Everything Moscow

Buenos Diaries Pt. 2: Diary Harder

2011-11-26T10:37:00.011+04:00

The exciting conclusion to my adventures in Argentina

Day 8 The lessons begin

Decide to be gross and eat at mcdonalds for lunch. Wouldn't accept credit card. Hmm. Try to find a citibank. Also no go. Tried to go to Disco supermarket - card worked there before - but place is completely friggin' packed. Sunbathe for an hour. Head to meet maestro Damian, who taught me various bits about the close embrace. A bunch more lessons with him await.

Return to Disco later. Card isn't blocked, just can't withdraw cash it seems, or pay for Big Macs (not that I need to). Before evening of dancing I post the first week's worth of blog stuff.

Two milongas (yes, two!) were complete washouts. Ended up practically performing in front of a crowd on an empty dance floor with Irina in a place called La Catedral. Someone was taking photos, I think, so I'm probably on someone's facebook wall by now. Floor there sucks. Thumbs down. Studenty BoHo crowd more interested in watching people than actually getting up themselves.

Early-ish start tomorrow.

Day 9 Cleaning up my act

Damian is an unbelievably nice guy who, aside from dancing, also plays the piano, teaches at the Fine School of Arts, and used to paint - so much so that his house is strewn with his works. His place is also totally awesome. His main room has an enormous mirror and a perfect solid wooden floor for dancing on.

After a couple minutes of dancing, Damian sets about picking apart various issues I have. Doing the basic figure called the sandwich (wherein the leader closes his feet over one of his partner's, performing a kind of 180 turn and ending up on the other side), he noticed that I'm switching my weight too soon. You should always "plant" your partner before doing any particular movement to avoid losing balance and falling over like a prat.

As (sort of) said before "leader" and "follower" is misleading when talking about the actual actions. As a leader, you aren't just dragging your partner about where you so please. You have to "invite" the movement and, if she accepts, you follow *her* and *then* lead her - if that makes any sense. It's not so much caveman "me - go; you - follow". It's more "My darling, would you kindly accompany me on this horse drawn carriage and we can hold the reins together?" You're also translating this idea into your hips. I know this analogy makes no sense.

MOVING ON. The next chief issue was contact in the open and close embrace, and switching between the two. Problem with open was pressure in right hand on shoulder blade, problem with close was the lack of support by the right hand and the elbow interfering. Also, breathing out at the end of a figure.

Figures worked on included ocho cortado (walking around leg to pretty much force it into a cross), entrada/salida(?) with the left after a cross leading into a forward ocho with another entrada/salida on the right, step to the left placing right foot between partner's (thick in the middle!) turning their hips with the foot (and a bit of the upper body) closing feet and shortcutting into a cross, step to the left switch weight into a sandwich contact on the shins don't lean away from partner, back step with right sidestep left plant both feet lead partner into cross system and follow into a cross. Most figures focused on simply closing the feet, rather than trying to keep step with the partner. [Editor's note: upon review of this it makes no sense.]

Always the whole time in close embrace maintaining pressure on chest (but not too much! opening and closing doors!). Bad habit of side-stepping on my part.

Try to pick up suit on return home - still not ready, should be tomorrow. Back at flat, sunbathe for a bit. Snooze. Zhenya brings me money (woohoo!). Milonga later. Hopefully it won't stink like last night's.

Meh. Knocked Germany and Austria off the list. Returned home early, getting too busy. I think I'll go to Villa Malcolm tomorrow like last week. Good crowd there the last time.

Day 10 Miercoles Milonga

Class with Damian at noon. Focus on milonga style music. Three styles of music are danced to in Argentine tango: tango, waltz (3/4), and milonga (kind of 2/4 but over the course of 8 beats with stress on the 1st, 4th, 5th and 7th - not to mention an alternative 3-beat syncopation). Milonga therefore is faster. Quicker, smaller steps required. Learned five figures in total (consult scrawled notes made in coffee shop afterwards ad memoriam, might be able to force Anton into teaching them back home). Maybe tackle waltz tomorrow.

Despite recommendation, nearby coffee shop did not boast best of service. Finally acquired tailored suit. Set me back some 700 pesos in total (divide by 4-ish for price in dollars). Fabulous new shoes the other day cost me about 550 pesos.

Tried to go to another group class in afternoon, place was bare except for one couple, turns out dude giving private class, listing is out of date. Consult El Tangauta magazine more carefully next time.

Eat at another restaurant dad recommended [Editor's note: wrong one entirely, but still good]. Called El Establo. Large hunk of cow again. Will gladly fly halfway across the world again for meat of that quality.

Contemplating another milonga to break suit in. Another glass of malbec is required for decision-making.

What a waste of taxi time, at least I got a free ticket to Friday milonga at the place. Armenian cultural center is not that good a venue.

Day 11 Thursday Waltzing

Didn't sleep at all. People like making noise in this city. Short blasts of sunbathing for barely half an hour has left me red. Sun is very strong here. Wash other clothes. Too hot and stuffy.

Class in evening with Damian. Nearly turn up late because of traffic. I suggest a waltz figure. Damian takes it and expands on it. Also sacada followed by in-step for follower into a cross.

Main focus was on the lapis and how I should (probably) be getting used to the idea of returning to the neutral position. Consult post-session scrawled notes for fuzzy details. Damian says I should bring my camera tomorrow, so we'll record every figure we've done this week. Will probably post this as a second part of the diaries on Friday [Editor's note: fat chance].

Small party at Mike's tonight.

Party is great fun. Heading to milonga tomorrow at Fundacion Tango Argentino (hopefully).

Day 12 Filming Friday

Taxi to Damian's is a bit messed up. Slightly psychotic old git who at one point was humming really off-key to Radiohead (no, seriously). Swerved dangerously in front of everyone. Arrive in one piece. Definitely more terrifying than Moscow. [Editor's note: Mike told me at one point that Buenos Aires has one of the highest car accident fatalities in the world.]

Get camera set up, no need to scribble down notes, except for the title of my new favourite milonga track called "Papas Calientes" (literally "hot potatoes") by Juan D'Arienzo. Class is pretty draining. Crappy lunch in nearby cafe again. Now in possession of about 50 minutes of footage that may or may not cause the netbook to explode during the transfer :/ At least now I have a record of the major stuff.

Milonga starts at 10-ish. I have been informed that I should go to the venue Confiteria Ideal at some point. Apparently it's famous *shrug*

Milonga at Fundacion totally blows. Small and very stuffy. Head to La Catedral to meet Mike & co. Ends up being awesome. Live orchestra in attendance with some French beatboxer joining them as part of his "tour" (or whatever the announcer said). Whirled a Polish girl about for a bit in front of the crowd. Almost certainly photos of me on some website now somewhere making an arse out of myself. Eventually in bed at about 4ish?

Day 13 Moar souvenirs

Didn't sleep for shit. Apparently, if I understood Andrey correctly, 16 people were stuck in the lift. The max is 6, so I probably misheard that figure [Editor's note: no, this is actually correct upon chatting to the parties in question later]. Either way, they certainly spent half the night banging the elevator in an attempt to move/escape. Allegedly somewhere between the 3rd and 4th floor they managed to crawl out.

Afternoon we head to La Boca. Birthplace of tango allegedly (photos somewhere), so big on tourist shite.

More Russians have arrived to the group. Buy some fridge magnets. Lunch involves a huge amount of meat.

Everyone else is tired in the evening. Shrug my shoulders - stuff it - and head out to Villa Malcolm on Cordoba by myself. I only came here for three things anyway. Good dances. Knocked Korea off the list. Left after a sort of half-time interval that involved a pretty shit hot Korean dude in a suit pulling off an impressive milonga routine. Taxi driver there was Danny Trejo's long lost brother. Taxi back was another fucking psychopath who I'm pretty sure spent more time looking at his GPS than the road itself. Radio played Flash Gordon at one point. Uh huh.

Day 14 Sunday... uhh... sort of sucked

Knackered from last night. Wander off to local supermarket called Disco to buy lunch and a couple of beers on a whim, which completely knock me out for the rest of the afternoon. Napping is the worst. Wake up feeling like crap. Bump into other Russians, ask if they wanna milonga later tonight. Anton *finally* arrives (yet to see him, he's probably tired). At about 10pm the sky decides to piss its pants, so the milonga idea goes out the window (I wasn't about to ruin my new good shoes).

Day 15 Penultimonday!

Wake up earlyish. Actually kinda breezy outside. Use weird washing machine again. Halfheartedly begin prepping for tomorrow, which is when I leave. Class with Damian this afternoon, possibly meeting Mike one more time before I head off. We grab a quick cafe con leche before my final session with Mr. Essel. I ask him to focus on steps and balance. Enlightening lecture on extreme subtleties of the step follows, which I can barely wrap my head around. It all makes sense, but putting it into practice is a whole other ball game.

Phone runs out of credit. Thankfully bump into Zhenya and Anton at coffee shop around the corner. Milonga is unfathomably shit. Some sort of stupid referees. Should have gone to Confiteria Ideal. There's always next year.

Day 16 YAY INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS

Wake up, pack up, Anton summons me to the roof to drink far too much beer in the blazing midday sun, then we go and buy nine pairs of women's shoes for me to take back home. Because that's, like, y'know, normal.

We lunch at some place called Meridian 58 not far from the apartment, which serves an amazing steak with some sort of pumpkin salsa. And more wine and beer.

Get my shit together, head for airport. Get the luggage wrapped up in clingfilm by one of those stupid devices for about twenty dollars, which is probably a lot less harder and cheaper than if you attempted to do so yourself in the kitchen. Seems sensible, considering the footwear I'm packin'.

Flight is incredibly delayed, but it's not so bad as it means the layover in Madrid won't stink as much. What's four hours, really, in the grand scheme of things? Look at trinkets. I eat some sort of excuse for a sandwich, which may or may not be the death of me. If I don't make it back to Moscow, I demand vengeance. There is a passenger wandering about whose eyelids look like they have been doing drugs since the 80s.

Little in the way to alleviate the sheer dullness of a four hour delay. Allegedly some sort of volcano warning.

Flight takes off, huuuuuuge airbus. Exhausted at this point.

Periodically re-open notebook to review footage from Damian's class. Sandwich from BsAs' airport still hasn't claimed my life. I am a god.

Get to Madrid, eat a burger, pay exorbitant sum for internet, yay skype and that boingo access thing. In spite of 4 hour twiddling of thumbs in EZE, there's still another 5 to go here in Barajas.

Gate changes about three times. Shitty airbus this time around. Very cramped [Editor's note: Russians have this horrendous habit of buying every single item in duty free and completely overloading the baggage lockers]. Nevertheless, the flight back from Shanghai has yet to be beaten. Food sucks, but Iberia are an okay company. Next time I'm booking my own flight with someone else.

Land in Moscow. Some sort of clusterfuck with the immigration thing. System has changed recently in that you no longer have to smudge your name across a crappy slip of paper that could be easily reproduced, they print them out instead with the necessary info filled in. All very well until the printer breaks or the computer crashes.

Get through, barely recognize my bag as it's shrink wrapped in green plastic, but I think it's mine. I hope. I'll be in trouble if it isn't.

Manage to waltz from one end of the airport to the other to get the express on time. I am typing this on the train to Paveletskaya Station. Almost thirty hours have passed since I set foot in Buenos Aires' airport. It is -10 degrees.

Welcome home.

Buenos Diaries Pt. 1

2011-11-15T01:54:00.002+04:00

The following is a really bad attempt at keeping a brief account of my time here in Argentina. Why is it brief? I want to make it seem as though I am too busy with hot sexy milongeuras and only have the opportunity to type with one hand because I'm dragging some girl to the dance floor with the other. Normally this process of writing takes me far longer than it does for you to read it. This time around I'm just opening notepad and hammering down whatever I thought was funny. Expect gibberish and garbled syntax. Here's the first week.

Day 1 Flight to BA

[Joining me on my journey is Andrey, also at the same school as me, and Irina, who is from Nizhny Novgorod. Due to personal matters, Anton's arrival is delayed by about ten days :( The whole thing will last some 15 days]

Delayed at Moscow Domodedovo airport by one hour. Flights to Central Asian states aplenty, meaning there are Tajiks and Uzbeks everywhere. For some extremely weird reason - might have been the breakfast omelette - I break into a vicious sweat for about ten minutes and nearly vomit on the way to Madrid. Bought some swiss mega-adapter, so my camera and netbook will be with me throughout this little jaunt halfway across the world. Despite delay, arrive in perfect time for boarding. 12 hours of sitting about lie ahead. I really need a drink for this.

Nowhere near as bad as return flight from Shanghai, during which I had no netbook and nearly went nuts. Iberia are okay. Steer clear of the moussaka, and the red wine is like grape juice.

No problems getting through immigration (unless you're Canadian, American or Australian). Zhenya, our guide, meets us with a driver. It is a muggy 24 degrees on our arrival.

A forty minute drive gets us to our apartment building, which is in the swanky district of Palermo. Flat is sparse, but towels and soap are in abundance. Zhenya gives me a SIM card and we discuss other stuff.

I don't have any shampoo, this is my hair.

Day 2 Welcome to BA

Wake up, hair is still a disheveled clump on my head. It rained last night. View from my balcony.

Trees lining the street are somewhat of a novelty for me, having spent 3 years wandering Moscow's dusty pavements.

Meet my fellow milonguero/as for breakfast. One of them is having a couple of medialunas (lit. half-moons). A medialuna is a sweet croissant.

Stood in dog shit. Bought new tango shoes, very fancy. Tailored suit and trousers incoming next week. We drink two bottles of malbec over lunch. Beef is glorious. Shopping now. Wait, it's raining. Supermarket is called Disco. Try to take money out from ATM with my card, doesn't work - mostly due to the fact that I was guessing which friggin' button I needed to push. Credit card still works at the till.

Chill for the afternoon. Milonga in the evening. Didn't have glasses, couldn't see shit [Editor's note: Eye contact is vital during such events], still had some good dances, new shoes kick ass, nuts half-time performance by a professional couple, left my goddamn wallet on the table like a knobend, Andrey looked at my wallet and then at me as if I was a knobend when I came back to the table (quite rightly so).

Day 3 Settling in

Drag my ass out of bed. Lost my key, duh. Ended up leaving it in the door, security guard took it. Sheepishly march to admin, lady puts fear of god into me "someone could have come into your apartment!" even though there's a glass security door, a guard monitoring it, and five stories separating me from any potential bandito.

Call Mike. Meet for coffee outside, reminisce, talk about dogs, head back to his for lunch with his girlfriend. Sunburned. Ouch.

Another milonga tonight - hopefully getting dinner with Andrey and Ira. Beef!

No beef, huge chunk of salmon instead. White wine.

Milonga in old dance hall. Not as good as yesterday's. Ironically most of the people I danced with weren't Argentine at all. Italian, English, Asian/Australian, Danish and I forget who else. Get home at about 3 AM

Day 4 Friday hangover

Wake up feeling like crap. Need to get washing powder. Washing powder aquired. Washing machine sucks, gonna resort to hand washing shit from now on [Editor's note: He doesn't].

Cook pasta. Eat far too much ice cream because freezer is too small. Oops.

Heading out for class and milonga. Class lasts two hours. Milonga straight after. Not particularly wild on one of the movements that was focused on, which was a sort of amagi/kunita for the milonguera and a perpendicular side step for the partner.

Class made all the better by the presence of Fernanda, whose embrace I shall not forget for quite some time. Instructor guy was a teensy bit too flashy for my liking. Cool beard, though.

Milonga afterwards involved two encounters with Argentineans, a Japanese and Bulgarian. Head home early because dance floor gets way too packed, and have no patience to wait another hour for it to calm down. Bottle of Terrazas Malbec waits for me at home.

