random anecdotes

I bought a leather bracelet on Sunday. But when I got on the metro and decided to put it on, I realise the shop had left on the security tag. I tried to pull it off, but it was attached by a metal wire, with instructions to use scissors for removal. The guy next to me had been staring at the bracelet and asked if I needed help. He seemed friendly so I showed him the problem. He proceeded to remove the wiring…with his teeth! He just bit through the metal like a rat, handed the bracelet back to me and said “here you go, oh, and I am Ferenc by the way.” Ferenc? So you must be Hungarian!” I said, certain that Ferencs can only occur amongst one particular nationality. But I was wrong. This Ferenc was South African, and had never set foot in Hungary. His father had been of Hungarian origin, but had only stayed with his mother long enough to give him a pseudo Hungarian name. and at that point, Ferenc the metal biting Boer got off the train and went on his way.

Nearly every day I stop by a corner shop to by a Diet Coke. The place is run by an Indian guy, and every day he is reading a porn magazine. Every day I pretend not to notice the pictures of naked women with improbable proportions. Today the image was so incredible I confess it caught my shocked eye for a moment. The man saw. “my wife left me. 10 years ago.” He said. He handed me my change and went back, glum faced, to his porn.

At lunch a colleague starts a surreal story about the mother of one of his kids who was previously dating one of FBI’s most wanted men. He was killed. She later broke into my colleague’s flat and stole designer clothes from his present live-in girlfriend. He confiscated her passport and held it for ransom to get back the clothes. The baby is really cute.

Another colleague has started coming to work in a face mask to prevent swine flu. He is convinced that “the chavs” (of whom he lives in fear) are all going to get it and breathe on him on the metro.

a new day

So the big day finally came. I handed in my resignation. As of four weeks from today I will no longer work for the Russian media. I will have done exactly one year minus one week in this cubicle. I have definitely learned a lot and had lots of adventures: in London, but also in Poland, Switzerland, Georgia and elsewhere! But it is time to move on, and conveniently with a pay raise. Hopefully things will move forward. We shall see.

kindle 2

Ok I confess when ereaders first hit the market, I was deeply suspicious. I love books. I love holding them, I love having them in my house. It didn’t seem possible that a little hand held electronic device could come close to the power of printed matter.

But after three years of working in a bookshop, and being flooded with free samples, I had amassed a book collection of ridiculous proportions. Then it came time for me to move flats. I took load after load to a used book shop. I sold off hundreds of books. I gave away the ones the used bookshops didn’t want. But I still had 30 boxes of books left. Some are collectors items from previous centuries. Some are signed by famous authors. Some I just love….but then some are simply interesting books I have read, yet may never read again. Considering in particular the latter category, I decided to go digital. I did the same a few years back when I got an ipod. It was one of the best moves I ever made.

So now I have a kindle 2. it is an amazing little machine. It can store 1,600 books at a time, it is super light, and when I am really bored at work, I can discreetly prop it on my desk and read fiction! Or I can put on headphones and have it read to me! It makes long intercontinental flights so much more pleasant and luggage free. So I have been won over. I still love my books. I intend to keep many of them. But for those one-off reads, I am very happy with my kindle

back in london

As annoying as certain aspects of it are, there are some big advantages to facebook.

One of my colleagues at work actually runs a side business on facebook from his cubicle. Given the current state of things in the office, his facebook constructed business is probably bringing in more money these days than his day job.

It has helped me too: having studied in international schools, and in different countries, I have friends all over the place. But thanks to facebook, I at least know where they are based and have a means of getting in touch with them. In February, I located my old colleague Johanna in Sydney and we met up for a drink. So when I found out I would be going to Minneapolis, something in my brain clicked- didn’t Jared’s facebook profile indicate he was living there?

