St. Petersburg and caught sight of a huge bustle at the end of a dank, narrow passage. I walked through and emerged upon a Gotham of cardboard boxes. In other poor countries, people would be living in them; here they were minding shop. All the world’s handiwork was for sale, at least all the world’s handiwork that’s cheap—from Chinese canned hams to Malaysian underpants. It was illegal, of course. But the only signs of that were two enormous thugs demanding a buck to let me in. This was where ordinary Russians cruised the mall. They shopped for old- fashioned necessities. They shopped for newfound pleasures. And I hope they shopped a little bit just to make the people at the Russian State Committee for Statistics look like saps. The day after I got back from Lake Baikal, I boarded the Trans-Siberian Railroad for Vladivostok. I’d gone to Intourist to look into traveling across Russia. “What about a train ride?” I’d asked the clerk. “Is the Trans-Siberian Railroad any fun?” She stared at me. “It will be long remembered,” she said. It will—four days and three nights with no scheduled stops longer than eighteen minutes in accommodations that were Spartan. Trojan is more what I mean—like the inside of the horse of that name after a whole platoon of sweaty Greek hoplites had been squished in there for, oh, four days and three nights. Public transport in Russia is not for the faint of nose. I don’t mean to hurt any feelings, but I’m a professional journalist with certain duties, and conscience compels me to provide the information that Russians smell. They smell with a big, mildewy, musky, left-the-gym-clothes-in-the-car-trunk-all-summer stink. And they didn’t start smelling any better between Irkutsk and the Pacific, because Russian trains don’t have baths in the bathrooms, or showers or hot water or soap or towels or toilet paper. The toilet itself empties directly onto the roadbed, with its waste pipe aimed out to the side in a way that must provide surprises to the occasional bystander. There’s one bathroom to a car. It’s the size of a high-school locker, and everything in there, including the toilet seat, is made out of sheet metal. There’s no drain in the floor, and what with spills and leaks of one kind and another, the cubicle quickly fills with a variety of liquids to a height above your shoe tops. Bring Handi Wipes.
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online