Day 5 Just Saturday

Sunbathe only a short while considering how red I turned in such a brief space of time the other day. Venture out on a little walk for an hour or so. End up on some main road (Avenue of the Liberator?)

with loads of trees and stuff everywhere.

Take a few snaps. Wander into some coffee shop by the zoo, order a chocolate alfajore which is similar-ish to Halva.

Waiting on early class tonight. Weekends are down time for milongas and lessons. If I can't get a personal instructor sorted tonight, gonna end up traipsing across the whole city next week to as many group classes as possible, if only for the fact that the quality of partners here is incredible compared to Moscow.

Turned up hour late for class (listing was incorrect). Met Damian Eselin. Apparently I'll be having a private lesson or two with him.

Milonga is a bit weak, but of all things Damian and his partner Nancy (along with another pair) are performing at this club. Rather than talk about the fact that it was not a young crowd in the slightest, I have videos of all their routines. Joy of joys is that the wifi in the apartment building is brill, and my upload speed is through the roof (sort of). Certainly way faster than Moscow. Anyway, enjoy.

There's a whole bunch more on my youtube channel.

Day 6 Souvenir Sunday?

Hang around flat til midday. Call Anton. Go to Parque Centenario to meet Mike. Eat a chorizo hot dog thing. Eat a churro. Eat some cake handed out by a couple of girls. "Spitting" trees. Attempt to buy souvenirs from flea market. End up settling on a set of nail clippers.

Drink a bottle of Quilmes local beer. Nothing exceptional. Might try and eat at the french brasserie tonight that my dad recommended.

A glorious chunk of cow is preceeded by a red tuna carpaccio. Creme caramel to finish. Wine with all three courses. I am full.

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Next time: the lessons with Damian begin...

Winter Is Coming

2011-11-03T13:39:00.008+04:00

Did you know Game of Thrones (Игра пристолов - Ee-gra pri-stall-ov) is actually filmed in Belfast? Came as a surprise to me. Great show all the same. Like Lord of the Rings (Властелин колец - Vlah-stel-in koh-lets), but taking out the twaddle about magic and elves and replacing it with everyone constantly shagging each other or stabbing each other in the back. Sometimes both. What's this got to do with Russia? Not much. I just felt like putting Sean Bean's face up there, because the poor bloke gets an awful lot of flak.

The reason I have not posted in a while is due to various external factors and, while we are at it, why not blame the weather (погода - po-go-da) too for its sharp seasonal turn about? So far it has been mildly wavering above zero (нуль - knool), teasing the local population (население - nah-si-len-i-ye) before it decides to nosedive.

It might be worthwhile re-naming this blog Everything Tango. I have become so dedicated to both it and the school (школа - sh-kawl-ah) that I am now turning into some sort of teaching assistant. If there is a lack of leaders or followers - the politically-correct term for guys and girls - for the beginner classes, on more than one occasion I have been invited to stay behind to help out.

This is by no means a bad thing, because I am now getting an insight into what it's like to dance as a follower - or, more romantically in Russian, a партнерша (part-nyor-sha). The leader is known as партнер (part-nyor). That sha you see at the end is a common method of feminizing a Russian noun, and the end result is that it actually sounds much more romantic. "Leader and Follower" has a sense of imbalance. "Two partners" on the other hand touches upon the very heart of the dance.

So that is what has mostly been the focus in the past three months - outside of work and personal life, which I cannot post about because they have been so exciting that blogger alone would not be able to contain it.

What I can say, without causing the Internet to explode, is that I went back to Ireland (Ирландия Eer-lan-di-ya) in August (Август - ahv-goost) for my birthday. Upon my return I celebrated with another Leo (Лев - Lyev) in tango tradition at the school, wherein everybody takes turns to dance with the birthday boy or girl.

In defence of my then-terrible dancing, I had just gotten off the plane the day before and hadn't practised in a week.

And what's the end result of all this? I am heading to Buenos Aires next week on a sort of pilgrimage for a fortnight. Expect photos (фотки foht-ki) and videos (роллики - rawl-ee-ki) of me eating beef, drinking red wine, and dreadful attempts at speaking the Spanish language (испанский язык - Ee-span-ski yih-sikh).

Oh and maybe dancing.

All We Hear Is...

2011-07-05T19:16:00.004+04:00

Instead of writing another entry, I decided to go on radio to talk for longer than I would spend jotting something down here. It was for Voice of Russia, which is kind of like the Motherland's version of the BBC World Service in that it broadcasts across the globe in many languages. I took part in the program "Home from Home", the host of which interviews English-speaking foreigners who now live and work in Moscow.

You can either follow the following link to the site to listen to it there, or download the 25-minute show by clicking here (or right-click and click "save as..."). Try to ignore the musical intermissions (unless, of course, you like samba), and the fact that I sound like a bit of a twerp in places.

Home from Home

Tags: World, Radio, Russia

Sam Gerrans

3.07.2011, 10:58

Benjamin Glover is from Northern Ireland. His school, unusual for Northern Ireland at that time, offered Russian, which he studied. He liked the language and went on to study Russian at university. After university he came out to Moscow three years ago and now works as a Style Editor at Russia Today. He has a range of interests and especially enjoys learning tango.

Source: Voice of Russia.

Fabulous Fantastic Fast Furious Facetious Five

2011-06-10T00:34:00.005+04:00

It's been both slow and busy for the past couple of months. Slow because of various factors (it's becoming too damn hot/humid for one) and busy because I can barely stop myself from going to tango class nearly every day. Seriously, we're talking 2-3 hours here during school nights, and I haven't even been to a milonga yet.

Part of the reason for this is because an Argentine maestro called Daniel Tuero (who has about 30 years of experience under his belt) came to visit last month for a three day seminar, so I decided to get as many classes in as possible in order to learn as much as I could. There's a whole bunch of vids of him on YouTube you can find. This is from a Moscow trip back in 2009.

Unfortunately the seminar wasn't the greatest in the world, as the overall skill level of attendees wasn't particularly advanced (продвинутая pro-dvi-noo-ta-ya), meaning Tuero had to keep things relatively simple. What was great, though, is that I booked a private lesson (индивидуальный урок in-dee-vid-you-al-ni ooh-rock) with him.

Yet as with any person who has studied or performed some sort of activity for far too many years, it was more of a philosophy lecture than me learning how to do something stupid like a backflip (those don't occur during normal dances anyway). Even though this is a no-brainer, Daniel pretty much reiterated that "it takes two to tango."

In other words, after watching me dance for a while, he explained that I wasn't thinking about my partner. On paper doing this is pretty obvious; in practice it can be quite hard, because there's a great tendency to want to show off and flick your legs around like a pillock - all the while ignoring the fact that you may not be leading properly, or that you're holding her in an uncomfortable manner, or that your posture is off, or that you're not even paying attention to her at all. I am guilty on all of these points.

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In other news I flagrantly abused my connections with another one of my friends and invited myself along to the Fast Five (Форсаж 5 Fore-sazh Pyat) press premiere at Moscow's Oktyabr theatre, which is pretty much the major cinema in the center of Moscow, located on the Novy Arbat. Why would I do such a thing, you might ask? Two words: Vin. Diesel.

Excuse the lighting on this video, the cinema was a bit dark at the time, but the audio is fine.

Tagging along were first-timer Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (of WWF fame) and regular co-star Paul Walker. As you can see in the video, it's kind of ironic that, despite The Rock's penchant for theatrics in his previous career, it was Vin Diesel who was hyping it up.

But what was even more bizarre was the fact that the person interpreting for the three was Dmitry Glukhovsky, who is the famous sci-fi author of the Metro 2033 series of books. In the video he introduces himself (in Russian) along the lines of "Well, yeah, I'm more known for writing those books - but I also like fast cars!" (In truth he's worked a bunch with Universal Pictures in the past helping out with localization).

As for the film itself, it's completely stupid. Totally and utterly utterly stupid. In a good way. I really haven't laughed so goddamn hard in the cinema in quite some time. Fast & Furious films are not high art by any means, and they don't pretend to be. It has also toppled 300 from the podium of "most homoerotic endeavor on the silver screen" too. I'm mildly concerned about Vin Diesel's physical condition, though, because in the film he looks terrible - and not as a result of his acting abilities.

And that "hint" Vin Diesel is referring to in the video? Yeah, they're shooting Fast 6 here.

What's In A Name?

2011-03-25T17:14:00.003+03:00

As with most large cities, the origin behind the name of Russia's capital is rife with different theories. Most folk tend to point towards the principal feature of Moscow (Москва - Massk-va, the stress being on the first syllable edit: no it's not, it's on the second, whoops! If a vowel in Russian isn't stressed, then it's not pronounced the way it should. So, for example, an unstressed "o" sounds like "ah") - its river, which is called the Moskva River. Naming a city according to its proximity to a geographical feature isn't exactly inspired. Regardless, what's the root of Москва?

According to some ancient Baltic languages (possibly Mordovian or Finno-Ugric), Москва could have come - via a slight mutation - from their words for 'dark' or 'muddy'. Another simply points to 'bear-river'. However, I was told a far more entertaining tale the other day regarding the origin of Москва. But first a little preamble.

In 1147, Prince Yury Dolgoruky of Rostov founded what would be later known as Moscow and set up a wooden kremlin there (кремль krem-l). Nowadays when you say the word Kremlin, most folk will associate it as the center of Russian government. What it actually means is something close to the word 'fortress'. Even though it got burned down a couple of times, Moscow has always had its kremlin in the same place.

So, if we believe my friend's account, Dolgoruky for whatever reason allegedly had an obsession with the word мост (mawst) or 'bridge'. It's not exactly a complete stretch of the imagination, there's a great big river there, and the prince probably did want a bridge. Over time, Dolgoruky kept saying мост, eventually leading to him dropping the 't' from the word.

Then, one day, while he was standing by the river, a frog (лягушка - lya-goosh-ka) leapt up the bank and croaked. Seeing as this was a Slavic frog, he did not 'ribbit'. In Russian, the onomatopaeia for a frog's croak is квак (kvak). Dogs (собака - soh-bah-ka), incidentally, do not go woof, they go гаф-гаф (gaff-gaff); pigs (свиня - sveen-yah) go хрунь (khroon); horses (лошадь - low-shad) go огого (oh-go-go); but cats (кот - cot) still go miaow regardless of language.

Dolgoruky's "мос" and the frog's "квак" came together in that moment, and thus was born Москва.

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In other news, spring has decided to rear its slush-coloured head. Proof of this was demonstrated beautifully by a coworker, who suddenly noticed that his wristwatch actually had a glow-in-the-dark dial. It had been so gloomy over the past few months that it simply wasn't absorbing any light until now.

Tango continues unabated. There was a special concert a couple of weekends ago at the Central House of Artists, during which the instructors of the school I go to performed.

Also performing were two Argentine maestros, Omar Caceres and Vidala Barboza, who stole the show (sorry, Anton). The way they moved so fluidly on stage pretty much confirms that all they do in Buenos Aires is just drink and shag. Apologies for the autofocus on this one; my camera had a mind of its own for the first 20 seconds.

There are more videos from the event on youtube, which you can find by clicking this link.

Swim City

2011-01-31T22:14:00.003+03:00

No man drowns if he perseveres in praying to God, and can swim.
- Russian proverb

Until last weekend I haven't been swimming (плавание plah-van-i-yeh) in at least two years. This is mostly due to the fact that I banjaxed my shoulder, effectively putting an end to any front crawl (кроль k-rawl) shenanigans, but I can still do the breast stroke (брасс brass) without any major repercussions. So where other than overpriced fitness centres can one go for a dip in the Russian capital, I hear you cry?

Well, there are far worse places than Чайка (Chai-ka lit. "seagull"), which is an open-air swimming pool (бассейн bah-say'n). Unfortunately, finding a decent picture of the complex is difficult, mostly because it shares its name with a rather famous - and incredibly depressing - play by Anton Chekhov. Fortunately, Google maps comes to the rescue.

View Larger Map

What you might also be asking is why on earth is someone going to an open-air swimming in the middle of a Russian winter? To that I don't really have an answer. I have a picture, though, courtesy of Alexander Baranov's flickr account.

Admittedly the temperature at the time that photo was taken was -20 at night. The coldest I've been there was when it was roughly -10 two weekends ago. And no, the pool is not -10, it's about +25 in the water.

Typical of Russian bureaucracy, in order to actually use the pool, you need to go and get something called a медицинская справка (med-it-sin-sky-ya sprav-kah) which is a doctor's certificate.

Fortunately, you don't need to go to some small hovel on the other side of the city for the scrap of paper that gets handed out for nearly everything and would probably be simple enough to falsify. There's a special office inside the complex where three ladies sit doing nothing but processing said scraps of paper and taking people's blood pressure all day. A few more form-signings and payments at the cashier later, one eventually gets to the changing rooms, which is where things start to get really Soviet.

First off you have to forfeit your медицинская справка to someone sitting in a small booth in exchange for a locker token (don't worry, you get it back later). Once you find your locker, you'll be presented with an odd sight.

Unlike a typical coin-operated lock and key mechanism found elsewhere, Chaika's lockers have four dials on them, both on the inside and the outside of the locker door. On the inside you clunk the dials into whatever code you want - which you later match on the outside to open it. Obviously you don't have the dials on the outside be the same as the ones on the inside, but the trick is trying to remember whatever 4 digit code you came up with. On the upside it means you don't have to worry about having to dive down three meters to get your key from the deep end.

Now I hope you brought a plastic bag (пакет pah-ket) with you, as well as a pair of flip flops (тапки tap-ki), a swim cap (шапочка для плавания sha-potch-ka d'lya pla-van-i-ya), goggles (защитные очки zah-sheet-ny-ye atch-key), a towel (полотенце po-lo-ten-tsye) and some shower gel (гель для душа gel d'lya doo-sha), because you'll be needing all that later.

Before taking the plunge, like at any pool you need to take a shower. Usually showers have the valve by the pipe connected to the shower head. Not so in Chaika. The valve is on the floor, which you have to stand on to operate.

Getting into the main Olympic-standard pool is actually kinda cool, though in the West it might be seen as a gross safety violation. You step into a small pool connected to the outside ,which is obstructed by a barrier that you then have to swim under. I suspect it's primarily a measure to keep the cold out of the shower area.

So once you've stuck on your swim cap and swum under the barrier, you're out in the open. And you better keep swimming, because even though the water is warm, the air above is still pretty cold.

Once you're sick of the pool, it's time to hit the sauna, though that involves having to walk outside around the pool.

[Writing about a Russian sauna/banya requires a whole other entry, so we'll skip this part for now. ]

After leaving the sauna, take a cold shower and then head round to another, much smaller pool. Now don't worry, this one's indoors. There's probably a very specific name for this bit, and if I knew it I'd post pictures because of how awesome it is.

You can only exit the pool from one side, the other side is up against a wall. About three meters up the side of that wall is a sort of gutter from which blasts a torrent of water. There are about ten of these things along the length of the pool. It sounds odd, but for the full Chaika experience you need to stand under one of these waterfalls and let it beat down on your back and shoulders. Bizarrely, it's the same as if someone were massaging you, and is ridiculously relaxing. And then you go back into the sauna and repeat the process a couple of times, and then outside to another pool in the open to come down from the whole experience.

Hopefully, by the end of all this, you are not dead.

In closing and in keeping with tradition I leave with a video of "Russian Rocket" Alexander Popov, who set the world record for the 50m freestyle in 2000.

========

In other news I was at an extremely odd recital at some performance artist's apartment last night. His name is German Vinogradov and he is a strange man. How I actually managed to end up at such a bizarre event should best be saved for another day, or wiped from memory altogether. I do not recommend looking him up on YouTube.

