29.12.06

race issues

we practically had a race riot at work yesterday.
one of my collegues is ukrainian, from some village i have never heard of. naturally, i talk to her alot, since we both speak russian. she has been here for 7 years already, but her english is pretty poor, which i suppose is not surprising: she spoke none at all when she arrived, and spent most of her first few years here cleaning dishes, most likelywith other ukrainians and poles. anyway, my point isthat her brain stayed in ukraine, and she hasnt really blended in much with english society, or it would seem, english values.
i am used to such people, so i didnt really think anything of it that she called our afro-british collegues "ni***rs" when we were speaking together in russian. i could never use that word myself, but russians do all the time and it is not considered in the same way there as it is here. but when you are in england, you have to follow english rules whether you like it or not, and that was the problem yesterday.
a woman came into the shop wearing a full burqua. she bought her books and left. then one of my other collegues commented that the burqua had been really beautiful. it had been: it was obviously made of really expensive material, and the cloth looked great. but oli (the ukrainian, the english call her that since her full name is too hard for them to pronounce) said that "those people" should go back where they came from if they dont want to dress "normally."
it was at that moment that all hell broke loose. one of the other collegues standing up front near me happens to be a british-born muslim and literally went berserk. he told oli she was a racist bitch, and that he, and most british muslims, had more right to be there than she, since he was born there, and speaks correct english, and that maybe she was the one who should go back where she came from, seeing as she obviously failed to understand english values. an incredible fight ensued. apparently it never occurred to oli that most english people consider english born muslims to be as english as anyother english person, she seemed to think that because her skin is white she has something in common with the english. but, of course, english people judge her by her poor english and think that she is stupid.....and foreign. i have to admit there was something ridiculous about hearing someone in a thick ukrainian accent saying london born people should "go back where they came from." at a certain point i fled to another section just to avoid getting dragged into the whole scene. but later MD (the british born muslim, whose parents are sudanese) told me how much he hates oli since she is always making racist and nationalistic remarks. he kept asking me why i was so different, when oli and i both come from the same place (we dont, but he doesnt understand that, since he just hears us talking to each other in the same language and assumes we are from the same place, and anyway oli claims to be russian, since she doesnt speak ukrainian and doesnt want to), and then oli came by to complain to me in russian that MD was a stupid ni***r and should go back to africa. apparently she had failed to grasp MD's point that he has never BEEN to africa and has lived in london his whole life.
later the boss came by to ask ME to explain the situation, since i seem to have become the specialist in explaining east euro behaviour. these moments make me cringe. i dont think such discussions should take place at work, in front of customers, many of whom might well be offended by such things, and i certainly cant understand why you would seeming delibrarely go out of your way to offend someone's faith.....i like to be on good terms with all my collegues, so i am nervous how this will play out, and how i will avoid taking sides.

27.12.06

back to work

it has been a quiet two days off (i havent had that many days off in a row since early november!) and i have used my time to do nothing. i mainly stayed in bed and read. i read one biography on allende, and then one on putin. reading about the sobchak years in piter brought back all kinds of memories, i remember those times well. the biographers accuses sochak of all kinds of corruption, the lady my father and i lived with back in those days would have had none of that: she was a massive sobchak supporter and cried buckets when he lost to yakovlev. it seems at that time putin and i were neighbours, both living on vasilievskii ostrov, and judging from the locations only about 3-4 streets apart. but then nobody knew who putin was at that time, and i was certainly unaware of living near a future president!
on the 25th i ventured out for a small walk, only to find myself in what looked like a colder version of the subcontinent. all the indian and pakistani run shops were open and all the wives were out taking walks with their kids, wearing saris covered by coats to make up for the differences in climate.
then yesterday, with the tube back in service, i decided to venture out a bit more, i walked around, but on the biggest shopping day of the year, it was a zoo everywhere. on regent street people were fighting just to get into zara, controlled by security guards, and one woman even had a heart attack or something and an ambulance had to come to take her off. at the zara by oxford circus, they had cops to brreak up the fights that erupted between angry customers, and the queue to pay was estimated to be an hour long. although there were certainly things i would have liked to have bought, and although i had money to spend, the whole thing was just so appauling that i bolted from the place empty handed, taking side streets back to a metro station that was not so overcrowded. from there i retreated to the calm of my flat and continued reading about the life and times of vladimir vladimirovich.
today it is back to work. on that note i should head for the shower and get ready for a day of reshelving.

25.12.06

....and rest

today is my first day off after 16 days of non-stop shifts. i did it for the money, it will be welcome at the end of january when the pay check arrives. yesterday i stayed late at work to help the boss redo things for the boxing day sales. it made me appreciate the hard work that goes into making a shop ready for such an event: the books needed to be restickered, new banners needed to be hung. different titles will now be going on the 3 for 2 offer (yeah! including several that i want to buy!!!) it all took several hours. and now i have two whole days of rest. i plan to sit around doing absolutely nothing other than sleeping and reading. i have a stack of books from work and from the library calling out to be read. i might watch a dvd as well, i have a bunch copied onto my computer. but mainly i want to curl up with a not-too-academic book and enjoy the break.....wednesday it is back to work.

22.12.06

and now turkmenbashi is dead too

this has really been the year of the dying tyrants. first milosevic died (ok, some of you might not like me grouping him with "tyrants," but, well, all these guys had their supporters, didnt they?) then pinochet died, and now turkmenbashi.
of them all turkmenbashi was certainly the wierdest. he constructed gold statues of himself all over the country and renamed the months of the year after himself and his family. worse, he destroyed the country's education system by making his book the only curiculum. i feel sorry for all those people stuck in his country.
turkmenistan has always been a abit wierd. my father was there in the 60s and his great memory of the place was having his flight out to baku delayed for several hours while they tried to get camels off the runway. i remember also the year when turkmenbashi expelled most of the ethnic russians left in his country. they were only given a few days notice to pack their bags and leave. they arrived like refugees, which is i suppose what they iin fact were, at sheremetevo. i was flying somewhere myself at the time, and i remember seeing plane loads of them arriving with those cheap checkered plasic bags, looking utterly lost. many of them had no relatives of acquaintances in russia, and many had never even been there before.
in hungry, i knew a guy from asgabat. he had left at 17 to go to uni in bishkek (since turkmenbashi essentially shut all the universities in turkmenistan) and he hadnt been home since. he was afraid if he went back he would never be allowed to leave again. so he hadnt been home in something like 5 years, and was determined not to until he had another citizenship of turkmenbashi was dead. but no one thought he would die so soon. i hope mersat can go back now.

20.12.06

sometimes the economist is right

i come from a family of economist readers. my father always had the logic that is was necessary to know the enemies arguements in order to effectively combat him/her. i have inherited this notion, except i have to admit that some times their writers are right on the target, in particular with regard to some of the recent articles that have been published on Russia. so i am attaching a piece from the latest edition on russian airports. appropriately it is entitled "kama sutra and feral cats."

