A Night on the Town

Day 77  Friday 17^th June 2011

We didn’t get to make vaginas at breakfast as we thought that we might get caught out by the ever watchful gaze of the serving wenches that populate the dining hall  in their continuous drive to keep tables cleared, broccoli turned, coffee filled, soup stirred and other such duties. Maybe tomorrow.

As with yesterday we had not much to do but we took our daily stroll down to the port and watched the general goings on and we were especially interested in watching a car being loaded onto a flat bed truck it catching our attention because, like a magic trick that had gone terribly wrong, it was sawn in half. We suspected that this was to avoid some sort of import duty as there seemed no other valid reason to destroy a car other than for increased profit.

Craving a change of scenery we walked to the main square which was now the scene of a bustling market selling mostly vegetables. Believe it or not we actually managed to make the people watching last until after 3pm and we began the laborious walk up the hill to the hotel where we bumped into Mattie and Juogo, the Fins. We had a chat and we went back to our rooms to catch up with emails etc. But this was interrupted by a call from reception to say that Clyde was in the lobby. This reminded me that I had posted on the Horizons Site to the effect that we were in the Hotel Vladivostok and would welcome contact – well Kestrel-KLR alias Clyde had read our mail and he turned up on spec to meet us. We had a coffee and the Fins joined us and we got some information about travel in Mongolia where Clyde had set out from earlier this month. Clyde left us at about 7.15pm and we then went to freshen up for our 8pm dinner rendezvous with the Dutch couple Ad & Rian. We walked down the hill towards the railway station and Ad stood at the side of the street with his hand held out and, as is the way here, a passer by stopped and picked us up. We spoke no Russian, the driver spoke no English but we managed (somehow) to get him to take us to Svetlanskya Street where we found an Italian Trattoria. A small amount of money passed hands and we were happy to have a lift and the driver was happy to have some fuel money – that’s the way it works.

The Italian was very nicely laid out complete with a serving wench in mediaeval costume but no English menus and she did not speak English (or Italian) but she did have a smattering of German which was helpful because the Dutch couple did also – we got by. The meal was relatively inexpensive but the wine was astronomically dear eating up nearly two thirds of the total cost of the meal – around £130 a head.  We ambled back up the hill to the hotel where we had a beer in the lobby before finally giving in to the call of the Sandman. ZZzzzzzzz.