Also, Moscow's new mayor Sergey Sobyanin has come under fire for supposedly lax snow-clearing efforts in the capital. Already there are mumblings about the good old days of Luzhkov. I can't honestly see the difference between this year and last year's winter.

Edit (February 13, 2011): I managed to find this little gem of Tango instructors Anton and Anya practising a routine.

You Know When You've Been Tango'd

2010-12-12T21:34:00.006+03:00

I guess I should own up to those scant few who don't already know: I have been going to tango lessons for the past month or so.

It's part of an attempt to make up for me not going to the gym any more, though ironically the practice hall is even closer than the gym to my apartment. The school is called To Tango, and it teaches the Argentine form of Tango. The school even has a website. Here's a picture of instructors Anton and Anna ripped from the site:

Anton is a fantastically cool guy, and he also speaks English, which is useful seeing as I'm the only foreigner in attendance. Unfortunately, Anton has been on tango sabbatical to Buenos Aires for the past few weeks, leaving us to Gennady and Lena. I don't have any pictures of Gena, but he has danced far longer than Anton, so the class is in good hands.

So why bring this up now? Well, the past two lessons have made me realize that I can't possibly dance in a crappy pair of dress shoes for much longer, so I went out and bought a proper pair today. Hopefully these will stop me from ruining my knees.

Shiny.

Tango is... challenging, but it sure as hell is fun and I heartily recommend it to you all. Even though I suck right now, at least I'm picking up various dance vocabulary along the way, such as: осанка (oh-san-ka) which means "posture"; ось (oz) which means "pivot" or "axis"; шаг (shag) which means "step"; and поворачивать (po-vo-rah-chi-vat) which means "to turn" among many others.

So far I'm only doing the basic technique classes (базовая техника, baz-oh-vai-ya tekh-ni-kah) once a week, which last two hours. With time I'll maybe join the other group classes later in the week, and pluck up the courage to take part in a milonga. While it might sound like a dignified event, from what I gather with conversations with classmates, folk just get shitfaced and dance with each other for three or four minutes at a time.

And in that time, you live, you love, you die - or so Gena tells us.

Play us off, Gotan Project

Can’t Stop the Gop(nik)

2010-11-02T17:23:00.006+03:00

Over the past two weeks I have probably gone to the cinema far more than I should. A new job schedule has (finally) allowed me to return home without feeling brain-dead and able to do something semi-intellectual. Conveniently, a film festival was in town. In fact, there’s a British film festival that just started as well, but I unfortunately missed a screening of Chris Morris’ Four Lions last night (it’s showing again on Sunday, so here’s hoping I can nab a seat).

The theme of the 2-in-1 film festival was fairly general – art movies here, comedies there, foreign flicks thrown in for good measure – and the three films I managed to catch were vastly different [Special thanks to Kseniya and Aleksey, by the way, for abusing their influence with the organizers and giving me free tickets].

Другое Небо/Another Sky (Dmitry Mamuliya, 2010)

Probably best to start with the crap and end on a high note. Другое Небо (Droo-goy-ye Nye-boh) is an enormously depressing piece about chain-smoking estranged husband & father Ali from Central Asia who comes to Moscow in search of his wife. His nine-year-old son tags along. Nothing good happens to any of them, put bluntly.

To those not aware of the problems “guest workers” (or “gastarbeiteri” as the Russians stole it from the Germans) face in Moscow, Another Sky highlights their plight and shows off the supposed monotony of their existence in the capital. Truth be told, it was just plain boring – mostly because shots lingered on the side of the father’s head walking down streets and corridors, and he barely utters a word throughout. The first five times are fine, we get the message: it’s shitty and that’s the life some of them have. Is it necessary that the whole film be an exposition-less snooze-a-thon? Can’t there at least be a semblance of a story?

The director held a Q&A afterwards. He was wearing a scarf indoors. Groan. Though if I understood what was said correctly afterwards, various guest-workers and typical locations were used in the film (rather than being shot in, say, Mosfilm Studios). Too bad the production didn’t bother to delve into the topic further, as I mentioned in previous posts that Slavic (or “White”) Russians don’t exactly have good attitudes towards the Southern Caucasians or their Asian neighbours.

Неглубокая могила/Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, 1994)

Before Trainspotting, Danny Boyle shot Shallow Grave. I got slight waves of nostalgia, as it was filmed in Edinburgh, plus there was a cèilidh scene (Scottish line dancing, essentially, except fun).

One of the three protagonists, Kerry Fox (who plays a doctor), was in town to present the movie. Ewan McGregor (an obnoxious journo who never shuts up) and Christopher Eccleston (a straight-laced accountant who “always gets the job done”) have since gone on to bigger things.

It’s a well-paced flick, and Eccleston does a wonderful job of making the rest of the cast feel paranoid as he becomes more and more unstable after new flatmate Keith Allen’s unexpected death by overdose in their apartment. Well worth watching.

Гоп-стоп/Hold Up (Pavel Bardin, 2010)

Before Гоп-стоп (Gop-Stop), Pavel Bardin shot the film “Russia 88” (2009), which was a fake documentary about Russian neo-Nazi skinheads. I’ve not seen it myself, but it was both fairly well-received and banned from being screened in Russia.

Hold Up isn’t exactly a good translation of the title. The word “gopnik” in the blog title is Russia’s word for someone of the lower class i.e. ned, spide, steek, towny or scally depending on where you’re from in the UK. Essentially the stereotypical image of individuals dressed in garish tracksuits who hang around in playgrounds drinking Buckfast or White Lightning.

Ironically, while Gop-Stop features aforesaid scummy gopniks as the lead characters, the tone is the polar opposite to Bardin’s previous flick. Even though the film is loaded with obscure cultural references, most of which I could barely understand, I still found it hilarious. Needless to say, the locals who were in attendance howled with laughter.

Gop-Stop is the tale of down-and-out gopnik Vasya, played by Pyotr Fyodorov (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Colin Farrell) and his close friend who embark on an absurd Robin Hood-esque scheme against the oppressive local mayor, who has spent most of his term embezzling the money of the taxpayers. I wonder where they got that idea from?

Sometimes the Russian definition of comedy tends to be a guy on stage holding a clipboard, who announces “Two Russians go to Las Vegas” and then reads out a list of the hijinx they get up to. Gop-Stop completely quashes that image, proving that writers here are equally capable of dumb-but-fun screenplays that need not really on one nationality as its audience to be successful. Russian slapstick is not high art by any means, but it sure as hell was infinitely more entertaining than Another Sky.

Bizarrely, on the night, the film was being screened twice. After we came out of the hall, it turned out the second showing was for cast, crew and guests only. It was slightly bizarre seeing the same people that I had just watched for the past hour and a half standing in front of me. Pyotr Fyodorov remained in character and was dressed up in an ugly tracksuit for the premiere.

Социа́льная Сеть/The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

This wasn’t part of the festival, though it has just been released in Russia. It might be a bit of a stretch to define it as “the film of the decade” that some reviewers have already said, but the combination of Fincher’s direction, Aaron Sorkin’s writing, and the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross made for a fantastic experience.

It should be noted that, while it’s been called “the Facebook movie”, it has very little to do with the website itself. Instead, the story (based on the mouthful of a book “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal”) focuses on the actions of the main players – how the site was spawned from Mark Zuckerberg being dumped and drunkenly taking out his frustrations through his skills as a programmer – and the sacrifices they have made along the way in pursuit of fortune.

Regrettably I had the misfortune of only getting to see the Russian dub, but I still walked out of the cinema satisfied. Reznor’s style shines throughout, especially when the second major scene hits.

And who would have thought Justin Timberlake would nearly steal the show with his sleazy, narcissistic portrayal of Sean Parker, one of the founders of peer-to-peer file sharing service Napster?

The overall moral of the story is, while the facts might likely have been skewed and overdramatized on the way to the projector, we are all human and are equally fragile. It’s not exactly a feel-good movie, but in spite of the success of Zuckerberg et al., they all get their comeuppance one way or another, be it being sued for 500 million dollars, or simply being dumped by your girlfriend for being a jerk.

= = = = = = =

Last night on the way back from work one man was walking around in the chilly autumn air topless very slowly, albeit with his coat hanging down around his elbows. Later, on the way to the local grocery store, there was a man sliding around on his arse for no apparent reason. He didn’t look crippled at all; something had just possessed him to propel himself across the asphalt with his hands. Seat of trousers be damned.

That’s it for now.

The Dethroning of Luzhkov

2010-10-01T11:23:00.010+04:00

In the twelve or so years I spent studying Russian, as well as going to and from Moscow, there was always one constant: Yury Luzhkov. For the past eighteen years Luzhkov was the mayor of Moscow. But earlier this week, during Dmitry Medvedev's trip to China to rub shoulders with potential Hu Jintao replacements, the head of state held a press conference, during which he told the media that he had just signed a decree removing Luzhkov from office over "loss of confidence". He added that, as head of state, he cannot work with a regional head he does not trust. Michele Berdy has an interesting insight into the affair in her column on translating Russian over at the Moscow Times concerning Medvedev's choice of words.

Luzhkov is not a popular man, especially among the gay community, whom he has repeatedly condemned for their so-called satanic activities and happily dispatched the police to knock the shit out of them every time they tried to hold an "unsanctioned" demonstration anywhere in the city, though specifically on Triumfalnaya Square, where one can find the statue of renowned poet Mayakovsky...

...but it wasn't always this way with Luzhkov. He did do a lot for the capital. After the USSR went belly up in the 90s, Moscow was in chaos, and Luzhkov's indefatigable management skills came to the fore and managed to turn the place from potentially becoming a swamp to one of the most opulent capitals on the planet.

Urban regeneration was his forte, and for the first few years he pulled it off. In the vid up top you'll see the big gold Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (Храм Христа Спасителя Khram Khree-sta Spa-see-tell-ya). The colossal structure was reconstructed under his watch (it got torn down in the 1930s). He had restored the city, and then some.

...But then things started to go wrong (well, not really for Luzhkov). Luzhkov slowly shifted from being a manager to a political figure, not to mention the sums of money that were being accumulated from the massive construction projects.

Of course, people in office in Russia aren't permitted to have any financial interests, but it would have been a terrible shame to let all those business contacts go to waste. That's where Luzkhov's wife came in.

Unlike her spouse, Yelena Baturina has no such problem with trivial issues like political accountability. Although it's never been declared officially, it's fair to assume that her construction firm wouldn't have been behind so many of Moscow's many sky-scraping eyesores had it not been for her proximity to the highest executive power in Moscow.

Speaking of eyesores, Luzhkov is also partly responsible for the most obnoxious statue in Moscow.

This 90-meter-tall behemoth is meant to be in memory of Peter the Great, and was constructed by the equally obnoxious "artist" Zurab Tsereteli, who just happens to be (surprise surprise) a close friend of Luzhkov. I think we're a seeing a pattern emerging.

Regardless of the slightly undemocratic deposition, it was more than ample time for him to be booted out. His stay in the mayor's office was way past any acceptable term, though I suspect Michael Bloomberg may have been taking notes.

========

In other news, I've been lax in visiting the gym, mostly due to laziness combined with the fact that I have achieved more or less what I set out to do. Honestly speaking, the place is pretty lame and the membership is running out soon. The fact that there are so many men doing those previously-mentioned thrusting motions in tight shorts (on more than one occasion I've even seen punters do some form of bizarre tapdance as a warm up) in front of me while I'm on the treadmill makes me feel I've wandered onto the set of a really crap gay softcore porno-comedy. The receptionist is cute, though.

I believe there's a nicer (read: more expensive) gym up the road.

[Husband & wife pic by Misha Japaridze/Associated Press, found in this Guardian article, the rest are mine :P]

Singing in the Rain

2010-09-11T02:04:00.010+04:00

So, for the first time ever, Irish super rock group U2 and its lead singer’s ego came to Moscow two weeks-ish ago to play at Luzhniki stadium, which is the same venue where the Champions League final took place in 2008.I had no real inclination to see them by myself (cue some locals shocked in disbelief at the fact that I didn’t want to see fellow Irishmen perform), but a last minute invitation swayed me. Plus it was an opportunity to see whether all the mocking of Bono by South Park and Family Guy is really warranted or not.

The only other time I had been at Luzhniki was in the summer of 2007 for the Metallica concert, which was pretty terrible. Not because of Metallica, they’re alright, but because of Luzhniki itself. As a concert venue it’s dreadful, as you can barely hear a damn thing in the stands (which is where I was at the time) because it echoes all over the place. But more importantly, the whole place was riddled with Moscow’s police force (or, rather, the Милициа - Militsia).

The moment you arrive at Sportivnaya Metro Station, you will see them standing around grumpily watching the platform. The moment you leave the station, you are confronted with the first of many rows of them.

This pattern repeats all the way towards the stadium, where you have to pass through at least two security checks before you even get a glimpse of the interior.

Admittedly, trying to keep several thousand people in a small area in some sort of order is a logistical nightmare, and the Militsia did pull it off despite being extremely menacing. To be fair, I’ve seen worse in Glasgow (Up Front Security are a particularly charming bunch). But none of it was particularly relaxing.

Given my previous experience at Luzhniki, I had very low expectations in the run up to being graced by Bono’s presence, and I was genuinely surprised… but not by U2. When the support group came on, I had a very odd sense of déjà vu.

It took a few seconds to register, but it turned out that, of all people, Snow Patrol was the warm-up act. And even without fancy audio visual equipment and costumes (lead singer Gary Lightbody was scruffy as usual) they were far more entertaining than the main act. Mostly because of this moment…

…After their set was done with, at least another hour was spent standing around, taking in the pleasant atmosphere of being intimidated by the local law enforcement while watching roadies do all sorts of things on the stage that was specially made for the 360° tour.

Eventually Bono, The Edge and the two other guys no one else cares about came out to the tune of David Bowie’s “Ground Control to Major Tom”. I’m not sure if it’s their “thing”, like how Metallica always kicks off its gigs with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’s “The Ecstasy of Gold” by Ennio Morricone. If you’ve not heard the track in question then, well, make up for it now.

I think it’s fair to say that Morricone is more effective in kicking off a rock concert than Bono’s crooning of “Singing in the Rain” as it had actually started raining the moment the lot of them walked on stage, which didn’t stop until we left. And yes, I got soaked.

Despite not owning a single CD, I pretty much recognized every single song played on the night because – unless folk are unaware at the dilemma major artists are facing nowadays – U2 weren’t there to promote anything new. All these guys now have to go on tour to keep going.

It’s not like the old days where you would have to sell a million copies to go to number one. With music downloads and the ubiquity of iTunes, U2 et al. simply can’t sustain themselves on record sales alone. This is why the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan are constantly on tour, and will do so until Keith Richards can’t drool over the frets anymore.

And who wins here? Well, the Russians do. An ever-increasing number of bands are flocking to Russia. Elton John was here with his Red Piano recently. Madonna was in St. Petersburg. The Prodigy can’t get enough of Moscow’s money. Looking at the billboards outside my balcony right now, I can see that ZZ Top, Placebo and Sheryl Crow are incoming.

Yet I digress. Truthfully, the gig wasn’t the best because, despite playing their timeless hits, the four Irishmen didn’t exactly rock out. It was more about the spectacle of the thing. All the flashing lights, all the camera angles, all the moving bits of the stage etcetera.

But what was both disappointing and baffling was Bono fulfilling the South Park/Family Guy prophecies of acting like the biggest tit on the planet. At one point there was a pre-recording by one of the dudes on the International Space Station reciting what I think was a stanza or two of one piece, which was followed by Bono holding his arm up and head down like the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics saying something along the lines of “Frank De Winne up der in the Inter-nash-un-al Spays Stay-shun, folks. Guys, just, y’know, keep ah-skin questions. Just keep findin’ ahnsers…”

…to the bemusement of all Russians in attendance. And then Desmond Tutu appeared on screen with an equally cryptic statement. And then the first four articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights scrolled up.

