Vladivostok... from the tiniest bathroom to the largest ship

17Oct2006. Vladivostok, Hotel Morlak.
Finally, we get to Vladivostok. I have been wanting to see this place for soooo many years. Actually ever since I heard an add on the Tv about 20 years ago, with a voice over by Terry Wogan. I don't remember the add, but I can hear Terry's dulcet tones right now.

The sun was beating it down when we arrived at 8.30am. Such a major change compared to the rest of our trip over the last 2 weeks. It was quite warm. We got the second hotel we tried. It is ok but it has the tiniest bathroom, I have ever seen in my life. It doenst even have a sink, we have to wash our hands and teeth over the shower. But it's clean.
Vladivostok is a lovely town. It is on a peninsula so has 2 harbour areas. One with little kiosks and a lovely promenade and an aquarium, the other with the Russian Pacific fleet docked and a major port for cruise ships. One cruise ship called the Saphire Princess was docked while we were there. It was absolutely massive. I have never, ever seen such a liner in my life. I think I should go on a cruise sometime. It was beautiful, as cruise ships go.
I went shopping my first day as I needed to get some presents. This was my last chance. I also managed to get a pair of trousers, as 2 pairs just ain't enough... And yea sad cow that I am, I bought some Russian Dolls. It just had to be done. We dined in this Georgian restaurant. We couldn't understand the menu at all. Sometimes the menus are ok but other times they use fancy writing or italics which make the cyrillic characters too difficult to read. So we both ordered from the first page of the menu that we thought might be the specials page. G ended up getting the one non alcholic beer on the menu. I at least got my tea, as I can ask for that now. G got a sort of stuffed base of a pizza and I ended up getting this chunk of very hot bread with a large hollow, with a raw egg broken into the hollow and the crust stuffed with cheese. I'm not a fan of soft eggs at the best of times so this was not quite what I would have liked. But the egg sort of cooked in the hot bread and I left the egg that was still raw. We realised we ordered from the bread section later when we looked up the word for bread. It all made sence. but too late.

19 Oct: We were on our way to view one of the 16 forts in VV. As we walked by the harbour, we saw load of men in wetsuits in this kind of pool in the sea. From what we could ascertain, they were moving some creatures that looked like seacows from this "pool" into tanks on the harbour. The divers were trying to tie a rope around this poor creatures tails, then they opened this underwter gate of the pool and dragged the cow to the edge of the water where they pulled her on to this kind of stretcher and she was then lifted by crane into the tanks parked on the promenade. We must have watched facinated for nearly half an hour. We didn't know if they were being moved for dinner or what. However, whilst watching them, we noticed they were very careful with the creatures and when they finally got the creature into the tank, a lady came along with a huge injection for it. I guess a tranquiliser. Later we found out that they seemed to have been connected to the aquarium and there was a big poster about the sea cows. So I guess that is what we saw.
We finally got to the fort we were searching. It was a really good museum, as well as a fort. It provided an amzing amount of arms, photos etc about the fort and about Vladivostok itself. It was quite a journey through time. Although information from the 1950s-80s was a bit sketchy.

Later that day we went up this little funicular. But when we got to the top, it absolutely pelted down. We quickly got our photos of the view and scarpered.

We also managed to get on to this submarine that is now a museum. G seemed to get more excited about this than anything else we've seen. It again had a lot of photographs and a history of the sub, as well as the russian navy and Vladivostok. It was not a huge sub so it is amazing how the men managed to move around or live on it when submerged.Our last night was spent in this lovely posh restaurant. We had a lovely meal. They had an English menu so we were sorted. I even got to have a glass of wine.