Still finding confetti

Today is Friday. I came home with confetti in my hair on Sunday evening and I’ve cleaned up bits of the stuff every day since then. I thought yesterday might be the last day, but I’ve already found four more pieces today and the day’s not half over. I wasn’t planning to bring home any confetti in the first place.

It all started out innocently enough. My friend Zarina called to ask if I’d take her to some sort of a concert. She was vague about what kind of a concert, but she can’t see well enough to go places on her own and I didn’t have enough advance notice to round up somebody else to escort her. I’m still trying to establish a formal network of guides to help the local visually-challenged community, but that’s a different story. In today’s story, there is no such network and the one friend I could ask such a favor on a moment’s notice already had other plans.

Actually, Alla and I had other plans too, so I asked for her advice. She agreed that I really couldn’t say no and we adjusted our plans. Zarina was overjoyed when I called back to say yes, and then she asked me if she could bring along her boyfriend too. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?” And then I thought why not: Why the heck couldn’t the boyfriend just take her to the concert and leave me to my plans at home?

I tried to be delicate. I thanked Zarina for the invitation to a concert. I wished I had better command of the Russian language to tell her just how touched I was that she wanted to include me, but if her boyfriend was going couldn’t he just lead her there himself? No, it turns out that he can’t see well enough to do that so they really needed a guide for two people.

So we formed a train. I led Zarina, who led Zhenya. Zhenya could tell when we approached staircases and whatnot, so he was safe at the end of the train and even helpful. (I kept forgetting that the English word “step” maps to two different Russian words, one about what we do with our feet and the other about the elements of a staircase.)

The concert was at a rock club. It was mostly a recital from an institution called Discovery Rock School, but it included a performance by Zarina’s favorite group, Litesound. When Litesound came onto the stage, we started to smell smoke. I looked back from our first-row position and saw a LOT of Roman candles burning behind us. I looked for fire exits, and decided we only had two ways out. We could go through a huge crowd of Litesound fans to the main entrance far behind us, or we could go out to the back garden. I wasn’t sure I could even get to that garden door by myself in event of an emergency, and shuddered at the idea of guiding Zarina and Zhenya in the midst of a panic.

I looked at the ceiling and didn’t see anything that appeared to be catching fire or even loose enough to catch fire quickly. At that moment, the Roman candles started blasting out what I thought at first were sparks. Stuff came showering down onto us. I looked at our clothes to see if I could brush off anything before it burned big holes, and discovered that the stuff raining down on us was little bits of colorful Mylar. The Roman candles burned out and nobody went up in flames.

I enjoyed the concert a lot. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy rock music. Finally we decided to go home. After getting Zarina and Zhenya onto their bus, I walked home and went straight to bed. Alla didn’t even wake up.

In the morning, I saw all the sparkly stuff in the bed and elsewhere, so I went into the bathroom and brushed my hair over the toilet. Then I took a shower and vacuumed my path from the front door to the bed. While I vacuumed, Alla walked into the bathroom and saw all that sparkly stuff in the toilet. She likes to worry, so she imagined I’d eaten something disastrous and it had a really strange effect on my digestive system.

That was Monday morning. Every day since then, as I said, I’ve found more sparkly stuff. One day I’ll find the last piece, but I wonder if Zarina will EVER get rid of all of her confetti. It could be a long-lasting souvenir that she doesn’t even know she has.

Turkey

I am sitting in a little neighborhood café in Istanbul, listening to three guys play Turkish music. It’s the right way to finish off an excellent Turkish day.

We spent most of the day on Turkish Airlines flight 82 from Boston. Although it was already daytime here when we left Boston, it was nighttime for us and we slept much of the trip, at least when we weren’t eating. The guy next to me squirmed around a lot, but I still slept pretty well. Alla apparently did not sleep as much, worrying about the airplane, the weather and the flight. If there was any excitement, I missed it. I liked the legroom and the food and didn’t care much that the in-flight entertainment system wasn’t completely working.

