wet branches – which I did not so well. Also, to the dismay of both the non-Russian-speaking guys (since it all went over their heads), I was able to hold conversation with the two girls fairly well. As I might have expected, the house was phenomenal. The view was unbelievable, and the baby toys and squishy kid books laying all around the place made the perfect finishing touch. И П started us out with pork chops – more like pork steaks, really; Russians eat pork like Americans and Aussies eat beef – moved to salmon fillets, then finished off with jumbo-prawn-sized crawdad-type things they call here медведки, or ‘little bears’ in the баня.

......

Sorry, had to bail out in a flash. Now where did I leave off?...

Ah yes. We stayed up and saunaed and munched and drank beer (Korean beer, apparently; I’m far from impressed) and chatted until a bit after midnight. Е П called a cab for us four guys, and we made it back to the hotel fairly quickly. Then С П and I sat up until nearly five in the morning strategizing. The amount of money to be made here defies belief.

Mid-day, (in fact, the reason I was cut off) D M and M D took off for the airport, and С П and I headed out to our hotel-for-the-rest-of-the-trip in the city center. On the way, we stopped to pay some money on my Russian mobile phone – since I had chewed through all the minutes on a call to A just yesterday. We went to the same MTS (Mobilniy TeleSistem) shop that I used last trip, but were met with yet another archaic holdover from the old systems, the Policy That Makes No Sense. MTS is a countrywide company, but my mobile has a Moscow number. While I am able to pay in cash anywhere in Russia to charge my phone, and am able to pay by credit card in Moscow to charge a Moscow phone and in Vladivostok to charge a Vladik phone, MTS will apparently not accept payment via credit card for a Moscow phone in Vladivostok. С П, being much more apt at being mean to the clerkettes than myself, gave the poor girl behind the counter, then one behind a desk absolute hell over it, all with a pleasant demeanor and with a smile on his face. In fact, the girls seemed to find the situation just as absurd as we did, but were apparently powerless to do anything about it. This being Saturday, we hit the wall of ‘no managers here’, and had to give up and throw down a couple thousand rubles cash. Still, I picked up a couple good words...

The weather here is turning a bit Portlandy, so I might not get a whole lot of sightseeing done for the next couple of days. Still, there are gifts to buy, and a city to explore in the rain; I doubt I’ll be too bored.

5/20 18:15, Vladivostok time

All day today at the Vladik dealer. As we have been doing elsewhere this week, the topic of discussion centered on spare parts, pricing, and sourcing. И П showed his hard-core side a couple times today cracking the whip on his warehouse guy and purchasing guy. When he get cruising, he doesn’t get loud, but he gets really really fast. At one point, I was only catching about one word in three (and wasn’t really certain what he was getting at), until at the end he tells the guy, “...и я не ещё ничего не хочу слышать.” – more or less, ‘and I don’t want to ever hear this happening again.’

There, I also ran into Р, the mechanic I did some systems training with last time I was here as well as А, who was a parts clerk, but now runs the parts shop and warehouse (and who was getting dressed down). Both recognized me; neither remembered my name. This was fortunate for me as I didn’t remember their names either. I also got to see the improvements they’ve made around the place in the year since I was last here. Pictured below is the most terrifying part of all – the classroom in which I’ll be spending my days for the next two weeks. If it had been dirt-floored and unlit like last time I was here, I might feel that И П and his mechanics’ expectations of me were a bit less. What I see is quite a bit to live up to.

Afterwards, we piled into И П’s Land Cruiser (Japanese model, steering wheel on the right hand side) and zoomed off to check out on of his other businesses, an open pit mine out near Artyom. It being only a small operation, he doesn’t have a huge fleet of trucks to service it; still, with the price of coal, delivered, sitting around thirty dollar a ton, the mine’s revenue runs around 4.5 million dollars a year. He’s, of course, reluctant to talk profit margins (I had to ask anyway), but he informs us that his next mine is being opened up at a capital investment of 1.5 million dollars, and it should bring in about 20% more coal yearly than this first one.

We talked a bit of politics on the drive out. As И П sees it, the country of Russia is too big to be effectively governed by a central power, but also too big to remain whole if regional autonomy reigns supreme. Yeltsin’s mistake, he says, was in surrendering all of the federal power to the regions; the resulting chaos has caused divisions between regions that need each other to survive, long-term. The recent activities of Putin (which most people agree are 75/25 talk to substance) represent merely a correction of the excesses of the Yeltsin era. И П remains very optimistic about the future of Russia. Primorsky Kray (Kray meaning something like ‘borderlands’ – this is roughly equivalent in size and politics to a US state) fairly recently got a new governor who, unlike all the previous administrations, comes from, and his built his own, business. This means that, unlike the outright theft that pervaded earlier administrations, the current one focuses more on graft. Not only is that an improvement from the standpoint of stability, but the form of graft employed – the governor shortly after assuming office bought out all the local construction companies – is actually having net positive results for the region as a whole as new buildings are going up and old infrastructure being renovated. It lines the pockets of the guys in charge, of course, but at least there is some payoff for the people too. At least they’re moving in the right direction.

In a few moments, we will be heading out again, this time to И П’s house where he will cook us dinner. He also is offering us the use of his sauna. Perhaps this will be yet another Russian evening that defies my expectations. We shall see.

Training room 

5/19 22:59, Vladivostok time

I have a lot of catching up to do. It has been a crazy day (or so; the big time changes really screw me up).

