Happy New Year to you all! З Новим Роком! С Новым Годом! Mutlu Yıllar!

Wishing you tons of health, love, joy, fun and adventures...



P.S. I'm so sorry for not writing back to some of you. One of my New Year's resolutions, though, is to stop being so sporadic and start keeping in touch with friends properly! :)

Marta is acting really wild here, refuses to go to bed, keeps waking up at night, and I'm too exhausted to write anything now, don't really have anything to say, even though I do feel like saying something... So here are two pictures of today's rush hour in Istanbul:

Finally, two views from our balcony, and I'm off to bed:





Part of Aya Sofya on the first photo - and Aya Irini on both.

The first one is Sultanahmet Camii, the second one is Aya Sofya.

And some Turkish kids on a school trip, eating their lunches between the two landmarks.

But Istanbul may not be such a good place to take your teenage kid to: a "Westerner"-looking mama and son came up to me today and asked if I knew where McDonald's was. I only knew where Burger King was, and the boy had this tragic look on his face when I said so. "But I need a McDonald's!" He was almost crying when he said that, and it made me feel terribly sorry for his mother. Before this encounter today, I had never understood why a place like Istanbul - where they serve you REAL meat nearly everywhere - needed all those Burger Kings.

The weather's awesome.



There was no sun in Moscow for something like a month. And no snow. It was so depressing. And I really owe an apology to those New York Times and Washington Post people that I blasted in this post back in November: I'm now convinced that snowless winters in Moscow do deserve all the coverage in the world, especially if they manage to find some amusing angles, to cheer us up, please.

Anyway, when the plane took off and went through the clouds, it turned out that the sun wasn't all that far away: just 30 seconds or so of flying.

That made me reconsider the words I said to Mishah in the morning: Is a mere vacation worth such a sacrifice?

Because, you see, my fear of flying is such a torture, makes me even more insomniac, but that's not all: we also had to leave home five hours before our plane actually took off, to make sure we make it on time even if we get stuck in traffic on the way to Sheremetyevo.

But I felt it was all okay it the moment I saw the sun.

And in Istanbul, it's not just sunny.

It's warm.

First, about a month ago, I saw the word PEACE - МИР - written on the roof of a car parked down below. I thought it was rather ... well, rather peaceful for this part of the world.

Then, a few weeks later, I saw the word GAY - ГЕЙ - on this or some other car parked in the same area. I thought it was rather friendly, too, for this part of the word. What a polite neighborhood we live in, I thought.

Finally, a few days ago, there appeared the word I've been waiting for - the most common Russian swear word.

Maybe it's someone's conceptual art project.

I wish I had pictures of the other two cars.

Wordpress, a blog-publishing platform, is blocked in Turkey, and here's the note that opens in my browser instead of, for example, Natalia Antonova's blog:



It's very annoying.

And perhaps as efficient as hanging a curtain in the middle of your room, to help yourself pretend the rest of the family isn't really there, the way many people did back in the Soviet times.

Because I can still read Wordpress blogs through my Bloglines feed, right?

Here's more on the silly measure, in a Global Voices roundup by Sami Ben Gharbia.

We're in Istanbul, btw. Arrived here yesterday, very happy to be back. More later, I hope.

Benazir Bhutto has just been killed. A very shocking news, despite everything.

RIP - to her and scores of others who were killed because of her, now and before.

Just like with Milosevic in 2006, until they're dead, it never occurs to me that they are mortal.

Politics, again.

Oh, Yulia, Yulia:

"We'll be working on it and will make it so that in our country both young people and children would want to become coal miners," said Tymoshenko.

Some of the comments from Korrespondent.net (RUS):

are:

I'll only believe in this when the President's daughter puts on a helmet and drags herself into a coal mine.

***

Guest:

It's simple: she'll make other professions so unappealing that children would rather hope to become coal miners than anything else.

***

Communist:

But this is exactly how it used to be in that great country that you destroyed! In the Soviet Union, children did dream about becoming coal miners, and their work was honorable and safe! Do you remember ever reading about coal mine accidents in Soviet newspapers?! No, because there weren't any!