A bunch of other surreal stuff appeared on the big screen, which was eventually closed off by an appearance of people carrying Amnesty International Chinese lanterns to Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, co-sung with the vocalist of Russian band DDT and noted activist Yury Shevchuk.

Afterwards it was a tiresome trek back to the metro station with several hundred other soaking wet people. Upon (eventually) returning home I jumped in the shower before gulping down a large glass of Chilean red.

[Photo of Bono found at Alf Broflovski’s flickr profile.]

Burning Down The House

2010-08-21T11:21:00.013+04:00

So last Sunday (15th) was amusing. Actually, the previous Wednesday (11th) was genuinely entertaining, as I attended my friend Dima's wedding, which was an absolutely wonderful day and I'll write about it later. A couple of hundred pics are on flickr from the day.

But something happened on my way to Dima's wedding, which took place at the Дворец Бракосочетания (Dvor-ets Brak-oh-so-shey-tan-i-ya lit. Palace of Marriage) which is more or less the same as ЗАГС (Zags an acronym for what is essentially a Registry Office, but everyone says Zags for short). A few doors up from mine an apartment was on fire and the firemen (пожарники po-zhar-ni-key) were busily blasting it from a cherry picker.

"That's interesting," I thought, as the apartment itself was part of the same building I live in. Most apartment buildings in Moscow have multiple подъезды (pod-yez-dh lit. um... well, езд comes from a verb of motion, but it means entrance). I was in a rush to get to the other side of town where the registry office is at, but after seeing the burly Russians attacking the blaze I became plagued by the idea that I might not have an apartment to come back to after all the wedding fun times. My fears didn't manifest themselves, and my apartment was fine after I came back home at two in the morning.

That was, of course, until Sunday. Coming back at about three in the afternoon - I can't recall what I had been doing before then - I noticed the apartment stairwell stank of what could best be described as burnt plastic. Подъезды smell funny most of the time, usually of stale piss because tramps have a tendency to pass out on the stairs in the winter, but this time round it was especially pungeant.

One astute neighbour also noticed the stench, and was pacing up and down the stairs looking for the source. I became paranoid and started feeling the floors of my apartment wondering if any of the parquet had suddenly become especially hot (not easy to tell when your apartment is hot to begin with given the recent heatwave). And wouldn't you know it? The apartment directly below mine was actually on fire.

By the time I had realized it was probably the right moment to vacate the place, I heard a colossal banging from downstairs. Firemen were already there and were attempting to force their way in with a crowbar, hose at the ready (meaning I couldn't really get past, but I guess I could have jumped off my balcony, which is only about twenty-five feet from the ground). Then I got a phonecall from one of my Russian friends who lives nearby, inquiring, "Umm, Ben, there's smoke coming from one of the windows of your building, are you alright?"

At that point I noticed that some burly firemen on a crane were peering through my balcony window at me to see if I was alright and rudely hung up on my friend to chat with them.

Given the sturdiness of doors you find in some Russian apartment buildings like the one I'm in (where the ceiling is about three meters high), the crowbar wasn't sufficient, prompting the appearance of an enormous diesel-powered angle grinder to saw through the bolts, which made a hilarious amount of noise.

Obviously, no one was in the apartment at the time. In fact, I can't recall the last time I had seen someone entering or exiting the place in the past year, so I suspect it may have been an electrical fault. I'm vaguely sure I heard mentions of an electric blanket, which might have explained the initial stench.

Anyway, the fire was put out relatively quickly. No towering inferno, I regret to disappoint, just a stairwell full of smoke (ironic, given the fact that the thick amount of smog that had descended on Moscow over the past fortnight had finally lifted). A fireman came in to inspect my place afterward and found no smoke or soot damage, and merely said that I should just leave the window open for a while.

Oddly enough, my friend who called me earlier was still waiting down on the street, which was nice, but, because of his particularly unique character, I was wondering if he was less interested in seeing me safe and well and instead more excited by the prospect of me emerging from the подъезд half on fire. He simply grinned when I later made this observation.

Not wanting to enjoy the stench of burnt plastic, I left the building for a few hours to both get a drink and let the excitement die down.

A few days later, I encountered a couple of my immediate neighbours talking by the lift. Unfortunately for them, who weren't present on the day it happened, it turned out that the fire had kicked off underneath theirs, and that there was some sort of soot damage here and there in the apartment. Although most of the apartments are uniform, a lot of them used to be all one large thing, called a коммуналка (com-oo-nal-ka lit. a short form of communal apartment) in which several families would live. After the Soviet Union died, a lot of these apartments were split up.

The flat below me, however, hadn't been completely rearranged as the ones above, and covered the same area of the two apartments above i.e. mine and my neighbours'.

But anyway, no lives lost and mostly superficial damage. Here's to the next disaster. Perhaps something less dramatic, though, like the power outage in four of St. Petersburg's city districts last night.

Summer has come... I almost wish it hadn't

2010-08-01T21:19:00.013+04:00

Yes it's incredibly lazy to just embed YouTube vids haphazardly, but it saves me time because I'm awfully lethargic. Since the last post I've been in between jobs - which actually means I've been doing two jobs until the latter is done with - so the prospect of coming home to read and write more stuff (that I won't get paid for) has been a little unappealing. That and the year-long honeymoon period of keeping a blog has nearly ended. But fret not, I shall endure!

Coming back to Martha and The Vandellas, it's been hot. No really. It started off as fun, but then came forest and turf fires, thick smog from the infernos completely blanketing parts of the capital, people's dachas (country houses) burning down in the Moscow outskirts, crop failures, and states of emergency being declared in 20+ regions of Russia. The past three weeks of drought have been hellish for a lot of people, but it's finally cooling down.

As a result it has added to the whole being idle thing. I have mostly hidden away indoors because there are only so many sunbeams the Northern Irish tan can take, as well as the fact that I am being less wild with my money - though what I would be spending on eating out is now being spent on keeping my air conditioner working overtime (my bedroom window faces the setting sun). On top of all that, the student loan Sword-of-Damascus over my head has finally made me paranoid enough to start paying it off.

So what is there to say? Well, my friend Mitya (formally Dmitry; Russians have various diminutives, e.g. Benjamin = Ben/Benny/Benster etc.) has finally released his first book, called «Секс в саду камней» (Seks v sah-doo kahm-neigh) which means... umm... "Sex in the Stone Garden". It's an erotic satire consisting of a collection of short stories, of which I've read the first four, which revolves around Japanese culture.

The huge irony is that, while Mitya spent a lot of time in China in his formative years, he has never once set foot in Japan, and instead bases his stories on various stereotypes and his own perverted mind. With each passage, I begin to look at him in a slightly different light, as they get ever more extreme in content, but all the more hilarious.

Pending his approval, I'll eventually put pictures of the book presentation, which took place at the Mayakovsky Museum, on my flickr account. It should be noted that in order for any book to be printed in Russia, the publishers must have a letter from what is ostensibly the propaganda ministry declaring that it does not contain extremist material. I would have been interested to see the expressions on their faces upon seeing the cover of Mitya's opus land on their desk.

Aside from potential book pics, a lot of (mostly untitled) photos have been added to the new Moscow 2010 flickr album They feature sunshine, and there are some ladies contained therein. Enjoy.

Update: Moscow continues to be enveloped in smog. There was brief respite on Friday afternoon, but it came back with a vengeance at the weekend. I took some pics last Wednesday, which more or less show what it's like currently.

But if that's not enough for you, someone made a video on YouTube of what it's like.

Thankfully I have an air conditioner in my apartment, as well as some surgical masks.

A Tale of Two Cities

2010-06-19T01:11:00.005+04:00

This entry has been a long time coming, for a whole bunch of reasons. I have alluded beforehand to the subject of problems that foreigners have working overseas. I kept putting it off because each time I attempted to write on this particular matter, I ended up descending into sweeping generalizations about the locals (which is boring, and it's been done to death by scummy nincompoops in various print media), or go into detailed explanation about how there are moments just before going to sleep or waking up whereupon a moment's reflection on my current situation nearly manifests itself into a "WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING HERE?" cold sweat scream (which is depressing, and it's been done to death by scummy nincompoops in various print media). And that's not the route I want to go down, naturally. But after visiting both Shanghai in December and Paris in March I feel as though I can come back to this topic, and subsequently tackle those two issues.

What am I trying to get at, you might ask? Well my overarching point is that, regardless of where you are, or wherever you go, you're still going to have problems. So without further ado, the following are the three main differences which stuck out during my little Parisian jaunt that support my observations.

Race

Yes, Eurodisney is just outside Paris – but there’s no point in going. Paris is kinda like London – people of all creeds and colors have descended on the place, and a short trip on its metro (which is rather unnerving as it is not a particularly smooth form of travel) is like seeing every single nationality in the world in one go. And they are all really, really well dressed to boot. Had I not brought the jacket I’m wearing in the photos on flickr, I’d have felt like a right arsehole wandering the streets.

Conversely, Moscow is predominantly white, and their fashion sense leaves much to be desired. Blame communism for that one (the clothes, not that it’s all whitey).

In addition, there’s an undercurrent of accepted racism in Russia, but delving into that topic would mean revisiting how scummy the police are here and their habit of beating to death anyone with remotely non-European features. That’s not to say Paris doesn’t have its own problems with race.

Flats

Hearing about the flat-finding process in Paris genuinely shocked me. Central (“traditional”) Paris, which is made up of twenty arrondissements (districts), is demarcated by the Peripherique ring road. Here’s a map:

From what I learned, trying to build/bulldoze any property in central Paris is a big no no, as it is either protected as a World Heritage site (granted, the buildings are pretty, feel free to look at the stupid number of photos I took on flickr) or the level of French bureaucracy makes the whole thing not worth a developer’s while.

What does this mean, then? It means that the housing market is heavily steeped in the landlord’s favor. Why? Because, in reality, there is only a certain amount of places available within the Peripherique. It’s not like Moscow, where Mayor Luzhkov will happily allow his fugly wife to knock over several acres of people’s homes to make way for obscene skyscrapers and further dilute the market.

As such, people seeking flats to rent anywhere in twenty of Paris’ central districts – forget about buying a property – have to accept the appalling fact that they will not only have to pay an exorbitant sum of money per month (if they even get a place), but will also need to fork out some serious cash up front as a deposit.

When my friend told me this (I may have the exact specifics wrong, as we were probably drinking red wine at the time, but the figure is not an exaggeration) to get a two-room flat along with another fellow, he had to pay a year’s rent in advance as a deposit up front. How much is that, you ask? At least TEN THOUSAND EURO.

Never in my life have I heard anything as bad as that. I lived in Glasgow for four years, been screwed around by dodgy Bangladeshi landlords, letting agencies, energy companies, and even the goddamn city council on more than one occasion – but they were mere trifles compared to my friend’s experience.

Still… those boulangeries…

On my side, I’ve had few problems finding a flat in Moscow, and I don’t really have any horror stories to tell of. There are a bunch of expat-friendly websites (expat.ru, redtape.ru, flatmates.ru) that can facilitate the flat/roommate-finding process. Agents are generally efficient and abundant as well, though some landlords will happily try to fuck over clueless Westerners.

Dogs

Within the first few minutes of walking around Paris, it became absolutely clear that the French did not have a revolution just so they could clean up dog shit. There is a frightening amount of the stuff. Not so much in the fancier parts of central Paris like the Marais or Montmarte. Yet up until that point, I couldn't recall the last time I'd stepped in crap on a city street. It's not happened to me in Moscow, that’s for sure, likely due to the fact that the migrant street cleaners do an insanely good job at keeping the place tidy. Having said that, I will likely step in some after I’m finished with this post.

But Moscow has its own dog issues - strays. And I don't mean the saccharine "Aww look at the fuzzy wuzzy's widdle face." I'm talking about actual packs of dogs that occupy courtyards and parks around apartment blocks. Dogs that put families off from taking their children anywhere near the playgrounds. Dogs that roam the streets and will actually attack passersby. Dogs that aren’t pets, they’re vermin.

Sure, bleeding heart liberals kick up a fuss about the city administration rounding them up and exterminating them (I believe there was a big surge prior to last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which Moscow hosted) as a temporary solution but, pray tell, what’s the alternative? Implementing that unrealistic neutering program that was much talked about?

Thankfully, a phenomenon already exists that partially deals with the flea-ridden mongrels – the weather. Come winter, temperatures drop so low that the majority of mutts simply get killed off, only to start breeding like rabbits and quickly tear up the city again come springtime.

In case it’s not clear from reading the last two paragraphs – my stance on Moscow’s stray dogs is pretty firm. I’d rather have a dead undomesticated animal on my conscience than being witness to a friend or coworker being attacked in front of me. I’ve been fortunate enough that such a thing hasn’t happened, but coworkers have shared too many stories to simply brush it off as an unlikely occurrence…

…Anyway, what I mean by all this is that Moscow has problems, but so does Paris. As an expat working abroad, you might think that you can run amok with a bottle of stout in defiance of the locals. For a brief amount of time, at least in Moscow, it’s possible to do so. But it comes to a point where you realize that the place is not perfect, and suddenly the idea of working in Paris becomes appealing.

However, having spent so much time in Paris – which was a bit of a mistake on my part, but I was damned if I was going to fart around Moscow for two weeks – and seeing what my friends’ lives are like there, they’re not much different to my own. They too sometimes get fed up with their surroundings.

I have managed to accept the fact that the brief sensations of loneliness and the doubts about my current way of life are not exclusive either to me, or to my location – be it Moscow, Paris, Shanghai, Glasgow or Belfast. It’s a given that has to be tolerated. Those that can’t and move on to the next place invariably end up going through the motions again once the novelty has worn off.

As such, I feel I can officially lay this topic to rest and move on to writing about something more meaningful – like Moscow’s numerous stripclubs.

= = = = = == = = = = = = =

In other news, there was a gay pride march (sort of – it was more like small groups of people streaking, but fully clothed and holding placards in various places for a few minutes at a time) on the day of the Eurovision Song Contest, but Peter Tatchell didn’t get punched this time by a Moscow riot cop, so no one cared too much.

I also had a wisdom tooth removed, which made me a bit cranky. My hot water went off the day after it got extracted. Double trouble.

Caveat Emptor II: The Birthday Chronicles

2010-04-26T12:52:00.004+04:00

Having witnessed two non-Russians celebrate their birthdays here in the space of the past month, I thought it would be astute to mention the… peculiarity that Russians perpetuate concerning such an event.

Put gently, the practice is just a matter of good manners on your part. Put plainly, it’s downright mean on the part of everyone else. The chief warning is this: don’t go to a bar or restaurant on your birthday in Russia.

Why, you might ask, would one not want to celebrate their birthday at an eatery? Good food, wine, and company are perfect for such an occasion – so where’s the issue here? The problem is that, once it’s time for all to stumble onwards, you have to pay.

This shock to a Westerner’s system is compounded by the fact that, when Russians actually go out for birthdays, they hunt in packs. The most recent party I was at had least twenty people in attendance. Even though the birthday boy in question was fully versed in Russian culture, he was still not best pleased when the bill came his way.

Oh sure, your guests will bring presents, cards and likely a cake also, but they will drink you out of house and home. So much for being pampered by your nearest and dearest on the one day of the year when it’s all about you.

So where does it come from? Upon consultation with a native, allegedly, after receiving such gifts and enjoying fun times, one should проставиться (pro-stav-it-sya). There’s no real direct translation, though it essentially means one should equal things out. Another example would be that if you have a housewarming or are cooking for people in Russia – you’ll have to clean the dishes (I actually think this one is meaner) while everyone else sits on their behinds drinking the booze you bought for them.