WORKING as a journalist in Russia, with its eleven time zones, its endless steppe and perpetual taiga, means spending a lot of time in the air. It involves flying in planes so creaky that landing in one piece is a pleasant surprise —then disembarking in airports so inhospitable that some visitors may want to take off again immediately.
But, if he has the strength, beyond the whine of the Tupolev engines and the cracked runways, a frequent flyer can find in Russia's airports a useful encapsulation of the country's problems and oddities. In their family resemblances, Russia's airports show how far the Soviet system squeezed the variety from the vast Russian continent; in their idiosyncrasies, they suggest how far it failed to. They illustrate how much of that system, and the mindset it created, live on, 15 years after the old empire nominally collapsed. Russia's awful, grimy, gaudy airports reveal how much hasn't changed in the world's biggest country—but also, on closer inspection, how much is beginning to.
Sheremetyevo: Landing at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, first-time visitors may be unnerved to see their more experienced co-passengers limbering up, as if for a football match or gladiatorial combat. When the plane stops taxiing, or before, the Sheremetyevo regular begins to run.
Sheremetyevo is war. The international terminal was built for the 1980 Olympics, to showcase the Soviet Union's modernity; now it recalls the old regime's everyday callousness (the anarchic domestic terminal is even worse). On a bad day, the queue at passport control stretches almost to the runway.
The Sheremetyevo virgin soon meets the various species of Moscow queue-jumper: the brazen hoodlum; the incremental babushka; the queue-surfing clans who relocate in groups when one of their number reaches the front. The immigration officer—usually sporting peroxide blond hair, six-inch heels and an abbreviated skirt—offers an early insight into Russian notions of customer service. Reflecting the country's neo-imperialist confidence, the immigration form was for most of this year available only in Russian (“distributed free”, it says, in case anyone is tempted to pay).
As with most Russian problems, cash can mitigate the Sheremetyevo ordeal: beautiful girls meet VIPs at the gate and escort them straight to the counter. If he passes customs unmolested, the visitor emerges into a crush of criminal-looking taxi drivers. If, as it will be, the traffic is bad on Leningradskoe Shosse, the road into town, the driver may try to ingratiate himself by driving on the pavement; a 50-rouble backhander will settle things if the police pull him over. On his return to Sheremetyevo, to reach his departure gate the visitor must negotiate a bewildering series of queues, starting with one to get into the building: if he is unassertive, he will still be standing in one of them when his plane takes off. There is nowhere to sit. Forlorn African students camp out in the upstairs corridors. The attendants in the overpriced food kiosks are proof incarnate that the profit motive is not yet universal—though stewardesses on Russian carriers offer unofficial upgrades on reasonable terms. For a small consideration, they sometimes oblige smokers on long-haul flights by turning off the smoke alarms in the toilets.
Mineralnye Vody: To reach this airport, in the north Caucasus, passengers pass through a series of military roadblocks, where documents and the boots of cars are checked by slouching policemen, looking for weapons or terrorists. But a sensible terrorist would leave his weapons at home and buy new ones at the airport, where a wide selection of enormous knives and ornamental Caucasian swords is on sale. There are also embossed Caucasian drinking horns, and a large number of Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra.
Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell. In Soviet times, before the region that the airport serves was desolated by separatist insurgencies, blood feuds and government brutality, the nearby mineral spas were popular holiday resorts. The building is incongruously large for a part of Russia that today, for all its macho hospitality and merriment, feels more African than European in its violence, poverty and corruption. It is weirdly cold inside. Feral cats have been sighted. The floor has not been cleaned since perestroika; the toilets are hauntingly squalid. On the wall there are arrival and departure boards that no longer work, and a big, proud map of the Soviet Union.
Vladikavkaz: Roughly meaning “to rule the Caucasus”, this city, south of Mineralnye Vody, is an old tsarist garrison and the capital of North Ossetia, one of the semi-autonomous ethnic republics of the north Caucasus. Backed by the Caucasus mountains and bisected by the rugged Terek river, Vladikavkaz might be pleasant, were it not for the occasional terrorist eruption and internecine gangster bombing. The Ossetians are Christians, give or take some residual animism, and are Moscow's traditional allies against the restive Muslims of the other republics. Like several other local peoples, the neighbouring Ingush were deported by Stalin in 1944; the Ossetians took part of their territory, and the two fought a war in 1992.
Vladikavkaz airport is actually closer to another, smaller town, obscure and unremarkable until September 2004: Beslan. The road to the airport leads past the auxiliary cemetery that was used to bury the hostages slain in the terrorist atrocity at a Beslan school; toys and drinks (because the dead children were denied water by their captors) are scattered on the graves. The airport ought to be hyper-sensitive to security risks.
It seems not to be. When your correspondent passed through, he noticed a couple of shady characters and their hulking bodyguard talking to an airport official. The official took their documents to the security desk. “Who are they?” asked the security officer. “They are businessmen,” replied the official, as the documents were stamped. The party appeared to reach the runway via a side door, with a large hold-all seemingly unexamined.
Kaliningrad: This airport has a sort of holding pen in which passengers are kept before being released onto the tarmac. Surveying the assembled crew, with their standard-issue gangster coats and tattoos, it becomes obvious why Kaliningrad has a reputation as a smugglers' haven.
It used to be Königsberg, city of Kant and celebrated Prussian architecture. By the time the Nazis, British bombers and the Red Army had finished with it, little of pre-war Königsberg was left. Then Stalin took a shine to it, deported the remaining Germans and incorporated the region into the Soviet Union. It is now an island of Russia in a sea of European Union—an anomaly that is profitable for a certain class of businessmen. As well as contraband, the exclave boasts most of the world's amber and Russia's ageing Baltic fleet.
The Kremlin worries that the Poles or the Germans might try to take Kaliningrad back; but, in truth, no one else really wants it. As the aromas of vodka and Dagestani cognac waft around the airport holding pen, the consolation for the nervous traveller is that if one group of dodgy passengers starts something nasty on the flight, another one will probably finish it.
Vladivostok (“to rule the east”): At the other end of the Russian empire, near China and on the Sea of Japan, Vladivostok is the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railway. It became famous during the Russian civil war as a wild eastern entrepot of refugees and interventionists; nowadays it is described (mostly by people who haven't been there) as Russia's Hong Kong or San Francisco. Here you face a classic Russian-airport dilemma.
You have clambered around the tsarist fort, and inside the decommissioned Soviet submarine. You have seen the children riding reindeer on the cigarette-ash beach, and peered at the disconsolate alligator in the aquarium. You have also met the mayor, known in the city, not altogether affectionately, as “Winnie the Pooh”, or “Vinnie Pookh”. He acquired his nickname during his fabled reign as a gangland boss. The mayor has ridden the post-Soviet escalator from crime to business and on into politics, securing his office after his main election rival was wounded in a grenade attack. In response to questions about his past, the mayor inquires whether you yourself have ever been in prison. You are not sure whether the mayor is asking or offering.
A dubious car arrives to take you to Vladivostok airport, about an hour's drive from the city, along a road lined with the forests that, like crab and salmon, are one of the great but fragile prizes of far-eastern Russian power struggles. Your driver is keener on talking than driving. “The Chinese are too cunning for us,” he says, decelerating with every fresh lament. “We are giving away our natural resources”. The factories are all closed; there is no place for anyone over 40 in the new Russia. It becomes clear that this driver is not entirely sober. You are running perilously late for your flight out of Vladivostok. Should you or shouldn't you ask him to go faster?
Murmansk: Well into the month of May, the runway at Murmansk is still fringed with snow; it dusts the pine trees over which incoming planes descend, along with still-frozen ponds and rivers. In the airport's VIP lounge there is a set of sofas of daunting tastelessness. The main terminal is mostly empty, save for a bar, a pool table and some fruit machines. Downstairs, outside the toilets, there is a strange drawing of a man wearing a trilby hat, silhouetted against the sun. But upstairs there is a lovely metallic relief on the wall, depicting everything that is produced in the Murmansk region, or that was once produced.
The biggest city anywhere inside the Arctic Circle, Murmansk was built for and shaped by war. It was founded during the first world war, and was a destination for the famous allied sea convoys during the second, when it was utterly destroyed. When the Kursk submarine was raised from the floor of the Barents Sea in 2000, the corpse-laden wreck was towed back to the nearby dry docks; nuclear icebreakers are their regular customers. A church was built in memory of the dead sailors, and stands amid the other monuments to deceased warriors. Otherwise, Murmansk is cluttered with the usual post-Soviet paraphernalia: a Lenin statue; shabby kiosks; gambling halls; pavements that seem to dissolve into the road.
For all that, the Arctic setting has its own appeal. Icy it may still be, but from late spring the Murmansk girls don their short skirts, and it is light around the clock. In the small hours, down at the port, seagulls wheel around the cranes resting motionless, like giant, paralysed insects, against the illuminated pink clouds. A Ferris wheel rotates on a hill above the town.
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: In tsarist times, Sakhalin island was a giant prison camp. Visiting in 1890, Chekhov considered it the most depressing of the many depressing places in Russia. From 1905, when Russia lost its war with Japan, the southern part of Sakhalin was ruled by the Japanese; it was taken back in 1945, along with four smaller islands that the two countries still bicker over. Traces of Japanese architecture are still visible; so are the descendants of the Korean slave labourers whom the Japanese imported. The Soviet experiment bequeathed sparse squares and omnipresent Lenins. After the experiment failed, many of Sakhalin's inhabitants fled its wasting beauty. Salmon can still be scooped by hand from its rivers in the spawning season, but much of the fishing fleet is rusting in the bays.
Yet Siberia and Russia's far east have always been lands of opportunity, as well as exile. On Sakhalin, today's opportunities are mostly in oil and gas, which foreign consortia are extracting from beneath the frigid Sea of Okhotsk, off the island's northern shore. New pipelines cut through forests, and up and down mountains, to an export terminal in the south. A stone's throw away, there are elderly Russians living on what they can fish and find in the forest; the few remaining indigenous reindeer-herders survive on even less. But in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the capital, there are new hotels, bars and jobs.
The primitive domestic terminal at the airport has a tannoy system, but the announcements are inaudible, and their main effect is to spread fear. Destination names are put up, taken down and put up again above the check-in desks. The upper floor is appointed with weirdly ornate Soviet chandeliers. Last year a family of bears wandered onto the runway: the airport authorities hunted them in vain. But there is also a new international terminal to serve the flights from Japan and South Korea. The staff there speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolence.
Irkutsk: Five hours ahead of Moscow, in eastern Siberia, Irkutsk is the nearest city to Lake Baikal, the world's largest body of fresh water—water so clear that it induces vertigo in many of its visitors. The drive to the lake leads through vast forests, past the roadside shamanistic altars of the indigenous Buryats, under an enormous Siberian sky. In the 19th century Irkutsk was home to many of the so-called Decembrists, and the wives who followed them into exile after their 1825 revolt against the tsar: men and events that might have changed Russia's history, and the world's. Alexander Kolchak, a diehard White commander, was shot in Irkutsk in 1920; his body was thrown into the icy Angara river.
Planes descend into the city's airport over identikit Soviet apartment blocks and rickety Siberian dachas. The current arrivals terminal is a hut on the apron of the tarmac. Passengers wait in the street until the baggage-handlers feel inclined to pass their bags through a hole in the hut's wall. The bags then circulate on a terrifying metal device apparently borrowed from a medieval torture chamber. The nearby departure terminal is chaos, though by ascending an obscure staircase passengers can find an interesting photographic display on “minerals of eastern Siberia”.
The staff speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolence
The hut, however, is only temporary: a new, modern terminal is being built. It will be needed if the local authorities attract all the tourists they are hoping for. Lake Baikal, the awesomely beautiful main draw, was threatened by a new oil pipeline—until Vladimir Putin ordered its route moved away from the shores of what Buryats call the “Sacred Sea”.
Yekaterinburg: Long-term residents of this city in the Urals shudder when they recall the state of its airport in the 1990s: never any taxis, they say, and very often no luggage. The arrivals hall still has a faint abattoir feel. But, next to it, a colonnaded Soviet edifice has been turned into a business terminal. And there is a new, glass-walled international terminal of positively Scandinavian gleam and efficiency, erected recently using private money. It has a swanky bar that serves edible food. There is an internet café where the internet connections work. “An airport”, says one of its managers proudly, “is a city's visiting card.”
It is not too fanciful to see the contrasting parts of Yekaterinburg's airport as a metaphor for the city's development. It was in Yekaterinburg that the Bolsheviks murdered the last tsar in 1918. Outside town, close to the border between Europe and Asia, there is a memorial to the local victims of Stalin's purges—a rare and moving place in a generally amnesiac nation.
In a nearby cemetery stand what wry locals describe as memorials to the victims of early capitalism: life-size statues (complete with car keys) of the dead gangsters who earned the city its 1990s sobriquet, the Chicago of the Urals. Because of the military industries that moved there during the war, Yekaterinburg was closed to foreigners until 1990. But these days most of the surviving crooks have gone straight, or into politics. Hoteliers are parlaying the city's infamy into a tourist attraction, foreign consulates are being opened, and businessmen and tourists can fly directly to the new airport.
Sheremetyevo: Ignore the snarling waitresses and look again at Sheremetyevo: something is happening. Its operators have come under pressure from Domodedovo, Moscow's other main airport, which was reconstructed a few years ago, and to which airlines have migrated in such numbers that its spacious facilities are often overrun. Sheremetyevo is getting a makeover (as are several of the other airports mentioned in this article).
There is a new café. There are now electric screens on the baggage carousels, displaying the numbers and origins of incoming flights (even if they do not, as yet, always correspond to the baggage circulating on them, much of which is still wrapped in clingfilm to keep out thieves). The nightmarish domestic terminal is being replaced, and a third terminal is going up. A new train service will one day replace the agony of Leningradskoe Shosse. Haltingly, frustratingly but undeniably, Sheremetyevo has started to change—much like Russia itself.

