I looked inside and saw that my expensive Ralph Lauren jacket was gone. I was furious and tried to talk to the train lady, but she didn’t speak English. Luckily there was a Mongolian tourist guide on board who did. She explained what happened to the train lady but she didn’t seem to care. I became angrier and told her I was going to search the train for those bastards. I was going to knock their teeth out as soon as I saw them.
I searched the whole train but didn’t see them. When I got back to my compartment there were two train cops and they asked what happened. Again the tourist guide explained things and then the two cops and I went looking for my jacket. We searched the whole train together and every time there were two guys without families, the cops roughly opened their bags and searched through. It was quite a spectacle. In the end we didn’t find the guys or my jacket. I let the train cops write a paper confirming that my stuff had been stolen, and they handwrote a paper in Mongolian. I asked the train lady to put some stamps on it to make it look more official. Months later, this helped me get a bit of insurance money back, but not nearly as much as the jacket was worth.
Russia (Far East) – Chita
After that partly unfortunate week in Mongolia I was back in my beloved Russia. I quickly bought a ticket to Chita and soon fell asleep on the train. When I woke up the next morning I got to talking with a Russian guy who was sleeping in the bunk below me. After I’d answered a few of his questions he told me I was a hero for travelling alone in Russia. He spoke a bit of English and I spoke a bit of Russian so together we managed a conversation. Sergei was a guy in his forties who was visiting his family for a few days, and he got me a fully-furnished two bedroom apartment for only five hundred rubles a day. That was about fifteen dollars back in 2009. Super cheap if you compare it to the crappy hostel in Moscow where I paid the same for a shitty dorm with sixteen beds and a toilet I couldn’t bring myself to use. That day I walked around Chita a bit and in the evening Sergei and his girlfriend showed me around different places in the city.
The next day was pretty much the same. We went to some forest where Sergei proudly showed Russia’s pride: the massive taiga, that endless spread of conifers that covers about half the country. Sergei paid for just about everything, including the food and drinks; I almost had to fight to manage to pay something in return. I did finally succeed in buying us some beers.
The next day was a weekday, so there wasn’t much to do till the evening, when I went out to meet some girls. I met two hot girls on the street and got to talking with them. It wasn’t the most peaceful of conversations: about ten meters away there was a fight going on, with a guy getting severely beaten up by three other guys. The girls wondered I wasn’t scared, but I pointed out that it wasn’t my ass getting kicked. Still, when the guys walked by us I thought it was better to stay quiet and not let them know I was a foreigner. It’s a technique I often use when cops are walking by.
I asked the girls for their phone numbers, and they said “Give me yours”. Doing that’s a stupid mistake I don't make nowadays. Always get the number of the girl and don't only hand out your own. I typed my number into her phone but was fucking the numbers up because her phone had the Russian alphabet.
Later in my room I realized I forgot to type in one number and was screwed. And not the fun kind of screwed I was hoping for, either.
I went back to where I’d met them, but I didn’t see them again. Still, I wasn’t going to waste too much time on something hopeless, so while walking back to the apartment I approached two girls. They didn’t speak English at all but somehow I got them to a bar. I paid shocking prices for three beers and tried to make the best of it. The personnel were happy to see a foreigner and we joked around a bit as we drank. When we were done we started walking back towards my apartment and I tried to convince them to join me. This is not an easy task if you only speak very bad Russian. Unfortunately, the ugly one of the two was cockblocking me and wouldn’t stop whining to her friend that she wanted to go home. I thought, Do or die, and looking at the hot one, a skinny girl named Ilona, I said the Russian word for kiss. “Da”, she said and her red lips touched mine. We kissed. She definitely liked it, but her crazy and probably jealous girlfriend was pulling her arm, looked shocked and yelling “Ilona, stop it”. We parted ways pretty soon after. Another almost sure thing ruined by someone else. The look in Ilona’s eyes had already told me she was up for anything, and I had my own apartment close by.
