2-27-2008, Vladivostok, Far-Eastern Province, Russia
Vladivostok is not a shithole. Yes, it is a dirty old city. It has very few sites to lure a tourist into the cold winds. It’s strangely expensive. On the boat from Korea I was told that getting around, eating out, buying drinks, were all as expensive as Seoul, and I would now say perhaps more so. Ten dollars for a modest lunch and four dollars for an espresso were pretty standard. Some bread, cheese, sausage, and a small tub of various things suspeneded in mayonaise (the Russian idea of salad) from a small deli could be over eight dollars for two. (Perhaps this price difference is why there are about ten times as many little groceries as there are restaurants and cafes.)
I find it hard to imagine where the money from these high prices goes. According to my young Russian friends, a normal twenty-something’s salary could run from about ten to fifteen thousand rubles, or, four to six hundred dollars. And the twenty-somethings I know seem to like to go out at night, having nice cell phones, buying snowboards at twice their U.S. prices, etc. Even sometimes hosting strange foreign boys pro bono.
Another strange contrast, particularly stark in Kamchatka, is between the inside and the outside of the buildings. Most everybody lives in old apartment buildings clearly built in the Soviet era. The interiors of the apartments that I visited were very clean, modern, and nice. If not terribly large, cerntainly up to Western standards. But the exteriors of these buildings look like some seriosly ghetto shit. Not a one has been painted, sophmoric graffiti aside, since Gorbachev at the very latest. Many have metal siding on the ends, rusted to such a degree as to give a strangely ship-wrecked yet boxy appearance. The stairwells are littered with junk and have recieved much more piss then fresh paint for many long years. Whoever is in charge of these buildings, and I failed to inquire most are publicly or privately owned, feels no need to maintain them. Admittedly the price of shipping building materials cannot be cheap. In respect to the maintaining of public placses, Ulya, a friend Harold met on the way to Kamchatka, explained that all the money meant for public works gets invariably detoured into corrupt pockets.
While the streets and public squares are indeed falling apart in Vladivostok as well, the buildings in the old downtown are very beautiful. It’s clear these were built before somebody had the idea that the proleteriat liked ugly buildings. Walking around the colorfully painted almost baroque banks and shops of downtown it’s hard to agree that this is still technically Asia.
* * *
Our first night in Petropavlosk, somewhere into perhaps the second bottle of Vodka, Harold and I were discussing early impressions of Russia. One of these impressions was strongly shared by the both of us, but I can’t possibly phrase it better than he:
“I didn’t expect that in Russia most of the girls are hot.
“And the rest are super-hot.”
I must admit I as well did not expect just how rediculously ubiquitous the whole being hot thing is in this suddenly very appealing of countries. The girls are a bit like heli-boarding season: I had been warned but realistically can’t expect to have known better.
I have long been familiar with the suggestion that bright pigmentation, such as blonde and red hairs, blue and green eyes, developed in Northern European peoples as a result of sexual selection. Lack of tanning salons made for pale, Vitamin-D friendly skins and light pigmentation in general. This allowed interesting colors to show up on various parts of some lucky genetic freaks’ bodies.
Before much of Northern Europe became today’s high-taxed, clean, well-run industrial democracies with boringly high standards of living and boringly low levels of gun ownership, life up there actually really sucked pretty bad. According to one theory (which I either read somewhere or just made up somewhere else along the way) a very high proportion of men had a habit of dying, and women with brilliant full-bodied blonde hair and bright blue bedroom eyes were better at winning the seminal affection of what hardy men were left. A few milenia later and my own blue eyes are not even so special among my pasty kin.
What was once Sweden is not so far from Russia today, as far as recent figures on young male death rates here are concerned (somewhat different causes aside). A friend of mine, long before I planned on coming here, contended that the same evolutionary forces that gave me my nice blue eyes didn’t stop at the eyes with the Russian ladies. Russian hotness is the result of plenty of selective pressure for nice other things too, he insisted. When he then admitted to recently having broken up with a Russian girl, I disregarded him as biased.
Turns out his knowledge of physical anthropology was only so true as my own in situ research could prove. I feel a little apprehensive to quit such studies, given that I will be heading to a country with a long history of an opposite gender imbalance, and thus an aesthetic physical philology open to many theoretical interpretations I’m not quite ready to publish. Nevertheless my current (self-administered) grant is to fund studies of the Chinese language, and so I’ll be getting on the 6:00am direct bus to Haerbin tomorrow. Even if Mandarin is also sounds less pretty than Russian.