Dividing My Time

The Bodies Politic

With the news about Vladimir Putin running for president (ending, as the international press called it, "months of uncertainty" -- poppycock!  I was always certain!) Russia now officially joins the US in gearing up for a presidential election in 2012.  The difference between the two political processes brings out the contrast between my native country and my sometimes-if-they-give-me-a-180-day-visa adopted country.    And while I love getting caught up in the hoop-la and intricate minute-by-minute politico.com approach of the American model, the minimalist/clutter-buster in me finds much to admire in the streamlined approach of the 35-minute Russian electoral cycle, where they waste no time on extraneous stuff like:

        1. Candidate-branded bumper stickers, lawn signs, baseball hats etc.   Branded items are for winners only, and since the electoral cycle is so very short, and, of course, no one in Russia actually has a lawn (that the public can see anyway), what’s the point?  

         2. Philadelphia Cheese Steaks: Ever since Boris Yeltsin’s ill-advised boozy boogie on the tarmac became the primary perestroika image, Russia’s leaders have avoided anything overtly physically sloppy or messy.   Food consumed on national television is limited to the traditional bread dipped in salt, which is much easier on the tie and shirt collection. 

        3. A hit television series, lasting the through two presidential terms, which details the inner workings of a fictitious Presidential Administration, in which the actor playing the fictitious president enjoys an actual political approval rating significantly higher than that of the real sitting president.  Puh-leeze.  There is enough confusion over who is really running the country, without putting Martin Sheen into the mix.

        4. C-SPAN:  “God is too high, and the Tsar too far away,” runs an old peasant saying, and that’s the way the current Kremlin crowd intends to keep it.  No need for raw uncut sausage factory detail, the sitting Russian government is hard at work, a message that is reinforced each night on the news.  The scene: ornate inner Kremlin office.   Minister X perches uncomfortably across from glossy reproduction Baroque desk from either the Prime Minister or the President (because, as we know, they are interchangeable,) torso bent over arms stacked one on top of each other, hands touching opposite elbows, listing slightly from side to side in the classic “Russian bureaucrat slump.”   He mumbles his set piece, which includes at least one set of statistics, peeking out from under his bushy eyebrows nervously at the boss, who learns back in the contemplative, but slightly condescending manner of a headmaster who has had to call this particularly errant 7th grader in just once too often, finally nodding and saying “Yes, that’s right.”  Flashbulbs pop.    “Dancing on Ice” follows after the break.

        5. Jon Stewart and Tina Fey.

        6. Debates.

        7. The long-drawn out Primary process.  Are we on ludes, or is the football season just too short?

        8. The wife of a national candidate showing off her bare upper arms.  Russian political wives and children keep subterranean profiles, in a tradition going back to the Tsarevich Alexei and hemophilia thing.  Russia’s first ladies only ever really come out in public during State Visits to meet The Queen  (and can you blame them?)  However, whoever is advising them on what they should wear to that particular social event needs to be shot.   J. Crew catalog – over here, please!  

        9. The clergy having an opinion.   And expressing it.  Uphill work for Russia, since the clergy only speak Old Church Slavonic, a 13th Century dialect which no one but them understands.  Picture Jeremiah Wright and Billy Graham communicating in Demotic Greek.  (So likely.)

        10. Sexual scandals.  Russians are genuinely baffled by the Anglo-American prevalence to sexual scandals like the Monica Lewinsky “episode” toppling the political careers of powerful men.   What is wrong with us?  HRH (my “handsome Russian husband”) could not make head or tail of the Senator Larry Craig foot tapping scandal, no matter how many times Velvet and I explained it to him.  The data went in, but his brain refused to fuse it together.   He couldn’t link “gay” with “senator;” or “senator” and “at” with “public airport bathroom.” “Public airport bathroom” and “gay overtures” didn’t make sense as a pair, and he kept going back to “senator” and “public airport” as a dubious match, and was finally defeated by “gay senator” and “reinstatement.”  Total data scramble.  Tech support please.

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A much edited version of this piece appeared this month in Russia Beyond The Headlines.  

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Hey there readers!  Can you think of any other differences between Russian and American political campaigns?  What's political campaigning like where you live?

Transitions: E-Z Pass versus VIP Arrival

 

Dividing my time is more complicated than it sounds.  

I’m back in Moscow, and I’ve spent the last few days doing what I always do after a lengthy absence:  removing every single garment and (carefully labeled) plastic container from my closet, which for some reason is covered in about an inch of dust.  If you ever wondered why luxury handbags come with those soft bags, now you know:  to keep the dust off.   Then I had to empty the fridge and do whatever it is I do do to rid it of the sour smell that comes from what I call “HRH food.”   I put all the half-wrapped salami slices into sealed containers, I throw away the rotting radishes, and I banish all the food my mother-in-law imports as soon as I leave: jam, German pickles (yuck!) and synthetic faux creamer.

Having replaced batteries in absolutely everything from my computer mouse to my Sonic-care toothbrush, downloaded software updates for my sluggish MacBook, completely reconfigured my To-doist.com (never underestimate the empowerment of a good to-do list), I read Raisa the cleaning lady the riot act about not throwing out any ice while I’m here, and finally feel ready to get back to writing.

I’ve been on an enforced writing sabbatical since HRH came to Northampton for a week’s holiday from the Difficult Start Up at the Important Industry right before my departure to Moscow (a schedule line up I won’t be repeating any time soon) during which, he declared, he wanted to do absolutely nothing.  Except buy some new suits.  And watch Velvet in a Very Serious Horse Show she attended in utter upstate New York.  HRH forgot his driver’s license, which meant I did all of the driving involved.  And this pleased neither one of us.   HRH loves to drive in the United States, which he likens to playing a not-too-demanding video game.   Since we acquired Serena, our dulcet-toned GPS, we never worry about getting lost, and since my Dad (the car Tsar) generously arranged for and continues to underwrite an E-Z Pass, we are almost never stuck in traffic.

The E-Z Pass reigns as one of HRH’s top favorite things about America (along with Cape Cod Potato chips and the Hampshire Regional YMCA).  Being Russian, he likens waiting in line for anything as a sign of weakness, and waiting in line to pay for using a road completely unacceptable.  Each time we shoot through the E-Z Pass lane, leaving the other drivers to creep and crawl through the “CASH” Lane, HRH gives a grunt of approval.     I certainly found it handy as I pushed pedal to metal on the New York Thruway in order to make it to one of Velvet’s early morning jump offs.

Perhaps it was the E-Z Pass, or maybe it was the smooth execution of the Valet Parking I surprised him with at the Natick Mall, but HRH got it into his head that he needed to order a VIP Meet & Great at Domodedevo Airport for his return journey back to Moscow.    He also very generously determined that I should have the same treatment for my return three days later.  I did not demur.  When you’ve checked in three large duffle bags full of harmless kitchen essentials such as a vertical chicken roaster, and innocuous white substances such as 500 packets of Splenda and baking powder, the thought is always there that some Customs’ Official recovering from a long night, might just take it into his head to decide that the former is a sex toy and the latter a controlled substance.

I was thrilled, therefore, to casually stroll off the aircraft as my fellow passengers pushed and shoved, and did that thing that is not quite a run, but is a lot more than a walk, in a desperate effort to get to the front of the endless passport control queue (which is now even longer as we wait for the printer to print out the registration card).  Savoring the moment, I approached the bored-looking female with pockmarked skin and an inexpertly hemmed uniform skirt, holding up the “VIP-ЗАЛ” sign.

“Hello there,” I said brightly, “I’m your client!”

She regarded me with a massive amount of disinterest.

“Identify yourself,” she grunted.

She seemed surprised, but resigned when I produced the right documentation and she motioned me to follow her.   

Does anything say “You’re back in Russia” like the echoing “clack clack clack” of a female airport employee’s rickety heels on the tile floor?   We forged our way through the steamy departure lounge, full of Russians in tracksuit bottoms and tank tops heading off for package holidays in Turkey and Egypt.     Through a door, down a corridor, up a flight of stairs, down another corridor and up an additional flight of stairs I lugged my rollaboard full of cameras, computers, my Duty free swag (three bottles of PIMMS) and enough cooking magazines to last me two months.   We finally pushed through the final set of doors to the VIP Lounge.

I won’t belabor the point describing it, except to say I think that rattan, as a decorative motif in a climate such as Russia's is a mistake, and that, at the prices they charge for the service, a cash bar seems tacky, but as the Russians say, “It’s a sin to complain.”

Well, maybe just one complaint then…

It is nice to sit in a rattan chair and wait for someone to collect your three large duffle bags full of Splenda and vertical chicken roasters for you, but having to lug them up those two flights of stairs then through the entire arrivals hall, down the one tiny working elevator to get to the car which is parked in the dedicated VIP Parking space…that makes me long for my E-Z Pass.

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Priveyt Readers!

Have you experienced a VIP service in Russia?  VIP Sushi perhaps?  Or VIP Banya? What's your experience been?  Hit the comment button below and tell us about it!

 

Day of Preserves and National Parks/День заповедников и национальных парков: Why I Am An Agoraphobic

Hello There Mr. Ranger, Sir!

~Yogi Bear

Today is National Parks Day!   On this day, in 1916, Russia’s first ever-national park was established in Buryatia, the “Barguzinski Preserve.”  I have to wonder how the Russians found the time, given that they were tied up with the double whammy of war and revolution, but there you go: if you want something done, give it to the busiest person in the room.    81 years later, in 1997, the Center for Preservation of Nature and, the real guided missiles of the piece, The World Wildlife Fund got together and lobbied for an official profpraznik.  Today, Russia is home to over 100 land and forest preserves and 40 national parks, covering a total area of over 79 million acres, about 2 % of Russia’s landmass, or roughly the size of Belarus, which is, of course, slated to become a Russian National Park in the very near future..

Big country, Russia, as I’ve said before, and much of it uninhabitable, or made so by the pursuit of what lies deep beneath its permafrost, gross mismanagement, or outdated upkeep such as the peat bog mess so fresh in our minds from last summer.  But much of Russia’s nature is stunning, and I speak with the experience of one who has written and edited many many many travel brochures.   The problem is, as it always is, the infrastructure.  It’s hard to get to many of these places unless, like my friend Lucy Milne (travel agent to the oligarchs) you have access to a helicopter:  “Everyone should have a helicopter,” says Lucy with conviction, in a neat twist on the classic line from “Cold Comfort Farm.” 

Russian National Parks differ from those found in the rest of the world.  You can’t plug in your RV at most of them (obviously) and they don’t have Smokey Bear, nor indeed, Yogi Bear, so of course, they’ve missed out on all that revenue stream, and, as the faint lines around my eyes and mouth attest, you can't always bank on what you'll find when you get there.

I have a modest example:

In my former life as a Tourist Rep during the Wild 90s, a rather bold foray into the world of eco-tourism (another word engraved on my heart) found my team in charge of an exclusive cruise around Lake Baikal on a private boat which went appallingly pear shaped.  In an attempt to provide something new and different, our bosses had crafted the itinerary with “The Baikal National Park” as their supplier.  My intrepid colleague, let’s call him Nikita, took off with 12 unsuspecting Americans to Irkutsk where he was met by one of those 22-year language students who you just know, right there at the airport, is going to be useless and you will have to do all the work.   A seasoned professional (and very well trained by yours truly) Nikita hit the ground running, and made a series of unsuccessful phone calls to “The Baikal National Park” people, none of whom answered their phones.  Since this was before mobile phones were the norm, Nikita strolled down to the quayside of the Angara River to the dock where the pleasure boats took off and made some enquiries.   He then purchased a few bottles of vodka and made some deeper enquiries.   Returning to the hotel, he put the useless 22-year old up against the wall in a menacing manner he had picked up in the Paratroopers and made some urgent enquiries.

“Korochiye– in short-- ” he said to me over a crackling Irkutsk - Moscow landline, “I can rent a boat for the trip, but you need to bring me $5000 in cash…by tomorrow.”

As the case unfolded, it turned out that, back then anyway, there was no “Baikal National Park” and our wire transfer securing the non-existent pleasure boat was now safely in someone's – not I think one of the 11,000 employees of Russia’s National Parks Service – numbered account in one of those small island nations.

