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?

intercultural commerce

For some reason our support staff are largely south American, I have no idea why or how this happened. I guess one person must have got the job, then recommended it to everyone else in their circle? In any case, they speak hardly any English, and every time management wants to pass one a message, I get called over to do the translating. Since the support crew know me as the sole Spanish speaking person on the “other side.” I have become the person they seek out to solve various odd issues, or when they have queries about life in this strange country. However, every time I try to clear things up, I wonder if in fact I have made their confusion greater. For example, stella (one of the cleaning ladies, a Columbian) called me over to ask me what a word meant: vegetarian. I explained that this is a person who eats no meat, but I could tell by her expression that my explanation had not succeeded. The poor woman asked me how could a person live without meat? And why? I explained that such things are common in this country, and that I myself was one of these strange non-meat eaters. At this point I thought Stella might fall over, by I tried to explain that I have an allergy and I really can’t eat meat for this reason. I thought I had got the message across, but some time later it somehow came up that one of my male colleagues was also a vegetarian, and I found myself being pulled aside again. “do you think he is gay?” Stella whispered to me over her vacuum cleaner. I responded that to my knowledge, the colleague in question was quite straight. “yes, but he is one of those….you know…..vegetarians!” and the whole conversations started again, with the end result being that although Stella accepted that I was vegetarian, she would never accept that a man could be.

Now I have come across this issue before, in and out of Latin America (like in France, as recently as ten years ago) so it was not a big surprise for me that eating habits could lead to doubts over a man’s sexuality. But some of the other questions that come my way are harder to anticipate. Recently, I was pulled over by a Peruvian, who had recently started, and had a very worried expression on his face. “who is this Paddington person?” he whispered. I had to ask him to explain, not believing he had just asked what I thought I had heard. It seemed every time he told an English person he was from Peru, they asked if he knew Paddington, and he had thus started to wonder who this famous fellow countryman was, and what he had done to become so well known in our work place. With some hesitation, I found myself explaining that Paddington…was, um, a bear….from Peru. The Peruvian guy looked more baffled than ever, and pointed out, I am sure quite correctly, that there are no bears in Peru. So, I ended up describing the entire story of Paddington turning up in the station of the same name, with a tag around his neck, and being taken in by the Brown family…..feeling that my retelling of the story sounded much weirder and illogical than the whole thing had seemed as a child. Seen through Peruvian eyes, the story did start to seem a bit odd….

Pichiciegos

“you’d have to be British to want this” complains one of the characters at the beginning of Rodolfo Fogwill’s Los Pichiciegos, the tiny 154 page novel which has been credited for helping bring down the Argentine junta in 1983.
I completely understand the character’s point. One of my first thoughts after setting foot on the Falkland islands was “why the hell do the Argentines WANT this?”
I had been prepared in advance that I was to visit a shithole. I had spoken to family friends, war vets, who had described it in gross detail: miserable weather, with snow possible at any time of the year, Antarctic winds hitting you in the face relentlessly, mined beaches, frozen food and penguins. The main artistic attraction is a garden filled with plastic garden gnomes. Why a war was fought over this place is beyond my imagination- had Thatcher or her predecessors been sensible, they would have got rid of the place long before Galtieri and co attacked. And Galtieri’s men were not up to any fighting, as Los Pichiciegos makes clear. Unlike the British, the Argentine army was made up of 19 year old conscripts, who were unmotivated, unequipped and unwilling to fight. The book has been compared to Catch-22, due to its black humour and graphic descriptions of soldiers’ lives, such as the problems of shitting when so many people are confined to a cave, and many have diarrhoea. At first this problem was solved chemically….but then disaster struck: “En esas putas islas no queda un solo tarro de polvo químico. ¿Por qué lo derrocharon? Lo derrocharon, lo olvidaron: ¡No queda un puto tarro de polvo químico! Ni los ingleses ni los malvineros, ni los marinos ni los de aeronáutica: ni los del comando, ni los de policía militar tienen un miserable frasquito de polvo químico, tan necesario. No hay polvo químico, nadie tiene.” After this, they are forced to shit outside at night in subzero temperatures, or take endless amounts of constipation provoking pills. As the war moves to its inevitable end, the characters, all Argentine deserters (los pichis) who have been hiding out in a cave and feeding themselves by raiding the pockets of deal soldiers and bartering with the British, sit and watch the remnants of their army queuing to surrender, a sad end for the army, but the end the pychis meet is even worse, accidentally gassed to death the last day of the war.
The book was published right as the war ended, riots followed shortly thereafter. It is easy to understand why.

more lists

I have been an avid reader of what I shall call travel fiction for decades. I use the term “travel fiction” as a difficult compromise- much of travel literature is clearly exaggerated or even completely fictional, yet it is classified somehow as “truth.” Meanwhile, many books call themselves fiction, yet read largely like travel books. The ones I normally like the best are those that combine fiction with travel successfully. I remember the first such book that fell into my hands when I was about 9 or 10- The Drifters by James Michener. Hardly a work of great literature, but at the time it seemed quite revolutionary to me at the time and I stayed up with my torch under my blankets in bed to find out what happened next.Soon after, my father found a bunch of expired lonely planets at the local library, on sale for 25p each. He brought them home to me and I read them all, underlining my favourite parts- from the consumption of guinea pigs in equator to growing penis gourds in parts of the Pacific. I suppose it is not surprising that some decades later I choose to pursue a doctorate in travel literature. Yet I actually prefer travel fiction, as it generally takes itself less seriously, not being burdened by the label of “truth.”

