Your Correspondents

Your Correspondents
Originally uploaded by jakeyd.

Back to the city for a nice dinner at a credible Italian joint. (Credible = Italian-Russian = sort of like Italian-American). Really nice chat with Sagat about his career, marriage, and children. (I guess Galina can’t be all bad; they’ve been married for 33 years.) In the “Soviet times,” he ran a power station (is trained as an electrical engineer and knows the power generation business pretty thoroughly), rose through the ranks of the utility, then chucked it at after independence given what sounds like a quasi-military work environment. Moved on to importing sugar from China until the market fell out, then cars from Russia until the market fell out, then ran the Pepsi syrup business until Pepsi and his partner made some bad-for-Sagat business decisions, and now runs a small construction business when not driving his wife’s clients around. (We may soon lose him so he can tend to business in the high season for construction.)