17.12.06

oi

it has been a long week. in my efforts to get some cash together, i volunteered to do massive amounts of overtime, and i am tired. the worst is i wont get the money until the end of january, due to byzantine english banking rules i cant understand. oh well.
today i was in charge of the travel section. i was flipping through all the nice glossy books with various 1000 things you need to see/do/ visit before you die. so here is another on of my lists: best and worst train rides within europe....i didnt get tothinking about the rest of the world, so pleasures like the dakar-bamako will have to wait for another shift.

Worst:
1. skoplje-belgrade. i especially like the part where the train stops in an empty field for a few hours
2. the RERs that run from gare du nord out to departement 93. they are gross. the people on them smell. and the cops come buy all the time to make things worse for everyone. and they are strike prone (like every other RATP/SNCF production)
3.budapest- lvov. the problem occurs inevitable at 3am at chop, the border crossing. they have to change all the wheels on the train since the soviet union operated on a different track system. it takes several hours and is a very loud process.
4.St petersburg-tallinn. russian trains are normally good, but thank god this one isnt running anymore. it was awful. it should have been 6 hours but the newly erected border suddenly made it 8 or more. it was also a major route for drug smugglers, most of whom were ethnic russian babushki. there is something sad about seeing a 70 year old woman hauled off in chains. there is also something ridiculous about the way the estonian guards would greet non russians with phrases like "welcome to europe."
5.istanbul-ankara. apparently it was faster in ottoman times. take the bus.
6.athens-thessaloniki. they over sold my ticket and didnt offer compensation. i spent the trip in the restaurant.AND it was expensive. i dont think trains are a balkan speciality.
7. scotland-london. they all suck. the last time i was delayed by 3 hours. sometimes it is 5. and the worst is you pay over 50 pound for this torture. and they bombard you with psuedo polite explanations like "due to signalling problems at newcastle, this train will be delayed...." blaim thatcher.

best.
1. eurostar. i spent my childhood on the bloody ferry. couldnt pay me to take it now. the only pity is that it is so pricy, sometimes i still fly because it is often half the price. if the train were cheaper, i would take it all the time.
2. lisbon-porto. i am not kidding, this thing is beautiful and it goes incredibly fast. and it wasnt even that expensive (comparitively)
3.stockholm to copenhagen. the bridge is incredible. and it is fast and reliable.
4. oslo-bergen. the scenery is breaktaking. i have never seen water so blue anywhere else.
5. rome-munich. same explanation as above: the scenery is phenomenal, and the sevice, while not so good as in scandanavia, is still quite good.

conclusions:
1. it is better to be on a train in scandanavia than in the former ottoman empire.
2. thatcher was evil.
3.russia is still the best place for trail journeys: the trains are bearable (ok except the toilets) and cheap. and they are safer than internal russian flights.

14.12.06

films

since sort of passing my exam; i have decided to vegetate for a few days and do nothing other than lie in bed and watch films. ok, obviously i have had to get out to go to work and so on, but the rest of the time has been as described, and in this i have been greatly aided by max who lent me 16 odd DVDs for the occasion (brought over here, naturally, from mother russia....)
so far, i have seen Casino royal for the second time (the actor is SOOOO cute) then breaking and entering (bosnians in london! although i have to admit that juiliette binoche was alot more convincing as a bosnian than i had anticpated), then borat, which is just as dumb as everyone claimed. then, really frying my brains, i saw some film about dancing and singing pengiuns. this would probably have been a dumb film under any circumstance, but i had the priveledge of seeing it dubbed in russian, which made it that much more surreal.
moving along to the russian stuff: i went on an feast of russian war films (there are so many of them, i get a bit confused as to which is which) 9 rota was better than proriv.....but not as goos as my all time favourite-voina.
oh, and Stranger than fiction......i laughed, but i didnt really like it....hmmm....

12.12.06

fones

my phone got stolen. again.
i sent out emails to as many peoples as i could with my new number. if i didnt send one to you, write me.
so here is my latest list:
phone stealing experiences:
1. august 2000, st petersburg, russia. i was with joao and lemurana in a perehod under nevski prospect, looking at cds and not paying attention. when we got out of the perehod, the phone was gone.
2. august 2003, srpsko sarajevo, bosnia. caitlin sent me a text with the exciting news that a 30+ canadian of our acquaintance was marrying the teenage belorussian daughter of his firms cleaning lady. i tried to verify this wild story, and didnt see the blow coming to my face or the knife being held to my neck until it was too late. the funny thing was i was waiting for my bus back to serbia. i got on the bus with blood all over my face. for once, i got two whole seats to myself!
3. june 2005, paris, france. i lived in the ghetto of departement 93, but it wasnt there that my fone was taken, but rather in the building where i worked. the boss didnt allow us to keep our phones on us, so we had to leave them in the staff room. unfortunately, not all the staff were too honest, and several of us lost our phones in the space of about a week.
4.december 2006, east london. the buggers must have got it on the tube. i didnt feel a thing and it was in a zipped up part of my bag. i have to hand it to them, they were good.