So in a fit of office boredom, I decided to construct my list of best travel fiction works. Not all the works are of great literary merit (in terms of writing, the first two are in some ways mediocre) but I included them due to the overwhelming attraction I felt to the story, its characters, its setting and the fact that it made me want to run to my closet and grab my sack, stuff in some underwear and do a runner. What did surprise me when I looked over what I had written, I was surprised how much Anglo-Saxon stuff was there, which struck me as odd. I don’t normally like reading Anglo-Saxon literature, I don’t even like reading much in English! But clearly this is a genre at which the Anglo-Saxon world excels, just as they also dominate heavily in the supposedly “non-fiction” travelogue industry….the reasons as to why can be the topic of someone else’s phd….

Just as a note though: I didn’t include Kerouac’s On the Road, as I could never get into it….nor is Greene’s the Power and the Glory on the list, as embarrassingly I have yet to read it!

 

1. The Beach. Alex Garland’s backpacker classic. I have read it several times. It is pure pulp fiction, but I find it addicting!
2. Shantaram. Gregory David Roberts. Again, pulp fiction. I never got into the mystical/spiritual parts, and I certainly do think it is more fiction than truth (but who cares!) yet the descriptions of the Indian underworld are incredible. Funnily enough, I once found myself being put up in a small hotel just down the road from Leopold’s, the café where much of the action takes place. So, some mates and I walked over to the café for a drink, and who did we run into? Gregory David Roberts. He apparently still goes there regularly, and is treated like a Bollywood celebrity by the staff. He looks every bit the ex-Australia convict he claims to have been.
3. A Moveable Feast. The Great Hemingway, who claimed “if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction.” Moving back some decades to the Paris in the 20s, I read this tale of the Lost Generation in school, and liked it so much I reread it in my free time. Probably the only time I genuinely liked something on the school curriculum.
4. Sheltering Sky. Paul Bowles. Twisted tale with some unforgettable characters. Odd echoes of it reappeared in Esther Freud’sHideous Kinky, which picks up on the same North Africa to the point of destruction theme.
5. In a Free State. V.S. Naipal. A gritty combination of foreignness, sex and sleaze.
6. Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip. A surreal work written by two Soviets during the Stalin era. Basically like Borat, circa 1935, these two oddballs drove across the US, observing capitalism up close.
7. Travesuras de la nina mala. Mario Vargas Llosa. The writer hits on every hot spot: Cuba in the early 60s, Paris’s left bank in the mid to late 60s, then moving on to protests in Trafalgar Square in the early 70s and glimpses of Tokyo’s weird business culture in the early 80s. all starting from Peru, naturally.
8. Tender is the Night. Fitzgerald. Although the Great Gatsby is the one that appears to have been classified as Fitzgerald’s great classic, I always preferred this one…
9. The Razor’s Edge. Somerset Maugham. I really don’t generally like American fiction. I normally avoid it deliberately. Yet three of my choices (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Maugham) all represent a slice of Americans camped out in France in the interwar period. It is amazing how a relatively small expat community could inspire and produce such as rich volume of literature!!!
10. The Berlin Diaries. Christopher Isherwood. A variation on the Americans in Paris, this one features an Englishman in gritty and decadent interwar Berlin…..my literature teacher caught me reading it when I was about 12 and felt it was not “appropriate reading material” for some one of my age, which obviously increased my interest levels dramatically.
11. Cuba and the Night. Pico Iyer combined with El Pintor de batallas by Perez Revelte. These two have a series of common themes (jaded war photographers as protagonists, lost love) although in mood they are quite different.
12. The Asiatics. Frederic Prokosch. Published in 1935, this is another classic of the genre I suppose....Camus called it the first “geographical novel,” as its nameless protagonist zips from Lebanon to China.
13. Out of Africa. Karen von Blixen-Finecke. Ok, again, some might classify this as biography, but I am going to include it anyway….von Blixen-Finecke must have been an amazing character though, I doubt she needed to stretch her imagination too far….

