another sunday brunch

yesterday i met caitlin for yet another one of our sunday brunches. this time we met near caitlins office, where she had stocked 20 boxes of gluten free crackers that she had discovered at the produkti near her house. the produkti lady thinks she is mad and even asked why on earth she was buying so many of the same boxes of crackers, caitlin tried to explain it was for a gluten intolerant friend, not that the baba understood what that meant....

excess

I managed to spend about 12 hours in restaurants on Wednesday.
The day got off to a nice, productive start. I got up at 5:45 to get to an early morning meeting at the other end of the city. The meeting finished at 9:30 and I headed straight for the library to get in to the fotocopy babas before the crowds arrived. This I did, and by 1 I felt I had got enough done to take a break…and that is when things got decadent. I met Igor and Ira. We were all hungry, and Igor mischievously suggested going for sushi. The thing is that Ira just moved here from western Ukraine, where apparently she never tried any national cusine other than Ukrainian. Igor knows this, obviously, and it was for this reason that he suggested the sushi. So we went to planeta sushi (a chain found all over the city selling edible, decently priced sushi) and went a bit crazy. First we ordered all the fresh fruit drinks Ira had never heard of (guava etc) and made her try them all, then we ordered a truly excessive amount of sushi and set about trying to teach Ira how to use chop sticks. It was a bit ridiculous, but after some drinks we were all laughing, including the waitresses. This went on for several hours, and the restaurant even brought us dessert sushi (with fruit inside) on the house. In the process we also managed to cover every topic imaginable from post grad examinations to Serbian post modernist writing. We must have seemed like a group of freaks.
This would have been a nice relaxing day had it stopped there. However in the evening, as every Wednesday evening, I had to go over to a company where I teach and check documents twice a week. But when I arrived, I was greeted by Vladimir (the ex KGB friend of the pirate) and Oleg who announced that we were not going to be productive, but rather were going to go out. Vladimir had already made reservations at B2, a restaurant/ night club with regular concerts. So we ended up in a jazz lounge with a band playing café del mar music while we drank and ate….naturally, sushi. We were there for hours. We kept ordering random plates just to try them, and then the mobiles came out and Oleg and Vladimir started to invite some friends and the table filled with people and plates…..i stumbled home at 2, although I had to be at the other side of Moscow at 8 to teach a class.
I actually made it to the class on time. Masha, the student, greeted me with “oi, I am too tired to work, lets go downstairs to the restaurant.”
We did, but I ordered only coffee. There was no room for more.

fainting spells

you probably never wondered what would happen to you if you fainted in the Lenin library. the topic never crossed my mind either until this morning when the girl in front of my wiped out quite unexpectantly, collapsing in a human puddle at my feet.
one of the library babas saw the girl fall, and after making a phone call, she ordered me to grab her by the legs. since saying no to a library baba is not an option i did as i was told, as did a girl who was sitting near by and was ordered to take the unconscious girl's arms. we then carried the girl (whose name i never discovered) to the central hall, as indicated by the babushka. we were met there by the Lenin Library Medsestra. i had no idea that the library even employed its own resident nurse, but it does....and an angrier baba i have never encountered!
she slapped the girl a few times on the face until she came to, and then asked her if she was pregnant. the girl claimed she wasnt, but the baba made a grunt that indicated "they all say that" and repeated her explanation. she then went for the details, asking when the last time the girl got her period, how often she had sex and so on. all of this in the central hall filled with people walking past to use the catelogues. obviously the girl turned bright red, especially whent he baba announced she would have to make a medical exam...right there! so the medical baba waddled off, ordering those of us who had carried the girl to stay with her. eventually she reappeared with all kinds of odd instruments. she took blood pressure, and then several blood samples, and continued asking all kinds of hideous questions, while people walked by and stared. i waited until she was side tracked and bolted, not wanting to spend the whole morning there....but i am very very very glad it was not me who wiped out on the library carpet!