***

Anna:

Our children are dreaming of being coal miners. Because in our town of Snezhnoye the mines have been shut and now there is no way to make any money at all. We are surviving on bread and water, and it'd be nice to leave, but where to?

***

Peter Pan:

Communist: "Do you remember ever reading about coal mine accidents in Soviet newspapers?! No, because there weren't any!"

Are you so sure? And Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" didn't exist, either, right?

It was all there. In special depositories. As for points of view that were different from the "leading and guiding one" - you could only hear those on short-wave radio through the wailing of the jamming stations. As Napoleon (not a psycho!) used to say in a well-known joke, "If I had controlled the Soviet press, the world wouldn't have learned about my defeat in the Battle of Waterloo!"

***

Benya na Laden dyshit 2 Communist:

You better remember football broadcasts from Donetsk. The tracks around the field were packed with wheelchairs.

Then they banned these wheelchairs, too.

As for the accidents, no one was reporting on them in the USSR - well, perhaps they did once, when the plane carrying Tashkent "Pakhtokor" [football team] crashed. They had to somehow explain to the people where the old players disappeared and why the backup team members were playing instead.

They didn't report a word on what happened to the Komsomolets submarine, nor did they report on the nuclear accident in the Urals - while it was way worse there than in Chernobyl.

So much for you Communist USSR government.

***

Ъ:

Kids are going to dream of playing for "Shakhtar" ["Coal Miner," a Donetsk football club]. That's for sure.

I love the way this conversation is evolving - even though I hate what Yulia has said.

***

P.S. I've made a GV entry out of it - here.

I wish I could use this place more for random notes, but I can't, and also, whenever I have something to write about, I'm too busy to, and then when there's time, I'm too tired to or I've already forgotten what it was that I wanted to write about.

By random notes I mean stuff that's not directly related to Ukrainian and Russian politics.

Like a conversation I've eavesdropped on today, between two elderly men who looked like they'd vote for Valeriya Novodvorskaya rather than Putin or Medvedev (well, okay, I don't think I'm capable of writing a single sentence without squeezing some politics into it anymore). One said to the other as they were crossing this really wide and dangerous street and I was walking next to them: "So, first there was Babylon, then there was Rome, and now - wouldn't you agree? - it's Moscow?" I didn't quite catch the rest of it, as they walked straight on and I had to turn right at that intersection.

And a cab driver today, from Kyrgyzstan, who talked about Chingiz Aytmatov with me. I loved it. He said he was a student in Moscow - but I somehow doubted it, I thought he was driving a cab full-time, but I liked him and so I didn't ask for details. He also said that those few nice people one happens to run in in Moscow all turn out to be from somewhere else, not native Muscovites.

And another cab driver, who was listening to some vostochnaya music - either Caucasus, or Middle Eastern - but switched to some silly Russian pop on the radio as soon as I got into his car, and I was too tired to ask him to please turn what he'd been listening to back on, because I liked it better, etc.

Anyway, I apologize for sporadic blogging, thank you all for reading, and for writing me, and I'm wishing you all a very joyful and fun holiday season, and hope that the new year is going to be an extremely happy one for us all.

Love to all,
Veronica

Marta in vyshyvanka a year ago, on Dec. 17, 2006:



And now, on Dec. 18, 2007:



Those sleeves are still too long for her... :)

Yulia is our PM again! I'm glad the vote went okay - it was a 'manual' vote, btw.

Plushch did not vote.

For papa:



Five months since he's been gone.

Two links - from Korrespondent.net, in Russian - for Andrey Slivka, who wrote this in his Kyiv traffic piece in the Washington Post:

Another peculiarity: Cars are really unnecessary here because Kiev's Soviet-built subway system is excellent.

- Dec. 11, 2007, 82 comments: They now have trambovshchiki at Livoberezhna, Darnytsya and Chernihivska stations - men who work from 8 to 9 AM, helping passengers to squeeze into subway cars during rush hours, by pushing them from, hmm, behind. From outside.

- Dec. 12, 2007, 127 comments: Kyiv subway authorities are asking passengers to avoid using subway from 7:30 to 9 AM, unless absolutely necessary, and use other means of transportation.