Ok I had intended to make a list of 10, but I have got carried away here and should stop, before the list takes on a life of its own and extends into the hundreds….there is so much out there! And it all makes me wonder, where to next?

old boy

 As films go, it is sadistic, gory, twisted and sick.It is like a Shakespearean tragedy in the epic scale of the characters’ personal destruction.It hits all the sicko themes, from incest to torture, as the audience is treated to teeth being extracted by pliers and unforgivable sex scenes. Yet somehow you have to watch to the end. It was directed by Park Chan-wook, one of Korea’s best directors, and he did a grotesquely beautiful job. Every gesture and musical rhythm is planned, so that there is a sort of sick artistic beauty even as someone blows his brains out in a lift. There is a scene in which the protagonist Oh Daesu fights his way through a line up of baseball bat wielding thugs that ends up resembling a baroque painting more than a modern film.The film is drastically different to the mange in almost all the details, including motivation of the antagonist, who is responsible for having locked up Oh Daesu for over a decade in a private jail. Yet the central themes are the same: the protagonists life is being manipulated and ultimately destroyed by another over a trivial childhood incident. Oh Daesu seeks to avenge his 15 year suffering, and yet it is too late, his life has already been manipulated out of his control and can never be reclaimed. I don’t think I have ever seen a film more twisted.

Время для паники ещё впереди

I dont know how it is possible that some people actually even imagine the race might be close. it the citizens of any other country were voting, I am sure Obama would be leading by 25 percentage points at the very least. Yet, instead, things could still go wither way. and lots of people here in Europe (and probably elsewhere) are still expecting the worst. After all, no one imagine that Bush could possibly win in 2000 (and to be sure he didnt technically) but he ended up in the White House none the less, and years of chaos have followed. A ridiculous war has pointlessly led to the loss of tens of thousands of civilian lives, sent the US spiraling into debt, and tarnished the country's already bad reputation abroad. the use of torture in jails which hold people apparently indefinitely without trial is both disgusting and uncivilized. the Bush years are now (thankfully) ending, with one of the idiot;s final acts being a 700 billion (and rising) bailout of the banks. the country is in recession, and may be heading for depression. Kids are being taken out of school, people cant pay their medical bills, and foreclosures are seeing people loosing their house across the country. Now, given such a situation, it seems hard to imagine that anyone could possibly imagine voting the Republican party back into office, Yet the US appears to be a country of extremes, in-which religious zealots actually get taken seriously and have political clout. Their judgement clouded by irrational forces, they seem capable of making wierd choices, even one involving Sarah Palin.

I stand with Puff Daddy (P Diddy, Diddy) on this one: Sarah Palin, she scare me! (youtube "diddy blog 24 Sarah Palin") And McCain is 72. So lets all hope Obama wins, otherwise my friends on the West side of the Bering Straights might wake up one morning to the sounds of Palin, as she rears her hear and decides to obey her God's will- AND INVADE CHUKHOTKA!!

So I saw Seu Jorge last night at the Roundhouse in Camden. The building had been refurbished apparently sometime last year, making it a far more presentable place than I remembered.
The concert had been meant to feature Afro-reggae, the 14 piece band from the favelas of Rio, as the opening group but legal battles over contracts, rights and money kept them back in Brazil, and Gilles Peterson took their place in the opening slot. I had been to Gilles Peterson shows before (EXIT festival) but I don’t think his music is well suited to a place like the Roundhouse. The music is chilled, acid jazz with (in this instance) some Brazilian infusions, and it would be ideal as a back drop in a chill room in a club, on in your living room towards the end of a party, but as the opening act in a large venue, it didn’t really go.
Seu Jorge came on at exactly 9, punctual to the minute, and started his set. In addition to all the expected hits (Tive Rizao. Carolina), he did two odd but interesting Bowie covers (Rebel, Rebel and Life on Mars) before launching into a crowd sing-a-long of Jorge Ben Jor’s Mas que Nada ~(think 2006 world cup FIFA song) which got people excited.
Pity it was so cold though, it made going out on the patio area a bit painful….

Confused

Interesting: The Georgian prime minister, who I feel like I have been chasing in conferences around Europe this past month, has stepped down. According to Saakashvili: "We made this decision together with Lado Gurgenidze, the decision that he will chair the new financial commission in charge of controlling the financial crisis and stabilizing the financial situation in Georgia." To be sure, he is an economist by training and used to run the Bank of Georgia- but why the sudden switch? Stepping in will be Grigol Mgaloblishvili, who was at the Georgian embassy in Turkey, and more recently the combined embassy of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to the opposition leader Kakha Kukava, “Nobody knows Grigol Mgaloblishvili in Georgian political circles. He is a dark horse. In reality, Georgian Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili implements the functions of the prime minister," Kukava speculated that if Saakashvili, keeps Merabishvili on his post, then everything will "remain as earlier."
The BBC reported Gurgenidze was "sacked," while Saakashvili insisted Gurgenidze had only ever intended to stay in power one year or so.
I am a bit confused, but then the piles on my desk are mounting concerning other areas, and I sense the focus is to turn elsewhere now.

