Two days sail from Kushiro, we had a shore excursion into Russia, to the oil and natural gas boomtown of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. (Hey, anybody can visit Moscow and St. Petersburg, but don't you think Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk will win in a travel pissing contest?)
I enjoyed gawking from the bus at the unbeautiful architecture, and strolling through the city park, full of tanks and guns from WW2, but the best part of the trip was our half-hour stop at the shiny new shopping mall. The other tourists from our bus headed for the global brand-name shops, but many of us went straight to the supermarket.
Maybe we expected to see meager piles of black bread made from sawdust, but if so we were sorely disappointed. I didn't have time to inspect the middle aisles of canned and packaged goods, but the produce and meat departments were somewhere between perfectly acceptable and wow!
Since we were right on the ocean, let's start with the fish. Not so many varieties as we saw in Kushiro, but more smoked stuff, and more ready-to-eat salads and sushi.
And no, I don't know what you're supposed to do with the fish head.
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