I then made a series of escalatingly urgent phone calls on a crackling Moscow – USA landline with my baffled and increasingly outraged American colleagues. Then scrounged around Moscow for some cash.   Another colleague – let’s call him Ilya – flew out to Irkutsk that night.  With a money belt.

It was right up there with the time we had the guy die in the back of the bus on a bitter cold day in Suzdal.  After a brief consultation with the driver and national guide, we upped the heating to maximum, put on some quiet music and prayed all the four hours back to Moscow that no one would wake up.  No one did.

Is it little wonder I never answer the phone or leave the house?

Happy National Parks Day to the more than 11,000 Russians who preserve and defend them!

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This post is part of The Stunt.

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So Readers,

That’s one of my favorite Russian horror stories…what are some of yours?  Share them with the rest of the Dividing My Time readership by clicking the comment button below.  Or, if you like, retweet or “like” this one Facebook so your friends can enjoy it too.  And when you are finished, stick around for more tales of Russia’s enormous land mass, the troubled ecological issues, and my miss-spent youth as a tour guide, by enjoying some more posts, like these:

 Ecologist’s Day/День эколога: Making Global Warming Work for Russia

Day of the Border Guards /День пограничника: Big Borders: Big Booze Up

Day of the Workers of the Ocean and River Fleets/День работников морского и речного флота: Old Man River, He Just Keeps Rolling Along

Thanks For Nothing

         Velvet is itching to go to the stables and I sense a narrow window of opportunity. 

“I’ll drive you over,” I bargain, “if you write your Christmas thank you letters.”

“Mooooohhhhhhmmm…” she wails, “I’ll do them after.”

“Do them now,” I say, “Non-negotiatiable.”

“Can I e-mail them?” she pleads.

 “Certainly not.” 

 Velvet grimaces, but silently takes the list, box of writing paper and roll of stamps I have ready for her.   She slumps at the kitchen table and scratches away diligently, but unenthusiastically for forty minutes, occasionally asking how to spell “quilted” or “polartech.”   

In the car, Velvet comments that she never has to write thank you notes in Russia.

 “That’s true,” I say, “but only Babushka and Dedushka give you things in Russia, and you are always there with them, so you don’t have to write them a note…and anyway, if you did, it would probably never reach its destination anyway…what with the postal service being the way it is.”

 Velvet skipped off to go for a ride and I swung the car back towards home, contemplating the thank you note zeitgeist.   What makes me hold a gun to my daughter’s head and deprive her of leisure and enjoyment until she puts pen to paper to thank someone for a gift or a visit, a favor, or simply going out of their way? I suppose it is because my mother held a gun to mine, and her mother held one to her head…all the way back to the Flood.

You never ever get a thank-you note in Russia. Not even via e-mail or text, so you can’t blame it on the   They have no place in the strictly mercantile favor exchange in Russia.  A credit history is built up with favors rendered.   Direct debit involves sourcing someone who knows someone, who can get to someone who has what you need.   It never occurs to Petrov to thank Ivanov.  

Russians have learned, however, that many foreigners release favors for free: like the Dior scent sample sandwiched between the pages of Vogue, or the basket of hard candies at the doctor’s office.   So they help themselves.

In college, my Russian teacher, a recent arrival to New York from Odessa, got me to hire her absolutely clueless sister, who spoke no English at all, as an office assistant at the law firm where I did night typing.   A National Guide from the State Tourism Committee I’d worked with landed at JFK to find that her (male) sponsor hadn’t turned up (Mrs. Male Sponsor had found out), and she ended up living with me for six months.    One of HRH’s military school buddies had a sister on an exchange program at Syracuse.  We invited her for Christmas break, a three week period, during which she spent the entire time lying on the sofa, eating Cheerios, watching videos, never once offering to help with any domestic chores.  No thank you notes from any of them.

Bees Rees, the uncrowned Queen of Expat Moscow sent me a breezy e-mail requesting a command performance to meet with “a really gifted Russian colleague,” who wanted to explore opportunities in PR.

“No,” I wrote back, “And that does mean no – this is not be a diplomatic fob off.  The answer next week will be the same.  I don’t do that anymore.”

Bees, who normally has the final word on everything was flummoxed.

“Why?” she asked finally.

“You know, I am just fed up with doing things for a crowd who can’t put “thank” together with “you” when I do it.  A Russian wants something -- or decides that he or she can get something from you, so they beg, plead, wheedle, and cajole you in that slightly breathless voice.  They flatter you; say you are the only person who can help them.  You provide the necessary, and then, once they’ve got the contact, the quote, the copy or the e-mail of someone who can do even more for them, you never hear from them again.  I feel like used Kleenex. I don’t expect them to put a stamp on good stock writing paper, but an e mail or a phone call wouldn’t kill them.”

“Wow,” said Bees.  “Wow.”

I just say no.  I don’t help Tom’s 18-year old Russian girlfriend du jour re-do her resume.   I say “no” to Russians in the USA who expect me to take stuff to their relations in Russia.  “That’s why God invented DHL,” I tell them.  I’m done spending hours copyediting emails for HRH’s turbo-charged female relations to their boss’s boss.   

Thank you notes are never going to take off in Russia.   I once asked this Gorgon at a Russian company I worked for to send a personal thank-you note to a very senior executive from a Fortune 100 company for a face-to-face meeting. Olga Vladimirovna clearly felt it was a big waste of time but handed me this:  

[Company Letterhead]

Letter # 49/2001

LETTER OF THANK YOU TO ABC COMPANY

Respected Mr. O:

The General Director of XYZ company, Ivanova, Olga Vladimirovna, conveys her respect to you and your organization and extends her gratitude for the, carried out by you, meeting on 19.08.01 in the city of Moscow to discuss company ABC’s mutually profitable business negotiations with XYZ.

We assume that continued mutually convenient business partnerships will be in the future.

With Respect

Ivanova, Olga Vladimirovna

[Place for Company Stamp]

City:  Moscow

See what I mean?

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Ahoy There Readers!!

How did your Christmas go?  What is your take on thank you notes?  Outdated, old-fashioned and obsolete or never more charming and prevalent than in this edgy digital universe we inhabit?  Have you ever been on the receiving end of a Russian thank you note like Olga Vladimirovna's?  Weigh in by hitting the comment button below!

QHU9UZ9RM353

Grandfather Frost’s Birthday/День рождения Деда Мороза: Russia’s Santa Claus Is a Year Older!

He sees you when you’re sleeping,  

He knows when you’re awake

He knows when you’ve been bad or good, 

So be good for goodness sake

~J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie 

Today is Grandfather Frost’s birthday!  This is a huge big deal: way more important than any of the naval fleets, or the cryptographers, or even my buddies who jump out of parachutes, because Grandfather Frost is Russia’s Santa Claus!  

I know…I know, trust the Russians to have their own Santa Claus.  But since they have their own calendar, alphabet, and Olympics – why should Santa be any different.

Dyed Moroz lives further south than Santa – in Velikii Ustyug, the heart of Russia’s dairy belt along the Volga River.  In medieval times, Velikii – or Great -- Ustyug was a principality of great importance, and a major trade hub.  Today, it’s on the map as Dyed Moroz’s hometown, which was made official in 1999.   I would love to see the legislation, wouldn’t you?   Presumably, as a Russian citizen, Dyed Moroz votes for United Russia and, like all other Russians, is currently trying to come up with a name for Vladimir Putin’s new dog.  

In appearance, Dyed Moroz is longer and leaner than Santa, more Slavic and more stern, no doubt because he is the elder of the two:  Dyed Moroz is more than 2000 years old, while Santa Claus, who was born the Greek Nikolaos of Myra is only 1740 years old, or, as my friend Judy pointed out, perhaps much much younger – only 187, if you, like Judy, attribute Santa’s emergence as a brand from the publication of “The Night Before Christmas” in 1823.   Not being the patron saint of sailors, thieves, merchants, archers and children, Dyed Moroz lacks the kind of infrastructure Santa has built up:  he has no elves, no workshop, and no Mrs. Claus to help him out.  He does have one helpmate – his granddaughter, Sneguritchka, or Snowflake, a classic Russian beauty, who is traditionally dressed in an ornate blue Russian sarafan.  Together, they make personal appearances in the run up to New Year’s Eve to hand out presents, which means that children all over Russia actually get to meet the great man.  I don’t know why they feel they can drop the veil like this, but it may have something to do with the fact that Dyed Moroz doesn’t have the kind of transport, which Santa does.   There is no sleigh, no reindeer, and certainly no Rudolf to help guide the sleigh when the weather gets bad, as it so often does in Russia.  “America,” Dyed Moroz must sigh, as all Russians do when contemplating the ease and comfort of our life compared to the hardships of life in Russia.   

The lack of transport also accounts for the fact that Dyed Moroz runs 6 days behind Santa, coming, as he does, on December 31st rather than December 24th.   This is a holdover from the Soviet period, when the Russians replaced the Christian Christmas with secular New Year’s.  For a while, Stalin tried to even outlaw Dyed Moroz, declaring him in 1928 “an ally of the priest and kulak.”  Certainly, there have been moments in Russia’s history (and there may well be more ahead) when the concept of “he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good,” might be less than a desirable state of affairs. But, even Stalin (the Burgermeister and Heatmiser of his day) can’t keep the likes of Dyed Moroz down for long.  Dyed Moroz was rehabilitated in 1937 – though with one important wardrobe change:  during the Soviet period, he and Sneguritchka wore blue fur trimmed outfits, as opposed to red so that Russian children would not confuse them with Santa Claus.

On November 18th, each town in Russia opens a ceremonial mailbox for Dyed Moroz, and he receives official (really – official) delegations from all over Russia.  Instead of writing letters explaining that they’ve been nice, not naughty, and a lengthy list of Christmas wishes, Russian children wish Dyed Moroz a Happy Birthday, and then move on to the lengthy list of New Year’s Wishes!

So, if you are in Russia today, be sure to drop Dyed Moroz a line to wish him a very Happy Birthday!

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This post is part of The Stunt

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Dear Readers!

The holiday season is upon us!   Have you ever met Dyed Moroz and Sneguritchka?  More importantly, how are you going to do your Thanksgiving turkey?  Have you ever brined?   Is Dr. Pepper a good brining agent?  More importantly, do you have a gravy story?  Do you have big fights about the gravy…I’d love to know about those for an upcoming column.

Let me know, won’t you, by hitting the comment button below and leaving me some ideas.

And when you’ve done that, stick around and enjoy a few more forays into Russian history and culture:

The All-Russia Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity/Всероссийский день семьи, любви и верности: Happy Families

St. George’s Day /День святого Георгия Победоносца: Cry God For Vovka, Russia and St. George!

More Blessed to Give, Than to Receive

Day of Russian Policemen/День российской милиции: Do They Know Where My Husband Is?

 When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done

 A policeman’s lot is not a happy one

~ Gilbert & Sullivan (Pirates of Penzance)

Dearest Readers!

Dividing My Time turns one today!   I launched this blog one year ago with an inaugural post about envying all the smooth-haired authors on the book jackets who divided their time.  In their case, of course, it’s like Oxford and London, or New York and Paris, or Cape Cod and something else.  I think I must have the (very dubious) distinction of being the only aspiring writer to divide my time between Northampton and Moscow, but there it is, when life hands you beets, make some borscht.  

And what could be a better way to celebrate this milestone than by celebrating it in tandem with Russia’s Policemen!  Today marks the 40th anniversary since the creation of "Day of the Russian Militia" back in 1980, though of course, Russia’s police go back almost 300 years, to their founding by – you guessed it – Peter The Great in 1715.  There have always been policemen in Russia, but, as with so many organizations, they were slightly re-organized in 1917 on November 10th, like three days after the Russian Revolution (which might have been a hint, although perhaps that is unfair: hindsight is of course always 20/20 vision.)

HRH was curiously absent all day yesterday.  No calls, no SKYPE, and a few texts went unanswered.  This always makes me slightly nervous, but when I went into my Top Secret File on Russian Holidays and looked ahead to see what The Stunt had in store for me, I knew immediately where he was, and drew a long and heartfelt breath of relief.  No Oooh-Lah-Lah Strip Club last night for HRH.  Clearly, he was out with his policemen friends, helping them get well fortified and lubricated with 18-year old Scotch in preparation for the rigors of the day ahead.  HRH is a big fan of Policemen’s Day, and they like to start their holiday the night before.  So, it is just as well I am in Northampton at the moment, where I recently had my own little encounter with the local constabulary.