chav nation of hummers

Russians have long been obsesses with cars. When I lived here before, it seemed everyone needed a BMW or Mercedes. I can remember sergei my old boss arranging to have his stolen in Germany for him. My Russian friends could never understand why I, and many of my foreign friends preferred to take the metro. I tried to explain it is faster and cheaper, but my friends were never convinced, for them not taking the metro always seemed to be a source of pride, whereas for me, taking cars during the day always seemed like a huge pain. Lately, it seems, the city developed an incredible obsession for really big cars. Not cars, jeeps of SUVs. Several of my acquaintances have gone out and bought one. The last time I had lunch with anatoli, who always has the latest in car fashion, he was driving a Mercedes SUV. I find this odd, especially as these monsters are notoriously difficult to park in a city not designed to support the volume of cars currently on the roads. Parking would be a problem even in a smart car, but in a Mercedes SUV, it is a total nightmare. So why does everyone want one? I decided to ask people who are more in touch with these matters than i. Anatoli claims jeeps are more safe and more comfortable, since you supposedly have more leg room. Olga claims jeeps are more “kruta.” She is slightly car obsessed and is now in the process of getting a new one for herself. she was torn between the cute little mazda 3 and an SUV. The mazda was cuter (and comes in red, every dyevs favourite colour) but she insists that the SUV is better. She claims people feel more powerful in a jeep. Because they are high up, the drivers can look down (literally, physically) on all the other regular cars and feel more important. The mititsia (GAI) will not challenge you in the same way, they will show more respect. Other drivers will be afraid of you and always give you the right of way. And if you are in a crash, your car will not be as damaged as some little moscovitch. Or at least that is how olga explained things to me. Of course, it is also a money thing. Russian like cars that look like they were very expensive (even if they were stolen from some poor german) and SUVs are certainly that. They also like the ones that come with the dark windows so you cant see the person inside, hence the appearance of Hummers. Oleg claims jeeps are better in an accident, the other person will die before you do, he argues. But then Marina claims that Russia is simply a chav nation and Russians just want to buy the most expensive car they can find so they can show it off to everyone. They prefer to have a Mercedes SUV and to live in a small soviet flat with their mother than to save money to buy a flat of their own or make remont. But this phenomenon seems to have attacked the whole region. Caitlin went to Yerevan the other weekend, and came back reporting that there were few cars on the roads, but a disproportionate number of them were Hummers. How odd.

the good life

it is good to be an overfed house cat.
i have human servants who spend all their waking hours attending to my every feline need. i even managed to pack one of them off to my old rodina to earn more money to feed me and buy me more toys and cat beds.
in the meantime i have been granted a large house with a garden and servants who take care of me. as you can see in the photo, i am waiting at the moment for one of them to open my food tin, and to serve me on my silver platter.
things are as they should be.

blah

i cant wait for the end of this week. i dont know why, but it has seemed exceptionally long, even though it has been very productive. i have got alot done in the library and at home. i finished my annotated bibliography and got it off to my supervisor, and now i am back to working on my literary review. i have decided that in order to write this though, i must first come up with a working definition of culture and that has proved suprisingly difficult. so i spent a few hours late last night reading through Lotman on the hopes that his great thoughts would enlighten me. they did, but i still havent come up with the thing i am looking for. so finally i got frustrated and watched a DVD (i saw Kukushka a russian film that is actually mainly in finnish and some odd lapplandish language)....the most simple way to turn of my brain and completely relax. i guess any serious thoughts regarding culture and my literary review will have to wait for the weekend when i dont have my job to think about as well. but no matter how much work i get done, i always have the feeling that it isnt enough, that i have somehow wasted time, and that i should be doing more with my months here. this feeling has been with me for years, since budapest at least and maybe before. no matter how much i do, it isnt enough.....yet, unlike in budapest, there is no competition here. or rather there is, but they are unseen? or maybe i am only up against myself at this stage?

