the falkland Islands/ las malvinas 2008

ushuaia 2008

beagle channel 2008

chile 2008: santiago, Valparaiso, puerto montt, punta arenas

paris 2008

2008

so for the fourth time in the history of this blog, i have come to the end of a year.

before writing this, i reread my previous end-of-the-year entries. last year i gave myself two goals for the year- to finish my thesis and change jobs. I managed one of those. the thesis is yet to be completed, although the first draft has made it past my supervisors and is now in revision stage. so, hopefully this year i will manage to achieve my goals. they will be the exact same as last year: finish the thesis and change jobs (again).  we shall see. 2009 seems set to be a difficult year for most people, as the economy is on the edge, and people are loosing their jobs all around the globe. although there were already whispers of recession this time last year, i never imagined things would work out as they have, with major banks going under, and another company going into administration seemingly every day. what will happen in 2009? i dont know, but it all seems scary at times.

As i assemble together the images of the past 12 months, i am struck by the fact that it was the first year in well over a decade i did not set foot once in Russia, even though i work for a Russian company. But i got to the favourite places of my youth- the southern cone, just in time for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Allende. Academically, i also moved back to my Latin American roots, taking part in a project on Cuba. somewhere in the dusty reels of fidel's speeches, i realised how much i had missed this part of my background. 

it will be interesting to see what happens next.

A little night music

i havent written in nearly ten days, but due to the season, things have been hectic.
it all started with the suggestion by those who wish to remain nameless that we go to the theatre. we didnt have tickets and the play we wanted to see, Stephan Sondheim's A Little Night Music, on at the Menier Chocolate Factory, was totally sold out. So, we decided to go and beg for returned tickets. Thanks to some fools who didnt show up, and the kind Aussie at the box office, we actually managed to get tickets about 5 minutes before the play started. however, during the wait to see if we would be successful, one of my companions noticed that a woman standing nearby appeared to be none other than Leslie Caron, the film actress who was Gigi in Gigi, among other characters. He googled a current image on his iphone, just to be sure. We finally got our random returned tickets and i went off to find mine. i wandered to the bac row, looked around, apparently appearing puzzled, as Leslie Caron turned to me and asked what number i was looking for. it was the seat next to hers.
so i sat there watching the performance (which was excellent, in particular Maureen Lipman as the Grandmother!) and started to note how similar the ambiance actually is to Gigi. the general story line is totally different, but the characters are similar: the young girl with the absent actress mother, who has left the child to be raised by the Grandmother, a former high class courtesean. my mind drifted back to the time, when i was about age 10 or so, and i saw the video of Gigi in the library. My parents were very liberal, and i could read or watch anything i wanted, but it often had to be accompanied by educational explanations. So prior to being allowed to watch the film, i had to read the book (a novella, by Colette) and make an investigation into the world of the demi-monde, and its elaborate rules and etiquitte. having convinced my mother i was competant on those subjects, i was allowed my 2 hours of musical entertainment. I imagine i must have impressed my mother with my comprehension of the Demi-monde, as she even got me a Gigi doll for my next birthday! So i sat there in the theatre, listening to Leslie Caron as she giggled along with the play's racy jokes, and wondered if she could have any idea of the educational role she played at one moment in my childhood?

2666

In my excessive boredom, I have sought refuge in fiction. Predicting a large chunk of time will be on my hands in the near future, I decided I couldn't choose just any novel- I am a fast reader and, often to my own annoyance, finish books far too quickly. So I reached for the fattest book that people have recommended to me in recent months- 2666 by Roberto Bolano. At 1,150 pages, I hope it will keep me going awhile. But I can see some late night frenzied reads are ahead of me- it is all so addictive! From the start I knew I would be hooked. The writing is immense, and the story hops about in a strangely lateral way, linking people to places and back to people. Somewhere by the first third, after the group of literature academics, whose story I have become obsessed by, disappear into the folds of the novel, I marvel at how far this work is from the magical realism which has characterised/caricaturized Latin American literature for the past half century. This is a grimly realistic approach, as soon becomes clear as the book shifts from the world of European academia to mass murder in the grimy northern Mexican city of Santa Teresa (ie: Juarez). Bolano's vision of the world depicts a dangerous place: the book swings through endless descriptions of corpses, murder and rape as Bolano's writing merges the boundary between fiction and documentary. Some critics have already called this book the first great piece of literature in the 21^st century, but unfortunately it will be Bolano's last. Perhaps due to years of heroin abuse, he died of hepatic failure at age 50, just after handing in the manuscript of his masterpiece.

christmas 2008

The holiday season appears to have officially kicked off, with the usual onslaught of corporate parties, binge drinking and excessive junk food consumption.

