A month in Chita, Nov-Dec 2021, post #1

Written November 24, updated and posted November 25

While there is little news to report about Siberian Bridges yet, you might like knowing what Chita is like on November 23, 2021, my arrival morning.  

The plane flew into Chita at dawn, dawn being at about 8:45am! The temperature on arrival was -15F and got up to about 1F for yesterday’s high. I was told this is the coldest moment so far this fall and it will be getting milder in the next few days. I’m pretty sure I brought the right clothes for the weather (fingers crossed)!

Stepping out of the plane onto the stairs to the tarmac, the air was filled with a heavy haze under the cloudless sky. I had a sharply nostalgic moment just then: it was the smell of the coal-fired power plant. The plant is pretty close to the airport with its three tall smokestacks, their thick white steam/smoke billowing sideways and then downwards in the bitter cold. It reminded me that Chita has a problem with thermal inversion (just like Los Angeles) in the cold months so the air quality can be not so great. I don’t think I’ve encountered that smell since I was here last in cold months. That would’ve been March 2007. 

For the first half of my visit I’m staying with Elena and Vitaly Pishchersky in their apartment in the city’s center. Their 13 year old son Pasha and 6 year old son Sasha seemed glad to see me, and I was very happy to see them. I’m flattered that they both talk to me as if I understand their fast Russian…and once in a while I actually do. Pasha generously has already given me several Russian lessons already, though the info is not sticking very well… (Pasha asked me my age and I forced him to guess. The young diplomat said “50?” “51?” I love this guy.)

Elena greeting me in this first morning making homemade blini with homemade jelly, pickles, and lecho—a tomato and onion relish—all also homemade, and coffee. For my first dinner in Russia this evening they served Vitaly’s homemade borsch, a cabbage slaw with oil, the lecho and pickles again, plus salo, Ukrainian frozen pork fat laced with garlic, also Vitaly’s production, brown bread, and tea with a Choco Pie. And we toasted our meeting with their homemade liqueur made of the leftover smushed berries from jelly production—currants, I think—flavoring some vodka. Our friend Victor told Vitaly he needed to have some toasting in the first meeting since that would be proper form.

Today I’ll go register at the Immigration Office a few blocks away and hopefully see my host, Elena Prusakova, for the first time. I’ll be staying the 2nd half of my stay out in the KSK district of Chita where she lives and her City of Childhood Child Development Center is situated, about 7km from the city center.

One small fun thing that happened last evening: after I got my new Russian sim card working in my phone, it re-registered my Viber texting app with the new number and sent that news out to others using Viber. I got a greeting on Viber soon after that from someone named Artek. The name was vaguely familiar, and on looking in my contacts, I saw a note I made two years ago. He was a taxi driver who took me from the city to KSK once. Back then, he was excited to meet me, his first American, so video-called his wife while we were driving (a little scary, but fun) He wanted me to come to dinner. I couldn’t just then, but I said I’d look him up when I came back in 2020. Well, I didn’t come back in 2020, of course, but now we are back in touch. At the time, he made sure I understood he was not Russian, but Armenian, self-exiled from Armenia 20 years before because of the strife there. He remembered me, and then I remembered him! I hope to meet him this time, or worst case, next summer when I come back.

November 25 update: I met Elena Prusakova at the Migration Office, but it was closed, so we’ll get me registered today. She said everyone at her house has a cold so we didn’t talk long.

Today is Thanksgiving and Elena and Vitaly want to have a kind of American Thanksgiving dinner this evening. We’ll have chicken, mashed potatoes, apple pie and instead of cranberry sauce, some of the frozen black currants from their dacha. Elena said she didn’t understand our stuffing made of bread, and I had to agree with her. Turkey stuffing isn’t a favorite of mine, so we’re not making it. It is sweet of them to want to do this, and I know it is sacrilege for me to say this, but turkey dinner once a year is enough for me.

A few plans have been made now. Tomorrow morning Victor and Elena and I will visit Olga Isaakovna Fleshler’s grave and also those of Tanya Sukhanova and her sister Luda, if we can find them. If not, I will get better directions from Andrei Mikhailovich Nikonov, Luda’s husband and my longtime host (and great background supporter of Siberian Bridges) when I pay my respects to him.

Tomorrow afternoon Elena’s students and I will view the American animation, Shrek, for the December 3 Movie Club zoom discussion between Americans, mostly in Minneapolis, MN, and Russians, mostly students in Chita. The Russian movie for comparison will be the 2015 animation Fortress. Anyone can join the zoom call, just watch both movies (Fortress is on Netflix with subtitles, I think) and email us for the zoom link. The discussion will be an hour or so on Dec. 3 evening in the US/Dec. 4 morning in Chita.

Then on Saturday we’ll have dinner with Victor and Elena, and also, I hope, Victor’s son, Vova, his wife, Olya and their two children, Varya (9) and Seva (2) who is my godson!