I seem to have last left off checking out of the hotel in Peterburg. The airport experience and ride back were acceptable, Russian-style. We flew Pulkovo Avia, the local Peterburg carrier -- which also happens to run all the way out to Sharm-al-Sheik, Havana, and Phuket, among other international destinations -- and landed at Sheremetevo. Both Н and the other driver, В, were waiting to pick us and our gear up, but we were able to economize, leaving our gear in the storage downstairs at the airport (where a mongrel tabby cat was snoozing, warming the side of its butt on the top of the x-ray machine).

That done, and since Н had another engagement, we piled into the Mercedes В was using and headed immediately to Balashikha. Some hour later, we had arrived at К Е's dealership, unfortunately, while he was absent. No worries, his parts manager, Е, and an administrator were there and willing to talk pricing, delivery, and the various other subjects that form the meat of D M and M D's respective businesses. The Balashikha dealership is, like all of the otehr places I've seen so far, making massive investments into facilities. Unlike the others, though, this one seems to lack the expertise in this business that I've come to expect. Further, while Е was paying close attention and making notes based on our recommendations for statistical analysis of ordering and parts flow, the administrator, an older gentleman whose name I don't recall, embodied, as С П explained to us afterwards, the classic Soviet attitude towards doing a job. Given a task, the classic attitude is to both refuse to step even one micron outside the bounds of that task -- the example is a mechanic who refuses to clean up after himself, since he's not a cleaner -- and to be nearly unable to envision doing a job in a way different from what has been done in the past. All of us grew almost immediately frustrated with a guy who insists that everyone else has to make changes to counter the deficiencies that arise from the way he is doing things. No wonder manufacturing quality here is crap...

Lunch, we headed to the stolovaya С П and I used the whole last time we were at Balashikha. The cook (who holds a degree in electrical engineering, but opened up the cafeteria a few years back as the money up front was just as good, and the income from this one untraceable and untaxable) remembered me from last time. I suppose that's not terribly strange, given the fact that her location captures and is captive to an industrial complex well outside the city center, which is almost certainly not heavily frequented by Americans. I tried to do the chivalrous/business thing and pay for the meal, particularly since Е was trying to pay for us, but was soundly defeated after a minute or so of arguing when she turned to the stolovaya owner and told her not to bother quoting the damage, she eats all the time there, knows the prices, and had it already figured out. Skunked.

After Balashikha, we quickly moved on to meet up with a customer of D M's, unrelated to The Company's business, also located in Moscow. Г is an importer without inventory, almost a stuff-broker, who moved out of automotive parts a few years back when the market got saturated with official dealers, and is currently in heavy equipment parts (one presumes, until that market gets saturated as well, then on to the next one). Money in the Russian market is unbelievably easy to make. Even a guy with a patently terrible business plan like Г -- a very nice guy, though, who tried to treat us to lunch and tea and whatnot himself -- is able to find for himself a piece of the unbelievable market here. I am told that Ikea not only has its most profitable store here (along with the other three stores it has in Moscow), but that the initial investment -- including a multi-story building with a footprint that must be the size of at least five Home Depots inside the Moscow ring road -- was paid off within twelve months. С П, P R, В Е, and I have been discussing ways for ourselves (without polluting The Comapany's sphere) to get a chunk of this too. My words do it no justice, you really can't believe it until you've been here, and even then, you keep discovering more and more incredible things the longer you stay.

We finished with Г and returned once more to Sheremetevo, where the security cat was warming the other side of his butt, but otherwise unchanged from the morning. Our flight to Vladivostok was on Aeroflot; business class got real silverware with the hammer-and-sickle-with-wings logo on it. When in Russia... I only regret not being bold enough to snag the knife and fork along with the spoon I slipped into the business class goodie bag. As С П says, you can't be here for long without starting to think like a Russian.

The winds into Vladivostok were crazy-wild; apparently all air traffic was closed until earlier this morning when the last traces of the typhoon that's been hitting here for the first half of the week had passed. Nonetheless, the pilots set a madly bucking and slewing plane down so well that hardly a bump was felt in the cabin. Applause actually broke out. И Ч was waiting for us at the airport, and, declaring the rest of today to be a catch-up day, we headed immediately to the Canadian hotel Vlad Motor Inn (you know it's a north american owner; the nickname Vlad sounds stupid in russian; they call it "Vladik" here) for a quick snooze.

Three ours later, И's college-aged daughter В Ч picked us up for a quick jaunt into downtown (were a bit out of town here, but close to the Артём/Находка highway cutoff where the dealer sits. Of course, after going to the Far East State Technical University hill, to get an overview of the city, we moved down for D M and M D to do some souvenir hunting. I'm unwilling to pay souvenir prices, so I briefly set off on my own to the Fleet store I found last time in Vladik. On the way there, I ran across a hunting supply shop and allowed myself to be hypnotized by the kinds of stuff people here can buy over-the-counter. Breaking hypnosis, I found the Fleet shop and picked up the first item on my gift list, a wool Officer's hat (with Navy forehead medallion, free of charge) for A's uncle J. I'll be here two weeks, and basically spent all the cash I had in hand on the hat, so I was in no rush to find other stuff. I'll fill out the list before I leave though, no worries.

