31.5.06

ok ok

so i have received numerous comments on this site, as well as by email asking me to
1. say something positive
2. say where i am and what i am doing exactly
so, the second point is the easier. i am living in northern moscow in a fairly decent and fairly large flat with a german (sort of) girl named natalia. she doesnt like being called natasha, as she has made clear. she works here with foreign students, and we are both associated loosely with the same umbrella company, which is why we have been alloted a flat together. the flat is free, clean and furnished, so i am not complaining. i will be in this flat until august when it appears i will be assigned another, but i have no clue where.
i am theoretically working at a major oil company, i am there on loan from the company i previously worked, correcting documents and teaching....but i dont know if i will stick around with this job or not. i have some possibilities to change, and i will decide in the next week or two what i am actually doing. i am also supposed to be doing research for my degree. yesterday i went and got my chitatelski billet for biblioteka imena lenina....but i was so exhausted by the effort that i didnt actually read anything, i just established that i have the right to do so...i will go back in a few minutes and try to get some serious work done.
i think i need a few weeks for things to fall into place and then i will have a better idea of where everything is going.
i met up with caitlin last night for dinner. we used to hang out regularly three years ago when i last lived here, and we resumed some old traditions immediately, starting with sushi. she knew of a really good place in the centre, and we feasted there. i think i have about 3 plates and a soup! grotesque, but i really really like sushi!
then we headed past the book shop moskva on tverskaia because i turn out to be the only person who hasnt read robskii's pro luboff...so i bought it and i will read it will great interest.
the usual promenade continued down to ohotni riad and a perusal through the shops. but it doesnt seem as interesting as it used to....but maybe my eyes have changed? i dont know. we then migrated over to the building where yuri used to work, which has a great bar on the ground floor....and we ordered drinks...another moscow night i guess....
i had a horridly early morning today, and it seems i am set to have a lot of those, the oil people want me there at 8 am....when the hell was the last time i had to be somewhere at 8 am? groan.

30.5.06

vozvrashenie

so i am back in the motherland.
it has been a while. i was here on holiday 18 months ago, but i havent actually lived here in three years. just long enough to forget how it is necessary to push everyone in front of you on the metro....and other useful tidbits.
things started out suitably eventfully. my luggage was overwieght so i had to go pay the people at the aeroflot stand at ferihegy 2 in budapest.
of course the office was run by a babyshka who spoke only russian.
of course they didnt accept credit cards or hungarian money.
so i had to go to the bank machine and take out forints, only to then change them into dollars (as they didnt take euros either) then the baba looked at my documents and made a nasty comment about english people. i finnaly pointed out that i am not english, at which point it occured to her i was speaking russian....this changed her mood. by the time i told her i was a graduate of moscow state university, she was positively ecstatic. she then started telling me what an evil place london is...she had gone once on holiday, and she just couldnt believe how many darked skinned people she had seen. why did the english let them in? whats worse, she heard they were even allowed to marry white people! can you imagine? the horror! they should all be sent back where they are from and not be allowed to corrupt european blood. but then english blood is already corrupted, according to her...
there were a few things about russian, like blantent racism, i didnt miss!

27.5.06

papers and parties

even on holdiay, life establishes a pattern revolving around work.
i get up around noon and masha and i go for a coffee. then we head to....the library! inspiring place that it is! the next 8 hours or so are spent shuttling between the phd and the library with periodic coffee and ciggarette breaks. then sometime around 8 we head of to a restaurant or someones house for dinner and drinks and conversation that lasts until about 2 am. then we go our separate ways and the whole thing repeats again the next day.
i spent a year living like this in 2003-2004, and being back here makes me nostalgic. i remember the odd conversations i had in various restaurants and bars, and with whom. the fact that the bars and the people are for the most part all still here only contributes to my disorientation. as we all panic in the library, i have to remind myself that i am no longer a student here....
oh well at least i have finished my paper...
last night we stayed up smoking and drinking (and eating) at simina's house. vlado and bogdan are both gone, to amsterdam and bucharest as i understood, so we had the place clean and to ourselves. pictures to follow.