11.12.06

pinochet, asesino

Y se murió de viejito nomás. En una cama, del corazón (un corazón al que sólo acudió para morir tranquilo), rodeado de fascistas y dolorosamente impune. Cuesta encontrar las palabras para expresar la monstruosidad de este hombre. Cuesta expresar la tragedia que implicó en nuestras vidas. Inauguró el golpe sangriento, con torturas sin límite, con desaparecidos. Todo golpe cruento, asesino, tomó su nombre: pinochetazo. Aquí, a mediados del ’75, todos lo decían: “Lo que se viene es el pinochetazo”. Debimos saberlo desde el ’73. Debimos saber que el adversario no sólo era poderoso, sino que era criminal. Debimos haber puesto cautela en nuestra mano; no frenarla, no pararla, pero reflexionar que lo de Chile nos dejaba muy solos, era muy desmedido y reclamaba eso: cautela. Pero estábamos embalados. En septiembre de 1973 la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras dictaba muchas de sus materias en la calle Córdoba. Un lindo lugar con una capilla en el medio. Ivannisevich se sacó una foto pegándole con un pico a una pared, destruyendo el edificio. Prolijos, dejaron la capilla. Todavía está. Un pibe de la JUP me dijo del golpe y se me ofreció para levantar mi clase. Yo, uno se creía, aún, inmortal, le dije que la levantaba yo y llevaba a mis alumnos a la marcha. Salimos de las aulas en busca de las marchas. Sentíamos más la presencia de la JP en las calles, vivando a Allende, que la relación profunda, íntima, que la tragedia de Chile tenía con nosotros. En esa época las fronteras parecían más lejanas. Si algo pasaba en Chile, no tenía por qué pasar aquí.
En seguida llegó la foto del carnicero. Es la perfecta caricatura del general golpista sudamericano. La jeta erguida, bigote, anteojos negros. Después, la noticia de la muerte de Allende. Decían: se suicidó. Un periodista le pregunta a Ricardo Balbín qué haría él en una situación así. El compadrito de comité se mandó una histórica: “¡Ah, no! A mí no me hacen eso”. No recuerdo qué dijo Perón. Nada memorable, sin duda. Poco tiempo después cruzaba la cordillera y se entrevistaba con el carnicero. ¡Qué vivos están estos recuerdos! Los dos bien trajeados de milicos. Con capas y todo. Le gustaban las capas a Pinochet. Al día siguiente o a los dos días empezaron a llegar los exiliados, los que apenas habían salvado el pellejo o los que habían sido escupidos del Estado Nacional. Estaban desechos. En Ezeiza, el gobierno argentino les tomó huellas digitales hasta de los dedos del pie. Les tomaron todos los datos, los ficharon bien fichados, les hicieron saber que si algo raro hacían duraban media hora sin ser arrestados. El Descamisado publicó las fotos y tituló: “Esta vergüenza se hace en nombre del peronismo”. Claro que sí: eso hizo el peronismo. Lo habría hecho cualquier gobierno argentino. Pero el peronismo de esos días era pinochetista. Cosa que, en algún oscuro rincón de su alma, siempre puede volver a ser si es necesario.
López Rega habrá brindado con champán. El carnicero de Chile estaba enseñando cómo se arreglan las cosas con el marxismo internacional, con la sinarquía apátrida. Nosotros empezamos a enterarnos de las peores cosas. Las versiones que llegaban sobre las torturas y las violaciones del Estado Nacional estremecían. ¿Era posible tanta crueldad? Se sabía que estaba lleno de tipos de la CIA el Estadio. Que los de la CIA eran especialmente activos en torturar y hasta enseñaban a los empeñosos chilenos cómo hacerlo. Las mujeres que maltrataron a Allende con los cacerolazos salieron a festejar. Otros agarraban lo que tenían a mano y huían. “Yo –me contó años después un escritor– llegué a Perú, me metí en una pensión, abrí mi valija y puse en un estante los libros que me había llevado. Ahí estaba mi nueva biblioteca: un libro de Cortázar, otro de Lezama Lima y uno de Tolstoi. Era todo lo que tenía.”
Un día lo fue a ver Borges. El carnicero estaba orgulloso: el gran escritor había cruzado la cordillera y estaba feliz de verlo. Le puso una condecoración bien llamativa. El gran escritor –el que decía un mar de concheterías bobas cada vez que “comía”, porque un concheto no “almuerza” ni “cena”, “come”, en lo de Bioy Casares– le dijo al carnicero: “Me honra esta condecoración porque Chile tiene la forma de una espada”. También la Thatcher lo recibió y le habló con un inglés lento y vocalizado como para que el carnicero entendiera: “Le agradezco su ayuda en la guerra de las Falklands. Sin sus informaciones nuestros pilotos no podrían haber hecho los blancos que hicieron”. El carnicero sonrió, satisfecho, goloso.
Cierta vez estaba en una clínica en Londres. Golpean a su habitación. Entra una mujer joven y resuelta, treinta años, por ahí. El carnicero, siempre seductor, sonríe y dice: “Pasa, niña. Dime, ¿a qué vienes?” “A arrestarlo, general. Por violaciones a los derechos humanos.” Se enfurece y llama a sus matones: “¡Saquen de aquí a esta comunista!” Días después regresa a su país. Llega en silla de ruedas. No bien baja del avión se pone de pie y saluda a los suyos. ¡Pícaro el carnicero! Otra vez había engañado a todos.
No sirve para nada que se muera. Que estos tipos se mueran cuando ya mataron a todos los que querían matar es un pobre consuelo. Ni un cáncer vale desearle. Nadie va a revivir por eso. Nadie va a sufrir menos de lo que sufrió. Deja, para colmo, problemas. Los militares de su país (al que le aseguró la economía y todos sabemos cuánto aprecian esto los pueblos) lo honrarán desde las armas. Michelle Bachelet no lo honrará desde el Estado. Pero habrá que organizar actos en toda América latina. El New York Times ha anunciado su muerte como la de un cruzado contra el marxismo. Puño de hierro, dictador, pero un hombre que no dudó. Fue la suma de las peores cosas que un ser humano puede ofrecer: lo de asesino lo sabemos, pero fue, además, ladrón, mentiroso, cínico, se rió de sus adversarios y de sus muertos. Descansará en paz porque morirse es eso. Pero que no tenga paz su memoria. Que nadie olvide sus crímenes. La era de horror que inauguró. Que en las escuelas argentinas se sepa que Pinochet es parte de nuestra historia, porque prefiguró nuestra pesadilla, porque inspiró a nuestros verdugos. Que gane la verdad por sobre la mentira con que sus adeptos buscan protegerlo. Que su nombre infunda pavor y que ese pavor se transforme en coraje: nunca más un Pinochet. Que haya un busto suyo con una placa en todos los países del mundo. Que esa placa diga: “Augusto Pinochet, asesino”. Porque olvidarlo sería como olvidar Auschwitz, el Estadio Nacional, la ESMA.
pagina/12

9.12.06

work

yesterday was my last day off work before christmas day. i wanted things to be like that: i need the extra money! for the next two weeks i will be working straight, so i can hopefully go off somewhere in the spring.
my last day off started slowly with me in bed watching stupid films. then i went into uni. i had great plans to go to the library, but i ran into zbek at the enterence and we ended up going for coffee. i told him the story about my supervisors and he said that, actually, he wasnt too surprised, he said he could completely imagine them doing something like that. we had a chat for an hour or so, then i resolved to really go to the library....but just as i got down the steps leading into it, i ran into uilliem....which led to another long conversation, and by the time that finished it was already after 5 and i had to leave to meet paul who was in london for an exciting day at the public record office. he was frustrated: he had spent several hours going through the documents of a double agent, and everything seemed to be backing up his beliefs....until he got to the very last paragraph, where the spies british handlers note that everything in the previous few hundred pages was rubbish, and largely fabricated. the guy was a fake. so paul was annoyed that he had wasted so much time on. we headed for a chinese restaurant to moan about our dissertations and two bottles of wine later we moved on to a bar in convent garden with a completely cool interior, but too many people. paul insisted on buying vodka cocktails.....oi my poor liver.....but it is always good to be with friends, regardless of the damage to your internal organs!

6.12.06

more lists

worst places to use the toilet:
1.my secondary school in russia: now only was there never toilet paper: there werent even doors to the stalls. this meant we had to go to the toilets in groups so that one girl could hold the outer door closed (to prevent boys from running in) while the other girls used the toilets, with all other girls watching. yuck.
2. algonquin park, canada. i always went to "hit the bush" as it seemed the only civilised thing to do. the toilets installed by the authorities were scary. truely scary.
3. moscow state university. at one point someone drew a smile face on the wall with their own shit. it stayed there for months, flaking off from time to time onto the floor.
4. the hospital i was in in serbia. i dont think these things had been cleaned since tito walked this earth. there was no running water in the hospital, and naturally no toilet paper. my ukrainian flatmate smuggled some rolls of it to me, and i walked around with it non stop for the whole duration of my stay, as i was terrified someone would steal it from me. i slept with it under the pillow.
5. the exit festival, serbia. thousands of people, too few portopotties. the queues were huge and i dont think the things got cleaned once during the 9 day festival. i once woke up in the morning to see shit all around the bottom of my trousers. yuck.
6. a glaswegian pub. i dont remember the name, but it was something like out of trainspotting: the worst in scotland.
7.laurents flat in paris. strictly speaking, there was no toilet here, there was a paying one down on the street, and a sink. the choice was left to me.
8. darkos flat in belgrade. harry claimed i was the first woman ever to step into this guys flat, which i can well believe from the looks of things. it was too grimy to even put in words, best to draw a veil over this one.
9.the hungry duck in the late 1990s, moscow. the vomit was everywhere, your shoes stuck to the floor. supposedly some people died in here.....
10 the public toilet accross from the job centre plus in cambridge. there were junkies shooting up at the sink. the place stank of homelessness. no wonder you are not allowed to use the ones inside the job centre plus, such is their clientelle....

and all of this doesnt take into account the emergencies that could not be solved by an actual toilet. such as the time i had to go in a serbian sunflower feild with a whole bus watching me, or the time i had to do the same thing in the loire valley, or the time i sent in the yard of bratislava university, or the time on a greek autoroute.....or....
hmmm, reading this list i am starting to wonder: could there be a connection between orthodoxy and uncomfortable toilet experiences? serbia and russia seem overly well represented on this list, while i cannnot think of a single comprable experience in a muslim country, for example.

the latest

oi oi oi
i am exhausted. i was supposed to have my massive comprehensive exam this morning. but the yesterday i ran into my second supervisor, who told me that my exam had been cancelled as she felt i was not ready for it. instead, she told me to come in to meet with her and my first superisor to discuss where i had gone wrong. i was totally upset and paranoid, wondering what exactly i had done wrong. i mean, i had had doubts about some things, i was aware that my first chapter was a bit un methodological, and i started to think that i was totally off.....but then this morning i came into the university and both my supervisors started apologising: my first supervisor had sent my second supervisor THE WRONG PAPER!!!! this only occured to them last night at 11pm when they finnally got around to discussing what was actually wrong with my paper, and realised they were talking about 2 different papers actually.
so in the end we had half the exam (the historiography section, since everyone had read my literature review) but we will have the other half now in january, after my correct paper has been circulated and read but the various people. so ridiculous. and here all night i had been really worried about where i had gone wrong and what i had done...and it seems in the end it was all about nothing! how ridiculous! but as my dad said when i told him the latest news: vsyo horosho shto horosho konchaetsia!

1.12.06

food

went out again last night with jovana and olena. olena brought along some siberian friend of hers named yelena who was (like olena) from a town i had never even heard of, and i think i have pretty good sense of geography, so it must be small. we headed for a pub near where oli (as olena is called here in england) and i work. we talked in a strange slavoenglish that got more odd as the hours and wine passed. jovana got married three days ago, so that was the major news.
funny people i hang out with.

one of the topics of conversation was the odd food people eat in this country. (marmite! what need more be said?)so i decided to compile a list of food i wish i could have access to here all the time but dont. by this i dont mean any gourmet or complicated things, just food that is normal everyday food elsewhere, but not here.

