Friday, February 13, 2009

It's A Wonderful World.



If you have ever lived as an expat, you will never forget your host country. The sights, sounds, smells, tastes--the women--all are lodged for eternity deep within.
Alexander Nazaryan writes for the New York Times blog Proof: Alcohol and the American Life. Last night's post brought me back to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East, where I spent the summer of 2007.
Maybe you'll like it, too:

There are few bars in my native city of St. Petersburg, and none at all, as far as I can tell, in Brighton Beach, the Russian enclave of Brooklyn to which I return whenever the memory of stuffed cabbage dumplings and accordion music begins to beckon. Not that sobriety has too much traction in either: when I returned to St. Petersburg in 2003 for the first time in 20 years, it was much more common to find open beers in the morning crowd than cups of coffee. And in the extravagant cabarets of Brighton Beach ― those gilded mafiyahaunts now frequented by well-heeled families from Montclair and Stamford ― each dinner table is marked by an endless cavalcade of Smirnoff and Courvoisier.

The rest is here. Nostrovia...   
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