Большой Камень

We were in a small apartment in a city called большой камень, or Bolshoy Kamen. My host mom has an office there, and the family often goes there for a weekend. It was small: a kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. Anna and I shared the bed in the back room and my host parents took the other room. I fell in love with the place instantly. I can't describe how, but it was what I'd always pictured as Russian. It felt old, like it hadn't changed in the twenty years they had owned it. The floor was linoleum, the wallpaper was peeling, the doors had latches and the lights were dim. It was furnished with pull out couches, Art Deco lamps and water color prints. Old toys filled the shelves, along with family photographs, classic books and knick-knacks they had acquired.

The first night we sat around a small rolling table in the room with the television set. The table was covered in various Russian salads, black bread and cheeses. We toasted to life, love and good health. A Russian sci-fi film played on the tv (that was an interesting movie) and the night turned incredibly black outside the window, as clouds rolled in, promising rain in the morning.

After finishing most of the food on the table, we cleaned up, put on our coats and headed out to the house of a relative, for his birthday. It was black as pitch, but no one brought a flashlight. We carefully navigated the treacherous sidewalks, that are plenty dangerous in the daylight! We passed apartment building after apartment building, all of them grouped in a wide field. It was interesting to see how they clustered closely together, then abruptly ended, while the field continued on empty.

Reaching the apartment, which was the size of our own, we piled in to greet the hosts and other guests. There were already six people there, and we added four more to the party. It made for a cozy atmosphere. We ate cake and ice cream, toasted many times and watched videos of cats on the tv. The apartment was much like ours, with the rooms small and their knick knacks filling every available space. The table was crowded, with cheeses, fruit, cookies, and candy. I was dying to know what they were all saying, but the words flew by so fast, and without pause. No one spoke English, and even if they did they were not eager to try it out.

We left around ten, handing our gifts to the birthday-cousin, which consisted of a decorative ornament, a bag of candy and a pillow. The moon peaked out from behind the black clouds while we walked back to our building. There really would be rain in the morning.

The rain came in buckets the next day. It gushed down the old water pipes and ran in streams down the streets. The tracks that ran between buildings and through the town were all mud, and a heavy mist had settled in overnight. My host dad and I left the apartment at eleven to go visit my host mom at her office. It gave me a chance to see a little more of the city, not that there was much to see. It seemed to me to be a city of apartment buildings, there were a few administrative buildings here and there, and a sport complex, but most businesses were just on the ground floor of the apartment buildings. There was a "main street" that had most of the businesses and was actually paved, but other than that it was simply a city of apartments.

My host mother's office was on the edge of town, overlooking the sea. It was foggy so we couldn't see much as we dashed through the rain to the door. We walked up to the third floor. The walls were a horrid greenish-yellow pastel color, with spotless floors and black doors at intervals along the hall. We entered her office, which was painted a pink pastel with tall shelving units jutting out from the walls. "Привет!" came her familiar voice from behind one of the shelves. Her desk was tucked back against a wall. A huge map of the Primorsky Krai region hung on the wall behind her.   A huge window was opposite her, and on a clear day, she said, she can see all the way to Vladivostok. (A distance of about forty kilometers). While she made tea I tried to ask her about her work. I was so interested, but I struggled to find words and form questions.

My host mom is an Engineer, and from what I could understand, she fixes ships. When a ship (military or civilian) is broken, it is brought to this city to be fixed. My host mom works mainly on civilian ships, but there is a huge plant here for submarine repairs as well. She served me my tea, along with a hard, lightly sweetened biscuit which she told me were made for the military and were on every submarine. I found that fascinating and ate a second one just because.

We did other fun activities during the weekend. Ice skating was one of them. I learned the Russian word for "fall," nothing like hands-on learning. My pride was left smarting as a tiny girl, who seemed barely old enough to walk and was bundled to within an inch of her life, skated easily past me, as I, sweating and panting, was struggling to stand. However, by the end I wasn't clinging to the wall, and could go full circuit without even touching it. A big accomplishment for uncoordinated me!

We also went walking on the beach, and it went something like this:

Everyone gets out of the car and we walk slowly for about a minute.

Dad: "Are you cold?"

Me: "Well the wind is a little cold." (My hair blasted straight back by the howling baby-tornado)

Dad: "Let's go."

Everyone bolts for the car. Needless to say we took a little drive instead.


My time there, in Болшой Камнеь was a little surreal. I actually felt a little uncomfortable at sometimes, thinking about what it was like twenty or thirty years ago. It felt like a compound, with all the buildings the same, and all the buildings being apartments. The colors all blended together, grays and browns. It was not a pretty place, in fact it was incredibly ugly and stark. The bare, gray feel was made even more pronounced as all the leaves had fallen from the trees, and were turning black and brown on the ground. However, there was beauty to be found there. It was in the tires-turned-planters that were painted bright colors in the overgrown flower beds. It was in the colorful coats and the laughter of kids walking to school. It was in the music drifting out of cars as they drove by. You could say it was "signs of life" that made it beautiful, that people were thriving here in a place where it looked like happiness had long been forgotten.