my classy neighbourhood

so this is the area i live in. the region is a great tribute to sovietdom, as well as post soviet kitch. so on one side of the street (appropriately called kosmonaut street) is a really tacky and monstrously large soviet hotel (the cosmos) which has tons of limos in the parking lot, some of which have new jersey licence plates tacked on top of the normal russian ones. what the appeal of new jersey can be, i cant possibly imagine, but apparently it exists. inside the hotel is a casino, so there is naturally tons of security and occasional shoot outs.

on the other side of the street is VDNH, an exposition theme park more or less dedicated to the soviet unions great accomplishments in all spheres of life. it is pretty hideous with its gold fountains and psuedo palaces, but then it is really nice to live next to one of the city's largest parks, especially as it has been over 30 degrees for the past week, and is predicted to remain so for the foreseeable future (and air conditioning is essentially unheard of) so the second picture is taken next to the park's public toilets, located at the feet of a statue dedicated to the soviet unions victories in space. why they put the toilet next to the monument is beyond me, but you cna imagine the smell!
in general i like the neighbourhood, there are tons of japanese restaurants and supermarkets near by, which is convinent, and the area is green by moscow standards...not that that is difficult!

sundays and expos

it is sunday again. it has been a habit for years to go for sunday brunch on moscow sundays. i dont know why, it started years ago, i think when i was living with jeremy, and then it just became a sort of habit. it is the only day in the week when several of us can get together, as work schedules vary, making it practically impossible to meet during the week.
this morning i went to an interesting photo expo at manezh, and i recomend all of you in moscow to go see it (but hurry, it ends this next week). the photographer vladimir mishukov went around to different families houses and just took photos of them where ever they wanted. the result is an amazing view of russian families and their surroundings. a variety of different social classes were present, but on the whole the majority were not particulary well off (although there was one family that looked like something out of the bonfire of the vanieties). many of the flats featured the standard tapachki and carpet on the wall, and it often appeared that families were living in cramped quarters, which i suppose reflects reality. the family in the picture i attacted is that of a postman, who has 11 children. the note said that until the 6th was born they lived in a 13 square metre room. i know that is common here, but i dont know anyone myself living in such a state...
anyway, the expo was great, and now time for lunch!

35 and up

this morning over our coffees, natalia and i checked the thermometre. by 9:30 it had reached 34 degrees. the forecast shows that this will continue for the foreseeable future. at this rate i will have to buy new clothes. everything i wear is dirty within and hour, and i shower three times a day, even though our hot water was cut, in best moscow tradition, almost two weeks ago.
the library naturally has no air conditioning and it is not allowed to take drinks inside. so you just have to endure it. it is starting to remind me of the summer of 1999 when it was about 35 degrees in moscow for six weeks or so non stop.
everyone is complaining, but i am happy, i like the heat, and the humidity even more, even if there is no air conditioning anywhere, i would rather it be very hot than cold!
yesterday after work i met daniel and we went to kitaiski liotchik. i hadnt been there for at least 3 years, but nothing had changed at all, even the menu was the same. nostalgia set in and i remembered all the nights spent there....
but then we went with a group of french boys and italian girls to watch france destroy togo in the world cup. l'equipe de france sucks this time around, but at least they can still beat togo!

ремонт

remont seems to be happening every where in this city. i suppose the city planners have decided to follow the berlin example, i wonder if they also will go bankrupt in the process.
so everywhere you go in the centre, it seems something is being rebuilt, torn down, or constructed from scratch. they started all of this when i was living here before, by tearing down the old hotel intourist, which was a good decision on the whole, as the place was nasty and infested with cheap prostitutes and roaches. they have been building a new luxery hotel in its place....but remont being a much longer process than the english variant (renovations) it looks like it will be a while yet before intourists replacement opens. in the meantime they have torn down the hotel moskva and are now in the middle of getting rid of the rossia (once the largest hotel in the world, and one of the ugliest, it was built for the 1980 moscow olympic games) Furthermore, my hopes of going to the theatre were dashed when i went by the bolshoi, only to discover that it too is zakrit na remont, as you can see from the photo above.
additionally, they are building "moscow city" a new business centre along the lines of la defense,
and a huge new residential area in basically the centre. i drove by the residential place the other day, it is being built on top of what used to be a miltary airfield (or something like that) the place looks enormous, but i wonder who exactly will buy those flats? they certainly will not be cheap!
oh, and it seems that next to every train station a shopping mall is being constructed. atrium was the first in this trend i believe,a dn it opened when i still lived here before.
however, i never go there, it always just seems to sterile for my tastes....
and just to add to my notes on remont, it would also appear that many of my friends have decided that this summer should be the summer of remont....it is becoming a major topic of conversation!
i only have to ask myself, is this level of remont going on in other russian cities, and who the hell is paying for it all?