I was on my way to my Writing Group, and, as usual, I had left early to get the plum parking spot at the top of the road, which runs perpendicular to our host’s road.  I like to have the top spot since I’m still enough of an urban beast to feel slightly terrified walking down a dark street on my own, but truthfully, I can’t parallel park for love or money, so getting there early means I have time to wiggle the Subaru around before the other Subarus get there.  I don’t like to be observed when trying to park, which is a phobia I developed when I lived on Leningradsky Pr-t and shared a courtyard parking space with the Metro Police.   They used to love watching me try to back out of my woefully too small parking space in my very large Land Rover.  They would stand around, spit, scratch their crotches and laugh at me.  Sometimes,  I would just put my head down on the steering wheel and howl until they went away, or HRH or Tolya-The-Driver came to rescue me.

So there I was, in Northampton, all snug up against the curb, rooting around in my bottomless tote bag for my flash drive on which I keep all my writing work, when a bright light flooded the window.   I looked up into a 4-gazillion watt searchlight, aimed right at me from a Northampton Police cruiser.

“Oh #$%^&,” I thought, “I don’t have any cash.”  

The officer got out of the car and crossed the street.  

“Calm down,” I said to myself, “I'm probably just blocking a fire hydrant or something.”

“Yes,” said my Slavic alter-ego, “but you still don’t have any cash on you…you're gonna be in troooooooooble.”

I rolled down the window.

“Hi,” I said, “is there a problem?”

“Ma’am, are you okay?” asked the dead good-looking police officer in a concerned manner.

I was blind-sided.   Policemen aren't supposed to be concerned, not in a sincere sort of way.  

“I am…I’m fine,” I said, wondering if I should make a full disclosure about not really being able to parallel park.  I wondered if he might share my concern about the social faux pas inherent in arriving too early for Writing Group.  Russian police, I knew, didn't give a damn about that kind of thing, but Officer McDreamy looked like he might just be in a writing group of his own.

“Don’t be ludicrous,” said my alter ego, “like he cares.”

“Just wanted to be sure, you have a good evening now,” he said and got back into his cruiser.

I wanted to give him a bottle of like 80-year old scotch right there and then but, of course, they frown on that kind of thing in Northampton.   So, I went home and wrote a check to the Policemen’s Fund.  A large one.

Happy Policemen's Day to any of you still standing today! And to all of Noho's Finest for that matter!

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This post is part of The Stunt.

Photo by the author.  All rights reserved.

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Hello there Readers!

First of all, heartfelt thanks for your loyal support which has got me through one year of blogging!  As a readership, you number more than 35,000, which means a lot of you are keeping very quiet!  I'd love to hear from you going into year 2, so take this opportunity to weigh in with a comment!  If you were an early commenter on this blog and stopped, I wish you'd weigh in again!

I’ll bet you have a good policeman story – Russian or Northamptonite or wherever you do hail from!  My good friend Mouse told me a funny one about Stockbridge, MA’s legendary Officer Oppenheimer, better known to his fans as “Officer Opie.” Opie, as the cognoscenti refer to him, is the anti-hero of Arlo Guthrie’s ballad “Alice’s Restaurant,” he who has “the twenty-seven 8” by 10” colored glossy photos with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.”  After the film of  “Alice’s Restaurant” came out with Opie in a cameo role as himself, he stopped calling Mouse’s mother, “Mrs. Miles” and would say, “Hey Flo!”    

Got a story like that one?  Let us know by hitting the comment button below and weighing in.  

Or, stick around and read some other posts about law enforcement or me being reduced to tears in Russia, like these:

Day of the Canine Units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia/День кинологических подразделений МВД России: It’s a Dog’s Life

Day of Knowledge/День знаний: Back to School!

Day of the Traffic Cops (Day of the GIBDD) /День ГАИ (День ГИБДД МВД РФ): A Hypothetical Reenactment

 

 

Day of Knowledge/День знаний: Back to School!

That Was Easy

~Motto of STAPLES office supplies store.

Today is the 1st of September so it’s back to school day all over Russia!  And I’m back from a blogging hiatus – and relieved to be so after lots of end of summer housework, admin and general revving up for the school year.  I’m reminded of a recent quote from Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat Pray Love” in a piece on Slate.com's XX Factor (Eat, Pray Love and Never Get Any Work Done) by Hanna Rosin on women and writing and the frustrations we often feel sticking to the task.  “Do you think Philip Roth ever set aside his novel so he could change the sheets in the guest bedroom for the third time that week?” she asked.  I love it: so true. 

In honor of The Day of Knowledge, I wrote a piece for the BBC’s Russian Service blog “Strana Russia” about the differences of back to school in Russia versus back to school in the USA, which was published today in Russian.  As usual, it garnered some heated comments.  Here it is in English:  

Back To School

My 13-year old daughter Velvet starts her second year at boarding school in the United States this autumn, so she and I have spent the past few weeks in the US getting her ready. My Russian husband has remained in Moscow at work.  He is very sanguine about the entire process, which makes a marked contrast to his mood this time last year:

“Did you get everything Velvet needs for school?” he would bark at me on an almost hourly basis, “have you managed it all?”

I would repeatedly pull out a thick file folder with all the separate, color-coded forms from the school, my crowded “To-Do” lists and print outs from the Internet.  Everything was there, all in order: she saw the doctor for her shots, had her eyes checked, she was up to date with the orthodontist, and, for good measure, I’d made an appointment for her to have her hair cut the week before school started.  I told my husband all of this in what I hoped was a reassuring manner.

“But did you manage to buy everything she needs?” he would press impatiently.

“Like what?” I would query, mentally reviewing the past week, when it seemed Velvet and I had done nothing but fill up shopping carts (real and Internet cached) and “proceed to checkout.”

“Like her notebooks,” he exploded over the SKYPE line which crackled briefly, “AND PENCILS!” he screamed, “and erasers, and exercise books, and…that kind of thing.

Pencils?  My husband never micro-manages on this level.  It never occurs to him if we have sufficient reserves of fabric softener, cottage cheese, or cat food:  he just assumes we will.  And we do.   So, I had, indeed, taken care of everything for Velvet in what is as American a tradition as hot dogs at a baseball game:  the annual “Back to School” trip to STAPLES, the largest national purveyor of office and school supplies.  We had, of course, had a blast: Velvet had everything from a set of highlighter pens all the colors of the rainbow, to a professional engineering calculator.

“Of course,” I told my husband reassuringly, “We did that last week.” I launched into a detailed list of our purchases.

“But did you manage to get everything?” he pressed.

“Well, what else do you think she needs?” I exploded, “a wand from Ollivanders…or maybe Quidditch pads?”

Which made him laugh, and he relaxed and crossed Velvet’s school supplies off his worry list forever.

I had actually understood his concern, which dated back to his Soviet childhood when ballpoint pens were non-existent, and exercise books only po blatu.    Some of that underlying fear seems to linger in Russia today, despite the booming free market economy PR.  The last week in August in Moscow is sheer hell as children from ages 7 – 22 get ready to return to their institutions of learning on September 1st.   The traffic, always hectic, snarls into total gridlock for hours as harried parents crisscross the city in search of elusive school uniforms and French dictionaries.   Bronzed from the dacha, frantic mothers race from one book store to the next, stand in lines, and elbow their fellow countrymen aside with more than the usual level of rudeness to stockpile paper products and state-issued text books which, as far as I can see, are manufactured with no thought to population statistics.  This is why shifty looking types in dirty rain coats stand outside book stores and murmur sotto voce, “Woman…do you need an algebra textbook?”  They hold up battered cardboard index cards with a list of all the books you won’t find in the store, but which they, presumably, can provide if you are brave enough to accompany them down the street to a dark alley where they operate out of the boot of a beat up Lada.

There is no joy in the process, the way there is for parents in the US, who fling themselves wildly into wild orgies of spending -- spiral notebooks, post-its, and # 2 pencils, knowing, as they do so, that relative freedom lies just around the corner.  The thrill in America is the (admittedly mercantile) run up to the day, while the day itself is something of a let down.  In Russia, however, it’s the actual “Back to School” that is the emotional zenith.  After the frenetic, last minute search for supplies, suddenly September 1st dawns and, magically, the angst melts away in the face of the moving “First Bell” ritual that is as much a part of Russian life as military parades and blini and caviar.  Russia’s children set forth on “the Day of Knowledge” bright as new pennies: boys with shiny shoes and scrubbed faces, girls adorned with stiff bows aloft in their hair. They grasp stiff bouquets of flowers to present to their teachers:  held carefully -- slightly away from their bodies so as not to crush them on the journey to school.  Through the streets, they make their way: little ones clutching parent’s hand; the older ones faking disinterest in meeting their friends after the summer vacation. Music fills the crisp September air, and Moscow, for one bright autumn morning anyway, becomes a big party.  It never fails to reduce me to tears.   

Just like the pencil aisle at STAPLES.   

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This post is part of The Stunt.

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Author's Note:

This article originally appeared on September 1, 2010 in Russian on the BBC’s Russian Service under the title: 1-я сентября - ежегодная паника.  A link to the original online version can be found here.

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Hey there Readers!

How is your Back To School process going?  Who changes the sheets in your family?

Let me know by leaving a comment below! 

Metallurgy Day/День металлурга: No Oligarch Is That Good Looking

All that is gold does not glitter.

~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of The Ring

Today is the day of the Metallurgists!   Today we celebrate all those who spend their days making alloys, or heating metal to a certain temperature to change its shape.  That kind of thing.

There are, of course, a lot of metals companies (yes, that’s how you spell it – I know from my time at The Bank) in Russia, and they make gazillions of rubles, which I suppose would make them fun to work for, were it not for the fact that they are all located in remote, inclement, and inhospitable regions of Russia’s interior – many of which began life as gulag penal colonies.  Still, I was intrigued enough when a head hunter rang me up several years ago about a Senior PR position at one such company with a direct report to literally the only good looking oligarch.  I put on my best Hermes scarf, dabbed some #5 behind both ears and went off to the interview.   Sadly, I had to call the agency afterwards and pull myself off the list:  it was that scary.   I didn’t mind having to go through the whole humiliating rigmarole of sticking my head into a small window and begging for a propusk (pass) to enter the building, and I didn’t really mind witnessing the vitriolic exchange that took place amongst the propusk ladies and the security guards about who was going to escort me up to the office in question (a distance of .7 miles through depressing warped pine paneling and dirty windows), but I couldn’t stick being escorted by an armed guard with an AK-40 rifle who walked behind me (which is exactly how they escort criminals).  

No oligarch is that good-looking.

    Neither is the Pioneer Valley’s most prominent metallurgist, Good Ole Tom, though he, at least, really does want to see you, as he points out in his charming range of local TV ads like this one:

Good Ole Tom came up at a meeting of the parents’ association at Velvet’s school, and it struck, I don’t have to tell those of you readers who are familiar with that kind of gathering, an incongruous note.   I have written before about how much I am enjoying being involved in Velvet’s new school, after a decade and a half of being ostracized by the Scottish Mums Mafia, so I was very pleased to be invited with such enthusiasm to join the parents’ association.  The parents association consists of a number of earnest female types who live within a 100-mile radius of the school, who get together once a month or so to discuss some important issues surrounding the continued financial well-being of the school, who will bring the hot chocolate to the horse show, and other item agendas in this vein.  It makes you feel good: like going to a yoga class.  It’s wholesome, its selfless, and it is the right thing to do.

Picture the reaction, and then, when in the “new business” section of the meeting, a father (yes, a father, at the parents’ association) got up to propose a new fund-raising idea.  He couched the idea in a snazzy presentation, which included words like “philanthropy” and “gold standard,” but you can’t live in Russia for almost 20 years without having serious BS-radar, and mine started to buzz.  What he was actually proposing was that we set up a tent on the lawn of this small, somewhat struggling, girls’ boarding school, and have people come with their old jewelry, kick nacks and other bibelots to sell for cash to his associates, with the school getting a slice of the financial pie. 

