August 3, 2020 Upon stepping off the train and looking at my surroundings, I almost felt as if something was amiss, as the city I had arrived in looked more like some European city outside of Russia, or like an alternate Russia from a parallel universe. The architecture immediately struck me as atypical for this country, and memories of my day trip to Helsinki, Finland almost two years ago returned. But this is Russia indeed, and it was this feeling that something in Primorsky Krai was significantly different from the rest of the country which pervaded throughout my time here, a time spent immersed in the history, culture, and nature of this incredible region. A cable-stay bridge in Vladivostok From the train station at Vladivostok, which has other stations for boats and buses, I figured out where my hostel was on the map and called a taxi there. Early in the morning, I checked in to my hole-in-the-wall hostel, greeted by a couple of tired and possibly stoned rec...