The chill of fall has set in
and the trees that line Karl Marx
Street, Khabarovsk's main thoroughfare, are beginning to turn color. Walking down
the wide boulevard with its baroque
and art deco architecture, broken up now and again by bulky Soviet structures,
you somehow get the impression of being
in a small town rather than a city of 700,000. The streets are clean, the people
are friendly and helpful. Everyone we
speak with seems to be genuinely happy to be living in Khabarovsk. The only
consistent complaint is that the prices for food
and goods here are so high. Judging from
the stores we stop in, the prices are
generally about 25 percent higher than in Moscow. I had my first taste of kvas today - a traditional, slightly alcoholic Russian drink made from roughly the same ingredients as bread. Lisa and I paid our 900 rubles each to a woman selling it from a huge vat on a street corner. In return we received two glasses of the murky brown brew.
Bitter, with a sweet
and tangy finish, the drink wasn't
completely disagreeable, but I wasn't
about to order a second round. Lisa, though, had struck up a conversation with
the kvas lady, Lyudmilla Mikhailovna, who turned out to
have some pretty
bizarre things to say. Hoping that she'd
eventually warm up to the idea of being photographed, we ordered two more glasses
followed by a third , which Lyudmilla
kindly offered on the house. In the end, I may have actually begun to acquire a
taste for this peculiar beverage.
Unfortunately, I never did get a photograph of the camera-shy Lyudmilla that I
was satisfied with.
Later we spoke with an older woman, Galina Sergeyevna, and her
granddaughter Galya, who came to Khabarovsk as refugees after the devastating
earthquake that hit Russia's Sakhalin
Island on May 28th of this year.