procrastinating

I am supposed to be working on my annotated bibliography, and i am actually. But it involves reading large amounts of Lapteva’s 900 page book, which is armful to the health in substantial quantities. So for time to time I need to take rests from Lapteva’s encyclopaedic narrative to enjoy less dense fare.
So over the past few days, while trying to finish up this awful bibliography, I have watched a series of films, provided courtesy of the pirate, and also courtesy of the various airlines I have been sitting on recently. As for the airlines, British Airways films are MUCH better than those on Air France. Due to this difference, I was subjected to the latest Asterix film earlier this week. One was ok, but now they are not even remotely funny. Nor would I say that les Brigades du Tigre really merited an international audience.
The pirates films have been a bit more inspiring. Breakfast on Pluto is brilliant, and I recommend it highly. It was completely different than what I expected, but maybe that is because I didn’t read the description on the back of the film case very carefully. It is a bit like Transamerica, but Northern Irish and a lot better. The Devil Wears Prada made me laugh very hard, even though the copy I got was dubbed in Russian, despite its claim to the contrary. Meryl Streep is excellent…you never know whether to sympathise with her character or not. Of course I will not argue that the film constitutes great art, but it is exactly the sort of entertainment I have been enjoying indulging in over the past few days.
I have also gone through a series of Russian films, having got one of those compilations where you get 8 films on 1 DVD. They seem to only produce those here in Moscow, I have never seen such DVD combos elsewhere. They are only good for Russian films, as they never come with dual language sound tracks, and I really do prefer to hear things in the original, rather than dubbed over by a monotone Russian male voice.
So I watched that great hit of the summer, прорыв. It is yet another one of those easy-to-understand movies about the war in Chechnya. The good guys are blond and clean-shaven (although some have moustaches) and the bad guys are swarthy and have beards. The good guys are always heroic and honest and willing to die for mother Russia, and the bad guys are treacherous. The good guys have standard uniforms and the bad guys have tracksuits and trainers with green scarves tied around their head and covered in Arabic writing. The good guys are purely ethnically Russian, whereas the bad team always includes a couple of foreign agitators, normally some Arabs or Africans. A number of films have been made along these lines, and I suppose this is just the latest. Of course I recognise it is a piece of rubbish, but I also see it as a popular culture reflection of where things are at the moment. Not that I like what I see. On the subject of Chechnya, Vladimir lent me дом дураков, which is some kind of weird Kosturica style film, just set in Chechnya. It features all the caricatures mentioned above, plus a lot of crazy people (hence the title). фартовый isn’t set in Chechnya, but the action does take place in a Gulag, which I imagine is the next best thing. It features all the standard heroes mentioned above, only the Chechens are missing. So naturally by the end of the film, some of the seeming bad guys are converted into good ones. Not all though, one guy remains evil, but then he has slanty eyes, so maybe we are to believe he is not ethnically Russian after all? Then many people I know liked питер FM, but i cant say that i did. It was, of course, more intelligent than a Chechen war film, actually, it is the most intelligent of the Russian films listed here, but I couldn’t get into its mood. Maybe that is my fault. I will have to get мне не больно, i haven’t seen it yet, but everyone says it is really good.
But now I suppose I really should get back to that bibliography, there is a limit to the amount even I can procrastinate.

more on moscow

i have been back in moscow for over a week, but i have had so much to do that everything just seems like a blur. i have been running around trying to get things done for my research and my job, so much actually that i havent had the time to think about what i am doing. i am just going through the motions of doing it, thoughtlessly.
friday i had coffee with igor and ira. ira has just moved here from lvov. i find that really funny, since when i first met her (we were roomates in serbia in 2003) she had never been to russia and was determined that she would never set foot in the place. yet now she is living in russia and it seems highly likely she will spend the rest of her life here, since she and igor are planning on getting married sometime in august, and igor's future is pretty clearly here.
then yesterday i was over at the chos trying to help them...as they have suddenly decided to immigrate to canada! yet there are so many forms to fill out. the boys are to go to some private school that requires all kinds of special enterance exams, includding the SSAT (secondary school admissions examination). they also have to write all sorts of essays...even though they are 9 and 12 years old! and the school applications must be done nearly a year in advance, hence they should be sent off soon for admission in September 2007. it is all very complicated, even more so than applying for university, it would seem.
exhausted from these efforts, caitlin and i decided on a nice bimbo sunday. we had our normal brunch (i had an omlette, as always, this time we went to Jean Jacques). then we went on our regular sunday shopping tour. i ended up with a belt from furla and some shoes from Tsum....not that i needed anything...but i suppose it is the retail therapy necessary to get me through the week that is approaching...

