Neeka's Backlog

2011-12-31T21:27:00.000+04:00

Dearest friends,

Wishing you lots of joy, health and fun in the New Year!

Much love and warmest wishes,
Veronica

2011-11-22T21:16:00.000+04:00

Maidan 2004 - seven years ago:

From my Facebook page (which this blog has long become secondary to, unfortunately...):

‎200 photos seems like a lot (and I do have some more, but a FB album only allows 200, so I had to abide) - but I've actually got surprisingly few photos from Maidan, partly because my camera was broken much of the time, and I spent half the time sick back then, and also because it was just too awesome to be there, around people, etc., it was great to live in Kyiv during those two months... Anyway, the quality of these photos is kind of crappy (I'm a late-night person who doesn't know how to shoot properly in the dark) - but I'm feeling nostalgic for that time, and selecting and posting these photos has brought some relief... :)

2011-10-16T04:30:00.001+04:00

Autumn does weird things to me. After spending a few hours listening to Arthur Meschian's songs and reading Mark Grigorian's posts about Yerevan and about his grandfather, an Armenian architect who, among other things, designed Matenadaran, I felt homesick - in a way I had never experienced homesickness before.

Suddenly, I was craving to look at all the old photos and papers stored back home in Kyiv, a messy and neglected collection, some of it packed into an ancient suitcase that I keep in my room, the rest hiding somewhere in the dark and dusty mazes of the so-called entresol, a space I've never really explored.

Home is where all this stuff is. A family history that's too sketchy and disorganized, that won't reveal itself unless someone talks about it. And my father's no longer around to talk about his part of this history. My history, too - but most of it out of reach now.

In Kyiv, I keep promising myself to buy a scanner next time I'm there, then sit down and go through as much of this paper and photo stuff as possible. But I never do this somehow. Part of me, I guess, is scared of attempting to connect with the family's past: what if I fail to connect - or, what if I find something I don't want to find there?

Here in Moscow, I only have a few photos of my father's father, and a few of my mother as a little girl. And I've a scanner here. So, to alleviate this unusual homesickness, I went ahead and scanned those few photos of Sergei Andreevich Khokhlov that I keep in the little pocket of my Dear Diary.

I don't know as much as I'd like to know about my grandfather. He was a very good man, everyone used to say. He died in 1969, unexpectedly, due to a surgery gone bad, at the age of 61. My father missed him very much, but he rarely talked about him - or maybe I just didn't listen well enough. I love to look at the photos of him: I find him very handsome. He had some Greek roots, according to my father (I wrote more about it here). He had nothing to do with tennis and was pretty upset when my father quit his studies at the Construction Engineering Institute after one year and switched to sports. For a while, he was furious, actually. He worked as a quantity surveyor (I had to look up the translation of the boring Russian term "сметчик": it sounds as boring in English). He was said to be the best quantity surveyor in Ukraine at some point, whatever that means. I had spent some time looking at his work-related papers - and also at his insanely detailed calculations for repairs in our two-room apartment (hilarious stuff, somehow) - and even though I don't understand anything about the field he worked in, I do understand that he was a very stubborn and meticulous person. And very independent. I find it moving. And I'm proud of him. And I'll try to write more about all this later. For now, here are some of his photos.

With my father - who looks Marta's age on the first picture and a little bit older on the second one, so this must be one of the last pre-war years, 1939 or 1940, but there's no way of knowing for sure, I guess:

At some party at our place in Kyiv, with my father's friends - gymnasts Yuri Titov, Boris Shakhlin and Larisa Latynina - Olympic and world champions (only these three are identified on the back of this photo in my mother's handwriting):

At work:

And some miscellaneous photos:

2011-10-12T04:17:00.001+04:00

Yulia Tymoshenko has been sentenced to seven years in prison today.

In the seven years since Maidan, the folks running this country - all of them, with no exception - have made a gazillion of outrageous, embarrassing, gut-wrenching, absurd mistakes, on every level imaginable. Unlike this year's Tymoshenko trial and today's verdict, however, most of these missteps had been a bit too local and a bit too minor for the "international community" to conclude once and for all that Ukraine was just too dysfunctional to be treated seriously.

Today, Yanukovych and his gang have finally succeeded in sending the clearest and the loudest message possible: we're a bunch of morons bent on ridding this country of whatever little common sense it's got left; we believe that the only reasonable way to rule this country is by chasing off all those who've got the guts and the brains; the rest of them are just the biomass that exists for the sole purpose of providing fuel for our Bentleys, Maybachs and Maseratis; we're thugs and proud of it and couldn't care less if you disapprove.

Anyway, I hope Tymoshenko's legal team "wins" the appeal, though even if they do and she's set free, I don't think there's much of what's known elsewhere as "opportunity" for the majority of the Ukrainian citizens at this point.

***

My apologies to the genuises from all over the world, who've been landing on this blog in droves today, searching for yulia v. tymoshenko hot pics, legs, pantyhose, leather, heels, ass, hot, sexy, young. As I wrote at the beginning of this post, your idol has been sentenced to seven years in jail today, so you better brace yourself for the long, gloomy meatless days.

***

By way of consolation - and just to indulge myself - here are a few pictures of Tymoshenko that I took in 2004 and 2006. Nothing too hot, just cute.

Dec. 26-27, 2004:

Feb. 26-27, 2006 - across Khreshchatyk from the infamous Pechersky Court:

March 19, 2006:

***

Oh, and just when I was ready to publish this post, a comment from an anonymous reader from Saint Clair Shores, Michigan, came in - poetry inspired by Yulia Tymoshenko's sentencing, no less: beautifully cretinous, very relevant, written in mind-numbingly broken Russian, most likely translated from English with the help of Google Translate. The comment was meant for the previous post, which is too apolitical and personal to be marred with such crap - so I'll publish the poem here instead, along with its Google Translate back-translation. Enjoy! :)

Я зажечь горелку на плите
Благодарные иметь дорогой газ
Напоминая, когда не было газа
Сейчас пламя горит больше красного
Она уже не ожоги синий и желтый
Давно прошли это надежда оранжевого мерцания
Некоторые искры, кажется потушен
Не сжигать в течение семи лет.

***

I light a burner on the stove
Grateful to have expensive gas
Recalling when there was no gas
Now the flame burns more red
It no longer burns blue and yellow
Long gone is the hope of an orange flickering
Some of the sparks, it seems extinguished
Do not burn for seven years.

2011-10-01T21:07:00.000+04:00

Had a lovely date with Kyiv. For much of the past three weeks, it was a demented city, and I'm glad that it has managed to pull itself together for me on my last full day here this fall. Thank you, Kyiv. I love you, in spite of all the shit.

2011-09-28T21:55:00.002+04:00

Also yesterday evening, riot police clashed with the people from the pro-Yulia camp, spraying tear gas at the protesters at some point (Ukrainska Pravda wrote about it here; the Interior Ministry has confirmed the use of tear gas today).

It felt very weird to be there during the clashes. Only a few minutes ago, the angry elderly lady from the previous post was yelling at a guy who didn't deserve being yelled at - and now she was acting as a nurse, splashing water on a middle-aged man who seemed to have gotten very sick after a close encounter with riot cops. Only an hour or so ago, I was taking pictures at the pro-Yulia camp, a place full of somewhat eccentric but totally friendly people - and now there was all this pushing, pulling and screaming. It felt weird, and sad, and unnerving.

At the end of the video below, you can see some bottles being thrown at the cops, and then a tiny cloud of what looks like smoke appears briefly over the people's heads: I was filming from the other side of Khreshchatyk by then - and now I wonder if this is what tear gas looks like from a distance...

2011-09-28T20:35:00.001+04:00

Yesterday evening, when Yulia Tymoshenko was expected to emerge from the court, her fans gathered to greet her and ended up blocking the passage in front of the court's archway, a rather narrow path between Khreshchatyk stores and the two camps, along which "ordinary" people uninvolved in all this politics were crossing from one side of the block to the other. Upon reaching the court, these unsuspecting pedestrians had to turn around and walk all the way back to the underground pass near Besarabka.

Everyone seemed not too happy about this situation, including at least one of Yulia's elderly fans, who was extremely angry with all these apolitical intruders. She told one man to go to Yanukovych for help, assuming that he was a Yanukovych fan - and he replied that he didn't give a damn about Yanukovych, thanked the residents of Donbass for "such a president" and explained to the elderly lady that he just wanted to reach the other end of the block. She was still mad at him, and her hostility forced him to this conclusion about the pro- and anti-Yulia camps: "A Zoo here, and a Zoo there."

This exchange was taking place while the Ukrainian anthem was playing in the background. It was still playing when the crowd - and the angry elderly lady - started chanting "Han'ba!" ("Shame!"). Later, they switched to the "Bandu het'!" ("Down with the gang!") chant.

2011-09-28T06:00:00.000+04:00

To imagine what it's been like to live and work on Khreshchatyk for much of this past summer and for much of this month, please watch this video at least five times in row, with the volume all the way up - and then imagine hearing all this constantly, over and over again, on weekdays and on weekends, from 9 AM to 8PM, for three months in a row, and also imagine hearing lots of music - Ukrainian songs, some of them good, some not so good, but all of them absolutely awful when played simultaneously - in between live speeches for your right ear and pre-recorded speeches for your left ear. (Just kidding. Or not.)

2011-09-28T03:51:00.004+04:00

Yulia Tymoshenko's trial - its final stage - has resumed today, and I spent some time in the evening walking around the pro-Yulia camp - and rushing past the fenced-off anti-Yulia camp.

The difference between the two is striking.