Russia – The wedding in Chita
When I told Sergei I was about to leave because my visa was running out, he burst out “No way! Tomorrow’s my cousin’s wedding, you’ve got to see a Russian wedding!” How could I refuse? The next morning I bought a big bouquet of flowers and we went to the bride’s house. It was still only ten in the morning and when we entered the house the bride was still walking around in her underwear. She was a totally hot girl, the kind they only make in Russia. Her bridesmaids kicked us out of the house. A bit later when she was dressed we went back inside and I was introduced to the whole family. The groom was a biker and all his biker buddies came over on their motorcycles. Luckily I found out that one of the bridesmaids (Natalia) spoke perfect English and I talked with her for a while.
In the afternoon we went to a park where the couple had the pictures taken. There was a lot of food and people started drinking vodka. Welcome to Russia. I had at least five double shots of vodka before we moved on. There was a whole truckload of hot girls there, but unfortunately most of them didn’t speak English. Still, when we drove to a small church for more pictures I ended up in a large SUV with the hottest girls from the wedding crowd. We were sitting in the back of the car and suddenly the girls opened the small rooftop and stood up and started shouting and cheering like something out of the movies. I just sat there with the two finest asses a man could ever see waving in my face. I took a sneaky picture, because my friends back home would never believe me if I told them about this.
Later that night we all went to the wedding party where I kind of felt like a wedding crasher. But still, most people seemed to like it that I was there: at one point people almost stood in a line to toast with the foreigner. I was downing so many vodka shots that I had to switch to champagne so that I wouldn’t get completely wasted. I danced with some girls and Sergei did half a drunken striptease. I got the feeling that Sergei was the disreputable uncle of the family, the one his brothers and sisters probably warned their kids about. I still found it almost unbelievable I was just attending a Russian wedding in the countryside like it was something perfectly natural.
I got talking with one of the bikers who had studied English once, and after the wedding he and a few other bikers drove me to a garage in some back alley. It all looked pretty dodgy but once inside they showed me their bikes and we drank some beers. After a while we smoked weed.
They had some sort of weed oil that they smoked with a sawed off plastic bottle and a bucket of water. I had never used that sort of bong before. Needless to say, after all that vodka and champagne and now this, I was pretty fucked up that day. Afterwards three of the rough bikers brought me home in a car and walked me all the way to the door of my apartment. At first it looked a bit sketchy when they walked up the stairs with me but they were just being nice and making sure I got indoors alright. Just as well, too. Russian people hardly ever smile but are among the nicest, friendliest people I met around the world.
I had a massive hangover the next morning but Natalia and a lot of young people from the wedding picked me up anyway, and we went with four or five cars to some lake a few hours away. It was still very hot outside. We all lay on the beach that day, eating leftover food from the wedding and drinking vodka again. (Welcome to Russia.) I made a sorry attempt to score with one of the girls but no success – I really wasn’t in any state to carry it off anyway. Natalia was watching from a distance and acted like she didn’t mind, but to this day she asks me to return to Russia and hang out with her. And one day I will and who knows what will
happen then.
Russia (Far East) – Khabarovsk
After the wedding in Chita I spent two nights on the train to reach Khabarovsk, the second-largest city in Russia’s Far East. When I got off the train I dropped my bag in a locker and started exploring the city. It was hot outside and I walked around the city most of the afternoon. The first thing I noticed was the extremely high number of hot girls in the city. Having already been in Russia for already six weeks I was getting used to seeing quite a lot of attractive girls around but here it was unreal. Out of every ten girls you saw at least seven or eight were highly bangable. Almost every girl was at least a 7 on a scale of 10. It was at least thirty degrees in the sun and they were all dressed in short skirts and high heels. For some reason they were all big-breasted. I don't know what they eat there but they should introduce that diet to other parts of the world. I decided then and there that I would live in Khabarovsk after returning from my word trip.