25.5.06

wierd encounters

this is bizarre. i was working away in the ceu phd lab when ferenc bounced in an suggested we go for drinks. As i am always thirsty, i immediately agreed....so we went to a bar near the university and starting catching up on all that has happened in the past 5 months since we last saw each other...then i looked up just in time to see a familiar face walk through the door.
i know about 4 other phds in my programme in london, only one of them english ethnically, and he studies hungarian agrarian policy (as an exciting topic as that must be). i first met him at the post grad party i went to last september with gabor. i have seen him since and when we are in the same room we end up talking sometimes,
so as i am listening to Feri go on about university politics, in walks this guy from my faculty in london. and he doesnt look at me. then his friend chooses the table right next to ours and we actually sit without acknowledging each others presence for over an hour. i mean, it wasnt me, i smiled, but he looked down!
english are so strange

updates




to the disgust of a romanian girl named daniela, i have invited myself into the ceu history department phd lab. i know this is technically not allowed, as i belong to another university now, but since i know everyone here and i know their computer login passwords, i dont really see the problem. it is not like i am bothering anyone, except, it would seem daniela. but i am sure she will recover.
last night i went out for another round of drinking with Masha, Vlado and Simina...we stayed in one of my old haunts near liszt ferenc ter until the staff kicked us out at around 2 am. then masha and i walked home and i collapsed into bed...but my sleep cycle is totally messed up from all the aeroplanes...so even though i fell asleep easily and quickly, i woke up 4 hours later utterly unable to get back to sleep. so being the maniac that i sort of am sometimes, i got up and started typing a paper that i have been trying to finish recently... i am doing two variants, one in English and the other in Russian. We will see which gets done first, but i managed to get in about 4-5 hours of work before masha got up at 11 or so. i was very envioug of her long sleep....probably i should buy some sleeping pills today...i need to get back onto some sort of sheduale before i start work next monday!
but the drinks were great, and so were the jokes, and i am just enjoying being back in the ceu phd lab, even if this time i around i am not supposed to be here.

24.5.06

spinning

the past 72 hours have been a bit of a wirl... When I was a child I had a Paddington bear. According to widely held Paddington belief, Paddington has an aunt Lucy who lives in a home for retired bears in Peru. I was at first bothered by this point, thinking that Paddington would feel isolated in England, separated from aunt Lucy. Then my father told me that bears have jaunting belts which allowed them to travel at the speed of sound. this way, Paddington could visit his aunt Lcuy every night when I was sleeping. So now it appears that maybe i have been borrowing Paddington's belt, as i have the feeling of jaunting myself. ...three countries in 30 hours. i was on one continent, then another having lunch near covent garden with justin...then i was suddenly transported to a bar in budapest, having drinks with Vlado, Masha and Simina.suddenly it dawned on me that it was late Tuesday and i had neither showered nor slept since sunday. so i went to mashas and collapsed like a drunkard on her couch. unfortunately, for mysterious hungarian reasons, mashas flat has no hot water at the moment, but this morning i felt so dirty that i forced myself to take on in the fucking freezing cold. at least i feel clean now...sort of...
but even if the water is icy, it is good to be back on familiar territory, and among friends!
i am now back at ceu, in the wifi zone, among familar faces. even the guards are the same as when I lived here.
it is good to be back...;
and meanwhile, while I was floating in space, Montenegro has voted to be an independant country. I asked Vlado how he felt about this and he claimed that "I have lost bigger things than Montenegro in my life." but I am glad for them. I like Montenegro (even if its inhabitants are slightly insane) and I look forward to my next trip to Podgorica, in its new condition of international capital city, ha ha ha.