summer time at last

suddenly, it has got hot in moscow. the past few days have been consistently in the 30s, and it is very very sunny. at the same time, it seems every one has decided to return to moscow, at least for a while. igor flew in on saturday. on sunday i went by his house (20 minutes walk from mine, wierd given how large the city is) and his kitchen was filled with all kinds of dishes his parents brought up from engels. so we sat and ate fruit from his parents dacha and then he showed me a few places in the area i had not yet discovered. ira is moving in with him in july, and it will be fun to have her so close by! then tomarrow daniel is coming from tallinn for a visit, and friday masha is arriving. thank god it is finnally starting to seem like summer!

pain

my stomach is in knots that keep tightening.
in april the doctors told me i cant eat gluten anymore.
at first this didnt seem like a big deal, in england all products clearly indicate what they do and do not contain. so it wasnt hard: i went to sainsburys and bought the items with the gluten free sign.
in hungary, with simina's help, i learned a new word, glutenmentes, which means that the item in question is something i can eat.
the problem is that here in russia, companies feel no need to indicate ingrediants in such details on their products, and as a result i am never quite sure what i am eating, the recipe for disaster.
and so eating has become a major problem. at home it is not too bad, rice and vegetables is always safe. but i am not home during the day, so i cant cook for myself....and the results of restaurant and street food are often not pleasant. it is amazing how many products contain gluten. for example, i cant drink beer, or put my sushi in soy sauce, as both are generally made from wheat (soy sauce can be made with out...but how do you know?). yet if you ask in a restaurant if the soy sauce has wheat, the waiters will tell you that it doesnt...grrr....
the worst thing is that since i have essentially stopped eating gluten, the results when i accidentally do are far worse than before. i dont know exactly why, but i suppose it is like when i got glasses. i didnt know i had a problem with my sight until i failed my drivers license exam, but after i got glasses, everything with out them seemed more blurry than before and within a few months my eyesight worsen considerably and i needed my perscription changed. the doctors said it was normal, even though it seemed odd. perhaps it is the same with stomachs?

night

the metro

home sweet home

ежегодная пуховая напасть

the pukh has started falling. actually it has been ruthlessly attacking us for the past several days. it rained yesterday, and we all hoped that this would cure the problem, but i think it will take another such downpour to completely rid the city of this menace.
for those of you who have never had the dubious pleasure of spending a june in moscow, i suppose you will not know what this pukh. i myself have no idea how to translate the word into english, or any other language, as i have never encountered it anywhere out side russia.
basically there is this tree that some idea decided to plant all over moscow, and every june its leaves turn white and this purh stuff starts falling and floating through the air. basically it gives the impression that it is snowing all over the city, even though it is warm. everywhere you go there is this stuff falling and blowing about in the air. it gets in your eyes. and you ears and mouth. people with allergies wheeze and get horrid symptoms. when you walk down the street is looks like there is a blizzard, and when you drive it hits the window pane but never sticks.
everyone complains about it, but there appears to be no solution to the problem, other than to wait for enough rain to wash it out of the trees and into the gutters.

strange encounters

yesterday, after a tough serious of texts (julia kristeva, yikes) i decided i needed a walk to change my ideas (hmm, that is a bit franglais, but i hope you follow)
so i ended up in karen millen. not that i was planning on buying anything, i just wanted to look. but as i was contemplating trying on a dress, i had the impression that someone was watching me. i looked up and it was in fact the case: anatoli, whom i had not seen since i was in bangkok in 2004, and who generally lives in santo domingo, was watching me shop in a moscow mall. the world is indeed small. i sometimes have the feeling there is no where on the planet where you can go and be truely anonymous.
anyway, we went out for lunch (indian, my favourite...the restaurant was excellent) and tried to catch up on the past two years. very odd.

