Last week I had the odd privilege of having dinner inside the bowels of the Binhai Aircraft Carrier Theme Park outside of Tianjin. There are several online sources of information for this man-made wonder (though not nearly as many as I expected), so I’ll keep this brief. Construction of the Kiev, a Soviet aircraft carrier, began in 1970. The boat served until the late 1980s, when the Soviet disintegration and decimated Russian finances rendered her too expensive to operate. She was retired in 1993, and in 1996 a Chinese company purchased and relocated her to Binhai, about 100 miles southeast of Beijing, where she now serves as a theme park on a windswept piece of abandoned real estate near Tianjin’s port.
To reach the boat, a roughly two mile road winds from the main highway, past fences plastered with silk-screen images of well-known war films. Along the way, it passes two abandoned glass buildings that were clearly intended for restaurants and souvenir sellers; in the distance is a run-down hotel lit by faded neon.
If not for the aircraft carrier, the scene could be mistaken for a failed and abandoned real estate development. Which it very well might be. I honestly don’t know.
The inside of the carrier isn’t much fun. It’s poorly lit, the uniformed staff is bored, and there’s only so much time you can spend admiring steel floors, photos of Soviet Army generals, and the areas of actual interest – say, the bridge – lack labels or any other explanatory material.
Anyway, throughout the carrier, mannequins are arrange to simulate the every-day activities of Russian sailors. For example, one popular instance depicts sailors loading rockets into firing tubes. So imagine my surprise when – as I passed through on of the ship’s main corridors – I paused to look through a window labeled “Sauna” and found this scene:
