Steve Vincent

Budget bachata

2012-02-18T01:31:00.000+03:00

A series of economic setbacks drastically reduced most people’s real wages here in Belarus. That is to say, the amount of groceries you can buy on a typical paycheck is getting pretty meager. I always enjoyed lunch at the National Library as a way to stretch my own budget. I could never figure out how they sold food so inexpensively there and often wondered if it were subsidized. Today’s lunch probably did not benefit from any subsidy, however. I ordered a chicken cutlet. I had to order that because the people in front of me got the last pork cutlet, which looked meatier. Mine sported an encrustation of little croutons but I thought that was still a safer bet than the mystery meat with cheese on top.

I don’t know how my chicken compared to the mystery meat, but I’ve got to say how impressed I am at the chef’s ability to glue together a crouton encrustation around an airy meat meringue. I can’t guess the total calories from meat in today’s lunch, but I suspect I could count them on my fingers and toes.

Perhaps the financial crisis played a role in tonight’s festivities as well. This weekend there’s an international bachata dance festival in town and I went to the opening party. I figured I’d arrive early and leave early, wanting to leave before people got too drunk. There was nothing to worry about on that account. The bartender had very little to do, and it appeared to me that he sold considerably more water than any other beverage. I stayed until a little after midnight, when I noticed that most of the other non-expert dancers had already gone home. Having already danced at least once with most of the women who appeared willing to dance with me, I decided I’d better go home before I became a public nuisance.

One of the women I had not asked to dance saw me at the coat check and asked why I was leaving so early. I think she was just being nice, because I know she’s a really good dancer and I also know that I am not. Yet. But it doesn’t cost much (more than pride) to go out and practice, so I’ll keep at it.

Trying to give away a flag

2012-02-13T16:05:00.001+03:00

I made my flag out of paper

Last year the folks at the university asked me to impersonate an Englishman. They asked for this because they wanted to assemble a diverse selection of students from various lands to represent Minsk State Linguistic University at some sort of an educational fair. As I've already written, they had a British flag but not American, and somebody thought that people at the show wouldn't notice that I have an American accent. They also had a string of flags decorating the top of their booth, once again without an American flag.

I tried at the time to buy an American flag around here, but failed. So over the summer I ordered some small flags on sticks and a bigger one to hang from the string at the top of the next booth. That part was easy, since I found a fine choice of flags on the internet. But I had a devil of a time giving them away.

First I took them to the Belarusian Student Union, looking for the people who originally recruited me. Unfortunately, the head woman had been promoted to a new position and nobody in the office had any idea where to put my flags. I gave them two small flags on sticks because I had extras anyway and if these got lost I could offer more when needed. I asked next about the bunting, which was tricky because I still don't know how to say "bunting" in Russian. (OK, it's флажки.) The new people in the office had no idea that they'd ever had such bunting so I decided to take my special flag to the top, the pro-rector. I got as far as her secretary, who recognized me, and I offered her my flag.

I could see the skepticism on her face as she asked me, "So, you want us to fly an American flag?" I explained again about the bunting and she consented to take the flag. Possibly by now they have figured out who controls the flag bunting and whether my flag fits on the rope. Or perhaps they are now using it as a covering for their tea service. I don't really know.

Speed skating

2012-02-07T14:49:00.000+03:00

On Sunday afternoon I set out to meet some friends to go skating at the Minsk Arena. It turns out you don’t just show up at the rink when you want to skate: You need to choose a time and buy your ticket before that particular session sells out. Each session lasts 45 minutes, after which they clean the ice. They do this because of very high demand, especially in light of the fact that most public skating areas are outdoors and very cold right now.

I started nice and early so I could get there in time to buy tickets for the 3:00 session. As I approached the bus stop, I saw a bus approach. “What luck!” I thought. Believing that most buses on that street continue straight as far as the arena, I got on intending to ask questions later. But seeing passengers carrying skis, I didn’t even ask any questions. The city’s best ski area faces the arena, and I assumed the skiers planned to go there.

I should have asked questions at least once the skiers got off the bus earlier than I expected, but by this time I was warm and happy so I didn’t move. I finally did decide to move, however, when the bus turned left onto an unknown street. I got off at the first stop, and discovered that I could not walk back to the big street safely because snow covered whatever sidewalk or trail I might have otherwise followed and the bridge I wanted to cross had no sidewalk at all.

So I crossed the street and got onto the first bus to arrive, figuring any bus that got me across the bridge was a good bus. Not only did it cross the bridge, it followed a cloverleaf back to Victory Boulevard toward the arena. You can imagine my satisfaction, then, settling into my seat still in good time to buy tickets for our group. I must have been satisfied for almost a whole minute before the bus moved into the left-turn lane. I got up and stood by the door, ready to jump out at the next stop. But the bus did not stop. I told the driver I’d made a mistake and asked him how far to the next stop. He did not take pity on me, but finally let me out at the regular stop facing an empty field a full kilometer from Victory Boulevard.

This time I asked how to get to the arena, and a passerby told me to walk back up the road and wait at the bus stop around the bend. Along the way I found a taxi driver snoozing in his car. He agreed to get me to my destination for about US$ 2.50, which I paid with gratitude.

I have a problem about publishing this story because my wife already thinks I’m not always as attentive to navigational details as I should be. I have not told her these details about my adventure and she doesn’t read 100% of my blog posts. If you know her, I’d prefer that you keep this particular incident to yourselves at least until I’ve put a little distance on it.

By the way, the 3:00 session included only the speed-skating track that goes all the way around the hockey practice arena. None of us had ever worn speed skates before, and they are VERY different from hockey skates. For one thing, they don’t steer. For another thing, the long blades catch easily on the ice and threaten to catch on each other if you cross your feet in the turns. Malcolm did cross his feet successfully, but I don’t think the rest of us tried. We had a great time, though, the only four people on fresh-fresh ice as smooth as glass. I’d definitely like to go back.

Yakub Kolas

2012-01-31T22:36:00.001+03:00

The kind folks at the House of Friendship invited me to reprise last year's performance as master of ceremonies for a presentation on the works of a famous Belarusian poet called Yakub Kolas. The invitation came at a busy time, so I declined. Undeterred, they called back and invited me to be a participant, responsible only to read a poem or two in English. I said yes just to be a good sport, but I didn't have any special expectations for the evening.

In spite of my limited expectations I had a great time choosing and rehearsing the poems. I think I enjoyed that part of the project more this year than last, since I bore small responsibilities and had more time to savor and analyze the poetry. I chose two poems, a very downhearted cry for freedom from before the revolution and a joyous paean of praise to the joys of labor on a collective farm after the revolution. While both poems showed how hard people worked on the farms, the drudgery of working for "the man" before the revolution is supplanted by the joy of working for the collective good afterwards.

It's interesting how much the poet's impression of life changes along with his change of standpoint. It reminds me of something I used to think a lot about years ago. Fascinated by space travel, I wondered when we would look out from the stars instead of looking up at them. After a while I decided that we already began looking out from the stars once we gained a better understanding of our place in the universe. We're still looking, but we're beginning see differently.

Anyway, I had a good time getting ready for the program and didn't really think much about who else might be there or what they might say or read. Well... If I had any idea who would be there, I would have put on better shoes at least, and I would have encouraged Alla to come. The poet's youngest son is still alive and well, and he came to talk about his father and his poetry. There was also a bigwig from something like the Ministry of Culture, though I don't specifically remember her title. Anyway, the poet's son gave an excellent talk and everybody performed beautifully. The first guy was so enthusiastic about his poem that he read it in three languages: The original Belarusian, a professional English translation, and his own translation into his native language, Chinese. I worried for a moment about following such a powerful presentation but felt completely in my element once I took the stage, grateful for my thorough preparation and the audience's warmth.

I'm very grateful even to have been in the room for today's presentation. And being a participant comes as a much more special privilege than I dared imagine. What an opportunity!

Vilnius, day 2

2012-01-29T10:36:00.000+03:00

Yesterday we planned to go into museums because it was even colder than Friday. But the sun shone brightly and we couldn't miss it.

We started the day with an attempt to walk to a big shopping center called Akropolis because we heard they had a farmers' market on Saturdays. We layered on extra clothes and headed out, slightly overdressed. After walking for about twenty minutes we thought we saw our destination ahead but when we asked a passer-by he said that we had much farther to go and he strongly recommended that we get onto a bus. We took his advice, and discovered that indeed the Akropolis was nowhere near us. We didn't buy much at the farmers' market, but Alla continues to get a good laugh out of the brick of traditional bread I bought. It seems to weigh about as much as a newborn baby. We also found an enormous supermarket in the shopping center and we bought a couple of bags of groceries. We limited ourselves to stuff we couldn't buy at all in Belarus, though we were also tempted to load up on stuff that just costs less here.

If we saved any money by shopping in Vilnius, we spent it all getting home from the Akropolis anyway. We decided to take our load home in a taxi, and taxis aren't so cheap here as in Minsk. I don't think our driver took anything even close to the most direct route back either. It felt like a majestic S, which we converted to a dollar sign by imagining the straight line we would have liked to take top to bottom. $

We ended the day at Philharmony, where we heard Chopin's 2nd piano concerto, unknown to me but very familiar to Alla and Saint-Sains' 3rd symphony; unknown to Alla but very familiar to me. Everybody enjoyed both pieces thoroughly and the performers gave us encores after each. Vilnius has two symphony orchestras, which really impresses us. We tried first to get tickets to performances in a new hall but couldn't find any tickets left for sale. I'm really glad now, because I loved the show in the small and historic hall. The musicians were superb, as were the acoustics in the hall. I'd go back there any time.

Today we really do plan to stay indoors. We will go to church first, and stay for an organ concert in the church right after the service. Then we finally plan to get inside the National Gallery of Art. Or whatever it's really called.

Speaking of what things are called, there's a great drink here called rugpeinis. I was really afraid to pronounce it when I found it on the menu. Turns out it's pronounced about like I thought. The menu described it as curdled milk, and indeed it has a slightly globular texture. I like it, though I still cannot order it with an entirely straight face.

I get the peanut butter and the alcohol-free beer, Alla gets the wine and real beer, and we'll share everything else.

Intro to Vilnius

2012-01-28T10:25:00.000+03:00

I got thirty minutes' free access to the internet in our hotel's business center so I'm writing about our extraordinary day yesterday. I'll go back once we get home and add some pictures.

As I explained in my last post, Alla launched us on a cold-weather excursion to Vilnius, Lithuania. Our expedition started out with a pleasant ride in a somewhat-chilly train car from Minsk. I was glad the train car heating system couldn't keep up with air leaks in the front of the car because I was wearing warm ski pants and a thick fleece jacket. Alla also dressed warmly, so we decided to walk from the train station to the hotel. I had already mapped out a route on Google Maps and knew some of the landmarks we could pass on the way. Not surprisingly, we didn't encounter a lot of other pedestrians. We ourselves enjoyed the privilege of being out on the beautiful streets of Vilnius and walking along a bike path without too much snow and ice under our feet.

The hotel we chose turned out to be a little simpler than we expected, but we like the location and the very attentive staff. We intended to make short commando raids on the town, retreating to our hotel when we needed to warm up. It turned out that we didn't need to return to the hotel except to set a few things down. As long as we kept moving, we felt warm enough. This is especially true for Alla, who bought a pretty and very warm wool sweater at an outdoor market. She amused both the vendor and me by disrobing enough in the bitter cold to try on unique and beautiful wool sweaters and dresses at her stand. I think Alla was actually warmer than the vendor and I, since she was quite active undressing and dressing at top speed.

Vilnius is filled with beautiful churches, a fantastic and very historic university, and many architectural treasures. We started off with a planned route but got lost when we exited the university by a different door than we entered. From that moment forward, we never quite knew where we were. We knew we hadn't left the old town area, however, and anticipated that we could find our way home on the map whenever we wanted. But we really didn't want to find our way home because we kept finding wonderful pastry shops, enticing restaurants, cozy bookstores, amazing crafts galleries and gorgeous buildings. We finally decided we really could not eat anything more when we left the last restaurant at about 8:00 after an early dinner. Intending to go home, we decided to meander down our favorite street one more time before settling into our room. Finally we did succed in getting home, but it took a lot longer than we expected because we kept finding more things to investigate and photograph.

Today we will start with a trip to an indoor farmers market at a big shopping mall. We expect that this will give us opportunities to buy stuff we can't get easily in Minsk. In particular, I plan to buy some peanut butter and Alla plans to find some unfamiliar kinds of cheese.

So far we haven't eaten any pigs' ears. We did see them on the menu yesterday, but the waiter recommended against them. Maybe later!

Traveling like a Russian

2012-01-26T23:25:00.000+03:00

Alla really wanted to take me to Vilnius in the winter. She said it would be beautiful. She went on to explain that in Soviet times, only foreigners could get to desirable vacation spots like that in the warm season and she wanted to relive her happy Soviet youth. I pointed out that she now has an American passport, which sounds reasonably foreign to me, so she could try out a different lifestyle. Unfortunately I was too late with this observation and we are leaving tomorrow morning.

I got a weather forecast and it’s going to be unseasonably cold. Since it’s usually cold around here anyway, that’s really bad news. Tomorrow’s high should be -12. That already impresses me, but the wind chill brings it down to -23. Thoroughly impressed, I’m bringing the heavy equipment: shearling coat, fur hat, ski pants and a pair of tights to wear underneath when Alla takes me out for the inevitable walking tour. (Note to my American readers: The temperatures aren’t as impressive as you may think because we’re talking Centigrade, but I want you to imagine that I’m very heroic.)

We’ll take the train, of course. The other way to travel like a Russian would involve Aeroflot, but that makes no sense because Vilnius is right next door and the train trip takes just over three hours. Train tickets are about ten dollars apiece each way, which sounds like a heck of a deal to me. Before we settled for the cheap tickets, Alla asked if there would be a TV in our train car. Last time I rode in the armchair section of a Belarusian train we had some sort of a “deluxe” car with a TV set playing American movies at ear-splitting volume. I would have upgraded to a compartment if this trip included entertainment, but apparently we get to entertain ourselves. I’ll bring earplugs just in case.

The final detail of traveling like a Russian would involve some sort of a picnic lunch on the train, but I’m side-stepping that one. I’m pretty confident that if I eat breakfast at home I can survive three hours without sausage, bread and cucumbers. I want to be hungry when I get to Vilnius because it’s apparently the eating capital of Eastern Europe. We have received advice from a couple of trustworthy sources, for example, that we should eat pigs’ ears. While Alla swore that she’d never try pigs’ ears again after opening a jar of gooey glop that we bought at an import store in Boston, I think we’re both up for another experiment in international cuisine now that we’ll be close to the kitchen. But we can probably split a single order, at least the first time. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Oh boy!

2012-01-21T16:38:00.000+03:00

English is a fairly universal language, so advertisers here sometimes use English words as a way to increase the "coolness" of their image. I always wondered if that might not explain the signs I see around Minsk advertising stores called Oh Boy. Generally the signs don't announce much more than the fact that you can find Oh Boy stores in several countries and that they consider themselves deluxe. I imagined that everybody knew what they sold, much like everybody seems to know what to expect at Ikea even though we don't all go there.

The other day, however, I realized that "Oh Boy" (Обои) means wallpaper.

Circus

2012-01-13T17:26:00.001+03:00

I love circus in general, and I definitely love the newly-rebuilt circus building downtown Minsk. As far as I know, they only opened for one show last year because they were still working on some details of the renovation. This year’s holiday show featured a new self-illuminated floor during the first half. We came back during intermission and discovered a big hole where the floor had been. It returned from the depths with a new covering for the horses. Nothing like this happened last year, that’s for sure.

When I was a kid I used to enjoy watching Russian circus programs on TV. One detail that always fascinated me was the way the audience would clap in unison when they really liked something. Here in Belarus we don’t always clap in unison, but we did it at the circus. This made me feel like I was living an old fantasy and certainly added to my pleasure.

This year’s show didn’t include any performances by frightened or tormented animals. Since I don’t like tormented-animal acts, almost nothing detracted from my pleasure. The only unfavorable detail was the tired little kid in the next row that kept whacking me on the head with her program and kicking the back of my chair. I didn’t even mind that much because circuses are intended, after all, for kids. Finally Alla gave her a mandarin to eat and miraculously she calmed down.

I think we were lucky to get the tickets. I didn’t go down to buy them until a few days ago, and all they had to offer were tickets for the VIP box up at the very back of the viewing area. (These would be called nosebleed seats in the USA, or God seats in England.) The VIP seats cost two-and-a-half times the price of front-row seats, and I declined the opportunity. Wanting to make sure Alla felt OK about missing the circus when at least some tickets were available, I called her. While I was still on the phone, the agent came back to the window and motioned me over. “You only want two?” she asked. “I just found a pair.” We ended up in the fifth row of the section below the VIP seats.

A Cuban circus is coming to town next month. I don’t know anything about Cuban circus traditions, but I’m confident at least that we’ll like the music. I think we’ll try to buy a pair of tickets on our way to the theater tonight.

Finale

Paper money

2012-01-10T14:58:00.001+03:00

We only use paper money here in Belarus; no coins. I was surprised after the recent inflationary runup to discover that we still use ten-ruble notes. They sure don’t buy anything, but the same way we keep using pennies in the USA, we keep using ten-ruble notes here. The best thing I can say for them is that they fatten our wallets and perhaps we can feel a bit richer for that.

I try to avoid the little money, but I’m afraid to leave it lying on the counter for fear of appearing to be a foreign snob. So I just make sure to spend it as quickly as possible after I receive it. This doesn’t always work, because the people who deal most often with little bills also prefer to get rid of them. Sometimes I give small bills to cashiers hoping to round up to the point where I can get back a big bill only to get back the same small bills and more in my change. For example, when I paid for lunch today at the university cafeteria, I offered a few small bills. If I had another 100-ruble note to reach the point where she could give me 500 rubles change, she would have played along. As it was, she refused my trashy little banknotes and gave me some more.

Now I have in the front of my wallet three 10-ruble notes, a 20 and some 50’s. I would have preferred at least to have a single 100-ruble note, but this is what I have. Curious, I calculated the value of 100 rubles. It’s just over a penny. Somebody warned me that it’s illegal to deface or destroy Belarusian currency, so I can’t even throw it away. Instead, I am alert like a cat on the hunt, ready to pounce the moment anybody opens a cash-box in front of me.

Orthodox Christmas

2012-01-07T22:22:00.000+03:00

The Merkulov family had two ducks, one black and one white. Unfortunately, their neighbors had a hungry dog, which got into the yard and killed the black one. The white duck, then, got all of the best grass and herbs, scraps of Belarusian bread, and other delicious delicacies. It grew up to be a fine big bird, which they brought over here to share as a Christmas gift. Today is Orthodox Christmas eve, and we celebrated with Merkulovy duck, American wild rice, and Sergey’s signature birch-juice sparkler.

Preparing for these festivities, I went off to the market to buy salad ingredients. Approaching, I heard a little choir singing to recorded background music, so I stopped to listen. This is one of the special pleasures of Belarusian life. People gather outside to listen to performers playing for free. Kids clapped rhythm, everybody smiled, and the performers did a great job.

Inside, I found a vendor with wonderful lettuce loaded with chlorophyll. Last year I was often frustrated by the hothouse lettuce, which generally looked anemic. This time, in addition to beautiful lettuce, I got green onions, parsley and dill. These green delicacies haven’t always been easy to find around here when they aren’t growing outdoors, and it really enhanced my holiday to find them. Matvey liked it too. He’s just as enthusiastic as Alla about Dill.

There are more pictures here.

Buying deodorant

2012-01-06T19:08:00.000+03:00

I've been using a Ukrainian deodorant that I like except that it goes bad when we return to the USA. The roll-on version dries up and the gel version melts in the container and dribbles out. Last time it dribbled out the bottom of the container and I replaced it with another of the same kind, which still looked OK when we returned to Minsk. I threw it into my gym bag a few days ago when I went down to lift weights. By the time I arrived at the gym, however, my toiletries were swimming in a gooey mass of deodorant which had leaked out the top of the bottle as I walked.

On the way home, I stopped at GUM and bought their last bottle of Dove Invisible Dry. Pleased to discover that I like the product, I decided to buy another bottle to use at home. In the USA, that would be easy. Pretty much any drug store in the country would offer the same array of product choices and if I didn't find what I wanted on the first try, I'd be pretty sure of success at the next store. Unfortunately, things work differently in Belarus. On my way to the central market I stopped in at a trade center with a huge array of little stores under one roof. I looked half-heartedly for my deodorant, but gave up half-way through the first floor because I imagined I'd find my product easily enough at the market.

I got to know the second floor of the marketplace really well, since I visited every stand as I looked for Dove products. Each stand featured a different product line, and the ones including Dove did not offer the version I wanted. Somewhere during this survey I remembered a lesson from a couple of years ago: If you find something you really like, buy extra because you may not find it again.

I decided to solve the problem by going downtown to the big stores. GUM still had not re-stocked after selling me their last bottle. The big toiletries outlet down the street offered other Dove products too, but not mine. I took the bus back home, hoping to get lucky at the big Euro pharmacy down the street from us. Unfortunately, luck eluded me there too.

The only real fortune in today's adventure came en route to the Euro pharmacy. As the bus rolled toward the circus, I phoned Alla to see if she'd gotten us any tickets yet to the winter show, which closes in another week. Since she had not, I jumped off the bus and asked what they had to offer. At first, my only choice was "VIP" seats in a loge far from the ring for three times the price of regular tickets. That location didn't sound so VIP to me, but I called Alla to see if she really-really wanted to see the show anyway. While I was on the phone, the ticket lady went to the back of the room. As I hung up, she motioned me back towards the window. "You just want two?" she asked. When I affirmed, she said that she'd just found me a pair. I got excellent seats in the fifth row at the regular price. I hope I can smell good by the time of the show.

Adjusting to Minsk

2011-12-31T12:15:00.001+03:00

Our plane got in late yesterday, and I was surprised to discover that the sun hadn’t set by the time we got home. I knew in the back of my mind that Belarus never went back from daylight-saving time last autumn, but didn’t fully appreciate what that would mean to me until this morning.

I had another surprise, too. It’s been warm here all week and if Minsk ever got any snow thus far, it all melted long ago. After unpacking most of my stuff, I decided to go off to the supermarket and get a few basic supplies. Keeping my jeans on, I threw on a jacket and cap and walked to the store. By the time I got there, I’d unzipped the jacket and had already begun making plans to get my bike on the road right away.

At the store I had to recalibrate my expectations too. I picked up a little bag of rice and saw that it cost 24,000 rubles. Momentarily, my hair stood up. Then I remembered that we’re now getting more than 8,000 rubles to the dollar. OK, the bag of rice was worth about three dollars, not eight dollars. I’ll get the hang of this.

Some things may adjust faster than I do, however. Recent developments suggest, for example, that I may not be riding my bike after all. I couldn’t even see the street when I woke up this morning because it was so dark out. This came as a bit of a surprise, because the streetlight outside our bedroom window bathed the whole back yard in light when I went to bed at 11:00. Apparently they turned it off after midnight and whoever controls this stuff didn’t see any need to turn it on again in the morning. We felt our way to the light switch and lit up the apartment this morning. I kept looking at the clock because I imagined I was confused about the time. Can it really be daytime when it’s so dark out? Dawn finally began breaking around 9:30. By ten or eleven o’clock I could see outside well enough to discover that the weather had changed. As I write this, it’s snowing hard.

I guess I’d better pull on my warm pants and go out to buy Alla a pair of ski poles before they sell out of her size. I don’t think the sporting goods store restocks after the New Year’s rush, so if they don’t have her size today they will never have it. At least, they never got any last winter, when we had snow to ski on. I’m not so sure that today’s snow will change anything fundamental, but I am still committed to those ski poles. I want to be prepared.

Charlie Cards

2011-12-25T08:44:00.000+03:00

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority never seems to get public transit exactly right. We were all excited when they started a new system five years ago, with plastic stored-value cards. I keep my card in my wallet and just tap the whole wallet on the gate sensor as I enter the system. I even used to turn around and back up against the sensor without withdrawing the wallet from my pocket, but this got me into trouble with one of the MBTA shortcomings.

We use the same gates to enter and to leave the subway system. This means that an unsuspecting passenger can spend money from his stored-value card to open an entry gate only to be swept away by somebody emerging from the station. We all struggled with this when the Charlie gates first arrived, but now most people have gotten pretty good about joining a stream of traffic going one direction or another at each gate. Notwithstanding this cooperation, I confused a lot of people when I used to back up to the gate so it would read the card I was too lazy to get out of my back pocket. Not surprisingly, I kept getting overrun by people leaving the station when I was trying to enter backwards.

We all started getting new surprises in the last two or three months. Apparently it’s been exactly five years since Charlie Cards came out. We learned this because the cards expire five years from their first use. Lots of disappointed people discovered that their stored-value cards suddenly stopped working, regardless of the amount of money they held the day before.

I got caught with an expired Charlie Card today, and asked the station manager to give me a new one. Instead of a card, he gave me bad news. Everybody has been asking for so many new Charlie Cards recently that the entire MBTA system has run out of them. He didn’t know when they might receive new ones, so everybody is struggling with different forms of payment until the MBTA sorts out its supply problem. What I want to know, then, is why do these cards expire at all? I just can’t imagine how the MBTA gains more from killing old cards than they lose by facing a flood of free-card requests every five years.

Transferrable skills / deflated prejudices

2011-12-20T00:14:00.002+03:00

While living in Belarus I often wrote with amazement about the way people on the streets and in public transport would meet my gaze and return a smile. It seemed special to me, unique to the place or at least unique to the fact that I’m readily identifiable as a foreigner there. In another post I commented on my delight in discovering that the young women in Belarus didn’t display much doubt or awkwardness about dancing with me in spite of our age and availability differences. I attributed both of these graces to special characteristics of Belarusian people and did not expect to find them back in Boston.

This summer I realized that people treat me much the same way in Boston. I can still catch the eyes of strangers who smile back, and I can still dance with young women who accept willingly. Having noticed that, I stopped to wonder why.

My favorite theory, since it makes me feel good about myself, is that I’ve learned something or changed in some way that makes people feel more comfortable with me. When I first moved to New England I used to embarrass myself by trying to start conversations with strangers in elevators who would invariably act as if I were not even there. Foreigners would acknowledge my glance or join in casual chat, but the “yankees” generally would not. In Belarus, my outgoing nature generally resulted in smiling acknowledgements and heartfelt greetings. I can imagine that I’ve become more comfortable with myself and with strangers, and as a result the strangers act more comfortable with me.

Of course maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe the times have changed, or maybe people are just more comfortable with a guy who looks, shall we say, a little more mature. Realistically, it’s possible that all of these factors contribute to the change. Anyway, I enjoy feeling welcome, at home and accepted in a variety of places, and I wish the same for my readers.

Swimming to the ocean

2011-12-07T08:10:00.001+03:00

I wanted to do this from the first time we saw Tres Rios three years ago. Today we kayaked up First River to the cenote where it originates, and then I swam all the way back to the ocean. Last time I swam downstream here, I left Alla and some friends at the cenote. After going about half-way downstream, I turned to swim back to the group. Those figures of speech about swimming upstream really mean what they imply. I struggled with the current, and where the river narrowed I had to grab the mangrove roots and crawl hand-over-hand against the flow.

It's not so difficult to paddle upstream in a kayak, and we've done it several times already. Today I brought my swim goggles and left the boat with Alla, who wanted to paddle back down. I enjoyed the scenery as I floated over crazy tangles of mangrove roots, underwater caverns, big schools of fish in a variety of sizes, crabs, stabs of sunlight, and even patches of white river bottom.

I couldn't dive down to see what made those white spots on the river bottom because I wore a life jacket, both for security and to stay a little warmer. I suppose I saw ocean sand that washed upstream during a big storm. Anyway, I was in a big hurry because I had a macho problem. Early in my voyage, I passed a kayak while the paddlers were goofing off. Not wanting to hold them up and certainly not wanting to be passed, I stayed pretty focused on my swimming. I reached the ocean with a comfortable gap between myself and the boat.

Bird blessing

2011-12-05T07:29:00.000+03:00

Allareminded me of a scene in a movie where a bird soils a visitor’s head and herItalian companion remarks that this indicates good luck ahead. Alla thought ofit yesterday after dragging her sleeve through a huge and gooey dropping on ourtable at an outdoor café at the Tres Rios resort. We found ourselves eating atthe café because we arrived early and our room wasn’t ready yet. Mysteriously,the woman at the desk said that she needed to figure out which room she shouldassign to us. After dragging her sleeve through the bird droppings, Allaannounced that this was an omen that we would receive a great hotel room.

In fact, we received two great hotel rooms, interconnected. I can offer two orthree guesses as to why we received this surprising luxury, but we’re notworrying all that much about the details. While we don’t need it, we do find itpleasant. And I did like having someplace to go when Alla started snoring lastnight and I couldn’t wake her up easily.

Our rooms face the ocean, a manmade lagoon, and the well-landscaped pool area.Tonight as I write this, a mariachi band plays in the courtyard below us. Theyplayed really well at first, but they’ve been playing for about three hours nowand I think they’re getting a little tired. Still, we enjoy the serenade andtrust that they’ll quit by the time we go to bed.

We spent much of today in the pool area because it’s sheltered from the wind. While the wind blew down the ocean beach all day today, we didn’t notice it near the pool. A rather tame coati came out of the jungle to steal food from the diners at one of the poolside restaurants. She came back after stealing an entire calzone from the table beside me, and let me pet her even though I didn’t share any of my pizza. The fur at her neck is pretty soft, but the fir down her back was stiff like a brush.

We saw other wildlife yesterday when we walked along the jungle trail through amangrove swamp and past numerous cenotes.I particularly liked a big yellow bird and I was quite amused by the littlecrab that crawled onto my foot as I dangled my feet into the biggest cenote.Just as I was about to call Alla’s attention to the cute little guy, he pinchedmy toe hard enough that I kicked him off of my foot. Unoffended, he came backafter a few minutes and tried to crawl onto my foot a second time. I didn’tstay this time for him to climb on.

From 2011-11 Cancun

Such a busy day

2011-12-02T08:59:00.000+03:00

This morning we decided to go back to Isla Mujeres for more seafood tacos at Avalon. Originally we intended to do that tomorrow, but the resort folks changed something so we rushed out the door on about five minutes’ notice and caught the 10:00 ferry. Because the sea and air were perfectly calm when we took our early-morning walk on the beach, we expected a fine day at Avalon beach. At least we got the sun, but the calm blew away during the ferry ride.

We keep running into Russians, and we found them at Avalon beach too. A little tour group of eight friends from Nizhny Novgorod spilled into the chairs next to us. We conversed a bit and then left them for fish tacos. Alla and I tried to eat outdoors, but the wind kept blowing our stuff around and we finally gave up and went into the restaurant. As we passed the bar, Alla noticed one of the waiters bringing in an armload of fresh coconuts, so she went to find out what she could drink out of one. I asked her to order a plain coconut for me at the same time. Her beverage was called a coco loco, and it included tequila and a face made of fruits. She liked it a lot.

Because of the wind, we decided to come home on the 3:30 ferry, which proved to be a very good idea. After a soak in the hot tub and a quick sauna, we came back to our room and found a voicemail from some new Russian friends who had an invitation for four people to the horse show at Hacienda Andalucía. We got the message exactly in time that we could still say yes.

Many of the guests at this show, like our friends, had just bought timeshares. The horse show is a regular thank-you gift, and as a result the resort people are pretty generous about the free liquor. Alla, Alexei and Natasha enjoyed lavish amounts of tequila reposado while I consumed an obscene number of virgin piña coladas. No doubt everybody felt really good about their timeshare purchases by the end of the evening, and the show was pretty good too.

Little adventures

2011-11-30T07:35:00.001+03:00

Today we went out with gifts we wanted to deliver to people who were especially nice to us last year. We tracked down our reservations agent at the Cancun Service Center, which provides reservation and telephone support to multiple unaffiliated hotels. It’s located in an old hacienda at the edge of a golf course, and the building still shows a lot of the charm of old Mexico.

Inside we found a little café, run by an employee of the service center. Shebuilt a little wooden stand on the edge of the lobby, serving mainly employeesfrom within the building. She served us too, delicious mango-strawberrysmoothies. She probably should have been back at her main job inside, but shestayed out at the stand to chat with us while her employee made our drinks. Ireally enjoy the friendly atmosphere we encounter throughout Cancun.

Our bigger adventure began after dinner tonight, when Alla noticed a Panamanianpassport lying on the ground in the street. The passport was issued seven daysago to a 21-year-old guy, and we expect that he’ll miss it as soon as he thinksabout going home to Panama. We tried to find him at the two hotels nearest towhere we found the passport, but they didn’t know him. We did learn, however,that there’s a Panamanian Consulate in town, so we’ll call up tomorrow and let themknow that we have it. We figure the passport’s owner will call the consulate assoon as he realizes he’s lost it.

Fashionista once again

2011-11-28T08:30:00.001+03:00

Now I know all about that mysterious tent they set up in front of the resort next door. It was for a fashion show called Cancun Moda Nextel 2011. I even found their press release where they talked about a special Russian supermodel whom they would not name and music by Carlos Vives, from Colombia.

It took several days to set up all the staging, which included a temporary floor atop the sand, a huge array of those motorized spotlights which dance around and change colors, and a couple of truly huge jumbotron LED displays. Since all this went up at the hotel next door to us, I wandered by from time to time to get a look at all the fancy gear. Whenever I went by, I spoke to the workmen, or at least waved at them.Yesterday morning, I stopped to talk with a bunch of guys sitting around waiting for their duties to start. I asked about when the show would begin, and they told me 7:30 that evening. I knew from the press release that guests were asked to wear white and orange, so I dressed up in a white guayabera shirt and white pants and walked over. No guests had arrived yet, so I walked around and took pictures of the setup. On my way back home, I saw the same guys from this morning and came over to find out what 7:30 was all about.

It turns out that my guys were part of the security crew, and they referred me to their boss nearby. He asked me if I were a guest, which sounded about right so I said yes. Then he asked me if I were a VIP, and I assured him that I’m just a regular guy. Once we sorted my status, I asked him about when the music would start. He didn’t have a clear timeline for the evening, but told me that he didn’t think it could possibly start before ten o’clock. Meanwhile, feeling pretty exposed standing around I the empty space with nothing to do, I decided to go back to my hotel for a while.

By this time, all the security guys had spread out over the perimeter of the show area. Apparently that’s what happened at 7:30. So I went from the security boss to the security guy closest to my hotel and told him I was stepping out but that I’d be back in about 45 minutes.

The show started much later than that. I could see people assembling at the next-door resort, eating and chatting before they finally filed down to the beach. I thought it would be very un-cool to arrive from the beach while everybody else arrived on the hotel staircase, so I waited. Then the tent filled up almost to capacity and I got engrossed in writing a letter in Russian, which takes me a long time. I missed the whole fashion show, but when that ended folks spread out enough that I felt OK about walking in.

My security guard was still there, and he let me in, teasing me a little bit about my long 45 minutes. Everybody milled about, so I walked around a bit myself and got into line at the bar, where I ordered a mineral water. I was relieved to see that the bartender didn’t ask for money, because I had none.

Later, after the music started and everybody had eaten something, I went and tried out some of the leftover food. I liked the desserts best, and by the time I went home I’d had four of them. I was surprised when I got home to learn that it was 2 a.m. and the band had been playing without any real break since 11 p.m. In fact, I continued to listen to the band through the walls and windows in the room, and I think they didn’t stop playing until 5 a.m. I guess it was a heck of a party, and in any event I didn’t sleep much. Both at the party and in my bed, I really enjoyed the music. The band played various styles, all with a Latin flavor. I particularly enjoyed the Latino rock, and I had a great time watching the beautifully-dressed people who came to the show.

From 2011-11 Cancun

The sour cream bowl

2011-11-26T19:00:00.000+03:00

[Today’s entry is a guest post by Alla’sdaughter Nika]

Yesterday my mom and I headed out to La FiestaMexican Outlet about half a mile from our hotel. Neither of us really neededanything, and I didn’t even have any pesos in my wallet, for that matter, but Ithought I’d keep her company, we’d have a nice walk, and it’d be fun to takeanother look at the ceramics, sarongs, and tourist knick-knacks we’ve bothalready seen. Leaving the hotel room, I asked, “So what are you shopping for,anyway?” and she said, “Nothing, I’m just coming to keep you company.” Funny, Ithought I was going to keep hercompany.

We walked over to the Outlet, politely declining all the offers from solicitousvendors at the Mexican Flea Market on the way. We had a destination, and, what’smore, we had a coupon for the Outlet. Plus, the Outlet took US dollars! I had atwenty in my wallet and I was starting to think I might find something I “need”after all.

At the store, I methodically went up and down the aisles to see what they had –frosted glass margarita glasses, belts, ponchos, blankets, tooled leather ofall quality and price ranges, rows of tequila and chocolate products, bathingsuits, straw hats, traditional toys, Mexican-style cotton tops and dresses,and, most interesting to me, lots of square footage devoted to many types of colorfulceramics. I found two small lidded boxes with bird and fish motifs on brightbackgrounds, glitzed up with a touch of sparkles under the glaze, put them in ashopping basket, and went to find my mother.

She was by one of the cheap souvenir stands, paying her respects on bended kneeto a stack of ¼ pint bowls. She was holding a bright one with a picture of atoiling Mexican man in a verdant field, with an extravagant sunset behind him. “Whatdo you think? I want something to take to Belarus to remind us of Mexico.” Thatwas as good a pretext as any to launch into an intent debate on what functionalor decorative purpose this tiny receptacle would serve in an apartment that Iwas pretty sure was already well-endowed with ceramics. I wasn’t sure about theMexican, though – he was painted with very little detail, the place where hisface would have been obscured in the picture by a load-carrying arm, presumablyto keep the diagram simple, and the bowl an affordable $3. It seemed like tooobvious a symbol of the faceless toilers by whom we’re surrounded here inCancun, working tirelessly to make a living by making our stays comfortable.

I turned to the rack next to me, and picked up a slightly bigger bowl with apretty pastel bird pattern on a chocolate background. “What about this one?” “No,that one is $5, and these are only $3.” Ah, so we were dealing with a classiccase of “I want to buy something but I don’t need anything, so I should spendas little as possible.” I indulged my mother for a bit by discussing the relativemerits of green, burgundy, and orange backgrounds and bird, fruit, or toilingMexican motifs, and, seeing as the choice was overwhelming for the size of the task,helpfully suggested that perhaps one dish could be for serving sour cream andanother might be placed in the bathroom to house rings when my mom takes themoff to apply lotion. She liked the expanded shopping license and I waltzed off,thinking settling on two bowls ought to make it easier to decide. I did anotherturn or two around the outlet, and considered another souvenir for a friend.Fifteen minutes later, my mother was still at her post, the original selectionwidely expanded, no closer to a decision. “I really like this teal one with thefruit, what do you think? There are also these 3 other ones, with differentfruit arrangements.” “If you already like one, why do you need to pull fiveothers off the shelf to make it complicated? Just go with the one you want.” “Becauseit’s fun to look.” We went back and forth with this current selection, and atleast I talked her out of having a faceless Mexican under her sour cream. Iwent for another lap, reminding her that we had a dinner reservation and shouldprobably head back to the hotel soon.

Five minutes later, she was still crouching by the bowls. “Nika!,” she crieddespondently when she saw me, “I have a crisis! I put the teal bowl back andwent away for a second, and now it’s gone! Someone else has bought it!” “That’sGod telling you not to buy it. But there is no one else shopping for these, Idoubt someone else took it.” We looked for a minute among the myriad colors andpainted papaya/banana/watermelon combinations for just that one. I waswondering why she had put it down if she had felt so strongly about it, or if shedidn’t care that much, why we were still here. We found it after a few minutes,my mother rejoicing at the reunion and decisively heading to the cash registerwith me, finally. As my boxes were getting wrapped up, she held it up andasked, “Do I need this?” I was already invested in the deliberations and urged herto commit to her choice. The transaction finally complete and the darned bowlin my bag, we headed back to the hotel. “Save the receipt,” she said as we walked out. “I might want to come back tomorrow and trade it for that pastel bird one.”

Isla Mujeres

2011-11-26T02:31:00.001+03:00

Every time we’ve been in Cancun somebody has mentioned Isla Mujeres, always favorably. We always intended to go there, but somehow always got distracted by other activities until yesterday. Wow! Now I want to go back.

We took the 9 a.m. ferry and walked indirectly to the Hotel Avalon. We went there because the last person to recommend Isla Mujeres had worked at that hotel until recently and he told us that they have a nice beach beside a friendly bar, and if we order a drink or two they’ll let us hang out on their beach. And we walked indirectly because we got a little bit lost, but in a good way. We walked around the back side of the island and contrasted beautiful views of the craggy coral-encrusted coastline with the washed-out buildings not yet repaired after a hurricane from a few years ago.

At last we approached the bridge to Avalon by way of a beautiful strait dividing the tiny island of Avalon from Isla Mujeres. Once across the bridge, we found the hotel people just as friendly as promised. We bought some virgin piña coladas and settled in at their very quiet beach. After a while we got hungry, and went back to the hotel bar for lunch. They made us delicious fish tacos, and the waiter served us with food-delivery stunts and plenty of smiles.

After lunch, the waiter confided in us, suggesting that we should go through the hotel to a private tidal pool at the back, called the King’s Bath. He also gave us a few pieces of bread to feed the fish. The fish must have been hungry, because they swarmed us as we scattered crumbs on the water. We swam around in the pool and found a wider variety of fish and coral than we’d seen anywhere else in Cancun, all in microcosm.

We explored the villas near the pools, often remarking on the beautiful gardens and breathtaking views. Finally I went and asked at the front desk what it would cost to stay at this paradise. The villas, this season, sell for $110 (US) per night. Considering the view, the beauty of the place, and the delicious food, it sounds like an amazing bargain. I don’t know what the rooms look like inside, but I don’t care. I’m eager to add a couple of nights to our next trip and stay at the Hotel Avalon villas. And eat more fish tacos.

Mystery tent

2011-11-24T07:40:00.001+03:00

Last night some members of our party noticed a bit of banging as workers drove giant stakes to support a huge tent. We walked by the tent this morning as we went to swim at a neighboring beach. Workers had apparently worked all night long, and were tightening down the last few guy wires as we walked by. Then they went away and left the tent empty. We saw huge tire tracks in the sand, but did not learn who might use the tent and for what purpose.

This evening another vehicle approached the tent. This time we saw a huge 18-wheeler creep ahead along the sand, assisted by a large crew of workers moving plywood sheets to create a track for the truck. Tomorrow, then, I expect at least to learn what was in the truck. Maybe I’ll even know what it’s for.

From 2011-11 Cancun

Alla wins the contest

2011-11-21T21:06:00.001+03:00

At our resort’s welcome party last night, they sought out two men and two women for the last event on the program. As the master of ceremonies scanned the crowd looking for a female volunteer, I pointed at Alla, who cringed and tried to make herself too small to notice. This didn’t hide her, however, and since I wore a bright red shirt and unusually wild white hair, the guy called her to the stage. Then he explained the contest. While he described it as a dance contest, Alla observes that it was really more about seduction. They rounded up a male and female volunteer who sat in a chair, and then the dancers were supposed to dance across the room in an alluring way toward the seated target.

The male and female resort employees leading the show demonstrated first. Since they perform this act for a living, they’ve gotten quite good at it. The male dancer , for example, removed his belt and used it as a prop with lower-body movements borrowed from burlesque shows. Next they invited the guy in the Batman T-shirt to try out his version of the dance. He was great, and I thought he might win. A young female Latino guest danced second, attempting to copy the female performer’s sexy example. She danced hard, but without any particular success. The second man called himself Superman, and he out-did Batman, adding a few personal flourishes to the original choreography.

At last Alla danced. She ignored the choreography, cut the dance tempo in half, and approached her victim very slowly. As soon as the music started, she unclipped her hair, which fell in a lush curly mass. (Her hair gets lots of body in humid conditions.) She maintained hypnotic eye-contact with the poor guy, who was sweating profusely by the time she reached him. The professional and the first volunteer came and touched him. Alla didn’t think that would be appropriate for her, so she just came close and teased him with her hands near his face. Everybody loved Alla’s act, and the disk jockey wouldn’t turn off the music until she’d danced about twice as long as everybody else.

So, you can guess whom the audience chose as the winner. There never was a question. Alla took home a nice Mexican blanket as her prize.

No camera today

2011-11-21T08:59:00.000+03:00

I didn’t take my camera with me today because I didn’t expect to see anything I hadn’t already photographed many times before. I guess I forgot that every day is different. I certainly could have taken some interesting photographs.

I don’t regret at all leaving the camera behind when we went out for our morning walk. We went to the northern end of our beach, where a man-made breakwater creates a pool of placid sea. We set our hats and sunglasses down on the sand and went out to float around in water Alla describes as being warm as fresh milk. Never having been that close to a cow, I’ll take her word for it. I don’t float well in fresh water, but I always enjoy floating around in a warm sea.

I did have a little trouble floating at one moment, which Alla found quite amusing. I had noticed a particularly alluring bathing suit. Or, to be more accurate, I noticed the owner of the bathing suit. Anyway, I was a little distracted until she got into the water.

On our way to lunch we met a guy who grew up around here and he gave us some useful advice about things to do. One of his suggestions related to a nearby restaurant, which we found soon after. It’s located beside a little public beach we’d never seen before because it’s on the other side of the breakwater. This beach attracted a different class of people than we see on the more private hotel beaches, and we enjoyed the colorful crowd.

We didn’t eat there, however, because I had in mind a less expensive restaurant our driver told me about on the way in from the airport. I’m not sure I found the place he told me about, but we liked it very well. It was a tiny place, without indoor seating. The owner and his cook took really good care of us, feeding us delicious Mexican food for not much money. I’m eager to go back.

We spent some time after our late lunch riding the bus downtown and buying groceries. Most tourists don’t go downtown, and it feels different there. I’m not sure I would have liked to take a lot of pictures, but we certainly enjoyed the vibrant and colorful atmosphere.

Two or more mistakes

2011-11-14T05:11:00.001+03:00

I got sucked into the first mistake by an e-mail from Borders inviting me to buy a $25 restaurant coupon for $3. It sounded like a good deal at the time, so I bought a coupon while we were still in Belarus last June. All summer long, I was thinking, “I don’t want to forget to use that valuable restaurant coupon while I’m still in the USA.” (This may have been another mistake, but who’s counting?)

We made the next mistake a few nights ago when we decided to find a local restaurant where we could use our coupon. We knew some of the restaurants on the list, but decided to try a new one in the Italian part of town. When I opened the restaurants.com page where I could customize my $25 coupon to the restaurant we chose, I was a little concerned to read several paragraphs of fine print about when and how we could use the coupon. Unfortunately, it was late at night and I didn’t want to waste any more time re-thinking our choice of restaurants. That decision didn’t work out so well this time.

When we got to the restaurant, we had a wide choice of tables. That is to say, there was just one other couple in the entire place. We thought hard enough to recognize that this is generally a bad sign, but we had our stupid $25 coupon in our hands and decided to eat there anyway because the reviews said the food was better than the service, and we felt pretty confident we wouldn’t have any trouble getting the waitress’ attention when we wanted her.

I won’t count any more mistakes, but I’ve got to say that the food wasn’t all that great and the coupon didn’t make it any kind of a bargain. After applying the coupon, our bill came to $61 for simple bland food based on less than $20 worth of ingredients. Let’s just say that we learned a few things this evening.

Islamic art at the Met

2011-11-13T05:13:00.000+03:00

Alla and I were eager to see the new Islamic art wing recently installed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. We tried to book a room but couldn’t find any good enough deals, so we decided to go down just for a day. This turned out to be a pretty good idea.

We started on the 6:30 a.m. Lucky Star bus, from Chinatown Boston to Chinatown New York. We caught up on our sleep during the first part of the ride, and then we enjoyed the fall colors as we rolled through Connecticut. It’s a beautiful time of year to pass through Connecticut, since the lawns still look juicy and green while the trees sport their red and yellow autumn leaves. Encountering no serious traffic, we reached New York in four hours and got to the Museum at 11:11 a.m. on 11/11/2011.

Off to an excellent start, we showed our MFA membership cards (from Boston's Museum of Fine Art) when we went to buy our tickets to the Met. I’m not sure if they were supposed to give us a 100% discount, but that’s what we got. Grateful, we splurged on a delicious lunch at one of the Met's fancier restaurants when we finally took a break. First, however, we hurried straight to the new wing.

The Islamic Art wing includes two special installations, a Moroccan courtyard and a sitting room after the Ottoman style from Damascus, Syria. I especially liked these two installations, and went back to them a couple of times after I’d seen everything else.

Alla and I also enjoyed seeing lots of other installations at the Met. While she isn’t terribly fond of modern art, I am. So we gave ourselves a block of time to explore independently, and then we came back to discover that we’d each seen great stuff, much of which did not overlap.

When we finally decided that we’d both seen enough, we went back to Chinatown. Conveniently, we got there just before the 7:00 bus left for Boston and we still had food with us that we had originally intended to eat as a picnic lunch. Instead we had a picnic dinner on the bus and got home at a very comfortable hour. The whole trip flowed so well that we’re eager to do it again and see other parts of that museum or visit other museums.

To see more of our pictures, click here.

Free money from Boston Gas

2011-11-10T07:17:00.001+03:00

The State government has decided that gas meters in Boston are too dangerous to keep for a long time. As a result, every few years the gas company comes out and installs a replacement meter. As I understand it, they take the old meters back to their warehouse, wave their hands over them and declare them safe, then re-install them in somebody else’s house.

I’m not too excited about any of this stuff, but since they are excited, I accepted their proposal last week that they come over. They wouldn’t tell me exactly when they intended to come, but it would be sometime between noon and 6 p.m. and they’d call to confirm before coming over. Alla and I dutifully waited all afternoon on the appointed day but nothing happened.

At first we thought that since we don’t really care about the new meter, we’d just ignore their failure and go out of town. But then we thought about our poor house-sitter dealing with their annoying calls and I decided to see if I could make the gas company feel guilty enough to give us a specific appointment they would actually honor.

The gas company found itself unable to promise a more specific time, but they offered us a $50 credit for the inconvenience. OK. I’ll take it. Heck, at this rate they can stand me up as often as they want. I have plenty to do at home anyway.

Rambutan

2011-11-06T06:11:00.000+03:00

Today one of the vendors at Haymarket had a big pile of red fuzzy-looking things a little smaller than a tennis ball. "What's that?" I asked.

He had a mouthful of something or another, so he simply pointed at his mouth and said something like "Mmurff." His assistant noted that the sign said "rambutan."

I'd heard of rambutan, but if I've ever eaten it I don't remember it, and at least I've never seen it fresh inside its husk. So I asked if it were good. The assistant didn't answer, possibly because he speaks limited English. The boss chewed. And chewed. He didn't hurry to swallow whatever filled his mouth, but finally found his voice and told me that they're good and that they're something like lychee. I stood around, hoping he'd offer me a sample, but he offered me nothing.

Meanwhile, couple from Southeast Asia came by, got very excited, and bought a big bag of them. They advised me to do the same, so I finally bought a pound. Peeling off the husk, I found a shiny white sphere inside. (It looked to me like an eyeball, a fact which I decided to ignore.) I gave Alla a bite and then I took the second half. It was delicious. I opened another one for Alla and another for myself. And another.

I turned around and returned to the stand, telling the head guy that I'd made a mistake. He looked suspicious. I elaborated that I'd only bought one pound of rambutan and should have bought two. He said, "I tried to tell you you'd like it." His assistant filled my bag generously. Alla and I munched rambutan most of the way back home. Highly recommended.

Halloween

2011-11-03T06:55:00.000+03:00

Some of my foreign friends are curious about this peculiar American holiday, Halloween. Others, it seems, know quite a bit about it. I’ve seen photographs of Halloween parties in Belarus, and at least some folks have got the costume part down pretty well. But I think the Americans really excel at candy distribution.

It wasn’t always this way. My dad describes the Halloween of his boyhood as being mostly tricks. Kids would make noisemakers and try to scare their neighbors. The “trick or treat” business really lived up to the slogan. The tricksters engaged in petty extortion, hoping to get bribed out of pulling pranks.

By the time I came along, the adults had mostly given up and bought plenty of candy to give away. I remember when the Mars Company started marketing those tiny candy bars. It meant that I got a lot more Three Musketeers bars, my favorite, but they kept getting smaller and smaller.

When I moved to the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston I discovered adults in the neighborhood having as much fun with the holiday as the kids. Some folks dressed up in scary costumes and sat outdoors to greet the kids. Luci and I joined the trend, but we discovered that sometimes a costume can be too scary and the smallest kids are afraid to approach the candy dish. Still, having gotten all dressed up we’d take turns walking around the neighborhoods to see how everybody else got dressed up.

Because houses are very close to each other in our neighborhood and lots of people like to participate in the holiday, kids from other neighborhoods started coming over here to go trick-or-treating. Ultimately the crowds got so big that the Civic Association and the police department agreed to block off a few streets to protect the kids from moving vehicles. Our house is outside of the blocked-off area so we don’t get any kids here, but that means that we are completely free to dress up and walk around in the crowds. We love to do that.

This year we finally thought to mention to our friends Henry and Gabriela that their daughter and son might enjoy trick-or-treating here instead of close to their more suburban home. And we felt pretty confident that Henry and Gaby would arrive in style. Indeed, they all arrived in style, and we had a great time patrolling the streets. Amazingly, the kids didn’t eat a single piece of candy until after they had come back inside the house and eaten dinner. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I had three, and I wasn’t even collecting treats.

For more, see 2011-10 Halloween

I probably shouldn’t be writing about this

2011-10-20T06:13:00.000+03:00

Today Alla and I had lunch at the restaurant run by a local cooking school. They serve a three-course lunch from a very interesting menu for $10 per person. They also serve dinners for $12 per person, but we couldn’t get any reservations until December so we settled for lunch. They warned us not to expect perfection, because it’s a school. Sure enough, the waiter dropped my dessert on his way to the table. No problem: He brought me another one right away.

They certainly didn’t make any serious mistakes with the food. Wow, we really loved it. In fact, we made lunch reservations once a week for every week when we’re in town and they have students. We got a dinner reservation too, for their last week before Christmas break. Apparently some people who live near the school eat there three times a week and they’ve already booked most of the slots.

That’s why I’m not sure I should be mentioning this in my blog. I don’t want anybody else in Boston to know about it, but since I think most of my readers live elsewhere I’ll let you see a few pictures of our food.

Silent Sunday

2011-10-18T05:52:00.000+03:00

I thought it would be fun to do something sufficiently interesting to write about every day this week. But on Sunday I didn't.

Super Saturday

2011-10-17T06:10:00.000+03:00

I liked yesterday even better than Friday. I started out at church, working on projects I’d prepared for over several days. I’m co-chair of the Maintenance and Property committee, and my partner and I gathered the troops to think about our five-year plan. The two years previous I didn’t manage to get everybody’s input on the long-term plan and I kept turning in documents I’d prepared with very little help and, honestly, insufficient information.

This year everybody managed to stay focused on the main project with only a little pressure from me. I think it’s the best five-year plan we’ve ever produced, and I’m proud of us all for our success. Following that initial success, we set in on a list of projects we’d agreed on for a church work day. A bunch of other church members came to join us, and together we produced obvious results. One group polished all the pews while another group polished up the Sunday School tables and undertook other deep-cleaning projects in the Sunday School. Meanwhile, I cleaned out the accumulated clutter from our coat room and from the Sunday School balcony. It’s impossible not to notice how much better things look.

After lunch I went out for my first bike ride in several days. I’d been prevented from riding by general business with guests from out of town and later by rain. Yesterday, however, I rode like a locomotive. I noticed in the middle of my ride that I was hitting the hills harder than usual and feeling great. I decided to see how fast I could go all the way home, and held my pace all the way.

Finally, we had a delightful evening with our friends John and Rebecca. Rebecca grew up in a family of Mexican immigrants, and she cooked us a traditional Mexican dinner with homemade corn tortillas. I love fresh corn tortillas, almost as much as I love Rebecca and John. (When I’m hungry, maybe I love the corn tortillas even more.)

Fun Friday

2011-10-16T03:00:00.000+03:00

Yesterday we went to see Kings of Salsa at a nearby theater. I hadn’t been sure I even wanted to go, but when we found a way to buy some half-price tickets we figured we’d give it a shot. The last time we went to a salsa-music concert we became bored by repetitious music and were afraid it would happen again. It didn’t. We definitely were not bored.

For starters, our seats turned out to be quite good. Our half-price entry got us into the center of the mezzanine, far enough away that the music wouldn’t be painfully loud but still close enough that we could see well. This was our first experience buying half-price tickets from Goldstar, and we’re impressed that we got decent seats. With other agencies, our half-price tickets generally led to the worst seats in the house.

We both loved the show. The group played a variety of salsa styles, and accompanied nearly all of the music with fabulously-beautiful dancing. These folks didn’t count out standard eight step patterns, but performed far more complex pieces reminiscent of modern dance based on classical fundamentals. Alla liked the show so much that she tried to get a ticket to see the show again today, though she didn’t succeed.

We did see a little standard eight-step salsa after the intermission. They invited the audience onto the stage, and a cast of brave dancers took them up on it. The master of ceremonies asked some of the best dancers about themselves. The first guy said that his name was Andrew and he came from Belarus. We had noticed a few people speaking Russian in the lobby and knew anyway that the audience would include Russians because we see them at every cultural event in Boston. So the Russians began to applaud. I probably made more noise than the rest of them, however. I found myself yelling at the top of my lungs, “BELARUUUUUS!” People turned to look.

After the audience members cleared from the stage, the band invited a local musician to sit in with them. A Cuban professor of piano at Berklee College of Music came up and offered us a completely different interpretation of salsa style. The party never really ended. The troupe performed the planned second half of the show, said goodbye, and then apologized to the theater management and kept right on playing. We stayed until they decided they’d really better quit, perhaps before the big shots decided to shut off the lights. We loved it so much that Alla decided it was her favorite show of the whole year.

From 2011-10 Boston

Tourists in our own city

2011-10-11T01:58:00.000+03:00

We’ve had friends in town, which motivated us to get out and see some stuff we ordinarily take for granted. It turns out we live in a pretty great city.

My favorite of our tourist adventures was the day we rented a car and drove out to the Berkshires. Alla and I haven’t been there in two or three years, and we really enjoyed coming back. It’s the most mountainous part of Massachusetts, and the hills are peppered with small towns that haven’t changed much in a hundred years. OK, they’ve changed some. But they’re incredibly quaint.

We went out there on Friday, just before Columbus Day Weekend. We chose Friday in order to avoid the crowds, and we generally succeeded. We saw lots of tour buses in Stockbridge, but that’s the only place we overlapped the leaf peepers. (“Leaf peepers” is New England slang for the tourists who arrive every autumn to see the fall colors. I suppose we use the term just a bit sharply because they’re the ones who clog up the roads for the rest of us.)

We strolled through several small towns and crisscrossed the grounds of Tanglewood where the Boston Symphony takes up summer residence. Bryant and Sam don’t generally walk as much as we do, and were pleased to discover the joys of travel by foot. We’re happy that they took our preferences in stride.

We finally left the Berkshires at just before 5:30 p.m. and estimated that we’d be home for dinner by 7:30. Unfortunately, others apparently shared our desire. Cars choked the turnpike and we drove long stretches at pathetically low speeds. Oddly, occasionally we’d hit a patch where we could drive at normal highway speeds but never for very long. I don’t understand how those fast areas open up in a road that’s generally choked, but I’m grateful that we had them. Still, I felt pretty exhausted by the time we got home, and we scaled back our dinner plans dramatically as a result.

Oktoberfest, Cambridge style

2011-10-03T04:59:00.000+03:00

As in Germany so in Cambridge, folks gather for Oktoberfest — a chance to hang out together, eat and listen to music. I understand the German version may involve a little more beer than the Cambridge version, but I’m pretty confident that nobody beats our musical scene.

I volunteered to work at my church’s bookstore / reading room after church this afternoon, so Alla came to Cambridge with some sandwiches for us to eat together before I opened for business. Since the reading room is right in the middle of Oktoberfest, she didn’t manage to leave the area until well after I finished my three-hour shift. I got to spend a couple of hours there too, and had a very good time. Alla kept coming back to the reading room to tell me about arts and crafts she liked. I liked them too, but I didn’t get any pictures of them.

I did get quite a few pictures of bands and band members. Some of the band uniforms bore some similarity to conventional school band uniforms, but most of them were unified only by color schemes and general freakiness. I’m not sure the music would have sounded so good without the ridiculous uniforms, but we found them generally quite listenable and certainly very amusing.

I also enjoyed a participatory art project by an organization trying to solicit good ideas for the betterment of society. I visited this organization’s web site and found it pretty empty, but today’s project worked out well. They passed out blank sticky notes and marking pens, asking people to write down what makes them happy. I wrote down “eye contact” and put my note as high as I could reach. (Mine is the highest blue one, but not the highest note of all. In fact, somebody beat me by about a meter.)

There are more pictures in my album

Early Mahler

2011-09-28T05:46:00.000+03:00

We live near some great music schools here in Boston. We like to visit two of them, and yesterday we went to New England Conservatory to hear the first in a series of programs they are offering celebrating the life and work of Gustav Mahler.

Tickets to this event were free, but they came with a catch. In order to get a good seat, you had to arrive in time to hear an academic presentation at 5:30, and then you could keep your seat for the 7:30 concert. Truthfully, I wasn't too interested in the lecture, but Alla wanted to go and I figured that sitting through a potentially-boring lecture would be an OK price of admission for a concert in the Conservatory's gorgeous concert hall.

Well, the lecture was not boring. Gilbert Kaplan, the lecturer, really knows his stuff. He's a world-renowned conductor of Mahler's music and he speaks very entertainingly. He illustrated his talk with sheet music, comics, recorded music, and lively stories. I'm really glad we came to the lecture, which fully prepared us to listen to the program and helped us understand important aspects of Mahler's life.

After the lecture we ate a picnic dinner and returned to our seats for the concert. They played the original version of Mahler's First Symphony. This version did not please the audience when Mahler was young, and he reworked it over the course of twenty years to the version we know today. One of the Conservatory students spent the entire summer transcribing the original manuscripts for the use of the musicians and director at our concert, and we really enjoyed the results of his work.

Actually, the whole audience really enjoyed it. Perhaps the audience included more than a few students who knew the folks on the stage, but I think we all felt like we'd been treated to something extraordinary. Most of us probably like the final version better, but the original version still works really well and I don't think I've ever seen an audience show so much enthusiasm over a classical performance. Last night's audience went practically berserk with ecstasy. I'm super-glad that we went.

Busy weekend

2011-09-26T06:03:00.000+03:00

Our friends Larry and Sarah came down from Vermont to visit us this weekend, and our friend Kai was already in town. We had lots to do.

Larry and Sarah came because we invited them to yesterday’s Beantown Jazz Festival, an annual event on a section of street in Boston’s South End. Berklee College of Music organizes the music, which they do extremely well. Berklee is the pre-eminent institution in the world for jazz musicians and students of other modern styles. They assembled a really fine lineup for this weekend, the weather cooperated, and everybody had a great time. In fact, I especially enjoyed watching the smiles on the faces of the many people in the audience at the last performance of the day. I think we all had a good time.

Kai came to Boston for a number of reasons, and we already got to see him earlier in the week. We were happy, then, that he was free to come join us for a while at the jazz fest. I sent him a text message again after lunch today to tell him that we’d be going to a bike race later in the afternoon. Kai replied that he was tied up at the Museum of Fine Arts. What do you know? That’s where we’d just finished lunch, and we were on our way to the very place where he was enjoying the art with another friend.

Before going to the art museum, Larry and I got up early in the morning for a bike ride around Spot Pond and the nearby reservoirs while our wives took a long walk along the Charles River. We got to the art museum right after church, just in time for lunch. Although we enjoyed our time there very much, none of us felt satisfied. We will go back soon to carry on where we left off. I love looking at art.

We “had” to leave, however, to go see the last bike race. There had been a public bike event earlier today, and lots of celebrations leading up to the races. By the time we got there, some of the sponsors realized that they had extra goodies which they had not given away, so we came home with lots of energy bar samples and other fun stuff. We liked the race too. Cyclists raced around City Hall in a short course called a criterium. This meant that the racers shot past us almost once every minute, providing a very energetic and entertaining show. We even got grandstand seats.

We like Boston a lot, but it’s true that we exaggerated when we told Larry and Sarah that every weekend is something like this. Still, it’s pretty special here.

Don't forget to check out our other pictures.

Freedom Rally

2011-09-19T05:16:00.000+03:00

Yesterday was Boston’s 22nd annual Freedom Rally. I’ve missed all 22 of them, but I’ve heard plenty about them as the years went by. It was originally called Mass Grass, and has been commonly known as Hemp Fest. It’s all about smoking dope. The organizers figured that if a bunch of people got together and smoked their marijuana at once, there would be too many to arrest at once. There were arrests every year, but relatively few.

Alla and I got out-voted in November of 2008, when the people passed a statewide ballot initiative decriminalizing possession of less than one ounce of marijuana. I’m not completely sure what this means, but in practice it means that the Boston Common was a very smoky place on Saturday. I assume everybody who brought dope carried a small amount.

On the positive side, Alla finally knows what marijuana smells like. We walked across town yesterday to the South End Open Studios, an annual art event, and our walk took us across the Boston Common. Whoo-ee, what a crowd. What a strong aroma! Wishing to avoid any potential misunderstandings, I dragged Alla through the crowd pretty quickly.

It turns out she was familiar with the aroma anyway. “Smells like hemp,” she allowed. “We used to burn that stuff sometimes in Ukraine.”

Что такое «LUNCH»?

2011-09-19T05:03:00.000+03:00

Мы с Аллой обычно говорим по-русски. К сожалению, мне кажется, что она забыла свой родной язык. Например, она может спросить «Что ты хочешь готовить для lunch-a.»

«ЧТО???» я отвечаю. Я никогда не отвечаю на этот вопрос. Я хочу говорить об обеде, не о lunch, lunch-e или другой падеж. Мы говорим по-русски. Всё!

Алла говорит, что можно сказать «ланч» по-русски, но я не уверен. Если это правильно, почему мой словарь не показывает это слово? Надо поговорить с другими людьми, людьми которые говорят каждый день по-русски.

Trainee

2011-09-09T00:57:00.000+03:00

I just got through the security inspection at San Francisco International Airport. In the words of Arlo Guthrie, “I was inspected, detected, neglected and selected.” It all started out so nicely. As Alla and I stood in the regular line, the lady at the super-fast line ran out of people to process and she invited us even though we are flying economy class and aren’t members of any Federal jump-to-the-head-of-the-line program. She sent us on to the standard inspection stations, but ahead of all the folks in the regular line. So far, so good.

Of course I know the drill. I took out my laptop, removed my shoes and emptied my pockets. I didn’t remove my belt because, as usual, I wore my nylon belt with the plastic buckle. Ordinarily, airport inspectors recognize that it’s not a threat and they let me keep it on. Today’s inspector, at the backscatter x-ray machine, felt that my little strip of cloth would ruin his detailed anatomical picture and he made me remove it. When I emerged from the far side of the x-ray machine the inspector drew my attention to the video screen and told me I could see my results. Curious, I waited. All I got to see, however, was that the screen turned green and said “OK.”

Unfortunately, however, “OK” did not mean I was free to go. The moment I turned away from the monitor another fellow held my suitcase aloft and asked me if he could look inside. Maybe he didn’t even ask. We both knew that he could do whatever he wanted. And then, just to add to the farce, a third inspector came along and asked if she could look inside my rucksack. Yes, fine. Look at everything. At least they didn’t want to look a second time at my computer or my shoes.

The suitcase guy turned out to be a trainee, and his teacher stood beside him as he ran through his program. First he told me not to touch any of my stuff until he had finished, and then he inspected my suitcase from all sides. I thought he couldn’t find the zipper and I finally pointed out that the main zipper was facing him. He said he knew that, but he had to start with a visual inspection.

Next he asked me if I had anything sharp or dangerous inside. This question scared me a little bit because the last time one of these guys asked me I said no and then they found a huge knife I’d forgotten in a side pocket on my previous (non-flying) vacation. In that case, the inspector told me that I’d committed the offense of lying to a Federal agent, but his boss decided not to press charges. I felt sure that I’d put my pocket knife into my checked baggage, but still didn’t feel altogether comfortable answering no this time.

Once the trainee deemed my suitcase safe enough to open, he unzipped the cover and started taking things out, dumping them into a little plastic tray. I didn’t care much about the stuff in the top layers, because the nicely-folded things lay closer to the bottom. He filled the tray, loosely, with underwear, swim suits, FiveFingers shoes (“Oh,” the boss said. “I want to get a pair of these. Very nice!”), water bottles and other little stuff. They spent extra time inspecting a package of three CR2032 batteries I had bought for a dollar each. Seeing the price tag, they told me I’d found a fantastic bargain.

Finally the tray was full but the inspector was not satisfied. “What are you looking for?” I asked.

“Metal,” he answered.

I allowed as how I had an umbrella on the bottom, but that didn’t impress him. Meanwhile, the other inspector rooted through my rucksack and produced the little zipper bag I fill with chargers and cables for my electronic stuff. She ran the rucksack and chargers back through the x-ray separately and decided they were safe. By this time the trainee had dug almost to the bottom of my suitcase, piling my nicely-folded slacks in the ever-growing heap in his little plastic bin. He found my military-style belt with the metal buckle. “Oh,” he mused, “maybe that was it.” He decided to run everything through the x-ray again. I objected that my teetering pile of clothes would surely collapse as it entered or exited the x-ray machine’s heavy door flaps, so he scooped up the top layer and dumped it unceremoniously into a second tray.

Not surprisingly, everything checked out OK once they knew that they were worrying about an ordinary belt buckle. He gave me back all of my stuff in a state of high disarray and asked me if I needed any additional help. I declined with a smile. “No, thank you,” I said. “You’ve helped me enough already.”

Visiting Turkmenistan

2011-09-02T08:53:00.001+03:00

I’ve never been in Turkmenistan, and I’m not sure I’ll ever end up visiting there, though I know quite a few Turkmen from the Minsk State Linguistic University. I got to thinking about Turkmenistan today, however, as a result of spending a few hours at San Francisco’s Museum of Asian Art. The museum opened my consciousness in the way that art so often does. I felt a vague buzzing down my spine as I marveled at the beauty of the individual works and the context of many works of Asian art in a cascade of presentations.

I don’t think I even saw anything from Turkmenistan, and from what I know Turkmen traditions differ from the styles featured in today’s exhibits. Nevertheless, being in the museum reminded me of how wide the world really is and how much of the world’s riches I have yet to enjoy. I toured Asia once, long ago, and haven’t given it much thought in recent years. It’s expensive to get there and I’ve been enjoying places I can reach fairly easily and where the cultures are familiar.

Then today, I got re-introduced to Asian art. It speaks of cultures I don’t know, histories I barely know and people I know mainly as immigrants. I want to know it better, and I don’t mind experiencing some inconvenience in order to do so. I’ve always wanted to see Angkor Wat, for example, and now I understand the richness of cultures around this iconic site. I wouldn’t go halfway around the world to see just one thing, but I’m curious to know more about the people, customs, sights, smells and flavors practically filling a hemisphere I’ve barely seen.

Heck, I might even go to Turkmenistan. But I should probably visit Turkey first.

San Francisco

2011-08-31T08:24:00.001+03:00

Fog engulfed the city last night, as practically every night during summer in San Francisco. I hoped it would burn off by nine or ten o’clock in the morning, but when I stepped out onto Mary’s back balcony the cold wet wind drove me back indoors. I decided to get my morning workout once again on the Lyon Street Steps. I hustled up and down the long staircase for an hour, seeing very little of the view and very much of the steps.

By the time I returned and showered, we saw signs of sunlight in the air. After lunch, we were able to head out without jackets and ride the bus to Chinatown. Alla had been looking forward to tea tasting for several months, and I came with her. We like to visit a company called Vital Leaf, where they stock an incredible variety of teas in big shiny metal canisters. Alla and I sampled a small variety of about fifteen teas and chose a few favorites to bring home. It’s amazing how two ounces here and four ounces there add up to a lot of tea. If you come to visit, don’t forget to ask Alla to brew a cup for you.

After tea we intended to cook dinner for ourselves at Mary’s apartment, but we got hungry before we reached home. So we walked from Chinatown only as far as Hayes and Kebab, a Middle-Eastern restaurant we discovered last week. The owner welcomed us back with a big smile and let his younger brother take care of us. Said brother ran back and forth in the restaurant with a big smile on his face, tending to each customer’s needs with a spirit of genuine welcome. We started with a meze plate including delicious baba ganoush and other tasty treats, and then we moved on to a wonderful vegetarian moussaka.

By the time we finished, we felt fortified to walk all the way home, where I still managed to eat another slice of sharlyn melon, a summer favorite difficult to buy in New England. Despite the foggy start, we enjoyed our day tremendously.

Woodside

2011-08-29T03:14:00.001+03:00

We came to spend the weekend with relatives John and Meredith. They have just bought a home in Woodside, in the southern part of Silicone Valley. Yesterday, in deference to Alla, we took a hike in the woods rather than ride our bikes. We enjoyed a long walk through a redwood forest up to the top of a ridge known as Skyline Drive. Alla saw her first banana slugs, including a particularly large and juicy specimen. Meredith invited me to join an elite club she joined as a child, but the initiation required me to kiss a banana slug and she wasn’t really able to tell me any compelling benefits of membership. Today I learned that John is a member too, but I still feel OK about the fact that I have not joined.

As we drove to and from the park, we passed dozens of cyclists. Traffic slowed to a crawl at a major crossroads, as cyclists whizzed hither and yon through the intersection and stopped at the local very fancy, very organic, natural foods store cum delicatessen. I remarked that perhaps one should not move to Woodside without first purchasing at least one bicycle. Fortunately, we have bikes. So this morning John, Meredith and I rode through that intersection and up to the top of Skyline Drive. The entire Los Gatos Racing Club rode past us when we stopped at the base of the hill. Naturally John and Meredith charged off to chase them and pass quite a few. Unfortunately, I’m not in that kind of condition right now and I managed to pass just a single straggler.

When they’ve put away their bikes, Woodside residents seem to spend lots of time at their backyard swimming pools. At least, that’s the way it appears to us as we listen to the quiet splashing sounds wafting through the bushes. As I write this, in fact, Alla is making quiet splashing sounds in John and Meredith’s pool, heated by roof-mounted solar panels. It’s quite a contrast to the Saturday morning cacophony of leaf blowers, and I’m quite happy to see that the leaf blower folks seem to have agreed on a fixed time for their endeavors.

Best day in a long time

2011-08-24T08:28:00.000+03:00

I went for a bike ride today with my cousin Hal Cranston. We’re visiting him at his cabin in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and he took me today for one of his favorite rides. We drove to Sierraville, a tiny town almost a mile above sea level. We left our car there and rode up over Yuba Pass under a clear blue sky. The shadows of huge pine trees sheltered us during the first part of the ride, and as we got higher we began to pass fragrant meadows filled with Indian corn lily and other plants I could have identified when I got Nature merit badge at Boy Scout camp.

Though I cannot name the rest of the meadow plants, I can say that they looked as good as they smelled. We passed huge fields of little white flowers, commented on little thickets of bright purple, and admired the ever-changing backdrop of the Sierra Buttes, high alpine valleys, and mountain streams.

After cresting Yuba Pass we descended into a little settlement called Bassetts, where we stopped at a combined general store and restaurant and bought a few fig Newtons to propel us up the next climb. At the top of this one we found a forested mesa with numerous small lakes sparkling behind the trees. By the time we stopped at Gold Lake I could hardly believe what I’d seen and experienced. I’d forgotten the beauty of the Sierra Nevada, its aromas and vistas. Staring across the pristine surface of Gold Lake, completely alone but for my close friend and relative, I could only whisper a prayer of thanks for the opportunity to be there.

We returned by the same route, stopping again at Bassetts to refill our water bottles. Since I’d only drunk two bottles to that time, I decided to go light and fill only one bottle for the last leg of our journey. Unfortunately, I drank much faster under the afternoon sun, and my bottle ran dry a couple of miles before we crested Yuba Pass. Thinking to reach the pass before I got absolutely parched, I rode a little harder and pulled out ahead of Harold. Presently a couple of people in a yellow pickup truck slowed down beside me and rolled down the window to talk. They said that they’d seen Harold go off the road behind me and fall in the dirt at the side of the road. They added that they’d go back and check on him themselves had they not seen me.

I doubled back and learned that Harold hadn’t taken a serious fall, but had just bogged down in soft dirt when he drifted off the pavement. As we rode together again, the couple in the yellow truck returned to assure themselves that we were OK. They said they were prepared to load his bike into the back of the truck if he needed help, and we replied with gratitude and sent them on their way.

Then I begged Harold for a drink of his water. As soon as I returned his bottle, the yellow truck was back, and the passenger asked me if I’d like an extra bottle of water. Yes! With plenty of water, we powered over the pass in fine style and coasted downhill at a wonderfully high speed to our starting point.

I’d forgotten how much I enjoy alpine scenery and situations. Now I want to get out my backpacking gear again and see more of it.

Lobster bake

2011-08-14T06:00:00.000+03:00

A member of my college alumni association, Joe Ayers, now works as a professor and researcher at an oceanographic facility on the shore near Boston. He invited our alumni club to a traditional New England lobster feast. I’ve heard of these things, but I’ve never before seen lobsters cooked this way.

We had to arrive early in order to dig a pit on the beach. (But somebody else got there even earlier so Alla and I escaped that task.) Then we piled alternating layers of wood with kindling and big rocks into the pit, and ended with as much material above ground as in the pit. Joe took a shortcut here and added barbecue fire-starting liquid to the wood before throwing in a ball of burning newspaper. The pile burned all afternoon while we swam in the ocean and ate hamburgers cooked on an ordinary gas grill. In addition, we spent a lot of time gathering wet seaweed, which we began even before the tide got low enough to expose it.

Finally the fire burned down enough that the hot rocks settled to ground level and we prepared the food. Joe taught us how safely to remove the bands from the lobsters’ claws, and we put the live lobsters and clams into huge steamer frames along with sacks filled with potatoes, onions and hot dogs. (Lobsters are only safe to eat if cooked alive. It’s apparently something like staying too long in the sauna.) We also laid out lots of corn with the silk removed and the leaves wrapped back around the kernels.

We stacked the two steamer frames on top of the hot seaweed and put two wet tarps on top. A little over an hour later, we removed the covers and took the food up to the lawn so everybody could fill their plates. Dinner tasted excellent, and we had a really great time preparing it.

Rainy day fun

2011-08-10T17:49:00.000+03:00

We had big plans for Sunday, but then the rains began. Even though I carried a huge umbrella, my pants were dripping onto my feet when I got home from church. Our friends called and apologized that they could not come over for lunch as we had planned. They couldn’t imagine coming through the downpour and bringing their dripping children into our house.

Alla re-set the table for the two of us and we feasted on a meal originally intended to feed six. (Yes, we had leftovers.) We talked about going back to the Museum of Fine Arts to see the Chihuly exhibit one more time before it closed, but decided against fighting the rain and the crowds. Instead, Alla curled up with a book and I got out the slide projector.

About two years ago my dad sent me thousands of slides that he had collected until sometime in the 1970’s when his lifestyle began to change. Overwhelmed, I put the boxes into a far corner and waited for an auspicious time to sort through them and decide which to keep. Finally, I decided after lunch to choose a few from these thousands to salvage.

The first box I opened contained the most recent stuff, from 1973-1974. My parents went to Japan a couple of times then, and my dad joined some mountaineering expeditions with the Mazama club in Oregon. I stormed through the slides, loading a roll at a time into my projector and picking out one or two photos from each roll. While I enjoyed some of the scenic photographs, I didn’t spend long with most of them. I developed a rhythm, click-click-clicking through a roll and stopping only for the really great photos.

After getting through half of the slides, I got tired, bored and hungry. I stopped for dinner and planned to put away the projector and save the remaining slides for later. I didn’t particularly enjoy looking through so many pictures of places I’d never seen and people I didn’t know. But after my break I decided to finish the project for the sake of efficiency. This time I found myself digging into the older stuff (where I appeared more often!) I found pictures depicting the Christmas when Santa brought my brother a toy saxophone and left me a toy trumpet. Roger hadn’t gotten up yet, so I rushed into my parents’ bedroom and told them I really wanted the saxophone. They allowed me to switch the instruments before Roger saw anything. I saw the saxophone again on Sunday, and it brought back far more than a memory of two little boys.

I also found pictures of our bikes decorated for Play Day at school. Play Day! I’d forgotten that too. Once a year we set aside all academic considerations and played. The festivities included a bicycle rodeo, for which we always decorated our bikes with colored crepe paper. A policeman would come to spend the morning with us and judge our cycling abilities. He would also run a little demonstration to show us how much time it takes to stop a car from the moment one of the teachers fired a piece of chalk into the pavement from a gun mounted on his bumper. Then he’d measure the distance from the chalk mark to the bumper and tell us all to be careful around cars.

All the slides are gone now. I selected about 800 favorites and sent them off to a slide-scanning service, where they promise to start work on my shipment sometime next month. The thousands of rejects have already left the city, sent wherever Boston buries its trash.

Something has got to change

2011-08-05T06:03:00.000+03:00

Today I wrote a grossly over-simplified blog post about Proposition 13, the consequent failures of education, and the dumb things our Federal government has done lately. I worried that a poorly-educated electorate may be leading toward poor decisions in government (leading to more school cutbacks and... it got kind of black.) I decided not to publish it because it offered no constructive solution, but I am very concerned. The only good news I have in mind right now is that at least I felt free to write and potentially publish my concerns about the direction of the American government. In my other life, I never talk about politics at all.

Rather than publish a finger-pointing piece about people with bad ideas, I'd like to take steps to change the environment and encourage us all to talk together and even think together. But this has to happen mutually, and it can only happen with inspired leadership. Which we must, somehow, elect. (There I go again.)

I think we all need to set aside time to talk together. We may not agree, but if we don't make time to work toward a solution on the local level we will never figure out how to make a solution on the national level. I guess I'll start at my local church. Where will you start?

Lowell Folk Festival

2011-08-01T06:28:00.001+03:00

We always like the Lowell Folk Festival. It’s not only big and wonderful: it’s free. Volunteers do ask everybody to contribute a few dollars, but folks from the poor neighborhood certainly can and do attend. Alla and I figured out a couple of years ago that we can stay overnight at a hotel in the middle of town and enjoy two full days of music without driving home late on Saturday night, which makes the show much easier to enjoy fully. This year we almost forgot to make our hotel reservations in time, and they could only offer us a room with two double beds. The big room gave us an opportunity to throw a little party, so we invited our friends Larry and Sarah to stay with us. Everything worked out perfectly.

As we walked out from the hotel yesterday, Alla and Larry spotted a booth offering sunglasses for $8.00 a pair or two for $10. Alla and Larry got together and bought identical glasses. I think their choice must be “fashion-forward,” because the style looked like the glasses the ever-so-trendy guys from Turkmenistan wore last spring at the Minsk State Linguistic University.

Equipped with proper eyewear, we got ourselves a nice spot on the lawn right in front of the stage at Boarding House Park. The program started with a Hawaiian guitar player whom we had just met at the hotel and included a very powerful gospel quartet and a group of sisters who play Texas swing music on the fiddle and sing their own sweet harmonies. We left our stage a couple of times for other opportunities at nearby locations, including a boogie-woogie piano player from Mississippi who both moved our feet and won our hearts, but finished the day with a big salsa orchestra back where we started.

We ate really well this year. Church and other groups from all around town set up booths and sold fresh hot and cold food. We discovered two groups (one Jewish and one Lebanese) selling falafel, and we undertook an in-depth study of the two. I can’t pick a winner because I liked them both for different reasons. If the Lebanese gave their recipe to the Jews, I think that would have been ideal. The Lebanese falafel had more flavor, but the Jewish falafel came with much better salad.

Today we moved around a bit more so that we could hear some groups we’d missed on Saturday. Still, we tried not to spend all our time walking from one stage to another, and we ended up hearing and seeing some really great groups simply because they came up next at whatever stage we happened to be watching. I wouldn’t have expected to enjoy the Cambodian dance troupe, but they turned out to be a wonderful surprise. All-in-all, we had a fantastic weekend.

Chihuly (Gasp!)

2011-07-29T18:45:00.001+03:00

Everybody’s been talking about the Chihuly show at the Museum of Fine Arts. We nearly missed it because we’ve been away, but we got there yesterday. We brought Ibrahim Kanun, a classmate of mine from my very first group at the Minsk State Linguistic University. We really enjoyed seeing him, and we’re grateful that he also wanted to see this exhibit.

I’ve seen Chihuly glass before, but this show surpassed any that I remember. The MFA show included both volume and density, which really brought out some central ideas in Chihuly’s art. Many of his big pieces are amalgamations of a lot of smaller parts, frequently featuring a single color. These pieces often held less appeal for me than other more colorful glass art, but somehow I gained a new understanding at the MFA show. I guess he’s been trying to make a point all along and this time he finally managed to make it forcefully enough that I got his message.

Sorry I was so slow about understanding it. Now I want to go back and see it again, and try to put everything into its new context. We have one more week before it’s gone.

From 2011-07 Boston

Writing

2011-07-26T19:56:00.001+03:00

For a while now I’ve talked about the book I started writing in 2003 as if it were some sort of a work in progress. Honestly, however, I didn’t touch it for about eight years. Meanwhile, kind friends and even strangers have encouraged me to get it done, so I’ve arranged my life in a way that I am sure to write a few hours every day. I don’t do very well about writing at home because I’m too often distracted. To counteract this I re-joined the Boston Athenaeum, the second-largest private library in the world and the largest in the United States. Fortunately for me, it’s about a ten minute walk from home and I really enjoy working there. As a result, I’m making daily headway on my book. In addition, I really enjoy being inside the beautiful building with its views over historic Boston.

We're not supposed to take pictures inside, but I took a couple of clandestine shots with my phone:

Looking left from my table

Looking right from my table

Native costume

2011-07-26T01:25:00.002+03:00

Occasionally I participate in events at the university in Minsk where people ask me to arrive in “native costume.” This is a little tough for me. I could take them literally and dress as a real Native American (still Known as Indians in Belarus) but such a costume could cost piles of money and I’d feel a little odd in any event appropriating a tribe. I spent some time, then, noodling over what might seem believable in Belarus as “native” garb for an American.

My first choice was to arrive as a Red Sox fan, but I don't yet own a single piece of the required gear. At a minimum, I'd need to get a proper hat (which I should own anyway) and a replica jersey. But I'm not sure what I'd wear from the waist down unless I add a pair of honest-to-goodness baseball pants and a pair of red stockings. It seems like a whole lot of stuff to buy just to strut around at some event pretending to be a typical American with a sense of humor.

I never really considered coming as a Wall Street mogul, though I do own fancy suspenders and the other required gear. Feeling like I’m done with that stuff, I toyed briefly with grunge culture and thought about dressing as an urban skateboarder. But my skateboard is out of date and I can’t do any tricks on it anyway. It would be a lot more fun to arrive in a zoot suit, but once again I’d be starting from zero and I’d have to buy a whole lot of stuff. I promise: If I ever hit the big time I’ll buy myself a zoot suit and parade around in it for everybody’s amusement. (See advertising photo at right.)

That left me with my beginning cliché. I can dress like a cowboy without much effort. When I started Canyon Technology Group I began wearing a lot of Western apparel, and I can bring an acceptable outfit without even buying anything new. But my Western belts are all far too serious, perhaps even yuppified. I decided I’d look for a more attention-getting belt buckle, and I didn’t even have to look very hard. Today as I walked down Charles Street I noticed that Helen’s Leather had some excellent buckles in their window. I didn’t expect to find anything like this in Massachusetts, let alone in downtown Boston. I chose for myself a buckle that melds the Indian Motorcycle logo with other American symbols. I’m all set now with the buckle alone. I don’t even need to bring my cowboy boots and other stuff, but I will anyway.

My belt buckle

Enjoying Boston

2011-07-21T06:42:00.000+03:00

Last weekend was our first and Nika’s last in Boston, so we went for a picnic at Columbus Park on the harbor. Conditions were perfect: We found a cool spot in the shade of a big tree facing the harbor on a sunny and warm day. Kids played in the fountain and a guitarist played mellow pop tunes for donations all afternoon long. The water taxis came and went, while we just stayed. We ate, blew soap bubbles, and relaxed.

Nika is gone now, so we celebrated Alla’s birthday with our friend Atef, who may have been born on the same date in spite of what it says on his birth certificate. (The registry was closed on the day of his birth, so his birth certificate cites the day of registration and not necessarily the day of birth.) Atef has a wonderful garden patio, where he grilled steaks and served them beautifully and deliciously.

Moving day, part 1

2011-07-16T15:32:00.003+03:00

Nika (my stepdaughter) is moving to California. She’s lived in our house for the past eighteen months or so, and she brought a lot of stuff with her. In order to make space, Alla and I removed clothing from our closets, extra blankets from our cupboards, and other stuff we knew we could live without. We ended up living without that stuff for about a year longer than we expected, which meant that we had a little less variety than usual in our wardrobes. Not surprisingly, we lived just fine without so much clothing and now that I have it back I plan to go through it and give some of it to charity.

Still, it felt a little bit like Christmas to open up the storage locker and find clothing I’d almost forgotten about. Nika and I loaded Alla’s and my things into a rented truck and drove them home. Then we re-loaded the truck with everything Nika’s been using for the past 18 months. She already had a lot of things in storage, including furniture, linens, art and home appliances. Yesterday we added most of her clothing, books, art supplies, and other household items. We had to pack the truck carefully going back to the storage locker in order to transport everything in one trip, but we succeeded. And it all fit in the storage locker.

As I look at the amount of free space in the storage locker, I think I’m going to have an interesting challenge next week when the moving pod arrives. Nika is escaping in advance, and it’ll be my privilege to move everything from her storage locker to her moving pod. The interesting challenge comes because the moving pod is smaller than the storage locker. I’m confident that everything will fit, but I definitely won’t enjoy the luxury of wasting any space. I’ve got a lot of experience with moving, and I actually look forward to the challenge of fitting everything into the pod. I just don’t look forward to the labor involved, and dearly hope that Nika lines up one of her friends to help me with the lifting.

We finally got to the wall

2011-07-14T00:56:00.002+03:00

Jubilant Berliners removed most of the Berlin Wall as soon as they could. Just before they finished the job, somebody realized that they should save a little bit as a historical artifact, and we finally got down to see it today. I didn’t realize how thin it is. It’s supported by plenty of steel inside, but now I understand how people broke through it so quickly once they realized they could get away with it.

On our way to the wall memorial, we spent a lot of time reading historical displays mounted along the sidewalks. I was familiar with most of what they presented, but my facts had gotten a little rusty over time. For Alla, the displays presented a lot of new information. The Soviets didn’t really feel the need to teach her much about it in school, or even to publicize it for her parents to discuss at home.

While I found the wall history interesting and entertaining, I found myself completely engrossed in the next historical display. On the site of the old SS headquarters, we spent about an hour walking down a historical timeline of the Nazi movement. I like to imagine that humanity is older and wiser now, and that nobody would fall for the kind of program Hitler conceived. But looking at the historical context and the language he used, I can understand how he won the hearts and minds of his followers. If you don’t stop to think about consequences, his ideas carried enough superficial appeal that a credulous populace could buy into them. He appealed to a group consciousness, offering the prospect of better lives for the segment of the population that considered themselves part of this group, and made it easy for most Germans to identify with the group.

I am familiar with other societies very conscious of a group identity, and I wonder to what extent such appeals might still work if presented in the right way and developed in a non-critical environment. It probably happens more than I like to imagine, and the exhibit makes me want to be very careful about what groups I choose to identify with. Best, I think, to identify with “humanity,” or “God’s creation.” The smaller the group, the bigger the risk of shutting out other people.

Bundestag and other surprises

2011-07-13T00:30:00.000+03:00

We tried to get into the Bundestag on Friday and learned that we needed to request tickets in advance. So, on Saturday morning I went online and found that it’s not a matter of filling out a form but of writing an e-mail and waiting for a response. I sent my e-mail on Saturday morning, and wasn’t surprised when I didn’t receive a response over the weekend. But I got worried when I still hadn’t received a response by yesterday afternoon, and I sent a follow-up e-mail.

This morning, still having received no response, I printed out my e-mails and we resolved to show our requests to the guards and try to talk our way in. The first guard said that we’d asked at the wrong post but that we’d probably get in simply by showing our e-mail, and that it’s possible we’re on the list anyway. Indeed, the guard who mattered found us on his list, and we’d apparently arrived at precisely the time they’d allocated for us. Things were looking pretty good until they asked for our identification. I had my driver’s license in my wallet, but Alla had nothing. Briefly I thought about how long it would take to go home and return with proper identification, when Alla and I simultaneously came up with alternatives.

Alla proffered a credit card with her name on it and I offered one of our business cards that have our pictures and our names on them. The guard grumbled that we’re supposed to have proper ID with us at all times, Alla promised to start carrying her driver’s license, and he waved us in.

We didn’t get to go to the very top of the glass dome because cleaning crews had just started their ascents, but we got excellent views from the roof and took about a thousand pictures.

Many other things worked out smoothly for us today, and I intended to write about how well Alla has acclimated to travel in Western Europe. (This is her first real trip.) But then there was the subway incident this evening. We had booked dinner reservations at a café just outside the Opera House so we could listen to an open-air concert. The restaurant lady had stressed the importance of arriving on time to keep this reservation, and we ran into a problem when the S-Bahn shut down temporarily due to a suicide on the track. I led her onto a U-Bahn which could get us the same station with a few changes of train. Let’s just say that Alla finds the transport system here a bit tricky anyway and she grumbled the whole way about giving up and returning to the hotel.

In fact, we got to dinner pretty nearly on time, though the show itself didn’t live up to the drama of getting there.

Strawberries

2011-07-12T01:10:00.000+03:00

There are strawberry stands all over Berlin. They’re shaped and painted like a strawberry and most of them sell only strawberries. I don’t know what happens when strawberry season is over. Do they import berries from somewhere in the south? Perhaps they sell other fruits: at least one stand we saw today displayed a few blueberries and a very few raspberries.

We bought our first box of strawberries a couple of days ago, and finished the entire half-kilogram in a few hours. Yesterday the local stand sold out before we got home, so we stopped on our way out this morning to see how long the operator planned to work today. She answered that she’d go home as soon as she sold out, and that yesterday she closed at 5:00. The customer ahead of us in line added that this stand tended to have the best strawberries and we should really buy immediately.

We bought elsewhere, late afternoon, and we are quite satisfied with what we bought. We learned that the stands feature strawberries from the Baltic coast and we took home some free strawberry cookbooks. The Baltic farmers are definitely encouraging German consumption, and they command a distinct price premium over the strawberries we’d been buying in Belarus. But it works: We see lots of people carrying Karl’s clear-plastic bags with beautiful strawberries inside.

From 2011-07 Berlin

Berlin begins to make sense

2011-07-11T00:25:00.000+03:00

Alla and I gave ourselves a fairly thorough introductory tour of Berlin yesterday. We started the process on foot, walking from the main train station to a bunch of the places our books recommended. We couldn’t get inside of the Reichstag or the old Soviet television tower without reservations or an inordinate wait, so we kept moving until we could sit down on a boat and get another look at the city from the Spree River. We haven’t absorbed as much as we’ve seen, but we’ve gained a sense of context.

Having checked off so many must-do items in one day, we took today at a much easier pace. After church we gathered a picnic lunch and took it to the grounds behind the Charlottenburg Palace. I’m sure we’d love to see the inside of the palace too, but we found the grounds quite satisfactory and didn’t manage to get inside. The only building we entered was a little out-building now serving as a quite interesting (and manageably small) museum of porcelain.

As we approached the palace, I withered in the sun and cursed my decision not to bring shorts. Fortunately, we found a shady bench on the quite-cool bank of the river behind the palace and we settled there for our picnic. After lunch Alla let me read a Pushkin story, “The Blizzard,” aloud to her in Russian. I really like this story, which I read for the first time on the train coming to Berlin. Pushkin wrote well enough that Alla even enjoyed the story as it unfolded at my slower-than-ideal reading pace.

By the time I finished reading, the air had cooled off so we enjoyed a very pleasant walk through the formal areas of the palace garden, emerging at the far end of the property. We were glad to discover a Metro station nearby, and we managed to get to the big Berlin Dom cathedral in time for the evening service. The beautiful cathedral includes an excellent organ. Since we couldn’t understand the service in German, we particularly focused on the music and the architecture.

When we left the church we discovered with pleasure that we finally recognized a few areas on the map as we planned our trip to dinner. Unfortunately, a budding sense of context does not make the public transportation system easy to use. We still find the S-Bahn, U-Bahn, Deutsche Bahn system problematic all by itself, let alone the fact that we are nearly hopeless at finding any given station on a surface map of the city. While we can navigate between any two stations once we find them on the map, we can still find only a small fraction of the stations without wanting to refer to Google Maps. But at least the city feels a bit familiar now, and we’re excited about seeing some other sites with the level of detail we enjoyed at the palace garden today.

Suddenly I was a fashionista

2011-07-09T00:16:00.001+03:00

I wanted to go to a museum of manufactured things today because I didn’t think Alla would want to go there and she’s joining me tonight. But when I got to the station near the museum, I encountered some sort of chaos and couldn’t figure out how to reach the museum. A participant in the chaos told me that the museum was on the other side of “Premium,” and he pointed me in the only direction I could go to get around all the extra stuff clogging the area.

Most of the extra stuff related to Fashion Week. In my efforts to get to the other side of “Premium,” I walked into the high-end area for a city-wide fashion extravaganza. Everybody else had wrist bands and often even tags hanging around their necks, but somehow I got in without any of that stuff. As soon as I understood my good fortune, I postponed my museum plans and took in the fashion as an art show. Not only did I enjoy the clothing, I enjoyed watching the well-dressed people who bought and sold this stuff.

Unlike the computer trade shows I know so well, this trade show didn’t attract a dense crowd. As I learned later, nobody is allowed except those who buy clothing in wholesale quantities and others specially invited by the manufacturers. I didn’t have any trouble seeing the garments, and I even got to meet some of the principals. My favorite was Luca Maestrami, of the Italian firm that bears his family name. I’m sorry my photo didn’t come out well, because the morning suits they’re making now look even better than the ceremonial stuff I saw online later at http://www.maestrami.com.

I am happy to report that I saw a lot of really colorful stuff, some of which may even reach the American market. And I did ultimately reach the museum as well.

Trying to make sense of Berlin

2011-07-08T01:11:00.004+03:00

I’ve written about the importance of having some sort of a plan when one travels, and our friend Elena even tried to help by loaning us a book about Berlin in English. Unfortunately, I was too busy with last-minute details to read in Minsk, and I couldn’t find a book in English anywhere in Prague for less than $40 and that book wouldn’t have fit in my pocket so I skipped it.

As a result, I arrived in Berlin with nothing more than a hotel reservation. After showering and unpacking, I went out to buy a book and look for dinner. The staff was closing up the bookstore as I arrived, but a clerk let me in on the promise that I’d buy the first item I picked up. Then she actually helped me pick the best pocket-sized book about Berlin. When I said that I'd be here for a whole week, she encouraged me to buy the bigger book I saw in Prague, but realistically I won’t sit around in my hotel to read and I won’t read a book that I’d have to fish out of a backpack. The little one I bought looks to be good enough, based on the part I read over dinner.

I met a couple of Hungarians at the restaurant. They’d also just arrived, armed with three books. They promised to give me more information tomorrow, which is a really good thing.

My first impressions of Berlin are that it’s much too big and too busy to figure out without some kind of help. I like the fact that there are a whole lot of bicycles here, and I feel sort of out-of-it without a bicycle of my own. I also saw a lot of people in lawn chairs looking at the river. Unable to imagine why people would crowd so closely on a small patch of lawn, I went and asked if something were about to happen on the water. Nope. They’d just finished watching the sun go down. In summary, then, I have no cohesive idea of what Berlin is about. I’ll go work on it, and report back later.

Meanwhile, I discovered on Facebook that some old friends are coming to town tomorrow to start a bike trip from Berlin to Prague. I’ll go see them tomorrow evening, and then I’ll finally be able to tell Alla that Facebook can have redeeming social value.

The mistake budget

2011-07-06T00:02:00.002+03:00

When I was in the investment management business, my firm modeled itself after a very successful firm run by a fellow named Dean LeBaron, the primary differences being that Dean had better mathematical models and a hotter wife than any of us. One day Dean offered to share some secrets of his success at a Boston Security Analysts Society meeting, and my boss and I decided to go. While he did not reveal any secrets to building better portfolios, he did elaborate on a very interesting idea. He stressed the importance of trying things, and suggested that all of us should plan to fail more often and build a mistake budget into our fiscal plan.

I dipped into my mistake budget this evening. Remembering the good fortune of the chamber concert I walked into a couple of nights ago, I bought a ticket to the “Liszt & Dvorak International Piano Festival,” which featured an orchestra called the Prague Dvorak Symphony Orchestra. I wasn’t particularly skeptical when I bought the ticket because I figured the city government would have the good sense only to allow a serious orchestra to play at their serious new hall in the Municipal House. I’m not sure why I had such an optimistic idea of what the City Fathers would allow or not allow, and in fact the orchestra was decidedly mediocre in spite of the high ticket price.

I mistakenly assumed that an expensive ticket would lead to a good concert, but in this case the ticket led to a nearly-empty hall. The empty hall freed the orchestra from any concerns over developing a bad reputation and they took good advantage of that freedom. Honestly, I think the attorneys in the Boston Bar Association Orchestra played at least as well the last time I heard them, and their concert was free.

Fortunately, the day began so well that the closing concert did not damage it. I started out in the Museum of Applied Arts, where I gasped over and over again at exhibits that delighted me. The exhibits included glass, textiles, woodwork, clocks, porcelain, and other crafts presented in an extraordinary building. And at the museum I met a very interesting couple from Boston, with whom I enjoyed an equally-delightful lunch. Finally, I got lost and found myself rescued by a gentleman about my dad's age who walked me over to the Mucha Museum and then toured the exhibits with me. After all that, the closing mistake bothered me very little.

Great day

2011-07-04T23:33:00.003+03:00

I had an excellent day today. I selected this day for my trip to Český Krumlov because the weather forecasters only promised only this one dry day all week and I knew I'd want to be on my feet outdoors in Český Krumlov. Later the foresters teased me by saying it might rain after all, and it sure looked like rain this morning. However, the clouds parted about the minute our bus pulled into town and by lunch time I forgot about rain altogether.

I did discover one little problem arising from my weather-forecast-based travel planning. The castle is closed on Mondays and the big museum in Prague is closed on Tuesdays. Had I known that, I might have cursed the weather and reversed my plans for today and tomorrow, but so far I don't mind. I got inside enough museums today that the castle museum seems like a small sacrifice. And, late in the afternoon I noticed people in the turret at the top of the castle tower. That area interested me more than the rest off the castle, and it turned out to be open.

I even met a few people today, most importantly a very gregarious group from China. They invited me to eat lunch with them, and I nearly did. Ultimately, however, I ate alone because the Chinese contingent never quite pulled itself together all at once to go to the restaurant. I chose a different restaurant, also on the river, where the staff spent lots of time chatting with me.

The first time I came to Cesky Krumlov, about 15 years ago, my wife and I rode in by bicycle on a day trip from somewhere in Germany. We added this as an optional excursion from an organized bike tour. I remember that we rode hard in the rain and pulled into town at about 2:00, wet and hungry. Most of the rest of our group had arrived earlier, by bus. All I really remember about the town was sitting on the plaza enjoying a miraculous interval of sunshine and eating lunch.

Today I did not have to hurry at all, at least not after I caught the 7 a.m. bus from Prague. Leisurely, I walked and explored museums, gardens, serpentine cobbled streets, shops and exhibits. I even had time to sit down a few times to look around or write post cards.

I am very grateful for such a fine day.

Click here to see the album.

Small change

2011-07-04T10:31:00.000+03:00

In the USA, the government spends more than the face value of the coin for every penny it mints. Then these coins go out into circulation, where they are distributed to consumers as change in the course of business. At the end of the day, a significant number of people lighten their pockets by dumping their pennies into a jar and the merchants go to their banks to get more new pennies to give away.

Much the same thing happens in Belarus, where people commonly resort to ten- and twenty-ruble notes if there isn't toilet paper on hand. The ten-ruble note, worth two tenths of a cent, probably also costs more than its face value to produce even though it's just nice printed paper.

The Czech Republic seems to have solved this problem. Their unit of money is called the crown, worth six cents. Interestingly, the smallest banknote is 100 crowns and they use a lot of coins. In the big stores prices are quoted in crowns and tenths of crowns (coronets?), but they round off the total bill to the nearest crown and nobody worries about the small change.

The U.S. Treasury has been trying for years to phase out the penny but they have never succeeded. I'd love to see us take a lesson from the Czechs. The merchants can still try to trick is into believing that their product is inexpensive because it's $14.99 and not $15. Then, let's allow them to charge us $15 anyway because we have stopped worrying about pennies. If you really care about the extra penny, pay with a credit card.

Pictures worth a thousand words?

2011-07-03T00:49:00.002+03:00

I went to Karlovy Vary today. I took an early bus, walked all day, and returned on an evening bus. I liked the town a lot, but I'm not sure what to say about it that I haven't already said in the titles of my photos. Besides, it's already late and I really want to get some sleep for a change. Maybe later I'll manage to write something about the film festival, the smell of sulfur, the Serbian tourists who turned back minutes before reaching the summit they couldn't see, or my quest to buy stamps.

I should really write about the stamps. In the age of internet, it's amazing how few hotels keep stamps for their guests, or at least how few admitted it. One lady offered me a free city map instead. I finally got stamps from a Russian hotelier who cracked when I told her I wanted to send postcards to Russia. (They really went to Belarus, but I thought she'd be more sympathetic to Russia.) But I won't tell that story because as I said it's way past my bed time.

I hope you will write your own stories from the pictures. (Click below and start at the 25th photo.)

From 2011-07 Prague

I still like Prague

2011-07-02T00:59:00.000+03:00

I got off to a poor start in Prague and spent an inordinate amount of time finding the bus station. (I wanted tickets for a couple of side trips.) The funniest part was when I got close enough to see the buses and saw a window that said tickets, with a huge line leading to it. I stood in the line for a while and it didn’t move, so I asked the guy in front of me if this were really the line to buy bus tickets. It turns out I’d been standing in line to buy tickets to some kind of concert.

Things didn’t immediately improve after that. I tried out a café the author of my guide book listed as one of the top ten things to see in Prague. He liked it because authors hung out there. I didn’t like it because authors apparently all smoke. The waiter put me in the non-smoking section, which had practically no view at all, while the smokers looked out at the river. Frustrated by the discrimination, I went out and bought a gyro sandwich from a hole-in-the-wall place and then walked down to a much more pleasant art deco café where I got a good tuna salad Nicoise. It was a variant on the salad I know and love, but still good.

My better salad came later. I had been snacking and didn’t want a heavy dinner, so I stopped in at an unknown restaurant advertising salads. My Caprese salad would have been at home in Italy, and I couldn’t have been happier. I got lots of great tomatoes under lots of superb sheep’s-milk mozzarella cheese, served with homemade Serbian bread. The owner moved here from Serbia, and we had a devil of a time communicating, but he remained cheerful in spite of our confusions. (The restaurant is called Gitanes and it has live music. I’d go back, but I’d ask them not to salt my food in the kitchen. They like salt more than I do.)

In between meals I took a long walk and a few photos. I found lots of interesting back alleys, weird art, the American embassy, and numerous details I’d overlooked last time. At the end, I arrived at St. Vitus’ cathedral exactly at closing time. The guard asked me if I’d like to go to the church service, and I accepted. As I entered, I saw a bunch of tourists (I thought) being escorted up a very exciting-looking winding staircase. I walked up with them and found myself in the organ loft with the whole choir. Oops. I went back and took a seat near the choir and organ. I found one empty space in a section near the front with a bunch of school kids all wearing ID badges. Once again, I think I found myself in a place where I hadn’t been invited. I learned this when the Cardinal came out and greeted one of the guys a few rows ahead of me.

It turns out that the Poland has just begun a stint as President of the European Union and the Polish Ambassador asked for the blessing of the church. Other EU ambassadors also came and the Cardinal led the service. The choir and organ carried their end of the program quite well, and in spite of the fact that I understood only a very tiny fraction of the Czech-language service I didn’t feel bored. Oh, and I sat right beside the famous Royal Mausoleum and enjoyed fantastic stained-glass windows and lots of beautiful sculptures around me. I took pictures after the service.

From 2011-07 Prague

Deep in debt

2011-06-30T21:42:00.000+03:00

The burden of debt weighs heavily on my conscience. As I write this, I am on a train, rolling through Poland. We stopped for about 45 minutes just outside of Warsaw in order to reconfigure the train, splitting off Amsterdam-bound cars and switching to an electric engine. I got off the train to stretch my legs, hoping to buy a bottle of water at the same time. I did get my walk, but I piled up an inordinate amount of social debt.

First I decided to visit a real restroom. Seeing an attendant, I asked her in Russian if I should pay a fee. She waved me inside and said something in Polish. As I stood there, I played back what she said and finally understood that she wanted money and the number fifty was involved. Sure enough, I saw a sign near the sink advising that the fee was 2.50 Zlotys. I had no idea the value of a Zloty, but I offered her a 5,000 ruble note, which would get me five trips to the toilet in Minsk. She had no use for this strange bank note and gave it back to me. Checking the exchange-rate app on my phone, I learned that 2.50 Zlotys is indeed about 5,000 rubles but I didn’t go back because she didn’t want that money and the incremental cost of my toilet usage couldn’t be much more than zero anyway. (Sorry to all my Belarusian readers. That sentence was hard, wasn’t it? I used to be an economist.)

Instead, I went over to the guy selling bottled water in the tunnel underneath the train platforms. I asked him if he spoke Russian or English, and he teased me in Polish about how I should really learn his language. I understood enough to follow, and we continued to negotiate in our respective languages. He didn’t want any amount of Belarus rubles, but he pointed out the lady on the other side of the tunnel and said that she’s from Ukraine. I didn’t really think a translator was going to be much help since he clearly had no way to get rid of my money. (Actually, it’s really hard for anybody anywhere to get rid of Belarus rubles. You can buy all you want, but heaven help you if you buy too many of them.) Anyway, I went over and spoke to the Ukrainian lady.

She had a little table beside her, displaying underwear and other small items for sale. Like her Polish neighbor, she refused my Belarus rubles, but she fished in her pocket and counted out a stack of coins, which she handed to me. Grateful, I gave the coins to the other merchant, who gave me a bottle of water. At this moment my conscience finally awoke. I could have bought a bottle of water from the conductor for 5,000 rubles, so why had I accepted this charity? I tried to press some money into the lady’s hand, but she refused, pointing out that she can’t do anything with my money and she knows how difficult travel can be.

The really touching thing is that I’m pretty sure she knew I didn’t really need her charity. She just saw an opportunity to help me out and she did it. Actually, maybe I did need her charity. The result of this kind act is that I feel a very urgent compulsion to “pay it forward,” that is to reflect her kindness in other situations I might have overlooked otherwise. OK, Prague, here I come.

Boat trip 2011

2011-06-30T10:21:00.001+03:00

From 2011-06 Boat trip

Sergey invited us once again to go paddling with his partner and their employees. This time Alla even came along and shared a boat with me. Since she also shares a couple of languages with me, we had a much easier time working out our rowing technique than I had last year with Irina. Sometimes Irina and I struggled to reconcile what she wanted to what she wanted. I think we could have done better this year, but paddling with Alla proved to be easier and we had no trouble navigating around obstacles or overtaking other boats.

I really enjoyed being a member of this group once again. Since we were all comfortable already with each other, we were free to get directly to the business of enjoying each other’s company. As before, Sergey’s employees welcomed us warmly and treated us well.

This year’s route took us down wider rivers and we seldom encountered obstacles. As a result, sometimes we didn’t bother paddling at all. We’d just get out in front of the group and drift until a few boats passed us. Sometimes we’d grab onto another boat so we could drift and talk, and other times we paddled hard to overtake the boats ahead of us. Always we enjoyed beautiful scenery and we seldom saw evidence of human activity.

From 2011-06 Boat trip

There was, however, one very apparent area of human activity. Our guide’s sense of wilderness camping differs from our own. He brought along shovels, axes and even a chain saw in order to adapt the natural environment to his sense of what constitutes a campground. Alla and I scurried around picking up the litter we were dropping, but there was nothing we could do about the trees. I just hope they were more or less dead already. As for the berries, well, I hope the plants didn’t really need them all because I certainly enjoyed eating the ones I found.

Backyard toys

2011-06-24T18:06:00.000+03:00

I often walk through back alleys and yards rather than major streets. The other day I finally noticed that practically EVERY yard has a play area with a unique selection of structures and equipment. I started thinking about it because I noticed a spectacular toy along my way home. It’s a wooden drum mounted with excellent bearings on an axel. Naturally I tried it. This toy is not for wimps. On the first step the drum started turning faster than I wanted, but since I’m tall enough to suspend myself from the tops of the handrails I did that, rather than learn “on the fly” how to control this wheel of terror.

It’s a great toy, and I would have spent hours on it as a kid but nobody thought to build one anywhere I ever went. At least we had teeter-totters. Somehow over the years teeter-totters were deemed too dangerous for American kids (I wondered briefly if American kids were considered too stupid for the teeter-totters, but then I remembered how many times my friends and I nearly crushed each other’s spines by jumping off of the downhill end and I decided I’d better not mention anything about the intelligence of American kids.) Anyway, kids here still get to play with teeter-totters too.

Then there are the climbing structures. My favorite one looks like the Eiffel Tower, but I’m pretty fond of the one with the circular horizontal ladder too. The amazing thing is how different they are from each other. I imagine each structure was custom made by an imaginative welder with plenty of steel tubing. While a few pieces of playground equipment have plastic parts, most of them look like they could have been made long ago. In spite of their age, these toys certainly don’t look abandoned. The metal parts wear jackets of colorful paint, in some cases reapplied as often as if aboard a Navy ship.

I started a little photo album of these backyard toys here. I could have showed many more interesting toys if I added stuff from any number of public parks, but parks feel like a different topic. I am impressed to find many different styles of backyard playground, and without even walking far from home.

Salsa Minsk

2011-06-22T23:17:00.000+03:00

I’ve been taking salsa dance classes for a few months now and I know enough steps to go out onto the dance floor but not enough steps or style to be entertaining. I feel, however, like I’m finally looking at the next level. I got a big lift the last couple of days from a different instructor. There’s an American guy in town on business, and he somehow agreed to teach a few classes at my school.

He taught my regular group last night, and I had a really good time. I particularly enjoyed the fact that he taught in English and (surprise-surprise) I understood 100% of what he said. Typically I understand enough to learn the steps, but it’s possible that some of my stylistic problems were due to missing nuances in the instructions. Or it’s possible that this guy gives better instructions. Whatever the difference, I had such a great time last night that I decided to barge into his class tonight as well even though it’s intended for more advanced students.

It turns out that I know enough basics that I had no problem learning with these advanced students. I’m just not as fluent as they are at putting together a string of fancy moves without coaching. Once again, I had a great time. More importantly, however, tonight’s class really lifted my confidence. I’m excited, now, to continue my dance education when I get back home. If American instructors are the key for me, I want to take advantage of the upcoming opportunity.

Fortunate roadblock

2011-06-18T23:57:00.002+03:00

Last year I regularly used the weight training room and the aerobics equipment at the university. They didn’t want to let me use it but I managed to get privileges, at least when a couple of particularly generous trainers were on duty. This year didn’t work out so well. I got all the necessary documents and health clearances and presented myself to my guy, who sent me to the head trainer, who sent me to the deacon of my department at the university.

The deacon told me that she could indeed write me a letter of recommendation and that she’d do it for me if I insisted. She objected, however, that she already knew that her application would be rejected. She had taken the matter to the highest levels on behalf of another student she liked, and learned that the head guy is unwilling to have foreign students in his training facility because he was too traumatized when one of them dropped dead lifting weights a couple of years ago.

The deacon encouraged me to go to a private health club, but I didn’t bother following up. I’d already been using the training facilities at the Hotel Minsk for about two dollars a session and I liked it well enough. About this time, I came to like it a whole lot better because it suddenly got more social. There was a woman there every time I went, but we never spoke because she was always plugged into her MP3 player. Finally, about the time I was rejected from the university facilities, this woman unplugged her earphones before she left the room. I exclaimed, “At last!” and came over and introduced myself. Her name is Katya.

From 2011-06 Minsk

The great thing about Katya is that she speaks slowly and clearly, and she’s patient about the fact that I speak even more slowly and often imperfectly. She even turns out to be a pretty good cyclist, and we managed to take a couple of rides together this spring. Meanwhile, the Hotel Minsk has gotten even friendlier. Now another woman, Irina, also comes in regularly. She’s an entertaining conversationalist in her own right, and if we get stuck on something she can usually bail me out in English, which she speaks quite well. Good thing the university didn’t want me this year, because I’m having a really good time with the alternative.

Rainy-day fun

2011-06-17T23:20:00.001+03:00

Last weekend the weather turned against us but we went swimming anyway. Elena and Sasha wanted to take us to a restaurant next to a water ski area, where we could have a private poolside cabana and eat vast amounts of shashleek (sheesh-kebab) and other Belarusian traditional foods. She apparently called them several times trying to reserve a cabana, and finally achieved success when she mentioned that she had an American guest and she wanted him (me) to see the best of the place. It might have helped that the weather suddenly changed from hot to cloudy with occasional rain, but we got our cabana.

The restaurant, prepared for changeable weather, provided us not only with blankets but also with a heater. That was good enough for Sasha and me, so we went swimming right away, trying to splash the water out of the little above-ground pool by jumping into it. (We failed.) After swimming, we ate and ate, and then Sasha swam some more while the rest of us photographed ourselves under fake palm trees.

We’ve had the same changeable weather all week. Alla and I tried to go out for a walk this evening but got distracted by a field hockey game in the park. I’ve never seen field hockey before, and it looks at least as physically demanding as soccer. (I’d say “football,” but my American readers would be completely confused.) I intended to stay until the end, wanting to see the home team beat the guys from Brest, but we chickened out when it started raining. So we went home, stopping for ice cream along the way.

Green stuff

2011-06-12T22:48:00.011+03:00

Alla used to work in a commercial greenhouse, and she is really efficient at planting seeds. Where a typical gardener will scatter seeds and then thin out the crop, Alla distributes the seeds such that every plant will survive. And she’s really quick about it. She put these skills to work this spring when she went to help out our landlords when they planted early crops at their dacha. Now everybody is suffering.

The seeds belonged to Anna Adamovna, who brought them home from Germany. She bought them based on the pictures because the labels were written in Chinese. Now she has a lot of bok choy, which she is afraid to cook or eat, huge amounts of lettuce, and an abundance of green onions and garlic, dill, parsley and other very green stuff. Her soil seems to be extremely fertile because the plants shot up like Jack’s beanstalk. Now she is overwhelmed with produce which she delivers to us in bulk every time she comes home from the dacha.

Alla and I demurred. “Gee,” we said, “you’re awfully generous but you shouldn’t give us your whole garden.”

“I’m not giving you my whole garden,” she replied. “I don’t even like green vegetables as much as Evgenny Ivanovich and we just can’t eat this stuff as quickly as it’s growing.” Fortunately, it turns out that Alla and I can, and we’re enjoying it very much. All winter long I was dying to eat more vegetables, especially fresh ones. Now I am making up for my period of starvation, and it tastes really great. I can hardly believe the sense of wealth and abundance we are enjoying through our landlords’ generosity.

It’s a real shame that we can’t stay through the month of July as we originally intended, because I think we’d eat pretty well. And just as that garden thrives, the same green splendor fills the city. Yesterday I rode my bike across a recently-mowed field and reveled in the scent of the cut green stalks of who-knows-what and chatted with the birds that flitted around like characters in a Disney movie. It sure is green here right now.

Not the same field, but you get the idea

Raw milk!

2011-06-08T18:35:00.002+03:00

When I was a kid my mom always held her breath when she drank milk. She explained that this had been her habit since the time in her youth when the California legislature banned the sale of raw milk. She loved the flavor of raw milk and though she wanted the nutrients of the pasteurized version, she wasn’t able to bring herself to notice the smell (or lack thereof) as she drank it.

I grew up used to the flavor of pasteurized milk, but still read with serious interest when people wrote in praise of raw milk. In the State of Massachusetts, I think it’s possible to buy raw milk somewhere, but I don’t know where and I hear that it’s very expensive.

Here, on the other hand, anybody with a cow is free to sell raw milk and anybody with the guts to drink it may buy it. Anna Adamovna and Evgenny Ivanovich have a summer place (dacha) near a man with a cow, and they loaded up on dairy products just before Alla and I came to visit on Saturday. To buy milk, you simply turn in last week’s three-liter jar and buy a clean jar full. You can also buy smaller jars of sour cream as thick as cookie dough and a couple of kinds of cheese. They bought samples of all of this stuff, and brought it out over lunch.

I can’t describe the flavor of raw milk, except to say that it’s amazingly great. It tastes familiar. I can tell it’s from the same family as milk in the store, but it’s more like the beautiful sister you never met because she wasn’t in your class. Suddenly I forgot my first love and I found myself swooning over the unknown sister.

I found the sour cream pretty impressive too. Interestingly, I’m told that it thickens further after a day, reaching the consistency of butter. Alla would like to use it as a butter substitute, though I’m not sure the shelf life would be convenient. Still, the flavor of these dairy products certainly does attract me out of the city.

First impressions

2011-06-08T14:08:00.009+03:00

This morning at the gym I met a translator from Los Angeles who flew in to translate “some meetings.” She evaded my conversational questions, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the IMF is in town. Anyway, she seemed almost shocked to learn that I chose to come to Minsk in order to learn Russian. The more we talked, the clearer it became that she isn’t impressed by this city.

I can understand where she’s coming from. When Alla and I arrived the first time, I couldn’t wait to get out of here. Our guide brought us from the airport to the Minsk Hotel, a rather austere building on a four-lane street without many trees. I was puzzled by her apparent pride as she told us how to walk toward various sites she thought would be interesting to us. It took us a day or two to understand that our place in Minsk is not in front of that hotel but in the parks and the quiet streets as near a block away. I still avoid that big avenue, but I love to walk throughout the city and I could easily rattle off a long list of things I like about Minsk, things I experience practically every day.

Unfortunately, starting at the train station or even at the Minsk Hotel tourists don’t immediately see the best parts of the city. Given a little help they probably find their way into the big underground mall and perhaps to the linen stores and the crystal factory showroom. It takes a little more time and effort to locate the nearest parks and discover how far they extend. And only after all this might the tourist begin to appreciate the kindness of strangers here, and to notice the talent of Belarusian artists.

We probably made the same mistake recently in Warsaw. We had some free time waiting to change trains on our way back from Prague, so we set out without a map to explore the area near the train station. We found our way to a commercial area without parks and with little architectural interest for us, and decided that Warsaw was almost a waste of time. After returning home I looked online and discovered that we could have seen many more interesting things if we’d bothered to do some research before setting out from the train station.

I think I’d better start reading more guide books before traveling, starting with our upcoming trip to Berlin. We like to say that “knowledge is power,” but when traveling, knowledge is pleasure.

Hotel Minsk

A more restful corner

Dumpsters

2011-06-03T23:25:00.000+03:00

In class today one of my classmates asked our teacher how to say “wastebasket” in Russian. I joked about how he should be recycling, not throwing away, and asked how to say “recycle bin.” The teacher didn’t understand my question, so I explained that I was asking about those big yellow municipal bins for bottles, cans and paper. Oh, she said, we call those “trash containers.”

I followed up, then, and asked what they call the blue containers intended for garbage. Patiently, she explained that those are called trash containers.

“The same word?” I asked. “No wonder there’s always so much garbage in the yellow bins and so many bottles and cans in the blue bins.”

A fruitless discussion ensued. As far as I could tell at the beginning, she was completely unfamiliar with the concept of recycling. My classmate Ramazan pressed the issue and explained what recycling is all about. Oh yes, the teacher said brightly, “We have a word for recycling. It’s…” [They use a phrase which translates to “second use.”]

“So,” I asked, “how would you ask your husband to take a bag of trash to the dumpster and a second bag of cans and bottles to the recycling bin?”

Unfortunately, my question effectively killed the discussion. Apparently it was completely nonsensical, so we moved straight back to our grammar lesson.

Recyclable stuff in the trash bin

Trash in the recycle bin

Shoppiing for shoes

2011-06-01T23:09:00.000+03:00

I’m a lousy shopper. I can be pretty effective ordering things on the Internet, but send me off to shops and I give up way too soon or buy something I wasn’t looking for.

Notwithstanding my shortcomings, I went shopping for shoes today. The weather has gotten hot, and I regret the fact that I left my lightweight athletic shoes at home. I’ve been wearing my Crocks at the gym and my black walking shoes most of the time, but I really wanted something to wear with shorts now that it’s hot out. I also wanted something light to wear at my dance classes, but that wasn’t my priority.

So, I went off to the Mirror Mall. This is not like any American shopping center at all. It houses an innumerable array of tiny-tiny stores, each one typically big enough for a shopkeeper and a couple of customers. Many of the stores on the second floor sell shoes, and I wandered the hallways and visited several featuring casual or athletic shoes. I didn’t visit any other floors, and I don’t even know what’s overhead. Nor did I stay in any store without marked prices because I quickly learned that if the price was not marked, we’d be talking about more than I had in my pocket. I learned further that nobody has much stock and finding an attractive floor sample didn’t guarantee that the store stocked my size.

I did find a very comfortable pair of Ecco water shoes, and the price worked out to about $130. That’s not much different from Amazon’s price, and I was tempted. But since I’d have to find an ATM before I could buy them, I kept walking. Do I really want water shoes?

Next, I came across another store where the shopkeeper played to two of my key weaknesses. First, I have a soft spot for pretty women, and she had me going from the moment I walked into her store. Second, she appealed to my vanity and told me how wonderfully I speak Russian. The upshot of all this is that I came home with a fifty-dollar pair of wing-tip sneakers

that have no arch support at all but they look quite snazzy to me. I think they’ll be fine for dancing, but probably not so great if I want to walk more than a kilometer or two. Now do I have to go back and try to find athletic shoes? I hope not.

This is why I don’t go shopping very often.

Cycling to Priluki

2011-05-29T16:20:00.001+03:00

Sergey and Irina live in a delightful settlement called Priluki. We first met them and their children when we stayed as guests at their bed-and-breakfast, and we’ve never really left. When we go to see them, however, it’s always in motorized transport. This often feels a bit shameful to me, since they live close to Minsk and I find the route captivatingly beautiful once we get outside the city limits.

The first part of the trip, however, holds no appeal to me at all. We typically roll past the train station and alongside the old airport on congested roads with rough pavement and narrow shoulders. I tried really hard last year to find a good bike route in that direction, and actually did find an acceptable course. I poked through the ring road now and again, but never managed to find my way to familiar territory and kept turning back.

The main problem is that they live outside the scope of regular city maps, and the suburban maps I’ve found never show enough detail. Finally this year I spent a lot of time with Google Earth and figured out that I’d broken out at the wrong place, one exit too far north. I stared and stared at Google’s satellite images and decided that I didn’t want to try to reach Priluki from that exit. Instead, I noodled over the problem at odd moments for the next month or two, referring back to Google Earth and buying every available map.

I decided early on that I would like to start toward the necessary ring-road underpass by riding south on the bike path running near our apartment. My problem was figuring how to get across the railroad tracks that run north and south between me and my exit. I finally solved the puzzle yesterday morning. Google has augmented their satellite imagery with sharper aerial photos, and I was able to zoom in low enough to make out a footpath leading to the tracks from a place I knew how to reach by bike path. Eureka!

I tested the route as soon as I found it, and knocked on the Merkulov’s door about 90 minutes after I left home. Sergey was kind enough to drop whatever else he was doing, round up his son, and join me for a bicycle excursion on the dirt roads joining some of the local villages. The bright yellow rape flowers perfumed the air with a fragrance I never noticed from motorized transport, people swam in the ice-cold ponds, and each village demonstrated the serenity of Belarusian country life.

When we got back, Irina invited me in for fresh green soup she had just made from wild herbs she’d harvested nearby and eggs from the family’s chickens. This had to be one of my best bike rides ever in Belarus.

Matvey and Steve

Sergey cools off

(Smart) women and marriage

2011-05-27T23:32:00.000+03:00

I’ve enjoyed a very small group in my Russian class this year, and one result of having a very small group is that we’ve gotten quite comfortable with each other and we have some interesting discussions. There’s one topic on which I’m always the odd man out: women and marriage. My most outspoken classmates are Turkish, and they tend to think alike on this topic. The Korean guy sees things a little differently, but he also favors women who stay at home and don’t assert themselves much. Understandably, perhaps, none of them has ever been married.

This has been going on for five months now. Every time we talk about women and marriage, my classmates indicate a strong preference for women who will be dependent on their men, both financially and intellectually. They can’t imagine a happy relationship with a smart woman, and especially not a woman with leadership responsibilities anywhere in her life. Today I realized that it’s even hard for at least some of these guys to imagine even being friends with such a woman.

I keep trying to tell them about my experience. I have always been surrounded by smart women, beginning at birth. I don’t just like them, I love them. Women often have a different perspective from men, and I couldn’t imagine isolating myself from it. My guys are pretty OK with that part of my argument, but fully convinced that smart and successful women would fail them in other important ways. So I tried to tell them that the smart women I know best even know how to cook well. That concept appeared to get right past my audience, as does the idea that they might be tender, caring and thoughtful at the same time.

It makes me really value the successful women in my life. I feel invigorated whenever I am in the same room with them, and their strength and character inform my every interaction with another human being.

I also respect the young Muslim woman who was careful not to be alone with me when we helped each other with our homework. I understand her caution because I know who she expects to marry. Her strength is very different from the type I know best, but she inspires me too. I hope her target audience is similarly inspired, and I hope we can all learn to value good ideas and good people.

The little palace

2011-05-25T20:56:00.000+03:00

I have a favorite public restroom, which I call the Piss Palace. It’s a scaled-down manor house with a basement and attic in addition to the public space inside. Last year it cost 600 rubles to stop in here, and I was so fond of the place that I’d visit without any particular need. This year, times are financially tough in Belarus and the price went up at the beginning of the year to 800. As of today, it’s a cool thousand. The price to me is actually unchanged, since at the beginning of the year I was getting 3,000 rubles to the dollar and now I’m getting 5,000. Folks getting paid in Belarusian money probably don’t go here so often, however.

To the extent that the locals have money to spend, they’re pretty busy spending it. I don’t know the official rate of inflation, but prices climb continuously and people find it attractive to buy anything they plan to use in the coming months because they imagine the price will be higher later. The deputy prime minister is talking about raising stipends for pensioners, but it’s hard to imagine how that can be done without fueling added inflation. Better to buy now.

Alla and I went down to the biggest downtown mall today to buy linen shirts. Last year I waited to do this until the weather got really warm, and the current production had almost completely sold out. Yesterday we thought we’d started early enough, but apparently the other buyers started even earlier and the fancy linen store had very little to chose from. But then I got the brainy idea to visit a different store with less tourist appeal. Today we found shirts, including a hefty percentage of older stock on which prices had not yet risen. I felt so virtuous about the savings that I stopped at the palace on the way home.

Back to basics

2011-05-22T00:35:00.002+03:00

I wanted to learn whether we ever had a formal “you” and a familiar “you” in old English. We did. “Thee” is for family and other intimates, and “ye” is for everybody else. But the more interesting part of the Wikipedia article explaining it is the fact that the English language has cases too, but I didn’t know what they were called. In Russian they are called Падеж, which I long ago improperly transliterated to padej. I had a really hard time figuring them out, so I am very amused to know that I’d actually seen them in grade school.

Here’s a table cribbed from Wikipedia.

Russian also has the first three of these cases, but I never imagined that we ever did too. I’m still not sure whether this stuff counts because the Russians have so many (MANY) more uses for them. But it takes a little of the wind out of my self-righteous sails to know that we’ve actually been using these things successfully in English for a long time.

Blue jeans (again)

2011-05-18T23:11:00.003+03:00

My dad read my post about blue jeans and decided to do something about it. He is sending me a pair from my home town in California. He had about as much trouble sending the jeans to me as I've ever had with any of my projects on this side of the ocean, so I couldn't resist posting his letter to me. He says:

Your Jeans left the East Sacramento Post Office yeserday afternoon (5/17/11).

The postal clerk was very anxious to be helpful, and I only hope the postal people in Minsk can read your address. The process is first to fill in a 3-page address and info form, which for some reason is not meant to be attached to the package. I then wrote on the sealed and taped package although my writing is not very legible. The clerk then sold me the second largest bubble envelope, and crammed the pants in. (I would have bought the larger one for about 50 cents more if he had not insisted in helping me and saving 50 cents). Then he requested I write your name and address on the package using a ball point pen that punched through the distended envelope. Upon again returning to the counter he gave me a Sharpie pen which was awkward for me, so he took over the job, and I do not think his writing was much better. In desperation I asked him to tape the note I had copied from your e-mail. He did and concluded it would work just fine and sends his greetings. This was a historic moment in East Sacramento since the clerk had never heard of Belarus, and apparently this is the first package sent from Sacramento.

I am sure it will all work out, and for the sake of the people waiting in line behind me, I am sure they do not want me to come back. So, let me know when you receive it. In spite of the writing struggle, I am sure that they can decipher it at your end.

Love,
Dad

Another day, another adventure

2011-05-07T22:20:00.002+03:00

Very little happens automatically around here. On the plus side, this results in a lot of pleasant experiences involving helpful strangers, but on the minus side it results in a lot of work. I have mentioned earlier bureaucratic challenges, but I still can’t resist posting another story because this one is so completely crazy. As this story unfolded, I thought about how I much fun it would be to write up all the details about sending a pair of broken sunglasses to France for factory service. That only made sense until today, when I finally realized that the story is so confounding, so complex, that you wouldn’t want to read the whole thing.

I have a pair of Maui Jim sunglasses, and they broke at the bridge of my nose. This is not the first time this has happened, and I’m an old hand with the Maui Jim warranty service folks in the USA. This time, however, I thought it would be convenient to order service from Belarus. I was wrong.

Getting the glasses out of here proved to be a problem in the first place because the glasses were expensive and I couldn’t insure them for their full value unless I sent them international express mail. We tore up most of the forms I filled out trying to order priority mail and started anew, in triplicate. Triplicate here doesn’t mean a three-part form that you fill out once. It means a one-part form that you fill out three times. Alla helped me, and it “only” took about half an hour.

I should mention at this point that the mail service hadn’t been my first choice. Originally I called DHL and was prepared to compare their price with UPS and FedEx, but the lady at DHL talked me out of it. She said that if I used a private service I’d have to go to the airport two times to escort my package through customs, once on the way out and once on the way back. The postal service had no such requirement, so it still seems like the right choice.

Unfortunately, Maui Jim France had a different idea, and they used a private service called ChronoPost to return my repaired sunglasses. I learned this on Wednesday evening, when the postal service left a note on our door telling me to come to the main post office for my package. When I went to the post office early on Thursday morning they gave me a different piece of paper and told me to take it to the airport so I could escort my package through customs.

We tried really hard to get ChronoPost’s Belarusian partner to escort my package through customs, but it proved to be a waste of time. I e-mailed to them copies of my passport and several other documents including a Limited Power of Attorney and waited for my glasses to arrive yesterday. As 5:00 approached, Alla called the local ChronoPost rep and asked what was up. Either the call failed at that moment or the guy hung up on her. When she called back moments later, he was out of the office.

Skipping ahead a few steps, we decided to go to the airport ourselves this afternoon. As a matter of principal, I didn’t want to take a taxi because Alla was already alarmed at the mounting cost of this repair, and I had a fresh magazine to read on the bus anyway.

The customs office isn’t “at the airport” in the way you might imagine. It’s about a kilometer’s walk around the back. Getting inside involves passports and tickets, and then more tickets to get into the inner sanctum. In the inner sanctum we had to fill out more forms and negotiate with a customs officer who thought we should pay duty on the incoming glasses. Finally he relented and agreed that if the glasses were indeed repaired and not new, then he’d allow them without duty. My heart sank when they opened the box and the glasses looked awfully-damn-new to me. By this time, however, the customs officer had decided to be a good sport and he filled out the paperwork confirming that my glasses had been repaired. This part of the adventure took about an hour, not including the bus trip and the walk around the airport.

The return trip included its own adventure, since the bus didn’t show up. (We ended up sharing a seven-passenger van with a veritable United Nations of passengers.) I didn’t care, however, because I had my glasses.

Vetka Museum of Handicraft

2011-05-07T22:00:00.001+03:00

A couple of years ago we went to an out-of-the-way museum in the town of Vetka. They feature handicrafts of all sorts, and I always regretted that I didn’t buy a photo pass when we went in. Since I had to go to Gomel last week after my visa anyway, we allowed time to continue on to Vetka and see the museum again. I still like it a lot. Even the building includes a lot of beautiful hand-made elements, and it’s a lot easier to photograph than the exhibits behind glass.

Click on the photo to reach our album and get a taste of what we saw.

Blue jeans

2011-05-01T16:11:00.003+03:00

When in December I packed for my return to Belarus, I tried to remember what pants I wore home because whatever they were, I knew I’d want them back. Somehow I decided that the pants in question were some high-tech travel pants which virtually scream, “The person wearing these pants is an American tourist.” In point of fact, I do not like to identify myself that way here, and I have not once put on those pants. The pants I should have brought were an ordinary pair of Levi’s 501 blue jeans.

I did manage to bring myself a second pair of 501 jeans, but both pairs I have here are black. This certainly makes it easy for me to have a pair of clean black jeans at the ready, but I’m getting really tired of them and almost desperate to wear something else. So I went out a couple of weeks ago to do something about it. We have a Levi’s store not far from our apartment, and I walked in there to see if I might be lucky enough to find my size in stock.

Buying jeans in the USA is difficult for me because I am unusually tall for my waist size. Or perhaps I am skinny for my height. Whatever the problem, this means I usually have to look at more than one store to find somebody who has my size in stock. Here in Belarus, where my height is even more unusual than in the USA, I found a choice of about eight pairs in my size, in various color gradations. “Wow!,” I thought, “I’m in luck.” I chose the shade of blue I wanted and asked how much these jeans would cost. The price worked out to about $120.

A hundred twenty bucks? Don’t I usually pay somewhere around forty or fifty bucks for these things back in the USA? I couldn’t do it. Instead, I went home and logged onto Amazon.com and found the same jeans for $40. I figured there was no way that shipping could be anywhere close to the remaining $80 and I set out to order a pair for myself. I was delighted to find Belarus in the drop-down list of countries on Amazon’s shipping-info page, and figured I was home free.

Nope. After I filled in the page, Amazon’s server came back with an error message saying that they couldn’t ship this particular order to my address. I clicked through for more details and learned that manufacturers won’t allow certain items to be shipped to certain countries, and that if I reduced the contents of my shopping cart I might be able to get the order to work. Unfortunately, those jeans were the only contents of my shopping cart and the Levi’s company had obviously felt that Amazon was inappropriate competition for their store in Minsk.

I may have to buy a pair of Belarusian-style jeans. They will probably be highly decorated, and I’ll probably have to spend a day visiting numerous small stores until I find something that fits well and looks the way I’d like to look. Then again, it’ll soon be warm enough to wear linen pants and I can put my jeans aside altogether. Then next time I should make a better packing list.

Easter

2011-04-25T22:15:00.004+03:00

All winter long, Elena and Sasha tried to talk us into coming with them to the ski area called Raubichy. I had seen this place one time from the window of a bus and thought it was merely "interesting." From the bus I saw a big pile of dirt with a ski jump sticking up from the top like the feather on a Tyrolean hat. Belarus has no mountains so the Soviets built this as an Olympic training facility. Since I don't ski jump and have no burning desire to ski down a pile of dirt, our friends never managed to drag me there in spite of their assurances that we could have fun with our cross-country skis.

Finally they made an offer that I understood. They suggested that we go to Raubichy together on a day trip and cook shashleek (sheesh-kebab) outdoors. Everybody here seems to do things like this, speaking often about eating "in nature," but we'd never been on such an expedition. This time we found the idea instantly appealing. So, on Saturday morning we piled into Elena’s car and drove out. I’d forgotten how close this facility is to Minsk and we arrived in a few minutes, or at least so it felt.

Once again the huge ski jump dominated the landscape, but it turns out that the facility includes much more than I imagined. Indeed, we saw the cross-country ski trail running into the woods and up and down hills. The snow has long since melted away, and now the underlying asphalt ribbon presents a very attractive roller-ski opportunity for those who know how to stop on that apparatus when going downhill. (Do those things have brakes?) I’m eager to return with my regular skis next winter, when any falls will take place on snow.

We didn’t come for the trail, however. We carried our stuff to a little hut at the side of the cross-country ski trail and set up camp. Much to our delight, Sasha is a veritable wizard in the preparation of shashleek. After he built a fire, we all went for a walk. But while Elena, Alla and I were admiring the flowers, Sasha went back to tend his fire. Later, we set out finger food (while Sasha tended the fire) and ate it while the meat cooked over Sasha’s perfect coals. Sasha, our devoted chef, kept wandering back to turn the meat. Ah, what a treat he produced! The meat came out perfectly, tender, juicy and delicious.

After eating way more meat than I imagined possible, we walked around a bit more and played Frisbee before returning home to play more cerebral games.

By tradition we should have been fasting that day, but by breaking tradition we enjoyed a wonderful day in nature without a lot of competition. And we were so inspired by Saturday’s success that we did go out to eat lunch in nature once again after church on Sunday, but this time we went to a big city park and brought food that we didn’t need to cook. We enjoyed that day a great deal as well, and hope to eat outdoors regularly in the coming weeks.

Ersatz peanut butter

2011-04-21T09:35:00.003+03:00

I’m afraid my Belarusian readers are scratching their heads over the title of this post. Ersatz means “artificial” or “substitute,” and we understand that it’s not likely to be as good as the original.

I had some real peanut butter here earlier on this trip. First I managed to buy some Polish peanut butter at the central supermarket, and then I received a jar from Europe as a gift from our friend Elena. When that ran out, I started looking to buy more, but never managed to find anything besides some weird-looking white stuff from China. I didn’t buy the Chinese peanut butter, and as a result I have not had peanut butter of any kind for a couple of months.

Feeling severely starved for a favorite food, I tried to make some of my own. I bought a bag of peanuts and ran some of them our meat grinder several times. The first time was the hardest. The whole peanuts were too hard for the not-so-sharp teeth on our old Soviet meat grinder and I had to keep reversing and pushing forward just a fraction of a turn with each effort. The output resembled fine sand.

I ran my sandy peanut crumbs back through the meat grinder numerous times. Each time it got marginally finer, but the level of improvement with each pass got pretty hard to detect. I finally became bored and ran out of time when I had a cupful of slightly-sticky peanut dust. If I had a food processor, I could have converted this dust to peanut butter in moments, but I gave up and stirred in a tablespoon of honey to hold the crumbs together.

Honestly, the Chinese peanut butter probably would have been better. And cleaning up the meat grinder proved to be a bigger nuisance than I expected. I think I’ll regard this as a learning experience that I don’t need to repeat.

Flash trip to Gomel

2011-04-18T20:36:00.004+03:00

On Friday Alla and I went down to the police station where we are registered in order to renew my visa. I got the original in the town of Gomel, but figured I had a pretty good shot at renewing in Minsk after all the bureaucratic hoops I jumped through to get registered there. Ha! All my original files are in Gomel and they aren't fully computerized. Truthfully, I don't really know if they are computerized at all, but I assume so because the level of technical education here its quite high.

Anyway, we took an evening train to Gomel yesterday so I could file my application first thing this morning. We really lucked out on the train. The one we chose included a couple of brand-new cars, and we paid the extra seventy-five cents apiece to ride in one. Ooh... It was great. The seats are a few centimeters wider than usual, and they would be really comfortable for me to sleep on. Alla couldn't stop photographing our super-spacious compartment, but she couldn't really capture its grandeur with her phone's camera. Anyway, we'll look for these cars a we schedule future trips. Here's a picture of Alla in the new train car.

You'll have to click through if you want to see her wearing bananas on her head.

As for this trip, it's not really clear that it was strictly necessary. We had to write a letter to the head guy, which he dictated to us, and pay a fee at the bank. If the banks are interconnected it seems like I should have been able to mail the letter and pay at the bank's main office in Minsk. I'll pursue this idea in a couple of years, next time I'm up for a simple renewal. Meanwhile, I have to go back in a week or two to receive the visa in my passport, something I absolutely must do in person. We asked whether I could leave them with a release allowing Alla to pick it up, but they have strict anti-slavery policies and never under any circumstance return a passport to anybody other than the passport holder. I understand, but it's a nuisance.

Anyway, I had a chance to help Alla clean and decorate her parents' graves and do a couple of household chores. Next time I think we'll take a side-trip to the handicraft museum in the nearby town of Vetka. This time I'll buy a photography permit because it's a spectacular museum. I'll let you know when we go there.

Октябрская Metro Station

2011-04-13T22:46:00.004+03:00

Today I went down to the main entrance to the subway station that got bombed on Monday. It still smells like fire, and nobody is allowed to go downstairs yet. But near the doors, both inside and outside the vestibule, people have laid thousands of flowers and hundreds of candles. I could have shed a few tears, but I'm a tough guy so I held them back. Nevertheless, my heart aches not just for the lives lost, but for the lives affected in so many unkind ways.

The perpetrators have been caught, and they deny any political motivation. According to The Moscow Times, it was simply the work of psychopaths. Not everybody accepts this explanation, of course, but I am inclined to go along with it. It reminds me of recent American tragedies like Columbine High School and the Beltway snipers, the work of disturbed individuals with no particular goal.

I hope that the people of Belarus are able to close the book on this in some way and find the strength and compassion to begin rebuilding lives and community together. It would be an even greater tragedy if a couple of lunatics form a basis for damaging the fabric of a society that tends to use the word "our" with real pride.

This is nuts!

2011-04-11T20:35:00.002+03:00

I wanted to write a humorous post today entitled “Training a swarm of bees,” but nothing seems very funny at this moment. While I was in a rehearsal with a bunch of students preparing a program for the University, there was a tragic explosion in the main Metro station, where our two subway lines intersect. The explosion happened at rush hour: several people lost their lives and many more were injured, some very seriously. I haven’t seen any news about what caused the blast, but the timing and location makes me guess that this was not a simple accident.

As far as I know right now none of our friends was hurt, but my heart goes out to all the people affected by this tragedy.

As for the swarm of bees, I may write about it later. It appears that all the male students from a certain country (not Belarus) suffer from some sort of Attention Deficit Disorder. With a nod to Garry Trudeau, let’s call the country Berzerkistan, because at least in this case it seems to fit. I will just note that it’s really hard to teach a dance number to a bunch of guys who can’t stand in a line and pay attention to instructions that involve counting from one to eight while moving one’s feet in rhythm.

The way the heat works around here

2011-04-08T17:28:00.001+03:00

Most, if not all, buildings are heated from central plants that send steam to large numbers of residents. I suppose we're getting waste heat from power plants, but I'm not really sure. I just know that our radiators get hotter when the outdoor temperatures drop, and the system usually works pretty well.

Unfortunately, Alla had a hot flash yesterday and called ЖЕС (the people in control of the heat) to complain that they were wasting energy and she was too hot. Now today everybody in our district is probably wearing hats and two sweaters at home because of this. Somebody please call and tell ЖЕС that we're all freezing!

You want WHAT?

2011-04-05T16:55:00.001+03:00

Everybody’s been talking during the past few weeks about a potential devaluation of the Belarus ruble. Acting on their concerns, many people have been trying to convert assets to dollars or euros, and we had a little trouble getting the dollars we needed at the end of March to pay our rent. This just means that we had to visit a few banks until we found somebody able to process our international transfer, but we spent more time walking around than waiting in line.

It was a little harder to get the euros we needed for our recent trip to the E.U., but that’s only because we started looking on the day we needed the money. There certainly weren’t long lines anywhere.

This recent experience contrasts sharply with a story I read in the Western press this morning about people in Belarus waiting in line all day to exchange their rubles for dollars. I scratched my head as I read the story and wondered where in the heck these long lines might be. By the end of the article I realized that the reporter had built this impression on the fact that he or she had found one woman who claimed to have waited ten hours to get some euros. Sure. Now I believe it. If she came to a bank that didn’t have any euros in inventory, perhaps she chose to stay there and wait for somebody to do a euro-denominated transaction leaving the bank with some euros. I suspect she could have walked around and asked at some other banks, but maybe it was payday or maybe that particular woman didn’t have much imagination.

I, on the other hand, wanted to go in a different direction. We came back from Poland with a few leftover zlotys, and I wanted to convert them to Belarus rubles. I walked into the nearest bank and discovered, for the first time in my life, a line of more than two people. That is to say, there may have been five or six people ahead of me, and two tellers to take care of us. I don’t know what most people were doing, but I did overhear one guy who wanted to convert some rubles to dollars. The bank was out of dollars but offered him euros, which he accepted. In this context, the teller was surprised when I asked her to convert my zlotys to rubles. “You actually want rubles?” she asked.

Yep. That’s what we use here, and they’re really easy to get.

Finding Francisco Skorina

2011-04-02T23:37:00.003+03:00

In Belarus everybody knows the name “Francisco Skorina” the way everybody in America knows the name “Benjamin Franklin.” Like Franklin, Skorina was a self-published writer. I always thought he was the first to publish a book in the Belarusian language, but according to the sign near the statue he was the first publisher of any printed book in any Slavic language. I learned about him in the course of numerous lessons at the Minsk State Linguistic University, and I have several pictures of myself and my friends at the Skorina statue near the National Library of Belarus. He has become one of my heroes.

Having learned that there was a statue in his honor somewhere in Prague, I set out to find it. First I did a Google search in English, which resulted in a lot of useless hits. So I tried the same search in Russian, with the same result. Somehow during this process I discovered how to spell his name in Czech, which allowed me to find a photo of the statue on the Czech Wikimedia Commons page. Soon I knew where to look for the statue and we began planning our trip to a somewhat obscure park.

We really enjoyed our trip to this park. We took a long and beautiful walk not far from yesterday’s route but completely different in feeling and details. Mozart remarked that he could walk home from symphony hall in Prague by the same route every day and still discover something new each time. I understand why he felt that way.

We got lucky and entered the park right below the statue. We celebrated like any explorers might, with whoops, hollers and photographs. Not only did we enjoy a great walk, but we even felt a little surge of nationalistic pride as we admired the statue and read the nearby plaque.

Nothing else about the day proved to be quite so exciting or quite so challenging, but I think we were in the right place. Today’s temperatures in Minsk ranged from 5 to 10 degrees C. In Prague, however, temperatures ranged from 10 to 20. I think this means that Prague was twice as good as Minsk today. That’s pretty exciting in and of itself.

A full day in Prague

2011-04-02T00:37:00.007+03:00

We set out this morning for an efficient day of sightseeing, but some of our favorite things weren't on the original plan. We started out by walking to the “Eiffel” tower, a metal contraption on the hill above our hotel. I didn’t fully appreciate how large and how steep the hill would be, but we really enjoyed the walk. There are various paths criss-crossing each other all the way up the mountain, but as long as we kept going uphill we couldn’t get lost. The morning sun warmed us, and near the top we found several sheltered areas filled with early spring bulbs. We felt very fortunate to be there, especially since today’s weather forecast indicated snow in Minsk.

After exploring and playing at the top of the hill, we went across a valley and up another hill so Alla could see the inside of Saint Vitus’ cathedral. We walked through a meadow, traipsed down a lonely cobblestone road with walls on either side, took a false start across a monastery yard, and finally found our way up a spectacularly quaint little street leading up from the German embassy

After enjoying the inside of the church, we scurried back down the hill for lunch and on to the old Jewish district. Following our highbrow entertainment we moved ahead to shopping, the Museum of Chocolate and finally toward dinner. As we crossed the Charles Bridge we discovered a huge snarl of people carrying a wide variety of musical instruments, including drums, violins, bagpipe, various wind instruments, tubas and even an electric keyboard hung on a cord around the musician’s neck. We had found some sort of anarchic parade, with various groups of people playing together or taking turns, or competing with one another. The participants wore colorful clothes and reminded me a whole lot of the hippies I used to hang out with in college. Even though the music was really lousy, I loved the parade and we followed it all the way down to the island at the foot of the bridge, where we found them still playing as we walked home from dinner.

I read that Prague has historically tolerated nonconformity. Apparently it’s still true, and I love this city for that.

Prague

2011-03-31T01:11:00.007+03:00

Two nights ago we stopped in Poland, in a spa town called Kudowa-Zdrój. Our tourist-class hotel, the Sans Souci, proved to be a very pleasant two-star place with cute small rooms in a classic building and pleasant environment. Now we are staying at a less-impressive place in Prague, with bigger rooms but little else to recommend it. It's clean and efficient, but has no soul.

Notwithstanding the hotel, we’ve both fallen in love with Prague. I can’t describe it as well as any number of professional travel writers, but I would like to comment on the pleasures of seeing Prague with grade-school students. I’m pretty sure these students are special, but they’re amazingly good travel companions. They arrive on schedule, clean up their messes, complain very little, appreciate the beautiful things they see, carry on conversations with adults, and generally amaze me. That’s not to say that the trip has been completely free of problems, but the only problems we’ve had would be typical of almost any large bus trip. I’m particularly glad to be traveling with a group that shows up on time, because that mitigates a whole lot of other problems.

Yesterday we took a guided walking tour of the city. The guide wore a microphone and transmitter, and the rest of us wore headsets connected to little radio receivers. We also wore yellow neckerchiefs. The combination made the walking tour really easy. We could wander about and take pictures while the guide talked, and we still heard the guide. And if we wandered a bit too far, we just had to look for a few yellow neckerchiefs in order to rejoin the nucleus of our group. I’m not sure how easy it would be to get a bunch of adults to wear anything matching, but it really simplifies a large guided tour. [Maybe our daughter should propose bright feather boas for her charges on Harvard Art Museum trips. Just a thought.]

The school group heads towards Minsk tomorrow, and Alla and I will be on our own until we get onto the train in three days. We’re looking forward to going inside some of the museums and perhaps hearing an opera or concert. We really don’t have enough time, so we’re already talking about a next trip. Prague is a really great city.

More information about “tourist class”

2011-03-29T11:29:00.000+03:00

As I write this entry, we have not yet reached our tourist class hotel, though we have been seventeen hours on our bus trip. At one time they told us we’d reach our hotel in time for dinner at eight o’clock, which was a couple of hours ago. Now they keep telling us it’s three and a half hours more. Well, maybe they finally decided that it’s less than three and a half. It can’t stay three-and-a-half forever unless we’re going in circles and I don’t think I’ve seen anything twice yet.

For me it’s been fairly painless. The kids we’re traveling with are really nice and as far as I can tell Alla is the only one complaining. She still hasn’t mastered the subtle art of making the best of bad travel situations.

In my efforts to make the best of our present situation I apparently annoyed a few people just a little bit. It turns out that some folks wanted to sleep, and I was leading a little cluster of kids in song. I never fancied myself the underminer of sixth-grade decorum, and I was a real goody-two-shoes as a school kid. One of the advantages of growing up is one gets a better idea of what one can get away with, so I got away with my music and singing as long as I could. Now I am sitting quietly with my computer playing my goody-two-shoes role once again.

Anyway, this trip does nothing to change my general rule of thumb that bus travel should be my last choice. I’m glad I’m here, but I do look forward to the pleasures of the train ride we will take back home.

[Late breaking news: we arrived at the hotel three hours after I wrote the above post, 20 hours after we left Minsk. We are guessing that our driver took a wrong turn somewhere, but nobody is talking about it. That's life in tourist class!]

What is "tourist class?"

2011-03-27T22:06:00.000+03:00

Tomorrow we are leaving for a week-long adventure with a grade-school group. Our friend Elena teaches 5th and 6th grade English, and she invited us along for their spring-break trip to Prague. We accepted right away, against the recommendations of all other friends who have ever been on a school trip. We figured Prague sounds like fun, and not only do we like Elena and her husband, but we also like as many of her students as we have met so far. How bad can it be?

To insure our sanity, we opted not to return with the class group on their 36-hour marathon return bus trip. OK, maybe it’s not 36 hours, but it’s enough more than 24 that I know I’m not interested. We’ll stay for a couple of extra days at a hotel of our choosing and come home on a first-class train. I’ve never been in a first-class sleeping car, so I’m excited about that.

I’m a little less excited about the hotels we’ll enjoy for the next three nights. They are “tourist class,” and I don’t actually know what that means. I’m sure it’s significantly different from first class, and I’m afraid it’s different from second class as well. How many classes are there? Elena offered to help us upgrade our hotel accommodations, but we figured we’d prefer to be with the group while we’re traveling with them. Relieved to know that we’ll have attached bathrooms, I didn’t think any further about what it might be like.

Now I have another clue. Elena called today to advise us to bring our own soap because we shouldn’t expect soap in our rooms. I can’t even remember the last time I stayed in a hotel that didn’t offer some kind of free soap. It’s going to be interesting, and I’ll be sure to post pictures whenever next I have internet access.

Issues of control

2011-03-26T10:45:00.000+02:00

My classmate Ramazan and I like to talk. In fact, we used to annoy each other sometimes because I felt like he was monopolizing or controlling the classroom and he felt the same way about me. Fortunately, we both figured this out about each other and tempered our styles for the benefit of our class group. Our regular teacher does not have a controlling style, so we students had to work together and learn how to control ourselves. Life was good.

More recently, we added a new classmate who did not benefit from the experiences Ramazan and I shared together. As a result, it turned out that he dominated the class experience. When he wasn’t pressing his own agenda on the teacher, he was updating his Facebook page or engaging in conversation with other members of the class. In other words, his influence broke the sense of group effort that we had built and enjoyed up until that moment.

Ramazan got frustrated and announced that he wanted to move to another group. I agreed with him, and began trying to imagine how that might work and what I should ask for.

At this time, our much-beloved teacher got sent away on a business trip. The replacement teacher arrived with a much different educational style. She is fiercely protective of her lesson plan and determinedly egalitarian in how long each student is allowed to talk. We are flying through the material and learning effectively. More impressively, the new guy appears to be adapting really well. Yesterday he arrived on time, with books, and beginning Monday he promises to do his homework.

I don’t know how long this can keep up, and whether the momentum will continue after our regular teacher comes back from her business trip, but so far I am really impressed.

Another beauty pageant

2011-03-20T21:31:00.003+02:00

We received an invitation to the city-wide beauty pageant following the recent pageant at my university. This came as a special pleasure because we had gotten to know one of the contestants. A beautiful, kind and outgoing Venezuelan girl named Silangel came in second at the Minsk State Linguistic University and joined me on the team representing our university to the Minister of Education. I like Silangel’s competitive spirit: When I congratulated her on her success, she griped about coming in second. I don’t think most of us would have griped about that, but I have some relatives who would and I understand that this sort of attitude is common among highly successful people.

At the city pageant, the first event was a test of cleverness. There’s a type of improvisational theater called KVN that’s popular in the Russian-speaking world, and the KVN player leading this segment nearly choked on her name. He decided that he’d like to do a sketch with her in which she was a teacher of Russian as a second language and explaining to him some new word or concept. My head spun as I imagined what I’d do in her place. She decided more quickly, choosing a very simple approach: She made him pronounce the word “thermometer,” which is more or less a cognate in Russian, Spanish and English. Because she carried it out with grace and authority, it worked out just fine.

We enjoyed seeing all the beautiful contestants and their talent presentations, but missed the fill-in acts that had been part of the earlier pageant at the university. Nightclub “Next” sponsored this show, and while they offered a very flashy environment they did not round up the sort of continuous stream of talent we enjoyed the first time. In fact, I got bored and hungry while waiting for the judges to make their decisions, and we decided to slip out. Our escape was aborted, however, by a radio reporter who came to interview me. He asked me lots of questions, some of which I answered satisfactorily. If I had known there would be a quiz, I suppose I would have paid more attention to the show. Anyway, he promised that I’d be on the radio tomorrow evening and I guess we’ll try to find Minskaya Volna at 7:00 tomorrow.

By the time I had finished my radio interview, the judges were returning so we returned as well. Celanngel ranked among the winners, and she will defend her title at another contest next week. We are grateful that we’ve been invited, but doubt that we will go since it comes just before we will leave for Prague. That, of course, will be a whole other story.

Performing for the minister of education

2011-03-16T15:34:00.004+02:00

Now I know what yesterday’s rehearsals were all about. A college expo opened today, with much fanfare. All or most of the Belarusian institutions of higher education set up booths

and exhibits at BelExpo, and I was part of the team representing the Minsk State Linguistic University.

The expo center boiled with activity as teams from various universities poured in. Cadets from a military college marched down the main aisle with their swords unsheathed, kids from the railroad school milled about in their super-cute uniforms, a dance crew strutted in wearing sequin-lame jumpsuits, and lots of people swarmed about wearing traditional Belarusian outfits. I was a member of this latter group, since traditional American clothes aren’t terribly interesting.

Presently, the minister of education came in like a kindly general inspecting his troops. He took his time with us, taking special note of the fact that even Americans come to MSLU. He also kidded me at the end of the presentation, for the fact that I had crib notes in my hand because I hadn’t memorized the song we sang to him. Finally, we presented him still-warm piroshky made in the University’s kitchen. He broke one open with great ceremony, showed everybody the abundant filling, and ate it with obvious pleasure.

We also ate piroshky with pleasure, as soon as he left. Our team had ordered a hundred of these little darlings, in three flavors. I was happy to try all three flavors, and agree with the general consensus that the mushroom variety was the best. Alla was disappointed that I didn’t have a bag with me so I could sneak one home to her, but with any luck I will figure out how to order a batch of these things from the stolovaya. They’d make great party food if I can get them.

Mission creep

2011-03-15T23:21:00.003+02:00

I got a call yesterday from “Katya.” She didn’t say which Katya, but it turns out that I guessed correctly. She wanted me to show up this morning to help out with a little project at the university, calling for an international cluster of students who worked on a project together last year to make a short presentation at 11 a.m. tomorrow.

At this morning’s meeting we got our assignments. I was to play the part of a student from England. I was not allowed to play the part of an American because they couldn’t find any American flags anywhere in Minsk. We would have a rehearsal after our morning classes.

At the rehearsal I learned that the new gathering time would be 9:45 tomorrow morning, which meant that I wouldn’t get to any part of my classes. Fine. I came home and memorized my line, with pronunciation help and guidance from Alla. I also downloaded a picture of an American flag and got it printed two-sided on photo paper so I could regain my nationality.

Next thing I knew, the gathering time would be 8:30 a.m. and we will take a bus to I-don’t-know-where, and the line I learned has been completely revised. The new line included a word in Belarusian which even Alla didn’t know how to pronounce. I’ll at least take sufficient control to substitute the Russian version of the word. Now not only will I miss my entire class, I’ll miss my early-morning workout at the gym.

What do you think will be next? Will they let me go home for lunch? Dinner?

Note from the next day
I am unwilling to change the above text, but I'm sorry I let my petty frustration show through. The event turned out to be a whole lot of fun, and I am really glad I was invited to participate.