Ethnographic Expedition 2008. Part IX

August 25—September 1, 2008

Turns out, there’s an absolutely amazing Mercedes dealership in Vladivostok. In addition to a 24-hour service department, where they even found authentic replacement bushings for Moumousique, it also has a delicious restaurant, as well as a person who makes excellent espresso. You can tell they’re making an effort. If I lived here, I’d drop by this dealership for lunch once in a while.

Ussuriysk

There’s virtually nothing here.

We have virtually everything!

The city is ready for defense.

Contextual advertising.

Limousines

Many streets have some sort of drainage ditches, almost like in Guyana’s Georgetown.

The traffic lights are like the ones in Nakhodka—with poles consisting of double pipes.

Sometimes even triple pipes.

Birobidzhan

Birobidzhan is the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.

Birobidzhan! / You’re in your prime / As your son, I’m proud / to call you mine.

Everyone in the city plays up the Jewish theme to the best of their creative ability.

Sholom Motors

Since there are hardly any actual Jews here.

Tzimmes Deli Meats

I stopped by Tzimmes. They still have the old Soviet system with a cashier in a separate booth here. You tell her the amount, she rings you up and gives you a receipt, you take the receipt to the counter to get your purchases. In the old days, you also had to tell the cashier the counter number—in this regard, there’s some progress in Birobidzhan because the amount alone is sufficient. (This is what old age feels like. Today’s 20-year-olds are astonished to hear about this system.)

What’s also interesting is that dealing with the cashier used to be relatively simple: the selection of products in every store was small, and the prices were the same in all the stores. Today, it’s really hard to memorize the price of a particular yogurt, cheese spread, type of bread, green tea, gum and whatever else I was buying—I had to constantly run back to check the price tags.

A church building.

Church of Jesus Christ

The city is trying to combat littering.

Clean—it’s simple

There are even progressive trash cans like in Paris.

Clean—it’s simple

The design of the local traffic light masts is mind-boggling. Since they already went to all the trouble of raising the light so high and extending the pole sideways, why extend it by only a meter? Why not to the middle of the road so that the light would be visible from a distance? The pedestrian light takes some neck-craning to see as well.

The annual Stupidest Traffic Light Placement Award goes to Birobidzhan.

I fueled up at another Alliance Oil gas station and received a new portion of stickers. In the process, I got to talking with the security guard and cashier, who asked me if I had a sheet for the stickers. Turns out, they only redeem stickers stuck onto special sheets, which they’d stopped giving out two weeks before. I was lucky: the guard retrieved one sheet from storage and gave it to me.

At night, about a hundred kilometers from Blagoveshchensk, I felt my entire car vibrating. I radioed the others:

“Expedition, this is Moumousique. My engine fell out again.”

I got another bunch of stickers at a gas station right before the city, stuck them onto the special sheet and exchanged it for my long-awaited blue terry face towel, which came sealed in plastic. Then I slowly drove my car to the repair shop, which I now know how to find from anywhere in Blagoveshchensk.

The motor mount bracket turned out to be intact this time, but the bolts keeping it in place had broken off. I needed to replace the bolts and yet another torn dust cover. The order for the latter flew off to Moscow. The last thing I wanted to do at that point was spend another two nights in Blagoveshchensk. But I had no choice.

Finally, the dust cover arrived by plane, and we could move out again.

Svobodny

If this is the square with Lenin on it, you can imagine what the rest of the city looks like.

It was time to take the Amur Highway in the other direction. One thousand kilometers of horrendous potholes. I heard some sort of dinging in my car the entire time. As I would find out later, this was the rear shock absorber, which had made its way inside the car through the trunk floor.

Some time before reaching Chita we turned south, towards the Mongolian border.

Nerchinsk

A backwater town.

Borzya

Our last overnight stop on the territory of Russia. The Mongolian border is an hour’s drive from here.

But all the locals drive three hours to the Chinese border instead, because there’s nothing in Mongolia, while China has shopping and cheap food.

Solovevsk

A small border town. Steppe. An active railroad track. A Russian diesel locomotive heads to Mongolia to pull three cars to Choibalsan.

Our border guards are pointedly formal, polite and efficient. I try to get them talking.

“That’s a long fence you have here!”

“It’s the utility system.”

My offering of a bottle of moonshine was refused.

The actual border. The post on the left is Russian; the one on the right is Mongolian. I would have thought it was the other way around based on the colors. A strange choice of colors, frankly speaking.