Vladivostok
Offside!
Friday 17th June
OK, so we’d been to North Korea on football tour, and the only thing that the team could agree about afterwards, was that we all wanted to go somewhere else equally unusual next time. But where?
Well this became a much-discussed topic on the bus amongst our team on the way to our regular Sunday matches, with many an excellent suggestion, unfortunately all with some down side:
Libya Too far
Myanmar Too predictable
Ulan Batoor Too much of a copy - been done recently by the team that went to N. Korea before us
Vietnam Too easy
Darkest China Too unpopular
Then Wayne popped up: ‘when I was in Tokyo, some of my friends went to Vladivostok for the weekend. They just went out in the woods armed with shotguns & a bottle of vodka, and went bear hunting.’
Bear hunting…Vladivostok…now we’re talking.
Fast forward six months & we’re sitting in the airport bar, ready to get at the bears. And the beers. Unfortunately, and I know this will surprise you, Vladivostok isn’t the easiest place to get to in terms of direct, or even connecting flights. So we had a midnight thirty flight to Seoul.
Saturday 18th June
We landed in Seoul at 4am, with a couple of us learning the most basic of basic rules on football tour – don’t fall asleep when everyone else is drinking. I was feeling quite smooth skinned as apparently I had spent most of the flight with moisturiser poured on my face, and Steve was fuming because someone ripped the last five pages out of his book & he couldn’t find out who dunnit.
We weren’t due to fly on to Vlad until 10am, so we had to find somewhere to crash. To its credit, Seoul airport has a stopover hotel, so we could actually get some proper sleep; although this seemed to have a somewhat questionable effect on Aldo, who after two hours sleep came running out of his room claiming to have had a hallucinatory nightmare. I don’t know what the Koreans put in their toothpaste.
Back on the plane and we were off to Vlad. I proved that I am a slow learner sometimes by falling asleep again, waking up to find that my shoes were now ten rows behind us. Everyone thought this was funny, until I pointed out that it would mean I would have to wait until everyone was off the plane before I could retrieve them; then I would be the last one off the plane & everyone else would have to wait for me when we went through…the shoes came back.
We got off the plane and breathed in what passed for fresh Russian air. We were instructed to get on the airport bus, which we did, although we noticed it was right next to what looked suspiciously like the terminal building….but surely that couldn’t be right…Oh Ok it was…after approximately five seconds, we finished our 10m bus journey and emptied off again to go through the never-ending immigration process.
Happily enough though, once we finally made it through, there was a sign waiting for us - ‘Mr Mote, football team’. Welcome to Vladivostok.
One of the bonuses of going to Russia was that our team had recently signed up a new player called Eugene. I am still a bit hazy about how Eugene came to us, but the good part was that he used to live in Vlad. Unfortunately he couldn’t make the tour, but he had managed to sort us out with two interpreters, Anna and the excellently-named Nastya, and had also recommended a list of restaurants to go to. One of these was the Royal Park, and having had some email banter with the chef before leaving Hong Kong, (the not particularly Russian sounding Robert), it was there that we went off to on Saturday night.
We turned up in what could generously be described as a car park, with some big grey warehouse-type buildings looking fairly decrepit. Ah don’t worry, we were told – we were going round the back. Oh ok then.
So we walked round the back & at least there were some people there – armed security guards. We got frisked, which seems a bit extreme for a restaurant, but it turned out that there is a casino and nightclub attached, so everyone had to be checked. But were the metal detectors strictly necessary??
Thankfully though a top meal followed, and Robert made us feel very welcome. It turned out he was actually from Tooting, and had ended up in Russia because he didn’t like his previous chef job, working in the Caribbean. Right...
The restaurant had a reputation of being one of the best in the City, which meant that the great and good of Vladivostok were coming through whilst we were there…hmmm interesting bunch. If the typical English phrase is that people are dressed ‘to the nines’, then it was fair to say that some of the ladies in the restaurant were dressed to about 15…and these were all respectable wives I hasten to add. The ones looking like they were trying to imitate Marilyn Monroe were my favourites.
After dinner I was eyeing up the casino, but everyone else was determined to hit the nightclub, which, fair play, was pretty good as clubs go. It was busy without being rammed, the music was decent dance music without being cheesy, there were dancing girls on the podiums, and in one memorable moment a four-piece brass band appeared on the stage to add backing to the tunes the DJ was playing. As with any nightclub all the women were dancing & all the men were hanging around the edges…to be fair, the Russian men didn’t look like the dancing type.
All went well in usual Saturday night fashion, although I decided it was time to leave when one of the team mumbled something about ‘we’ve just met some local mafia guy in the toilet & he wants us to present some champagne to a girl who’s getting married’. As you do…
Sunday 19th June
We try and cobble everyone together on the Sunday morning for the big game. It turned out that for reasons which were never made entirely clear, two of the team had jumped in a car with some Russian guy, and had been taken to a council estate garage, that was allegedly so rough ‘even Andy McNabb wouldn’t go there’. Well they made it back in one piece anyway, so we rescued them out of bed and hit the road.