Finishing up the day, we met with И Ч and И П for dinner at the hotel. Nice, light conversation; И П has a five-month-old son, we had spent the afternoon with И Ч's daughter, and I had used all the chunks of idle time I could find that corresponded with reasonable hours at home to talk to Z on his birthday, so the talk trended heavily towards kids. И П had to leave first, at nine PM to read his son his bedtime story. The guy is quite different from my memory of him; C П and M D concur. It'll do that to you...

Please see below another Gratuitous Commie Photo; this is one of a row of similarly marked lightpost/signposts -- this one shows speed limit -- on the road between the Balashikha dealer's main offices and the stolovaya out back. Though battered, the symbol shows clearly enough. Five minutes, including the time it would take to get the wire cutters or screwdriver and the ladder, and this could be taken down. Here they know, though, time is money.

Logo on speed limit post 

5/18 06:58, Saint-Peterburg time

The phone situation here has been funny. I’m not comfortable using my mobile in Peter, since the prepay account debiting seems to be acting funny. Add to that the fact that my hotel phone flat out refused to work, and you have the situation that I have not been able to manage my daily calls home. This morning, particularly since I may not have another chance until Z’s birthday is over, I’ll try to borrow С П’s phone and get that done.

You may have noticed a shift in the quality and content of my postings. Now that M D and D M have arrived (which arrival itself doesn’t bother me at all), I have been grafted onto their schedule for a hop-hop-hop week. This leaves precious little time for either putting together my thoughts or getting them down. The week, however, is half over. We shall see how the remainder of my trip goes once I’m more or less back onto my own schedule.

5/18 00:50, Saint-Peterburg time

Happy birthday to Z, though not for him yet. I’m too far away from home today.

Today was first a new dealer located in the north of Peterburg, run by an American (fine, born in Russia, left at age ten, educated and everything in America, returned this year at age 26 to run his dad’s business). The size and scope of it was beyond belief. The American, M B, was interesting, though not so engaging to me as he was to D M, a fellow (at least from my eye) New Englander. M B is a New Yorker. Really, that sums him up. Still, the business he is running is one that intrigues me – on The Company’s behalf, of course – very greatly.

Then the afternoon we spent back south of the city at С П-в’s new locations. also there were the general manager, А Л, and the favorite of everyone (particularly my sales-counterpart currently suffering back in Portland) – Т. Everyone who has not been to Bashkortostan, that is (so far as I’m concerned...). Waiting to meet these guys outside their new property, С П and I were looking at a statue of a soldier commemorating the “Proletarian Revolution”, when a guy walking by yelled to us that the only thing it was missing to make it truly beautiful was a grenade at the base. I guess we were looking too intently. Apparently also, С П isn’t the only one touchy about those people.

Tomorrow morning, we’re back to Moscow. I have the good fortune of getting to hook back up with К Е out at the Balashikha dealer while we are in between planes. Then on to Vladik and the second half of my trip. For now, to sleep.

5/17 08:30, Saint-Peterburg time

More and more apologies. I doubt I’m going to be able to give yesterday a more than cursory going-over. And it deserves more. Time, time, give me more time!

Monday was our (C П, M D, D M, and myself) day at И Ю’s dealership in Pushkin. The gifts I brought, along with the ones brought by the two other Americans with me, went over very well. Meeting in the morning, I was again pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to get things fixed or improved when all parties are in the same room. The entire morning was a cycle of, problem x, request y to address x, agreement by other party to do y. Next problem. Later on, we toured И Ю’s premises – newly improved, and still being worked on. His office building has been more than doubled in size to accommodate space for mechanics to shower and change, an improved cafeteria, and actual offices for every person who needs them. Also, he’s put up two new buildings, a big warehouse, and an assembly building for one other part of his business – building flatbed trailers. И Ю, И В, and Б М all kept the four of us visitors occupied with at least business-related small talk all day.

At the end of the work day, we invited all the guys, as well as И Ю’s wife, К, to dinner with us. Then the four of us visitors Metroed into Peterburg city center and took a couple-hour walking tour. My opinion is repeatedly confirmed: if you only get to see one place in Russia, this is it.

Dinner was excellent (as usual), and conversation was lively. С П and I split the translating duties, meaning he got a chance to actually socialize on a business trip – a rare treat for him.

I so apologize, but I really must run. So much more detail could be added (ask me about the ‘eggs’ tour of the city when I get back home), but time is not on my side. Пока.

5/17 00:21, Saint-Peterburg time

I guess I’m not going to quite pick up where I left off this morning. Suffice to say, the conversation with Н Т was extremely enlightening.

Afterwards, С П and I made our way to Sheremetevo airport, and then via Aeroflot to Saint-Peterburg. M D, The Company’s parts guy for international markets, was supposed to have arrived well before us, but as we were getting into our car at Pulkovo, the driver commented that M D hadn’t turned up yet. This set off a whole chain of efforts on our part to ascertain exactly what happened to M D between Portland and Peterburg. Even, I ended up calling to Portland (the time was maybe 8 AM on a Sunday) to have someone there check up on him with the Lufthansa office, since the one in Pulkovo was closed. Turns out, his flight out of Portland was delayed by 1.5 hours, and he was unable to make his connection in Frankfurt, so got bumped to a flight four hours later. No worries though, everyone ended up arriving just fine.