1Grechka. i have only seen this in russia, where a big bag costs about 20 rubles (less than 50p). you can buy it at the russian immigrant shop here near hyde park, but the same bag costs close to 5 pounds, and that is just absurd.
2.my breakfast shakes, caracas. i never really figured out what was in these: obviously various tropical fruits, ice and maybe some kind of milk. they are both incredibly good and very filling. i used to have them every single morning....mmm/
3.all russian milk products: in particular tvorog, kefir, and smetana. why dont they export these things?
4 mrs cho's cooking, moscow and elsewhere. ok, i have not yet been to korean, so maybe there everyone cooks like this, but i kind of doubt it. her food is incredible, i could live the rest of my live on pipinpop.
5 al- diwan, paris. amazing. from hommous starters to dessert. great location as well.
6. burek od sira. as we were drinking and becoming desperate for some kind of fatty zakuski, jovana and i decided that what english pubs need to be selling is burek. it is fatty, tasty, and absorbs all alcohol like a sponge. i have several regular places to buy it, favourites being belgrade train station, the underground shopping mall near zagreb train station, and any place in bosnia.
7.baked potatoes on the street, istambul. it is filling, cheap, and has yet to poison me. (the same cannot be said for russian street food, for example)
8. salted corn in cups, mexico city. so cheap and simple, why dont other people think of this? it is like pop corn, but fresh....
9.breakfast in thailand. i prefer salty to sweet food. so i was exstatic when i discovered that in thailand, and it would seem in asia in general, the breakfast looks almost the same as dinner. i could have a huge stir fry in the morning and not feel like a freak, excellent!
10.greek frappés, athens. so simple and so logical. caffeine doses for summer.
11. roated chestnuts. they sell these in a lot of places, but they are not always good, as in london where they are grotesquely overpriced and not well toasted. great ones are in budapest and zagreb.
12. mini fank, budapest. small and fatty, and 40 forints.
13 empanadas, chile. anything can be stuffed into these things, even tofu. i dont know why they have not caught on elsewhere.
14 any meal in bulgaria. i love the food in this country. and the prices.

30.11.06

more lists

Wow, i didnt imagine my lists would be so popular, but within hours of posting them i started getting emails from random people agreeing and disagreeing with them. Hmmm. In any case, I have promised several people to make some more, and as I am now doing extra hours for the holiday season (and to get extra cash, obviously) I certainly have the time for more listing. Since these lists are composed primarily while I am at work, I thought this would be fitting:

Best Bookshops In The World.
1 gibert jeune, paris: this place is amazing. I can spend hours wandering about the buildings. And the prices are excellent as well. My favourite room is the top one in the section that is on your left as you are looking at the seine (with your back to the fountain). It has used and new fiction paperbacks, I can spend hours in there.
2.akateeminen kirjakauppa, Helsinki: also amazing. Just going inside is an experience in itself. The building was designed by the architect alvar aalto and is famous for its roof. Even if, like me, you don’t read finnish, it doesn’t matter, there are huge academic and fiction sections in Swedish, French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian.
3biblio globus, Moscow: going here is normally an uncomfortable experience, the place is always over crowded with smelly people, and the organisation and lay out is atrocious. Still, the selection is great and so are the prices.
4.plato, Belgrade: great atmosphere. A cool bookshop combined with a restaurant. Good selection, cheap prices.
5. Mamut, Belgrade: just down the street from plato, better selection, but not quite so cool.
6. waterstones, gower street, London: good selection of used stuff, in addition to the normal stuff that commercial book chains in England carry.
7.FNAC, les halles, paris : if you cant find it at gibert jeune cheaper, it will be here, in addition to all the cds, dvds, and digital stuff.
8. sajam knige, Belgrade: I think every book published in a south slav language can surely be found here in October. the problem is exactly finding it….the place is completely unorganised, and you need a map to navigate among all the corridors and stands.
9. dom knigi na arbate: as uncomfortable as biblio globus, but also with a good selection.

special mentions:
11. book market, Havana: really weird stuff turns up here. If you ever want a copy of la historia me absolvera, or Tania la guerrillera inolvidable, this is certainly the place.
12. Shakespeare and company, paris: I almost never buy anything here (why buy an expensive English book when you can get a much cheaper French one at gibert jeune next door?) but I always go in for a look. The building is great. This is exactly what I want my house to look like when I am old.

29.11.06

blue lists

sometimes at work i get to take over the travel section. my actual job is fiction, but everyone knows i love travel literature, so when someone else needs cover, they often let me do it. the other good thing about the travel section (besides the cool books) is that they arent man people, and they seem more considerate than the guys who go to fiction (or worse still: erotica) which basically means less straightening and tidying for me to do, and more time to look at cool books with exciting pictures. it was in this way that i became addicted to the lonely planets blue list 2007. i had flipped through last years edition (oddly titled blue list 06-07, i suppose they didnt realise how popular they would be) but the new one is even better. it provides all kinds of ideas as to where to go and what to do on your next holiday.
inspired, and trying to alleviate boredom, a collegue and i started composing lists of our own. here are mine.
Worlds Worst Airports
1. Paris-beauvais: for a city like paris, this is really just an embassament
2. tie: Moscow-sheremetevo 1: once coming back from africa it took me 3 hours to clear customs
Moscow- sheremetevo 2: the queues, the queues, the queues........
4. canaima international (venezuela): when i showed pictures to my mother, she asked if it was a native hut!!!
5. San josé (Costa rica): the smoking section is IN THE BATHROOM. just like in high school....
6. Rochester (usa): the guy at check in didnt know where "moscow" was. he then preceded to put my luggage into the computer with the wrong tags.....oh, and the airport is in the middle of a corn feild, and has some of the fattest people i have EVER seen.
7Adler (Russia): the last time i was there, they still insisted that foriegn passport holders sit seperately from russians while waiting for their plane.
8Tie: Washington: reagan national: the place just sucks. and it has no shuttle to dulles!
Washington: dulles international: there is no link to public transportation at all, and the airport is only accessible by car or taxi. there is no proper shuttle to reagan, although you often have to transfer from one to the other.once inside, the queues are absolutely enormous, and the duty free is HORRIBLE. there is not even anything edible to buy.
10.narsarsuaq (greenland): this place is just depressing. especially in april.

Worst Airline
1Air rutaca: i dont think this one flies anymore actually. i hope.it had a big crash shortly after the last time i took it. i think it went bankrupt after that.
2. KrasAir. they are based in krasnayarsk, what more need be said?
3. Canada 3000: They stole my camera! and they have a horrible slogan (we're leading the way, nous sommes au sommet)
4. air transit: why, when air canada is so acceptable, are all the other canadian ones so bad?
5. JAT: the mysterious flights that never take off....
6. Air india in the 1980s: it might have improved. but i still have nightmares of the stench.
7.delta: this is a personal vengance, they lost my luggage 3 times
8. ryan air: we all know, the service just sucks.
9 Aeroflot in the 1980s: things have improved today on the international services. but once years ago we landed by accident in poland....our tickets said germany......
10. Balkan: do these planes EVER leave on time????do the pilots even have watches?

Most Entertaining Airline:
1 Aeroflot: they let my cat run around the plane, and served her a meal.ok, i gave the stewardessa some money, but still....it was appreciated.
2. Cubana. the inflight movies are incredible. i can never decide which is better: the revolutionary accomplishments of the health care system, or the revolutionary accomplishments of the education system. both are riveting.
3. estonian air. they serve incredible fresh meals with REAL plates and REAL cutlery and fresh baked rolls. even on 45 minute flights from St petersburg.
4. air rutaca (before the crash). the flights were terrifying, but the cute pilots always let good looking young girls sit in the cock pit with them, which i admit was kind of cool, even while i feared for my safetly.

27.11.06

yuck

i hate romance literature of the georgette heyer variety. unfortunately, however, other people seem to like it. so it was announced yesterday that we would have to make a seperate display of it in the shop. three whole bays or nothing but romance literature, gross. in the end it turned out kind of funny. my manager is a scottish guy whose goal in life is to be a policeman in glasgow. he is working here while his girlfriend studies, and then it is on to police academy. hardly the ideal person to be organising a display on romance literature. while emma and i shelved, he stood and read out the backs of the covers in a mock serious tone, complete with phoney sighs and swoon.at the end it seemed a whole section of the shop had turned into a pastel sea. it looked absolutely hideous in my view, but, hey, i just follow orders dont i? fortunately, last friday one of the guys made a james bond display, complete with all the bond books. it looks way cooler and at least gives me something more pleasant to look at when i am at work!

24.11.06

photography

went with max to see "in the face of history: European photographers in the twentieth century" exibit on at the barbican. it was pretty comprehensive, running from the first world war up to the present. i really like the collection by boris Mihailov. his "red" series really captured the kitschyness of the soviet union. max loved the pedantic sayings visible in the backgrounds of many of the photos (ex: kto chitaet, tot mnogo znaet") he swears they didnt have such things in poland, which i find astonishing, maybe he was just too young to remember. i have always thought such things were just an automatic part of the socialist experience, have seen these sorts of phrases plastered on walls and billboards from moscow to havana.....but maybe the poles escaped? the modern photos were really great, especially from the perspective of technology, it is amazing how far cameras have come in the last few decades....it all makes me want to go out and buy a new, great, expensive one....if only i had the money!

on the subject of max and poles, he told me a good jokeover coffee at the barbican cafe:
what is the difference between E.T. and a Pole in london?
E.T. spoke good english, had his own bicycle, and wanted to go home.