the mormons

i had to go into work this morning at 7:30, what an ungodly hour. at first i thought i would never manage to be anywhere at that time, but it was actually rather nice: the streets were almost empty, and the metro wasnt packed with smelly peasants. i finished what i had to do by 8:30 and decided to head to the library. As the library wasnt open yet, i popped into an internet cafe to check my mail. it is not the first early morning i have gone into this cafe, so i have had the opportunity to notice a common early morning trend: mormons.
i dont know why, but it seems all the mormons in moscow flock to this one cafe every morning, at an oddly early hour, when they have the place almost to themselves. since they apparently dont drink stimulants, they order juice. not suprisingly, they are all 20-something american males (do females not do this?) and they all speak absolutely amazing russian. i have long been curious about this fact. there is a joke that only two kinds of westerners can learn russian: spies and mormons. my question is: how do they do it? do they have special language schools out there in utah that teach every language spoken on earth (as i dont think these guys limit themselves to russia)? and do they ever achieve any success with their little sermons? do people actually get converted by a 20 year old in a polyester white shirt and grey trousers?
anyway, while i was wondering all this, i started listening in on their conversations. there were so many of them it was hard not to. the guy next to me had 17 siblings. yes, that is right SEVENTEEN. i restained myself from asking how many wives his dad has... another was reading the email of his sister who had just got "dis-engaged," he, after consulting with his mates, decided to advise the sister to go talk to her bishop. what planet are these people on?
after my internet encounters, i was positively relieved to get yelled at by the foul tempered babushki at leninki! at least they are not looking for converts!

boys

today is a government holiday (den rossii, whatever that is supposed to imply) so no one is working and guys are trotting about in military uniform. i think this holiday used to have another name, but i cnat remember what. maybe it was independance day? they are always renaming the holidays around here, and i get confused. but as long as i dont have to go to work, i wont complain.
caitlin and i went out with the chos yesterday for lunch, and then for coffee. i hadnt seen the boys since february of last year, and i barely recognised hyan soo. when i saw him 15 months ago, he was still a little boy....now he has suddenly grown several centimeters, grown his hair longer, and his voice has changed. astonishing...i remember when he used to roll aroung on the floor like a little kid!
hyun ho has not changed so much, however. he is still a little comedian, as he always was. he treated us to a round of knock-knock jokes in the restaurant.
we went to the korean restaurant on frunzenskaia naberezhnaia. i love that place. the food is truely incredible. they brought tons of little plates with different vegetable dishes, and there was one with these great tofu slices. then we had rice and leafy greens, with a sauce i have had before, but cant identify. afterwards we went for coffee near mgy. it pissed rain and we were seated next to some odd fellows. they had ordered each a bottle of cheap soviet champagne, with they were consuming with beer and shashlik! only in russia could you see such a sight! at one point they asked me to take their foto, and they posed, each holding up his champagne glass and looking very serious. afterwards caitlin and i make a procession through tsum, and we each ended up buying a pair of jeans (not that i needed yet another pair....but they were on sale....) we then had a coffee before going our separate ways. the weather has been bloody miserable. they keep promising it will warm up, but i dont yet see evidence of that. so i bought some dvds on the way home and curled up on my mongo-bed with them. i have been buying about a dvd a day since i got back here. given the price, it seems a crime not to take advantage of russia's pirating skills. the dvds at my metro station are 80 rubles, which is to say about 1.50 pounds (51 rubles is a pound) i highly recommend Tsotsi to all who have not seen it, it is a south african film, and i thought it was quite good. flight 93 was better than i expected it to be, as was v for vendetta....memories of a geisha was not nearly as good as the book, and lemming just sucked. it managed to combine every french film cliche available. i think i will go for a classic tonight...maybe casablanca.