I was riveted.  Nothing like this ever happens at a parents’ association meeting, and I thought the woman sitting next to me in a turtleneck with whales on it was going to have an aneurism.  Several of the mothers were sitting, politely, looking like they felt they’d missed something vital to the conversation, particularly the ones for whom English is not a native language. 

“Is it like Good ‘Ole Tom?” one of the more savvy Moms finally asked.

All at once, fifteen barracudas jumped into the fray, interrupting one another to be the first to introduce the most heinous aspect of this dubious fundraising concept:  the reaction of the local community, the senior who would sell her mother’s ancestral pearl earrings and head off with a guy on a motorcycle and never be seen again, the Public Relations message, the security, the potential for crime, the association with Good Ole Tom, the tax situation…the Scottish Mum Mafia had never been this animated.  Never.

“Are you on drugs?”  I casually asked one of the staff organizers of the parents’ association who had added the item to the agenda. “Because if you are, I would be so interested to learn where you obtain that kind of fine pharmaceuticals.”

“This is not, per se, a terrible idea,” she argued. “It would make more than a bake sale.”

I tried to think of other ideas that would make more than a bake sale. I came up with a lot, but the best one was to auction off the senior class as escort girls – low overhead, I figured, and you could do the entire thing on-line.  But I wasn’t sure it would get off the ground with the parents’ association.

Just as long as we steer clear of metallurgy…that’s my rule.

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This post is part of The Stunt.

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Hey there, readers –

Are you involved in a parents’ organization?  Does it ever get out of hand?  What’s your story?  Have you ever been escorted to a job interview by an armed guard?   Thank you, as ever, for stopping by Dividing My Time.  Stick around and learn more about horse shows and the Scottish Mum Mafia in posts like these:

Horse Shows: Don't Forget The Maps and The Martinis!

Oh, Do You Know The Muffin Mom?

May Day / День труда: A Day of Solidarity

Day of the Inventors and Rationalizers (Management Consultants)/День изобретателя и рационализатора: Love To Hear Medvedev Go “Tweet Tweet Tweet!”

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

~ Plato (The Republic)

  Today is the Day of the Inventors and the Rationalizers!  I crossed checked “rationalizer” in a number of online dictionaries and it seems that it can to refer to someone who re-organizes or brings modern, efficient methods to an industry i.e. Management Consultants.   Management Consultants, as I learned during my happy time at Russia’s National Carrier are creepy expat parasites, who, as HRH would say, are “You-zzz-eh-less” so I thought we might focus on the inventors.   

We have, of course, talked before about Russia’s past contributions to world technology…that Periodic Table of Elements thing, so I thought what we might do is focus more on Russia’s future inventors and innovators.

And what a great week to do so!  As all Russia-watchers, and many techno-geeks know, President Dmitry Medvedev, clearly off on good behavior, visited Silicon Valley on fact and fund finding missions for Russia’s  “City of Innovation,” Skolkovo.  Skolkovo, which is 20 kilometers from Moscow, was recently designated the site for Russia’s new innovation and technology center, where the focus will be on energy, information technologies, communication, biomedical research and nuclear technology.

Russia’s president is a real gadget geek and so this was like having lunch with all of the Disney Princesses for a 6-year old girl from Alabama.  He visited Apple, where he got a new 4G iPhone from Saint Steve himself (to add to the pirated and “cracked” 3G one he already had), he met with the Russian programmer Diaspora, about whom he expressed the (wildly unrealistic) hope that they would all return home and work at Skolkovo, and then, he visited Twitter, where he set up an account, and sent his first tweet, with an adorable typo.  He then proceeded to tweet the entire rest of the day, sending Twitpicks of the view from his hotel room, some random thoughts on Skolkovo, the good news that Belarus was going to repay it’s gas bill, and his latest tweet says he just met with David Cameron, and they agreed to stay in touch, and not just on line.

Having just worked my way through “Twitter for Dummies,” I was able to instantly “follow” the President. He isn’t following me.  Yet, but I am sure that will be put to right as soon as he gets home and synchs his contacts on the new phone with his iPad and his Kremlin hotmail account.  I sent him (unanswered as of yet) a tweet expressing my hope (in 140 characters) that he had enjoyed his cheeseburger with President Obama, and congratulating him on the cool press conference.   And you can send both President Medvedev and me tweets if you like as well.    We’re up to speed.

The President’s visit got a lot of coverage, most of it positive, some not, but the visit put Skolkovo firmly back on the top-five dinner party topics, from whence, frankly, it had slipped slightly, what with the initial rollout being not super duper PR, and the oppressive heat, and the BP oil spill and everything.  But, with companies like Nokia and CISCO pledging billion dollar investments into Skolkovo, we all wonder: is this the new hot place to look for a job?  Is the Innovation Technology racket the new Management Consultant racket?   Or do you have to, like, know something for this gig?

I’ll send you a hashtagged tweet if I find out!

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This post is part of The Stunt

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Dear Reader:

Had you heard about Skolkovo before you saw the charming footage of Medvedev at the Twitter office?   What do you think the Skolkovo crowd should focus on apart from how to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which a lot of us believe they already know, but what else?  Better ice machines and more powerful a/c are on the top of my list, since it is 93.2 degrees today (which is 34 degrees Celsius for the Metric geeks among you.).  Thank you, as ever, for stopping by.  Stick around, and read some other posts like this one:

Day of the Chemists / День химика: Russia’s Unquestioned Contribution to Civilization

Day of the Freelancers / День фрилансера: The Pajama-Clad Workforce

Day of the Ameliorators/День мелиоратора: Professionals From Fiction with Tough Rows to Hoe

Day of the Workers of the Federal Migration Service/День работников миграционной службы: Lambs to the Slaughter

Do you have any specialized skills, training or experience related to firearms and explosives, or to nuclear, biological or chemical activities?  If <Yes>, please explain.

~ Question # 32 on the visa application for US Citizens to the Russian Federation.

Here is another holiday, Like Day of the HR Managers, where I do not see us breaking out the Veuve Cliquot and the cobalt blue champagne flutes with the Imperial Seal.   Today is Workers of the Federal Migration Service Day. See, I can’t even work up enthusiasm for my customary exclamation mark.  

This is the crowd, as I have written before, who are making us run around Moscow trying to find a certified Latin- Russian translator, so we can have our college diplomas translated and apostiled, and have us combing the post-Armageddon landscape of southern Moscow to find the one rump-sprung clinic that is still testing for leprosy.  These are the clowns who change the rules about where and how to register your visa (once you actually get one and successfully enter the country) every single solitary time.   And, I have to assume that these are the Sadists who came up with that PDF version of the visa application, which is quite simply impossible to fill out on the computer. Go ahead, try to do it…click here and try and fill in one line without having to move your mouse and click on every single box.   See?

These people drive me to drink...and I can crawl there on my own, thank you very much.

People are always offering me back doors to Russian citizenship, and I just decline politely on behalf of myself and Velvet.  For one thing, Russia doesn’t have a dual citizenship agreement with America, or a number of other desirable first world locales like the EU...and all those Russians who think they are so clever (a number of HRH’s female relatives fall in to this category) in keeping their red passports once they get the new blue or burgundy ones should, I believe, be made to choose one and not the other, in tense circumstances by someone as unpleasant as Officer Noble, after a 26-hour flight.   Citizenship, Comrades, is not a travel document.   You can’t have a propiska (a residency permit) in a Moscow apartment, and vote for Barack Obama.  One or the other.  Not both.  Apart from anything else, you are depriving the poor Workers of the Federal Migration Service income, and driving the price of a one-year, multi-entry visa (for which you could get an entire new outfit at Eileen Fisher) for the rest of us!

The Federal Migration Workers are in charge of surveillance of labor migration, which is everyone from the Head of Proctor & Gamble in Russia to the Tadzhik street sweepers, and I always smile at the Tadzhiks and say “Good Day” politely since I feel we are essentially in the same boat.  It seems the Russians also think so, because the Moscow Times had a hysterical report on Friday about a little volume being created by Moscow City Hall.   This quite over-shadowed the other news of the day which I must just mention:  about the 65 meter penis painted on the underside of one of Saint Petersburg’s drawbridges on the eve of the Petersburg Economic Forum.   When raised, the drawbridge faced the Saint Petersburg HQ of the FSB, and that, to me, is genius on a scale you rarely see these days.

But to get back to the other story:  it seems the authorities at City Hall are coming up with an etiquette book for foreign workers visiting the capital.  This is A Bit Much, if you ask me, from a crowd who clear their nostrils of phlegm by pinching one side and blowing out the contents of the other.  Like on the main street, in broad daylight.

Is this woman getting ready to slaughter a lamb?

 

Is this man wearing his national costume on Tverskaya Street? 

The latter-day Emily Posts at City Hall, if you ask me (and no one ever ever does) could spend a little more time on re-working traffic patterns to ease the gridlock than telling me how to behave, but there they are, putting out this silly thing and issuing press releases about it all over the place.   The volume gets specific about some taboo behavior including wearing one’s national costume in public, which rules out jeans I guess, and LL Bean boots, as well as my North Face parka.  We are also supposed to refrain from slaughtering sheep in the courtyard, which wasn’t high up on my to-do list, but then my blood ran cold when I saw that we were also forbidden to barbecue on our balconies.

Oh Dear…

Congratulations to all of the Workers of the Federal Migration Service.

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This post is part of The Stunt

Photos by the author.  All Rights Reserved

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Dear Reader:

Have you ever applied for a visa to Russia?  Did you have to be medicated after you completed the application?  Did you try that PDF, and if so, do you agree it was created by a modern day Torquemada?   Do you know why I am so concerned about the barbecue rule???  (HINT: you’ll find the answer in one of the posts listed below!) Leave me a message of support below, or stick around and enjoy a few more posts like this one.  

More Blessed to Give, Than to Receive

Human Resource Department Day/День кадровика: 69 Pieces of Paper And Your Blood

Vivant et repulica…et qui illam regit!

Vanilla Love vs. Alfred A. Knopf: A Blogger's Dilemma

 A guy at a thing asks me what I do.

“I write,” I say, punching the “T” for emphasis.

“Oh really?” he says, mildly interested, “Publish anything?”

“Oh yes,” I say, “I write a monthly humor column, and I’m working on a book about Russia, and,” I pause for effect, “I have a blog, which is about the funny side of life in Russia.” 

“Do you like, make any money from the blog thing?” he asks.

God, how mercantile, I think.

“Do I monetize, you mean?” I query, tilting my head to one side and using the singsong, quizzical, and annoyingly gravelly voice well-educated women five to seven years younger than myself seem to these days.  “Put ads on it you mean?”   I note with satisfaction: my jargon has momentarily trumped his condescension.  He nods.  “Oh no,” I say, shaking my head gravely, as if he has offered me something toxic like cigarettes or a ride on a Harley without a helmet, “No, I don’t do that.”

“What’s the point, then?” he asks genuinely perplexed.

I dial up the gravel several notches, and babble about keeping the space pure, creating trust with my readership (all six of them including Aunt Debbie), and drop in some other sound bytes I read in “Typepad for Dummies” about monetizing.  His eyes begin to wander about the room, and pretty soon, he knocks back the rest of his glass in a gulp and mutters something about getting more to drink and beats a hasty retreat.

Cards on the table:  I can’t monetize, because, if I did, my blog would be immediately and irrevocably overrun with semi-pornographic ads for Russian and Ukrainian women looking for Western husbands. Sites called creepily racist things like “Vanilla Love,” would establish permanent resident alien status on the extreme right hand side of my blog, flashing garish neon blue messages:  “Hot Ukrainian girls are waiting for you!” or “Russian babes want you!”  

This isn’t the message I’m trying to convey.  I spend a lot of time researching various things for a part of the blog which covers all of Russia’s professional and public holidays, and doesn’t matter what I Google or Bing:  “Siberian dumplings,” or “Baltic Fleet,” or “Peter the Great,” there, alongside the search results is a column of scantily-clad live blond Barbie dolls called things like “Snezhena,” which I’m pretty sure isn’t even a name.   Surely, I won’t be taken seriously as a blogger or a writer if I allow this kind of cyber hoi polloi onto my “platform.”  