21.11.06

the peoples taste

since working in a book shop, i have learned alot about what new fiction is out there. everyday i get to shelve all kinds of books, read the back covers, and my knowledge of the genre is expanding rapidly. pity i just dont have the time to actually read all the books i get to shelve. there is a lot of good stuff out there, and as soon as i get my discount, i will be buying book with every last penny i have got. however, i have also learned a lot about what english people read. twoof the three big selling and over-producing authors i hadnt even heard of until i started working. the one i had heard of is Georgette heyer. i knew of her as my mother (who has dodgy literary taste) reads her books. they are awful: basically they are bodice-rippers dressed up as historical romances, so respectable middle aged women can buy them without feeling they are doing something "dirty." one of the other big selling authors, phillipa gregory, is exactly the same. but these middle age types buy both writers' works up in mass quantities. i have to reshelve both several times a day. what i find especially odd though, is that these novels, set in England during the time of the empire, (think jane austin period) are bought in particularly large numbers by black women. i really am a bit puzzled by this point, as neither the gregory nor the heyer books seem to make any effort to appeal to such and audiance: the world the aim to depict seems pretty white and, frankly, exclusionist to me.
then there is bernard cornwall. i suppose he must be the most successful, since middle aged men buy his stuff too (in addition to women). his Sharpe series fly off the shelf, even in hardback edition.
utter insanity.
the other thing i have learned is what kind of people buy pornobooks.
i am not talking here about soft porn, i mean the hard core nasty stuff. (the bookshop where i work as a section hidden in a corner selling the stuff, and we dont even bother to reshelve it correctly in alphabetical order, as it would be immpossible to maintain, people take books of the shelves and, in their shame to be caught, shove them back in any place they find)
so anyway, hard core porn is purchased predominantly by two types of people:
1. respectable looking business men wearing expensive suits and ties, of all races and backgrounds, aged 35 and over
2.equally respectable middle age women, generally over the age of 45 or so.
this job has clearly been a truely illuminating experience.

16.11.06

urban foxes

I live in an attic. It is basically a (very) little room that was tacked on to the top back of a typical English terraced house. It has a good sized window which looks out on top of two long rows of the backs of other terraced houses. So when I look out my window, I see endless chimneys and mini-gardens stretching as far as my eye can see. This gives me the occasional view into other peoples lives. During Diwali, I could seem some Indian neighbours lightening of firecrackers in their yard with limited success. I can see teenagers drinking routinely. And I often see dogs running around and cats running up trees. So I was initially not surprised when I heard my furry companion start to make teeth grinding noises and growl at something outside the window. I looked up and saw something furry moving on the roof closest to mine. I assumed it was a cat. But then, as I looked closer, the creature seemed….well bizarre. I put on my glasses and looked again. Definitely not a cat. Way too long a body, and too bushy a tail. Still, it took me a few minutes to realise that the animal moving elegantly across the roof was a FOX. I have seen foxes before, of course, but normally in the countryside, near people’s cottages or dachas. Once in a very rare while my father will report one terrorising the bunnies in his garden. I had no clue, however, that several tens of thousands of foxes are resident in London. I decided to ask about. Iain, who knows the history of everything, claims that they have been here since the war. They got hungry in the nearby counties and migrated into the city. It seems they are a highly adaptable species and thus quickly became adept at climbing of rooftops to look for new unexplored rubbish bins and so on. The city authorities are well aware of their presence and see this as no threat. Britain is rabies free country after all, so unlike in other places where foxes are seen as diseased and dangerous, these ones are relatively harmless, provided you close your rubbish bin tightly. Iain claims he once saw one strolling down Oxford Street, weaving in and out among the crowds, just like a dog. This seemed far-fetched, but then Paul told me that one once followed him down the street on his way back from sainsbury’s. he had meat in his shopping bag, and the fox kept trying to swipe at it! The fox in my back yard has made a few repeat appearances, to the great annoyance of my own furry friend, who sees this as an infuriating assault on her territory. I wonder what she sees when she looks at the fox? And bigger, strange version of herself?

15.11.06

meetings and museums

my aunt came into town yesterday for a very brief visit enroute between the cotswells and florida. she flys through like this a few times a year, normally intransit between the cotswells and somewhere else (last time it was botswana!)
we had a ggreat day going through various museum exibits. first we went to the holbein at the Tate britain, which was interesting and well put together, although i cannot say that i am realy a great holbein fan. comparitively, i liked the Vélasquez show more.
but then we hopped a cab to the V&A, where we saw an AMAZING expo on renaissance italian interiors. i hadnt been expecting very much out of it, since it didnt really sound like my sort of thing, but i was completely impressed. the exhibit showed tuscan and venetian style houses between 1400 and 1600. it concentrated on how they were constructed and what purpose each room served. the emphasis waas on everyday life and its rituals, and i really learned a lot about how people actually lived then, their habits, their hygeine and so on. it was truely fascinating.
after the show, we went to the V1A restaurant for lunch and overate (of course) and then briefly back to my aunts hotel for tea and so she could change her clothes for a meeting she had to go to....the holtel was expensive and incredible as always, and my aunt always gets the best service imaginable, since she works in the travel industry (and is thus in a position to recommend various hotels to many rich people). afterwards i went of to work and my aunt to meetings and some musical. it is fun to have visiters from time to time!

13.11.06

monday monday

now that i have this new part time job, i look forward to monday mornings. for most people, including previously myself, it was the other way around. Monday is normally the dreaded start of the work week, not the end. but i work all day on saturday and 6 hours on Sunday, so monday has suddenly become relaxing. i can sleep in, read, make a huge breakfast, and do everything else i didnt find time to do at the weekend. like writing blog entries.
i did eat and drink well this weekend. friday justin and i went to an excellent (but not cheap) restaurant near angel. the food was refined, with subtle tastes that seemed a bit different in every bite. we then saw the Prestige. it was ok, but, well.....that is about all.
saturday i worked my long shift. i enjoy it though. the job is light and entertaining and i have very funny collegues. however, i really end up speaking five languages in every shift. and after 8 hours i have the feeling my brain is turning into kasha. the head of financial matters in my branch is from ukraine (we speak russian). one of the two collegues who is assigned to the same section i am is from mostar (we speak, um, serbo-bosnian?). a huge number of the customers who come in to the place are tourist, with the overwelming majority being french, spanish and german. the germans inevitably speak good english, but that is not true for the other two nationalities, and since i am the only staff member who speaks french (which i find wierd) and one of the few who speaks spanish, i get to talk to these people. it is fun, but i get confused sometimes. yesterday, i was giving directions to an elderly argentine lady when the bosnian asked me a question....to which i responded in spanish....then later i told a spanish woman that the toilet was upstairs and "levo" which i suppose didnt make much sense to her either. oh well. hopefully my brain will adjust with time. but things seem to be ok, saturday after work the boss took me out for drinks in a nearby pub...and outdrank me easily. i had four glasses and practically stumbled home and into bed.
yesterday chester (who lives with justin) made an amazing roast at their house. so after work i went over and ate like a pig as part of what seems to be emerging as a glutinous sunday routine. the vegetables were amazing and chester even opened the special bottle of wine he had (apparently) been guarding for some time. i waddled home and fell asleep, content.

8.11.06

caught in the act

Last night, as I was getting ready for bed, I went to the toilet to brush my teeth and wash my hands and so on. But when I came out of the bathroom, I had a bit of a surprise. Our bathroom is adjoined to the kitchen, so when I opened the bathroom door I had a full view of the kitchen, and thus an excellent view of the spectacle that was unfolding: in the two minutes it had taken me to brush my teeth, my furry friend had:
opened lemurana’s drawer where she keeps her food.
climbed inside the said drawer
located the container of luso cod that was inside
attacked the container of luso cod with all her furry strength.Fortunately, I caught her in the act and thus was able to save both the cod and her digestive tract from what would otherwise have surely been a disastrous situation.

views of east london






7.11.06

down to work


so now that i have a job with a fixed (more or less) schedule, i have started to get going on what i am actually supposed to be doing here, ie my research. i have finished a draft of my first chapter and am waiting for my supervisor to approve it...i sent the email ages ago, but i havent heard a word back and i dont know if that is a good or a bad sign....but , well, i will wait.
meanwhile i have started reading my primary sources. i have nearly 50 kilos worth. they all arrived by special post delivary to justins house. they arrived primitively wrapped in brown paper bags held together by string tightly tied by babushka hands over the summer at the post office at chisti prudi. they are now on my over filling IKEA book shelf, waiting to be read. so i start this past weekend. i figured it was best to start at the begining, so i took the oldest one, from 1810 and started reading. the reading is a bit slow, although it is picking up now that i have got used to the different spellings and slightly different words. had the writer lived today, i think he could have been tried for inciting racial hatred at the least. in the last chapter he spent the night sleeping in a field, after he discovered that the owner of the (only) inn in the town where he found himself was jewish. i cant wait to find out what he writes when he actually reaches his destination: the ottoman empire.
more to follow

6.11.06

exciting new job (ha ha )

so i started my new job over the weekend, and am now on day three.
basically it is like being back in secondary school. i used to have a lot of these kinds of service jobs. i had thought i had put them behind me when i got a BA, but it seems not. so i am working at a book shop, as a salesgirl. my last sales girl job finished nearly a decade ago in 1997, if i remember correctly. but one has to eat, and this is what i got. that said the work is brainless and even kind of fun. almost everyone is is a student. most of them are doing degrees in dubiously employable fields such as creative writing and arts semiotics, and generally at universities i have not heard of. there are a number of would be future writers among the employees. but everyone seems nice and friendly, and they all know a lot about literature, so at least they make for interesting conversation. the funny thing is the head of finance for the place is russian (from ukraine actually, but ethnic russian) and so i had all my training in russian, which i thought was a little surreal in a bookshop in central london. but, hey, she likes me, and keeps saying how amazing it is that i speak russian, so i am not complaining. actually i get to speak all kinds of languages int he place, since there are tourista from allover, but especially france and spain (there are germans to, but they inevitably speak impeccable english) i even helped a serbian couple yesterday.....they bought 120 pounds worth of agatha cristie.....wierd, huh?

