And I drank juice straight from a rusty can in the USSR 36 years ago… a memory I will always treasure
“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s OK. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
Anthony Bourdain
You are right, Anthony, but then again, you always are. RIP
My brother, mother and share many a food/travel story from our time in the USSR. It was 1985 and for Americans it was a tense place to be. A few weeks before an American soldier had been killed in the Berlin no man’s land and the Soviets closed their borders. They opened just in time for us to go but it was a tense time. Jay says I yelled at a front desk clerk who wouldn’t give us map, when she claimed to only have one in German. I began speaking German to her and when I still didn’t get my map I guess I got heated. He attributes that to us having a “babysitter” follow us around for the next few days. Lenin’s tomb was closed to foreigners so we copied the hours/day ;isted on the building in Russian, figured out when the tomb was open and got in line. The Russians ahead of us and behind us knew we weren’t Russian and seemed to get a kick out of us being line. At one point a guard barked and order to us in Russian-apparently my mom needed to zip up her wind breaker. We didn’t do it so the people ahead of us patted my mom on the head as if she were senile and zipped up the coat for us. We did get to see Lenin. The food in the Intourist hotels were really most interesting. They would have a long list of items: Tea; Tea with Lemon, Tea with Milk and Lemon, Tea with Milk, etc. and when you asked for tea with lemon they would say they only had tea with milk and lemon but would then bring you tea, squeeze in the lemon and add the milk. Hmm. My brother still wonders we didn’t die when we were brough rusty cans of orange juice that had a hole punctured in the top and we drank from the rusty can. I know that Anthony likely had something more exotic in mind when he spoke of the discomfort of travel but I am still always going to marvel that we drank from those orange juice cans. Had they been left from WW2, I would not have been surprised.