more on minneapolis

the sky line you see is minneapolis during the day, and the kid flying fountain was taken in rochester, which is about an hour away. minneapolis is a typical north american city, modern with lots of sky scrapers. i was surprised to learn that the place isnt small, it has a population of about 2 million, which makes it the same size as budapest (although it is a lot less beautiful!) the weather was hot, around 35 or so, but i had to carry a sweater with me all the time since every place i went had air conditioning, which i am definately not used to. it was a bit uncomfortable to sleep at night in the hotel, since i always felt too cold, no matter how i tried to adjust the temperture dial....

MOA

i also went to the mall of america while in minneapolis. it appears to be the city's biggest attraction, and i had the dismal feeling that people actually choose to spend their free time there. the place is absolutely huge, with over 500 shops inside. it is the largest shopping centre in the country and the second largest in the world. in the middle there is a huge theme park, stupidly called camp snoopy. but little kids seem to love it. there are roller costers and water rides...i got some clothes and a new 60 GB ipod....

guthrie

so i have been back in moscow for a full work week already, but i havent had the time to post my photos from last weeks adventures...so here are some photos of the guthrie theatre, where i saw the Great Gatsby performed. i thought it was a well chosen performance, and it was fairly well staged. the theatre has recently been redesigned by a french architect, and while the outside is a bit odd, the inside is nice, with a comfortable bar and great views window views of the river, as you can see.

москва

i havent had the chance to write anything about what i actually got up to outside the airports...but now i am already back in russia. if you want to know what i have been up to in the past 30 hours, just look at the airport entries, but in reverse. it was a long trip back, flying out of a corn feild yesterday morning and getting in to moscow this afternoon. i havent even been to my house yet. my not-terrbily-understanding boss didnt give me today off, so i am killing 45 minutes in an internet cafe before heading into work....with my suitcases in tow. mondays i work late, starting only at 7pm, so in my boss's mind i didnt need the day off, as my plane came in at 4. grrr. oh well, i suppose on one hand it is better to save the holiday days for when i really want them....but on the other hand, i have been on airplanes in 5 cities for the past 30 hours, and i smell.

freak show culminates: detroit- minneapolis

the flight from detroit to minneapolis was scary. i was next to a fat woman who kept eating crisps (hmmm, no mystery there). but by then i was so jet lagged i could barely think, much less observe. i got to the the hotel late in the evening and crashed on the bed.

freak show gets provincial: new york- detroit

the image you get from the pictures is not what i imagine detroit would look like....but then, except for this part, the rest of this place was depressing as hell. the people were noticibly more provincial than in new york, and kept telling me how cute my accent is. i even got upgraded to first class on the plane there just for being foreign...i suppose....i cant see why else in any case.
i cant imagine why anyone would voluntarily live in such a place.

freak show goes political, new york-detroit

who holds political rallies in aeroports? hassidic jews it would seem.
i arrived in jfk and hopped on the little aeroport rail to get to the next gate from which i would be departing. the whole process went really quickly and i arrived in my departure lounge with over 3 hours to kill. i made a complete tour of the aeroport. the architecture doesnt match: some parts are really pretty and the rest is another ugly aeroport. then i played around on my computer and watched the people in my groggy sleep deprived way. but then i heard people shouting into a microphone...so i followed the sounds and i saw that a political rally was going on, right in the aeroport. the speaker, a young woman, was calling for beirut to be bombed into the stone age. the audience, hasidic jews waiting for their flight to tel aviv, was applauding and aggreeing vigourously.
appauled and unable to believe people could get so happy about ANYONE being bombed, i watched out of horror for a few minutes before moving on to another part of the terminal where el salvadoran gast arbeiters were waiting for there flight home. it is a good thing i had to take tons of spanish in school, it is certainly of use in this aeroport, where it appears to be the language of preference. at least i can understand what everyone is saying around me....although i am not always sure that i want to....