4.11.06

cambridge II

so i went up to cambridge yesterday to check on the situation......paul is doing very well, he is hacking away at his thesis, i was even treated to a sample of it over a few drinks at the eagle. btu our other friend is not doing so well. it is sad to get a to a point in your life and realise that you have failed to do the things that you really wanted to, and to spend all your time regreting that. but there is nothing paul or i can do to help him, other than to be there and listen i suppose, and to not encourage activity, like falling in love with the vicar's wife, that seem certain to lead to disaster.
cambridge meanwhile, looked absolutely beautiful. it was cold but sunny and i had almost forgot what a really lovely little town it is. i also forgot (well not really) how many good book shops there are there in very close proximity. i even managed to get the last from david mitchell, in hard cover edition, for all of 2 pounds, which suits even my limited budget.
on the subject of books, today is my first day of work, and i can see i am going to be learning about the book selling business over the next few months.
details to follow.

1.11.06

another cambridge soap opera

i am not even in cambridge, but the soap operas of the place still reach me. having survived the TTB scandal of last semester, it seems an even juicier one has emerged: I.N. is having an affair with the vicar's wife from the theological faculty! and here i thought these things only happened in made for the BBC movies, but no, the stereotype of the sex starved vicars wife turns out to have a firm basis in reality, and the speces is alive and well in cambridge. the only problem is that i am now watching it tear my poor friend apart as he is courting what clearly seems to be to be disaster. i fear he has actually got attached to this female......and cambridge is a small town and the academic world is even smaller, so every one is in everyone else's business all the time. little can be kept secret and gossip spreads quickly. so i am very worried about the outcome of this and the ramifications it will have on my friends sanity. i think i might have to go up soon myself and regulate.
in the meantime, i am heading off to the pub to celebrate my new employment with max. max has been tolerating my unemployment woes for sometime. he had a very peculiar cure for unemployment: crawling in a ball under the bed. as it is a very cat like thing to do, i didnt object too much to the suggestion, but i do wonder how on earth he came up with such an idea....but then he works for an NGO that deals with children in conflict situations (palestine, georgia) so i guess maybe that is the stuff these NGOs get up to in their theory training. who knows?
but the next time you are feeling down, try it: crawl into a ball under the the bed and stay there a while. then let me know if it works, i am curious.

my new digs


31.10.06

my new career

i finnally got the part time job i was looking for....i am now a book seller at one of london's largest book shops. ha ha, i think this suits me pretty well. the only problem is that after i pass my 3 month probation period, i get a big discount on all books....this is dangerous, i will have to restrain myself from spending my whole pay all at once! needless to say, if any of you guys have requests, please let me know....three months from now that is.
the fun starts this weekend....

29.10.06

art

For all of you who are in London and like art, i HIGHLY recommend the Velasquez expo on at the National Gallery. It is the first completely satisfactory expo i have been to since the Modernism one at the V&A in April. Ok, it wasn’t perfect, i went on Sunday, and the crowds were pretty dense, which meant that i sometimes had to wait or wiggle about in order to get a really good look at the various paintings. But the effort was worth it, the selection of paintings is really good. I also really appreciated it that they give you a complementary booklet to take with you into the expo that provides an overview of the different artistic periods in Velasquez’s career and gives mini-insights into the different paintings. The booklet was really perfect: the info blurbs on each painting was just enough to give you some valuable information to think about and to bring out some points that might not have otherwise been evident, but at the same time, all the blurbs were short enough that it didn’t feel like you were reading your way through the expo. Of course there were all the usual super expensive hard cover beautiful edition of books on Velasquez in the gift shop, but in terms of valuable information to actually improve you viewing experience, i found the free booklet really perfect.
There are a lot of court paintings of the 16th century Spanish monarchy, which effectively demonstrate that the Habsburgs were truly inbred. The booklet pointed out details such as “the infanta, aged eight, pictured in painting number 45 was engaged to her uncle….” And at painting 40 we learn that “Habsburg dynastic politics superseded genetic prudence in determining the choice of Philip IV’s second wife, who was his niece….” Of course, the Habsburg genetic issues are hardly a historic secret, but it was funny to see so many misfortunes displayed in one space.
So if you have time and six pounds to spare, i recommend going.

28.10.06

obviously winter is coming

our place is getting colder and colder, especially at night. it is the end of october, and the season is clearly changing. my furry companion seems to have subconsciously realised this as weel as suddenly she has started eating very large amounts, even of the tapioca and manioc japanese food that she normally spurns. i assume this is some way of trying to bulk up a bit before winter sets in completely? her fur is puffing up also and she is starting to look like a little cotton ball instead of the lean mean tiger who killed mice all summer long. the down side of this sudden furry-body building is that there are more, um, malodourous physical manifestations of her eating binge. her box is constantly overflowing. i suppose this is the down side of the changing seasons!

25.10.06

stress

i havent been writing much lately. i have been very very busy. i have another interview today in about 2 hours, all for the same job. and i still know nothing about finance. i am waiting for them to start laughing at me.
meanwhile, i just got my computer back from the shop...i had been temporarily out of commision sue to a burnout fuse....or something like that. 90 pounds later it is working fine, but who knows for how long. it isnt new anymore, and laptops arent really made to last forever.
ok i am back to studying for my interview. fingers crossed for me, and for masyamba who has her comprehensive today at 5!!!!!!

19.10.06

oddities

here is a good laugh. after a couple of weeks of trying to find a decently paid job in my field, i get invited to an interview for a job i applied to practically by accident to work in FINANCIAL RECRUITMENT SERVICES about which i know NOTHING.
first they telephoned me, about 45 minutes after i sent the joke application. they told me on the phone that financial recruitment was a difficult sector to get into, and asked why i thought i might be good at it. i was still in a depressed and obnoixious mood, so i informed the interviewer that i was a genius and capable of doing anything. they told me that was an excellent answer and they invited me for a live interview the next day. they said i am what they are looking for and now i have SIX more interviews lined up. but as i was leaving the room...they told me to go out and buy a better suit....although the one i was wearing was BRAND NEW.
time to go shopping, with the money i havent got.

16.10.06

moscow retrospektive

lessons on how to destroy your credit card information.... put them all in the toilet and then set them alight and watch them sizzle. fortunately (or not) moscow homes are not equipped with smoke detectors, hence the neighbours will never know (unless they have good noses) what you are up to. furry creatures should be kept away however, as they are likely to get their whiskers singed.
these are the results of m last roll of film from the motherland....next dstination: east london?

14.10.06

confessions

i confess: deep down i have no culture and i like IKEA.
harsh words, but i fear they are true. having spent my life passing through 55 different countries on 5 continents (and having spent over a year in 7 of those countries) even i sometimes seek consistency. some people travel and refuse, for example, to eat in a french restaurant in tokyo because they want to "experience" the local culture. then there are people who travel and dont want to "experience" the local culture at all. like the family of my old korean boss, they go to paris and only eat in korean restaurants, because they just assume the local offerings must be disgusting. (i know several french people who do the same when travelling abroad....i have distinct memories of croissant hunting in venezuela and other unlikely spots)
but personnally i feel too disoriented for either approach. one of the best italian restaurants i have ever been to was in bangkok, and i have been to plenty of good thai places in london.
furthermore, i find i shop generally in the same 5 shops all over the world. when i go somewhere and i see them, i am relieved. if they are not there, i feel nervous. i really sometimes like the generic and the globalised. this brings me IKEA, which is conviently located about 20 mintues from my present house. i like being able to walk into the same shop in any country and get the same things. it is comforting somehow. i have bought the same IKEA bedsheets in montreal, budapest (they are now masyambas, she inherited them), moscow, paris and london. this gives me the feeling of continuity, even as i change location. it is somehow comforting to be in the same bedsheets, even if you are in a different place. but then that is just my opinion.

12.10.06

i am ill.
i started to feel badly yesterday and today i am worse.
i want to crawl under my blanket and sleep until it is all over.

11.10.06

maybe this world is too small

so a few entrees back i accused moscow of being an overgrown village. in the space of 24hours i had run into my ex-flatmates ex-girlfriend on tverskaia, followed by my ex-classmate who turned out to be working in the same office building as i.
well it seems the same must be said of London. today i was walking in central london when i thought i saw a familiar face. "impossible" i thought to myself....but then the face looked back at me with the same stunned expression and shouted "je crois pas mes yeux!"
it was limou, a senegalese girl i knew in paris. she had been a receptionist where i had worked, and now she is here trying her luck in london, and she was tagging along behind some guy named matheius whose nationality i couldnt figure out, but he obviously didnt speak french. Limou says a couple of our other acquaintances from that time are here.....she said everyone is going out for drinks saturday. i found myself searching for excuses and running off towards the library.

