Monday, January 10th

Finally we arrived. I felt really strange when I saw Vladivostok outlined on the horizon. All those kilometres to reach this town! It was a bit as if I was on a rocket and I was approaching another planet. Quite destabilizing.

ВЛАДИВОСТОК, километр 9238

I slowly got down from the step and my foot feverishly hit the ground of this cold but hearty world. Vladivostok was a small provincial town, and it wouldn’t have been interesting at all if it had not been one of the most important strategic centres of Russia. In fact, during the first two decades after its annexation by Russia in 1860, Vladivostok had been a little port without importance. But at the end of the 1870s, the Russian government decided to transfer the general administration of the region there. That is why the tiny town had developed urban and port facilities and had become one of the town centres of the region with Khabarovsk.
That was how my journey ended. I knew that the following things I had to do were to visit the submarine which contained the Pacific War Marine Museum and maybe the Sakhalin Islands. Unless I write to Macha…


Simon.
Thanks to my Russian teacher.
This short story was written for a socio-cultural project (English-Russian) in the 2nd year of my study in ENTPE... but it's clearly not mistakeless !