The pro-Yulia camp is an exhibition of all sorts of posters, political folklore and various hand-made items, all praising Yulia and making fun of Yanukovych and his bunch. You can walk all you want there, you can talk to people as much as you wish (though I felt better just taking pictures). Quite a lot of eccentric types are hanging out there, and the majority seem rather aged. Tired, too, but who wouldn't be, after a day spent in such a horribly noisy environment.

The anti-Yulia camp is populated with young flag-waving human robots. I know this because I can see them from my window - but these guys are invisible to those who just walk past their stretch of Khreshchatyk. Their flags and anti-Yulia slogans is all you get to see up close. A few of them stand by the entrances to their space - and they don't look like people eager to explain their presence on Khreshchatyk. And even if they were, I don't think it's physically possible to talk to them: their monstrous sound equipment is too close, and getting as far away from it as possible is the only thing you wish for. I've a feeling that these guys are preternaturally tireless - and brainless - but I'm probably just biased against them (as many others who work and live next to their camp are).

***

I also have a few videos of the clashes with riot police at the end of this first day - maybe I'll post them later tonight, maybe not.

***

All of today's photos are here.

2011-09-23T03:29:00.000+04:00

How wonderful it is to find myself at a place where there's plenty of fresh air, no politics, very few people, no noise, lots of flowers and enough space to walk for hours: Pirogovo/Pyrohiv, the open air museum of Ukrainian folk architecture...

2011-09-21T19:20:00.002+04:00

Most protesters at yesterday's rally by afgantsy, chernobyltsy and others looked like people who probably didn't own computers and definitely did not organize through Facebook or any other social networks.

There was no dance, song, music or pre-recorded speeches at this rally; there were many fatigues and medals, and at least one "Thanks to Donbass residents..." t-shirt.

The rally also included a rather successful storming of the Rada building (I, of course, missed it, but here are some photos and video from Ukrainska Pravda) - and this storming inspired the MPs to wait a bit with the legislation that would've cancelled benefits for the groups of Ukrainian citizens that the protesters represented.

It took just a few days for that lonely bunch of hunger-striking chernobyltsy by the Presidential Administration to evolve into a much more impressive entity. "Ты никому не нужен" ("No one needs you"), a line that seemed to be begging to attach itself to the image of that tiny, irrelevant group last week, has been replaced with "Никто, кроме нас" ("No one but us"), the Marines' slogan that one could hear occasionally by the Rada yesterday (as well as the name of an organization that seemed to be behind the protests: Всеукраїнська громадська організація «Ніхто крім нас» (НКН).

Here are all the pictures that I took:

2011-09-19T15:03:00.002+04:00

One of the many things I totally do not understand about Kyiv is why the Chocolate House in Lypky has been so neglected for the past 30 years or so.

They started holding various events there sometime last year (including an exhibition of some of Ilya Chichkan's works, which looked awesome in that setting - I do have a few pictures somewhere, should try to find them), and that's great - but not enough.

Right now, for example, there's a small theater puppet exhibition (and some of those puppets are truly great) - but one of the rooms is filled with drawings done by some 11-year-old girl - and I've absolutely nothing against her, but it seems like such an odd place to exhibit a kid's work...

Below are some of the interiors, puppets and kids' drawings (more photos are here):

2011-09-17T21:47:00.005+04:00

I keep thinking of Kyiv's size, of the fact that there are nearly as many people in this city as in the whole country of Croatia.

And at Georgi Gongadze's memorial yesterday there were many people - more than last year, I've been told.

Two hundred or so, including journalists, according to TSN.ua.

Surreal.

The day before, crowds of football fans flooded Kyiv's center on their way to the Dynamo Stadium. Thousands of them, it seemed.

And yesterday, a bunch of people walked slowly uphill from Maidan to the Presidential Administration building, with candles, chanting occasionally. A bunch that seemed both numerous and tiny, depending on what you compared it with. Angry honking from an asshole cab driver riding behind this group - a needless reminder that there were way more people in this huge city who couldn't care less.

(A few of my pictures from the event are here.)

While still at Maidan, I eavesdropped on a TV journalist carefully correcting an elderly woman she was interviewing: "Yes, but perhaps low pensions in Ukraine isn't what has brought you here today?"

Up at Bankova, as the names of the 63 journalists who lost their lives in the 20 years of Ukraine's independence were being read, Kuchma's ex-guard Mykola Melnychenko was rambling about something, looking very important, in front of a bunch of TV cameras.

A few dozen meters away, three or four Chernobyl liquidators lay on the ground, hunger-striking, irrelevant.

"Ты никому не нужен" - "No one needs you" - read a stencil near St. Sophia's Cathedral that I took a picture of earlier that day. Exactly.

2011-09-16T02:50:00.003+04:00

The pro-Yulia camp - and a Georgi Gongadze Sep. 16 memorial poster - on Khreshchatyk:

The anti-Yulia camp (all those flags on the other side of the street):

A very realistic photo of St. Sophia's Cathedral (and if the only thing you see at first is someone's shiny Toyota parked on a sidewalk, that's because this photo is, as I said, very realistic - Kyiv is full of nice, shiny cars that drive and park on sidewalks):

Kyiv is also full of riot cops now (partly due to politics, and partly due to a Dynamo Kyiv football game today, which we have managed not to lose thanks to a Croatian player on our team) - here's a photo of a grey bus used for their transportation (and a boy waiting to cross the street):

And finally, a short video, in which some guy in a car parked on the sidewalk is calling for Ukrainians to unite to fight the totalitarian regime, while others are thanking the residents of Donbass for a moron of a president (a complete video and photo report on the ugly mess that took place at and around Maidan today, see this piece in Ukrainska Pravda; some background in English at The Next Web here):

2011-09-15T02:40:00.000+04:00

Kyiv in mid-September...

2011-09-13T20:03:00.000+04:00

To make the transition from the wonderful island of Vis to the Besarabka nuthouse a bit more bearable, I've decided to re-read Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, one of my very favorite childhood books.

I've always remembered Durrell's descriptions of the Greek island of Corfu: mention an olive grove to me, for example, and even now I would still immediately think of his book.

But six years ago, in 2005, when we first went to the Assos/Çanakkale/Küçükkuyu area, which is relatively far from Corfu, but is still totally part of the same ancient, amazing land, I realized something funny: as a child growing up in Ukraine, where it rains pretty often in summer, I could never imagine a land so dry - and it turned out that all those images from Durrell's book that I had kept in my mind all those years had to be sort of re-painted, desaturated, once I found myself in the more or less actual setting of the book.

I think I first realized it when we took a walk from our friends' house, located above a mountainous village, down to the sea, passing some of the olive groves along the way. I remember looking at the olive trees and thinking: so sturdy, they seem to grow out of rocks and are capable of withstanding powerful winds - and there's no emerald green grass growing anywhere around these trees, or anywhere at all here...

Back in the Ukrainian village where I was reading Durrell's book as a kid, there was a river, and the grass covering its banks was indeed emerald green - and so lush. And even though we used to spend many of our summers back then in Crimea, in Sevastopol, a land that's probably as dry as the Mediterranean, my mind somehow chose to cling to the more "northern" imagery, found nowhere in Durrell's book, obviously.

I've been thinking of this curious perception error all these years, including this summer on Vis. And now that I'm finally re-reading Durrell's book, I first see my initial, childish, picture of the place, the wrong one, the greener one - and then, as vividly, I see the real picture, so familiar to me now as well, so dear. And so beautiful, in a totally different kind of way.

2011-09-13T03:32:00.000+04:00

(I really like Storify.com - helps make Twitter a little bit less of an abyss and a maze...)

2011-09-12T21:55:00.000+04:00

It took Vimeo forever to process these seven minutes of the cacophony outside, filmed from inside our room in the early afternoon, with a couple of windows partly open.

The quality's awful, but - just for the record.

I know that no sane person will have the energy to watch this thing, and I've no energy to edit it, or to explain what they are yelling about Yulia Tymoshenko, her gas deals with Gazprom, her debts to Russia and other evils - after a day like this, I can't really hear myself think.

As for the music, at first, there's their idiotic anthem, which I must've heard at least 50 times today and as many times yesterday, and then, at the end of this video, there's some Volodymyr Ivasyuk with Ya Pidu V Daleki Hory from the pro-Yulia camp - and some beautiful Ukrainian signing from the anti-Yulia camp - but they both sound predictably horrible when played simultaneously...

2011-09-10T21:05:00.001+04:00

Finally, I've opened the windows and recorded a little bit of the sound that has been coming non-stop, from around 9AM to around 8PM, seven days a week, since early July or so, from the anti-Yulia and pro-Yulia camps right across the street from us.

Nearly five minutes of Oleh Kalashnikov's recurring pre-recorded speech (and here's a rather cute picture of him) and his organization's anthem - and some Ukrainian choir music in the background, from the pro-Yulia camp.

Enjoy! :)

2011-09-10T01:38:00.000+04:00

2011-08-30T15:05:00.001+04:00

There's a little shop up the street from us, and its elderly owner is an unfriendly woman whose face is like a fist with unsmiling lips, unsmiling eyes and a potato of a nose on it. We were buying ice-cream from her a few days ago, and she tried to guess where we were from by the language we were speaking.

Czechs?

No. Well, not really. Ukrainians.

At some point, I told her how lovely Croatia was.

She spoke Croatian to us, but I understood her response: yes, it is beautiful, but it is hopeless here, no opportunities.

I tried to protest: but Komiza is such a wonder, a paradise on earth, raj na zemlji.

And she said, with muted anger: right, come here in winter and see - there is nothing.

And I said that I understood exactly what she meant. Because, somehow, I did. Though I would still prefer to spend my winters here, by the sea, than in our part of the world, no matter what.

