The New Russian Watch Is Here!

This morning my accumulated mail from vacation was delivered, and what should I find but a package from Russia... containing none other than the new Russian watch I ordered a few weeks ago! It's a Raketa watch, 16-jewel mechanical movement, and I daresay it looks like a watch from some alternate reality...

Note the yellowish-orange dial. A 24-hour dial. Yes, the hour hand goes around only once every 24 hours, not twice like a regular watch. Takes some getting used to, that's 4:16 PM you see in the picture, otherwise known as 1616 hours.

One advantage of a 24-hour dial is that it's easy to compare times in different time zones around the world. Around the outer edge of the dial is a rotating ring with names of various cities, written of course in Russian.

I've really gotten into Russian-made mechanical watches, wind 'em up, gears and mainspring, tick tick tick, no battery required. Last summer I got that Russian watch, cheap but sturdy as an army tank. A couple of months ago I got that funky Russian chronograph, not-so-cheap, which has become my usual watch for everyday use.

Now I get this 24-hour watch that looks like something out of no known historical timeline; cheap, not quite discount-store cheap, but close. A watch as if from an alternate history where in the 21st century steamboats still ply up and down the sparsely settled Mississippi River from one British colonial river town to the next, and this watch has traveled across North America from the Tsar's imperial province of Alaska. (That's "Аляска" you'll see at 10 AM on the dial.) Believe me, you couldn't make up a watch like this, not even if you tried.