budapest retrospective

adi, in goethe (and somewhere else, but i dont remember where)

masha and semina cooking in siminas kitchen (as i am incapable of such things, i stayed out of the way, drinking wine and taking photos

ferenc, outside ceu

princess anna

To get some extra easy money, i have agreed to be the personal tutor for a 15 year old russian girl. She has her FCE in 1 week, so for the past two weeks, I have been preparing her for it, and receiving some rather generous cash in the process. Not that money is an issue with these folks: princess anna lives in the biggest Moscow flat I have ever seen. It takes up a whole bloody floor of the flat block. It has at least 15 rooms, maybe more, I still haven’t scoped out the whole place. It has all been newly remonted in late imperial Russian style. If the help were ethnic Russians, I would expect them in Nicholas II era clothing…but they are all Asians.
The entire flat is immaculately clean, I suppose thanks to the maids who are always fussing about. I arrive, having passed through gates of guards and security cameras, then when I walk in the door, the maids remove my street shoes and bring me rabbit fur slippers. We have our lessons in the princess anna’s study room (she has multiple rooms to herself). the room has the latest computer and other electronic equipment. Princess Anna has different colour ipods for her various outfits. She normally wears jeans, but I have never seen her wear the same pair twice. On her desk are frame and signed photos from people like Britney spears. The funny thing is, I don’t even really have to do anything. The girl is obviously a good student and I am convinced she will pass, with or without my assistance. So we spend a lot of time just chatting (I cant believe I get paid for this) she tells me about her favourite places, like harrods and various resorts in Switzerland she goes off to. We compare notes as to which floor of harrods has the best stuff. Sometimes she tells me jokes, such as:
“a new Russian goes through customs at sheremetevo 2. the customs officer asks him what is in the three bags on the trolley. The Russian answers that the first bag has cocaine, the second 100,000 in cash, and the third clothing and various gifts. ‘is it all yours?’ asks the customs officer. ‘oh no’ says the new Russia, ‘this is all yours, mine is coming next.’”
Only in Russia would a 15 year old think this was a realistically funny joke. But I suppose she has learned some tricks from her dad (a buznizmeni who is more often in London than Moscow) the mother is also rarely around the flat, or if she is I don’t see her much. But then the flat is so big that when she wants to ask princess anna something, she calls her on the mobile, even when they are in the same flat. I guess the mother just cant be bothered walking through all those rooms to ask something in person. But as the say, dengi ni pahnut

night time

it gets dark quite late now, around 11 pm, and it is light again obscenely early in the morning...but i have been sleeping odd hours...and sleeping very little at that, so i have wandered about a bit at night, like a vampire.

nostalgia

Yet another trip of nostalgia.
I had a long break in the middle of my day today. I wanted to use it efficiently, but as usual in this city, I was prevented from doing so by the force of a squad of iron babushka, this time around in the form of librarians.
Librarian babushki are among the worst. When I was in uni, they used to stop us from taking our coats into the library in winter, even though it was often (nearly) unheated inside. Taking in drinks or “printed matter” was of course out of the question. In all, going to the gorky library (as it was called) was a miserable experience.
The Lenin library isn’t that different. Like gorky, it is not computerised and features a whole hall of card catalogues, many of which are written in one of the evil baba’s indecipherable handwriting. Shit, even in the Serbian national library they have computers!
So naturally, by the time I filled out all the pieces of paper correctly, it was too late to expect to get any reading matter the same day…I will have to go back.
After putting in my requests, I still had several hours to kill, so I decided to make the trek down to my alma mater, mgy. It was a beautiful day: 30 degrees and sunny, my favourite combination. So I walked over to vtoroi gum, my old building, where we used to have classes. Besides a little remont, not much had changed. The students looked the same, only I didn’t recognise their faces any more. They had sandblasted the wall where a persistent student had spray painted love messages to his katya in latin. Every corner reminded me of the past: the stairwell where I used to smoke with masha, shurik, Robert, viktor and and ivan, the last 4 of whom I have not seen since graduation. the buffet where we got tea. The unspeakably vile toilets. The bulochka lady. The lady who sells magazines and was once probably beautiful, but now only gets fatter and sadder looking year after year (she has been there as long as I can remember, which is to say at least since 1997) everything was there, just like I remembered it. But I fear something changed with my eyes. I struggled to believe I had spent years of my life between those walls, studying, smoking, panicking before my flipping Serbian class. I remember everything in exact detail, but when I actually see it in front of me, it is like watching a film: that wasn’t my life it was someone else’s, someone else running up 5 flights of stairs not to get yelled at by an evil Serbian teacher, someone else waiting in the hallway to be called for an exam. It wasn’t that long ago, but so much has happened since, that it seems so much longer.
I tried to go to my old kafedra, but no one was there and the door was locked. So instead I ended up in the antikvariat book places on the first floor, where I was unable to restrain myself from buying four books…. including the latest by lapteva, and 800 page epic. No doubt it will take me the whole year to get through it.

