Tallinn to Fushiki - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 40

At this point, Rebecca is deeply in her cups. She's enjoying the attention, though she deftly deflects
it. Which makes the Russians try that much harder. “Rehb-yehk-ah,” slurs a guy named Sergey, his eyes
glazed and his forehead sweaty. “Vweel you danz vwith me?”
I am becoming terrified. I sense an imminent fistfight. I can vividly picture myself dangling over a ferry
railing, one of these drunken brutes gripping my ankles and cackling. Meanwhile, Rebecca will be out on
the dance floor, obliviously grooving to bad Russian techno.
Thank God for the Serbs. I'm pretty certain they have my back if the going gets weird. Nobody's gonna
mess with the badass Serbs.
Around 4:00 a.m., I manage to at last shepherd Rebecca away from her new friends, out of the bar, and
back to our cabin. She passes out instantly. I watch the moonlit Sea of Japan through our porthole for a
minute, and then follow suit.
THE next morning, Rebecca wakes up horribly hung over. “I'm just seasick,” she insists. Last night re-
mains a bit of a blur for her. When she steps outside for fresh air, thirty Russian dudes excitedly yell “Rehb-
yehk-ah!” across the open deck. This both confuses her and troubles her greatly.
With the sunlight streaming in, I now realize that our cabin is a squalid shithole. The floor is buckling.
The shower has no water pressure and yet somehow still floods the bathroom. There is a dented, non-
functional rotary phone bolted into the wall. This ship was constructed in Poland in 1986, and I can't
say—having been made aware of the disaster of the Estonia —that I'm hugely psyched to be riding in a
twenty-year-old car ferry, built by eastern Europeans, operated by a Russian crew.
We order dinner in the ship's café, but our waitress shoos us out before we can eat the last few bites
on our plates. “Feeneesh time,” she barks, clearing the table. I look at her in amazement. In return, I get a
classic shrug.
We thought we'd left Russia when this ship cast off from the dock in Vladivostok. But it turns out the
ship is a floating microcosm of the country—complete with hateful shrugs, beefy drunkards, and failing
infrastructure. I am counting down the hours until we set foot on Japanese soil.