the bubble burst

I find myself in yet another 5 star soulless business hotel at yet another financial/ banking conference. There appears to be a hard core group of 15 bankers on the permanent conference circuit, or the “rubber chicken circuit” as my father used to call it, after having been served a few too many rubbery platters in his day. But these same 15 guys (for they are all men) show up at every event, in every country. They recognise me now, and sometimes nod as I walk in. As I am often the only youngish female in attendance, I suppose I am rather noticeable! Over the past 4 months the tone in these conferences has changed rather dramatically. In June there was still the hope that Europe would escape the worst of the credit crunch, and that Russia would be unaffected completely. We all know now that this will not be the case- things are bad and they are set to get much worse. Reports suggest that several times over the past month, the British banking sector has come close to complete collapse. Iceland, once the model, has gone under completely. Russia has weather the crisis worse than most other emerging markets, yet even China has started to wobble this week. In short, things are bad, and the projected recovery dates are receding further into the horizon. The head of Credit Suisse estimated things would stabilise by the end of 2010, with recovery beginning in 2011. Ernst and Young’s recent report also has pushed recovery dates back to 2011. In a similar investment conference I attended in June, these same guys were talking about the end of 2009 as the date by which things would be back to normal. Today, one speaker claimed that possible half of all Russian banks will go over in the near future. Several Western ones are already gone.
And unemployment is rising. In Britain, it is anticipated that it will reach 2 million by this Christmas, and 3 million by next Christmas. So Europe has not escaped. No one has: even Canada, where the leaders saw clearly what was coming and took strict measures to protect their banks, is not safe. The banks might be in better shape, but Canadian industries are among the hardest hit, thanks to their economic ties with their southern neighbour.
I listen to the gloom and doom with half an ear, wondering what the free lunch will include. I like when they serve wine at lunch, it helps make the rest of the afternoon go more quickly, as I discretely snooze with my eyes open in the back….i have heard all the figures already, I know things are bad, and I can only feign attention for so long.

shoes

I am not good a polishing shoes. I never have been. I make a mess, not only of the shoe, but everything in a metre radius of it. So I find myself standing with my foot up on a box in cities around the world having some one else polish my shoes, when I get desperate. It often costs less than doing it myself anyway (so I tell myself). In some cities (Rio, Mumbai) the polishers are often young boys, who do their job diligently and with minimal communication. In other places, (Santiago de Chile) this job seems to be the domain of older men, who ask polite questions and seem astonished to have a woman's foot on their box. But today the polisher was neither young nor old, mid thirties I am guessing, and I quickly recognised a familiar rhythm to his speech. "Glasgow?" I asked, although I already knew the answer. I then told him some portion of me hailed from the same northern city. A long chat followed (I was wearing super grimy boots). The guy left Glasgow at 18 and had been working his way around the world ever since, cleaning shoes and doing other tasks along the way. He assured me that the rumours are true: there is no city on this planet without a Glaswegian population. He has cleaned fellow Glaswegians' shoes in Berlin, Sydney and San Francisco. Like me, many of these diaspora Glaswegians have foreign accents, but they all assured him of their origins. Glasgow has been exporting people for several centuries now, so I suppose this is hardly surprising, but it was interesting to note none the less.
He cleaned my shoes well. I tipped generously, and we both continued our day.

honesty

I am increasingly thinking that Georgians are making a point of defining themselves against Russians. Most telling example: the police in Georgia don’t take bribes!!! I had heard rumours of this great transformation back when I still lived in Moscow. An acquaintance of mine who regularly travelled to Tbilisi assured me that the president had fired two thirds of the police force and given huge raises to those who stayed, on the condition they clean up their act. Some in the beginning pushed their luck and ended up in jail, and the message soon got out to the rest. Today on the streets you see a fair number of police, but unlike the Russian militsia, they do not seem to regard foreigners as walking banks. They appear polite and law abiding. On the autobahn, I was stopped once by the traffic police. The officer apologised for the inconvenience, checked the driver’s license, then saluted and wished us a pleasant journey on to the airport. I was shocked, but the driver assured me it was all normal these days, and I was just too used to living in Russia, “they will need 300 years to catch up to us” he announced proudly. Next came the tales of the war in August, when the soldiers were apparently stealing everything they could get their hands on, from shoes to toilet bowls, which reminds me of the stories older Hungarians used to tell me in Budapest….apparently stealing toilet bowls has long been a Russian soldier trademark- of it has become a self perpetuating myth of Russian soldiers at least. How much of this is true is of course anyones guess, but it is interesting to see what is valued here, and that apparently includes honesty…..

sidenote

Georgian TV shows an interview with a group of Russian soldiers during the war.



Georgian Journalist: “who is the president of your country?”

Soldier: “putin of course”

Journalist: “Putin is your PRESIDENT?”

Soldier: “yeah. I think.”

Journalist: “Who is Dmitry Medvedev?”

Soldier: “I have heard of him…..some minister?”

Journalist: “do you know who our president is?”

Soldier: “no”

Journalist: “have you heard of Mikhail Saakashvili?”

Soldier: “On kto? Gruzin shto li?”



I am sure the Georgians had fun filming that one.

land

The natural setting of Bakuriani is stunning. I arrived around 7am. I was tired from the overnight flight and I must have dozed off at some point in the ride over from Tbilisi, because all I remember was that at some point I opened my eyes and saw we were on a dirt road surrounded by mountains on both sides. It was so dramatic that my tired eyes struggled to take it all in.