And then I thought that perhaps it was winter, not all those idiotic politicians, that was actually to blame for so many of our problems.

And I also realized that I would've probably heard the same desperately gloomy opinions on winter from the locals of the Aegean Coast of Turkey - more than once, during the three or four of our wonderful summer visits there - had it not been for the impenetrable language barrier between us.

2011-08-16T03:47:00.000+04:00

Too tired to write much now, but I really wanted to share these photos of the lovely place that we are staying at here in Komiža: Insulae Apartmani (the Facebook page is here). We spent the month of July here and have just returned after two weeks at another place for the rest of our time on Vis. It's the coziest and the friendliest place in the world!!!

2011-08-13T03:48:00.000+04:00

For the first month in Komiža, we stayed at Insulae Apartmani, a wonderful place run by wonderful people. At the beginning of high season, we moved to another place, just a couple minutes away, and now we are about to move back to Insulae for the remaining three weeks here. Packing and moving isn't too much fun, but change is exciting, especially for Marta. Below are some pics from this second place, which is also very, very nice:

2011-08-06T06:03:00.000+04:00

Keep forgetting to mention that Marta now has a photo blog - Marta on Otok Vis: photos she's taking here, selected and posted by me.

:)

2011-08-06T05:44:00.000+04:00

We are still on the island, and I'm too far behind with posting photos.

To jump-start myself, I've compiled images of the island's lovely doors, windows and miscellaneous dwellings:

2011-07-17T03:28:00.001+04:00

Misha and I got married on July 15, 2005 - and the last time I saw my father was on July 16, 2007.

July 15 is supposed to be a very happy day, and I was doing my best to feel happy yesterday, tried very hard to fend off the sadness, to postpone it for just one day.

Today, a swallow flew into one of our windows in the morning, crossed the room, nearly colliding with me, and flew out of the window on the other side of the room. It didn't seem to panic - maybe it wasn't the first for it here - and I thought it was a good sign, because birds are cool.

I went for a long walk in the afternoon, up a mostly narrow path high above the sea, where the hot air is filled with the amazing smell of rosemary and pine trees, and the views are incredible, and there are no people around.

The two-hour walk was both exhausting and invigorating. I wish I didn't hate hats and wore one on this walk. But I never do. That's my only regret.

I kept thinking about papa, about his long last walk somewhere in the forest and in the fields, in the summer heat, lost, four years ago.

I kept thinking of how good it was to know where I was and where I was going to and why, to know the way back, to know that Marta and Misha were waiting for me at the beach, to have my cell phone with me, just in case. It was good to remember that I had the keys to our apartment with me, and that I had to turn around and walk back eventually because of that. It was good to know exactly who I was, to remember my name, age and all, as well as today's date, despite some lightheadedness caused by the heat.

I felt grateful for all this routine knowledge that kept me safe during this walk.

And I hoped, the way I always do during my marathon walks, that my father was somehow there with me, in awe of all I was in awe of.

2011-07-13T04:09:00.001+04:00

Komiža - July 5, 2011

2011-07-12T03:49:00.002+04:00

Komiža, July 3, 2011:

2011-07-08T17:33:00.000+04:00

The wonderful town of Vis, a 15-minute ride away from Komiža - no way to walk there, though, because of the mountains:

2011-07-08T16:29:00.007+04:00

To get used to the language, I watch Croatian TV every now and then, and, also every now and then, I understand some things that are being said.

I've already seen two broadcasts from the Croatian Parliament (Hrvatski sabor), and, boring as it may be, I've still caught a few interesting things.

During today's session, for example, they were voting for something, and I really liked their procedure: the speaker (or his deputy or whatever) stood by the microphone, calling each MP's name - and each MP present then responded with a loud "za" or "protiv" (for/against). There was no sound from those who were absent, obviously - though when ex-PM Ivo Sanader's name was called, there was a cheerful, noisy reaction from some MPs (Sanader has been in an Austrian prison on corruption charges since Dec. 2010). After the vote was completed, the speaker read the names of those absent once again, to make sure they were actually not there. And then they counted the votes.

Such a lo-tech, uncool procedure, right? But so much more efficient than the relatively hi-tech one that we have in Ukraine, which allows our assholes to cheat like crazy (see this GV text by Tetyana Bohdanova on one really embarrassing episode of cheating, witnessed by a Polish delegation - and the video of it is below).

UPDATE: A local friend has just explained to me that this lo-tech voting system is normally used in special cases, while the routine voting is done electronically, just like everywhere else.

Yesterday's vote for changes in the war veterans' rights legislation failed - they needed 102 votes in favor of it, but only 101 MPs were present - and there was no space for them to cheat in, even if they wanted to. (An item about it in English is here, with a mention of the laughing caused by Ivo Sanader's name being called.)

Meanwhile in Ukraine, they've passed the pension reform, and the voting was done the usual, backasswards, way, of course. Here's what LEvko of Foreign Notes wrote about it:

Today, [Friday] laws on pension reforms which will directly affect the lives of every Ukrainian citizen, were passed in parliament. Now every Ukrainian will have to work several years longer before achieving retirement.

248 deputies voted in support of the motion even though it seems only 143 deputies were actually registered to vote in the parliament building.

Multiple voting by deputies is a blantant contravention of the country's Constitution, but takes place with numbing regularity. [...]

LEvko also wrote about Yanukovych's reaction to being told that his son had been caught voting for other MPs:

[...] Also today, President Yanukovych, who is 'Guarantor of the Constitution', was asked at a press conference why his younger, parliamentary deputy son, Viktor, had voted in the past in parliament for other deputies in their absence, thus contravening to the Constitution.

His reply? - "When children are picked on - this is something else. I assure you I am not ashamed of my children, my family....When children are dragged into this dirt into which you are trying to drag my children, my family. You could pick on my grandchildren, the oldest is 11 years old - come on, let's go after them too." [...]

Here's the video of Yanukovych's son doing the multiple voting thing:

2011-07-04T14:13:00.000+04:00

A few bunches of last week's pictures, from Split and Komiža (no time to write anything):

2011-06-29T02:50:00.000+04:00

We've made it to Split, Croatia, today!

It's a wonderful city, reminds Misha of Venice, but I've never been there, so it reminded me of Lviv - Lviv with the sea.

At first, I felt very disoriented: I'm too used to Turkey, haven't been anywhere but Turkey in the past decade, and here, before we got to the Old Town, the scenery was more or less like the Çanakkale area - and it's all South to me, of course, the awesome Mediterranean, the Promised Land! - but the language was so different, and I understood even less of it, because my ears, obviously, thought they'd be hearing Turkish once abroad...

Our first coherent conversation in Croatia was with a cab driver, in English - about football: the UEFA Euro 2012, which we are hosting with Poland - and which could've taken place in Croatia and Hungary instead, if we hadn't won the bid.

The driver also told us about last summer's wildfires here: on the way from the airport, it's hard not to notice the dead, black forest in the distance, at the feet of the mountains that wall off the seaside area. Very sad and scary.

The Old Town is, as I said, wonderful, but we were very upset to discover too many homophobic writings on the walls of the old buildings. I had read about the assault on the gay pride parade in Split just a few weeks ago, but seeing the hateful leftovers all around us was still very unsettling. I wish I didn't understand Croatian at all - the way I don't understand Turkish: I would've preferred to remain ignorant and more idealistic, and I feel terribly upset (though not surprised at all) that this amazingly beautiful place is suddenly so transparent - and that some of it looks so similar to our own part of the world, which is also filled with hateful schmucks.

I'm falling asleep as I type now, so here are the photos that I took today - both of the good things that we saw and of the bad:

2011-06-24T15:30:00.004+04:00

Yulia Tymoshenko's trial has started with two rallies on Khreshchatyk today: her supporters were a lot more numerous than her opponents. The latter seemed piled together with the former somewhere on the other side of Khreshchatyk by the building of the court, and I have failed to identify them visually when I crossed the street, even though I knew they were there because of the peculiar music - the so-called chanson - that they played very loudly, to block the sound of the pro-Yulia rally.

Many elderly people were out there today, and Yulia's buddy Turchynov even tried to make a joke, saying that these pensioners were ready for a rebellion. I felt pity for them, because they had to stand for hours in the sun, and no one had thought of supplying them with free drinking water (I do think they should have, whoever organized this rally), and then there was a really wild thunderstorm, and they probably had nowhere to hide from it - or had to run for shelter, which isn't easy for people their age. Anyway, their lives are tough in general, this rally isn't a picnic either - but they are tough, too, so the rally continues, despite crazy weather.

Below are some photos - and maybe I'll have enough for Part 2 later today. It's been a long time for me since the last rally I took pictures at, so I find it really interesting.

***

Update:

I've added 15 more pictures and a tiny video to today's set.

The post-rain part of the pro-Yulia rally was a depressing sight.

Tons of garbage everywhere; some of the protesters who were still there looked exhausted and demoralized; a few, however, still oozed with naive enthusiasm.

Two old men from the opposing camps got into an argument, which later evolved into a very brief fight, but a man who looked like one of the rally's organizers got involved and had them calm down:

One of the protesters next to me talked to someone who had been inside the court building: it was terribly hot in there, he said, a small room with a hundred people in it, everyone sweating like crazy.

Someone praised the protesters from the stage, noting that they were heroes - and indeed, they were, for it was already 3 PM and they had been on Khreshchatyk for nine hours by then, since 6 AM. It's 4:30 PM now, and they're still playing music, chanting and making speeches out there, though I've no idea if anyone's still left. I guess they are waiting for Yulia to get out of the courthouse.