It’s a sort of superstition that is almost reminiscent of the Aztecs, though not so much of the human-sacrifice-so-the-sun-will-rise-again. Put another way, if there’s enjoyment happening, those mysterious Slavic gods of social conscience must be appeased immediately, lest your moments of fleeting pleasure somehow bite you in the ass further down the line.

In other words, if you come to Russia, go to other people’s birthday parties – not your own.

================

In other news, well, there is not much excitement. I’m attempting to snap photos here and there and still going to the gym, though not lifting weights and instead running like a pillock on the machines. Russians tend to have a different gym regime to what I’ve seen in the UK, so thankfully the machines are hardly occupied. This is because Russians are big on weights, but are more calisthenics-ish outside of that, in that they will do exaggerated, odd-angled squats, sit ups, abdominal stretches and so forth (rather than cardio, maybe it’s a not-wanting-to-sweat thing). And then they’ll just grab a bar and hang off it for about ten seconds before repeating.

Victory Day (День Победы, Dyen Po-byed-ee) is coming soon, which should be more fun than last year, as it’s the 65^th anniversary of the end of World War II. On that note, I read a magnificent variation on the typical error Russians suffer from when translating into English. Instead of writing the typical “The World War II” (i.e. Russians have a problem with definite articles – the same goes for “The Wall Street” or “The Red Square”), one Russian presented me with the beautiful “World War the Second”.

I was also endlessly amused by Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano-glacier thing terrorizing Europe, even more so by the fact that I didn’t hear one news anchor attempt to say its name in full (it’s pronounced “EYE-a-fyat-la-jo-kutl”).

Finally, my hair dryer dramatically gave up the ghost, ending its own life with a crunching noise, but it matters not: it’s warm outside, and that’s where I’m going next…

Terrorism returns to Moscow

2010-04-04T08:58:00.014+04:00

A new entry has been a long time coming. This is mostly due to the fact that I was on holiday for the first two weeks in March, and then straight back on shift for another week. The events on the Metro on Monday, March 29th, have also delayed writing as well. On the upside, prior to my holiday in Paris, I acquired a digital camera and have uploaded several hundred photos of the French and Russian capitals, which you can find at my flickr account.

I'm not entirely sure it's my place to discuss the Moscow Metro attacks. Looking up the entry about it on Wikipedia will give you more information than I can. Yet what I can do, perhaps, is give you a basic version of the events for those who don't have the patience, or the background knowledge. I should warn you that I will hyperlink a bunch of phrases, something I normally hate doing (seeing as nearly every other damned blog post on the Internet consists entirely of links to other sites). Try to think of them as further reading. I'll attempt to keep things simple.

On Monday, March 29th, the first explosion struck the red line Metro station Lubyanka just before 08:00, which was smack bang during rush hour ("час-пик" chass-peek or "peak hour" literally). Lubyanka is of importance, not so much in terms of the transport network as it only meets the purple line, but what's above it. Here's a pic of the Moscow Metro's layout in English. Click to expand.

On Lubyanka Square is the headquarters of the former KGB (Комитет Государственной Безопасность - Komitet Gos-u-darst-vennoi Bez-o-pass-nost lit. Committee for State Security), now the FSB (Федеральная Служба Безопасности - Federalnaya Sloozh-bah Bez-o-pass-nost-ee lit. Federal Service of Security). In other words, it's the equivalent of London's MI5. As you can see from the map, it's just a little bit north from the Kremlin itself, making it a prime target for anyone wanting to attack the Russian government.

Approximately 40 minutes later, the second bomb went off at Park Kultury Metro station, located further down the line from Lubyanka and joins with the ring line station, which is extremely busy at the best of times. Both bombs occurred while the trains were on the platforms. Had they gone off while the train was in motion doesn't bear thinking about. The trains themselves can hit a top speed of about 70 km/h between stations, certainly at that time of day. The bombs themselves weren't that powerful, but they did contain shrapnel and metal rods, and were detonated via the use of cellphones.

As it turns out, Park Kultury was allegedly not the intended target, even though it is a busy thoroughfare at that time. Instead, Oktyabrskaya (one station anti-clockwise from Park Kultury on the circular line) was meant to be hit next. As for what's at Oktyabyrskaya... well, nothing exceptional comes to mind, other than the fact that it's a ring line station like Park Kultury.

The chief reason why the bomber was not successful in reaching Oktyabyrskaya is that perhaps she had been delayed. I know from an acquaintance - who was on the train ahead of the one that was carrying the second bomber at Park Kultury and heard the explosion behind her - that the red line was being closed off and people were being taken off the trains "for technical reasons" and "told to seek other routes", so the second suicide bomber there would have had to get off at the station regardless of whether or not she was heading to Oktyabyrskaya. It was also at such a time that news about Lubyanka was just beginning to spread. Consequently, access to the ring line at Park Kultury was also shut down for approximately an hour.

In addition, the bombers themselves were two young women - one in her teens - reported to be the widows of two Chechen militants (it's not uncommon for these men often have multiple wives). They have been named, and were allegedly accompanied by two men to the station they both got on at, which is Yugo-Zapadnaya - the first station on the red line from the south west. The apartment they were residing in and where the bombs were assembled has also been discovered. The manhunt for the two accomplices is underway.

On top of killing 40 and injuring 100 people and causing transport havoc - which greedy taxi drivers capitalized on at Metro station Komsomolskaya, also on the red line, by hiking up their fares to ludicrous sums (something in the region of 3000 roubles, or $100, to get to the centre of the city) - the mobile phone networks ground to a halt in the middle of the day as a result of the sheer number of phonecalls made and text messages sent. The authorities also asked the networks to do so in an attempt to block any further detonations. The phone network Megafon reimbursed its customers for any text messages sent from the time of 08:00 to 16:00, while mine (Beeline) sent me information messages about alternative bus routes or something along those lines (I couldn't tell, as the rest of the text was missing).

As for responsibility, it lies with so-called Chechen warlord/Islamist rebel leader/freedom fighter Doku Umarov, who is more or less deemed Russia's equivalent of Osama Bin Laden. Previous acts attributed to this man (or his group, of which he is its self-styled Emir) include the recent derailment of the Nevsky Express in November 2009, which claimed 27 people, as well as numerous homocides and kidnappings - all in the name of seeking the creation of the so-called "Caucasus Emirate".

Thankfully, all of my friends and acquaintances were unharmed, though there were a number of near-misses and those who slept in or were late for work.

As a result of Monday's events, I ended being contacted by BBC Radio Ulster to talk about it. Skip ahead to approximately 1:14:30. I was a bit nervous talking on national radio, so please excuse the inaccuracies that I have hopefully remedied with this post.

Finally, Russia Today went into overdrive on Monday with its coverage, some of which you can watch here. Their footage was at one point being streamed by both the BBC and CNN on the day.

=======

In other news, the snow is gone and it's warming up. Despite me looking forward to a winter wonderland of lots of snow remiscent of 2005/2006, which I got, it was too long and too dark. So much so that it was starting to take its toll emotionally. What'll likely happen now is a boiling hot summer, just like in 2006, which should be a joy when I'm at work.

I've also joined a gym literally around the corner from my apartment. Nothing exceptional, but it's open late, meaning I can go for a run after work, which is a relief after being on a 12-hour shift.

Last but not least, I acquired a faux leather office chair from Ikea for my flat. Its design is nothing exceptional, but it took a ludicrously long time to assemble because of its leatherette-ness. It was a balancing act trying to position a cumbersome soft thing next to another combersome soft thing, then trying to screw the two together. Three limb minimum. In hindsight I'd have rather changed the tires on a Hummer. Here's the completed article.

Someone should invent some sort of clamp specifically for Ikea furniture.

The (taxi) ride of your life

2010-02-22T14:53:00.004+03:00

In trying to drum up something to write about, as I haven't typed anything in a while, I initially thought about writing on the mental and physical effects living abroad can cause. Then, ironically, it turned out to be too depressing and dull to write about, so I've settled to instead talking about a completely unique and life-threatening form of Russian transport - the gypsy cab.

I'm not too sure where the practice originates from. Maybe it stems from the economic hoo-haa of Communist times, combined with the whole 'equality' ideology as well (comrade). The basic process is this, and you don't need your phone to call up some pithy taxi company:

1) Go to the side of the road, preferably the busiest;
2) Stick out your hand (this is known as поймать машину poi-i-mat ma-shi-nu lit. catch a car);
3) Watch in amusement as several automobiles, usually the shitty ones, swerve across a few lanes to make it to the kerb;

[What a Moscow taxi maybe should look like, but yours certainly won't.]

4) At this point, carefully open the front passenger door of the first car, lest you break it. Confront the driver brusquely, state where you're going and how much you are going to pay. If he agrees: jump in beside him, as opposed to the back seat, (again, I don't know why this is the case) and off you go. If not, slam the door in his face and walk to the next one. Eventually, by the third or fourth, you'll get where you want for what you want. Always negotiate a price before getting in, and, although this should go without saying, never get into a car with two people in it.

Now for the ride itself. Quality of conversation - if you choose to have one - can range from simple chit-chat (what's the traffic like?) to historical debates (what was life like under communism?) to outright racist outbursts (WHY DID I EVEN OPEN MY MOUTH?). It also depends on whether or not the man (I've hitched a ride on two separate occasions with women, one of which was very manly and didn't charge me a dime, as it was a short journey to the end of a one-way street anyway, the other was a German real estate agent) is drinking stary melnik beer, smoking belamor cigarettes, eating sunflower seeds, or fooling around with his portable DVD player.

None of this is an exaggeration, I've been in a gypsy cab where at least one of these things has occurred. In some occurrences they've been nigh on terrifying. This New Year's drive home at 4am from my friend's flat I will never forget, for instance. I was with a lady friend, and I got the feeling the driver was trying to be the cock of the walk . It had also snowed heavily, so the roads weren't exactly ideal, but the metro was closed for another couple of hours, so death cab it was.

I've never been driven home so fast through so much snow (or any weather conditions for that matter) with no real concern on the driver's part. He was doing the usual chit chat, and was on his mobile phone a lot, only pausing in conversation to whip the wheel around corners. Four hundred roubles for the pleasure (about eight quid).

Thankfully, having had a chance encounter with an English person at the airport a while back and sharing a taxi home, I now know that there are many reputable companies. For the expats, here's one called XXL, and you can call them at +74959958294, but you should really only consider them for long distance journeys to the airports. Domodedovo, for instance, is about 50 kilometers away.

Another instance was meeting a Dublin couple on the street a year ago. They had backpacks on, due to take the Transiberian express in a couple of days, and were looking decidedly lost, so my friend and I helped them find the nearby hostel, then go went and grabbed a drink in the center to celebrate, only for us to realize later that it was a national holiday and the metro had closed early. So we caught a ludicrously small, pathetic looking, clapped-out gypsy cab to squeeze into. My friend and I are desensitized to such things, but upon seeing the faces of the Dubliners halfway through the journey, I realized that the two of them probably won't forget the encounter for some time.

It's snowing a hell of a lot right now. Heaviest in 40 years. Take that, Luzhkov!

One night in Shanghai

2010-01-24T09:08:00.002+03:00

The second last evening I spent in Shanghai was probably the most active of the lot. Considering the fact that I was such a terrible tourist the whole time I was there (remember, not a single photo, though I did attempt to take a pic of a sign in the subway which said something along the lines of "Jumping into the tunnel is dangerous" with my phone, but the light was too poor), it was high time I made the most of it.

Ironically, I had traveled several thousand kilometers only to end up hanging out with a bunch of Russians. Because I was there on the week prior to Christmas, the Russian expat community was having a sort of party (known in Russian as кооператив, I think. cooperative, lit.), before they went their own ways to celebrate New Year with their respective families. It was held in a faux-German bierhaus, English speaking staff as required. The whole event was practically the least Chinese thing you could do in the city.

The set up involved buying a 300 RMB - or yuan, I would have preferred to have said yuan, but they all say RMB there (short for Renmenbi) - ticket at the door, which paid for the buffet, a few drink tokens, and lottery ticket. 300 RMB, by the way, is roughly 30 euro. The event was sponsored by various Russian companies, which was... well, also bizarre. Again, I came all the way from Moscow just to see people giving out Спортсмастер (Sportsmaster - think along the lines of JD Sports) clothing.

The food was great, especially considering I was famished at the time, and the beer was okay. After having drinking it over the previous couple of days, I had learnt that, yes, Tsingtao beer is the local piss.

[Incidentally, it's always friggin' hilarious in the UK with certain bars selling foreign, supposedly elite beers. Glasgow's Bierhalle Republic and a couple of other places on Ashton Lane in the West End sell Russian Baltika beer for ludicrous sums, whereas it's about a sixth of the price buying it from the street booths in Moscow. I mean, it's not terrible, but it's not as if the hops are handpicked by ivory-skinned virgins. The same goes for Tsingtao. Speaking of Glasgow, although Irn Bru is the number one soft drink in Scotland, there are more Irn Bru drinkers in Russia. Barr shrewdly carved themselves out a niche about a decade ago.]

So, a room full of Russian, drinks a-plenty, there's a lottery with a top prize of two Aeroflot tickets to Moscow - surely good times ahead. Yeah, well, were it not for the Master of Ceremonies, who was a small, thin dorky-looking fellow in glasses dressed up as Santa (or rather Дед Мороз Ded Moroz lit. Father Frost), the night would have been awesome. Instead, he had likely drawn the short straw and everyone else who set it up decided to entrust him with the microphone. What followed was a case of verbal diarrhea coupled with rabbit-in-the-headlights stammering. I had no problem with him chatting away, Russians like to make speeches at celebrations where drinking is involved (it's mandatory), but the speakers were turned up so goddamn loud that I couldn't really chat up any of the lovely Russian ladies my host had introduced me to.

The MC did shut up for about five minutes at one point - and I mean at just one point - but he broke things up between reading out lottery numbers by holding games with everyone. Typically, the audience was shy, apart from one Russian guy who got progessively more drunk off his ass as the evening went on (by leaving time I noticed he was slumped over his chair) and another guy in a nicely tailored Chinese suit. Props to them, because they kept things going, and at one point they made me choke on my drink during one ridiculous game.

It's kind of hard to describe, but basically the game was between two Russian teams, each with a mic. The challenge was to sing a particular well-known Russian song, except leaving out most of the consonants. The effect this generated was one of the straight-up funniest things I've seen in a while, as good as Klaus the Forklift Driver. For the two gentlemen, they didn't just sing it, they almost rocked out to it. I have no clue what the song was, some sort of dorky jingle, to which these two men bellowed (gripping the mic stand as if it were a mighty stead with their war faces on):

- AH-AH-AH!
- OOH-AH-AH!
- OOH-OOH-AH-HA!
- OOH-HA OOH-HA-HA!
- AH-OOH AH-OOH!
- OOH-OOH CHA-CHA-CHA!

You can't really make this stuff up, and it's another reason why I lament not having a decent camera on my person. The two gentlemen were awarded with a bottle of cognac for their efforts, which they of course shared with the losing team, keeping in the spirit of things.

Sadly, lame-ass Santa hit the stage again, though not before having a large glass of cognac thrust down his throat by the two afore mentioned gentlemen. The lottery continued, and none of our numbers had been called either. Things were looking in our favour, seeing as there weren't many guests in attendance either.

Initial prizes were pretty good things like a bunch of iPod nanos (wouldn't have minded one of those), the sports clothing stuff, umm... I don't recall exactly what else, but they weren't naff like something you'd get at a community function at a church hall on a Saturday afternoon. And you'd think that something as big as two plane tickets as the top prize would mean that second and third would be pretty awesome.

No.