С П and I walked the ? mile from our hotel to the Metro station and headed into the city center for dinner. Of course, we ate at Kavkaz just off Nevskiy Prospekt. Dinner ended around fifteen minutes past eleven (oh yes, I remember this place well; it may not be White Nights yet, but it stays light out until just about eleven) and we headed back to the Metro only to find it had closed for the night. This was quite a surprise to С П, as the Moscow Metro, with which he is more familiar, is open until better than two in the morning. Of course, we didn’t know this about the Metro’s hours last time, as we were staying in the center of the city, and were able to simply walk wherever we wanted. So, we grabbed a taxi, negotiating with him a fairly reasonable price of 200 rubles for the ten-minute trip back to the hotel, then headed off to bed.

This seems like as good a pausing-place as any. I realize I’m a day behind now, but beg forgiveness as: a) I really need to get to sleep now; and b) I will have time tomorrow morning to catch things up, since nothing will happen between now and then that is of any interest to anyone.

5/16 08:03, Saint-Peterburg time

Having bought a 30-minute internet access card, I have time, sitting in the lobby of Pulkovskaya hotel, to put up the events of the last day. Yesterday morning, finishing hotel breakfast, I checked out and headed to meet С П over at his place on the otehr side of town. Experience (and no small amount of good luck) got me there about as quickly as С П had estimated it would take a native to navigate the requisite Metro station transfer. We met up just outside station Taganskaya on a bridge overpass (I wanted to wait somewhere I'd stand out), and headed over to meet a prospective very interested/interesting Moscow dealer partner (of the previous two I had visited my first time, one is exapnding, and the entire management of the other is in jail, their property confiscated, so we need to look for more in the city).

The gentleman, Н Т, for reasons which, though quite significant, are not particularly appropriate for this log, after meeting with the company currently acting as our Moscow distributor (note how I said that...) only two times has absolutely refused to do any kind of business with them whatsoever. He and С П, on the other hand share a love of surfing, which helped С П make a personal relationship with him. Knowing that a direct representative of The Company was in town, and having been told that The Company's intentions for the Russian market are quite serious, he was interested in talking. How could I refuse?

So, in a Yolki-Palki (a coffee shop-type establishment found pretty much all over Russia -- think of a Starbucks, McDonalds, and full bar (by the way, beer is served at McDonalds here) combined -- I found myself sitting accross a table from a vey serious businessman, trying to outline The Company's plans for Russia, the models of dealer relationships we aim for, and the possible variations on those models that we are considering (actually, at this point, that I am considering; I've made mention to my boss of these things, but detailed discussion is not something that can be done over the phone) for our Russian dealers. Some twenty minutes in, I recalled the original assessment made by a Russian-fluent colleague of my boss's when I was first interviewing for this job, "he speaks Russian well enough for the job, but not enough to lead negotiations". I suppose that no longer applies. Heh heh heh.

Н Т may be literally the first Russian I've met with a wholly positive outlook on the future of his country. As he put it to me, Russia's problems right now are just the remaining ones from the larger number they've had for years; Putin is in the process of trying to get the chaotic situation left by the old Communists and their American economic advisors back under control, and all signs are that he is succeeding. From this, we briefly got onto the subject of freedom and whatnot. He says, "All the US spokesmen say that Putin is 'cracking down' on the free press, but here we can print that the President is an incompetent asshole who deserves execution, without retributions; at the same time, in America, a newsguy who makes even one comment contrary to the President's policies on Iraq (for example) knows that he will lose his job in a second." At one point, talking about being pulled over by the police (the conversation rambled around once Н Т and I had the formalities and the big answers (such as they exist) out of the way), he said to me, "Of course, I know that America is not a free country. Americans do only one thing freely, and that is propaganda -- at that they are supreme, particularly on their own people".

Time has flown, and I intended to write a lot more on this. I'll get back to it later on. /off

5/15 08:18, Moscow time

The flight out of Ufa was quite nice, even seated in Russian-style economy class. Both С П and I were most impressed by the fact that a small local airline would have stewardesses, pilots, and the automated announcements in three languages (Bashkir, Russian, and English). As he put it, "Hardly, you would find this kind of a situation". They also had Bashkiri music piped in, which has sort of a Middle Eastern feel to it, and just capped the whole experience. We arrived at Domodedovo (which completes my trifecta of Moscow airports this trip), to the south, outside the Moscow ring road.

A common arrangement in Russia when a public holiday falls near a weekend is to extend the thre-day holiday to a four-day one, and pay back the fourth day on the following Saturday. The fourteenth was such a day. So, after Н stopped us by at С П's place to drop off his stuff and pick up the bag of mine that I didn't need in Ufa, we headed over to our Moscow office. Being late in the afternoon, and the big office boss (J V, you may remember him from my first trip) having decided not to shorten his weekend, the whole crew -- А К, В Е, М Ч, Ю П, and И Т -- were just getting kicked into a TGIS, complete with wine, cognac, and pastries. No wonder Н and С П wanted to hit the office even so late in the day...

So, for about two hours, the eight of us sat around, sipped wine, and chatted. I'm definitely getting better and better at social situations, particularly when the conversation steers in a direction with which I'm already familiar. The big hit this time was when they got to talking first about some news out of Uzbekistan (where С П grew up, and some of his family still lives), involving tangentially one of the US bases being established there. Soon, Ю П pointed out that, in addition to US military presences in a handful of the -stans, along with Latvia and some Ukraine, there was an American sitting in the very room with them! Of course, I told them, The Company is only my second job; my primary work is as an advance scout to help us keep to our timetable. I told them, next comes Rostov, Irkutsk, and Magadan. И Т, who is mildly unusual (given his age) in having studied German instead of English in school, commented that he should get to work on that language too. I replied that there was no rush, we weren't planning to be in Moscow until [look at watch] three years from now. It went over exactly as I could have hoped. A big part of socializing is thinking on one's feet. I'm getting to be about as quick (again, within my limited range of subject matter) in Russian as I am in English -- which really says more about how well I do at home than on the road...

