Petropavlovsk-KamchatskyMapOctober 1–3, 2005 One of my lifelong dreams is greeting midnight in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. My dream came true a few hours after we landed. Also that very night in Kamchatka ammunition started blowing up at military depots.  On the whole I liked everything without exception. View of the cove from a hill.  View of the city.  Fragment. 
The city is 250 years old Fact.  300 years of Orthodox Christianity in Kamchatka Slogan.  Master modern management techniques ! This artist ran out of space.  Welco This one didn’t.  EVERYTHING passes — even THIS When they hang something on a pole here it comes from the heart and there’s always a lot of it.  The done thing here is to dry your clothes between houses.  If there isn’t a suitable house opposite, the rope is tied to a pole or directly to the hill (that’s what the poles in the foreground are there for).  In Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk they board up five-storey buildings using planks, whereas here it’s sheet metal.  With time the sheets begin to rust, creating inimitable beauty.  Smokestacks stuck in all over the place.  But it doesn’t mar the view.  Because it’s utterly impossible to ruin such beauty.  The plane, which was supposed to fly out on Sunday, 2 October, never arrived from Moscow. Perhaps that was due to the military depot explosions, or maybe there was some other reason. I had to be in Moscow by Monday evening without fail. I greeted midnight in Petropavlovsk- Kamchatsky for the third time at the Laboratory of Active Volcanism and Dynamics of Eruption, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Volcanology and Seismology. I felt right at home here, as if I were back in my own office.  Alexey Ozerov, a senior research fellow at the lab, regaled us with tales and demonstrations of how volcanoes work. It’s enough to make anyone want to drop everything and go off to observe the intensity of volcanic ashfall right after the eruption kicks off.  * * * The next day, the plane was delayed until 7 p.m. That was enough time to visit the town of Yelizovo, then read all of the magazines I’d prepared for the flight. The main point of interest in Yelizovo is a statue of Lenin, short in stature, with a head like Socrates and trousers with pressed creases, but no fly.  * * * The plane arrived in Moscow at about 8 p.m. The view out the window was on a par with the one you get from Google’s Maps.  |
