It wasn’t until several months after my final return from Russia, an event marking the end of a string of short-duration business trips to Moscow and Irkutsk, that the novelty of having traveled to those destinations began to wear off; as it did, the possibility grew that the impressions I was forming of my visits were dependent on having traversed a temporal distance from them and that, while there, I could not have felt about the places the way I was beginning to. I oblige the temptation to interpret this as an example of the following proposition: certain perceptions are put on hold until their forebears have had their time.

It was not as though being there blinded me to negative aspects — indeed, I speculated that the abhorrent vehicle emissions, and consequent air pollution, contributed to the virtual absence of attractive women beyond their mid-twenties; fair skin can only tolerate so many hydrocarbons, afterall — no, rather, it was that the negative aspects were overshadowed by the distractions of being in a foreign land, with its unique history, infrastructure, architecture, culture, etc. When expectation is realized or corrected via one’s present experience, neurogenesis/neuroplasticity associated with internalizing the experience likely precludes reflection on it. Relatedly, I think that recognizing I had returned from my final trip to Russia permitted reflection on the travel that had been inaccessible for as long as there existed the likelihood of future travel.

I recall being struck by how anachronistic certain districts were, with Cold War era buildings seemingly neglected in the decades since, their pastel-colored paint flaking away, leaving grey patches of naked concrete behind, and everything covered in a thin, grimy dust that evoked nuclear fallout.