21.5.06

film review

i have had an unusual amount of spare time this past week. so much so that i have even updated my research student log, which i have supposed to have been keeping all this past year. I havent done anything with it until now, and my supervisor was so shocked when she got the automatic confirmation that she sent me an email saying i had been very noble...but didnt i need to get out more?
i have also watched a number of films, and my unsolicited films are as follows:
da vinci code: ok i read the book and of course i noticed like everyone else that it is badly written...but i still read the book until the end in a remarkably short period of time, so it would be absurd to deny that some part of me enjoyed it, despite its limitations. after all, it doesnt claim to be great literature...so about the film, well it wasnt much better or worse than the book. i did go to see it after all, just as i did read the book. tom hanks is not terrribly inspiring as the professor, and audrey tautou is not much better. the albino monk was pretty creepy though. maybe i will start having nightmares about him (although i dont think so). the film as a whole was trite, predictable and contained no suprises....but how could it when we have all read the book anyway?
Matchpoint: another somewhat disappointment. perhaps i thought so because so many people had liked it. but i also thought it was trite. it did however improve as the film progressed and some parts at the end were good, had it been otherwise i dont think i would have survived it all. great music.
Bareback mountain: not my sort of film...i wouldnt watch a heterosexual cowboy movie afterall....but for its genre it was well done...i am glad someone out there makes such films, even if they are not really for me.
mean girls: ok, i got a free copy which is the only reason i would ever watch such a film....it is truely awful, but i did laugh.
the parent trap: this is the 1998 version with lynsey lohan before she turned into a chav. she was so cute when she was little! the film is impossibly stupid, but cute...
Jarhead: a sharp contrast to the two above. on the whole, i liked it. it seems in many ways the follow up 20 years later of full metal jacket. the kubrick film is much much better, but jarhead had its own merits, and is the best of the list above...
and now i am going to sit back and watch crash....more unsolicited views to follow!

16.5.06

ahead of the wave....or bad timing?

so first i hear that laure had got into SOAS and is moving to London...then Jusitn gets a cool job and decides to stay in london....and now lemurana has got accepted to the the university as well....all of this...and i have just left!!! so am i a trend setter who remains always one step ahead of everyone else...or have i just screwed up and choose the worst time possible to leave? i fear the latter.
ok, you guys had better ALL visit me in Moscow, otherwise i will be massively offended!

14.5.06

the grandmother story explained

so i received requests to explain in more detail this family story. i will try but it is difficult, as the only people left around are my father, who has very few memories, and this lady who has appeared, but is very elderly and batty.
what is clear is that i come from very, very humble origins. according to the documents, both of my biological great grandfathers were journeymen, which is to say a day worker who got day wages. these guys lived hand to moth doing low level jobs. there families lived in appauling conditions, all the children slept in one bed, rats bit their ankles and disease and fire were common. according to Iain, the urban life expectancy for men at the turn of the century was around 37, and that was certainly true in a working class enviornment , such as the one i obviously desend from.
it appears my biological grandparents had a shot gun wedding. the wedding papers indicate it was an "irregular" wedding. furthermore, my father was born only 4 months after the wedding, so that implies that the whole thing was an attempt to maintain the minimum of respectabilty.
my mother even doubts that the man who married my grandmother was actually my grandfather, especially as my dad looks absolutely nothing like his siblings. also, according to my dads memories, he spent most of his early childhood with his mothers parents at their house. he has very few memories of his parents house at all. he doesnt know why he spent so much time with his grandparents and hjis other siblings did not. it appears to have been some family conspiracy, but we dont know exactly why.
the second world war started on 1 september 1939. Glasgow was britain's second city, and it was anticipated that it would be bombed (it was, quite heavily in fact) so my father was evacuated with his school on 1 october of the same year. he doesnt remember much except that it was explained he was going on an "adventure" and was given a gas mask, biscuits, and an ID tag to wear across his neck. he was told that he would be returned "as soon as possible." he was the oldest child in the family, and the only one of school age, hence the only one to be evacuated. the children were taken by train to the far north of the country. he says periodically the train would stop at rural villages and local families would select some children to take in. many of these families were sheep tending or farming families, so of course they wanted the older children, especially strong looking boys. after the war, it became clear that many of these children were used as cheap labour by the families that took them in, but my father was too young to have been of any agricultural use, so he was taken in by the local school headmaster of a small village up in the mountains.
he wasnt returned to his real parents and his real parents never once wrote to him.
so until his majority, he lived up in the mountains with a strict school teacher and his wife (the only other the school teacher in the town). his adopted parents were respected people in the village, as they were the most educated, and he was a first world war survivor, with medals (over 25% of the country's men died in that war, so those who survived got respect automatically.)this couple had no children of their own so they raised my father like their own son, and made sure he got an education, and eventually he won a scholarship to go off to study in the Soviet Union. but we never found out what happened to the real family. my dad probably has 3 siblings outthere somewhere, but i suppose we will never know what happened to them, or why my grandmother never reclaimed my dad. a mystery it remains.