After a few wall-to-wall exchanges, I found myself on the other side of the planet, having a drink in a bar with Jared, in Minnesota’s great metropolis. We had studied together in Budapest some five years earlier. I struggled to believe that five years had passed since we finished out MAs. five years is a long time, but I remember everything about that year with hyper clarity. I didn’t actually know Jared too well that year. well, in Budapest we all knew each other to some degree, but he was always more a friend of a friend (zack) than a close friend of mine. I have a funny memory of him from one evening towards the end of the year. my friend yaelle was visiting from paris and we had gone to one of those out door Hungarian courtyard bars. Jared stumbled by, smiling from a nice evening out drinking and smoking with mates. He sat down and entertained us for a good 45 minutes before trundling off on his way.

And five years on we met again in a Minneapolis parking lot. He drove me around the small centre of the city before taking me to a bar to catch up on news. After three days of attempting to communicate with people with whom I have absolutely nothing in common, speaking with Jared was like a breath of reality, or at least, my reality. Strange how after five years, I still have so much in common, not only with him, but with all those I studied with in Hungary. I am not sure if it was the recruiting process, or the combination of intensity and shared experience that shaped us into intellectually similar beings. but i know my year in hungary was one of the most important in my life, and that many of my most valued friendships come from that time. and that where ever i go or end up, my deep love and respect for budapest will always be there.

food

There is a major food epidemic in the US. I have spent 7 days in this country in the past 10 years, (three days in 2006, and four days in 2009) and on both of these occasions I have found it pretty shocking, perhaps because it is just so different. It is not that just SOME people happen to be fat. Rather MANY people are huge, and (worse) it would be hard not to be, given the food available. I spend three days in Rochester, which is famous for its world class medical facilities. Yet the centre of the town has about 3 restaurants, as far as I could see. One of those was closed, another was a steak house whose only vegetarian dish was a greasy looking macaroni and cheese, and the final one was…..well, in the end I got mac and cheese there too…..on Sunday I order something which claims to be a “green salad side order.” It arrives with spinach leaves, sugar coated walnuts and tinned fruit bits in it, all smothered in a disgusting dressing. I couldn’t eat it. even a side dish of steamed potatoes proved inedible. the portions were large enough to feed three people my size, and cost less than half what the same dish would cost me in Europe. The wine generally seemed to come from cardboard boxes with little plastic nozzles, and was served with ICE CUBES! I had to show my ID every single time I asked for a drink, and no alcohol was for sale on Sundays.

On Monday I met up with Jared, an old classmate from Hungary who lives in Minneapolis, having moved there as his partner is on a post grad course at the university there. He has lived there less than two years and they will be moving to the West Coast next month. He is just completing a teacher training course, but claims if he doesn’t get a teaching job, he wants to work in food policy. Clearly I am not the only one who thinks there is a problem. He complained that buying fresh vegetables is seen as “elitist” or “snobby.” He is made to feel like a freak, or at least a not-one-of-us, every time he stocks up on greens in the supermarket. He is made to feel “self indulgent” or “foolish” for spending a large sum of his (lowish) income on his food and drink. Apparently that is seen as wasteful. More “prudent” people buy more cheaply- choosing quantity over quality. This results in lots of processed, refined stuff devoid of nutrients and stuffed with all sorts of weird things.

I have never been a food activist. I like to eat reasonably well, and I enjoy good food, but I have never thought too much about it. but looking at the average Midwesterner, I felt truly scared. I passed people who looked like walking time bombs. People who rode around in wheel chairs, not because they were handicapped, but because walking left them “out of breath.” I met a woman who was in fact confined to a wheel chair by necessity- her type two diabetes had led to the amputation of a leg!

On Sunday, my mother and I had wanted to have some wine. The restaurant didn’t serve it on Sunday. Neither did any shops. We decided to make it a mission to find alcohol, just to prove we can. We finally found a hotel (but not ours!) whose room service let us buy a bottle and take it with us back to our own hotel. On the 5 minute walk back, we noticed people staring at us and whispering nervously. Clearly the sight of two foreigners breaking the traditions unnerved them. But is drinking a glass of wine on a Sunday really worse than living on a diet of twinkies and starch? I suppose it is a matter of perspective, but I was clearly the odd one out in this case.

