Out My Hotel Window -- Vladivostok, Russia (8/2008)
This amazing trip is at an end and I am grateful to start the long trek home tomorrow. It will be two travel days of more than 24 hours with an overnight in Moscow. This has been truly amazing. Siberia is not at all what I thought it would be and Vladivostok reminds me more of Seattle than any other city. Given that it was a closed city for so many years I expected a dull, drab, military city. What I found instead was a vibrant and very westernized port city -- more westernized than any of the other cities we saw in Russia, including Moscow. Still, I will be glad to get back to the land of bourbon instead of vodka and of fresh vegetables other than cabbage and cucumber. There are a number of essays to write, which will be done after I'm home and have regained a reasonable amount of temporal sanity.
You would think, in an age of energy efficiency and high fuel costs that they would fly me the short way -- Vladivostok, Seoul, Los Angeles, IAD, RDU...but no. Tomorrow I fly back to Moscow, then to Frankfurt, then to IAD and then to RDU. I have no idea what time zone my body will be in when I get back.
You would think, in an age of energy efficiency and high fuel costs that they would fly me the short way -- Vladivostok, Seoul, Los Angeles, IAD, RDU...but no. Tomorrow I fly back to Moscow, then to Frankfurt, then to IAD and then to RDU. I have no idea what time zone my body will be in when I get back.