And yet…  If I were, hypothetically, willing to go down the monetization route, it occurs to me that I could make a fortune, although I cannot believe this Russian bride industry is still going strong twenty-five years after perestroika.  Are there still Western men of sub-human intelligence who are stupid enough to be taken in by: “Hello, my name is Masha and I have not found my soul mate yet,” or “I’m Nadia, I’m 19 and I’m a student.”   I thought they all cycled through the system a decade ago: 60-something expat men making asses of themselves by marrying the first 20-something guided missile they meet at work; or oil rig employees too cheap or lazy to get on a plane themselves, sending off for 19-year old Nadia, and then astonished when 37-year old Lena plods down the jet way, with her 72 year-old mother, Svetlana and 11-year old son Ruslan in tow; and, on a somewhat later flight, 51 year-old Vlad. 

Googling “Russian meteorologists” today, there was so much resulting “Vanilla Love” that I started to seriously re-examine my whole approach.  Should I face facts, give up the high road, and turn the blog into a “portal” rather than a “platform?” If I’m honest, most of the traffic I get is from people looking to save a failed Beef Stroganoff, which would be great if I were a food blogger. But I’m not. Could I offer advice to these silly men?  Could I sell them my unique, patented insight into the personality of a Russian woman based on her first name?  “Olga,” for example: very scary.  Could I blow the lid off the “Snezhena hoax?  Should I de-gravel my voice and start making some real cash?  $14.99 a month, I could charge, or 12 months for only $99.99.  I could get a PayPal button!  

Or would I just get people looking for cheap vanilla extract?

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Author's Note:  This article first appeared on "Powder Room Graffiti"

Ecologist’s Day/День эколога: Making Global Warming Work for Russia

“…Global warming might even benefit countries like Russia as people would spend less money on fur coats and other warm things.”

~ Paraphrase of comment made by President Vladimir Putin at a climate change conference. 

Today is Ecologist’s Day in Russia!  It's also my Dad's birthday, and since he's a very dedicated recycler, we'll wish him a very happy day today!  Happy Birthday Dad!!!   Today we take our SPF 50 sun hats off (briefly) to all of the professional ecologists, activists and all those who spend their professional lives worrying about Russia’s ecology and the effects of climate change on the world’s largest country.  

“There’s your global warming,” says HRH in a snarky tone during every major snowstorm. He, like many Russians believes that global warming is a figment of the Western imagination.

“Climate change,” I correct him sternly, “and it doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t snow.”

“Humph…” says HRH non-committed.

HRH is not really interested in going green.   He’s not up at night fretting about his carbon footprint.  He refused to let me consider getting a hybrid car, which he feels are for sissies.  I’ve explained the recycle concept to him until I’m blue in the face, but he still throws beer bottles in with the regular trash in Northampton, and in Northampton that is worse than larceny. There is no recycle program in Russia, and this was brought home to me rather vividly when Tolya the driver watched open-mouthed as my mother washed out a cottage cheese container with soap and water and left it on the draining board during her last visit to Moscow.

“Why did your mother do that?” he asked when we were alone in the car.

I explained that she’d spent more than half her life separating paper from plastic, and keeping boxes in the basement where glass was categorized by color, and tin cans, their paper labels removed and added to the paper pile, scrubbed and flattened.

“Why?” asked Tolya.

“It’s better for the environment,” I said rather smugly.

“Oh,” said Tolya.

 Driving around Moscow, you often wonder if “better for the environment” is a phrase that ever crops up at government meetings…and I don’t mean the ones where they are trying to slap a huge environmental tax fine on Shell for supposed environmental damages (and I suppose this is not really the week, month, or year for me to discuss other people’s oil spills is it?).  But it is true that there are lots of noxious fumes belching out of smokestacks and car engines, and those are the ones we can actually see.   The air quality in Moscow is not super: I have to neti pot twice a day and I only wear my contact lenses if I am taking pictures, and by the end of a morning, my eyes feel like sandpaper.

The bad air quality is what sends everyone racing off to the dacha, crying “Ekologiteshki chisto!!” (“Ecologically clean!!) Velvet’s horrible school in Moscow was in the middle of nowhere because it was a neighborhood that had the cleanest air quality, but everyone used up way too much petrol to get there.  But no one seems to worry about that, or global warming, or climate change.

I believe in climate change, and I think anyone who lives in the Northern hemisphere who doesn’t is either on some very potent prescription drug or needs to be.  Summers in New England, which used to be so pleasant: warm clear days and chilly nights, have become unbearable: hot and humid and buggy, and miserable.  The winters have got much milder, and good luck to anyone trying to get over the river and through the woods on in a sleigh on Thanksgiving, even if the horse does know his way.    

There is a theory out there that Russia could do very well out of climate change: the frozen steppes could become dense Northern forests and the dense Northern forests could become tropical paradises.   All the goodies like coal, steel, gold, and oil lying under the permafrost could start bobbing up to the surface, which would make them much easier to pluck out of the ground, so the Chinese might not have to invade after all.    Moscow’s climate would shift such that it could become, along with Warsaw and Stockholm, the world’s premier wine-growing regions. Before it turned into swampland and then one large ocean after the polar ice caps melted down.

Imagine: Chateau le Kremlin 2108: a very good year.

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This post is part of The Stunt

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Dear Reader:

How did you celebrate Ecologists Day?  What's the recycling like where you are?  

Day of the Chemists / День химика: Russia’s Unquestioned Contribution to Civilization

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,

And there may be many others, but they haven’t been discovered.

~ Tom Lehrer

Today is the Day of the Chemists!  Today we celebrate all the eggheads who mix things up in test tubes and make the world a better place to be! The most famous Russian chemist is Dmitry Mendeleev, whom we last saw trying to get Russia to adopt the metric system.  Mendeleev came up with the Periodic Table of Elements, a systematic grouping of the elements by atomic weight.  He claims to have seen it in a dream, and then wrote it down.  He won the Nobel Prize and all kinds of other cool stuff, like having the Periodic Table etched into the wall of a house he used to live in.  I wonder if, in his wildest dreams, Mendeleev could have imagined the popularity of the Periodic Table as a shower curtain.  Seems unlikely.

 Alexei Soloviev, the COO of The Bank I used to work for, and I spent one rather dull winter week, trying to come up with a list of ten things Russia had invented or given the world.  It was the week we both discovered Wikipedia.  We had incredibly high standards: for example, the Kalashnikov rifle didn’t qualify because you had to have invented the firearm, which Russia didn’t do.  We looked at space exploration, but the French were responsible for coming up with the original technology for that, and if you don’t count that, then you have to give it to Italy since Leonardo da Vinci had some pretty definitive drawings.   We looked at vodka, which was invented by the Swedes, although our buddy Mendeleev was responsible for answering his country’s call by coming up with the chemical “standard” for vodka.  We had the radio screaming match.  We looked at a number of things, which are useful to mankind, that were invented by Russians who emigrated to other countries, such as helicopters and television, which I ruled out as possible entrants.  That’s like saying Maria Sharapova is a Russian tennis player, about which Alexei and I had a heated argument, which I eventually won.  Of course Maria Sharapova isn’t a Russian tennis player…how silly is that?

This is the kind of argument one does best to avoid with Russians.  They are the first to tell you just how truly useless their country is, but suggest that Maria Sharapova is not a Russian tennis player and they go ballistic.   They moan and groan about how badly things are run, but throw a national conniption fit when their gold medalist figure skater doesn’t win another gold medal and behaves badly in public.  A Russian can bore you to death over all the reasons why the government is going to hell in a handbag, but just you try to suggest that other countries took part in the Victory Over Fascism and you find yourself feeling like you’ve done 16 rounds with a heavyweight.

I did finally give Alexei these points: Russia did invent the musical synthesizer, chromatography, and synthetic rubber.

But the big contribution remains the shower curtain.   Russia definitely gave the world The Periodic Table of Elements.

However, it took an American Harvard professor to really make it a hit:

Happy Chemists' Day to Russian Chemists everywhere!

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This post is part of The Stunt

Author's Note:  photo of Dmitry Mendeleev's memorial statue from wikipedia, photo of shower curtain from amazon.com

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Dear Reader:

I welcome your thoughts…if you know of any other contributions to world culture, science, know-how or that ilk, please leave me a comment below.

All Russia Library Day/ Всероссийский день библиотек (День библиотекаря): The Call Number Girls

My library was Dukedom large enough.

~ The Tempest, William Shakespeare

  My buddy Joe Kelly is what Yiddish speakers call a mensch – a great guy who seems to have an innate sense when to turn up..  In May of 2005, I was single-handedly unpacking and shelving my book collection in our new flat in Moscow.  I had been itching to get this done, and so had spent much of the day, unpacking and stacking boxes with careful labels announcing, “Fiction Buchan – Dickens,” or “Dan Brown Studies,” and “Queen Marie of Rumania bios.”  When Joe showed up, looking for a clean bathroom, a cold drink, and a nap on my new couch, he found me more than ready to take a break.We sipped our ginger lemonades, feet up on piles of books, as we surveyed the stacks on the floor and partially filled shelves, which stretched across the length of two rooms.

“Want me to help you throw these up onto the shelves?” asked Joe.

“No,” I said, shaking my head, “Thanks…but I have to figure out where to start each section…that will take me a while.”

“Dude,” said Joe laughing, “what do you mean…section?”

“You know,” I explained, “like biography, early church history, interior design, fiction, foreign fiction –“

“Jenny B!” exclaimed Joe, laughing his head off, “you really catalog your books…like according to what, the Dewey Decimal system?”

I was confused. 

“Don’t you?” I asked.

Joe is still dining out on this…he calls me the Call Number Girl, and because he’s Joe, it’s funny.

Today is All Russian Library Day! From Kaliningrad to Nakhodka, we are celebrating Russian libraries and librarians!  Be sure to take a moment and stop off at your neighborhood public library and thank the librarians for all they do to make our lives richer, fuller, and happier.

That, of course, could be a problem if you live anywhere between Kaliningrad and Nakhodka, because you might not be able to get into the library.  Not unless you have a special access pass (which is very different from a card) like the one Lyudmila, the gutsy husband-hunting heroine of “Moscow Doesn’t Believe In Tears,” finagles in order to spend a Sunday afternoon in in search of a likely-looking graduate student in Moscow’s Lenin Library.

“What are you going for?” asks her more practical and studious friend, Katya, “surely not the books?”

“Well,” says Lyudmila, “you see…there is a cigarette break room.”

It goes without saying that there isn’t the Library culture in Russia that exists in the West.  There are libraries, to be sure, but you don’t get taken to them in a stroller for Story Hour as a toddler, or exhaust the Young Adult section by the time you are 13.  You don’t inhale Victoria Holt or become riveted by Nicholas & Alexandra.  They don’t offer free Internet access, and aren’t staffed by nice people who talk to you as they check out your books about the latest Rachel Cusk.  They certainly don’t hunt down an out of print copy of “My Ordeal” by Queen Marie of Rumania for you. You can’t check out a DVD of “My Man Godfrey” when you are feeling blue or a 30 hour engrossing Book On Tape for a long car drive…in fact you don’t check out anything, you stay in and read stuff there.  You don’t volunteer to go to an endless series of what are known in my family as “regularly scheduled emergency meetings of the Library Board,” on cold January nights.

There are no real libraries in Russia.    Not that I could find.  Not that satisfied my insatiable desire for books.  There is the Library of Foreign Literature which doesn’t smell super, but is a place where you can go and sit and read Jane Eyre or a three-month old Time Magazine if you are that desperate, but you have to bring six copies of your passport and leave your first born as hostage.

I took three books with me to Russia in 1992, and I read them until the spines cracked and the pages were waterlogged.  When Saint Steve came out with the iPod and I could download audio books, I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven.   English books were like gold in Moscow:  every trip to London included a long session at Hatchard’s or a slow trawl up Charring Cross Road.  You had to know someone really really well to lend them a book, and Russian drivers criss-crossed Moscow to deliver and return the precious commodities to book club members.  Today, my own library in Moscow to me seems nothing short of miraculous: Over 2000 volumes: impressive lit in the public areas of the flat, comfort lit downstairs in the privacy of the bedroom.  Each one, a triumph over logistics.  Each one, a friend.  Each one painstakingly trawled for in used book shops or online to satisfy the completist in me:  my childhood favorites added to Velvet’s shelves: Laura and Mary, Heidi, and Frodo joined the five sisters from All-Of-A-Kind-Family, and made room for newcomers Princess Mia, Harry, Ron and Hermione.

