It's Only Thirty-Three Letters

First time in Russia.  First time up and out of China in this direction.  The train into town sounded good but it wasn’t leaving for hours.  We negotiated a cab ride that wasn’t far afield of an airport cab ride in Beijing and we set out into the pure Primorsky air with keen sense of possibility.  Do you drive on the wrong side of the road?  Oh.  You just have second hand Japanese cars.  Our driver avoided traffic and then became part of it.  I fell asleep and an hour later we were still in traffic.  The phone’s mapping function said we were still in the airport neighborhood. Luggage not withstanding we could have just as easily have walked the distance.  Is all traffic in Russia like this?  My impressions are hours’ old.  There’s a light ahead.  No one is cutting the line.  This strikes me.  Russians, like Americans, like Western Europeans, unlike Chinese drivers, unlike Indian folk behind the wheel are well-behaved, or afraid of the law, or afraid of drivers with guns, or maybe just accustomed.  We turn the light, gills aerated and we dash of into unencumbered traffic, finally.

The faces look, Slavic.  Surprise.  They seem to be on the one hand rather familiar in that they look essentially European.  On the other hand, they look utterly different.  I wonder if people looking at “Americans” find them similarly stereotypical.  People here, like my driver, seem glum and suspicious and at turns, beautiful.  Americans must similarly flash upbeat, fatuous and at turns repulsive to people trying to reckon with them, newly arrived.  

The Cyrillic alphabet is utterly off-putting.  In a world where I had time, I might have tried to unpack this alphabet.  It’s “only” thirty-three letters.  That shouldn’t be hard compared with ten thousand Chinese characters.  Because half the letters are similar to what you’d see in English, you want to attribute the same sounds to the one you recognize.  This is completely wrong.  Highway signs have English along with Cyrillic which helps to illustrate just now utterly unrelated they are. 

The air is very clear and I feel far north so it reminds me of Finland.  Things seem stark and clear.  I suspect it won’t get dark until very late, much later than Beijing.  Off in the distance are mountains.  More precisely they are a series of rolling hills, none of them are particularly large.  But they extend out in every direction, pronounced, but unassuming.  The most familiar thing of all are the deciduous trees that line the road and cover the hills.  Hard wood trees, somewhat stunted in size no doubt in part due to the long hard winters.  But although I can’t say definitively if they are walnuts or birches they are undoubtedly beautiful and feel very familiar.  These are the sorts of trees we never see in Beijing. 

I have rolled into new countries many, many times over my life’s span.  But the excitement of going somewhere for the first time and seeing the mind’s myth revealed in corporeal people and physical buildings is gladly, forever exciting.  Forever renewed.  It is wonderful to be here.  Turning a corner of the highway I can see Vladivostok there, over the horizon sloping down to the water, the head of this jutting peninsula. 

Friday 6/22/18