On my way to the other side of Khreshchatyk, I noticed these elderly women selling flowers and berries:

They had nothing to do with the rally, or with politics in general, they were the near-Besarabka regulars - but what struck me was that they could've easily been part of the rally crowd - they seemed to fit in perfectly, at least visually. And this observation is what I'll probably remember best from today.

This, and the drunk man asleep in the sandbox at our playground...

2011-06-18T05:30:00.000+04:00

It was an insomnia-inspired walk that lasted from around 6 a.m. to around 9 a.m. An adventure, in a way, for I usually stay up much of the night, working or reading, and eventually fall asleep angry with myself for being such a vampire. In summertime I suffer the most: the sun is up and the birds are singing way too early, around 4 a.m., always catching me unprepared, still not sleepy enough. And I've always dreamed of being a morning person - because, I imagine, it's easier to be that way. But I'm not, and whenever I'm out early, I feel that the world is upside down, and the people who move around me with such ease are either aliens or robots.

For a long time, I've been very curious to see what Kyiv is like in the morning, so even though my last night's futile attempts to fall asleep had exhausted me, I was filled with some sort of a crazy enthusiasm when I set out on this walk. It turned out to be a pretty interesting, dreamlike experience, but I was upset to realize that taking pictures in the morning wasn't my thing at all somehow. All this endless walking and photographing that I normally do in late afternoons has always appealed to me because of its dreamy spontaneity; today (or should I call it yesterday already?) I've realized that my constant efforts to stay fully awake during this walk were taking all the fun out of the process. I ended up having more pictures in my mind than on my camera. Dreamlike pictures, some of them too subtle to describe in words.

Khreshchatyk was empty, with no one (or almost no one) driving on its sidewalks. If I still had a bicycle, I caught myself thinking, I'd go for an early-morning ride, the way I did once or twice in the late 1990s.

The air, unfortunately, had a really unpleasant smell - possibly, due to all the public toilets set up on Khreshchatyk, or because of all the drunks who populate the area at night, when the toilets are closed.

At 6 a.m., there were a few homeless people sitting on the benches, occasional bunches of tipsy young people returning from night clubs, and a water truck riding slowly along the sidewalk, stopping next to every tree and light pole with flowers hanging on it, and the driver, who was dispensing water from the hose right from his cabin, got into a fight with a cabbie at one point, because the cabbie didn't want to leave the spot he was parked at, right by a tree, and the driver didn't want to water him and his car together with that tree.

By 7 a.m., there were street cleaners everywhere, mostly the elderly local folks, unlike in Moscow, where a typical street cleaner is a young Central Asian male. An old woman was sweeping stuff from memorial plaques near the Unknown Soldier monument: she looked like a dedicated volunteer, with her ragged old broom and a white plastic bag to put the garbage in.

There were pigeons in almost every backyard I passed through: some were already being fed by compassionate elderly women, others were waiting for their guardian angels to wake up. In front of the Lavra, it was a man in a wheelchair who was feeding the pigeons. In the park, I saw people walking their dogs AND feeding a bunch of young black strays.

Around 7:30 a.m., buses and marshrutkas were already crowded as hell, and those mysterious morning people were marching in droves to their offices from the Arsenalna subway station, so very awake and energetic, so unlike me the somnambulist.

At 8:30 a.m., there was a minor traffic jam in the Presidential Administration neighborhood, the streetlights were off at the Bankova/Instytutska intersection, replaced by a cop in the middle of the street, which probably meant that Yanukovych was about to arrive to work. Two hours earlier and a few blocks away, when there were still only a few cars and a few people around, an extremely voluptuous middle-aged woman entered the huge Cabinet of Ministers building through its imposing front door: my guess is she was their head cook or something.

2011-06-12T14:27:00.001+04:00

Serbia's arrest of Mladic "might be a very strong turning point" for the Serbia-EU thing, someone wrote in a comment on GV yesterday.

It usually horrifies me to imagine a similar scenario for Ukraine, but I do get carried away sometimes.

First, half a decade of war. Then, business as usual, sort of, and also catching some of the war criminals, at a rather leisurely pace, leaving the most odious ones for dessert - at which point everyone around is so tired of waiting that they let you in without even lifting their heads to look at you. Something like that. War as the EU's entrance fee, more or less.

(There's the Russia factor, of course: Russia may be happy or unhappy about Serbia joining the EU - or both - but who cares.)

I'm so happy Ukraine has managed to stay sane and peaceful over the past two decades, but I do wonder sometimes what we have to do to get to our own "strong turning point" - or at least to have them allow us to travel to Europe visa-free, the way they allowed Serbian citizens a year and a half ago...

2011-06-12T13:21:00.000+04:00

Another bunch of pictures from a whole day of walking yesterday. I wish I weren't so exhausted, I wish I could write a little about some of these photos, and about other stuff that I've seen and heard lately, I wish I could write anything at all now, I miss writing, but I'm so incredibly tired, and also a little bit sick, so here are just the day's pictures...

2011-06-09T02:24:00.000+04:00

This deserves a special entry:

2011-06-09T02:22:00.000+04:00

Took another lovely marathon walk today - below are some pics:

2011-06-07T03:59:00.003+04:00

Half a month ago, I posted these two pictures of the sparrows that Marta and I were feeding at the park in Moscow, and I showed them to mama today, she loved them, and then she went out and came back with two baby sparrows that she found in the grass on Khreshchatyk. Had we lived in some park, she would've left them there, for their parents to continue caring for them. But on Khreshchatyk there are too many people and too many cars, this place is a bit too tough even for humans, no way these poor birdies would've survived it.

Our cat is growing more and more interested in them, and they require more or less constant feeding, but I do hope they'll survive. Mama is a former biologist, and she has tons of positive experience with all sorts of ordinary birds and animals: we've had pigeons and crows at home, and frogs and rats, and cats and dogs. Life is never boring in our family.

I looked up baby sparrow feeding tips on the web: turns out that in the States one needs some special permit to keep a sparrow at home - because sparrows are considered wild animals or something there. Which they are, of course, but still, I wonder if it's true about the permit.

On a different note, I saw a Svoboda Party rally against political repressions today - it was a comparatively small one, they were moving down to Khreshchatyk from the Shevchenko Park, and there were plenty of cops around them - as well as around the Lenin monument and the communist tent next to it. Haven't seen anything in the news about this rally yet.

And when I was walking past the 5-star Premier Palace Hotel on Shevchenko Boulevard in the evening, an elderly priest (or was he a monk?) asked me for some change: he was dressed in a neat black robe, had a neat beard - but the golden/gilded/shiny cross on his chest was too huge, too conspicuous, too in-your-face. I asked him where he was from, and he said, Konotop, in Ukrainian. His left eye was missing. I had a fleeting thought that he might be just posing as a priest (or a monk), but I gave him some money anyway - because even if he was a fake, he still didn't look like one of those Premier Palace guests to me.

Back home, we watched "Rio" with mama and Marta, to mark the arrival of the baby sparrows.

And an hour or so ago, I saw a very tall bum down at the playground: he was collecting empty bottles into a white plastic bag. He drank up whatever remained in a couple of those bottles, and seeing him do it made me really sad, even though this is definitely not the first time I observe something like this at this playground.

And it all got me thinking of food chains.

Baby sparrows feeding on the soaked cat food that our cat can't eat because of his health problems; the cat who'd really like to eat the sparrows, and that unhealthy cat food as well, but is on a diet; an eccentric-looking priest/monk who is quite conveniently begging for money next to a 5-star hotel; communists camping by the Lenin monument across the street from the 5-star hotel, and their Svoboda adversaries, all part of the really lucrative political food chain; local cops who seem to be regularly making some pocket money off the young people who drink beer illegally outside; a bum who makes some cash by collecting empty cans and bottles, and also gets to fill up on the beer and gin & tonic left over by those young people who got busted by the cops; and, finally, another bum, who is at the playground right now, surveying the locations already covered by his colleague - he leaves with nothing except for a large cup of cola from some fast food place that he came with, most likely a find from another dump.

2011-06-06T02:16:00.001+04:00

I took a really long, relaxed walk today. Much longer than yesterday. Once again, I didn't have any specific route in mind, just kept walking, looking around and taking pictures. Kyiv is so different from its winter self now. It is so gentle and so friendly. This friendliness has nothing to do with other people, friendly or not. It's the friendliness of a city that allows me to walk for hours on my own, never feeling lonely, bored or uncomfortable. Not even tired.

2011-06-04T19:14:00.001+04:00

Can't stand to see this blog so neglected - but somehow Facebook and Twitter keep getting most of my attention...

So here's a quick photoset from my first walk in Kyiv this summer (we've just arrived today) - I posted these pictures on Facebook as well, of course, and on Flickr, and I'll tweet the link, too - I swear I can't stand being fractured like this, and also repeating myself constantly, but I can't help it, either...

2011-05-27T03:32:00.000+04:00

Ernest Hemingway to Martha Gellhorn, after she had gotten hysterical from observing child labor and a bunch of other horrifying things in Hongkong in early 1941 (from Mr Ma's Tigers/Travels With Myself and Another):

"The trouble with you, M., is that you think everybody is exactly like you. What you can't stand, they can't stand. What's hell for you has to be hell for them. How do you know what they feel about their lives? If it was as bad as you think, they'd kill themselves instead of having more kids and setting off fireworks."

2011-05-24T11:25:00.000+04:00

A Filipino cleaning lady, who has two kids back home and is pregnant with her third one right now, works at least half a dozen jobs here in Moscow to support her family so far away. Her husband joined her half a year ago and works alongside her: a four-hour job now takes two hours to complete. She misses her kids terribly, talks to them on Skype. She has seen her 4-year-old younger daughter only once in the past three years, for a month. In the fall, she'll travel to the Philippines to give birth, but her husband will stay behind and continue working. When the new baby turns six months old, she'll return to Moscow.