I got second prize. Second prize was a fucking year-long magazine subscription to the expat rag by the organizers. Third prize was a proper iPod, or something fancy. If anything it was a slightly shameless bit of self-promotion on second-prize-giver's part, because when I went up onto the stage, Geek Moroz was replaced by the supposed editor in chief, who then spent the next five minutes waxxing lyrical about the publication while I stood there like a plonker. Glancing over at the people I was with confirmed this - their faces said "You look like a plonker".

The prize was also totally pointless, as I was leaving in about two days. Given that this guy had been talking on and on about the magazine, the rest of the audience had stopped listening, so by the time he handed the mic over to me to say a few words it was apparent that nobody would be interested in learning that an Irishman who can speak Russian was at their Shanghai party. But taking a note from the two men of the night, I shouted Всем Наступающим Новым Годом! (vsyem nas-too-pai-yoo-shim no-vym go-dom - lit. To all a happy oncoming New Year) which got a couple of yays from the crowd. That said, my host currently enjoys this subscription, I believe, though she's not made any mention of it to me since then. There were a couple of copies lying around at the venue, though leafing through them was nothing to write home about.

Santa departed, a local band began singing the latest hits of the west and a few old-timers (I've not heard Love Shack by the B-52s in a LOOOOOOOOONG time) and we grooved away til closing time with some locals. I distinctly remember a fat Chinese guy in glasses, shirt and tie, doing a rather toned down interpretation of the Running Man.

We then went on to a pretentious skyscraper nightclub called Mint to see a remarkably effective form of crowd control on the part of the bouncers through the use of green laser pens, drink ludicrously-overpriced bottles of water that may have just been filled from the tap, and watch many ladies (some of whom were at the Russian party) dance suggestively on a couple of podiums.

On the Seventh Day of January, My True Love Sent to Me...

2010-01-07T17:00:00.002+03:00

...Bugger all to do, because the first week of January in Russia is their official Christmas, according to the Orthodox Calendar. I won't go into detail about Russian celebrations, safe to say that their 'Christmas' (i.e. all the gift-giving and celebrating on December 25th) falls on New Year's Eve due to the godless regime of the communists quashing anything to do with religion. I also won't touch on the Orthodox Church in Russia, other than the fact its rapid re-emergence since the 1990s has left NO separation between church and state in this country.

What I have been up to since my last post hasn't been that action-filled, but because it's the first week of January and that the whole country is officially comatose, I no longer have any excuse not to write something about last month. My months of being stingy have finally enabled me to waste it in more sensible ways - most prominent of which was a short trip to Shanghai.

Given the fact that a Belgian friend of mine was extremely kind enough to host me in the spare room of her gorgeous Shanghai flat, and the fact that Aeroflot (Russia's national airline) were doing deals at the time of purchase (approx 16,000 roubles round trip, or £320), meant that there was little reason not to get the hell out of Moscow for once.

Unfortunately, I have to confess that I'm one of the worst tourists in the world. I didn't take a single photo, mostly due to the fact that I don't have a digital camera (the one on my Nokia does not count), but I didn't really need to. It wasn't one of those "I need to embrace the local culture in full" type of trips. I just came to hang out, to see what life is like for my Belgian friend and her expatriate acquaintances there, to eat some weird vegetables that look like they are from outer space, to watch my friend argue with souvenir sellers, to shake my butt in extremely pretentious and overpriced nightclubs that have shark tanks by the dance floor located in skyscrapers, and to attend a party held by the local Russian community, only to pointlessly win a subscription to the local community rag in the lottery at the aforesaid party. All of these instances are short stories in themselves, and it would not be fair to cut them short in this entry.

Chiefly what I gathered there is that, much like Moscow isn't Russia, Shanghai isn't China. Oh sure there are Chinese people living there, and they all speak Chinese, but it's very Westernized, a bit of a concrete jungle in the center, but, at least to me, rather comfortable. Even though there are about 20 million people in Shanghai (roughly 5 million more than Moscow, officially), it didn't feel cramped in the slightest. Maybe something to do with the fact that I was on average about a foot taller than everyone else.

Moscow, on the contrary, especially with its winter workday commute on the metro, can be stressful for those who have not yet lost that part of their soul. Shanghai is clean, the locals don't scowl, and the living costs for foreigners are minuscule. Yes, they spit in the streets, but I'll take that over the foul Russian habit of clearing one's nose (Step 1: close one nostril. Step 2: blow out the other. Step 3: repeat with the other. Try to do it in a crowded area as possible for maximum revulsion) any day.

And yes, there are bicycles. Everywhere. Even my Belgian friend has one. Those songs you've heard about the Chinese and bicycles, they're all true. Just bicycles and taxis. The rest of the world should take note, rather than demonizing the Chinese for its sizable contribution to industrial pollution.

=======

In other news, Mayor Yury Luzhkov's bullshit snow prevention plan has fallen on its arse. Someone sensible in the Russian Air Force (VVS - Voyenno-vozdushnye sily Rossii lit. Military-aerial strength of Russia) has said that they need two weeks notice before they do any cloud seeding. It doesn't really matter now, as Europe appears to have stolen this year's quota. That's not to say it isn't cold. It's very cold. The day I left for Shanghai it plummeted to -27ºC. It currently hovers around the -15 mark, which is just about the temperature where your nasal hairs start to freeze whenever you inhale.

Snow joke

2009-12-08T09:50:00.006+03:00

Yesterday it snowed. A lot. From about midday for at least eight hours or so, which makes me happy for a few reasons:

1) I like snow.
2) It makes me thankful I don't need to drive in Moscow.
3) It makes a mockery out of Moscow's Mayor Yury Luzhkov's latest project.

The first point is self-explanatory. Snow is somewhat of a luxury in Ireland, and it's not too windy here, so providing you have a warm enough coat and boots, you're fine, especially if it hangs around minus fifteen/twenty (as the snow lies long enough and is less likely to become a sheet of ice). It's dry underfoot, and as long as it's not windy it's rather pleasant.

Secondly, cast your mind back to a few posts ago, where I posted a couple of pictures of a minor traffic jam. Wasn't really a jam at all, more a run of the mill tailback. My flat looks out on the ring road, and I only live about ten minutes walk away from my workplace. I was just told earlier by a comrade-in-arms that, what would normally take him about 15 minutes to drive home, took him three-and-a-half hours. The worst I have heard was six for another. Last night there were still jams and the occasional siren outside my window when I went to bed at about 11pm.

Lastly, Luzhkov, who is not exactly the most repellent politician in the world (were we to include certain African states), recently came up with a wonderful idea of how to combat such snowfall to prevent such traffic problems - cloud seeding. He believes, by cloud seeding from now until mid-March, he can save millions on the capital's street cleaners (who already do an excellent job) and probably more on lost man hours. Instead, it will allegedly cost less to have a couple of aircraft from the Russian Air Force going up and down several hundred times over the course of four months. Clearly no one there has a clue how much it costs to maintain aircraft, regardless of backhanders and subsidies.

As yesterday clearly demonstrated, this idea hasn't worked. At least I think it hasn't. I'm not sure it's been fully implemented, and even if it is, snow still has to fall elsewhere - likely onto places where people commute from outside the city, but hey - that's not Luzhkov's problem!

One thing is for sure - somebody out there doesn't like the idea that a migrant work force is cleaning up the city, and doesn't want to pay them anymore.

[Yes, I know it's a terrible headline.]

Haye denies Valuev victory

2009-11-08T12:54:00.007+03:00

Well, he's done it, and on points no less. I didn't see the fight, not that I could have anyway, so I'll leave it up to the BBC to recount it. What's interesting is that, bearing in mind what I said about Valuev being built like a brick shithouse, is that Haye is suspected of breaking his right hand in the match.

======

Haye shocks Valuev to take crown

By Ben Dirs
BBC Sport in Nuremberg

Britain's David Haye put on a magnificent performance to claim the WBA heavyweight crown from Russian Nikolay Valuev in Nuremberg.

Haye, 29, won by majority decision, winning the fight on two judges' scorecards, with the other judge scoring it even.

The Londoner, giving away seven stone to his 7ft opponent, fought the perfect fight, staying on the move and making the lumbering Valuev look every one of his 36 years with his speed.

With his win, the Londoner becomes the first Briton to hold a world heavyweight crown since Lennox Lewis retired in 2003.

In addition, Haye is also only the second former cruiserweight champion to win a portion of the heavyweight crown, after four-time champion Evander Holyfield.

"It means everything to me," said Haye. "From when I was a baby, I said I would be the heavyweight world champion.

"It's a dream come true. I've fought the biggest heavyweight champion and caught him with big shots.

"I made him look like an amateur. People doubted my skills, but I did enough to win.

"Here I am, heavyweight champion of the world and I'm loving it. I'm going to clean up the division."

Approximately 10,000 fans were in attendance at the Nuremberg Arena, including a sizable and vociferous British contingent, to see David do what many thought was impossible and slay Goliath.

Even more remarkable, Haye managed to do it with a suspected broken right hand, which trainer Adam Booth said gave way in the third round.

"His head is solid, the hardest thing I've ever hit," said Haye. "It's like hitting a solid brick wall.

"I'm pretty sure my hand is broken, but it's a small price to pay for being the heavyweight champion of the world."

The first round was largely a fact-finding mission for Haye, circling anti-clockwise away from Valuev's big right and scoring with the occasional flurry to the head and jab to the body.

An immaculate-looking Haye visibly grew in confidence in the second stanza, landing with two sharp left hooks and a stinging left-right combination that forced Valuev to cover up.

Valuev landed with his first meaningful blow at the end of the round, a ramrod jab, but it was more of the same in the third, with Haye having little problem slipping Valuev's left hand and scoring with flashing lefts of his own.

Haye had made Valuev look decidedly sluggish and one-dimensional in the first quarter of the contest. Even though the Russian showed more urgency in the fourth, the Englishman was able to extricate himself from any potential trouble.

With both hands now slung by his waist, once again he had the better of the action, landing with a couple of left-right-left combinations and skimming Valuev's jaw with a huge right hand on the bell.

Haye found the mark with a left-right-right combination in round five, and it was becoming abundantly clear as the fight wore on that unless he was to tire down the stretch, the title could be his.

Valuev managed to pin Haye in a corner and unload with two clubbing blows to the body at the start of round six, but Haye hit back with a hurtful upper-cut and a big over-the-top right.

There were signs that Haye was beginning to tire in the seventh, but he came storming back in the eighth, stiffening Valuev up with a rigid jab before landing with a rasping right to the body.

The ninth was close until Haye unloaded with perhaps the best combination of the night, a left jab followed closely by a right straight down the pipe and Haye landed with two more right-hand bombs in the 10th as Valuev began to look desperate.

With Haye's staying power questioned in the past, the last two rounds, if it got that far, were always going to be tense, but Haye continued to move in round 11, leaving Valuev needing a knockout to win it in the final stanza.

Here I am, heavyweight champion of the world and I'm loving it. I'm going to clean up the division
David Haye

In the final round, Haye almost achieved the impossible, very nearly flooring Valuev with yet another vicious left-right combination with a minute to go. Valuev regained his balance, but Haye continued to pepper the Russian until the final bell sounded.

"From my point of view, the main thing which went wrong was the pace," said Valuev.

"It was like a marathon for me. It was like a track event. I wasn't ready to run that much.

"The judges made their decision and I think the last round made the difference, especially the end of it."

Haye, who was awarded the fight 116-112, 116-112, 114-114, is only the third Briton to win a world heavyweight title since Bob Fitzsimmons lost his crown to James J Jeffries in 1899.

His victory also injects some much-needed vim into a previously moribund heavyweight division.

With 23 wins (21 KOs) from 24 fights, Haye now says he intends to clean up the heavyweight division.

That would mean defeating WBC champion Vitali Klitschko and his brother IBF and WBO holder Wladimir Klitschko.

But his first defence of the WBA belt will likely come against American John Ruiz, who earlier on Saturday beat German Adnan Serin in the seventh round by a technical knockout.

Haye said he sees few problems against former WBA champion.

"I don't think he is the most entertaining. He has won the world title before and you don't do that by being a bad fighter," he said. "I will be way too fast, I will knock him out."

Story from BBC SPORT:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/sport2/hi/boxing/8347139.stm

Published: 2009/11/07 22:58:41 GMT

======

And here's a pic from the final round of last night's battle. Taken from PA via BBC.

The End of the Beginning?

2009-11-07T15:36:00.008+03:00

Two things to talk about soon:

1.) Snow has fallen, quite heavily. I'd produce photographic evidence, but unfortunately it's still hovering around 0°C and has since melted. A good half-inch or so throughout the day yesterday. It further confirms my prediction that this winter will be a cold one. Last year's sucked ass. Just wet, slushy, and miserable - and the lowest it got was -15°C. This year round it reminds me of the winter of 2005/2006 when I was studying here. It was roasting hot in September, then very mild until approximately the end of October, and then the snow began. In the first week of January of 2006 it dropped as low as -32°C. I'm looking forward to it, honestly, because when it's around -20°C and you're surrounded by a blanket of snow and there's no wind - it's like a fairytale and, despite what one might think, very dry. Complete contrast to the howling gales of Glasgow that chill you right to the bone, even though it's only something like 5°C

2.) The aforementioned Haye-Valuev fight takes place later today in Bern, Switzerland. It will be interesting to see if Haye will live up to his recent remarks about Valuev (circus freak, hairy animal, etc...), and his latest training method of beating up a dummy with a goblin mask on it. "That's Valuev," Haye pointed out, before smacking it at an open workout session on November 4.

(That pic isn't from the workout session, just a press conference, but you get the idea)

Truth be told, Haye will probably get hammered, though all his cruiserweight fight wins were KOs, and he has lost only once to Carl Thompson back in 2004 (at the time he had 10 KOs). His manager threw in the towel after a right hand made Haye lose his balance, sending him in the direction of the canvas.

Here's how the two match up against each other. Note the respective hairiness.

Pictures property of AP and Action Images

Another Day/Another Dollar

2009-10-01T09:26:00.013+04:00

"Чим платити?" written on the billing invoice above is in Ukrainian. Although I don't speak it, the language itself is very similar to Russian, and I'm pretty sure it means "What are we paying for?" considering the article I nicked it from is about tariffs in Kiev.

It applies to my post rather neatly as , when I examined my own utility bill - known as "коммунальные услуги" (kommunaliye ooslooghee lit. "communal services") in Russian - there exists (next to the usual electricity, gas, central heating, telephone and hot water) the entry "радио" (lit. radio).

I was puzzled at first what this radio entry meant. Was it something to do with owning an actual radio like a TV license in the UK? I was mildly pissed off at first, considering I didn't have a radio initially, though I then bought a CD/MP3/Radio combo thing (which has since turned out to be a total piece of shit, prompting me to spend some 30,000 roubles - approx. 600 quid - in total on a desktop computer, but the radio still works) meaning I didn't really have any legal ground to stand on. And it's only about 38 roubles a month anyway - just over a dollar at the current exchange rate, or about 80 pence - and I don't handle my bills either (all inclusive in the rent), so I just forgot about it. Until a week ago.

In my monthly shelling out of rent to my (genuinely helpful) landlord and former engineer Giorgy, I handed over the usual scrap of paper that this time round had been obnoxiously stuck into my door handle - a technique usually reserved for pizza delivery employees - rather than slotted into my post box and, out of curiosity, asked what this radio payment actually was.

Turns out this "radio" is a leftover of mid-Soviet times, whereby nearly every apartment in built-up cities were equipped with essentially a direct line to the police for purposes of either asking for assistance, or informing on your dissident liberal neighbors. When Giorgy bought the actual flat back in the 80s, it was no longer there, yet it was still coming in on the utility bill (though back then all sorts of stuff was subsidized by the state).