expats

According to the crap canadian-english dictionary left in my flat by a previous occupant, and expat is someone « voluntarily living in a foreign country » the same dictionary lists an immigrant as one who « comes to a foreign county and takes up residence. » these are classic definitions, the ones you give to non native speaker students is they ask….but I find them very unsatisfying, and I have for several years. I had the debate with tony and cam last month in paris. Tony claims and expat plans on returning home, and an immigrant doesn’t. yet, this is also an unsatisfactory explanation in my mind. My old flatmates father worked in france for a couple of decades with the clear goal and intention of retiring to his native Vietnam, which he did. Yet nobody in paris talks about “Vietnamese expats” just as no one ever talks about “congelese expats” or “Malian expats.” no no, those guys are “immigrants” even when they have no intention of staying france for more than a few years, At the same time, doug, an acquaintance of mine here in Moscow, has been here nearly a decade and has no intention of ever leaving. Yet, he is an expat, and he is no alone…I know plenty such types in Moscow…and they are not only here. So I propose an alternative definition: and immigrant is a person from a poorer country residing in a richer one. And expat is a person from a richer country living in a poorer one. And expat often enjoys social and economic advantages over people from the local population, whereas an immigrant is more frequently economically disadvantaged compared to the native born population. An immigrant works long hours for low pay in hopes of one day having a better life….and expat sits, overpaid and overfed, in Moscow cocktail bars and hits on local girls in his native language.
Such was the scene last night. I went to a cocktail bar with ilia, asad, and a few Russian blokes whose names I missed (friends of ilias) and, just my luck, we got a table next to a bunch of expats. They were moscow’s worst: fat, loud, American, and incapable of ordering their own drinks in Russian. There were about 4 of them, all males, all trying to talk to whatever Russian female came near their table. At one point they started singing, and periodically filled the whole bar with informative exclamations like “Moscow is so cool dude, you can do whatever you fucking want.”
The Russian guys I was with rolled their eyes and sent over some dirty looks: they all have to work with expats and consequently cant stand them. …I meanwhile was transported back to the late 1990s and the years of the hungry duck and ultimate expat hooliganism. Yuck. Those are days I certainly don’t want to see again.
I have lived in several different countries, and this feature of Moscow that always irked me. Western expats are a widely acknowledged category here, living separately from the locals. When I was living in Budapest or montreal, no one ever called me and expat! It would have seemed absurd in the context of those societies, and it never would have occurred to me to call myself one. So what is it with Moscow? Is this the legacy of the early 1990s when the country was in economic freefall, and foreigners were invited in, supposedly to clean things up? I know Moscow isn’t the only place with such a mentality, Thailand was the same…but there racial issues came into play as well, and the differences between foreigners and locals seemed so much greater. Or maybe I just feel this way as I am a bit stuck in the middle here, with my Russian university degree and my funny name. Dunno.
But if last night I was drinking with the Russian boys, today was purely expatella: long brunch with Caitlin, followed by a cruise through all the major malls in the downtown area, then an equally long dinner in an outdoor courtyard café. Forward to my past.

Driving part 2

drinks last night...absinthe to be specific...and the boys had something so vile that one of them, Asad, said huzhe tolka smert...and that is what it looked like...

driving

driving in moscow during the day can be a massive pain, the traffic is horrendous and it can take you hours to get where you are going. furthermore, the metro is fast and efficient (even if often filled with stinking peasants!)
on the other hand, driving in moscow at night is really pleasant. there are cars on the road, but not so many that you cant move.
yesterday afternoon i went over to price water house coopers near paveletskaia and met ilia and doug...then some of ilias friends came and we went to a cafe, since i was starving (as usual). then one of ilias friends called from his office, on the top floor of a building that looks like a space ship, adn suggested we come over for armenian cognac in his office. unable to resist we headed over. the view was incredible, the sun was setting and we could see almost all of moscow from that his up...and we sat in the office and drank and smoked and played narvi....
then ilia and i went to a cartoon film at frunzenskaia.....it was about life in the 8th district of budapest....totally wierd film... then we drove back north at about 1 am, through the brightly lit enormous streets...
the question is: when the hell will i get this thesis done?