 As Velvet got older, she would ask for new stories and I’d pull Lizzie Bennett, Linda Radlett and Fanny Logan, Patrick Dennis or Scout down from the shelf.  

My books keep me company and make me feel safe.  It isn’t too much of a stretch to say they keep me sane.

After we closed on the new house in Northampton, title documents in hand, HRH suggested we head off for a long celebratory lunch at our favorite French restaurant, Bistro Le Gras.

“One stop to make first,” I said, climbing into the car.

“Where?” asked HRH, puzzled.

“The Forbes Public Library,” I said, “I want a library card.”

Happy Library Day to librarians – wannabe or otherwise – throughout all of Russia and the world!

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This post is part of The Stunt.

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Dear Reader:

Let's shout it out for the Librarians!!!!! Leave a tribute by clicking on the comment button below, and don't forget to say "Thank You" to the people who make your library possible!  Consider becoming a member of your own local public library, volunteer for story hour, or just browse the shelves.  Or, if you're in Moscow, come and see my Library....if you are very good, I'll lend you a book!

World Wide Metrology Day/Всемирный день метролога: He’s Metric: I’m Imperial: How Can Love Survive?

Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;  Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.

~William Shakespeare (Measure for Measure)

 
He’s Russian: I’m American. He’s Male: I’m Female. He’s Metric: I’m Imperial.  Marriage is uphill work at the best of times, but marriages like ours mean you have to try just that little bit harder to achieve total understanding.    I imagine Velvet in therapy as a 42-year old saying, “No, my parents were happy enough, but they didn’t always speak the same language.”

And she will mean that literally.  HRH and I decided early on to bring her up bi-lingual and all the baby books agreed that the best way to do this was to have each parent stick to their native tongue.   After about a year, this became habit, and Velvet grew up listening to Mommy speaking English at Papa, and Papa responding automatically in Russian.  She speaks both, choosing her language to match her interlocutor.  This makes perfect sense to all of us, although we get some odd looks pretty much everywhere we go.

In bi-lingual marriages like ours, you sometimes have to push the PAUSE button, literally and figuratively to be sure you understand one another.   HRH pauses the DVD of the 30 hour classic Soviet spy thriller “17 Seconds of Spring” every 18 minutes or so to explain a phrase containing World War II-era military slang; and I pause in the middle of the pre-Christmas chaos to explain in detail why I’m tipping the garbage collector $50.   These cultural details are certainly very nice icing, but something as basic as weights and measurements – that’s the cake, and it is essential.

 Clearly, the burden was on me to go metric, and quite right too:  only the USA, Burma and Liberia aren’t members of the global metric club, and that’s not what I call an A-list group.   But, it was like going green:  such a good thing to do in theory:  we should all have a Prius, but it’s easier to get to a horse show in a Land Rover.

My learning curve was steep.  Math has never been part of my core skill set, and in the days before there was an app for that on metric/Imperial conversion, I made a lot of mistakes.   A kilo turned out to be about 2 times what a pound is, so I was always buying much more food than we needed.  This calculation allowed denial about my own personal weight to get wildly out of hand.  I knew that a 10K run was equivalent to 6 miles, so I did every calculation based on this ratio.   I never really understood meters versus feet, but, since real estate is a National Obsession in Russia, I have a highly accurate understanding of what a 90 square meter apartment is, versus a 220 square meter apartment, and when George, HRH’s godson reached the astonishing height of 2 meters, that made sense, but the rest was lost on me.  I have no idea how many square feet the house in Northampton is.  Like, a lot.

Weather also presented a challenge.  It was many years before I automatically understood that the perfect temperature, for me, was 17 Degrees Celsius, and it took HRH a while to realize that 23 Degrees F was not shorts and T-shirt weather.   I would have burnt the Thanksgiving turkey more than once, if not for a handy conversion table in the back of my grease-stained copy of The Silver Palate Cookbook!   

Kilometers and miles still present problems for us.  On his first trip to America, HRH was shocked to see the gas price, which in Russia is listed in litres, until we explained, by holiding up a plastic jug of apple cider what a gallon looked like.  Years later, he puzzled over the dashboard of our new Subaru in Northampton for a while before he admitted he didn’t know what the “MPG” dial meant.  

“Miles per gallon,” I explained.

“And, remind me, a gallon again is…” he asked, and I went to the store and bought another gallon of apple cider.

Of course, we should all go metric, just like we should all go green, if only so we never have to worry about MPG ever again.  It would give Sarah Palin and the Tea Partyers something to really get ticked off about, though I think if you explained it to them carefully, even they would think twice about the cache of being lumped in with Burma and Liberia.  

Today is World Metrology Day, celebrating the sense and sensibility of the metric system, marking the first Metrology Convention in Paris in 1875, when a lot of sensible people got together and decided upon a reasonable, universal method of measurement.

HRH would tell you that a Russian, Dmitry Mendeleev, about whom we will hear much more in the next few weeks invented the metric system, which is no doubt what he was taught in school, just like the one about Alexander Popov inventing radio.  Alas, no, HRH, sorry to disappoint you but the metric system was first dreamed up by a Flemish scientist in the 16th Century, first proposed in England in 1668, and polished to a high gloss by the French in the 18th Century.  Mendeleev certainly supported the move to a metric system, which Russia supported in a delusory fashion at the Paris Convention on May 20th, agreeing to “try” to adopt it, but, as anyone who has ever struggled through Turgenev and Tolstoy knows, Russia was still using its outdated units  by the late 19th Century.  And it is a shame they changed, really, because these have great names like piad (palm), verst’, krushka (cup), vedro (bucket), butilka (bottle) and butilka vinnaya (wine bottle) and others.   Imperial Russia did finally adopt the metric system in 1889; fearful it would be thought backward (surely not!).  The Soviet Union officially adopted the metric system in 1924.  America, as you know, along with Burma and Liberia, still waits.  

Happy World Wide Metrology Day to all those who think in terms of meters, grams, liters, and Celsius!

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This post is part of The Stunt.

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Dear Reader:

Are you metric or Imperial?  Do you think in cups, buckets, and bottles?  Do you know the point at which water freezes?  Are you sure?  More importantly, do you and your partner understand the fundamentals of your weights and measurements?  I’d be interested to know:  leave me a comment by clicking the button below!

The Day of the Baltic Fleet/День Балтийского флота: The Double Glazing on Russia’s Window on The West

And thus he mused: “From here indeed

Shall we strike terror in the Swede,

And here a city, by our labor, 

Founded, shall gall our haughty neighbor;

“Here cut” – So Nature gives command –

“Your window through on Europe: stand

Firm-footed by the sea, unchanging!”

~Alexander Pushkin (The Bronze Horseman)

(Your intrepid blogger's personal tribute to the Baltic Fleet in Leningrad circa 1990)

 Today is Baltic Fleet Day!  The oldest of Russia’s naval fleets was founded by Tsar Peter The Great, himself as part of his Herculean efforts to secure a “Window on the West” for Russia.  On this day, in 1703, Peter led his troops in a naval victory against two Swedish battleships, and thereby secured the strategic mouth of the Neva River, where he went on to build the naval city of his dreams, St. Petersburg.   

The Baltic Fleet, like the Black Sea Fleet, has a sticky wicket in terms of the territorial waters it defends, a historically complex relationship with its near-neighbors, and, of course, the base question.   One Baltic Fleet base is in Kronstadt, and the other in the Russian enclave, Kalingrad.  Kronstadt has the advantage of being cozily tucked deep into the Gulf of Finland, and Russia’s second city, St. Petersburg has its back. Kalingrad, formerly German Konigsberg, on the other hand, is handicapped by being the lone blueberry in a NATO muffin.  As with the Black Sea post, it’s a visual so check out this helpful map:

The Kaliningrad question has been in the news a lot.  Short history lesson may be in order: Soviet troops captured Konigsberg from the Germans in 1945 at the end of The Great Patriotic War and renamed it “Kaliningrad” after a prominent Bolshevik.  In 1991, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia said “Thanks, but we’ll take it from here,” which meant that Kaliningrad was cut off from the rest of newly forming Russia. Then those crybaby Baltic States and that wimp Poland went to hide behind NATO’s skirts, which meant Kaliningrad was more than just mildly logistically difficult.   Every time the US talks about putting missiles in places like Poland “to fight terrorism in the Middle East,” Russia drops a hint (thud) that Kaliningrad would also make a nice place to stick a few warheads.  Kaliningrad is a special economic zone, but some of the Kaliningraders feel they might have more fun being part of the EU. 

A few years ago, my friend Jack, who goes to Russia frequently for business, was being held hostage at a long liquid lunch in St. Petersburg with some tourism types.  This happens to Jack a lot, and not having much of a head for liquor, he was tuning out, letting his local representative do the heavy conversational lifting, until he vaguely noticed that the conversation kept including a funny word he’d not heard before, which sounded like the syllable “nat-“ (as in “fat-“ “cat-“ or “rat-“) and then “oh.”  Nat-OH.  Jack first thought it might be a newly opened summer palace, which, as far as he was concerned, are all unpronounceable:  “Gatchina,” and “Orianbaum,” Forchrissakes, or the ultimate tongue twister, “Tsarskoye Selo.”   But that didn’t seem right, because the battleaxe he was lunching with kept saying things like,

“But you know that nat-oh has absolutely no right…”

or 

“And you know, nat-oh never ratified..”

“Perhaps,” thought Jack, “it’s a new hotel and they haven’t got the price points we need.”  That seemed plausible:  God knows most St. Petersburg hotels were both overpriced and unpronounceable – after 25 years he still couldn’t say “Pribaltiyskaya,”  “Pulkovskaya,” or “Oktyabrskaya,” and, really, he thought, why on earth should anyone want to try?

“Putin is having all kinds of trouble with nat-oh,” said the Battleaxe.

“A-ha,” thought Jack, relieved he’d at last got the right end of the stick, “it’s a tourism ministry thing.”   He prepared to jump into the conversation, when his interlocutor said, bafflingly,

“And then there is the question of Kaliningrad.”

“Kaliningrad?” thought Jack, wildly, downing another shot of Stolichnaya in an ill-advised attempt to achieve some clarity, “Where the hell is that?”  Then, because he’d been on 461 city tours of St. Petersburg, he recalled that St. Petersburg had been called Leningrad from 1924 - 1991, (well, that’s not what Jack thought…but I’m supplying the correct information) and as The Battleaxe paused to take in another lungful of air, he interjected what he hoped was an overdue intelligent observation.

“I find it interesting that some people still call it that,” he said affably,

The Battleaxe leaned over and slammed her fist down on the table, making the silverware dance, and the crockery rattle.  Sour cream splashed onto the tablecloth.   Jack sighed, thinking that much – perhaps too much -- of his professional life had been spent in a semi-alcoholic-induced stupor, sitting across the table from Slavic battleaxes from the tourism industry who rested their titanic bosoms on the shelf of a groaning lunch table, and banged on the grease-stained tablecloth to make some emphatic point the vodka kept him from fully understanding.  Perhaps, thought Jack, it was time to begin to contemplate partial retirement.

“We are not giving it back!” she shouted, “No matter what nat-oh says!”

“Golly,” thought my friend, “this new tourism ministry is even more powerful than the old guys.”

“But who would you give it back to?” asked Jack, searching his memory for a sketchy understanding of 18th Century Russian history.

“The Swedes,” asserted Jack’s local St. Petersburg representative, who had much more of a head for lunchtime drinking and had been following along with a certain amount of wicked amusement. 

“The Swedes!?!?!?!” howled The Battleaxe, bosom heaving,  “What have they got to do with it.”

“NATO,” said the local rep, making it rhyme with ‘Plato,’ and kicking Jack under the table to silence him.   “You have to keep your eyes on them at all times.”

To Vice Admiral Viktor Nikolaevich Mardusin, and all those who serve with him – many congratulations on the birthday of the Baltic Fleet!

