Friday, 21 August 2009 19:59
Well, we had big plans to get away for the weekend, maybe go down to the Black Sea for the last time this summer, but we called around and--being summer's last hurrah before school starts--no one had any vacancies. So we decided to stick around Krasnodar and go to a waterpark for the day instead. We usually (whether we're in The States or here) do this once a year anyway, so today seemed a good day for it. We drove to one waterpark in the city and...it was closed. Not just closed for the day, but utterly abandoned. Clearly not in business anymore. So we drove across town to the other waterpark, which we went to once last summer. At that time, only about half the slides were in operation, but it was clean and fairly-reasonably priced, which was enough. Today, although there were lifeguards sitting promisingly about in chairs, there was no water running down any of the slides.
I got out of the car, approached the security guard and asked, "Are you open today?"
Oh yes, he assured me, the park was wide open.
Me: "Even the slides?"
Him: "Yes, even the slides."
Me: (doubtfully) "All the slides are working?"
Him: (staunchly) "Every slide is working." (At this point, a little voice in the back of my head echoed, "There are no bread lines here," but I pushed it away. Ridiculous. That was 20 years ago, I thought.)
Tim was not quite so charitable. When I reported the guard's "All-the-slides-are-working" story, he got out of the car himself and looked over the fence and confirmed that, indeed, none of the slides appeard to be operating. He gave the children a small lecture on cultural differences, and how it is more important in some countries to maintain the appearance that everything is as it should be even if...well, everything is not exactly as it should be. Of course, we should still love these people while at the same time using our common sense to interpret the things they tell us, etc. etc.
Never mind, we thought, let's go to the river instead! The river is free, and a nice place to swim So we went to our old favorite, Solnichniy Ostrov ("Sunny Island") and saw the most amazing thing! Here, I'll show you:
These two elderly men--every day of 70, or older, were showing the young guys how the old-time athletes did things. It was incredible. The picture doesn't do justice to the impressive physical shape these gentlemen were in. Shortly after I took this shot, the one in the blue shorts (back to the camera) dropped and did about 50 push-ups in the sand. Then they noticed me taking their pictures, and sort of glared, so I waved in a friendly, non-threatening fashion and slunk away, hoping they wouldn't decide to hunt me down and take me out.
After we unpacked our towels, we went and got hot dogs. Beach hot dogs in Krasnodar look a bit different from what we're used to in America. For one thing, they're wrapped in lavash bread (like a tortilla) except on weekends, when they have buns. For another, "all the toppings" include mayonnaise and shredded carrots, but not mustard or relish. Anyway, they're good if you skip the mayo, and we ate our beach hot dogs and settled down with our books...when all of a sudden, the temperature dropped to about 50 degrees and it started to rain.
So we, being flexible like that, loaded our things back into the car and came home, where we alternately read or napped for the rest of the afternoon. Tomorrow, we hope to visit the sea for the day, but we may not make it there. By now we know that in Russia, there's nothing so certain as the uncertainty of everything.