MOA

This was my second trip to the Mall of America in Minnesota. My first is covered in an earlier entry from July 2006. rereading it, I see that my first impression was one of shock that the complex truly seemed to be the highpoint of many peoples lives in the Minneapolis area. People were actually proud of their shopping mall and saw it as one of the chief highlights foreigners should be shown! At the time, such rampant displays of consumerism horrified me.
What scared me this trip around was the emptiness. Except for the entertainment complex in the middle of the mall, which was still filled with screaming kids, much of the mall seemed empty. The global financial crisis has hit here hard. All the shops have sales, not just symbolic ones, but 50-75% ones. even summer clothes are on sale, and the items have only just hit the shops. In banana republic I found myself the only customer. In Abercrombie and fitch I bought cashmere jumpers for 10 DOLLARS that I know cost 80-120 POUNDS in London, an over 90% savings. i was so shocked that I bought three, but I don’t know why I didn’t get more, at that price. The sales assistant at the till desperately tried to push some last minute add-ons: did I need socks to go with those jumpers? Perfume? Maybe a scarf?
The feeling of emptiness is not only in the mall. The town seems abandoned too, except for some groups of kids wandering about with hoodies concealing their heads. Several signs announce “closing down sale, everything must go!” Some buildings are just boarded up entirely. Pensioners tell me about their shrinking reserve pots and cutting back on meals. Things might be bad in Europe, but they are definitely worse here.

on the road, again

Another crazy flight schedule- three countries in one bank holiday weekend. To make things more stressful, the night before I left England, I had a third and final job interview for a position I had wanted. So instead of packing sensibly, I was pacing about in panic mode. They promised me an answer by the next day. But when I called the recruiter handling my case from Amsterdam…he had heard nothing. Hours passed. Nothing. Panic. Were they offering it to the other person first and waiting to get their response before rejecting me? I wandered nervously around schipol. Answers weren’t coming and I put it out of my mind.
Yet after a 10 hour flight across the atlantic, I turned on my mobile, while still on the plane, and found a text message informing me that I had got the job. I squawked and the flight attendants looked at me nervously. The salary is higher and I was most likely facing redundancy in my old job anyway. I had known it was time to move on. But getting a new offer of more money as quickly as I did surprised me. We are in the middle of an ongoing recession, and I just feel really lucky to have got anything at all, never mind an offer so generous. I just hope the offer turns out to be as good as it seems, although a year of working in the City has made me suspicious of everything…

preotests in london

So as I suppose everyone knows by now, we have had some excitement in London.

Angry (but generally good natured) mobs took to the streets in the square mile (many of them right outside my office). They proclaimed, among other things, that consumers suck and capitalism kills. Many were young anarchists from all over Europe. Some were recently unemployed middle age workers. Clearly all were frustrated by the state of things. The police warned City workers in advance to “dress down” for the day, and sure enough most did turn up to work in jeans, myself included. In the office there was lots of talk arguing the protestors were just “little school children who just need to grow up” or “just jealous.” But the two groups actually deserve each other. Obviously the protesters were there to provoke City workers. But looking up and seeing a guy in a suit, waving a fist full of 50 pound notes from his glass and steel box…well it is provocative as well. By lunchtime the whole area around bank tube station was so crowded that it was impossible to get in or out of the area. Effigies of bankers were hung, graffiti generously sprayed, while the four horsemen of the apocalypse rode around with megaphones. The weather was unusually pleasant and the police presence was overwealming.

The question is: how are we all going to get out of this mess? People are loosing their jobs at alarming rates all over the country, and the end is not yet really in sight, even as some recent indicators suggest “green shoots.” It doesn’t appear that anyone has the answers