Obviously the key on any football tour is lining up who you are going to play against, and in this case, the answer is…well we weren’t really sure. The tour company had organised a game for us against the office of the local Governor, to be played on the training pitch of the local pro team. We had warned them though about our slight handicap – due to a combination of work issues, money, date clashes, injuries, and comments like ‘surely you’re not going there?’, we’d actually gone on football tour with only seven men. But the other team had told us they would give us some extra players, and when we arrived at the pitch and see the standard of the game that was already going on, we were feeling quite confident – they were rubbish.
But of course, we soon found out that this wasn’t the team that we were playing. After getting changed in the changing rooms which resembled someone’s front room, we ambled out and were introduced to the four Russians that were making up our team – one wore goggles so we nicknamed him ‘Buggles’, and one was the Vice-Governor, so we just called him Sir. We went through the apparent Russian pre-match ritual of shaking hands with each of the oppo and then having a team shout (that’s the best I can describe it, really) and then off we went.
We started off ok, and were quite pleased when we got an early break, and Buggles slotted in the opening goal. The oppo had some quite useful players, particularly their forward, but through a little luck & some good judgement, or quite possibly the other way round, we held them out for quite a while. Alas though they did finally get an equaliser, and then whilst our post-mortem was going on, scored two more in a minute to end the half 3-1 up.
Half-time was not a pretty sight for our team, as one unnamed player went off to be sick on the sidelines, whilst another just passed out in the centre circle. I hobbled off as well, victim yet again to my dodgy knee. I gave my shirt to a guy watching on the sideline, hoping that if he came on to play for us, he might be good & would bring us back into the game….he wasn’t and he didn’t.
The second half all went a bit surreal as hangovers kicked in, positional sense went a bit haywire & they raised their game a bit. Well, a bit, I mean a lot…20 mins into the second half and we were 11-1 down. Not quite sure how it came to that, but at least we got back on track and started playing properly again; we tried to get Buggles (or ‘Videostar’ as he was now named) to play in the centre, and tried to keep giving the ball to the Vice-Governor, because their team were too scared to tackle him.
We pulled four goals back, the highlights being Phil’s goal celebration, imitating Steve’s nightclub dancing from the night before, and our goalkeeper Nathan scoring a penalty in the last minute for his first goal in seven years (not counting own goals). The penalty came after Aldo fell over in the area because he was too tired to run any more. Not sure if 11-5 was respectable or not, but everyone seemed quite happy after.
Next stop was a city tour. And first stop on the tour… fast food. There are no McDonalds or KFCs in Vlad, and by God you could tell as the woman behind the desk in ‘Magic Burger’ responded to our orders by rummageing at the back of the counter to pull out a pile of burgers, each wrapped in cellophane, and then microwaved them at the front desk in front of us. Add on a couple of piles of lukewarm chips on small plastic plates and we were good to go.
Looking round the city for the first real time, I had expected some form of Asian influence…after all the place is two hours from either Seoul or Beijing, yet eight time zones from Moscow. However this was not the case; Vlad was Russia through & through. Plenty of grey concrete & socialist housing, lots of military influence, and plenty of hard looking people who you wouldn’t fancy meeting in a dark alley…and that was just the women. It was like the town had had a colour transplant.
The one piece of local colour we did see was outside a park, where some men & women dressed in traditional Russian costumes were demonstrating a traditional Russian dance to some children. They all held hands in a big circle and went round to the left, then round to the right… we all watched this amused, only to find that the women then left the kids and started pulling all of us in. Next thing you know half of us are each playing some clapping game with a woman dressed as a Russian farmer’s wife, followed by which we each had to kneel down on a cushion and hug our partner whilst everyone else danced round the outside. Quality.
Evening was dinner in a respectable Russian restaurant, where James started an ongoing love affair with Russian fish, in particular herring. We tried to get into Vlad’s most well known live music bar, but funnily enough at 10pm on a Sunday night there was no-one there, so we went elsewhere before heading back.
Our hotel was blessed with both its own nightclub & casino…the club was closed so we headed for the casino. I for one wasn’t going to pass up a second chance to have a flutter, so I settled in on the blackjack table next to a well-oiled Korean gentleman. I soon realised that whilst I was winning a few & losing a few, somehow he was winning every time.
‘You have 17’
‘Card!!!!!’
‘But it’s 17…’
‘Card!!!!!’
‘Ok….4. You have 21.’
I started betting more on the Korean guy’s hand than I did on my own, and he won them all. Eventually he staggered off laden down with chips, and I decided to ride my own luck for a bit. Something must have rubbed off as I started winning as well, and for the first time in many a try, left the table whilst considerably up on where I started. I was promptly instructed to buy drinks for the whole team…. I thought about the Absinth behind the bar, but eventually opted for vodka.
Monday 20th June
Our original itinerary had shown that we had had the whole day free, and before leaving HK I had been trying to find some activities for us all a bit more energetic than another sightseeing tour. The tour company had come up with rafting or fishing, neither of which really grabbed me, and the bear hunting had turned out to be a bit of a myth, but a word in the ear of our interpreters had come up with something much better…paintballing.