the freak show continues, paris-nyc

in addition to having to change planes in 5 cities, i also have to change terminals everywhere. i didnt have much time in paris, and the 45 minutes i had was spent on the roissy trains and sprinting about....i didnt even have time to benefit from the decent duty free in terminal 2C, so i was really annoyed. hopefully i will have more time on the way back to do some satisfying commercial damage. it looked like a nice sunny day. they told us on the plane it would be 28 degrees. i would have liked to have left the terminal and hopped on the RER....but no, the insanity continues.

the freak show commences, moscow- paris

i got up at 4 am. the zholti taxi arrived at 4:30.
the one good thing about having such an obscenely early flight is that early morning is the only time in moscow when there are not trafic jams. the roads were almost completely deserted and we got to sheremetevo in a record 23 minutes. normally it takes over an hour. it was already dawn, so i got a great view of the lovely enormous soviet flat blocks that line the route to the aeroport. millions of people must live in those areas.....it reminds me a bit of department 93.
I got upgraded to business class at the check in, and i ended up next to a wonderful exam of russian dyevdom: a teenage girl travelling to paris to go shopping. not only was she wearing all designer clothes....but she had a little yorkshire dog with her outfitted in the latest louis vuitton doggie accessories and traveling in a louis vuitton dog carrying case. he made sounds of neglect every time the dyev tried to read her gala magazine (or vogue, or bazarre).
i hate sheremetevo. i cant believe after all these years they havent cleaned it up at least a bit. there were all of two officers working at the passport control, and it took forever to get through the queue. plus the duty free sucks....and it is not as if people going through that place lack in disposible income, at least judging by my neighbour's appearence....

approaching insanity

had an excellent brunch with caitlin on Sunday at hediard, the omlettes are excellent, and the grocery section attached to the restaurant is good as well, with an excellent cheese section (as you would expect from hediard)
we then moved on for our normal sunday shopping rounds, but neither of us did any serious damage (i am still recovering from last weeks furla adventure)
today i am meeting some sort of book dealer in the metro. there are two books i have been trying to track down for some time, and, seeing as i hd not been very successful, i decided to pay someone totrack them down for me. today i am supposed to meet this character, with the books, in the metro. should be interesting.
meanwhile, tommarrow i have a 14 hour day at work...then i begin my insane long weekend tour.
wednesday morning at dawn i will get on a plane for paris to begin a very strange series of flights. the plan is to hit 5 cities in 3 counties in 27 hours.
the problem with all of this is that i have to return more or less by the same route....so i will have close to 60 hours in aeroports and on planes this week.
it might be a while before i post again. but maybe not, who knows? maybe luzhkov has installed wifi at sheremetevo? i doubt it somehow....

death by hospitality

There have been a number of memorable encounters this week.
On Tuesday evening I had the chance to meet, even if only for an hour or so, with Tania and Brad. We lived in the same komunalka type flat 6 years ago in St Petersburg. Then we saw each other quite a bit in Moscow in 2001-2002. Then they moved to Vancouver, which is where they have been for the past four years. Now they are off on a 6-month tour around the world, lucky them.
Then yesterday a group of my students decided to take me out for dinner. As the ringleader of them is ethnically Georgian, it was naturally decided we would go to a Georgian restaurant. Those of you who have had the pleasure and pain of experiencing Georgian hospitality will know what I suffered. The guys ordered enough food to feed the whole flipping Georgian army, and then insisted I try EVERYTHING.
Of course the food was delicious, Georgian food always is. I really have no idea why this cuisine has not caught on outside the borders of the old Soviet Union, it is truly incredible. I love the various vegetable dishes, especially as they often include my favourite aubergines, baklazhani po gruzinski is one of my favourite choices…and Georgian cheese is the best, I could eat it every day. Georgian wine is also very good, although unfortunately it has been made illegal due to stupid politically bickering between the Russian and Georgian governments (we don’t like you, so we will make your wine illegal!…..great foreign policy)
So the problem was no the quality of the food, as always the issue was quantity. Georgians have very specific notions of hospitality, one of the rules of this elaborate code seems to be that all guests must not leave the table until they are only able to do so by rolling. The guys ordered me multiple salads to start with, then multiple main dishes. I had to try them all. Next they ordered multiple desserts, and huge plates of fresh fruit to wash it all down. In the background a pianist was playing all the old songs of my 1980s childhood, including multiple sessions of Chicago’s “if you leave me now” and Toto’s “Africa” and this combined with the interesting Kavkaz interior design and the excess of food and drink created a rather surreal impression. The whole dinner lasted about three hours. When I got home I had to sit in a very still position without moving for about and hour before I could think of getting up and changing into my pyjamas. Then I had to sit still for another period of time before I could think of lying down.
This morning, just when I thought my intestines had more or less recovered from the beating, I went to work…….on Wednesday and Friday mornings I work in a company that seems to employ mainly Muslims. This is great for me, since I don’t have to listen to the endless racist jokes about my origins (or my origins as imagined to be implied by my name) but, unfortunately it provided me no rest from the complicated rules of Kavkaz hospitality.
So I arrived at work, sat down and a Chechen brought me coffee. Then a cheese concoction appeared. Then chocolat…..I think I can imagine now what a boa constrictor goes through.