So what's the big deal with this radio thing anyway? Well, put it this way: there are about 15 million people living in Moscow (legally, the actual number is higher). Granted there are not 15 million households, so let's say there are about four people on average to each residence, give or take an extra million depending on who has actually applied to get the radio thing taken off their bill. That leaves us with... umm... 3 million or so. So that's 3 million dollars a month to the state for a redundant service. Nice way to line the coffers, eh?

I don't think it's so much a case of corruption, more a catastrophic example of no one wanting to deal with the bureaucracy of the matter, so it will take nothing short of a violent coup to remove the damn thing for good.

One more thing to note on the bill, which is far less obvious as maybe not many people can actually visualize it, is not the cost of the hot water, but the actual amount you're paying for. The set amount per household (or flat, more accurately) is something like 5-6 cubic meters a month for just the hot water alone. I can't really visualize it either, but according to Giorgy (again, engineer, so he knows these things) it's an enormous amount, almost 3 or 4 times than the amount you'll ever use.

The upshot is Giorgy is endeavoring to adjust the tariffs appropriately using some sort of device for the hot water, but of course that means filling out several forms and asking some guy to come around with a meter and examine everything, then fill out some more forms.

Reasons #1-370 not to drive in Moscow

2009-09-23T17:49:00.006+04:00

Okay I'm giving myself away here a little by showing these, but here's two crappy pics from my crappy Nokia. Just in case you're wondering how bad the capital's traffic can get. Note that this is only the traffic going in one direction.

(The chief reason is due to roadworks further up the road. That traffic shown is far from the worst.)

Fast Food Nation

2009-09-13T19:11:00.012+04:00

Since arriving here in Moscow many moons ago to work professionally (rather than farting around as a hapless student or sightseeing prior to that), I've taken my first ever vacation. More of a stay-cation to be exact, but a holiday all the same. Frankly, it was a bit of a pain in the ass to do so, as the Russian system of actually taking a holiday (regardless of company - they all have to conform to Russia's Трудовой Кодекс Trudovoi Codex, lit. Work Codex) involves running between various offices, signing different forms, then returning a few weeks later to sign yet another form. By that point you wonder whether or not it's all worth the effort in doing so. But it is, to some extent, because you get to go and stuff your face with food from Moscow's street stalls more than you would were you at work.

Moscow possesses some of the most brilliant fast food outlets I've ever had the pleasure of frequenting. Before coming to Moscow I lived in Glasgow, which is known for its deep-frying of anything remotely edible (Mars bars, pizzas, ice cream) and, while tasty, you wouldn't really want to live off it for an extended period of time. But not in Moscow. So, in no particular order, I shall expose some of them to you:

Крошка Картошка (Kroshka Kartoshka - something along the lines of 'Munchkin Potato')

Let me go on the record now by saying this: I fucking love Kroshka Kartoshka. I'd have a picture of me hugging one of these things, were it not for the fact that my mobile phone has a very poor camera, and convincing a Muscovite passerby to photograph me doing so isn't an option either. So why's it so fucking good? They sell baked potatoes. I know of only one other outlet in the world that does the same, and that's Spud's on Bradbury Place in Belfast, which is a rather dingy little establishment and one that is especially grimey on a Saturday night.

The potatoes are gorgeous, mostly due to the fact that they've been baking for a couple of hours already and they then slather them with butter and cheese, but it doesn't end there. Like some perverted ice cream stand, they have tubs of various ingredients that you can add as toppings (and they actually use the ice cream scoop things, bizarrely). It ranges from simply extra cheese, various salads, and bits of fried bacon and onion, to incomprehensible additions like salmon and downright revolting crabmeat mayonnaise. They serve toasties too, which are yum as well, but the potato is enough on its own.

The Kroshka stands are all over the place in Moscow, as well as in the major department stores.

Теремок (Teremok, the name is taken from терем some sort of reference to a traditional boyar type of raised household in the countryside which people lived in many moons ago)

Teremok, contrary to Kroshka, deals with pancakes (or blinis, to be accurate). Much like with Kroshka, there are a variety of toppings. I'm a ham n' cheese man, but you can stick in chocolate and banana, or red caviar and cream if you're of the crabmeat mayonnaise mindset. They sell their own brand of квас (Kvass - a drink made from fermented rye bread. Ever-so-slightly alcoholic, but you'd have to pound away about 3 litres of the stuff to get the same buzz as a pint), which also goes down well.

Шаурма (Shwarma - a type of kebab, moreorless)

Not a chain of food stands per se, nor to my taste either, but it's a staple of Moscow so it merits attention. Shwarma is essentially a donner kebab, but wrapped up in an unleavened bread thing to resemble a sausage roll. Not sure of the meat's origins, which is why I tend to stray from them. Like with kebabs, however, you only eat them when you're hammered.

I've drawn a blank right now. There used to be a lot more of these food kiosks a few years ago. For example Rickshaw Ivan's, which was pre-prepared faux Chinese gunk heated up from frozen in a microwave, and Cono-Pizza, which was essentially pizza in an ice cream cone (and surprisingly tasty). I assume the economic crisis has played its part, or because nutjob Mayor Luzhkov - who, allegedly, has also put forward plans to stop snow from falling in Moscow this winter through cloud dispersal, which is mind-boggingly insane and I'm hoping he's finally kicked out of office - cleared a lot of them off the streets because they didn't pay the necessary gratuity to line his pockets with ivory or something, and it's only recently that I have seen some Kroshkas and Teremoks reappearing near to their old haunts.

There is a Kroshka wannabee, called Чудо Картошка (Chudo Kartoshka - lit. Wonder Potato), that appeared, but their quality is inferior and they're not so widespread. In addition to those, there are plenty of general kiosks that sell basic stuff (fags, booze, chewing gum, candy, fruit n' veg and so forth, though not all in one), but they blend into the Moscow scenery, rather than stick out obnoxiously like Kroshka and Teremok.

========

In other news, I joined the wandering prat brigade by carrying around a large teddybear inside a cardboard 'house' that I bought from a store called "Build a Bear" (I think it's just the same as the Bear Factory in the UK) for my friend to whom I had lost a bet three years ago. It's alright being stared at by folk on the metro, not so much when it's grotty children who smell really bad, trying to sidle as close as possible to me to get a look at what I'm carrying.

5-minute cop out from updating

2009-09-05T16:19:00.010+04:00

Just discovered a little gem through Everlasting Blort called "Slow Moscow". It captures the somewhat sinister side to Moscow, but the city's a great place to live in all the same. Try and name those places...

I've been on holiday the past month, which explains the lack of creative writing, but there is a new entry coming. Wasting too much time resizing the pictures to make it look nice and even. I got a taste for graphic design and layout working at Glasgow Uni's student newspaper, so I don't like things looking haphazard and messy.

Rolling with the punches

2009-08-02T17:00:00.019+04:00

Taking a break from linguistic slamming for the moment. I am trying to list some of my translating methods, but it has become so routine for me that I've been too lazy to write them down. So, for some inexplicable reason, I'm going to attempt writing on something I normally wouldn't - boxing.

The reason for this is that one particular individual keeps turning up in the sports section - Nikolai Valuev. Valuev is a boxer. Valuev couldn't be anything other than a boxer. Just look at him.

This man is quite literally built like a brick shithouse, there is simply no other way of describing him. He weighs over 320 pounds and is about 7 feet tall. Hopefully this pic can give you a sense of the scale of the man. This is him fighting John Ruiz for the WBA heavyweight title in 2005.

So why am I bothering to write about him? Well, I guess he's kind of an anomaly in the boxing world. He does have the typical scandal surrounding him - for example, he once picked up a security guard with one hand and hammered him a few times with the other for insulting his wife over her car-parking abilities (allegedly) which led to court action - but there are also his activities outside the ring, which just come off as plain bizarre. He recently defended his diploma on sports psychology, principally the effects on men and women practicing boxing training, successfully at a St. Petersburg university.

In addition to being an intellectual of sorts, he also has a sensitive, artistic side. He wooed his wife with poetry he wrote before proposing, and he's starred in a couple of films. The most well known is Каменная Башка (Kamennaya Bashka lit. "Stonehead") in which he plays a boxer who has lost his memory. Deep stuff, but all respect to him - at least he isn't biting people's ears off (Tyson), or stating that "if we were in prison I would make you my bitch" (Mayweather), or threatening to kill your family (too many to list).

So why even mention him? Well, in his professional career he has lost only once, and it was on points to Ruslan Chagaev, an Uzbek fellow who was the so-called "champion in recess" but shortly after his fight had to retire because he completely tore his Achilles tendon. Valuev has since regained the title and will be challenged soon by British boxer David Haye (formerly cruiserweight). David Haye believes he can take him because, and I quote, "no one has ever tried to knock him out" - a strategy he hopes will work come November.

But look at him. Look at him. How on earth can anyone knock him out? Can you even blame his opponents for not trying to? You'd need a sledgehammer to make him hit the canvas, and even then it would take a couple of blows. Not surprisingly, Valuev's style is extremely basic: he doesn't bother to dance around the ring much, and his big clumsy swings eventually hit their mark. He has none of the grace of Ali, or the grandeur of De La Hoya. Just a brick shithouse. A freak of nature... but there's a sort of weird charm to him, probably because he's one of the few post-soviet Russian pugilists to make the big time in an honest way, whereas the rest of them fell into disgrace in the nineties and ended up working as thugs for the mafia. That reminds me - the criminal world of Russia is an intriguing one, one which differs from the Cosa Nostra of Sicily, and one which I will touch upon later.

Translators Are Traitors pt. II

2009-06-24T12:17:00.018+04:00

Lesson time, kiddies, because I'm growing tired of encountering this over the past few years. Specifically, it's limited to Russian to English translating. As for other languages, I can't comment. Romance languages have that irritating habit of sort of sounding like each other and thus don't cause too many problems (what with the same root n'all) for anyone learning Spanish, French and Italian all in one go, but I'm sure common problems occur with all translators/editors and all are driven equally nuts by them.

So here goes. To set a sort of, umm... background thingy... tone. Or mood. Or whatever. For those unaware of who/what I am, outside of studies I have been translating and editing semi-passively for the past three years, and I have picked up a few things that may, at first , be small and mildly insignificant. But small things lead to big problems, and those problems can eventually come back to bite you and everyone above and below you in the ass. I'm not talking on the level of Krushchev's shoe-banging "We will bury you!" incident at the UN, merely professional bits that, frankly, should go completely without saying. Especially with the ludicrous power of the Internet available. The fact that you're reading this and are possibly mildly interested in translating/editing means that you, too, have no excuse for fluffing up your translating skills.

Bear in mind that I'm drawing all this from personal experience, and this is just how I do things, not dogmatic regurtitation from some wanky book on linguistics. The pissed-offness inside me will come and go, so this may be scattered over several posts, depending on the level of bile herein.

So, pray tell, what's the very VERY first basic rule of translating anything, be it a text of a Russian gossip magazine to a press release by an industry magazine to an extract from some book or other? Anyone? No? Four simple words:

Get. Your. Facts. Straight.

This isn't rocket science, unless you're this girl, it's simple common sense. By "get your facts straight", I'm talking about the names of people, titles, organizations, places, and so forth. Proper nouns, more or less. So how do you go about doing this? Well, some of the time, such words won't cause too much grief, as they're already well established and are talked about so much you'd wish they'd shut up. Let's use a pathetically easy example...

In English:
- North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

In French:
- Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique Nord (OTAN)
(And no, in case you were wondering, they weren't being pretentious at those meetings, spelling it backwards and forwards on all the posters)

And in Russian:
- Организация Североатлантического договора (НАТО)
(Organizatsiya Severoatlanticheskovo dogovora NATO)

Okay, so not so hard. All those things translate fairly literally. In Russian, we see, literally translated word-by-word into English, 'Organization of the North Atlantic agreement', yet the acronym still remains НАТО, even though it should technically be something like ОСД because, as we've established, it's so darn well-known that everyone (bar the French) calls it NATO...

...but you'd be surprised! I wrote there 'Organization of the North Atlantic agreement', literally, and - guess what - that's what some excuses for translators will actually write, rather than North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or even NATO! Why? Because they don't take ten seconds (I'm not kidding, that's how quickly this can be done) to double check their efforts.

Let's try something a little harder:

In English:

The United States Department of Defense (sometimes just DoD)

in Russian:

Министерство обороны США (Ministerstvo oborony S-SHA)
also written as
Департамент обороны США (Departament oborony S-SHA)

Here is a slightly less talked about institution, but nigh-on every country has one. In Britain we have the Ministry of Defence, and in Russian it translates to Ministry of Defense too, but (aha!) not in America! America calls their's (theirs? whatever) the Department of Defense (with the American spelling on the s, by the way), even though it deals with the exact same issues as its foreign counterparts. So, while everyone else in the world will be satisfied with the American DoD referred to as the Ministry of Defense, Americans bloody well won't. This instance isn't the biggest crime against communication, but it's the tip of the iceberg.

Now let's draw one from experience, but I'll need another preamble:

More often than not there are direct equivalents between Russian and English phrases like "When pigs fly", the Russian equivalent is "When crabs whistle on the mountains" (which is more evocative than its English counterpart, frankly). Of course, some phrases have no English equivalent because they relate to some weird cultural peculiarity that takes a whole paragraph to explain and by the time you get done with it everyone else has stopped reading.

So getting back on topic. Some Russian journalist in a newspaper a while back, probably in an attempt to be sarcastic, wrote the phrase мозговой штурм (mozgovoi shturm) in Dr. Evil-style finger quotation marks. It wasn't an attempt to introduce a new phrase into the Russian language - like, say, making the word 'Russophobia' or 'reset button' de rigeur - because it's already an extremely well-established set phrase in both English and Russian. Why he/she put it in quotation marks is irrelevant, what matters is that the phrase itself is in quotation marks which, if it hasn't already, should be ringing alarm bells in a translator's head.

Let's break it down first and look at this short phrase literally. Мозговой (mozgovoi) is taken from the noun мозга (mozga) which means brain. By turning it into мозговой, it makes it adjectival, i.e. of the brain - a particular beauty of the Russian language, in that verbs and nouns can be easily turned into adjectives.

[Incidentaly, this noun is masculine despite having a feminine ending.]

Штурм (shturm), following the adjective, is the noun 'assault' or 'storm'. Figured it out yet? What's that word we have in English that contains the words 'brain' and 'storm'? Yep, that's right - brainstorming.

For argument's sake, let's say you have just landed on the planet and aren't that savvy at the English language - how can we go about figuring out what the correct translation into English is for мозговой штурм? What you need are the following, in order of (sequential) importance:

- Google
- Wikipedia
- Multitran
- Lingvo

Non internet thingies:

- MS Word (purely for the semi-helpful grammar correction thing, but we'll focus on the phrase for the moment)

I won't be using all of these for the example, but it'll be relevant later when I come back to do more complex terms.

So here's the order of play: take мозговой штурм and put it inside quotation marks. Putting a phrase in quotation marks in a Google search means that phrase and that phrase alone is searched for, rather than just a bunch of keywords. So, copy and paste

"мозговой штурм"

into Google's search field. You should come up with results like this.

How many results is that? A million in Russian? That's a lot, given that it's just Russian. Methinks we're onto something here.

Now then, what's the very first result on that results page? Is that a Russian Wikipedia entry? Sure looks like it. So click on that.

Right. You're still bamboozled, maybe, because now the title of the article reads 'Метод мозгового штурма' (metod mozgovo sturma), but that's only because it's an incredibly smart redirect by Wikipedia/Google to its proper full term in Russian, as opposed to just мозговой штурм. Here's the last step. Scroll down the left hand side of the Wikipedia entry, and you'll see a list - titled на других языках (na drugikh yizikakh) - of languages that have the respective equivalents of that entry. Hunt for the word 'English' in that list. Click on it and there we have it: the correct entry for мозговой штурм is... brainstorming!