I wanted to take a long walk across the bridge to the Asian part of Istanbul and buy baklava from a famous confectionary. Alla had a closer baklava place in mind, so we walked there first, through wind-driven sleet. By the time we reached her chosen place we had gotten cold and wet enough that I didn’t press to extend our walk to the other side of the bridge. Anyway, we’ll pass through again on our way back to Boston in April.

After we bought baklava to bring to Minsk, we discovered another confectionary we had not noticed last time, so we stopped in to sample some of their treats and buy some Turkish delights to bring home. Alla didn’t think she could eat dinner after all that, but since we’d come downtown more or less specifically to eat at Amedros we went over to pick out a couple of light dishes. Mmm, am I glad! We already knew the menu pretty well from our visit two years ago, and we ordered brilliantly. Or maybe they cooked brilliantly. In any event, we had a great time and a great meal. Ibrahim, our server, took really good care of us too.

When we walked home after dinner we had to go slowly because by now it’s snowing and the soles of Alla’s shoes are pretty slippery. In any event, as we approached our hotel we noticed these three guys playing in front of a little fish house. While Alla wanted nothing more than to stay in our cozy room, I came across the street to hear the music. They’re pretty much playing only for me, though the maître d’ keeps running out to invite people in as they pass by.

We’re happy to see Istanbul in winter. Even at night it’s beautiful. And even more than in summer, we find Turks to be warm and hospitable. We’re very glad that Turkish Airlines lured us to stop on our way back to Minsk.

Persistent calls from India

I’ve been getting a lot of unsolicited phone calls lately, usually to the phone number belonging to my former company. The business has been closed for long enough that I feel free to mess with whomever calls on that number. My favorite opening, after I hear the telltale click of an automatic dialer plugging me into a call center, is to ask before they say anything, “Are you calling about the virus on my computer?”

Since most of the people calling me do, in fact, want to put viruses onto my computer, they usually know they’ve been had and they hang up right away. But today I got a couple of extremely persistent guys. The first one assured me immediately that he wasn’t calling about a virus.

“OK. What would you like to sell me?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, “I don’t want to sell you anything.”

I interrupted, “So how can you make money if you don’t have anything to sell?”

He replied that he wanted to give me something for free, so I asked how his bosses could possibly pay him if he didn’t have something to sell.

He replied that he wanted me to have solar power and that it wouldn’t cost me anything.

I interrupted again, “OK, you’re not selling anything but you want to sell me free solar power.”

He kept trying to explain his “free” product to me and I kept interrupting with stupid questions and jumping to absurd conclusions. The guy wouldn’t give up. Finally I asked, “Don’t you understand that I’m messing with you? Most people would have hung up by now.” Unimpressed, he pressed on with his sales pitch. I finally thanked him very much and told him I’d have to be the one to hang up.

The other persistent caller really did want to try the “virus on your computer” scam. Undeterred by my sarcastic opening, he assured me that he was calling from Windows Technical Support and that they’d noticed on their servers vast amounts of traffic indicative of a highly-sophisticated morphological virus. Clearly reading from a script he didn’t know very well, he had a hard time spitting out those fancy words.

Ignoring the fact that what he said made no technological sense, I said, “If you’re going to sell me a virus, you’re going to have to practice your script. That didn’t go smoothly at all.”

“Oh no,” he rejoined, “I never said anything about a virus…”

I interrupted, reminding him what he’d just said about that highly-sophisticated morphological virus.

He pressed on, gushing over the urgency of solving this problem. “I know you have a high-quality antivirus program on your computer. This problem can’t be detected by antivirus software. We need to solve it right away.”

“OK,” I said. “Tell me your phone number and I’ll call you back.”

“You don’t have time to call me back,” he urged, “you need to log onto our website right away.”

We circled around those points a couple of times. I said I wouldn’t do anything unless he gave me his phone number so I could call him back and then we’d talk further. I figured that if he gave me a real phone number I could complain to the authorities, but he wasn’t that stupid. He made up a phone number starting with 800 but ending with too many digits. It was painful to hear him making up the sequence, struggling over each digit and then going too far. I told him that couldn’t be a real phone number so he repeated the same number, though smoothly this time.