Н hiself took me back to my hotel, his place being not far from here. We got caught in major traffic, so had the beter part of an hour to chat ourselves. He confirmed for me the importance of proper context for language (particularly of the impolite kind) usage. As he put it, a man could come wandering in out from the woods, clean himself up, and start talking to you, and you'd stil l be able to know within seconds that he had wandered in from the woods. Among friends, in private is one thing, in public is quite another. Of course, I've been very good about following that rule here. In fact, I feel quite fortunate in С П's having absolutely refused to teach me any harsh language during my first trip out here. I know, with Spanish, which I learned from mexican construction workers, it is nearly impossible for me to speak in a manner appropriate to mixed company. In Russian, on the other hand, proper speech is my default. That is definitely the way to do it.

Not that I don't appreciate В Е's later, ongoing efforts to teach me the lower mode of speech. How would I be able to understand what most mechanics around here are talking about without that?...

Vnukovo Airport, Moscow 

5/14 11:20, Ufa time

I feel like I’ve been neglecting this, having gone better than 24 hours without posting, and with that last one being so pitiful. It was quite a day, Friday.

We started out in the Ufa dealer’s parts shop, about 45 minutes’ drive in city traffic from the main service (and sales by the winter) and office complex. The area is small enough, and oil wealth relatively recent enough that high-speed internet access can be hard to come by. I had to camp out for a couple of hours in the office of a very accommodating local Chevron rep to get The Company’s 80-some-odd-megabyte diagnostics programs downloaded onto the Ufa dealer’s shop computer. I learned a bit about the oil industry around here while I sat, though. Chevron and Esso have pretty big presences in Bashkortostan, though generally in joint-venture setups with BashNeft, BashkiriNeftiProdukti, or one of the other local oil companies. At the same time, not too far from here is Kazakhstan, in which region near Bashkortostan all the international oil giants have major operations. As for distribution, again here the big guys are setting up distributors and municipal contracts as quickly as ink can dry. It’s a big time to be in oil. The Chevron rep started his business two years ago, and just recently got named the main distribution center for all of Bashkortostan.

After С П and I had finished setting up our spare parts system in the store, we headed back to С Я’s place for lunch. Ahh... Russian food. Three hours after we started lunch, it was over, and we walked out С Я’s front door into the service complex to do a bit more training on the diagnostic stuff I’d set up that morning. С and Ю Я have a dog, too, Ksusha, the first Russian one I’ve met that I was willing to try petting. After the diagnostic work, someone pulled out a ping pong table and between the three of us, we played pingpong and threw sticks for Ksusha for a half hour.

Wrapping the day up was quite a thing. Maybe around six, we piled into С Я’s Land Cruiser, picked up a couple other guys (А and В – believe it or not...) and headed off for a sauna evening. Located not far from С Я’s place, there is a lake around which has been built since ’93 a complex of sauna buildings complete with docks and water slides into the lake in some cases. We had building Shetyor, which lacked the slide, but had something like an ice-fishing hole to dive into right out of the sauna, then paddle around to the dock and start over again. В, it turns out, has coached a number of Olympic skiing competitors, and is a crazy man with the birch branches in the sauna. I’m not sure of the technique, but you are basically thrashed with branches that are dipped in near-boiling water, and at the same time, blown by them with steam. I think the idea is to make it as excruciating as possible. В’s coaching experience came out when I started to groan (and eventually scream – it actually makes the pain more bearable) yelling to me “Хорошо! Ложись! Хоро-ш-о!!” (‘It’s fine/you’re doing fine; Stay laying down!’). Then into the lake. I gasped in a little fish my second time (not the only person to do so, only the first) to much amusement among the others. Surprisingly, there was less drinking this time around than in my other major night of sauna debauchery in Yekaterinburg. And the blinding heat alternating with the screaming cold actually helped. The kicker is, around 2 in the morning, I was starting to die off, so the guys sent me off to a couch in a side room to sleep for ‘half an hour’. Being the great guys they are, no one woke me up until 4 in the morning, when we left. I doubt either С П or myself got to sleep before 5.

As for conversations, not much of the talk was very heavy. A and I found ourselves on the dock at one point, and chatted about the future of Ufa, Bashkortostan, and Russia in general. He had that same sense of defeat with regards to the prospect of his country that I’ve encountered in most every Russian with whom I’ve spoken, even though he admitted that his republic had a bright future. One interesting point about Russia that I’m beginning to figure out: whereas in the States, intent can be important in how the law views your actions, such is not the case here. Either you follow the forms, and are clean, or you break them and are not. The net result is that the seemingly less-than-pristine programs that keep getting suggested to us for business operations could actually work out here in a way that would leave us clean, legally speaking. Frankly, it becomes increasingly obvious that The Company has practically been fumbling around blindly, from a strategic sense, in the CIS since we started to get serious about it. A new part of my job, I’m discovering, is going to be educating our bigwigs about a market model and environment that is almost completely outside any of our experience. It’s quite a thing to even begin to get your head around. These extended trips are turning out to be quite a good thing.