heathrow, terminal 4

i have spent long amounts of my life in heathrow airport. when i was little, it's terminal 4 was one of the places i knew best. i have numerous memories of the long hours spent roaming about the long hall of terminal 4 staring at all the people off to cape town or mumbai (or bombay as we then called it) . i used to know all the shops by order, harrods was of course my favourite, as it had the paddington bears (one of which was my loyal travelling compaginion).
so it is with pleasure that i find myself back in this place. the people are more or less as i remembered, in other words very diverse. this is in contrast to the crowds at my regular airport of recent times, stansted, with its largly white, largely male, stag night crowd. so i wandered to all the regular terminal 4 places, got eyedrops at boots, then went to the excellent breakfast place that does a decent breakfast for 5 quid (you cant find many otf those in central london!) the i went to harrods, just to make sure the paddingtons were still therer. the i looked at the great stuff at burburreys i cant afford at the moment...then on to HMV where i noticed with astonishment that the number 5 best selling dvd was nochnoi dozor. that books on which the film is based were massive best sellers in russia, but i never thought the story would be exported, and certainly not so successfully! then i sat in a cafe and people watched....exciting stuff terminal 4.
but as airports go i do think it is one of the best. it has better shopping than frankfort or roissy (not to speak of sheremetevo) and it is better organised than bangkok or ciampiano or JFK. and it has the oddest assorment of peoples, which is what makes it so interesting.

12.5.06

my grandmothers best friend, part II

so i finnally met my grandmothers best friend today. she was a dear sweet old lady with improbably red hair that she announced was natural....her place in london is a bit like a zoo, with animals running all over the place. it turns out she lives here in england as her daughter is a vet with the national animal protection something or another, hence all the abandoned animals that get brought home...
i learned a few things about my dad's family. my grandfather was an alcoholic who used to beat my grandmother. she was glad when he died. he wanted to be buried with a bottle in his coffin. i didnt establish whether or not this wish was granted. during our conversation i refered to him as my grandfather and the old lady said "ah you dont want to be calling him that, he was no grandfather." well, guess that says it all really...
the boxes dont contain a whole lot, mainly birth cirtificates and the like. so i learned that my grandmother was born in 1906, which is about what i would have guessed. my dad was born shortly (very shortly!) after my grandparents got married. i have my grandmothers wedding ring, but it is too big even for my thumb, it just slides right off. there are a few other bits and bobs, watches and another ring...pictures of people i cant identify but am most likely related to. they look like they must have been taken just before the war, but i cant be sure. i am just supposing that as i dont imagine the paper would have been so nice during the rationings....
the rest of the story is sad really. my grandmother lost my father and he wasnt really ever part of the family after 1939. i have no clue what happened to the other children, i couldnt find anything in the records, although i presume they must be the kids in the pictures i am guessing were taken right before the war. my grandmother died feeling lonely and unloved and she is buried somewhere under a tree in glasgow, in a paupers grave of sorts. her life was harsh a brutal and cold. i never knew her and i dont even know what she looked like....strange really isnt it?

last day of class...

the past few days have been extremely warm and beautiful, so i took my au pair class to the botanical gardens in order to have our last class in a more relaxed enviornment. it was really nice and we were entertained by english guys doing cartwheels all over the place...then today (my last official day at work) there was a party on the back patio with piles of cake which i naturally dug into with gusto...i have enjoyed my job this past year...not the greatest salary i have ever had, but nice collegues and students, which is important. good luck to all of them!