2011-05-24T05:08:00.003+04:00

From my Dear Diary, Nov. 28, 2008:

6 AM, rainy and cold, disgusting outside. From the balcony, I'm observing a guy who, with the help of a flashlight, is searching through the garbage containers and is also going through all the crap strewn around on the ground down below. As he's leaving, he tiptoes very carefully to the side, to avoid stepping into a puddle right in front of him - as if he's got something to lose if he gets his feet wet...

2011-05-22T04:51:00.000+04:00

So interesting to read about the Meiji period (1868-1912) in Japan in Ian Buruma's book - and when I reached the passage quoted below, I was, quite unexpectedly, reminded of the Turkish history:

Writing almost a century later, the novelist Mishima Yukio could still work himself into a rage about the superficial primness of the Meiji years. Prohibitions on public nudity, mixed bathing, and other embarrassing signs of "the coarse and the mean" stemmed less from native prudery than from fear of foreign disapproval.

I was even more surprised to run into a mention of Pierre Loti in the subsequent paragraph: the French novelist's Istanbul "headquarters" on top of the hill in Eyüp offers a great view of the Golden Horn/Haliç and is a lovely place to visit. Turns out Pierre Loti had recorded some of his observations - "supercilious and probably quite accurate" - of the Japanese "Europeanization" attempts in 1885, well before Turkey took a similar path:

The exterior of the [Deer Cry Pavilion], designed by a British architect in a mixture of high Victorian, French Empire and Italian Renaissance styles, was likened by Loti to a provincial French spa. He thought the Japanese gentlemen, dressed up in suits of tails, looked like performing monkeys, and the ladies, lining the walls like tapestries in their hoops and flounces and satin trains, were, well, "remarkable." Doing their best to strike the proper European attitudes, gentlemen puffed Havana cigars and played whist, while others picked at the truffles and pâté and ice-cream sorbets laid out on the buffet tables. A French orchestra struck up operetta tunes, while a German band played polkas, mazurkas, and waltzes. Loti: "They danced quite properly, my Japanese in Parisian gowns. But one sense that it is something drilled into them that they perform like automatons, without any personal initiative. If by change they lose the beat, they have to be stopped and started all over again."

And then this - which brings to mind the more recent Turkish history:

It is easy to laugh at all this with Pierre Loti. But the intention behind the entertainment was serious. Inoue Kaoru was foreign minister in his friend Ito Hirobumi's cabinet. They hoped that rapid Westernization would make foreign powers treat Japan as an equal and thus agree to relinquish their privileges under the unequal treaties. [...] To critics of this kind of thing, Ito's government became known as "the dancing cabinet."

And, finally, this:

When it became clear that Western diplomats and writers were quite willing to dance, but not to revise the treaties as a result of Inoue's hospitality, the foreign minister's star began to fade. His policy was discredited, and in 1889 the Deer Cry Pavilion was sold to a private club. A backlash against all the Westernizing had already begun by then. The building, alas, is no more.

2011-05-19T01:52:00.000+04:00

On the way back home tonight, Marta and I ended up taking a cab, after having spent at least 20 minutes at a shitty bus stop, waiting for a trolleybus that never came.

The car was some sort of a Lada, I guess. The driver appeared to be either a Caucasus or a Central Asia native, rather young. I offered him 200 rubles, he asked softly to please make it 300, and Marta and I were too tired for me to engage in bargaining. The car's windows were tinted to such an extent that I almost fell asleep as soon as I got in, but Marta kept talking, so that saved me from embarrassing myself (what if I snored, right?).

At one point, she praised the car loudly, calling it "stylish," and I noticed that the driver began to smile. She also did quite a lot of reading of the largest logos along the way: Hitachi was one, and I explained that it was a Japanese company, and we discussed hiragana and kanji a little, and then she saw Rosgosstrakh written in really huge letters, unpronounceable and incomprehensible nevertheless, and she couldn't read it herself, of course, and I did my best to explain the basics of insurance business to her, using Iowa and tornadoes as the example, for some reason, and Marta asked if it was possible for a tree to insure itself against a storm. Since everything Marta and I talked about was funny in a cute way, I don't remember at which point the driver turned around, laughing, and asked how old Marta was.

When we got to our neighborhood, it turned out I only had a 500-ruble bill, and the driver, of course, didn't have any change, so he stopped by the kiosk and went to buy himself something and thus obtain 200 rubles for me. We sat in the car, waiting for him, listening to the 10PM newscast, with Marta commenting sadly on the sad news of a collapsed building somewhere in Vladimir. Then the driver came back, handed me the change - and presented Marta with a small pack of apple juice with a straw! We were totally delighted. I asked him where he was from - Tajikistan - and I said "rakhmat," thanking him, and Marta repeated after me, because she is by now used to thanking cab drivers in their native languages.

I do love Moscow sometimes.

2011-05-16T04:32:00.002+04:00

Ten years since my last day in the States and NYC today/yesterday - May 15, 2001... I always remember pointless dates like this one (and in between these dates, I usually need a calendar to know what day it is)...

Anyway, it got me feeling nostalgic, so I took out my Dear Diary 2001 - and, among other things, found this clipping from the Financial Times (that I most likely picked on the connecting Paris-Moscow flight on May 16), about the late Victor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin and another dimension of "the language issue" (a somewhat distorted/exaggerated take on it):

Excuse me?
FT, May 16, 2001

Victor Chernomyrdin's appointment as Russia's new ambassador to Ukraine may have taken many people by surprise, but he will have at least one advantage in his new job.

Onserver learns that he and Leonid Kuchma, the president of Ukraine, speak a slang-ridden version of Russian that is almost incomprehensible even for close associates to understand.

Given all the secretly recorded conversations that seem to have leaked from Kuchma's office in recent months, including a tape-recording of alleged instructions to kill a journalist, any future discussions between Kuchma and Chernomyrdin would leave any Russian or Ukrainian enemies scratching their heads in bewilderment. Not to mention any CIA moles who might be listening in.

2011-05-16T03:06:00.000+04:00

According to Ukrainska Pravda (UKR), Victor Yushchenko said this on May 15:

Національною мовою не говорять лише окупанти, раби і дурні.

***

Only occupiers, slaves and fools do not speak the national language.

Back in October 2010, I was somewhat surprised to see a variation of this quote - it had "a guest" instead of "fools" - at a small pro-Ukrainian rally in Kyiv:

Back then, I was surprised because the quote was attributed to Karl Marx, of all people.

Here's what I wrote about it on my Tumblr blog (now deserted; three more pics from that rally - here, here, here):

[...] The quote on the poster that these young people are holding is allegedly from Karl Marx. The main idea of the quote is that it’s okay only for “a guest, a slave and an occupier” to be speaking a language that’s not the official language of the state they are in.

I think it’s ironic that they would need Marx to help them defend the Ukrainian language. A friend’s explanation that this is a neo-Marxist thing doesn’t make much sense to me. I even thought it was some kind of a joke that I didn’t get, but this friend of mine - a Ukrainian poet, among other things - doesn’t think so.

Before translating this quote here, I decided to search for the original - and ended up reading through a whole bunch of Marx & Engels stuff, for the first time in my life (I was a bad student back in the Soviet times when, I guess, we were supposed to read all that). I’ve discovered many interesting things (seriously) - but failed to find the source of the quote. Failed to find any mention of it in English, too.

Moreover, it seems to be only found online in the context of the ‘language issue’ in Ukraine. At least once, they used a variation of this quote at a pro-Ukrainian rally in Lviv. The wording differs from site to site, and a more democratic rendition says that those who cannot speak the state language of the country they are in are either guests, slaves or occupiers.

If there are any Marxists or Marx experts reading this, or just someone who is better at searching than I am, please help me find out whether Marx really said this and, if he did, where - and also what the original wording was. I’m really, really curious. [...]

And now I'm very curious again: who said it first - and how did the original sound???

2011-05-16T02:27:00.001+04:00

A note on the ancient prejudices, misperceptions, hatreds...

I'm reading Ian Buruma's Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 now (on Kindle - yay!!!), and here's a tiny insight on how Europeans were viewed in Japan sometime in the 17th century:

The popular image of the Dutch was that of exotic beasts, who lifted their legs, like dogs, when they relieved themselves.

It reminded me of what I had read about a Ukrainian view of the Tatars, in a novel about Roksolana/Hürrem Sultan, written by Osyp Nazaruk (I haven't finished it; another novel about Roksolana, by Pavlo Zahrebelnyi, I also have not finished - regret it, in both cases):

Розуміла, що прийдеться їй стати невольницею або, може, жінкою одної з тих брудних потворів, про які ще вдома оповідала їй бабуня, що вони родяться сліпі, як собаки.

***

She understood that she'd be forced to become a slave or, perhaps, a wife of one of those dirty monsters, who, her grandma used to tell her still back at home, were born blind, like dogs.

And the author's short annotation to this passage:

Автентичне повір'я нашого народу про татар.

***

Our people's authentic belief about the Tatars.

2011-05-09T03:34:00.001+04:00

In one of the previous posts, I've covered - and embarrassed myself in the process :) - some of what's written on the railing of the Luzhniki-Vorobyovy Gory Bridge in Moscow.

Here's another picture taken on that bridge:

And here's some of what's going on underneath the bridge - pretty awesome and, in the case of all those teens flying up and down on their bikes and skateboards, absolutely breathtaking:

2011-05-08T23:06:00.001+04:00

More flower pictures - I wish spring lasted forever... :)

2011-05-08T05:35:00.005+04:00

(UPDATE: This post doesn't make as much sense now as it did initially, because I - haha! - mistook Chinese for Japanese in the text written on the bridge railing! Thank you, Little Miss Moi, for your great explanation! I did have some doubts of my own at one point, but was too sleepy to give them serious thought... :) I would have posted these pictures anyway, even if I had known it was Chinese, not Japanese - and I'm still very curious about what it says there, and I hope it's not something too inappropriate! Sorry if it is!)

