The Port of Primorsk

As many of you know I do energy stuff for a living, so today I was in my element when I accompanied the Consul General, the Consul, and some other Consulate employees to the biggest oil port in Russia, and the fourth largest oil port in the world. The port is located about 2 hours north of the city on the Gulf of Finland. We passed many many dachas (summer homes) on the way up, and it was really beautiful.

Most of the 1.5 million barrels per day (bbl/d) of the crude oil Primorsk exports goes to ports in Europe, but only a very small amount (less than 100,000 bbl/d) comes to the US. We had a tour of the port facilities and some of the environmental labs where they test the water conditions. At the end we were given a wonderful lunch with a pike-like fish, red caviar blinies (much better in bliny than on sushi), salmon pelmeni (aka kreplach) in a fish-based soup, more salmon for the main meal, and then fruit and cookies for dessert. It was extremely nice and ochen vkoocni (very tasty). They answered almost all of my questions, but it makes me want to work on my Russian even more since I only understood about 1 in 10 words. I luckily had many people to help translate parts of the briefing, and even the native Russians didn't understand a lot of the oil terminology.

In the next couple days I have a couple other work-related meetings here, which means my spare time is being used up prepping for those and for my trip to Moscow on Friday night. I hope to post more about my activities this past week soon. Unfortunately no pictures of the Port for you all since it's kind of a security risk. Sorry!

Making change

I want to write quickly about something here that drives me nuts. Others have written about it, but I would like to rant. I recently ran out of money on my cell phone. You have to go to these little kiosks and put in small amounts of cash to add money to your account. Let's say however that when you last took out money, all you got out was 1000 roubles, or about $45, and you got it in one single bill. No place will take this 1000 roubles and exchange it for smaller denominations. If you go to a Producktы they look at you like you're crazy and if you try to give it to a bus money collector he takes your last 8 roubles and doesn't worry about the rest. I've tried to think about why this is the case here, and all I can think of is that it's some government or regionally sponsored initiative to control the liquidity of money, or more likely, they don't want to have too many large bills on hand in case the smaller establishments get robbed. Either way, it's annoying.