10.5.06

CDs of long goodbyes


see the picture of the room with all the CDs. frightening isnt it? and that is only a small proportion, one wall of one room. Dan has more CDs than anyone i have ever met...by far...max claims he has more CDs than virgin megastore...so when my hard drive crashed a while back it was to dan i went for help. helpfully he put a few hundred albums onto DVDs for me, so get my computer stocked up again. he has an incredibly eclectic collection of music, but i suppose that is hardly surprising given the sheer volume of stuff that he's got. and what is the most incredible is that he actually knows every CD on his shelves, it is not like he fills the place with stuff he never listens to, you just have to ask and he will give a full description. incredible.
i have him to thank for introducing me to romanian rap. who would have thought the genre even existed? we went out for drinks a few time this week...i guess it will be the last round for a while as i am off soon. i have been having such "last rounds" with many people lately. last night Igor and i went to our favourite pub and got royally sloshed. i expected to feel awful today, but curiously i felt absolutely fine...sometimes that just happens though. i will miss the pub culture when i am back in russia. it is not that i enjoy heavy drinking so much (and it is not like there is nothing to drink in russia!), it is just nice to have a centrally located place where you can meet up with friends with out having to bother with cleaning and supplies, as you would have to if you met up with them at your own house. so this is definately one thing i will miss. i will also miss the openness, and being able to have friends from all over the place. to be sure, i have friends from all over the place in moscow too, but avoiding the militsia is a always a major topic of conversation, and a major source of concern. it isnt here, and i appreciate that.
at the moment the weather is incredibly beautiful, but that has not been the case for most of the time i have lived here, so i aill not put that on my list of things to be missed, nor will i include the trains which are so notorious that i dont even think i need to comment further. but i will include the libraries, which are some of the best i have seen/used, i will remember them with great nostalgia this coming autumn as i am sitting in the lenin library for hours on end, filling out useless pieces of paper and waiting countless hours for my book to be retreaved from some distant storage shelf....

6.5.06

mission impossible

so i took of work yesterday with the purpose of spending my morning queueing at the bloody russian embassy. the experience was predicatable: long lines with corrupt officials. agh, mother russia...and soon i will be back...so i guess i have to reprepare myself for the inevitable, but that doesnt make it anymore fun.
afterwards i was so annoyed by the whole thing that i simply had to go to harrods for another pair of shoes. i realise i have been on a bit of a harrods shoe binge lately, but .....but.....ok i wont try to justify: i have been on a shoe binge lately because i like shoes
later i met justin and went on yet another binge, this one of a culinary nature. we went to a supurb japanese place near oxford street and blew a hefty amount of quid gorging ourselves....the food was just so good we had to keep ordering...and the sake went down so easily that we had to keep ordering that as well, and then justin convinced me to try some japanese mixed drinks for girls that taste like fruit but contain god knows how much sake in them...it has been a while since i have enjoyed a meal quite so much. the night was still young as we left the restaurant so we headed tipsily up to angel for a film.
for some reason beyond my comprehension, justin got it in his brain that we should see mission impossible III. what a bad film. the plot was as trite as they come, and tom cruise's acting was...well it is not really worth describing. justin had thought that pumping with alcohol first was the only was to get me to sit through such a spectacul, but even tipsy i barely managed....this seems to be a pattern in my life: every may a series of stupid films come out, and every may i end up going with some boy to watch them, even though i know how stupid they will be. last may, laurent got me tipsy in order to get me to go watch brice de nice with him....oh what another bad film....

