Last night, I had a dinner at Bacchus Restaurant with a Japanese government official and my friends Yasuko and Yoko. Yummy Lebanese food, a lot of laugh and the official's interesting adventure stories about Middle East and Africa. I had a good time.
I miss traveling. I used to travel a lot. My first travel abroad was to the former Soviet Union in 1989. I and my late friend, Yumiko, flew from Niigata Airport of Japan to Khabarovsk. We took the Siberian Express (not really an "express"...) from there to Irkutsuk, "Paris in Siberia" (um, yeah, kinda). It took 3 days. Then we flew from there to Moscow, where we walked around desperately looking for something edible.....and we suddenly found the shining big "M" sign...Woo hoo~! Vive capitalism!.....then it turned out to be a sign of a metro station. Yes, it was the pre-McDonald era of Moscow. We finally found a local restaurant filled with proletarian comrades. Yumiko actually fainted when she tasted a bowl of rice gruel there....I couldn't explain the real reason to the restaurant people (I spoke some Russian then)....she fainted because the food was so terrible.
Anyways, we kept going....from Moscow to Kiev (now the capitol of Ukraine), Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) , Murmansk (a port town in the Arctic Circle), Tbilisi (now the capitol of Georgia), Tashkent (now the capitol of Uzbekistan) and Samarkand. Samarkand is beautiful. Poets and historians called it "Rome of the East" or "The pearl of the Eastern Moslem World." It really is.
I made another trip to the Soviet Union in March of 1990 (I think). Thanks to the Glasnost policy promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev, I could visit my grandfather's grave in Ulan Ude, a small city near the lake Baikal. Nope, my grandfather was not Russian. He was captured by the Russians in northern China (he was deployed by the Imperial Japan) and sent to a labor camp. According to the available record, he died there from typhoid. He was 36. I also visited Yakutsuk to see a frozen mammoth.... and I was frozen there. It was -35F. Seriously. I also went to Sakhalin and Irkutsuk. I visited Russia again in 1999 with my parents. My dad wanted to see the grave of his father whom he barely remembered. I saw my dad crying for the first time.
Ok, other countries I've ever visited so far......Vietnam (5 times), Thailand (7 times), Cambodia (twice, one time for sightseeing another for internship), Laos, Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong (3 times), Singapore (I believe Singaporean boys are the cutest), Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Cuba. I may talk about those trips sometime.
BTW, the movie "Good Bye, Lenin!" is a great movie. I loved it.
2 comments:
nice rememberance. i'd like to go to russia sometime although now doesn't seem like the best of times and it may only get worse.
love bacchus! why haven't we gone there together?
and i agree, good bye lenin is a great movie. too bad they all die. just kidding.
She fainted because the food was so bad?!?! That must have been some seriously awful rice.
I need to watch goodbye lenin. I think I had it at one point, but never got around to watching and eventually returned it. Yes, I'm weird, but I do that a lot with Netflix movies.
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