8.10.06

Obituary: Anna Politkovskaya

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya won international recognition for her passionate reporting work on the conflict in Chechnya in which she sought to expose human rights abuses.
Detained on occasion by the Russian military, the Novaya Gazeta special correspondent was famous for her book The Dirty War, a collection of articles mainly about the second Chechen conflict which began in 1999.
In 2004, she was a joint winner of the Olof Palme Prize for human rights work.
The citation reads that she was "noted for her courage and strength when reporting in difficult and dangerous circumstances".
A visit to Hell
Born in 1958, she graduated as a journalist from Moscow State University in 1980 and worked on the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya for more than a decade.
Living streets full of dead eyes
Anna Politkovskaya writing about Groznyy
In 1999, she joined Novaya Gazeta, one of the few national Russian newspapers to take a consistently critical line on the Kremlin.
She frequently travelled to Chechnya and the North Caucasus where her dispatches described some of the horror of a war where most of the casualties were civilians.
In Hell, an article from July 2000, she describes the ruins of the Chechen capital, Groznyy:
"The city ruins are like a new Caucasus mountain range. African-style famine. Painfully thin children...
"Living streets full of dead eyes. Mad and half-mad people. Streets teeming with weapons. Mines everywhere. Permanent explosions. Despair."
Critic to the end
Her polemical style earned her many critics in Russia but her stories stood out from much of the mainstream Russian media and she pursued them at great personal risk, whether reporting from the war zone or receiving death threats in Moscow.
In October 2002, she was one of the few people to enter the Moscow theatre, where Chechen militants had seized hundreds of hostages, in a bid to negotiate.
In 2004, she tried to go to Beslan during the school siege but fell ill with food poisoning on the flight there. Some suspected a plot to incapacitate her.
The same year her book Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy depicted Russia as a country where human rights are routinely trampled upon.
Politkovskaya's last known article for Novaya Gazeta, published on 28 September, is a condemnation of pro-Kremlin militias operating in Chechnya as part of Moscow's so-called Chechenisation policy.
"Chechnya was always her main subject," Vitaly Yaroshevsky, the newspaper's deputy editor, told Reuters news agency.
"Everything she wrote was on the edge."

taken from the BBC

6.10.06


.....because it is wet and cold and i am procrastinating
the rain is pelting down on top of my attic and my furry compagnion has had the good sense to retreat under the duvet, installing herself in such a way as to leave me no room, even though it is a massively large bed and she is a rather petite beast.
i need to write that chapter.....

publishing a book is a lot of work

when i signed the book contract, it seemed everything what pretty much ready to go. i mean, the work is nearly finished already, and the editors just asked me to make a few final changes before sending it off to the final commission and then the press.
but damn those last little changes are taking me a while. everytime i walk into the library i find yet another book i havent considered but absolutely should, authors i have overlooked, articles, texts, images.....i spent 6 hours yesterday just editing my bibliography, which will be a small part in the back that no one except a few losers will bother to look at.
but things are moving along: i have a new title, some ideas for the cover, the set up , the font and so on. i have been given permission to take stuff out of a whole series of different london libraries since the stuff i need access to is pretty scattered. today i was at LSE trying to get various documents there, then back at my normal base of operations to take another few works out....and now i face the daunting task of trying to actually READ them all....when i will find the time i cannot imagine.

4.10.06

waiting

i have a meeting with my english supervisor in 45 minutes. until then i am killing time in the computer cluster in the building's basement. i am behind on my first chapter and i know it...i am bracing myself for the fallout....

30.9.06

and it's raining again

woke up early to the sound of incredibly hard rain assaulting from all directions. i am sleeping in an attic, so it was pounding on top of me as well as at the windows.
but the rain saved me from confusion: the moment i woke up i knew exactly where i was

27.9.06

tallinn

i always feel somehow relieved when i arrive in tallinn. i dont know why. perhaps it is my memories from when i was younger and arriving here always meant a shopping holiday away from russia, where, in those days, there was nothing. maybe because the place always seems so civilised: the streets are clean, the people friendly, and no one pushes and shoves. maybe because my family has good friends here who always showed me around and made me feel at home. i dont know.

the train ride was the usual russian train experience. there were two really cute ethnic russian actors who had been performing in moscow. they were young, and spoke fluent estonian and thus had citizenship. then there was an elderly ethnic russian pensioner who had been sent to estonia to work in a factory in 1970. he never learned estonian and consequently is citizenship, traveling with one one of those grey passports the estonian government started giving out in the early 1990s. it reads "Alien Passport" and announces in estonian and english that "the bearer of this passport is not an estonian citizen" and so on. the dyed gave me chocolat. the guys and i tried to explain to him where my country was. he didnt get it. he had noticed i spoke russian with an accent and assumed i was ethnic estonian. i explained that i wasnt, but i dont think i managed to convince him. slava, one of the young guys tried to draw a map....but that didnt seem to work either because dyed's final verdict was "nu, mi zhe vsye sovietski ludi v kontse kontsov." at that the guys and i concluded there was no point in explaining further.

25.9.06

the lasts all over again

every time i move to a different place (which is every few months) i have to go through this ritual of The Lasts. this is The Last Time I Will Do This This Time Around.
it is a depressing but i suppose necessary ritual.
so saturday was the Last Meal with the Chos. it was already an incomplete meal: hyun soo wasnt there. we went to the korean restaurant in the mezhdunarodnaia hotel and went over board eating. we had all my favourite foods including bibinbop....mmm...then there was a particularly interesting dish: korean pizza (as the chos described it) made from octopus. the little suckers on the tentacles looked a bit odd, but caitlin claimed it tasted alright.....hyun ho was being a little comic and entertained us all. afterwards caitlin and i said goodbye to masyamba, who left a few hours later for budapest.
next stop was Last Coffee with My Supervisor. we met at tratakovskaia and caught up on my research and his institutes needs. i now have a series of requests/ tasks to bring up to my other english supervisor (who is actually australian) when i see her on wednesday. my old supervisor is a funny guy, talking to him always makes me giggle. my favourite part of the conversation was when he asked me what my current supervisors' specialties are. so i told him that my first supervisor is interested in postcolonialism and masculinities. my old supervisor thought about this and asked "muzh est?" ie: has she got a husband? when i told him my second supervisors specialty is child suicide, he just looked completely confused.
yesterday was The Last Brunch and Bimbo Shopping With Caitlin. we over ate and overspent to mark the occasion. we had omlets and sirniki at a cafe near her house and then went down novi arbat to sultanna frantsuzova where i bought a suit and a jumper, telling myself that they would be a lot more expensive in london, and i mean, a girl always needs a suit!
today is The Last Trip to the Book shop, The Last Coffee With Caitlin, The Last Round of Drinks With Igor and The Last Restaurant Adventure With Vladimir and Oleg.
these lasts are tiring me out. i just went through them all 4 months ago when i left london! and i am sure they will all repeat again soon.
but life moves on, next stop: TALLINN

22.9.06

this city is too small

sometimes moscow really does seem like a village.
yesterday masyamba and i went back to our kafedra to meet one of our old professors. i had a funny feeling going into the building and up the stairs, past the stairwells of smoking students, where my group used spend out breaks. things look pretty much the same, some details have improved (there was no shit only the walls in the toilets) but the rest was as before. our professor was a bit strange with us (angry that we didnt stay in mother russia for aspirantura?) but thrust an invitation to the serbian embassy in our hands and insisted we go. i couldnt, as i had work, but masha did....and ran into my old supervisor in the process.
i meanwhile headed of to work. i got to the centre with sometime to kill and decided to stroll up tverskaia which was on my way. as i got to the coffee bean near pushkinskaia i heard a voice shout my name....and there in front of me was my ex-flatmates ex-girlfriend. she had just arrived in moscow the day before after THREE YEARS in new york. so we had a coffee. we never had much in common, and now less than ever. she has developped this annoying habit that many russians who have lived a couple of years in the west have of interjecting english idioms into their russian, to the point where they are completely incomprehensible. this tendancy is made worse when they misuse the idioms. for example "oi, new york, eto bilo vobshe, znaesh, over the top..." or "i potom ya dumala oh my god shto nado delat?" so the conversation went on like that and after 45 minutes i was all too glad to escape to work.
but today things got stranger. i bolted out of the office at 10 am to go to the post office. i was running to the metro and concentrating on my ipod when someone grabbed my arm. it was robert.
robert and i went to mgy together. we sat in classes together with shurik, viktor, masyamba, and ivan, all day every day. but after we graduated, masyamba and i kept up, but we both left the country and lost touch with the boys, all of whom stayed here in moscow....but now it seems that robert and i WORK IN THE SAME OFFICE BUILDING! he is on the 4th floor and i am on the 8th. pity i am leaving soon, i would have liked to have caught up more properly.

18.9.06

aigul in moscow

this weekend was mainly spent obsessing over my paper. natalia went to St Petersburg with some friends, leaving me a note instructing me "not to over-thesis" which i think represents the interesting addition of a new verb to the english language.
my exciting social activity was going for lunch with masyamba and aigul, who was visiting from kazan. we went to a japanese place on tverskaia and i stuffed my self on sushi. actually saturday turned out to be a bit of a CEU day. as i was walking into my flat on my way back from lunch, the phone started ringing. i assumed this would be my fathers routine saturday afternoon call, but no, it was filip calling from bulgaria. i hadnt spoken to the guy in 2.5 years, since i left budapest. it was a bit wierd to talk to him after all this time, but he seems to be doing well, still partying with the bulgarian contingent from CEU. then later in the evening i had a 1 hour chat with marko on the phone. he is in leipzig on scholarship for a month, after which he is going to berlin for awhile. it is amazing how one year can have such an impact on you life, but my year in Hungary certainly did, some of my closest friends come from that year, and i miss them all very much now that we have spread out to all corners of Europe.

16.9.06

need...sleep

went out last night to ZH.Z.L. and Diagalev. Diagalev was way better than ZH.Z.L.....but still they are all abit the same..the food at ZH.Z.L. was really good though. in the end i was the only girl at the party (big surprise) and the guys at my table spent most of the time talking about the women dancing. very few guys dance here (since they are all in suits) so the dance floor generally gets filled with women wearing very, um, creative attire. i went to bed too late and got up too early. i am having to bind all my fotocopies, because the russian post sends only books, not papers (which become books when you stick a plastic ring around them, logically) so i keep having to go to this internet place that binds things together. i think the people who work there have decided i am insane, which is possible. everytime i got there with yet another mound of papers the employees all seem to try to hide. i suppose no one wants to get stuck with the job of making holes in hundreds of sheets of paper, which is understandable. but there is nothing i can do about, other than tell them to blame the babushka at the central post office. i have already sent about 30 kilos of books out of the country, and i have still a mound of 20fotocopied books that need to be bound and sent out as well. by the time all this is dont, probably not only the internet cafe employees will be ready to kill me, but justin as well, since these things are all going to his address.
i will put you in the acknowledgements section of my first book, justin, i promise.
but today is a nice day (sunny, although very cold) and i am off to pushkinskaia for lunch with masha and aigul. i have to enjoy these sunny days while they last....