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?

Küçük Ayasofya neighborhood:

"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

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.

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...

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

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?

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

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

Kyiv:

Another random snapshot - same day, June 7, Podil:

June 7, 2010 - Besarabka:

A totally random picture - St. Pete, mid-summer of 2004:



What I really miss now is having the time to walk around, taking pictures - and having the time and energy to post those pictures afterwards, and even to write something about them...

In between everything else (and that's A LOT right now), I'm reading this wonderful book about languages - The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind's Greatest Invention, by Guy Deutscher.

One of the first examples in this book comes from Turkish - an illustration of one of the "many exotic and outlandish features" of foreign languages (p. 2):

[...] The Turkish word şehirlileştiremediklerimizdensiniz, to take one example, means nothing less than 'you are one of those whom we can't turn into a town-dweller'. (In case you are wondering, this monstrosity really is one word, not merely many different words squashed together - most of its components cannot even stand up on their own.) [...]

I've already seen something similar in one of my (many) Turkish textbooks - which promises to teach you Turkish in three months, but just scared me away by providing the following two "monstrosities" in Lesson 1, Part 5, which deals with seemingly innocent "vowel harmony":

Değiştiremediklerimizden misiniz?
Являешься ли ты одним из тех, кого мы были неспособны изменить?
[Are you one of those whom we've been incapable of changing?]

***

Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımızdan mısınız?
Разве ты являешься одним из тех, кого мы не смогли европеизировать?
[Aren't you one of those whom we haven't been able to europeize?]

***

Two more quotes from Deutscher on crazy irregularities in other languages - hilarious, got me laughing out loud, which doesn't happen all too often now, and that's why I have to preserve them here, for future reference... :)

English (pp. 40-41):

[...] Native speakers may be blithely unaware of the chaos that reigns in the English verbal system; not so anyone who has had to learn it at school. Here is a rhyme I wrote in memory of my frustrations:

The teacher claimed it was so plain,

I only had to use my brain.

She said the past of throw was threw,

The past of grow - of course - was grew,

So flew must be the past of fly,

And now, my boy, your turn to try.

But when I trew,

I had no clue,

If mow was mew

Like know and knew

(Or is it knowed

Like snow and snowed?)

The teacher frowned at me and said

The past of feed was - plainly - fed.

Fed up, I knew then what I ned:

I took a break, and out I snoke,

She shook and quook (or quaked? or quoke?)

With raging anger out she broke:

Your ignorance you want to hide?

Tell me the past form of collide!

But how on earth should I decide

If it's collid

(Like hide and hid),

Or else - from all that I surmose,

The past of rise was simply rose,

And that of ride was surely rode, 

So of collide must be collode?

Oh damn these English verbs, I thought

The whole thing absolutely stought!

Of English I have had enough,

These verbs of yours are far too tough.

Bolt upright in my chair I sat,

And said to her 'that's that' - I quat.

And German (p. 43) - via Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad, "an appendix entitled 'The Awful German Language'":

[...] Twain could not understand why, for instance, German rain should be a 'he', a German fishwife should be an 'it', and a German fish-scale a 'she'. So after a few more pages of rant, he went on to recount the following touching 'Tale of the Fishwife and its Sad Fate', purportedly translated literally from the German:

It is a bleak day. Hear the rain, how he pours, and the hail, how he rattles; and see the snow, how he drifts along, and of the mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor fishwife, it is stuck fast in the mire; it has dropped its basket of fishes; and its hands have been cut by the scales as it seized some of the falling creatures; and one scale has even got into its eye. And it cannot get her out. It opens its mouth to cry for help; but if any sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the storm. And now a tomcat has got one of the fishes and she will surely escape with him. No, she bites off a fin, she holds her in her mouth - will she swallow her? No, the fishwife's brave mother-dog deserts his puppies and rescues the fin - which he eats, himself, as his reward... [...]

The "audit" scandal - crazy, in many ways, including this (Kyiv Post):

[...] When asked how much tax payers’ money was and will be spent on the U.S. lawyers and investigators, Plato Cacheris with Trout Cacheris law firm said “it was much less than the money stolen” and would not elaborate further.

In turn, Ukraine’s Finance Ministry also refused to reveal any details, calling it a commercial secret.

A senior government official told the Kyiv Post that $2 million in state budget funds had been spent on the first stage of the audit.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the issue, said the aim was to recover a sum up to 100 times larger than the firms’ fees.

The official added that two further stages of investigations are planned, which will cost roughly the same each.

“So far we have done what we needed to. But there is a high possibility the Cabinet will ask us to do some other things,” Cacheris told Kyiv Post.

And this:

[...] Kroll and Akin Gump are not new to Ukraine.

After the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, Kroll was hired in 2001 by then-President Leonid Kuchma’s son-in-law Viktor Pinchuk to probe the case. In the end the firm issued a report saying Kuchma wasn’t involved, which was widely viewed an attempt to absolve him from suspicion arising from alleged discussions he had with senior officials about dealing with the journalist.

Akin Gump lawyers have also had experience working in Ukraine.

The firm’s lawyers have in the past defended Ukraine’s richest oligarchs and strongest Yanukovych’s backers – Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, and gas tycoon Dmytro Firtash.

At times these firms have pressured investigative journalists who write stories about both Ukrainian businessmen by threatening to file lawsuits against them. [...]