FRussian Noise

Whenever I flip through the 4 T.V. channels I have, I invariably come across some foreign film dubbed in Russian. This morning it was a French murder mystery flick. The strange thing about the dubbing here, however, is that instead of eliminating the French entirely, they simply run the Russian translations over the French dialogue, such that whether you know French, Russian, both, or none—you haven’t the slightest clue what anyone is saying!

This bizarre and somewhat incomprehensible mode of incorporating foreignness(?), seems to be the norm here in Russia, or at least in Vladivostok.

The city buses are all second-hand imports from Korea, plastered with route maps for cities like Busan (rather than Vlad) and advertisements for Korean tutoring academies. Though, I haven’t quite figured out yet whether the floral print curtains (+ fringe!) and tinsel Christmas garlands adorning the drivers’ sections of the buses are a Russian addition or a Korean remnant.

A Bang and Olufsen store and boutiques selling Gucci and Prada goods dot the downtown of a city that can’t supply hot water for months at a time. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen “Gucci” studded in gold and bling across women’s posteriors here—in large part because (from what they say, anyway) after most these girls spend six months salary on one high-end article of clothing, they wear it almost every day for the next seven or eight.

Vladivostok has a number of moving memorials all over the city to commemorate the great losses suffered on Russian soil during WWII. The swastikas I’ve seen tagged on walls around the city are almost as common—with one just around the corner from the 7000+ names of fallen soldiers from here in Primorye.

But I sure do appreciate the little English café on the city’s “Arbat” (likened to the famous Arbat Street of Moscow, Semyonovskaya Street turns into a little promenade of shops and cafes leading to the seashore) with affordable, imported tea from Whittards of Chelsea (!) and the tasty Chinese and Korean food stands at Sportivnaya Market. In the past 15 years or so since Vladivostok re-opened to foreign trade—and foreigners, in general, its desire to return to its former status as a cosmopolitan, international port is plain… even if along the way, some of it gets lost or muddled in translation.