Next I asked for his name. I couldn’t call him back without knowing his name. He said his name was William, but he couldn’t really pronounce it. Then he elaborated, “William Vincent.” Great. Now he’s a family member. I actually did try dialing the first seven digits of the number he gave me. Sadly, it didn’t get me to William so our little game is over.

I may not bother answering the phone at all tomorrow. Apparently that guy I messed with a few weeks ago really meant it when he said that he definitely would NOT add me to his do-not-call list.

A day in the land of the Maya

We started the day with a visit to the Montejo mansion. Two successive governors Montejo founded the city of Mérida, which until then had been a Mayan city. At the end of our visit, we stepped into a classroom with a huge mural on the wall, showing the Montejo mansion in the midst of a Mayan landscape. Indigenous workmen chipped away the ornamentation from stones that Montejo had removed from Mayan temples. My heart went out to the workers in the mural, destroying important cultural artifacts on behalf of their oppressors, and I said something about it to Alla.

An employee of the mansion overheard my comment and “corrected” my impression. He claimed that the Maya had already abandoned the city when the Spaniards arrived, amplifying and decorating his story with numerous fabrications about the Maya. I looked at his Spanish face and let the matter drop after questioning his claim that Montejo had taken over an empty city. He seemed sure of his facts.

We stopped next at City Hall, where we spent a lot of time studying various murals and paintings depicting the history of the Yucatan Peninsula. Most of them included texts explaining the historical events shown, including the 20-year war between the invading Spaniards and the locals who didn’t want to give up their land. The Spaniards had better weapons and ultimately prevailed, though Mayan culture never disappeared and by now dominates the area.

By this time we’d gotten hungry and I asked a volunteer guide where to eat lunch. She wanted us to go to Chaya Maya, a restaurant where we’d had a disappointing lunch yesterday. Her face fell when I told her we didn’t like it. She said that it’s the best Yucatan food in the city and that the locals eat there. She really wanted us to try again. Her earnestness won us over, so we decided to go. This time we went to the restaurant’s original location, and I couldn’t immediately even find any non-Mayan customers in the room. We asked if we could have an English-speaking waiter and described what we wished we’d ordered yesterday. He helped us get a huge and delicious meal accompanied by a stream of fresh handmade tortillas.

We loved our meal. About the time we started talking about how we may have more than we could eat, Alla looked up and saw a man staring in the window with deep pathos. That is to say, he looked very hungry. Alla made him a taco from our serving plate and a waitress brought over a take-out box for it. The guy took his food nearby and ate it with such enthusiasm that we stopped eating altogether. Alla scraped up all the food we had left, begged a couple more hot tortillas from the lady making them, and added them to the man’s take-out plate. The look on his face confirmed that the food was more important to him than to us.

After lunch we visited the Anthropological Museum, which had an excellent contemporary pottery exhibit on the first floor and a Mayan architectural exhibit upstairs. We had a great time on both floors.

Apparently we walked around enough, because on the way back to our inn I noticed that my shoe was falling apart. I wanted to buy some glue, and looked at the shops and businesses we passed. Ultimately we reached a little building-supply store where the owner offered to sell me a Coke-bottle full of glue from a gallon can. While I didn’t object to the price, I didn’t want to waste an entire bottle of glue. Finally he agreed to put a smaller amount onto a piece of cardboard since I intended to use it immediately. I stood on a plastic bag while the glue set, and Alla went out to make change so we could pay our five-peso debt. My shoe is a little better, but not by much. The patch won’t hold for long, but we’re flying back to Boston tomorrow.

We’re glad we came to Merida, with its colonial architecture, great museums and festive streets. I think next time we’ll spend another weekend in the city and then move on to the heart of the archaeological zone nearby. We have a lot to see and a lot to learn.