Later that day I returned to the train station, since there are no hostels or cheap hotels in Khabarovsk. My plan was to stay in the train station’s dorms, but as soon as she found out I was a foreigner the fat old lady behind the counter just said “Nyet”. There were people just walking around behind me and I could see all the empty dorm beds. That fat old pig of a woman, who came straight from Stalinist times, just kept saying “Nyet” and I didn’t really know what to do. I went to the information desk and asked what was going on, but that didn’t help much. But a security guard overheard my story and walked with me to the hostel’s desk and tried to get me in. He didn’t succeed. He started calling around for me and I was hopeful I might get a nice apartment the way I had in Chita. Unfortunately he couldn’t find me anything, but he said I could sleep in the VIP waiting room for free. I offered him a beer in thanks, but he (Andrei) said: “I don't drink, I’m a sportsman, I run marathon”. Although he looked like a low life with teeth missing I believed him.
Andrei worked a twelve-hour night shift and the next morning when I woke up he offered me a place in his house with his family. Obviously I accepted and we went there on an old, clunky bus to drop off my bag. After getting off the bus to the suburbs we walked over to his house. Although “house” is a bit of an overstatement. All of the two-story buildings were made of wood and looked like barracks from a WWII concentration camp. I finally understood what Moscow-Julia meant by a “really” bad look. But I hadn’t had a shower in three days, so I was fine with it. The only problem was that there was no shower, only a sink. Still, I made the best of it with a bar of soap.
Andrei’s wife was a lot younger than him; I think she was in her late twenties, but she was quite ugly for a Russian girl. I guess Andrei was already in his mid-forties. Anyway, after cleaning up I dropped my bag and Andrei and I went back to the city for a “tour”. Since Andrei didn’t have any money I bought him some food and he asked if he could get a beer with that. Communication was difficult because he didn’t speak much English and I needed my pocket translation book a lot as we walked around the city and visited all the sites. Andrei was drinking more and more. In the afternoon we went to visit a childhood friend of him.
We went to an office where he introduced me to Vitaly. Vitaly had a business getting visas for Russians who wanted to work abroad, and had two girls working there. One of them, Tanya, was very good-looking and her dress showed maximum cleavage. She didn’t speak much English. Natasha, the other one, was average-looking but spoke very good English. Both were in their early twenties. Vitaly was very interested in my travel story and invited me, the girls and Andrei to go to a Japanese restaurant. He had a thing for Japan and Buddhism.
He asked me if I’d be going to countries like Cambodia and Laos, and when I said yes he asked me to get him some information about meditation once I was there. I didn’t have to pay for the food that night. Later that night Andrei and I took another walk and we bought some vodka. He was getting drunk and annoying when I tried to speak with some girls, and I got the idea he was not exactly translating what I told him, so I suggested we went back to his house and sleep. And so we did. His wife put a mattress on the floor and gave me an old blanket. When I woke up their dirty dog was sleeping next to me on my pillow. At a guess I’d stolen its blanket.
The next morning, Andrei, his son and I went to a banya, a Russian bathing house. It was the only thing I hadn’t experienced yet in Russia, and since it’s a typical Russian thing to do I wanted to try it. The banya was very expensive by Russian standards and I was quite pissed that we only stayed for 1.5 hours while I paid about thirty dollars for it. Except for finally getting to take a decent shower after four days, I didn’t like it much. It was basically a small spa with a pool table and couches in the other room and wasn’t very interesting, or fun.
Andrei had to work the afternoon shift and his wife was supposed to bring me back to Vitaly’s office, since Vitaly had offered to drive me to Vladivostok. Obviously, I thought, Nice, a free ride. On the way back from the banya I bought Andrei some beers because he was insisting so much. Beer is cheap but he got damn annoying, asking for a gift. He didn’t know the English word for it and said it in Russian instead, but I pretended that I didn’t understand him. I was thinking that in just a few more minutes I’d be rid of this clown.