First things first though, we needed a cab to get there. And this proved to be a bit difficult, until eventually a mini-van with blacked out windows turned up. The taxi driver got out, revealing tattoos on his neck and hands, and instructed us to get in. We got in a bit nervously, eyeing up the leopardskin seat covers and the banner on the windshield ‘Ride the Wild Wind’.
And ride the wild wind we certainly did, as we were weaving in and out of the traffic with no particular respect for the traffic rules, or, indeed, the traffic. But judging by the aura of general hardness coming from the driver (who, as was common, was using a right hand drive bus, but in Vlad they drive on the right…go figure) we didn’t dare complain. It was with some relief that we arrived at the paintballing, and had the Russian military gas propelled guns put in our hands so that we could engage in a far safer activity than that of taking another taxi ride.
I was quite surprised to find that none of the other guys had done paintballing much before & so I was the more experienced person there taking part…a fact which I completely forgot on the first game, when I looked above the parapet, and Nathan nailed me in the head. Revenge was to be mine though as I took him out on the next two games, including running up behind him and shooting him in the back. All’s fair in love & paintball.
After a few different game variations on the usual paintballing theme of shoot-them-before-they-shoot-you, there was one final game to be held. During the trip there had been a lot of banter between Phil, the self styled ‘fastest man in the East’, and James, which a foot race up some steps the night before had failed to settle. So we held a 1-on-1 paintball celebrity death match, as they took each other on whilst everyone else watched. We had fully expected them to be stealthy, and hunt each other out, but it was not to be; Phil just charged straight at James, causing a hail of paint balls and smoke in either direction. When the smoke cleared, James was unmarked, and Phil looked like he was a one-man Jackson Pollock painting.
We didn’t dare get the taxi back in town, so we got on the bus. Russian buses are pretty much the same as anywhere else – bus has seen better days, lots of people crowded on, no-one had the correct change - except for the fact that in Russia the buses too sometimes ignore road safety requirements. We came up to a roundabout in the outside lane, and I thought no, he can't be...surely not…well I guess no-one is going to argue with a bus, and so the driver went the wrong way round the roundabout to get straight to where he wanted to go.
In the evening, we had another football match, playing 6-a-side against some local journalists. The location for this game was at the local university, which as you may see from the photos, and despite our team shirts, was another location that was a colour-free zone (2 - and before you ask, I was still injured...)
Playing on a concrete pitch with benches round the side and hard netting round the side wasn’t the safest pitch in the world, but at least we held our own this time, eventually going down 2-0, with their second from the last kick of the game.
Tuesday 21st June
Just time for one more tour round the city. This time we went to a local Russian orthodox church, which I found fascinating. Even at 10am on a Tuesday morning there was a service going on, with a number of local people coming and going. The church had grass leading all the way up to it & on its floor inside also, apparently to maintain the purity of the people walking through. Within the church there were paintings everywhere, & incense as the service progressed with devoted attention from the flock.
We also went to the Vladivostok railway station. Not wildly exciting, admittedly, but it was a bit of a landmark as it marks the end of the Trans-Siberian railway, a mere 9288km from Moscow. Which is a lot of cheese rolls in anyone’s books. The two entirely contradictory stories that we heard from different guides during the week were that Tsar Nicholas II took the first train along the Trans-Siberian, arriving at Vladivostok where he commemorated the occasion by setting the first stone in the station; or that Nicholas travelled all 9288km on horseback, after which time he was determined that he should build a railway so that no-one would ever have to do the same again, hence he then started the station construction. Which one is your money on?
Once the tour was over, that was pretty much it for the trip, and we headed for the airport. However whereas we thought we had plenty of time to make the flight, we soon hit a huge traffic jam on the main road out of the city, and took a very long time to go a very short distance. One guy asked why we always headed the same way out of the city whenever we went anywhere, to which I pointed out that the other way out of the city was the sea.
Anyway, we sat and sat in this traffic jam, and one eye on the clock turned to two. Things were looking tight. So what else to do…except take a short cut. So the driver took our 20-seater bus off the highway and up a track…I mean of course you can go 4x4 off-roading in a Russian bus! And if the track is going uphill and one side is a sheer drop, should that affect your decision? Of course not.
So we got to the top of the hill, only to find… the turning had been blocked by a concrete bar & the road was shut. You could tell the driver had watched too much Knight Rider & was thinking of trying to jump it, but eventually some vague form of sanity prevailed and we 4x4’d it back to the highway.
All of which, whilst waking us up, didn’t solve the problem of getting to the airport on time. Things were confused further when we tried to turn back on to the highway, but were blocked by a funeral procession, including a marching band. The procession all stopped in front of us and got into their cars, along with the band, who piled into a succession of buses. All of the cars & buses were then waved up the highway, so, naturally, we respectfully followed in behind them.
We went down the wrong side of the highway as traffic in both directions had now been stopped. We went past the serious accident that had caused the stoppage, and then all the cars & buses turned off the highway and went into the local graveyard. Our driver looked both ways, then instead of turning off the road along with the rest of the procession, just carried straight on & nailed it down the now empty highway. Aided by pretending to be part of a Russian funeral cortege, we made the plane with time to spare…
Now, as for next year’s tour….