This place has a great possibility to be one of the best skit resorts in Europe, I have become convinced. This potential has not escaped the notice of the Georgian authorities, which has recently started to pump money into the region. Thus, Bakuriani is a place in transition. Part of it has the feel of a backward and decayed village- there are mud roads and poorly constructed wood houses, and babushki sitting on broken benches watching the world go by. Yet, at the same time, much of the village is under construction, as luxury ski resorts are being constructed all over the area. Our hotel is not one of the top top range, but it is nice nonetheless. There is a sauna, a swimming pool, a fitness room, a billiard room and a cinema inside. Every day we have our breakfast in a glassed in terrace overlooking the woods. No complaints from my side….

food

Georgian food was widely considered to be the best in the Soviet Union. When my father used to organise tours of the USSR for Westerners, he always made sure that Georgia was included as the last stop on the tour, so the foreigners would leave with the impression of the Soviet Union as a place with friendly people and excessive quantities of good food. Part of the reason there is so much here is that everything grows. Georgia has several climate zones (sea coast, valley, mountains) and good weather most of the year. Thus, I kept meeting people who insisted I try the fruit from their grandmother’s garden or the wine made by their father etc. there are so many livestock animals that you see them wandering all over the place in the countryside. As country’s go, Georgia could not be better off in terms of its ability to feed itself.

But eating in Georgia is a particular affair. I got invited to a Supra, which literally means tablecloth, but the meaning it carries is closer to “mass feast,” and the seemingly endless rituals that go with it. Everyone who lived in the ex-USSR knows that Georgians are famous for their toasts, poetic affairs that seem to last up to 30 minutes. But, during this trip I have become acquainted with some extra details of the toasting procedure I did not know of. For example, it is a grave insult to toast with beer- you do this only to your enemies. If you like a person, you must toast with wine or spirits, nothing else. If the gathering is big, then someone (normally the oldest and wisest man) is appointed Tamada, or toastmaster. The tamada is basically the table dictator. Only he is allowed to make the toasts (unless he specifically gives permission to someone else) and you are only allowed to drink right after he has said his toast (ie, you cant drink whenever you feel like it). If the occasion is really big, then there is a alaverdi, who is like a second back up tamada, who makes sure everyone at the end of the table heard every thing correctly. In order to survive the onslaught of wine and chacha, you must eat enough to coat your stomach. But this requires careful pacing as the food arrives in huge quantities from the beginning…but then it keeps coming! So you must pace yourself carefully to avoid overeating in the first round, as more dishes continue arriving and it is something of a sin not to try ALL of them…..

Georgia

A friendlier people I have never met, or at least not in Europe. Georgians are famous for their hospitality, and rightfully so. Guests are treated like monarchs here. In a ride out to Bakuriani, it somehow came out that I had never seen a pig or a chicken. This is now no longer the case. On my first day some guys escorted me to a farm so I could see both a pig and a chicken together. The pig was lying lazily in a pile of mud and the chickens were walking about aimlessly in circles making strange noises. I was given the chance to kill one, which I declined. The hospitality continued. Not just were our hosts over the top in their efforts, but it seemed the whole population was as well. I walked into a café and the next thing I knew I was sitting around a table having the receipt for Khachipuri explained to me in great detail by the owner. Any time I got lost wandering about, I just stopped people on the street who often insisted on escorting me all the way to my destination. I speak no Georgian, but I found that almost everyone spoke fluent Russian, and unlike in some places (like the Baltics states) people were quite happy to speak with me in Russian, and never once did anyone make a nasty comment. Actually, while the Russian government, and Putin in particular, in universally despised, I did not sense real hostility towards the Russian people, although there were often tones of condensation. The laws of hospitality seem to eliminate the potential of rudeness towards foreigners. Then, of course, there is the over the top Caucasus treatment of women. My bags, even my handbags, are carried at all times. Chairs are pulled out, drinks are poured, and every time I approach a door, all the men queue along side and nod politely as I pass first them all. It is a bit hard to get used to, but I know the intentions are good. And then there is the foooood….