Back in his home he wanted money for the night I stayed there. His wife was kind of pissed that I’d bought him beers. I refused to give him a single cent because I’d just paid a shitload of money for the banya and his beers in the last two days, and he’d never said anything about paying when he invited me to his house. We started arguing, and in the end I just packed my bags and took the bus to the city center with his wife. I could see that she was very ashamed of him, and told her she could do much better than him.
When I got to Vitaly’s office it was full of hot girls applying for European visas. I told Vitaly all about my time with Andrei, and he agreed with me that Andrei was a strange character.
Vitaly told me his car was broken and that we’d have to go to Vladivostok by train. He gave me the keys to an apartment he owned or rented, and his office girls walked me there. I tried to game Tanya but she didn’t bite. She left later and I went to a bar with Natasha, where we met up with her boyfriend, a big guy who looked like a football hooligan. Luckily he had to work at the local carnival and didn’t stay long; Natasha and I drank a few half-liters of beer and then went to a cinema in the afternoon, The movie was super boring and we both fell asleep with our 3D glasses on. We said goodbye later and I went back to the apartment, but instead of going out and bringing a hot girl back to the fancy apartment I just watched some television and went to sleep. If only I had more confidence and game back then.
The next morning Vitaly and I got on the train to Vladivostok. Andrei called to say he was very sorry for what happened. Some people are really nice until they start drinking, and I guess he’s one of them. Tanya came to see goodbye but though I didn’t realize it then, it wasn’t a real goodbye: I would see Vitaly and Tanya again later in my trip.
Russia (Far East) – Vladivostok
Vladivostok, the last stop on my two-month trip in Russia, is a medium-sized city close to the borders of both China and North Korea. The train ride from Khabarovsk to Vladivostok took only one night, and in the morning Vitaly was talking my ears off about Buddhism. I was more interested in some hot-looking girls in the train wagon. One of them made a lot of eye contact with me and we touched a few times while passing in the hall. When the train had nearly arrived in the station, I thought What the hell, I’ll give it a try. I asked her if she spoke any English and she answered that she’d been an English teacher for a while a few years back. When I asked for her name she said … Julia. The one in Moscow had studied English and the one in Kazan was an actual English teacher. Meeting a third Julia, another English teacher, I thought, This can’t go wrong.
We talked for a short while and I got her phone number. When we got off the train, she nearly shouted out: “Call me!”
&n
bsp; Vitaly and I tried to find a room for me from hawkers around the train station, but all we found was a drunken old lady renting out a room. Vitaly said that it was best to find something else, and we ended up in a street with a few strip clubs and went inside one of them. Vitaly said he was friends with the owner and had a room there. We went inside and dropped off his bags. He then told me that we could visit the strip club backstage later. I was looking forward to that.
Then we went to his Vladivostok office, which like the one in Khabarovsk was a really nice-looking place. He had one girl working there and she was pretty hot also. We talked for a while and I saw a few very attractive girls applying for European visas. Vitaly said it was to do household work. I thought to myself, I’m not that stupid. The only people I’ve seen applying for your visas are really hot girls, and you’re friends with strip-club owners. I was pretty sure he was sending the girls to strip clubs or something. I didn’t know that was a part of Buddhism.
There was only one hostel in Vladivostok at that time but we couldn’t reach them by phone. Later a few of Vitaly’s friends from his running club joined us. Two of them were quite good marathon runners and had run marathons all over the world. We all went for a sightseeing walk and later to a restaurant. After a massive dinner I didn’t have to pay a cent. Have I mentioned that Russians are friendly?
Vitaly and his friends were discussing my room problem and Eduard, a policeman, offered me to stay at his place. He said that his wife was working the nightshift and only he and his two daughters would be there. I said: “Hmm I don't know, maybe I can find a place at the train station”. Then I asked how old his daughters were, and he answered nineteen and twenty years old. I started glowing from inside and waited a few minutes before saying, “OK, I will stay with you”.
Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova Page 6