no news is bad news

Something has been irritating me since I came back here. There is no news in this country…at least not really in an accessible or convenient way, and it was not always this way.
Once upon a time (but for a brief period, in the late 1990s) there used to be something that could be called a free press in this country. It wasn’t the most professional, it often looked pretty amateur, but it had articles of interest and opinionated views. Now it is completely gone. I could see the signs of this coming when I lived here before. The government changed in 2000, after a spade of bombings (as you will remember well, lemurana!), none of which was ever really satisfactorily solved, but all of which were blamed on Chechens. After that things got a lot harder for those of us of “non Slavic origins” and the government started insisting, for example, that we get tested for AIDS every 6 months and carry around a document claiming we were AIDS free. Now, in addition, we have to be tested for leprosy as well, what fun!
It was at that time too that the interesting newspapers started disappearing. There were take-overs….or journalists (like those of the old NTV) would show up to work and discover that all the locks had been changed. When I lived here before this problem was already clear but it was still in process, but now three years later it seems complete. I bought a Russian “news” magazine on the metro the other day, as I had nothing else to read, and I read the top three stories: Putin met with a group of tourists at the Kremlin and kissed a little boy, Nicole Kidman married Keith Urban in Australia, and the son of a Russian business man has redecorated his flat, in an effort to start his new adult life, “I will never be poor” he assures us “in every country in the world I would find a way to succeed.”
That is news?
Discouraged, I tried for the foreign press. The Moscow times used to have ok articles, but even it is looking boring these days, but I suppose it can be called the last remotely interesting newspaper here. Then I decided to track down the Economist. I used to buy it every week to entertain me on my train rides back and forth to the faculty. In London it come out Thursday night, or everywhere else in the country Friday morning. The same was true when I lived in Paris, it was always in the stands by Friday, and it was available in most stands and kiosks around the city centre. In Budapest as well, it was for sale by Friday afternoon, and in most central areas. Here, however, it is available only in a handful of kiosks (I have counted three thus far) in the very centre, near the major 5 star hotels. The most annoying thing is that it arrives, for some odd reason, one week late! It is on the stands by Wednesday or Thursday, or the day before the next issues appears in London. I don’t know why this is, but it is not the Economist: my mother lives on a different continent and gets her subscription economist by Monday at the latest. So if it can fly across the ocean, why can’t it make it in a timely fashion from one part of Europe to the other? What happens to it? Is it held up at Customs? The same goes for the other international news papers, they arrive late, and are available only in a few places.
Now of course, some people get around these issues. I know some companies have the Financial Times or the Economist delivered to their offices, and that those arrive more or less on time. But this represents the minority of the population who has access to these privileges. There is also the internet, where you can read pretty much what ever you want.
But what if you are an average person in this country, who for example, doesn’t read English or German fluently? Or what if you haven’t got regular internet access, as many people don’t? what are you supposed to do then? I used to make fun of expats who insisted in reading only the news from their home countries, but at the moment here there is not much else.
When I go back to England, the first thing I will do on my very first Saturday back is buy a nice, big, fat Guardian and read the whole thing from cover to cover. It will take me the whole day no doubt, but it will be a great pleasure!!!!