We’re heading back to Moscow shortly, on Bashkiri Avialiniyi. This has been quite a beginning for this trip. I am very excited about the prospect of working in this region (not the least because it gives me the excuse to come back to Ufa...).

By the way, please see below a feature I hope to make more regularly: Communist Monuments Still Standing. Pictured is a statue found in a park in the center of Ufa of Feliks Dzerzhinskii. The excuse I offer on the Russian peoples' behalf is that there are probably so many monuments to mega-villians in this country that to have missed a few after only two decades isn't really surprising. Other priorities must sit higher.

Gratuitous Commie-Monument Photo 

5/13 08:14, Ufa time

I’ve not all that much to add from yesterday. The time change, combined with the three toasts we shared over lunch at С Я’s place yesterday, conspired to knock me flat around 10 PM last night (which is not all that late – hardly even dinner time -- by the standards or Russian business-tripping). С П got to fend for himself, while I snored, for a straight 8? hours (again, an unusually long amount in my current context). As such, I’ve not a whole lot to say. We start again this morning to do the computer work and training.

I did, at that, forget my coat in С Я’s car yesterday. Fortunately, I left it behind at С П’s urging (the weather here is on the warm end of the ‘fabulous’ range), but removed my passport to his bag, then later to my pants pocket, so am not completely helpless. Then again, what need did I have for it in my bed all night? I must remember not to leave things behind...

5/12 17:48, Ufa time

I really like Ufa. Unlike almost every city I’ve visited in Russia (and I realize how pitifully few that amounts to), Ufa is comfortably spread out, clean, and most importantly, obviously growing as opposed to decaying. That makes an unbelievable difference. New construction is everywhere. С Я (Ю’s husband, and the owner of the dealership here) says this is all thanks to one word: oil. Ufa is the capital of Bashkortostan, which is a major oil-producing region.

The dealership is just outside of the city limits, about 1km off the highway that runs to Yekaterinburg away from Ufa, and in the other direction, through Ufa, to Moscow. It isn’t much right now, but some major parts are under construction, expected to be completed before winter (and permafrost) sets in. On two hectares of land, they will have two fairly sizeable service buildings, a big showroom/parts store, and an absolutely enormous hotel/truck stop and sauna complex. The hotel is five stories tall, and absolutely amazing (even half-built). As usual around here, everything is either brick or cinderblock, depending on the purpose of the building. At the same time, there are more than a handful of buildings here built from wood – quite a sight for sore eyes after the vast expanses of Moscow. Further, now that it is daylight, I can see that Ufa, far from being in a flat region as it had appeared from the airplane, is in a rather hilly area – also a familiar comfort to a Pac-Northwester like myself.

С Ю lives right next to his dealership in what I can only describe as an amazing house even by American standards. The guy certainly has cash, and on top of that a reputation in the area as a guy who can answer questions and get things done -- whatever that means. Definitely someone The Company wants to have in their court, if my opinion matters (which I like to think it does). Ю and С Я treated us to lunch with a bit of vodka in their own home. They have a five-month-old, who seemed fascinated with me in particular – I told them I must be his first foreigner – and the first friendly dog I’ve met in this country. Over lunch, the conversation was mostly business, though С Я had to congratulate me when I told him I had two sons, as he has two daughters himself from a previous marriage....

For tonight, I’ve managed to get my computer hooked up to a high-speed line to post this, but for some reason – and I’ve come to expect no less – I can’t get my business emails to synchronize. This means that, since some inconsiderate sent me an email with attached photos, I have gone over my limit on The Company’s servers, and am both unable to send emails via my blackberry gizmo, and unable to clean up the mess to be able to re-open that capacity. –sigh-.

By the way, С П and I learned a bit of Bashkiri today. One says “hello, sir” as: “Khairlogis’ Iptash”.

5/12 07:54, Ufa time


I am in the capital city of a place where, 100 years ago, the locals were living in tents and on horseback. There is a Bashkiri language and a Bashkiri alphabet -- similar to cyrillic, but different enough that neither С П nor myself can pronounce half of the signs we see. As I understand it, the language was suppressed by Lenin or Stalin (or whoever); with the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been making a resurgence. Ю Я, one of the two folks who met us at the Ufa airport, is clearly of Bashkiri descent; it’s not quite a Tatar look, but definitely not ethnic Russian. С П and I discovered, on our introductory stroll around the city center, that Kalinin (of the –grad) lived in this area. Having seen a very, very small part of the city (population, better than a million!), I must say that it compares favorably with Yekaterinburg and Vladivostok.

Yesterday, С П having just arrived back from Finland, he and Н picked me up from my hotel and took us over to his place in the south-west of Moscow. This is the nicer part of the city, due mainly to the fact that the prevailing winds are from the south-west, and the river flow is from the south, so only there do residents get both clean air and water. His place is a bit smaller than А Б’s, and not nearly as nice on the inside, but fairly decent nonetheless. It comes to a single bedroom, middling-sized front room/dining room, kitchen, and bathroom. He pays no utilities. Given that, and the fact of its desireable location (less than fifteen minutes, total time Metro and walking, from the office which itself is spitting distance from the Kremlin) the fact that he pays $300 a month for rent seems pretty good. It’s not beautiful by the standards of any western country, but sits just a bit over par for Russia.