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Today is also International Museum Day, and your opportunity to weigh in on your favorite museum bathroom, pick up value, desirability as a runaway venue and other categories!  Be sure not to miss it!

This post is part of The Stunt.

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Dear Reader:

Thank you so much for stopping by on Baltic Fleet Day!  Is it part of your job description to have too many cocktails at lunchtime?  What's your strategy?  And, does anyone know why Finland hasn't joined NATO yet?  That seems silly...

Tax is the new Terror

Tax Day in the USA, and I don’t mind telling you I feel exceptionally smug, having slid my mustard-colored envelopes, marked with how much postage to pay from my wonderful new CPA into the mail box a whopping 24 hours before the deadline.   

This is a phenomenal feeling – albeit an expensive one – someone who knows what they are doing, has done your taxes, got it right, told you how much postage to pay, and you get the return in on time.   It opens up a host of possibilities.   One can look Officer Nobel of the TSA square in the eye, in the sure and certain knowledge that you ARE paying his salary.    One feels marginally less guilty about asking the stalwart librarians at Forbes to track down the 1923 edition of Queen Marie of Romania’s autobiography; and I, for one, plan to give Scott Brown a piece of my mind, if I should ever meet him.   This is on a par with that blissful moment they call you from the OBGYN’s office and tell you chirpily in their flat vowels that “everything checked out great, Jen” in regards to your latest scary over forty test.  

“Phew,” you think,  “That’s great.   For today, at least, I can rest easy.”

Peace of mind on this scale regarding taxes in Russia never comes this cheap, and there is never a total certainty such as I had at the Easthampton Post Office, that you’ve done your civic duty to the letter.   The minute that statue of Felix Derzherinsky, founder of the KGB, which loomed menacingly over Lubyanka Square was pulled down along with the Berlin Wall, a new and far more nebulous demon took over:  The Tax Inspectors.    Formerly the Tax Police, this huge, paramilitary organization is today a branch of the Russian Ministry For Internal Affairs, which makes them a first cousin of the present-day KGB and the notorious Traffic Cops.  It’s a shared skill set.  I always picture this organization as the lidless eye of Sauron in The Lord of Rings.  I picture them inhabiting a dark tower in a barren landscape like Sauron, when in actual fact they are headquartered in a delightfully proportioned Stalin-era building on The Garden Ring.  I researched their web site for this post and I can say that they have a complete list of the weapons they use, but no hotline or website help about how to file your taxes correctly. 

From the beginning of my time in Russia, taxes were the ominous cloud in everyone’s sky – sometimes only a distant smudge on the horizon, sometimes a noxious and pervasive fug that threatened imminent deluge.   The Yeltsin years saw everyone try – and epically succeed --- in avoiding paying tax:  understandable since post-perestroika rates ran about 3000% on income and profit.  Then Mr. Putin came on board, lowered the tax rate to 13% (Thank you Mr. Putin!)  but made it abundantly clear that taxes should be paid, paid in full, paid on time, and paperwork (which makes War & Peace look like a haiku) lodged correctly.  The Big Four, which was then The Big Five, made an obscene fortune charging frightened foreigners gazillion dollars an hour to explain the tax laws to them.   Accountants were the most powerful people in companies (I was so frightened of the bulldozer called Olga who performed this service at my company, that I used to throw up before our meetings).  Heads rolled over taxes.  The richest man in Russia was sent to Gulag 2.0 Siberia: a new twist on an old formula.  Taxes are the new Terror.

I just finished "The Whisperers" by Orlando Figes, which is a very chilling (read -40 degrees below zero) look at family and personal life during Stalin’s Terror.   

“It was so depressing…I could not put it down,” I told the distracted person on my left at a dinner party.  He seemed baffled, but that is how it was.  It gave me a whole bunch of insight into lots of things I hadn’t given enough thought to: like why old ladies in Russia never look you in the eyes, why no one takes any personal responsibility for anything, and why public servants don’t act as if you paid their salaries, but rather as if they had a license to fleece you further.

   I hadn’t given the Terror much thought for quite some time.  It is not my period for a start (I’m an 1825 – 1918 gal) and of course, it is not remotely amusing.  I’m not sure I’ll want to revisit it anytime soon, but my head is full of it at the moment.   One thing the book really drove home was the mood of the time: people living numbly knowing that the NKVD could turn up at any moment of the night, how they kept suitcases to the ready, and disappeared in the Black Marias off to Gulag 1.0.

 I made my way through the book, as one drawn to pick off a scab: despite the pain, the challenge of painstakingly maneuvering the fingernail under the rough leathery ridge of the scab, then the uneasy flirtation of easing the scab up, millimeter by incredibly painful millimeter.   You know that pain will follow pain, but you keep peeling back the scab, finally feeling the rush of adrenaline when the air prickles the raw pus beneath. 

It was that kind of read.

But tonight, at least, I shall sleep easy.

Getting To Know Noho

So here we are back in Northampton, and our focus will shift to this lovely part of the world for the next two months.  Because I’m here, and frankly, HRH is involved in a business thing with a group of people who are not known for their appreciation of the dry, subtle humor of your author, and he’s given me to understand that her take on life in the world’s largest country needs to be back pedaled.  A little.  From the little I know of this crowd (and HRH makes sure it is a very little bit), I think we should be okay: they don’t strike me as people who Tweet, I know they don’t have a FB page, and in general, they are the type who, should Google decide to leave Russia, they’d provide a car and driver to the airport.  We’ll still be looking at the funnier side of Russia (I have a fat file folder of potential material that is very good indeed), but we’ll be looking more at the social/family/cheesy decor side of things.

Very cloak and dagger, isn’t it?

But, let’s firmly train our attention on Northampton, or “Noho” as it is known, where we have not spent much time in this space, but which has been home since July of last year.  For the uninitiated, here are seven salient facts to set the stage:

1.    Noho is the Lesbian capital of the Northeastern seaboard.  I’m not sure how this got started (any Noho bloggers out there?  Helllooooo????  Do you know?), but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with…

2.    Smith College, one of the oldest all-women colleges in the country, located in just left of downtown Noho.   Smith has remained resolutely all female to this day.  Smith students, from what I can tell, are very hip and edgy, artsy, politically active in a good way, and, at the moment they are over the moon because…

3.    Local girl-made-good RACHEL MADDOW of the Rachel Maddow Show is coming to speak at their commencement this year!  Very exciting for the Smithies, and for what one (male) blogger called Lesbiania or Noho.  When she is not in New York, articulately squelching the Birthers and the Tea Partiers, The Divine Rachel lives with her partner not far from Noho in the Hill Towns.  No, I haven’t spotted her yet; I know this because…

4.    The women from Eileen Fisher  told me.   Of course, in addition to about 400 yoga studios, 3 bead stores, and two health food co-ops, Noho has an Eileen Fisher store.   I won’t lie to you, it was a deciding factor in choosing Noho as a residence secondaire, because, apart from some ratty sweatshirts and DANSKO clogs, I get all my clothes from Eileen Fisher – I don’t shop anywhere else.  Those who would like to know more can read this piece I wrote for a friend’s blog on wardrobe issues for the over 40 set.   Sadly, she shut the blog down, which is a shame, but she does have a busy schedule, two kids, and a Fellowship.  Anyway, I thought Eileen Fisher was going to be a good place to make some cool, savvy, intellectual, liberal-thinking new friends but…

5.    Sadly, this hasn’t panned out.   In fact, I haven’t made too many friends here, and this is beginning to worry me.   With 20-20 hindsight, I can see that maybe the tip-offs should have been that a.) In a small New England College town, unless you are working for the small New England College as a tenured professor, you are not going to be invited to anything, you can’t use the gym or the library and so you will never meet anyone; and b.) I’m not a Lesbian, nor do I have any (immediate) plans to become one.  I thought I might join a book club but…

6.    Despite dropping lots of hints to the people I have met, trawling through the Internet, perusing the local freebie papers 

 

and community bulletin boards at the two health food co-ops, since I’m not breastfeeding, nor surviving cancer, nor entering or exiting menopause, dealing with a learning-different kid, or anything like that, there doesn’t seem to be a group for me.  And before you weigh in with your next piece of advice, yes I did try to…

7.    Volunteer, but that hasn’t panned out either somehow: I tried some obvious suspects like Public TV or the Food Bank, but they haven’t really called me back (what what what’s wrong with me, apart from the fact I’m a heterosexual, non-lactating, WASP, right-side-of-premenopausal woman?) so I am still confined to going to things I either have to buy a ticket to, for which there is homework assigned, or to which I have to drive, or all those things rolled into one.   The driving thing, is, of course, bizarre for me, despite being Tsarina of the Road in Moscow, I never drove anywhere in the evening myself: everything was either in walking distance or Tolya, one of HRH’s two drivers, or someone else’s Tolya, drove me.  Here in Noho, it’s just me and my Subaru, and we’ve gotten to be great friends.  I invited some great friends from other parts of the world to come and stay, but everyone seems to either need to prosecute their PAs, or kneel at the feet of cellular life coaches.   And, you know, fair enough…I get it…but I’m feeling like I felt in 7th and 8th grade, and not just because that particular hellhole is only an hour away.

I’m determined to change all of this though!  Onward!  If I could make it in Moscow, believe me, I can make it anywhere and definitely in Maddowland. If Noho won’t come to me – I shall go to Noho, and while I’m at it, and because this is Spring, I’m going to have a systematic self-help, self-improvement, streamlining, weight loss, creative breakthrough orgy.  I’ve been cooking up A Plan…  

Stay Tuned!

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Dear Reader, thanks for reading this post.  If you read it all, you’ll know that I’m feeling a little blue, and kind of lonely, so I’d welcome your feed back, which you can leave as a comment below…how do you make friends in a new place?  Are you a member of a Pioneer Valley Book Club, which needs a new member to host your chardonnay-fueled discussions? If so, could you please come out of hiding? Would you like to have brunch?

Oh, Do You Know The Muffin Mom?

    Oh Happy Day!

      I made it!  Or rather, I made them.  The muffins.   It’s official – I’m a bona fide American Mom!

 

    Velvet’s current school, despite being a classic New England boarding school, has a group of very dedicated Moms.  To be fair, it seems to have a group of very dedicated Dads too, though, as per usual, one sees rather less of the dads, and certainly not at “Make A Muffin,” an annual tradition of bringing fresh homemade baked goods to the school for morning snack.  It is organized and executed by the Moms of current students who live close enough to the school to be there at 08:45 in the morning, complete with homemade muffins, which sounds easy, but is it?  It’s a well-oiled machine, “Make A Muffin,” and I was roped into it at a Parents’ Committee meeting, and before I knew what I was doing, I had rashly agreed to make 36 muffins.

    36 muffins is all in a day’s work for a typical American soccer Mom, but I was secretly sweating.  I had never made muffins!  You can search high and low in Russia and you won’t find anything that looks like a muffin.  Except, of course, in that place that pretends to be a BA Executive Club Lounge at Moscow’s Domeodedevo Airport, where they have these small, tight, dry, and slightly tinny-tasting muffins.   But I don’t count them as food, let alone anything as specific as a muffin.

    The world is, of course, divided into cooks and bakers, and I am definitely a cook.  I can make soup without consulting a recipe, I can, and often do, take the contents of my fridge that look like its time they saw the light of day, and make a fantastic pasta sauce from them.  I roast haunches of beef, I can dauphinoise a potato or julienne a carrot, and, thanks to Mom’s recipe book, I make the best chicken liver pate in the universe East or West of the Iron Curtain, but my track record of making baked goods is blotchy.   I worried about it, I tried to work on it, but nothing ever seemed to turn out the way the recipe suggested.  Cakes were flat, pies underdone, quiche dough refused to “set,” and my one attempt to make Yorkshire pudding made me feel that a second attempt would not time well invested.

    My friend Michelle, who went to the Cordon Bleu and can make anything, told me it wasn’t altogether my fault: there is something, and this should surprise no one who has spent time in Russia, about Russian sugar that is heavier than the sugar in the rest of the world.    She said the flour was dodgy as well.    So, I stopped worrying, and whenever someone would say, “what can I bring?” when I’d invite them over, I’d say “Oh bring a dessert,” and we’d end up with a Russian cake…which is made out of spun lard.  Looks super.  Tastes awful.