sundays and ambar

i met caitlin yesterday for our weekly sunday brunch. these brunchs are often really more like lunches, happening later than the word brunch normally implies, as the result of late saturday nights. but yesterday we were up early and decided to meet for a proper brunch at 11:00am. we went to ambar. i used to go to that place practically every sunday with jeremy about 3 years ago, but i hadnt been there since august 2003, when i went there one last time with jeremy before hopping on a plane with an angry cat and all my worldly possessions, bound for budapest. but now that i am back, i decided to check out the place again adn see how it has held up....it is, i suspect, completely unchanged. even the prices seemed the same. but the food didnt taste so good this time around, i had a generic omlette, which was totally unsatisfying, but left me feeling i had overeaten. caitlin felt the same. i suppose some experiences are better preserved in ones memory.
fortunately the day improved as we headed for our weekly window shopping that generally doesnt stop at the window....i got a furla bag to match a dress i have to wear to a formal dinner in about 10 nights....
it was incredibly hot and sunny (33 degrees....later in the week they are predicting 37) and there were all kinds of strange people out in the streets, like the girl and her family walking their pet babboon, pictured above. all those types like me without a dacha...

my own personal pirate

While talking on the fone to Justin yesterday it occurred to me that perhaps this was not normal to the western mind. In London, I don’t think it is so common for a person to have their own personal pirate, whereas in Moscow it simply seems like common sense.
It all started on Wednesday when I was talking to Vladimir. We both love cinema, so at work we often compare the films we have seen, give each other recommendation, and swap dvds. We were doing so again on Wednesday when Vladimir asked me where I was getting my dvds. I have a few favourite places. For huge blockbusters (da vinci code, поцелуй бабочки) i simply go to the perehod near my metro station (a perehod is an underpass that allows you to cross a major street, they are also something like mini shopping centres, since people set up kiosks inside and sell everything from pepsi and chocolate to dvds and underwear)
When I want something more specific, I go to some perehods in the centre, where there is better choice, and if I feeling really ambitious, or I need some computer software, I go all the way out to gorbushka, a monstrously large complex that takes up the whole block of a street and sells everything electronic you could ever want. The going price for a dvd is about 100 rubles, which is to say just under 2 pounds, although you can get them for 80 if you go a bit out of the centre.
I though 2 pounds was a fair price to pay for a dvd, but Vladimir insisted I was paying far too much. He has his own personal pirate. Every month, he, his wife, and a few friends give the pirate a list of the 100 films they want that month, and a few days later, when everything is ready, the pirate delivers the dvds to Vladimirs office (yes, to the office). The pirate wont take orders of less than 100, and as a result gives Vladimir a good discount: he pays only 45 rubles per dvd, which is under 1 pound. He also saves Vladimir the effort of having to go to perehods all over the city to hunt down the dvds he really wants. Normally the pirate is able to produce about 80% of the films requested, and, being a civilised pirate, he doesn’t charge for the films he couldn’t find and deliver. Obviously this is a logical and effective way to save time, money, and hassle. So from now on, I am giving my orders directly to the pirate. I will let you all know the results.
Oh, and just as a final note, anticipating you queries as to the legality of all this, I thought I might add that Vladimir is ex-FSB. The FSB is what the KGB was renamed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And even though he no longer works there, Vladimir still has strong connections with the state security apparatus. Furthermore, these connections are not exclusively limited to the Russian Federation; he also seems to have strong ties with people in the security services in other former Soviet Republics. So I guess the pirate has himself a very good customer indeed.

the weekend, finnally

it is finnally saturday. it couldnt have come soon enough, i have had a really long week. my boss messed up my schedule and that left me with even less time than usual to do my research, which was frustrating. i sometimes have the feeling that i have no time to do what i came here to do: read and write. so i called a meeting with my boss to explain that i found the changes in my schedule both unnecessary and unfair. fortunately he agreed and things will go back to normal from next week. thank god, i would go crazy otherwise.
and then yesterday i got paid and decided to go shopping, as the sales are now on and everything is 50% off...but actually all i got clothing wise was a skirt, then i went shopping for what moscow produces best: books and dvds! so i trundled home with 8 new dvds, which cost me all of 10 pounds. i have been trying to catch up on the latest russian films, but last night i wasnt in the mood for such a production, and i ended up watching the lion the witch and the wardrobe...the narnia books were some of my favourites when i was little and i wanted to see how they looked in film. i know that some religious types have been argueing that the books are supposedly religous in their theme, but i have to say, that i was never aware of that when i read them as a kid and having watched the film, i still dont get it. perhaps i am a bit dense? or maybe i just prefer to believe that it really is a tale of a lion, a witch, a wardrobe, 4 children, and talking beavers. literally.