paul and other friends




So all of you from ayers rock to Lisbon faithfully following the story of my flatmate will be interested by the latest development: today he was diagnosed with glandular fever….or mono as it is called by some. In other words, that disease most of us got as teenagers from kissing someone or swapping spoons too often (or with the wrong people!) at least, that is what the doctors think it is, to be sure the blood tests wont be ready until Tuesday! but Paul has already set about blaming the Polish girl he brought home last week. I find this a bit dodgy, as mono has a rather longer incubation period than one week, as far as I know…but that is his story at least.
In other, more exciting news, Alexei is visiting from Moscow and simultaneously spring has decided to arrive. So my friends and I have been trying to profit from the coincidence as much as possible. We spent the other night sitting out on a terrace near tottenham court toad drinking, eating, debating, and people observing. The gathering was livened considerably by the presence of a considerable number of greeks, who are a nation of born partiers. It was also good to catch up with Alexei after so long (we haven’t seen each other since the Budapest days). Razvan was there too, but he seemed on the verge of tearing his hear out. In my faculty we have to pass our first year exams at the end of the first year, which is conceived as a calendar year with 12 months, ending in mid september. However, in Razvan and Ana’s faculty (anthropology) the exam must be passed at the end of the year, imagined as an academic year ending at the end of June. So basically, they have 2.5 months less to prepare for their exams, and as a consequence, they are all massively stressed at the moment, whereas I am not in such a state, although I have the unattractive prospect of having to study non stop through the summer ahead of me. But I prefer having to spend my summer months working at a more relaxed pace than killing myself by trying to do it all now, especially as I am already up to my limit with my stuff at work.
But next week is my last week in my job…then I have a nice 2 week break before beginning my new/old job in Moscow. To be sure, business in 4 countries will keep me busy during that time…but a break it nonetheless constitutes.

3.5.06

no comment in london





i finally got my last fotos of paris developped, here are tony and cam in da hood!

2.5.06

cat vengence

Cats can be vindictive little animals. My father once learned this when he teased our old cat to the point of frustration where she “confused” his pillow for her litter box. My mother told him it was his entire fault, he deserved it, and that he was responsible for cleaning it up. Another time my old flat mate’s father came for a one-week visit from Rostov and stayed for 3 months (at which point the cat and I moved out). This man also failed to respect the cat and was duly informed of this by having his full soup bowl overturned on the floor and his dried fish stolen off his plate. Now given their proclivities, I would think that anyone would think long and hard before annoying a cat, but it seems men in particular learn these things slowly.
So in recent weeks, Paul has been annoying the cat by deliberately mispronouncing her name and rubbing her fur in the wrong direction. So, today I guess she decided to take her feline revenge. I was sitting in my room, trying to get some work done when the said beast emerged from the kitchen bearing a fat juicy used condom in her mouth. Paul had buried the, um, item in the rubbish bin a few days before, supposedly well wrapped up and meant never to be seen again. But the cat obviously had other ideas and rummaged in the bin until she found what she was looking for, and then preceded to display her catch to the entire world that she surveys. Paul was naturally mortified, but like my father all those years ago, he too deserves it. You just don’t mess with cats, that is just the way it is.

Then, in our ongoing efforts to keep paul entertained and out of depression, Iain and I took him for a round of pubbing last night. But, as has happened so many times before, everything started out well, but ended in disaster. The first pub went ok, everyone was laughing and joking. Well, paul and I briefly disagreed over Iran (he thinks it should be blasted back into the stone age….i have difficulty accepting this, but I wasn’t up for making an issue about it…I mean how can you have an intellectual debate with someone who is mentally unstable?) but in general things seemed ok….then we headed over to Jesus bar. I really like Jesus College, it is really spacious and beautiful, and it looks a bit like Hogwarts. Plus, the people aren’t as unbearable as the Trinity ones, and the bar is nice (ok not as nice as at clare’s, but good enough). At the bar was this absolutely gorgeous blonde girl, and Iain invited her over for drinks on Paul’s behalf, as he was too shy to do so. So the blonde came over and it turned out that in addition to be pretty, she was also funny and intelligent. So we had a funny conversation, then this flaming gay friend of hers came over and joined us for a while, and he was entertaining as well. After about an hour, she went off to join her friends, and Iain and I looked at each other with satisfaction, both of us feeling that the encounter had gone well…but paul exploded at us. He claimed that the two of us had hogged the conversation and not let him do the talking, which we should have done since she had been brought over at HIS request. But Iain and I had only been trying to be friendly and make the girl feel more comfortable, while Paul sat and sulked as usual. But once again, we failed in our efforts to cheer him up. He stomped off and refused to speak to us the rest of the evening, except when he briefly exploded at me in the hallway of our flat, telling me I had no idea of the harm I had done.I know the guy has mental problems and cant control himself. But sometimes I wonder why Iain and I bother trying to keep him afloat. Sometimes I fear we might as well let him drown.