Discovering Mérida

Various friends recommended that we visit Mérida, so we finally went. It may be the oldest continuously-occupied city in the Americas and it once housed more millionaires than any other city in the world. Today we saw lots of mansions and evidence of that former wealth, but on first glance the city looked pretty worn out. In fact, Alla decided last night that she liked our bed-and-breakfast much better than she liked the city and she resolved to hole up at home for our few days in town. I practically had to drag her a few blocks to the square where our landlord told us we’d find food vendors and music.

Alla complained of narrow sidewalks, empty streets and a general feeling of dread all the way to the square. Her concern increased when we got there before the vendors had finished setting up because things even there looked pretty desolate. Alla wanted to flee, figuring she could live on the avocados she had left from Cancun. I held out for something better to eat. As Alla reached the limit of her patience, a woman started setting out interesting-looking ingredients for tacos and Alla noticed.

I helped the woman string up her lights and she gave me my first taco free. We ended up eating many different kinds of tacos, and we liked every one of them. By the time we finished eating, we noticed musicians setting up on a stage. We stayed for the music, and finally went home with hopes for today.

After breakfast we set out to walk the main streets that had been blocked off for bicycles and pedestrians. We saw lots of mansions, plenty of people on foot and on bikes, and lots of interesting artists and vendors of interesting and delicious things. After our walk, we went to another park for more live music and more tacos. I met several American ex-patriots buying tacos from a vendor who speaks good English. My Spanish is coming back, but I was happy to talk with the taco lady in Englsih. Anyway, we really liked the music at this square and stayed a long time. I even got Alla to dance with me.

By now Alla’s impression of Mérida had improved dramatically and by the end of the day we even started talking about coming back next year. Especially after we discovered a beautiful theater with a free dance performance. We’ll go back for another free performance tomorrow evening. I hope it’s as good as tonight’s, which we both liked a whole lot. Actually, I think we both like Mérida a lot.

¿Quién es más macho?

We’re in Cancún, on our annual winter break. We keep coming back to the same resort, which plays a lot of the same games year-to-year at the welcome party. I usually manage to volunteer for one thing or another because I enjoy getting up on the stage and acting silly in front of a lot of people. This year I got picked for a game that involves drinking tequila and behaving in other ways like a stereotypical Mexican. Oops. As many of my readers know, I don’t drink. I didn’t know what game we’d be playing when I volunteered, but I figured it out in time discreetly to tell the guy who seated me onstage that I’d like him to bring me a glass of water when he brought everybody else tequila. And I promised to put on a good show.

When the next guy came onstage, I shook his hand. Any time men gather in Belarus they all shake each other’s hands. It would probably happen in Texas, too. But this group of North American tourists didn’t take to that custom, and I had a hard time getting Contestant #2 to notice my hand held out to him. He didn’t extend the courtesy to Contestant #3 and the handshaking stalled. By Belarusian tradition, each newly-arriving man should have shaken the hands of each of the men already present. In this group of Americans, it was every man for himself.

Last time I played this game I lost, in part because the audience picks their favorite and most of them realized that I wasn’t drinking. If they hadn’t seen me negotiating with the staff about my beverage, they certainly noticed that my drink didn’t seem strong to me. This time, when we got to the drinking part of the show, I acted cautious and afraid about drinking (while I sniffed to make sure I really had water) and then I pretended to struggle with swallowing my drink. I also had to ride an imaginary horse, say a few things in Spanish, yodel and dance around a hat. All the while, I remembered to pay attention to the audience.

I still had to encourage the audience when it came to voting by applause. The other contestants just stood there and took however much applause they got. I milked the crowd with gestures of come-on, victory and conspiracy. They may not have wanted to vote for me, but they had to because they couldn’t ignore my encouragement. Since I was the only one asking for their approval, I got plenty. Since that evening, everybody greets me, frequently by my stage name. I am Juanito, the most macho man in Cancún.