After getting his stuff arranged, we grabbed some fried chicken at a place not far from his, and headed off to the third, smallest, and oldest of Moscow’s airports, Vnukovo. It also sits to the south-west of town (Sheremetevo is to the north, Domodedovo to the east). Clearly, it has undergone some recent renovation, but it is also in the middle of a major expansion, which will likely put it right between the other two airports in size. We flew UTair (actually pronounced that way in English. They write it ЮТэйр in cyrillic) instead of Bashkiri, on a Tupolev-134. This time around, I had the foresight to have my camera ready on the tarmac. You can see where the nose gunner sits in the photograph once I get it up. The joke now is that they kept the window so the copilot can go down below the flight deck every once in a while to check for landmarks.

Time has gone by faster writing this one that I had expected. I’m already late to meet С П for breakfast. More on Ufa later on.

5/11 11:49, Moscow time

I'm just returned from my half-day wandering the environs of the Kremlin. Most unfortunately, Red Square is closed for the rest of the week while they clean up and tear down from the parades Monday. I was also unable to get into the Kremlin itself. Sigh.

On the bright side (and what a bright side!), a fair number of the guys who came to see, or were part of the Victory Day celebrations were hanging around, taking pictures and whatnot. I was able -- see photos below -- to briefly accost one group consisting of two officers and an infantryman for a group picture. The gentleman standing next to me (unforgivably, I neglected to bring a pen with me, was unable to take down his name, and have a memory for names which is, to say the least, less than perfect) was an infantryman whose atallion fought up to Belorussia before getting detailed to handle German prisoners. The group was in such a hurry, I didn't get much more than that out of him, and not even that much out of the other two.

The picture above is a gentleman I ran into milling around outside the gates to the Kremlin war memorial. A tanker by the name of Mikhail Dimitrievich, his unit fought all the way into Berlin. My picture doesn't show it all that well, but while his left side is covered with campaign and unit ribbons and commendations, his right side has two Hero of the Soviet Union and two Order of Lenin pins on it, along with the one for winning the war. I got to shake hands with him, introduce myself, and politely abuse his native language. Supremely cool.

Of course, I did more than just hobnob with Red Army soldiers this morning, and have a bunch more pictures. Those, and the stories will have to wait until next time, as I am in dire need of packing and checking out of the hotel to get started on my way to Ufa. I'll surely write before I get there, but, as always when I head off for new quarters, I cannot guarantee that I'll be able to get the writings up until I'm back somewhere I know. In this case, that'll be this Saturday night, right where I'm sitting now. So, until, at the most, Saturday, счастливо.

Mikhail Dimitrievich 

WWII vets 

5/10 23:27 Moscow time

Н was at the airport to pick me up and bring me to my hotel. As before, a car ride with him is a good re-introduction to hearing and speaking Russian. I held my own really well this time (he was sure that I must have studied during the winter). The big event around here, of course, was the Victory Day celebrations yesterday. All sorts of political hotshots came to attend at the Kremlin; net result being that fairly significant parts of the city have temporary structures and barriers still up to inconvenience the general public. The bigwigs all flew through Vnukovo airport, which, by a happy [sarcasm] coincidence, is the same one the С П and I will be using tomorrow. They say to arrive way, way early.

Which brings me to the news. As Н was approaching my now-standard (three times is enough to call it that, right?) hotel in Sokol, we began discussing the mechanics of getting me from here to the airport tomorrow. Neither of us knew exactly what the times or locations surrounding the plan were. This turned out to be a good thing, though, as a quick call to М Ч had us learning that С П is not expected back from Finland until around noon tomorrow. The original plan was for us to leave in the morning... So, we were rescheduled to leave tomorrow night at ~7PM. This means that I have a fairly huge chunk of tomorrow to wander around Moscow, get some more pictures, and generally just enjoy the city (the weather here is nearly the best I've seen it). Yay me.

I also this evening took the opportunity to get together with А Б, a gentleman who participates in the online forum I frequent, and who lives only a couple minutes' walk from my hotel. Coordinating went smoothely, we grabbed some munchables and juice and strolled over to his place, right on the main road (it's not Leningradskoe Shosse right where he lives, but I can't recall exactly what the name changes to). He lives in the apartment his family has had since Stalin's days, in a row of three particularly nice (especially for the era) residential buildings. As he explained to me, the northernmost was for generals, so is the nicest, the middle was for managers, so is also quite impressive, and his is for 'smaller managers', which makes it really impressive by the baseline Russian standard, but not as good as they get. For an old Soviet building with wood floors, it was in surprisingly good shape. Really surprising. А Б lives on the eighth floor, and the elevator that accesses his apartment is in full working order. That is near-unbelievable, as I understand it.

We chatted for a couple hours in Russian -- А Б extended to me the same polite patience I've encountered with every other Russian I've met as I bludgeon their language into submission -- then switched to English for a couple hours. Quite good practice for both of us, I would say. Topics ranged from language in general (always an easy subject for students to handle) to politics American and Russian, to the old classic, "I remember/was told x; what do you remember/were told?" Since А Б was born in 1954, he has a pretty good memory of the Soviet times, without being necessary fossilized into the type, as som many old-guard guys are. To a certain extent, he shared the attitude most clearly expounded by С П-ёв regarding the future of Russia. His words to me -- in English, no less -- were, "I think in ten or fifteen years, Russia will die." As to whether that means another breakup, or a total collapse (or a takeover by the Chinese), he was less than sure. I also get from him the same conviction that the US is behind a lot of what's happened to Russia since the Soviet Union fell. As he said, whenever something bad has happened, be it the looting of the country's capital right after the fall, the spread of anti-Russian sentiment in the former Republics, or the spread of separationist sentiment inside Russia, the US never had its hands directly on it, but if you looked up from what was happening, the US was always standing right nearby. Strangely (to me at least) this didn't make him belligerent towards the States; he seemed to accept it as the natural course of thing to be utterly and mercilessly crushed by a rival who has obtained an upper hand. I suppose that makes him a good loser, at least. I know I wouldn't take that kind of thing nearly so well...