even more library babas

So it seems there is some secret set of shelves in biblioteka imena lenina. Or something like that. Yesterday I went in and asked the baba to get the books off my shelf and bring them to me. When she brought them, I noticed there were only 3 and I had requested the day before that another one be brought for me as well. When I asked about the other book, and the baba looked it up in her complicated hand scrawled file, she made a series of significant grunting sounds and took me to see another baba. This second baba was in charge of protecting a pad locked cupboard, which she opened when she saw my request card. Inside were all kinds of old books, including the one I wanted. When I asked why some books were kept here, I was told they were “exceptional” except that no one chose to tell me exactly why! The book didn’t look different than any others I had requested, so I couldn’t figure it out. But when I took my books back, the whole procedure had to be repeated, so now my reading time has become a double baba experience, ugh.
My research is coming along slowly and I am starting to understand why so many people in Russian history choose to do their primary research in Helsinki, the libraries have the same materials for the 19th century (since Finland at that time was part of the Russian empire) and yet in Helsinki they have things like COMPUTERS. Imagine that.

moscow stations

in the years since i last lived here, they have somehow managed to get the homeless people off the metro. i am not sure how it was done, but i cant say i am sorry. they used to sleep on the seats, especially on the circle line. the smell was absolutely horrendous, and it would stay with you for what seemed like ages even after you got off. sometimes the militsia or the metro babas would come and hit the bomzh on the head with their red paddles, but normally they just slept. often they were children, but sometimes they were adults or even old people.
but they are gone, for the most part.
the beggers who come and give pitiful speaches from one end of the train and then walk to the other end begging along the way are still very much in force. i even recognise some of them from three years ago, so i can only assume it must be a somewhat profitable occupation. the accordian players are still around as well, as are the gypsys at ohotni riad. and the first metro of the day is still filled with the most horrendously drunk people imaginable. one puked dangerously close to my feet just the other day. i, and every other sober person on the train, quickly bolted to the other end of the wagon. that was when one man somehow bumped into another and this started a major skandal. the two guys started fighting. first with words, then pushes, then finnally fists. one fell to the ground and rolled near the puke, while the other did the punching.
so i suppose some things have changed on the metro and some havent....

ill again

i have managed to develop some strange illness. i cough, i sneeze, my throat is inflamed.
after a few days of this i decided to check out my company provided health care plan and go to the doctor. somewhat to my surprise, the clinic where i am registered is really nice. the toilets even had toilet paper (amazing!) and it seemed clean. i saw a few specialists and was given and inhaler to walk around with and breathe from for 5 days. strangely, that seems to have taken care of the swelling and infection in my throat, but my cough is worse. hmmm. the doctor recommended i stay in bed for 3 days, but i can imagine my boss's (negative) reaction to that, and went to work anyway. this weekend however, i will sleep like a corpse.
i finnally finished watching the new russian version of doctor zhivago. it is uncomparably better than the hollywood rendition, and i recomend it to all of you who understand russian. oleg menshikov is great as zhivago (and he looks good to!) the only thing is the film is apporoximately 8 hours long. yes thats right EIGHT. so i saw it is an illness induced long-term project, and watched and about 2 hours a night for 4 nights....

my classy neighbourhood

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

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

sundays and expos

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

35 and up

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

ремонт

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

summer time at last

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

pain

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

night

the metro

home sweet home

ежегодная пуховая напасть

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

strange encounters

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

the mormons

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

boys

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

budapest retrospective

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

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

ferenc, outside ceu

princess anna

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

night time

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

nostalgia

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

expats

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

Driving part 2

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

driving

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