Hunting and Gathering

They say this is a good year for mushrooms. Our friend Natasha in Braslav has been taunting Alla for days in their frequent Skype conversations, showing ever-more-amazing mushrooms she’s been finding near her summer home. Clearly, we had to go.

We took the bus on Thursday morning. Alla and another passenger started freaking out as we approached Braslav and saw the quantity of mushrooms for sale along the side of the road. I thought one or the other might jump out of the window, but they both lasted until we finally reached our small-town destination. Victor met us while Natasha tidied up after the previous night’s labor of cooking, canning and drying the mushrooms she’d gathered the day before. We’d be needing that space in the kitchen.

As soon as we reached Natasha she whisked us into the woods. Alla and Natasha taught me to identify three mushrooms they considered worthwhile. They disparaged other edible mushrooms, saying they’d only bother with them in a bad year. This year, we’d only harvest “elite” varieties. I especially like the white ones, which they told me are safe even to eat raw though only I actually did it. Nobody here is used to the idea of eating raw mushrooms and most consider it scary. I grew up eating lots of raw mushrooms and don’t think twice about it when I have the right ones.

That first day we gathered less than a bucketful apiece. Natasha wanted to stay up as long as necessary to process them all and then get up to be on the road at six the next morning for a serious day of hunting. Alla negotiated her back to a 7:30 start, hoping to get something more like a normal night’s sleep. Natasha appeared to take the idea well, but she got pretty comical the next morning trying to make up for the late start by egging Victor on to drive faster into the forest. Victor does not drive fast, and the difference probably didn’t matter. Other people beat us to Natasha’s spot and they harvested a lot of mushrooms, but we still got a lot ourselves. I suppose it just took us a little longer, but I enjoyed visiting several different spots, each beautiful in its own way. And by the end of the day we had a WHOLE lot of mushrooms. I don’t know what they weighed, but I was surprised at how heavy were the two boxes we carried in from the car.

We arrayed ourselves in the kitchen to sort the mushrooms, some to freeze, some to dry, some to can and some simply to cook. We also set aside three or four nice white mushrooms for me to eat raw. We swapped stories over the mushrooms, trying to remember where they came from and under what circumstances who found this or that specimen. The cooking and processing tasks stretched into the next day, when we took a break from hunting.

Not that I got a complete break from bending over and picking stuff up from the ground. When I went outside I saw that the neighbor had gathered her extended family to harvest potatoes from a field big enough to warrant the use of a tractor. I knew Grandma as a very nice permanent resident of the village. Her extended family spilled out over the field, with her son-in-law driving the tractor, other men collecting bags of potatoes, and women and children loading potatoes into bags. They worked hard and they worked fast, as if perhaps the Nazis were about to return and steal their harvest. Grandma saw me taking a few pictures and asked me if I didn’t want to help out. What could I say? I went home and put on my work clothes, stole Victor’s Wellington boots and put in a good hour or more. Finally I decided I’d had enough fun and had atoned for taking those pictures of other people working so I went home and cleaned myself up. As I finished putting my shoes back on in front of the banya, one of the daughters brought me a big bucket of nice potatoes as a thank-you gift for my labors. We’ve already been eating them now, and they’re delicious.

Still, we had come to hunt so we went out near the village again the following morning, not too early. Somebody beat us to the woods and we met her staggering out with more mushrooms than she could comfortably carry. Alla asked her to describe where she’d been hunting so we could start somewhere else, but she said she’d been everywhere. Undaunted, we plunged in. I struggled to find much that this local hunter had missed, but Natasha filled her bucket with choice mushrooms which she apparently locates by X-ray vision. She’s amazing. I, meanwhile, sat down under a tree with a book after I got tired of poking around in the undergrowth. I did gather more than half a bucketful, but had to resort to some second-rate mushrooms to achieve that.

Natasha and Victor sent us home with more than our fair share of the harvest, and I think we’re going to have a pretty delicious winter. As a matter of fact, we had a pretty delicious dinner just now.

For other pictures, click here and start in the middle of the album.
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