Six Hours in Siberia
British Airways decided 700 euros wasn’t sufficient for a Tokyo return and wanted 200 more on top. I said no. Aeroflot would do it for 500, with a six-hour layover somewhere in the Siberian interior. Fine. The trade-off is worth it, and since I was rearranging anyway I pushed the trip to late May and extended it to five weeks, with a flexible return date—in case I fall in love with the country and refuse to leave, or in case I hate every moment of it after two weeks and need to get home fast.
Sari, who contributes to this journal, volunteered to be my guide. We’re planning to visit artists and photographers, see shows, eat things that probably shouldn’t exist, and document everything. Unless I end up drunk in a gutter somewhere, which I’ve heard is something of a local tradition among exhausted businessmen—so at minimum it would be culturally immersive.
Before any of that, there was Hannah—three months in Tokyo in 2009, and absolutely determined to brief me before I go. Her tips arrived in one long unbroken transmission. Don’t eat while walking; apparently rude. Avoid cold soup with a raw egg floating in it. The yellow egg custard pieces on the sushi conveyor belt will destroy you if you eat too many, but they taste incredible.
Anything that looks like slimy peanut paste: don’t. You will throw up. Just leave it.
The milk lemonade from the vending machines, though—genuinely outstanding.
There’s a beggar outside Shibuya station who specifically targets foreigners. Elaborate story, gets on his knees, the whole production—pure theater. In the side streets of Shibuya, and in most neighborhoods, the sex shops announce themselves with small colorful doorways where you can browse the available options from the outside. You can get a blowjob for money, which Hannah apparently discovered firsthand before getting thrown out. Men only.
Practical notes: fruit is shockingly expensive. Enter temple gates left foot first or you invite bad luck. They don’t blow their noses there—they sniff everything back in, loudly and continuously, which Hannah found genuinely disturbing. The soup slurping she eventually found charming. Get a Hello Kitty face mask. And English: almost no one speaks it, including men in suits who by all appearances should. They’ll say hai, hai
and nod at everything you say and wait patiently for you to give up and walk away. They learned to read it in school but speaking is apparently too mortifying. The ones who can’t speak a word of it but try anyway, though—unfailingly helpful.
Before Japan there’s Prague and Mallorca, but those are separate stories. Mostly I’m hoping the accommodation works out—if it doesn’t, a shared flat is fine, as long as the other people in it are worth talking to. Anything else would be too dull to endure.