A Bittersweet Goodbye

The last little amount of time that anyone has left in any place should be enjoyed, appreciated, and lived to the fullest. That is the approach that I have been taking to the last few weeks of my exchange in Russia.

Since I left Blagoveshchensk almost three weeks ago, I have been keeping busy. When I first arrived in Vladivostok, I attended the Rotary District Conference. The exchange students did an opening ceremony holding flags and telling about ourselves in Russian. One of the nights, we took a boat to Russkiy Ostrov, or “Russian Island” off the coast of Vladivostok. As we were leaving the shores of the city, the sun was shining, but while underway, we plowed straight into a huge wall of fog. However, the fog didn’t ruin the party, and we had a fun time full of good food (including lamb, scallops, and fresh crab), and singing and dancing. Afterwards, I went to a nightclub with some of the exchange students.

Since November, I have wanted to take a trip to the city of Khabarovsk, between Blagoveshchensk and Vladivostok, but it never worked out. However, after the Rotary conference, I had a chance to go visit, so I seized the opportunity and bought a train ticket to Khabarovsk. I lived in Khabarovsk for almost a week with some good friends in Rotaract. They showed me the city, took me to do interesting things, and gave me a good time. While I was there, I was going non-stop the whole time, barely taking time to sleep. I walked with them all day, seeing the city, and stayed up almost all night just hanging out. I went to a bar and heard “Big Max” sing some jazz and blues, I saw a museum, I walked along the Amur River, met a lot of new friends, learned how to skateboard (kind of), and went to different parks to hang out and grill food. It was really hot while I was there, and I drank a lot of kvas (a kind of cold carbonated drink made from bread), that we bought from the street vendors set up all over the city. I had a great time and made some good friends in Khabarovsk, which I will really miss.

The day after I got back to Vladivostok, it was one of the exchange student’s birthday, and we decided to celebrate by going camping out on the beach. The day that we decided to go, it was raining all day, and we weren’t sure if we would go or not, but all the food was already bought, the tents lugged across the city, and we were all together, so we went. The whole trip was planned on very little time, without a lot of foresight. I found out as we were leaving that I was the only one with any substantial camping experience, having gone camping with my parents in California since I was little. We got to the beach outside of Vladivostok, and amid the rain started setting up camp. We had ten people and three tents, which we set up surprisingly fast. After setting up camp, we were hungry, so the girls prepared some meat, cheese, and vegetables to make buterbrod (open faced sandwiches). After that, I went with Laura Secor to try to find dry firewood from the forest. We actually found a good amount of not too damp wood, and got sufficiently wet ourselves in the process of walking around in the damp grass and bushes. We came back and got a fire started which we were able to keep going all night, despite the drizzling rain. The trip actually turned out pretty good and it was fun, but not even the fire could keep us completely dry, and at 2AM, some of us decided to call a taxi to come take us home so that we didn’t have to sleep in the damp and cold.

One day later that week, the two Lauras (Secor and Lopez) were at Subway, and happened to run into a young British traveler trying to order a sub. They helped him order his sub in Russian, and then invited him to come walk with us. Matt, 23, from Britain, was traveling from Australia all the way back to Britain over land. He had just arrived in Vladivostok from Korea, and was departing that night to go non-stop to Moscow on train, an eight-day ordeal. We walked around the city, showing him Vladivostok, and telling him interesting things about Russia that we picked up during our year here. We also took him to a billiard hall to play some pool. When we departed, he thanked us dearly and said that we made his time in Vladivostok worthwhile and memorable.

That night, I helped Gabi cook a homemade dinner of hamburgers, mac and cheese, and French fries for her host family. Despite some initial hamburger-making-failings we finally got everything done and were able to enjoy an almost-all-American almost-like-home meal, washed down with some very-Russian drinks.

The next day, we had the Graduation Ball of the Lyceum that all the exchange students here attended, and to which I was invited to. All the girls were wearing ballroom dresses and the already beautiful Russian girls looked even more so. All the guys were wearing suits and cleaned up pretty nice too. The ball was held in the Hotel Hyundai, the fanciest hotel in the city. At first, we took a lot of pictures, then we did an opening ballroom dance, called the bolognaise, at around 7PM. After that, we ate, the students performed different songs and acts and received their diplomas. After that, the room turned into a discotheque, and they had a DJ and a live band that played all night long. We danced and partied all night long, until 5AM the next morning. Then we all walked to the dark, quiet harbor and greeted the sunrise, which is a tradition for Russian school graduates. It was such an incredible experience to stay up all night to greet the sunrise. The whole evening was an unforgettable experience, and one of the best of my exchange.

Then, my friends started leaving. It is already the last week of June, and that means that all the exchange students are starting to all fly back home. The first of my friends to leave was Torrey, who left to go back to Virginia on Sunday. We all went to the airport with him to see him off. It was a very sad and touching experience. I couldn’t cry, but I felt this deep pang in the middle of my chest, seeing my friend leave. It wasn’t completely sad though, because I know that I will be able to see him again someday once we are all back in the US. On Wednesday, Laura Lopez is going back to Chicago, on Thursday, Gabi is leaving for Pennsylvania, and on Friday, I myself and Laura Secor will be leaving to go back to Ohio and Oregon, respectively. The last few days we have spent together, walking around the city, hearing each other’s voices, and listening to each other’s jokes for one last time.


The feeling is bittersweet — we are all together one last time in order to all collectively say goodbye to each other, to say goodbye to a city, a country, and an overall way of life which has become so familiar to us, while fully knowing that in a few days time this same bittersweet feeling will return to us as we, now apart, will greet our old friends, and the city, the country, and the overall way of life that we said goodbye to on a similar hot summer day 10 months ago, and which have now become for us so completely unfamiliar and foreign.