vukovar

Between 18 and 21 November 1991, the town of Vukovar, in eastern Slavonia, close to the Serbian border, fell to the Serbian army, still calling itself the JNA. The low point of this battle came on the 20th when the Serbian army burst into Vukovar's hospital, and started a shooting spree. Those who werent killed at the time were interned and many killed later on at Ovčara (located 5 kilometers southeast of Vukovar). There their bodies were dumped in a mass grave. 200 bodies were exhumed in 1996, in a process which took over 40 days. DNA testing revealed the bodies belonged to teenagers, journalist, a French guy, and several elderly people, among others.
I went to Vukovar several times after the fighting ended. On my first trip, very few buildings had four walls intact, and the place was a ghost town. With my Greek friend Harry and some locals we wandered around the shells of buildings. Bojan, himself a Serb, claimed the Serbs who burst into the hospital that night were high on all sorts of drugs. Their pupils dilated the screamed hysterically and moved irrationally. They were jumpy and shot to kill at the slightest sound. Some were JNA, many more were paramilitaries, or teens who had been given guns and drugs and swept up in the act. It is believed 200 dies in the hospital alone.
The incident is well document and there are plenty of witnesses. Several of the leaders were indicted by the Hague tribunal in the years after the war, at the instigation of requests for the Croatian government. The Serbian government went after many of its own people: in 2004 the Prosecution for War Crimes found three of the JNA leaders guilty of murder and inhumane acts, killing 192 people, and sentenced them all to jail terms between 5 and 20 years. One who escaped all of this, however, was former Yugoslav defense minister Velko Kadijevic. Why? Because he had seen the light and relocated himself to Moscow in 2001. A few months ago, the Croatian started trying to close in on him, requesting his extradition (he was born in what is now Croatia, and the alleged crimes took place in what is now Croatia.) Medvedev responded by making him an automatic citizen through a presidential decree. Today the Russian prosecutor General's office announced officially that he is protected by Russian law and cannot be handed over.
Ok, Russia sees themselves as the defenders of Serbs, as we all know, but even the Serbian courts have concluded that this massacre took place. Kadijevic doesn't deny that either, he only denies "knowing about it at the time." I fail to see what Russia is exactly gaining by protecting such people. It is not the 1990s. These guys can receive a fair trial- in Serbia if anyone has doubts about the impartiality of the Hague tribunal. Jumping over endless laws and having the president personally grant Russian citizenship to prevent someone from facing justice is hardly the "rule of law" way to deal with such a man.

georgia on my mind

Ok I expected some sparks to fly when I announced that, well, I had been offered a free trip to Georgia.

And of course, working for a Russian company, I know to expect conspiracy theories to miraculously pop out of no where….but still I found the reaction overblown.

Yes, there was a big coincidence, I met the Georgian prime minister over some drinks and the very next day was invited to spend a week in a Georgian ski resort. i admit that looks suspicious. But (unlike my employers) I do not think that there is a plot to have me kidnapped, enslaved, locked in a harem, or made the personal toy of the government. I tried to explain that my friend had been there on the same programme and in the same circumstances…..but I also made the mistake of mentioning that certain friends very polish name….

So now it is official: there is an international Polish-Georgian conspiracy against the motherland!!!

'Have you written your will yet?' Asked my boss this morning as he came into the office…..no, I haven't, so if this blog mysteriously goes off the air in the next two weeks, will someone continuing feeding my furry companion? No reason why a cat should fall victim of international disputes!

the big adventure

I got a bike.

Specifically, a little, bright red, Brompton. My employers paid, to my great delight. Apparently this is a new fashion in London- buy your employees a bike and lower your taxes, and additionally claim you are helping the environment and fulfilling your corporate responsibility.

I also got an awesome military like helmut and I am now struggling to navigate londons streets from a new perspective. First, I am noticing certain things that I always managed to block out as a pedestrian, like the enormous quantities of one way streets all over this city! But it is quite fun to ride around the City in the morning watching everyone run off to their offices with their costa coffee mugs in their hands. You have to watch them carefully, cause they never look up at you.

I think I will need to shower 3 times a day from now on though…

perceptions

and so i found myself in a geneva 5 star hotel with a much of business leaders from all over europe, as well as certain political figures of note (again, wondering how i got there!) i was, as usual, the token female, a role i am increasingly getting used to.
the times are tense and tough, and talks quickly went political. as usual, they centred around Georgia.
let me state again, i am not writing here to judge the situation or to say who is right or wrong in it, what interests me far more is the war of perceptions. I have long been obsessed with the way in which the media can drive public opinion, and how it functions and gets manipulated.
but in this case, i would say the situation was a bit of a no-brainer. i have already written about the media war surrounding Georgia. but now i have been able to observe the players up close, making the whole thing even more painfully obvious.
i ran into the Georgian prime minister, Lado Gurgenidze, and two of his colleagues, over croissants in the morning. What a smooth operator! the sad thing is, images, perceptions and first impressions do count, and you could not help but be impressed by this guy. He has degree from the US, speaks absolutely fluent and colloquial English. his accent is less noticeable than mine. furthermore, it is not just the fluency that hits you, it is the high level of sophisticated vocabulary and turns of phrase. and he wears nice tailored suits, good cologne, and is polite and well mannered. In a clintonesque way, he poured me coffee with a charming smile, and asked me questions about my position, even though i more or less must represent the enemy in his eyes. i found myself assuring his aides that of course i love Georgia, its wine and its people- oh, and the cheese of course! hardly what a representative of the Russian media should be announcing in public i am sure. later he did a presentation. again, everything was ultra-slick, with flashing graphics and high definition flow charts.
now you could of dismissed this as a one off exception...but then later on a delegate from MONGOLIA showed up and made a similar impression. this guy had an Oxford degree, equally fluent language and manners, and another nice suit. after his 30 minute presentation, i think we were all indeed prepared to believe that the future of Mongolia is bright.