Already I can feel that my arteries have hardened and my liver strained another notch.

As I have two jobs, I am in particular subject to such affairs. As one of those jobs is in the City, there is really no escape from it all. so the past week has been sent writing stupid holiday greetings cards to market data teams in all the big banks, overlooking the fact that I don't like them and they don't like us. Next week, it will be time to take key market data types out to lunch and flood them with alcohol (and other substances). Yesterday was my Russian employer's Big Christmas Party. Christmas parties are a fairly new event in Russia, for obvious reasons, but despite this, they tend to go over the top. So, we started with an end of the year meeting, food and several bottles of champagne- at 11 am (utrom vipit, ves den svoboden!) next we moved on to the O2, where the office manager had rented us out ski slopes. The O2 is a completely soulless place, with even less charm or point to it than, say, the Mall of Americas in Minnesota. I had been highly dubious when we were all told about this plan, figuring that any artificial English construction of a ski slope would be horridly fake, and it was. However, I have to confess that the snow tubing (which we ended up doing) was actually really fun. We all sat in these tyre-like things and went flying down the fake ski slope at super speeds. The instructors spun us girls (um, all two of us) so that we would go down the hills spinning alarmingly. Fortunately we had all drunk a respectable amount before hand, so when I got rammed into by two of the guys and was sent flying out of my tube, backwards, and landed on my head, it didn't hurt too much. To keep the pain at bay, we then headed for more drinking. And then some horrible food, and more drinking.

Tonight my other company is having its Christmas party, a more classic English affair: an open bar until 11pm.

gotan project

I remember once back when I was in school, probably around 1990, my friend and I got into a massive debate with her brother about the point of going to concerts. My friends and I were quite into going to concerts at the time, while the brother argued that it was cheaper and more practical just to buy the CDs. At the time, CDs were about 1USD (and you could listen to them over and over, it was pointed out), while going to a concert was a one-off experience and cost at least 50USD. Furthermore, the sound quality are almost invariably better on a CD than in a sweaty, crowded stadium, where you can barely see the stage and are always somehow next to a drunken/high fool screaming exactly into your ear. Few acts do manage to produce a level of quality live that they can manage in a studio, aided by equipment. Despite that, Gotan Project put on a rather good show last night at the Roundhouse in Camden. From the very first second, the sound quality was phenomenal, partly thanks to the Roundhouse improved acoustics, but also their amazing skills. The beginning was a bit odd, with the band behind a screen onto which evocative images were being projected. Later, the positions reversed (thank god), so we could see the band in front and the images of the pampas and various tango dancers, behind. In songs, notably Mi confession, which have a rap, this was also project in super larger than life form in the background, which looked pretty cool.

We had front row seats on the circle level, which gave us a spectacular view of the rather odd audience. There were a fair number of Southern Cone expats, but in general it was more English than I might have imagined. Horrifically, there was a group of English people trying to tango in one isolated corner. With the exception of one or two couples (ok, one) none of them seemed to know what they were doing, and the whole spectacle looked more like a secondary school slow dance two step than anything else. Barring that, and the annoying people who kept trying to steal our seats every time we moved ever so slightly, it was a good show.

oh canada!

Among things that can be done to pass time is to survey the news reports from around the world. I justify this by claiming to be improving my “product knowledge.”