    Velvet’s school in Moscow was, I confess, uphill work.  Nominally British, it taught subjects in English to the children of the employees of Samsung, New Russians who wanted their kids to learn English, and the children of mixed marriages, like Velvet.  HRH refused to go to any school events after Velvet was 8, because it enraged him so.  This left me all alone on “international day,” when all the children were told to wear their national costumes and bring their national dish for a communal meal.  Parents were allowed – though not necessarily encouraged – to attend, and I would stand around, clinging to my friend Nora, who was the only American in the mix, trying to make polite conversation with Korean women, who nervously clutched their Louis Vuitton bags and nodded vigorously.   We all stood around with the 27 year old Russian moms doing nothing because we weren’t Scottish.  The Scots women had the monopoly on parent participation and they didn’t let anyone in the inner circle.  For her national costume and dish, Velvet diplomatically split the difference, dressing up in her Russian sarafan, the long and elegant traditional Russian folk dress, and elaborate kokoshnik, the beaded, tear-shaped head dress, which we all agreed was altogether more flattering than an Annie Oakley, Laura Ingalls Wilder, or Pocahontes outfit.  For balance, I made chocolate chip cookies, which is the only baked good item I ever managed in Moscow.  Of course, you can’t get chocolate chips in Russia, but we used M&Ms (try it) and I stuck little American flags into them, which I thought were festive, until I overheard one Scots woman, who had brought a store-bought packet of shortbread say to another, who had sent her sons to school in plaid skirts, “isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you ever saw?”    

    It was that kind of event.  Mind you, the Korean noodles were amazing, but I yearned for a more interactive kind of school: where they’d be glad to see you, with a Head Teacher who was a.) Sober, and b.) Could identify your daughter in a police line up.  A school where they’d be dying to get you on a committee even if you weren’t from Scotland.

    Be careful what you wish for!  At the current school, I had hardly got Velvet’s hardhat and boots unpacked, but I was immediately drafted onto the “Riding Committee,” which to be perfectly honest I had heard as the “Writing Committee,” and so was pleased and proud to be asked.  And then, before you know it, I had committed to sift the dry ingredients and make muffins.  

    I was cautiously optimistic, despite having always felt that muffins were kind of cupcakes with an attitude problem.   I went to Target and purchased, without any particular difficulty, two non-stick muffin tins.  This kind of retail slam dunk still leaves me breathless and giddy – time was I would have to go to three or four shops to get exactly what I wanted, and ended up with something that would do well enough.   I started to research muffin recipes, and realized that the active ingredient in most of them was buttermilk, which I had never been able to find in Russia (if any readers know – please please please let me know, only it isn’t RYAZHENKO), and this, too, seemed a good sign.  Buttermilk, I knew from my southern relations, was an agent of light and fluffy.

    I settled on lemon poppy seed for my flavor, collated different view points from cyber chefs, bought a lemon zester, and found poppy seeds at the local Stop & Shop.  I was all set to go, when I was brought up short by one of the Senior Administrators at Velvet’s school, with whom I’ve got chummy.  I was telling her all about suiting up to make the muffins.

    “You do know,” she idly threw in to the conversational batter, “that these muffins have to be bite-sized.”

    I took a hefty swig from my martini.

    “”Bite sized?” I gasped.

    “Oh yes,” she said.  “They are always bite-sized.”

    The next day I was up at dawn: making a beeline for Target, where, without any particular trouble, I acquired mini-muffin tins.  Back to the internet for more council and caution.   Back to the Cook’s Resource for mini-muffin paper thingys.    I queued up some unchallenging podcasts on the iPod and dove in to the deep end.

    Muffins, it turns out, are a synch.  They are a lot like living in America: simple, inclusive, uncomplicated, and optimistic.   I made the lemon poppy seed mini-muffins, then I made some full sized Linzer muffins, with raspberry filling, and then I rummaged in the vegetable and cheese drawers of my fridge and culled together scallion, thyme and goat cheese muffins.   Four hours later, I mixed up a fresh pitcher of martinis, collapsed in an exhausted heap, and gazed lovingly at the sheer yardage of muffins gracing my new kitchen island.   I downloaded some more muffin recipes – cheddar and jalapeno, crystallized ginger, sour cream coffee cake…

    Lord, preserve me from scrapbooking.

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Hometown

    In these troubled times, having a TSA horror story is like having an iPhone. Have awful TSA story – have traveled.  

    Nothing in this world is as boring as other people’s travel horror stories.  You get a lot of travel horror stories in expat circles: tales of planes grounded for six hours in Frankfurt, horror stories of flights missed by a mere and really so unfair thirty seconds, and let’s not even scratch the surface of the Russian aviation mother lode.   

    The only travel story worth telling is the one where my friend Sarah meets her fabulous boyfriend Estaban on a BA flight that had landed, and there was a strike, and they had to sit on the tarmac for 5 hours and lived happily ever after.  But, that incident of the Direct Intervention of God aside, I really dislike travel stories.  No sooner does someone launch into “and then I called the airline’s 800 number and you won’t believe it –“ but I mentally edge to the outer perimeter of the conversation, and start to make the grocery list in my head.  If they go on about a forced layover, I reach surreptitiously into my bag and make my iPhone ring (there’s an app for that) pull it out, grimace and say, “Oh goodness me, I must take this,” and flee.

    My latest TSA story, however, really is funny.

    HRH and I were coming back from our classic “don’t worry be happy” Caribbean idyll, where we had not left the resort for one blessed minute of the ten days.  We were tanned, rested, well fed, well read, very well watered, and generally in the sweet spot of married life.  

    And then we hit the airport.

    The Christiansted airport is not a state-of-the-art facility, and the people who staff it don’t strike one as coming off anyone’s “A List” of on-the-ball staffers.   Not a crack regiment.    Since St. Croix is officially US territory, this is all grist to HRH’s mill, and fair enough, since I spend a lot of my waking hours making fun of Russian institutions such as the Russian National Air Carrier or State Duma Committee on Public Holidays, and it gets printed under our own surname.  When he hits inefficiency even in this remote outpost of the USA, he feels its payback time.

    First up: a false start with a thirteen year old American Airlines trainee, who took nine minutes to work out that HRH’s last name ends in “EV” and mine is the same last name, only ending in “EVA” because, as I explained to him helpfully, “He’s a man, and I’m a woman.”  

    “And,” added HRH a little more menacingly in his practiced ‘Bad Cop’ manner, “I am also GOLD CARD Executive Club member,” which he set about proving by flinging the plastic on the counter.

    “Oh Darling,” I said effortlessly adopting my own ‘Good Cop’ parlance, “I am sure Mr. Lefebvre here knows that.  It must be in the system.” I turned a sparkling smile onto Mr. Lefebvre, who was desperately punching keys.

    “If he can read,” muttered HRH in Russian.

Eventually, two boarding passes spat out and --- is this boring? – onto the Border control

    We got up to the TSA desk and presented our documents to the Officer.  He looked the way they all do:  too swarthy, greasy looking skin, unfortunate pinky ring, white teeth, and spearmint chewing gum.   To me, they all look like extras on the Sopranos, but you can just tell they all see themselves as Kevin Costner or Harrison Ford. Our guy had a nameplate on that said, “Noble,” which I had to assume was his surname and not his provenance.   I also had to think that he could not have been that high up the TSA food chain.  St. Croix, after all, is not an international “hot spot” -- Anderson Cooper isn’t going to be live there just after these messages.  What self-respecting jihadist would try to launch a suicide bomb attack in St. Croix of all places?  But, it was right after the guy who tried to detonate his underwear, so they were taking no chances.  They were obviously on some heightened security brief, so HRH and I got the full treatment.

    Officer Noble scrutinized HRH’s red Russian passport, and my blue American passport for what he clearly felt was long enough to start making us nervous, which it didn’t, because Russian border control people are so much better at making you nervous.

    “Right, said Officer Noble, finally, hauling himself up from his hunched over position, and transferring his gum from one side of his mouth to the other, squinted at us and asked, “What is your relationship to this gentleman, ma’am?”

    “He’s my husband,” I responded promptly.

    “Oh, he is?

    “That’s right,” I said, turning to HRH for confirmation of the fifteen years of bed-making, 8 hours of labor with Velvet, the fact that I go to ALL the Parent Teacher Conferences, to say nothing of the last ten nights, and was annoyed to see him assume his, “I’m dealing with a congenital idiot in uniform” stance:  one hand on the handle of his roll-a-board, the other splayed on his hip, his head cocked and his mouth pursed in a simper.  He loves this kind of moment.

    Officer Noble proceeded to have another flip through my passport, in that way they teach them at TSA school: thumbing through it as if it were a stack of 50-dollar bills.   He would occasionally glance up, and it occurred to me to suggest asking him if he’d tried matching up the “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY” section of my passport with the information section of HRH’s passport, but I thought better of it.  Officer Noble might well think that was an obvious decoy, which would not have held much water once he failed to find the reciprocal page in HRH’s passport.  Russian authorities figure they have enough to do without screwing around with someone’s idea of their own emergency contacts.  The Authorities know whom to call.

Officer Noble stroked my Kingdom of Bhutan entry stamps suspiciously.

Then asked: “Ma’am where do you ree-side?”

    “Part of the year in Massachusetts and part of the year in Russia,” I said.  He furrowed his eyebrows: the Kingdom of Bhutan would have clearly been a more plausible response.  Officer Noble put down my passport and picked up HRH’s.  He flipped through it, rutching up the pages as he searched for something that didn’t make him think he had severe dyslexia.   

He finally heaved a frustrated sigh, closed the passport, then assumed a ‘Now I’ve gotcha,” expression and pulled out the trick question they teach you at TSA school.

    “So, where’s his home town?” he asked me.

    His hometown?  What did HRH’s hometown have to do with it? Then it dawned on me: Officer Noble thought I was Andie McDowell and HRH was Gerard Depardieu?  Was this a Green Card thing?  This was too good to be true.  Especially since I knew the answer, and the answer was a tricky one.

    “Berlin,” I said.

    Officer Noble pursed his oversized lips and snuck a surreptitious look down at the red passport’s info page.

    “Huh?” he finally said.

    “Berrrrrr-leeen,” I enunciated carefully, because the TSA crowd doesn’t get out much.  “In Germany.”

    Officer Noble seemed gob smacked.  He flipped the passport over, and checked the gold letters, which spelled out “The Russian Federation.”  He looked back up at HRH, who smiled and nodded, “Berlin…Berlin.”

    “As in “the Berlin Wall” I added helpfully, which I later thought wasn’t the smoothest conversational move, since people like Officer Noble are often of the opinion that the Berlin Wall, if anything, should have been reinforced and made higher.  But, while we certainly didn’t need to get specific on which side of The Wall HRH hailed from, I wanted to stay on the Berlin subject, since I had a growing concern that should HRH’s be asked to correctly identify my hometown, his pronunciation of “Oklahoma City” might be a bit dicey.  There was an added concern that, despite the four zillion forms HRH has had to fill out in Russia to facilitate our fifteen years of wedded bliss, he knew that this was indeed where I came from.   I certainly never encouraged anyone to put out press releases on that topic.

    “Where did you stay while you were here?” he asked HRH.

    HRH took off his “Sugar Mill” baseball hat, pointed to it and said, “The Sugar Mill.”

    Officer Noble took one more look at HRH’s passport, and then his eyes strayed to the area behind us where all kinds of straightforward TSA victims slouched in line: rum runners, Cubans with funky Green Cards, or, if Officer Noble got lucky, possibly even a loser jihadist who was going to try and pull a third rate terrorist attack on the puddle jumper to San Juan. Cases that were covered in the TSA Handbook, not like some wackado Russian, claiming to be married more than a decade to an American, but who hadn’t ever applied for US citizenship. He licked his lips, and transferred the gum from one side of the mouth to the other.

    “Anything to declare?” he asked, finally.

    “Wet bathing suits,” I said.

    Officer Noble shook his head wearily, as if he’d heard that one too many times, then stamped our passports and wished us a pleasant flight, conveying his conviction that this was a distinctly remote possibility.  We moved into the security line, and began to slip off our shoes and expose our laptops.

    

    “What the hell is ‘hometown’?” asked HRH.