now compare this image to the Russia delegates: poorly spoken, vulgar and crude, with thick accents and grammatical horrors. the men wore ill fitting suits and shirts with odd patterns. the one woman with them had badly died red hair and a bright blue suit on. The Georgians made no accusations of excuses, speaking instead about investment, economic growth and market reforms, the Russian delegates shrieked about the whole world being against them (while the government in Moscow decided to shut the stock market several times this week!!!) and accused Georgia of all kinds of atrocities.
and in doing so, they looked like fools. the georgians didnt have to accuse them of anything, they were their own worst advocates. it was painful to watch. in a room full of decision makers, you could almost read everyone's mind, seeing them writing off enormous cheques to tbilisi.
out in the hallway, one of the Russian delgates pulled me aside "these fucking Georgians, they are like monkeys dressed up in suits, and everyone is listening to them!" he continued to rant on, pointing out (i am sure correctly) that all the Georgians there were ultimately the off spring of Soviet elites, who had been to the best schools prior to 1991. "We made them who they are, they would have been nothing without us!" he barked. yes, i concede, he might be correct. but does that matter now?

the thing is, i have come across loads of Georgians who are semi-educated and practically peasants, and i know many well educated and sophisticated Russians. so why does every event like this end up the same way? it is not by any means an accurate reflection of inherent reality, it is a problem of representation of that reality. it is not just that the Georgians and Mongolians spoke perfect English (although that helped) it is that they behaved and spoke in a way investors (Swiss, German, French, British) understand and want to hear. many of the investors were themselves Russian born, but came to the event representing international banks, and were cringing as much as i was to watch their homelands official representatives.

i dont believe that Russia is necessarily on a fundamentally different planet, or that Georgians are somehow closer to "us the West." I think that the current Georgian leadership has a brilliant PR team, and the Russian leadership does not. the question here is- why? Russia has no shortage of people who could present a brillant image of their rich country and civilisation. Yet, their leadership seems to go for the crude goons everytime. If these leaders didnt care about world opinion, that would be understandable, but the hysteria suggested they do indeed care- and a lot. so i dont get it- why dont they get a slick PR team, get some well spoken guys in nice clothes and stick them behind the podium with a fetching smile? if they did, i am sure the perceptions of the situation would reverse radically.

decay at the centre?

London and new york have been reeling all week from the trauma. First there was the shock of Merrill lynch and Lehman brothers, followed by shakes and take overs with AIG, HBOS and so on. 5,000 people in canary wharf were fired on Monday alone, including a guy I know. The Lehman brothers employees weren’t even paid their last months wages (at least not yet) and it looks like they wont be. The City has pulsated like one big ball of stress all week long, with anxiety visible in the faces of all. As I walk to work, or wander on my lunch break, I see the usually confident (ok, arrogant) guys in suits huddled over, talking intensely on their mobiles or in little packs of two. The crunch hasn’t yet changed their drinking habits. Maybe it has even made them drink more, as the pubs in Leadenhall market remain overflowing. Maybe they have decided to drink their last wages into oblivion?

Yet as the city shrieks and screams, I escape to the calm of Geneva.

Despite London supposedly being the worlds financial centre, it is a decaying mess by comparison to Switzerland’s third largest city. I am sure the panic is here to, put it is thus far more restrained, or at least less hysterical. That, and it is one of the cleanest and most efficient places on the planet.

outings

Over the past few weeks I have made more of an effort, consciously of by accidental convenience to get out and do more with the limited spare time I have.

Last week I headed to the Royal Albert Hall for the Proms. The New York Philharmonic was playing Tchaikovskii, which can never go wrong, really. For one thing, the building itself is great. The Hall was designed by Captain Francis Fowke and Major-General Henry Y.D. Scott and built by Lucas Brothers. The designers were heavily influenced by ancient amphitheatres, and it shows. The place looks vaguely like a Roman Coliseum, with a huge organ in the middle. The acoustics of the building are actually not the best, but the setting makes up for it. I sat at the top, and thus got an excellent overview of everyone else. Unfortunately I didn’t take opera glasses, I would have had the best people watching post in London if I had.

Then this week I headed to Southbank to catch a multimedia rendition of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Ok, I admit I have never been a Virginia Woolf fan. I partly blame my secondary school teachers for this, having been forced to read A Room of One’s Own, which I detested, in the 10th class. i think my general dislike also stems from a great mistrust of anything that suggests feminism, to which I have a vague allergy.

Those hesitations aside, the production was technically very well done. The Waves is a saturated and self- aware work, which it has been argued, represents a high-modernist destruction and reconstruction of the concept of the novel. Presented as a play, it comes across as a radio serial form an earlier era more than a standard script. The monologues are typically Woolf, interior free associating monologues with complex vocabulary. The characters are caricatures of themselves, with each fulfilling his inevitable destiny, and the man around whom much of the action revolves, Percival, is left voiceless, uttering not a word of his own throughout the performance. The actors and choreography were amazing. Minute detail was paid to every sound and image, creating an acute impact on the senses. The timing was impeccable and the mis-en-scene incredibly striking, accurately reflecting the obsessions of the modernist mindset. Various microphones planted around the stage captured every little twitch and rustle, while cameras also projected onto a screen emotionally vivid images at well-chosen moments. Technically the play was perfect. I thank God I was not born a member of the English upper middle class at the turn of the century, as more emotionally repressed environment I could not imagine. Still don’t think I will ever be a major Virginia Woolf fan though, something about her writing just makes my skin crawl.

the nutters are everywhere!