So I start the morning by examining the Russian press, checking in on the latest accusations flying between Tbilisi and Moscow and the hysteria over NATO. Apparently drug use is up, yet government “specialists” insist AIDS is not a major issue. This never takes me too long- the news is nearly always the same. From there I entertain myself examining the press in…well pretty much any place where I can decipher the language. If it is a REALLY slow day, I sometimes have to go even further, aided by online dictionaries. There have even been a few Friday afternoons I have found myself attempting to make sense of Hungarian dailies, surely the supreme manifestation of boredom. By mid morning, I have read through the BBC, le Monde, la liberation, the Economist (my Friday morning entertainment), and whatever debate might be raging on the New York review of books website. Lunch time I devote to el Pais, ABC and Pagina/12. In the afternoon, I got through random stuff: Grandma internacional always gets the whole office going, and I have a Pakistani colleague who excels at reading out the Times of India, complete with the accent and commentary. Then sometimes I get emails or calls from people claiming there is a big story happening in their country, or being covered by their newspaper. I was stunned this week to get one such alert from Ottawa. Yes, that’s right in CANADA. I spent 2.5 years living in Quebec back in the 1990s, and I remember the local newspapers dedicating weeks of front page coverage to the debate that was raging….over the colour of margarine. This particular issue probably sticks in my mind so clearly as it was one of the few times the press seemed to wander off its normal favourite topic- linguistic grievances. However, having been informed by my old roommate that the Canadian government was on the brink of collapse (WHAT?!) I trotted downstairs to the news kiosk, and sat down at my cubicle to inspect the Globe and Mail. And sure enough, there is Harper (the prime minister) seeking desperate measures to keep his 7 week old government afloat. Furthermore, the comments (both in their content and quantity) suggest that Canadians are actually getting interested in the events, something which some of my Canadian friends have confirmed. Is my office just so dull that I am seeking solace in Canadian scandals? It is, but at the same time, this is incredible stuff!

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081204.wparliamentnew04/BNStory/politics/home

genius

After nearly three years of loyal service, my old ipod died. As I have no radio, tv, or CD player in my house, and yet am unable to survive without music, I went to the mac store and got a new one (my third in 6 years). But it had some issues when I first loaded my library onto it, so I went back to the shop to ask about it. They immediately ushered me up to the mac genius bar. Although I switched to mac sometime years ago, this was my first visit to the genius bar, as I had never actually had a problem before. It is basically a bar setting filled with computer geeks who have been certified “geniuses” by mac. They certainly conformed to my stereotypes of computer wizards- all were male, none was white, and by the accents I heard, none was born in England. One of the geniuses sat down with me, went through my computer, sorted out my ipod issue (in about 30 seconds), fixed another minor cosmetic issue I didn’t realise I had, then offered to replace my keyboard with a newer one, as the Cyrillic stickers I had stuck on mine were peeling, answered several other queries I had but were not related to the ipod, gave me his card in case I had any further questions, and wished me a pleasant evening. His information was clear and precise, and the whole thing took less than 10 minutes. Oh, and it was all free. Genius indeed.

credit crunch

In some ways it is really not surprising that Britain is suffering from a credit crunch, this country is addicted to credit, and rather than seeing this as something bad, tries to turn all kinds of indebting schemes into “deals.” For example, there is the national obsession with 12 month binding contracts on everything. Take my mobile phone as an example. If I were to have a contract free phone, with the right to change companies at anytime, and to only pay for the minutes I use on the phone it would cost me about 350 pounds for the phone, and another 100 or so pounds a month for the amount of minutes consumed. However, having signed a binding 18 month contract, I get the phone (crackberry) for free, along with free internet, free texting, AND free international calls…for only 35 pounds per month. Obviously this is the cheaper deal, and I would be stupid not to take it, especially as all my family and many of my friends live abroad. The money is removed from my account monthly, and I never even really notice it. However, I don’t like these kinds of schemes, and it annoys me that they are generally the best deals in this country. I think part of the problem in England is that the country seems to always balance its finances on money it hasn’t actually received yet, and has no way of coping should anything go wrong. Thus, the moment I signed up for my phone deal, I imagine my phone company saw their profit as 630 pounds (the amount I will indeed pay over 18 months) and not 35 pounds (the amount I paid this month). I could jump the country tomorrow, sell the phone on ebay, and there would be nothing the phone company could really do about it, yet when people do pull such a stunt, these companies often don’t have the resources to cover the losses. The tendency here is to “mortgage” everything, and not think about the outcome being anything other than ideal. I had thought that some of this would end given the current crisis, but the opposite seems true. Firms appear more desperate than ever to get you to sign away 12 or 18 months of your finances. My contact prescription ran out this month, and I went by Boots’ opticians on my lunch break to find out the cost of getting it updated. It seems it is 50 pounds for all the exams, then 30 pounds per month for my contacts (ie the same as this past year). However, the woman assured me, if I would just sign up to their 12 month direct debit scheme, all exams and after care would be free, and the contacts would cost only 25 pounds per month, saving me 110 pounds over the year, and even more if I wanted new glasses. I groaned. I cant deal with another one of these direct debit schemes, and my Russian insurance policy (amazingly) covers all eye exams, so I politely declined the offer. Surely there is a better way to pass deals on to customers without locking them in for commercial eternity?