A month or so ago, I bought myself a bunch of Japanese textbooks and iPhone apps, and started learning hiragana. Sort of suddenly. I now feel like a kid learning to write, once again. Last time it happened to me was in 1996-98, when I was learning to write in Arabic and Armenian. And it's making me extremely happy.

We're also watching Hayao Miyazaki's wonderful, amazing films all the time. Again, total happiness. Mixed with sadness.

And every now and then, I keep running into traces of Japanese in real life here in Moscow.

On the door of the elevator in our building, for example, someone had scribbled Neko Nyan ^_^. At first, my eyes caught the word "neko" ("cat"), one of the few Japanese words that I know, and I thought that I was, well, seeing things, but then I noticed those cat ears, so Marta and I googled it at home and learned about Chocotto Sister anime and its ending theme, the Neko-Nyan Dance:

Today, a Facebook friend shared a video about this charmingly silly device, Nekomimi (Cat Ears):

Also today, as we were crossing the bridge over the Moscow River at Vorobyovy Gory, I saw this text written on the railing - and now I'm so curious about its meaning. Someone, please help!!! (And, in case it says something nasty and inappropriate, I do apologize to those who know ~~Japanese~~ Chinese.)

#1

(A comment in Russian by someone who's most likely as clueless as I am: "Completely agree.")

#2

#3

#4

#5.1

("What is it?" - in Russian, in addition to "WTF?")

#5.2

(And they also think it's in Chinese: "A Chinese Corner.")

(Ha, and suddenly I'm having doubts as well - what if it is, indeed, Chinese, not Japanese??? Ouch.)

#6

("We're the champions..." - from MGIMO students; something in Japanese; and a German quote from Bill Kaulitz/Tokio Hotel fans.)

There was much more on that railing, including "I love you" in the Tatar language, but since I'm interested in Japanese now, I only took pictures of the stuff above.

Again, I'd love to know the translation! (I hope it's something as innocent and silly as those cat ears, and not some evil curses.)

:)

2011-05-07T02:24:00.001+04:00

A ton of flowers (55 photos):

2011-05-05T04:17:00.001+04:00

Marta and I stood watching these ballerina girls rehearse something by the river today (click to enlarge):

(The Moscow State Academy of Choreography is a couple of blocks away.)

2011-04-30T04:34:00.000+04:00

Hitchcock, a block away from Kremlin:

2011-04-30T04:17:00.000+04:00

Living next to a church in Moscow (click to enlarge):

2011-04-30T03:59:00.003+04:00

An old, wooden building in downtown Moscow (click to enlarge):

2011-04-27T18:36:00.002+04:00

Traffic in downtown Moscow is horrible. And now that the weather is finally so nice, this comes as something of a shock, somehow.

But - I've seen a middle-aged traffic cop today who was smiling a genuine, human smile to a cute young girl on a moped, who, for some reason, had smiled to him first as she passed him on Bolshaya Nikitskaya.

I've also seen a traffic cop today who shouted an unusually friendly "ay-ay-ay" to a woman who decided not to bother walking all the way to the intersection and was instead crossing the street illegally, right in front of his car.

And, almost sadly (in this context, at least), I've seen a traffic cop who was talking on his cell phone about his kid's cold and low-grade fever.

2011-04-25T04:21:00.000+04:00

An elderly, fat, homeless mutt was running down the dusty street, thinking: "I have survived. I have survived winter."

A tiny, young Yorkshire Terrier was riding a bicycle down by the river, squeezed into a leather bag that her gorgeous owner had tied to the rack over the rear wheel. They were going very fast. The poor thing was thinking: "I hope I'll survive this ride. I hope I'll survive."

All this on the second truly warm day of spring 2011 in Moscow. The 55th day of the actual, calendar, spring.

2011-04-22T05:39:00.000+04:00

This note is pasted on one of the first-floor windows of an old building on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, which, I assume, houses the Moscow city branch of the Russian Writers' Union.

It reads like something from the 1980s, very sour in a Soviet kind of way, very pitiful. Very uninspiring.

But they mean well, so I wish them to succeed. Or - I hope they'll feel as if they've succeeded.

Internet is a path to the reader!

The Moscow City Organization of the Writers' Union of Russia is launching a program aimed at creating a centralized system of personal WEB-pages [sic] for writers who are members of the MCO WU of Russia.

From now on, every writer will have an opportunity to post on the Internet, under the aegis of the MCO WU of Russia, [his/her] biographic and bibliographic data, information on awards and achievements, as well as [his/her] works!

An application form and instructions on how to fill it out are available at the Secretariat of the MCO WU of Russia (2nd floor, room 18 - Conference Hall, phone # [...]). Completed forms should be returned to the Secretariat of the MCO WU of Russia or sent electronically to this electronic address: [...]

2011-04-18T16:53:00.001+04:00

Municipal workers' revenge :)

2011-04-17T14:22:00.000+04:00

In addition to this wonderful French site for kids, Marta really likes this Polish one. The ongoing Russian Orthodox Church luxury scandal has reminded me of her concern for Jesus and his family after she had played a Christmas baby Jesus game: "They are so poor, they live in a barn," she told me sadly, then added hopefully, "Did they become better off later?"

2011-04-06T17:36:00.001+04:00

Moscow's downtown buildings, just as Kyiv's, don't get treated nicely when it comes to preserving their initial height...

2011-04-03T17:09:00.001+04:00

This is Moscow a few days ago:

And this is Moscow today - the first lovely spring day, but a bit too much dog shit everywhere still:

It'll only be getting better from now on, hopefully.

2011-03-27T19:50:00.000+04:00

8 PM - and the sun is still up there!

Lovely when we switch to summer time - even if winter's still here.

And it is still here, totally:

At the market today, I learned from one vendor that in the North Caucasus, for example, spring is already so far advanced that their wild garlic/cheremsha season is now over. The stuff that I bought today is from Moldova:

My two posts on cheremsha, weather and geography from 2009 are here and here.

It snowed on April 19 back then.

2011-03-25T16:38:00.000+03:00

End of March in Moscow:

Sunny outside. A pot-bellied neighbor is smoking on the balcony, with no shirt on. As if it's spring already. Must be one of those brave Orthodox Christians who swim in icy water in January, pretending it's River Jordan.

Three minutes later, a snowstorm. A snow wall. Or, as if some prankster has thoroughly painted our window white, thick white.

Two minutes later, sunny again.

Ten minutes later, snowing again.

And on, and on, and on.

2011-03-24T05:26:00.008+03:00

A bus stop at Nikitsky Boulevard, between 7 and 8 PM a few days ago, cars moving really slowly, no trolleybus in sight.

A Bentley parks in the middle of the no-parking zone by the bus stop. A stocky, tough-looking, middle-aged driver in a suit gets out, lights a cigarette and starts walking back and forth, occasionally glancing in the direction of a fancy clothing store nearby. Naturally, he has an air of superiority about him.

Five minutes later, a girl emerges from the store and walks towards the Bentley, accompanied by a bodyguard. She looks typically classy; he looks a few degrees tougher than the driver.

The driver's back in the car, the girl's in the backseat, the bodyguard shuts the door after her, but stays outside. The car begins to back out.

But, the traffic jam's still there - and a white SUV is right behind the Bentley.

The Bentley's driver begins to honk like crazy, but the SUV's not moving. For one thing, it's got no space around it to move away to.

Suddenly, the girl's bodyguard gets visibly jittery. He gesticulates to the driver, orders him to use the space in front of him to get out on the road, instead of honking and trying to back all the way out. The driver obeys, the bodyguard gets inside the car, and off they go, slowly but steadily.

When the Bentley's gone, we, the folks at the bus stop, get to see what had unnerved the bodyguard: the white SUV sports a Saudi flag decal on one of its windows - a Quranic inscription and a sword, ominous stuff in the context of Moscow - and the driver doesn't look like a tiny little man, either, judging by the size of his hand (see picture below).

Could be some Kadyrov's buddy, and, in any case, definitely not the type who'd tolerate all that honking business.

P.S. Or, it could be that the guy in the SUV is totally harmless, has nothing to do with any of the thugs, had bought his car somewhere in the Emirates, already with the decal, and decided not to take it off, because, as we've seen, the message it sends works really well.

Like a ladybug with its protective coloration.

P.P.S. Aposematism is the word: "Aposematism has been such a successful adaptation that harmless organisms have repeatedly evolved to mimic aposematic species [...]."

:)

2011-03-23T07:09:00.000+03:00

I don't have enough abstract thinking skills or attention span for philosophy, but I've realized that the way we are dealing with one highly unpleasant situation that arose last week is actually a good illustration of something known as "moral relativism": we all have different responses to the same situation; our own response would differ from those of others if we were those others ourselves; similar situations in the past, which did not affect us so directly, had us react differently than the way we are reacting to this particular situation now. Whatever. Hard to say if I'm on my way to emotional recovery or am heading in the other direction right now, but, either way, that sentence above is too much for Twitter, and that's why I'm posting it here.

:)

2011-03-21T18:46:00.001+03:00

Bilingualism at a public bathroom in Kyiv - a request (in Russian and Ukrainian) to please not dump objects, as well tea and coffee, into sinks:

2011-03-21T17:07:00.001+03:00

Social ads on Moscow benches:

Donate things you don't needs to the homeless...