5/10 11:42, Frankfurt time

Back in the basement at the Frankfurt airport; I’ve got 45 minutes or so before my flight to Moscow boards. On the leg out, I made the acquaintance of two other Oregonian international business travelers. The gentleman sitting next to me is from a quasi-agricultural company (dealing in “botanical extracts”) based in Eugene. He’s on his way to Delhi to meet with some folks from DOW Chemicals who are interested in contracting for some of the peppermint extract his company arranges over there. His work takes him to the crappy parts of the world, where farming peppermint or vanilla or the like is a major career move for an impoverished peasant. The impression he gets of Indians is not a good one, to say the least. I learned from him that they are the most dishonest, disloyal, corner-cutting people he works with. Example in point: apparently, as with drugs, one major source of revenue enhancement for the middlemen is in cutting the pure extracts with various oily-type stuffs. He tells of the repeated requests from the Indian groups who actually accumulate the peppermint to be given a tolerance for the permissible level of toluene in the product. This is product that goes into chewing gum, among other things. Not being given a tolerance (or, more correctly, being given a firm tolerance of 0.00 +/- 0.00 ppm) for toluene (or other industrial solvents), the local companies – and they’ve changed on a number of times to try to keep this from getting out of hand, but they all seem to do it – just pay off whoever is gas chromatograph testing their product to turn the machine off before it gets to the range of the spectrum where the solvents would show up. Voila, clean tests. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to chew gum much anymore. And don’t even ask about toothpaste!
The other guy is with a tanks-and-sprayers custom outfit in Troutdale, on his way to Tunis to help install some crop duster hardware on old Hueys for the Tunisian army. He’s never been there before, but both agreed that in third-world countries, the army facilities are nearly always the best.
I’m in Germany, but sitting in the gate for the flight to Moscow, surrounded by Russian-speaking. Certainly, I’m catching more than I did last time I was through (and massively more than the first time I came through). My hopes for a successful trip – linguistically speaking – are rising. Kind of hard to believe it’s already Tuesday afternoon, though...

5/9 14:09, Portland time

Turns out, the Portland airport beams wireless Internet throughout the main terminals. I'm getting more and more fond of this wireless modem The Company recently gifted me.

Early, as usual, I've got a couple of hours in PDX before I head off for Frankfurt. Already, the trip is off to an inauspicious start. At about 4:15 this morning, A and I were awakened by a loud bang both to our eardrums and our bed. Too loud to be a gunshot, too brief to be an earthquake, my mind immediately informed me, "explosion". A concurred. We couldn't see anything along the lines of flames or mushroom clouds out our bedroom windows, and a cursory inspection of the block with our baseball bat-wielding neighbors turned up nothing, so we went back to bed to wait for the morning news. Turns out, a small chemical plant about a mile away from our house obliterated itself (and damaged some neighbors, I assume). Here's hoping that's my only brush with explosions for the next month or so at least...

I'll not have a huge amount of time over the next couple of days (until I get to Ufa, really) outside of getting from here to there to another there and so forth. In the brief interstice tomorrow evening, I'm planning to meet up with a guy from an Internet discussion board I frequent. He lives right near my hotel in Moscow. Always good to meet people. Having connections is far better than not.

Z and A were pretty good at the airport goodbyes. This will be the longest away that G remembers. I know for a fact that his phone vocabulary has expanded beyond [in response to 'how are you?'] "I'm two years old." and [in response to questions about what he's doing or done recently] "I'm talking to you." I expect big things from him.

Also, it appears that my MTS mobile number has survived the long drought. I certainly need to put some money on it as soon as I get to Moscow, but the number I handed out (the one that starts with a '7-916'...) last time I was in Russia is going to be the one to use to reach me this time as well.

Tick tock; tick tock. I'm off to go enjoy my last (for the next month) pee in a normal toilet. Cheers.

Four more days until I leave. I've decided that this thime around, I'll not be forgetting anything important. I started accumulating gear in a pile at home on Monday, and have been poking through it and picking up whatever I missed through the rest of the week. Of course, it wouldn't be travel if I didn't end up forgetting something. Hopefully it'll be something small and meaningless.

As for news, at the moment, С П is moving forward on plans to take a new job (with, I believe, a competitor of The Company). My hopes are that The Comapny can come through with something to convince him to stay before too long. Regardless, though, it looks almost certain that I will only have his escort/translation/phenomenal company for my first week in Vladivostok. For the second week, I will be flying solo. I'll get to discover for myself both how good I can get at technical and conversational Russian in three weeks, and exactly how much of the content of a three-week course in pneumatic braking and antilock brake systems can be adequately expressed in five days of grunts and hand gestures. One thing is certain, though -- my earlier concerns about running out of material (since the original plan was for 1.5 weeks rather than two full ones) probably won't be that big of a problem.

On the super-happy side, though, Vladik is the city at which I will have the easiest time getting gift-swag, and I'll be there long enough for the navy shop I found last time to order in whatever they don't have in stock.