So that's an easy example of how you can figure out certain terms from Russian to English, using just Google and Wikipedia. Once you get used to it, the process takes no longer than half a minute or so, and should prevent you from embarrassing yourself by submitting alternate versions like "storming of minds" or "brain assault". I've spent far too long writing this up, but I'll come back to it later and elaborate on more advanced methods.

=======

In other news, new first prize for Carrying Random Shit Around Award goes to some confused scraggly-haired man walking down Tverskaya carrying a foot-long scale model Spanish galleon in one hand and a massive shabby rectangular cardboard slung over his opposing shoulder while I was eating sushi in a restaurant a couple of lazy afternoons ago.

"Translators are traitors" (Nabokov)

2009-06-09T08:26:00.011+04:00

Been an awfully long time since I bothered posting anything. This is mostly due to the fact that, on some occasions, I'm a boring person. Being an expat, regardless of city, ain't exactly wild times - unless you're one of those annoying students on a year abroad who, in spite of being in a different country, only end up socializing with other annoying international students and guffaw about how wonderful it is to live in Moscow, in spite of the fact that they hardly ever interact with the local population and, in fact, view them as scum (oh wait, covered this subject before, sorry).

In spite of me being boring, it wasn't all slouching on my bed doing nowt. No no no. I'd have much preferred doing that. Just dull nonsense that involved me being sedentary and not making the most of the nice weather. When I did try to make the most of it (on Thursday or Friday of last week, I forget which) I ended up being caught in a tropical downpour.

Turned out a miniature tornado had descended in the North East of the Moscow Region, in a place called Сергиев Посад (Sergiyev Posad), which is one of the Golden Ring towns (churches, toy factory, other touristy traps, not really my thing), and caused a massive rain storm across the entire Moscow area. Indeed in Sergiyev Posad itself the wind was so strong that a kiosk was lifted up off the ground and tossed 30 feet across the road. The woman inside was unhurt, though a little shaken. One wonders why she didn't bother getting out of there in the first place. What didn't make the headlines was that other people did in fact die as aresult of the storm, from car accidents or whatever.

To a much lesser extent I bore the brunt of the weather when I was leaving a Korean restaurant near the river. It looked to be a bit drizzly, and being from Ireland it's no real big deal. But then it got worse. Instead of seeking cover like my restaraunteuring friends, I decided to run for it, as I only lived about ten minutes walk away. What followed was the equivalent of jumping into a river. I've never been soaked so much by rain in my life. Needless to say, Sod's law dictated that moments before reaching my door, it stopped the same way a tap turns off. I literally had to wring some of my clothes out before getting into my flat. Bracing.

Other excitment has been language-y stuff. I began co-teaching a class of students on simultaneous interpretation with an acquaintance who is himself a professional teacher. Although I'm used to doing this kind of stuff before (as well as having a degree in languages), being a native speaker of English (especially UK folk) here is just short of being given a license to print money. If you know the right channels e.g. private lessons, and who to go for i.e. oligarch offspring with more money than braincells, then, well, you can clear up big time, and none of this nonsense like tax either. All cash in hand. Unfortunately I don't have the patience or the will to run around half of Moscow teaching people, but being a helping hand at regular lessons suits me grand.

In addition, rather than actually enjoying my days off and attempting to tan my pathetic pasty Irish skin, I've ended up doing more work editing and translating. The money's good, but if I'm not careful it'll drive me to madness. I don't like translating so much, and I am often appalled by other translators who can't do simple things like form sentences, use articles properly or, and this really gets me every time, get people's names right. The Internet, in spite of being a fountain of pornography, is so ludicrously useful for translators that there is simply no excuse nowadays not to be able to figure out English variants of Russian phrases or vice versa, or the name of the Czech Minister of Transport, or the exact title of some weird institute in Mongolia. Google and Wikipedia alone (disregarding the user-generated content snub) are two incredibly powerful tools for linguists. Throw Lingvo and Multitran into the mix (at least for Russian) and that's it - nothing else needed. Even Google has its own translation feature, which works wonders as well, especially if the material you're working on is already a collage of stuff taken from the net.

Nonetheless, all the translating tools in the world won't help you get your head around overly chirpy biz-speak on the railway infrastructure in Europe, which are usually things like "The two parties congregated to discuss forming an agreement on organizing a joint venture over the planned proposal that was considered in a development meeting last week." Or in other words: "They're gonna work together."

Right now it's пух season (Pookh like 'Loch') which are, umm... poplar seeds I think, but fluffy. It's like a fluffy snowstorm, and is absolute murder for allergy folk and it gets everywhere. Not to be confused with the word пук (Pook) which means fart. Someone who is a farter is a пердунь (Pear-doone).

Today is a momentous occasion (sort of)

2009-05-25T12:32:00.004+04:00

Boring title for a post, but my mental capacities are limited on my weeks off work. On saturday I (again) went to Ikea. There's about three in Moscow, and regardless of where you go they are always jammed with horrible people. I managed to cart a table all the way back from a far-off massive shopping centre at Белая Дача (Belaya Dacha which means, umm, white country house, I guess. Bit of a misnomer) in the south-west by myself, both blistering my fingers and looking like a pillock at the same time.

Walking along the Moscow ring road carrying a table top sideways would have turned me into a type of sailboat, meaning I constantly had to attack the wind. So rather than continue my zig-zagging, I ducked down the back streets behind the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on my way home. I didn't dare walk in front of the damn thing, in case one of the blasted militsiya decided to question my strange behaviour.

It's not entirely uncommon for muscovites to be seen carrying random pieces of crap . On the metro you'll run the gamut of mad old ladies with kittens stuffed down their coats to a slightly sheepish young girl carrying an enormous stuffed animal from an unknown fairground, or, my personal favourite, a tramp with a glazed look on his face holding three half-full glass tankards of beer and a half-opened bottle of champagne - all the while acting as if this were the norm, as if he was left at the table while the rest of his mates went outside for a fag.

As a result of my herculean efforts, I now have a proper desk to work from - rather than being hunched over on a crappy bedside table thing - or just eat in front of the comp like a fat slob.

On Sunday I was (sort of) teaching a class with my acquaintance Alex. He already teaches at an institute and asked me to come along and voice some optional classes for extra hard-core interpretation. Essentially it was me talking about myself and them having to interpret back to Alex as succinctly as possible. I rather enjoyed it, as I think that's one of the best possible teaching methods: put the feckless ones on the spot under pressure and see how they perform. Worked for me in my school days, and I lament the fact it didn't continue to uni level. Indeed I got a lot out of yesterday's class myself, as I hardly speak any Russian these days. At uni they made us read numerous works of Russian literature instead. I didn't mind, but it was too much of a roundabout way of learning a language.

Caveat Emptor

2009-05-14T15:14:00.009+04:00

I'm at terrible risk of sounding like one of those foreigners that plague Moscow with this post. The Expat stereotype, especially those from England and America, who haven't been here that long, have a dreadful tendency to openly complain about everything here, like the service or food or general quality of anything, despite the fact they don't pay taxes because their multinational employers pay them via their Swiss bank accounts, nor do they even go as far to sample anything Russian (and yes I do pay taxes, unfortunately, quite a hefty sum too because of the whole double taxation bawls). They pay no heed to the axiom "when in Rome..."

In this case, though, I am not so much complaining, but rather warning anyone who comes here expecting anything simple, such as a basic transaction. One shop relatively near to mine (I'm not petty, so I won't point out its exact location via googlemaps just yet) is but one of many 24-hour продукты (Produkti, like the word product with an 'ee' at the end) which are scattered around Moscow, and are exceedingly useful for food, booze, emergency toilet roll (or even all three if you're having a good night) etc...

A scant few outlets let you walk around and pick up your own stuff and proceed to a makeshift till, but god forbid you muss anything up as you meander around the cramped shop. Most of them, however, are over-the-counter style, which create the ideal situation for language students who have studied the necessary vocab, but what that teaching doesn't prepare you for is how vile some of the shop attendants are towards their customers.

I don't give a monkey's about the sub-par service or the relatively-low quality food that is permanently at odds with its price tag. What I do care about, or rather what baffles me constantly, is my constant need to be within approximately ten kopeks of whatever I need to pay for.

The simple idea of a float in a till isn't just limited to the uncouth turnips responsible for the bungalow down the road, it's EVERYWHERE - all the way up to the equivalent of Marks & Spencers, Седьмой Континент (Sedmoi Kontinent - lit. Seventh Continent). I have been refused service on more occasions than I care to remember, simply because I had in my possession more money than was needed, until I coughed up something closer to the sum required.

Think of it this way: you come into the Savoy, or the Ritz or somewhere fancy and you order a cocktail from the bar and halfway through your drink you whip a £50 noteout of your wallet to hand to the well-dressed waiting staff, only for them to say"we can't take that" (I think the phrase in Russian is "не несете" ne nesyote lit. "you don't carry").

What would you do? Kindly root around your pockets for two minutes trying to get the exact amount in musty coins and piss-soaked notes, or would you spit up that half of your drink onto their face in utter disbelief?

I cannot understand what the root of it is. Some places are okay. Ironically another produkti not far from the one I accuse has no such problems with doling out change (and they actually smile because I'm such a regular customer), but it's just that little bit too far away sometimes and my laziness prevents me from venturing that far. So what's their excuse? Does someone come in every day right before I do and pay for chewing gum with a 5000 rouble note (approximately £100)? Do they have a stingy manager lying in the wings who snatches away any and all cash of notable amounts as soon as the till drawer closes? Or do they just not care that I'm trying to not only prolong my existance by eating their sub-par salads, but also to contribute to an economy that is going down the toilet?

Nothing works against them either. You be nice and present the correct change and they stonewall you. You are neutral and they stonewall you. You act as much of a miserable fuck as they do and still nothing happens.

It's just... I just can't get it.

Oh right, yes other news:

- Eurovision tonight, approximately 7PM GMT which is 10PM here
- Gay pride parade was attempted earlier today near the grounds of MGU, only for about 24 people to be strongarmed by the armed forces (both the regular police AND folk called OMON, who are not known for their patience) and viciously heckled by right-wing arseholes claiming to represent the Orthodox Church. Cue footage of a policeman in a big hat smoking a fag dragging a transvestite in a wedding dress by their hair. Mayor Luzhkov, in one of his more diplomatic moods, has referred to the parades as 'satanic' and an abomination.

No one seems to have pointed out to any of these people that Moscow is already hosting the biggest gay parade Europe has ever known and they're paying for it too.

I can't say it about all of my Russian friends, but the ignorant bigotry in this country is staggering.

Hey wait, did I mention that foreigners need to get HIV blood tests every six months?

Hack journalist strikes again

2009-05-14T09:09:00.004+04:00

*cough* page 18 *cough* [/shamelesspromo]

Editorial correction

2009-05-13T23:12:00.007+04:00

Following the recent post on Moscow's hot water issues Ben has been informed by a Russian friend that the theory about Muscovite plumbers going away on holiday is incorrect. Rather, it is thought that the turning off of the hot water is a way of 'bringing people together', in that old friends will suddenly appear and your neighbours will unexpectedly become less hostile towards you for approximately a two-week period. Ben apologizes for any international language mishaps.

Hot water hydrophobia

2009-05-10T14:30:00.016+04:00

At some point (probably right now, if I'm lucky) the hot water in my apartment building will be turned off for about two weeks. I've never figured out the official reason for this, but it might be because the hot water is on CONSTANTLY all year round in every building, meaning they need to shut it off a district at a time to do maintenance. Russians joke that it's because "the plumbers go on holiday."

Those lucky enough to have either water heaters or are going away on holiday won't suffer the bone-chilling misery. I tried to wash during cold-water season on two occasions. It's impossible and it's not character building, though one esoteric character I met put it rather neatly, with something along the lines of "Well, you know, years ago, they never had warm water like today, so I don't see why it's hard," and used it as an obscure form of meditation. He's a good chess player. I also taught him poker.

So abandoning philosophical musings I'll either be reduced to using the kettle and the sink, or just not washing. Hopefully it'll start when I'm not working. On occasion, both the cold and hot water are known to go off completely in the building due to people doing something called Ремонт (Remont, which are repairs, literally, but when applied to apartments it means a complete overhaul). The revolting Soviet-era infrastructure (rusty pipes, bad wiring etc...) and uncomfortable furniture are often swept away in favour of IKEA-esque refinements (Moscow has at least two IKEAs - and a couple of H&Ms, finally), which are usually just as crappy, but do work much better (especially depending on the age of your apartment building i.e. Krushchev-era, Brezhnev-era etc...). Usually when the water goes off like that it's when you're trying to do something important, like flushing your recent contribution to the sewerage system down the loo.

The only other way of avoiding such a fate is get into a disastrous short-term relationship that at least affords you the opportunity of using their hot water. Then just break up once yours comes back on.

TV Go Home

2009-05-09T11:19:00.007+04:00

Not that I care too much, but because my tariff for my Kosmos TV account changed recently (slightly long story - previous tenant had signed a long-term agreement, but buggered off early because of rather shocking circumstances, meaning I got satellite TV on the cheap for a few months), I didn't get to watch the Victory Parade earlier. The channels are all scrambled. Boo-bloody-hoo. You'll probably be able to watch it here at some point later today.

My continued quest to teach Russians Hold 'em Poker is progressing nicely. I've already taught a couple of folk. I look forward to ripping their kopeks off them in the near future.

Sun, Soldiers and Motorcycles

2009-05-08T18:10:00.016+04:00

Summer has finally hit the streets Bulgakov once strolled, and with it the Russian character changes dramatically from the cold, gruff exterior, to just a gruff exterior with an occasional smile. It's entirely welcoming, given that the winter was not-cold-enough-to-be-inhospitable but just-cold-enough-to-depress-you, except for the fact that my flat is west facing, meaning the place now turns into a greenhouse. Swings and roundabouts.

Tomorrow is Victory Day (День Победы - Dyen Pobedi) so lots of St. George's ribbons have been handed out via young volunteers forced to sit in blazing heat wearing hazard vests, which everyone wears happily on whatever they can attach them to, yours truly included. There has already been a practice parade for the military, which meant that nearly all of Moscow traffic yesterday was brought to a standstill because they closed off the main road in the centre (Тверская Улица - Tverskaya) so the tanks could trundle down and ruin the roads, like they did last time. Pundits in the Western media will likely bitch about how it's a provocating show of military strength and how the whole Medvedev-Obama reset relationship blah blah blah...

Anyway, because the weather has defrosted the roads, many Russians, who were pedestrian bound beforehand, have suited up and mounted several CCs of unnecessary engine power. It's kinda fun watching them drive by, because it shows that they're actually enjoying themselves, throwing the whole stereotype of Russians having no emotion out the window. My balcony affords me a view of one of the major roads, and yesterday some bold maniac sped off from the lights and pulled off an insane wheelie over several yards with his biker friends on either side.

In other news - To nobody's surprise Moscow is due to host the Eurovision Song Contest, following 2008's abysmal performance by Dima Bilan. Russian's are not known for being particularly tolerant of gays or non-European Russians - European Russians are called Русь ('Roose' pronounced like the word 'moose') - so it's interesting that Bilan (a combination of both) has become so popular with the masses. Some kind soul (me) has arranged all the 2009 entries on YouTube into a playlist.

Germany's entry Alex Swings Oscar Sings will have Dita Von Teese dancing alongside them during the final. It's already the best song out of the lot, and, combined with Marilyn Manson's ex, this can only be seen as Western Europe's last-ditch attempt at wrestling the Eurovision title out of the grimy hands of Eastern Europe Bloc voting. Bookies are saying 2-1 Norway, tho.

First time for everything...

2009-05-08T17:19:00.001+04:00

Actually, that's a lie. This is a second attempt at a Moscow-related blog - the first one deleted years ago out of shame - but we've moved on now, so let's give it another turn...