Garbage is not homeless: "A family of two cans will rent a garbage container"...

2011-03-16T17:07:00.001+03:00

Салам (Salam): Marta read this word/name written on the back of a bus seat - and it was so much nicer to explain the meaning of it to her than that of the previous one a few days ago :)

2011-03-14T02:42:00.003+03:00

Couldn't drag myself out of this store yesterday - hearing Kurt Cobain and seeing him like this, all of a sudden, on a pretty huge screen made up of nine regular TV screens - it had a mesmerizing effect on me...

2011-03-10T19:41:00.001+03:00

One drawback of taking public buses with a 5-year-old kid who is learning to read is that she would absolutely try to read whatever is written on the seat right in front of her (in our case, it's the word 'bitch' in Russian)...

2011-03-10T03:13:00.003+03:00

Moscow:

Sound from the Kievsky Train Station: a safety/anti-terrorism announcement that shocks some tiny part of me every time I return here from such a relatively peaceful, innocent place as Kyiv...

And a few pics taken from the train:

2011-03-05T04:25:00.000+03:00

After days of walking around Kyiv and getting myself quite terrified and depressed by what I see and hear, and after yet another Friday night spent watching various political talk shows, I catch myself thinking this:

If I lived elsewhere and didn't really give a damn about this place, I'd just laugh at those pathetic idiots running this city and this country - they are horrible managers, with absolutely no idea of what a decent city should be like, tacky dorks, losers, nothing more, an embarrassment; and to distract everyone from their incompetence, they're screaming at each other on TV not only about politics, but also about literature, language and culture, which is often quite amusing, because they are as clueless in these fields as in most others.

But I do live here, and I do care, so it's heartbreaking to watch it all, knowing that they aren't going to stay away from any of it, because all these mismanaged projects bring them pretty huge personal fortunes, and all this hysterical screaming about culture issues keeps them popular with their voters.

And I know that things could be much worse - there're plenty of examples, everywhere - but I also feel that we are slowly getting there ourselves.

2011-03-04T18:32:00.001+03:00

I've finally visited the Holodomor Memorial. Lit a candle. Looked up the village some of my ancestors are from: only three people starved to death there in 1932-33, most likely because this village is located right next to a town. One of the three names is our family name: Ivasyuk. Ivasyuk Andriy Stanislavovych. No idea if he was related. Could be. Feel very shaken now.

2011-03-04T16:29:00.001+03:00

And this is the neverending reconstruction of the Mariyinsky Palace:

A small parking lot seems to have been set up in front of the green fence.

The project's start date is 2007, and the completion year is, quite conveniently, left out. Who knows, maybe they are so busy relocating some of the funds meant for Mariyinsky to the construction of their dachas that they really have no idea when this restoration is going to be over.

2011-03-04T15:41:00.001+03:00

Kyiv's new panoramic view to admire, damn it. A few more pictures later, maybe.

2011-03-02T21:23:00.004+03:00

Somehow, I've only now got to see the helicopter landing pad that they are building for Yanukovych.

(Click here to enlarge.)

The scale of this construction - and its location!!! - are absolutely outrageous.

I'm speechless with fury. Will try to get there during the day and take more pictures.

2011-02-28T21:37:00.004+03:00

I was walking through Maidan today, past the vendors selling Ukrainian books, flags, souvenirs, and music. At one table they were playing a Kvitka Cicyk CD - and I stood there for a few minutes, listening, and also checking how yet another one of my audio recording apps works. Caught some men cursing in Ukrainian, in addition to Kvitka Cicyk. The song - Стоїть гора високая - kept playing in my head until I reached Besarabka...

2011-02-28T04:59:00.002+03:00

I'm going through a blogger's identity crisis - or maybe it's a blogger's multiple personality disorder - or both.

I'm tired of Twitter, and of Tumblr, and of everything else, and I miss having only this blog to write on and using nothing but my Flickr account to post pictures to.

Part of the reason I'm not here often anymore is that it's easier to post to Tumblr when I'm away from my computer, but I'm testing an iPhone app right now that seems to work well with Blogger/Blogspot, and if I end up liking it, I'll migrate back here full-time.

I'm also somehow a bit embarrassed to post pictures with no explanations here - as well as those really quick posts that now seem to belong only on Twitter or Tumblr. But I'll try to overcome this shyness and post anything that wants to be posted here, regardless of its length and other parameters. Because I'm tired of being so scattered around.

Maybe I'll change my mind about this blog once again, though. Who knows.

2011-02-12T06:01:00.000+03:00

Friday night, Khreshchatyk, mild traffic, limos drive by every now and then. Hosni Mubarak resigned a few hours before. Ukrainian politicians are done TV-fighting over whose fault it is that the country's facing a shortage of buckwheat.

A young couple is hugging and kissing on the snow-covered part of the sidewalk. Suddenly, they both fall down - fresh snow conceals fresh ice underneath. They don't bother to get up. Instead, the girl climbs on top of the boy, and they lie like this for at least 15 minutes, kissing and petting.

Cars keep driving by. A few cab drivers sit inside their vehicles nearby. A few men walk past the couple, staring at them intensely, but not interfering. A police jeep is circling the neighborhood, but it never approaches the couple. By the time it re-appears for the fifth time, the couple seems to be asleep. Or frozen to death.

The couple's friends - a whole bunch of them - are drinking on one of the benches in the chestnut tree alley, some 50 meters away. One of them finally comes up to the couple, gets the girl off the boy, drags both of them up - but they aren't able to maintain a vertical position for longer than 15 seconds. The boy is a lot drunker than the girl, and he's much bigger, too. Their friend spends the next ten minutes trying to lead the couple back to the bench. They keep slipping and falling, slipping and falling, all three of them.

The helpful friend gives up eventually, leaving the couple by the bus stop, ten meters or so away from the bench.

They manage to get up by themselves, and they even make a quick attempt to have some sort of a conversation. As soon as they start kissing, though, they fall down again.

I watch them from my window until my feet turn cold. I leave for my room when the girl joins their friends - while the boy comes up to a car parked on the sidewalk and pees generously on it.

It's like watching a silent movie, so I keep thinking of an appropriate soundtrack for it. Gogol Bordello's Start Wearing Purple is the best fit I can think of.

An hour later, I'm at the balcony that faces our crazy Besarabka backyard - and guess what I see?

A different young couple is down on the ground, the boy is on top of the girl this time, she is struggling to get him off her, cursing at him, and he's cursing back at her. (This time, from the balcony, I can hear them really well.) She kicks him hard with her leg, he curses some more and gets up. He looks frustrated, but successfully fights off an urge to push and hit the girl as he helps her to get up. She's all dressed up, wearing high heels - and she looks and sounds quite furious. Like the first couple, these kids are very, very drunk. And the backyard is even more slippery than Khreshchatyk. They walk away unsteadily, still cursing at one another. The boy, quite traditionally, carries the girl's tiny, very feminine handbag - but since there's no longer any use pretending he's a gentleman, he's swinging that handbag madly as he walks.

2011-02-04T05:21:00.000+03:00

Hard to believe it hasn't even been three weeks yet since we returned from Istanbul.

All day today I was having flashbacks to Jan. 15, when we all went to Bebek, and, once there, I left Marta and Misha at the playground by the Bosphorus and set off for a long walk.

This walk consisted of much climbing, getting lost somewhere around Bebek Dağı Sokağı, running into the Boğaziçi Üniversitesi that, if I remember correctly, a dear friend of mine attended back in 2002-03, then finding my way out again and descending down Günaydın Yolu back to the Bosphorus minutes before the sun disappeared behind the hills.

It was such a nice walk - I felt so free that day! - and I longed to look at the pictures today, but the way I store them is kind of messy, and I've only gotten through to them now. Below is a pretty random selection, and it doesn't reflect the beauty of that walk or anything else about it at all - and yet it feels good to have these pictures within reach somewhere...

2011-02-03T06:50:00.003+03:00

“Say hi to the dinosaur,” mama tells us as we set off for the Natural History Museum (or whatever it's now called in Kyiv). Her memories of this museum must be fresher than mine: I haven't been to it since I was a kid, while she used to take children there when she worked at school in the late 1980s-early 90s.

On the way to the museum, we stop a few times and I take some pictures. The ugly new thing at Teatralna that's being built where it doesn't belong. A rather beautiful old building across the street that looks deserted and about to collapse. But there are ~~four~~ six satellite dishes on its facade, and there's light in many of its windows at night, and I've no idea if it's home to some homeless now, or to some more legitimate residents who are waiting for it to be refurbished and fixed. I explain to Marta, as simply as possible, why I'm taking pictures of these two structures, each gut-wrenching in its own way.

At the museum, the huge animal skeletons I used to be so impressed with as a child aren't all that huge anymore: I have grown, they haven't. The butterfly collection - something that I've remembered all these years - is still there. I keep looking for the dinosaur, but fail to find it: mama must have meant the mammoth.

Nestled underneath the skeleton of some huge, long-tailed sea creature, there's a dusty but neat scale model of the never-built Paleontological Park:

An elderly museum employee tells us that this construction project had been given up in the early 1990s - due to lack of funding, of course.

She then begins to follow us around, talking about things that everyone here seems to be preoccupied with: our dim-witted president, and his allies' notorious destruction and construction projects, including the one down the street, at Teatralna. She talks of her post-WWII Kyiv childhood, describes their cozy courtyard just off Maidan, and a little fountain that used to be there - but is now replaced by a tall new building that, of course, doesn't belong there.

She says she used to work at some “enterprise” - until they fired half of their workers. She found a job at this museum, while her friend went to work at one of Lavra’s (secular) museums - and is about to be unemployed again, because it looks like the current regime is shutting those Lavra museums down.