Well i have spent the past month swamped by the russian media, but today i have to confess i got sidetracked.

ok, mccain himself is bad enough. his choice of running mate on first glance seemed worst. the announcement that her unmarried 17 year old is 5 months pregnant with the kid of a high school drop out was just entertaining: right wing americans are so preachy on family issues that is amused me to see their hypocrisy revealed so publicly.
but the video on display in the office today was just scary:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html

click on the video part, and you will discover that:

1, an oil pipeline through canada is gods will
2. the war in iraq was gods will

what next? can this get any more absurd?

part III (what next?)

There is now no end to the number of petitions streaming in every day. todays pronouncement goes:
"There is no alternative to the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh," said Bako Saakyan, president of the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. "The existing differences must be resolved through direct dialogue. Everyone should realize once and for all that independence has no alternative and cannot be a subject of speculation. Today we can proudly state that we have created a strong and capable army, a progressing country which complies with international standards and is one of the key factors ensuring stability in the region...Rest assured, this is only a matter of time," the NKR leader said.

incidently, today was the 17th anniversary of the NKR's self-declared independance. no one has recognized them yet, but clearly the dream is still alive, as the occasion was celebrated with much show in the republic's capital of Stepanakert.

in case you are unaware, this self proclaimed state is entirely surrounded by Azerbaijan, but its population of 138,000 (after a major exodus of azeris in the 1990s) is around 95% Armenian. However, the Karabakh Armenians speak a dialect of Armenian which is considerably different from that which is spoken in Armenia, making mutual comprehension at times difficult.

the Lonely planet has a book called Microstates. It is written in tongue and cheak and dedicates a page to all the unrecognised, self proclaimed states around the world. Some, like Cristiania, are well known. Others are not. i wonder if they all intend to petition the russian government for recognition? i think there were at least 80 or so in that book!

paris, yet again

strange how efficient the eurostar is in comparison to all other trains in Britain. The journey time from London to paris is now less than 2 hours and 15 minutes, and the ride is smooth, far more so than my little nightly commute home, and more so than 3 years ago, when I was a regular commuter on the paris-london line.
So it has now been three years since I moved away from france. I have more or less switched here to writing in English, and I think in English more as well. (not that everyone is impressed by this great transition, given how often I am asked what my native tongue is!!)
Paris is good for visiting, far better than it is for living. So Sunday, as the weather held, I wandered around the right bank, dragging my 2 friends from one old haunt to another. We had brunch at le fumoir, where yaelle and I used to spend endless slow Sunday afternoons back in 2004-2005. I always find it amazing how so much is closed on Sundays in france. When I worked there is always really annoyed me: I worked on Saturdays, so I always had to run around after work and stock up on things, knowing everything would be closed the next day.
I also find it amazing how little the city changes comparatively. Three years have passed since I lived here, and still all the bars and restaurants I used to frequent are still in place. The shops have the same names and some even the same menu. I still know where things are and where to get what I need/want. This is such a contrast to, for example, Moscow, where there is more change in 6 months than in a paris decade. I sometimes find the endless continuity reassuring though, and it certainly makes it easier to play the tour guide!
But despite the continuity, I am aware how quickly time passes: it has been 3 years since I lived in paris, 4 since Budapest, 5 since Moscow, 8 since st Petersburg, 9 since montreal….and 27 since the friend I am showing around and I first met in the play yard of a school, whose name I no longer remember.

part II

Well the last posting was quasi a joke. I couldn’t believe a representative of Somaliland would really write my office here to ask the Russian government for recognition of Somalilands independence. But several other mini states have been in touch since, with similar requests. Some get taken seriously, others don’t. this one did:

"Transdniestria has by no means been thrown overboard. I believe that we've still got everything ahead of us," Oleg Gudymo told X in connection with Russia's recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. "Fortunately, in Moldova the ruling elite has turned out to be much more intelligent than the Georgian one. Moldovan nationalism is not as terrible as Georgian nationalism. And President Vladimir Voronin is a wise politician and is unlike Saakashvili, who has gone crazy," Gudymo said. "I believe it is Moldova that should be the first to recognize us," he said. “If they want to live in peace with us they have no other option because they realize that we will never go back on our position," Gudymo said.

That combined with the statement issued today by Dmitry Rogozin that "We will ensure the safety of our citizens no matter where they live - among polar bears or in Africa or in the United States. Ensuring the safety and human dignity of Russian citizens is the constitutional duty of our leadership," Rogozin stressed.

This was said on the radio (Ekho Moskvy) in response to a question about the Russian community in Crimea. Draw your own conclusions!