This museum isn't likely to last much longer, either, the woman tells me.

I hope she's wrong, but I won't be surprised if some fancy shopping mall does move in here, sooner or later. It's a huge building, but much of their collection is housed in the long corridors, and it's obvious that they do need more space, which could well be used as a justification for moving it elsewhere, to a less lucrative location.

So here is a Flickr set with some more pictures (lousy, taken with my iPhone) of this dinosaur (or mammoth) of a museum.

Now that I'm no longer a kid, what impresses me most here is this well-preserved - yet neutered, impotent - Sovietness. No one is consciously trying to recreate the atmosphere of that extinct country here, there's no Soviet propaganda left (and even if there is some, it no longer serves its purpose), but they lack money to modernize the place, and, perhaps, this isn't a bad thing, if it allows you to have such a wild time-travel experience. Because it is absolutely awesome to suddenly find yourself in a place that's as close in spirit as it gets to Eldar Ryazanov's Garage movie set - among other things.

2011-01-31T18:11:00.003+03:00

The construction site over Teatralna metro station (and across the street from the Russian Drama Theater) is very much alive again, despite various attempts to resist this odious project - and despite common sense.

There used to be a little area with flowers in front of the apartment building there - nothing special, but it's hard not to think of it as an absolutely crucial space now that it's gone - and gone in such a grotesque manner.

According to Korrespondent.net (RUS), they are building a shopping center there.

And there's going to be a protest rally tomorrow, at 2 PM: anti-construction activists are planning to appeal for help to UNESCO this time.

2011-01-24T05:09:00.000+03:00

Kyiv:

2011-01-24T04:57:00.001+03:00

My father lived in this neighborhood as a kid - before the war, during the occupation, and for a while after the war as well, I guess. I don't think their building is still there. I have a vague memory of where it must have been.

It hurts when I try to remember more: instead of papa's childhood stories, I recall very vividly how I went searching this area for him in July 2007, how I was showing his photo to the people who seemed local or semi-local to me (some elderly person, and a parking lot attendant). What if papa had tricked himself into thinking he was a little boy again - what if he was trying to find his way back to his childhood home? Every step I took back then was fueled by some tiny, seemingly rational hope like this one.

For the past few years, I've been trying to reclaim Kyiv. Not all of it: I have no plans of going close to the Botanical Garden ever again, and I always feel numb when I pass Vydubychi. But then there's also this street, and a number of other places that are so much about papa's pre-2007 life that I know I won't dwell on those horrible memories forever. It just takes time, somewhat longer than elsewhere.

Yesterday, at some point, it began to feel so good to stare at all these buildings on my way up towards St. Sophia, that by the time I reached the top of the hill, I was actually thinking about my own childhood more than anything else. How steep this hill used to seem when I was little, and how easy it is to conquer it now. How lazy I used to be as a kid, and how far I'm capable of walking now. How proud papa would have been of me. (And, even more so, of Marta, who is always excited about our walking tours and can walk almost as much as I do without getting too tired.)

2011-01-11T04:41:00.002+03:00

Istanbul is so overwhelming. As I was picking photos to post tonight, I felt like screaming, "Somebody, please stop me!"

The distances we cover daily are impressive, and what's also impressive is how little effort it takes, compared to Kyiv or Moscow. And Istanbul goes on and on, well beyond the places we manage to reach.

Istanbul seems to be made up of small towns, dozens - if not hundreds - of them, drawn really close together by some weird kind of gravitational force. And it's impossible to feel claustrophobic in these small town-like neighborhoods: there's always the next one to explore. (Very sadly, after Istanbul, Kyiv feels as if it's made up of ghettos...)

In Istanbul, I often wish I had some really tall stilts to walk on: trees and light poles always get in the way, and it's a bit oppressive to be always looking up at the buildings, like a dwarf, and to have to climb hills that seem almost perfectly vertical, in order to be able to catch a panorama view of the neighborhood and of the rest of the city beyond it.

On a different note, today I've heard church bells for the first time here: at 4 PM in Kuzguncuk, a neighborhood where a Greek church, a synagogue and a mosque are located very close to one another. It felt strange, in a nice way. (Now I dream of catching the simultaneous sound of these church bells AND the azan...)

***

2011-01-04T22:59:00.001+03:00

The weather's kind of horrid, so this, for now, is the last batch of Istanbul buildings photos. I promise. But as soon as the sun is back, I'll run to take more - I can't help it. (All photos from this trip are here.)

The dark building with roses and other Art Nouveau stuff, located in Sirkeci, got me thinking about being a tourist vs being a local - and about being something in between. It reminded me of my day trip to Vyborg in 2004 (the text on this trip is still there, at the wonderful site of The Morning News, but where are all the pictures from that trip, I wonder... I can't believe I never posted them anywhere, but I do have a vague memory that I never did...). Anyway, in Vyborg, they've got quite a few buildings that are as beautiful - and as battered as the Sirkeci house (or even worse). And battered means not only photogenic - it also means big problems with sewage, nasty insects and rodents, etc. And as a tourist you go "oh" and "ah" and "how sad what the Soviets/time/etc. did to such beauty" and you take some nice pictures and go home feeling a bit melancholic but quite happy in general - while as a local you are probably cursing your mayor and that guy who runs your neighborhood's communal services (and in Vyborg in 2004 it happened to be someone I used to know as a kid, a charming person, and it hurt a lot to discover that 18 years later he was shoveling shit out of the basement of one of those beautiful buildings - it still hurts to know that, actually). And in Istanbul I go "ah" and "oh" and take some pictures - and then I think of the filth and the decay that one would find inside that beautiful building, and I think of Vyborg - but it's Istanbul, and it doesn't let me think of any one thing for too long really, so I walk on, and end up with this image of the city as a gorgeous creature that keeps shedding its skin, sporadically, here and there and then here again, and some of the new skin doesn't stick, and some ages too fast but refuses to fall off, while some of the really old skin protrudes in the unlikeliest spots, and then there's also the stuff that's buried underground, lots of it, I'm sure, and I do end up feeling dizzy and kind of laugh at myself for having managed to compare Vyborg to Istanbul - what a silly comparison, Veronica.

2011-01-04T05:01:00.000+03:00

"The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind."

--Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

(Dec. 31, 2010: the touristy area between the Galata Tower and Istiklal Caddesi.)

2011-01-03T03:01:00.000+03:00

A few random pictures from a routine walk that I took on the last day of 2010 - a very sunny and absolutely lovely day. Happy New Year to everyone!!!

2011-01-02T20:54:00.001+03:00

Out of habit (a newly-acquired Kyiv habit), I'm walking around Istanbul with my head up, looking at buildings, not people. Feels awesome. Up there, a gorgeous creature that I never paid too much attention to before. A few days ago I think I caught it smiling right at me:

I took this photo almost accidentally, wasn't thinking about the geometry of it when I was shooting - did not see it - until the picture was there, smiling at me from the screen of my camera. Somehow, I'm sure it's a smile - I love Istanbul so much, what else can it be?

2010-12-31T02:48:00.000+03:00

Küçük Ayasofya neighborhood:

2010-12-29T05:51:00.004+03:00

"When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city."

--Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Dec. 28, 2010: Kapalıçarşı, Istanbul

2010-12-26T05:14:00.000+03:00

For some reason, Kyiv smelled of timber today, and of spring. It rained in the evening. Unlike yesterday, I didn't have to wear my woolen mittens outside. The lack of color, typical of this time of the year, was difficult to bear (which is also typical - of me, at least). I didn't enjoy the quick walk around Lipki that I went on shortly before sunset - but somehow it feels great to look at the pictures I took during this walk. Maybe I'm just really starved for photography.

2010-12-25T04:57:00.000+03:00

Kyiv is not what it used to be, which is sad. But sometime this summer I found a way to see it the way I love to remember it. All I have to do is walk around looking upwards instead of straight ahead of me, with some filters on/alarms off (e.g., ignore the ugly balconies and air conditioners stuck on facades, pretend there are just a few cars around, don't get mad when some jerk drives past you on a sidewalk). It works: Kyiv is still there, beautiful, lovable...

2010-12-24T23:50:00.000+03:00

A foggy day in Kyiv - so nice to be back...

2010-12-16T07:04:00.000+03:00

On Monday, two days after the first pogrom, Marta and I went grocery shopping across the street. Moscow seemed unchanged. What caught my eye while we were waiting for green light was a young Central Asian migrant worker, who had a black ski hat on. One of the words on this hat was "олимпиада" (the Olympics), and I thought, "Wow, the 1980 Moscow Olympics, are they still selling this stuff?" And then I noticed two more words below "the Olympics": "Красная Поляна" (Krasnaya Polyana) - a place where some of the events of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi are to take place.

My head is filled with those ugly pogrom images, and all those dirty chants, and those faces, and what I read online about it. But I haven't been around much lately, so a tiny part of me still doesn't believe any of it is for real. And I wish I could squeeze the rest of myself into this tiny part of me and live there. And somehow it helps to think about this gastarbeiter and his hat - it helps to pretend that I continue to stare at his hat, asking these questions: Is it a cheap fake hat that he bought at the market? Or did someone bring it to him all the way from Sochi? Or did he find it in a garbage container? Does he think it makes him look a little bit more like a Russian patriot? Does he think it makes him less of a target here? Or is it just a warm hat and he never thinks about it at all?

2010-11-25T03:43:00.000+03:00

Istanbul pictures from our pre-Marta years - 2003, 2004, and 2005. (This selection is my birthday present for Misha, actually.)

2010-11-21T18:08:00.000+03:00

Moscow's complicated relationship with what is often known collectively as "Kavkaz" here: