Sportivnaya - where we live

We live up on the eighth floor. From the balcony, the view is of the park at Novodevichy Monastery, and Sportivnaya, our neighborhood. Ahead is the city center: A spotlit Stalin skyscraper is just visible on the horizon. Leaning out of the kitchen window, you can see the university skyscraper, a golden, gothic-style tower standing on a hill carpeted with trees. Luzhniki Stadium is in the foreground, and when Madonna performed there in September, Ved caught strains of "Sorry."

People's Friendship University

I started my new job at The Moscow Times yesterday: good bye copy desk, hello City Wise, a lifestyle-type pullout. My first piece is a vox pop featuring foreign -- meaning dark-skinned -- students at Moscow's People's Friendship University, which since Soviet times has hosted students from poor, non-U.S.-aligned countries like Angola, China, Vietnam, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Ivory Coast. Skin color matters because there has been a slew of murders of African, Indian and South American students in recent months. A creeping, insidious racism lies just below the surface here, and it was reported Friday that Putin, usually so good at letting underlings make the ugly comments on NGOs and immigration for him, had called for the "ethnic hue" at neighborhood markets to be squeezed out, referring to workers from the Caucasus and Central Asia.

I hung out by the dormitories in the south of the city, careful to look as conspicuously like a harmless journalist as I could. People are nervous, I was told.

Adu from Cote D’Ivoire pointed to a gash by his lip where he was slashed with a broken bottle. Malaysian girls said they’d had their headscarves pulled off. Ved has been punched in the metro and shoved to the ground in a supermarket.

A woman from Kenya, Gladys, said she was staying in a renovated dorm that was gutted by fire in 2003, killing around 40 foreign students. I read the articles online later: Their building has no fire alarms, two of three emergency exits were locked, and according to some reports, firefighters transported white-skinned students to hospital first. (Read this from The New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/18/international/europe/18MOSC.html?ex=1387170000&en=c8463bdf6126d033&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND).

She once offered an elderly lady a seat on the metro, she said, to be told that the lady wouldn’t sit where a nigger had.

Only after the meetings on Friday, and hearing of Moscow police phoning schools to ask for lists of children with Georgian surnames, presumably for intimidation purposes (a teacher reported it to the press – and said she’d actually complied!), have I begun to reconsider Russia. I see evidence of the nastiness here every day as I leave home, with swastikas spray painted on bins in the park next door, and dripping Nazi SS slogans in black and red on garages.

The country seems as far from democracy as it did during Soviet times, and I can only laugh with other copy editors at the absurdity of the articles we read sometimes, listing the latest measure to ensure the authoritarian grip of Putin’s party on power.

Uzbekistan

(rest of photos to be uploaded soon)

The destruction of the Aral Sea is a manmade natural disaster of continental proportions. The sea, which straddles Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, has shrunk to a third of its size in the past 30 years. The two great rivers that used to supply it - the Amu Darya and the Amu Syr - no longer reach it after the Soviet planned economy declared the water was to be siphoned off for irrigating thirsty cotton plants.

Now the Uzbek town of Muynaq, which in the 1960s was on the coast, is 200 kilometers from the shore. There's still a fish on the painted sign at the entrance to the town, on a stretch of land called the Tiger's Spit, which formerly curved out into the sea. A dusty fishing trawler sits on a plinth by the town hall, and a rusty sign on an abandoned cinema creaks in the wind. Locals chased the retreating ocean with canals, but gave up as the sea's evaporation accelerated. The town fish cannery was supplied with catch from the distant Caspian until the 1990s, when economic forces finally dictated it close. There are 2,000 inhabitants left, subject to the climate extremes that emerged since the sea stopped modulating the weather: 50 degrees Celsius in the summer, minus 30 in the winter. Sea salt blown from the former sea bed has made the land barren, and agriculture is failing. Cancers proliferate, and the region has the highest rate of anaemia of anywhere in the world.

One of the worst things is, they knew it was happening. Commissions were set up. Expeditions filed reports. Locals recall vacationing at a holiday camp by the sea - except one year water lapped the huts, and a few years later it was already a few hundred meters away. But people profited from the cotton, indeed their livelihood depended on it, so the farming continued. Now it's though that even if the rivers did reach the sea, the destruction is irreversible. They've managed to stabilized the top quarter, in Kazakhstan, by building a dam, but the Uzbekistan portion is doomed. And as an added bonus, the shrinkage has connected a Soviet chemical and biological weapons plant built on an island to the mainland.

Today, you can stand on Muynaq's clifftop war memorial, and where once an azure sea would have been spread out before, you stare out at mile upon mile of sandy, scrubby desert. A scorching wind howls off the dunes. In the distance glimmers a small lake, part of an effort to restore the area's microclimate. And before it, their prows jutting out of the sand as if they were cresting a wave, lie fishing trawlers and barges that locals finally abandoned. You can climb all over them, into their stripped-down bridges and under their rudders, stare through their portholes and into the shadowy holds for storing fish, and open and close the heavy, rusting doors. A time, only 30 years ago, when they plowed across a wind-frothed sea seems impossibly distant.



Muynaq's airport closed as people left, and we reached it from Nukus, a few hundred kilometers south. Our guidebook calls it "a grim, spiritless city of bitter pleasures whose gridded avenues of socialism support a centerless town, only to peter out around fading fringes into an endless wasteland of cotton fields." It wasn't quite this bad, but not a particularly affluent place, either. It's the capital of a forgotten region called Karakalpakstan - Karakalpak means "Black-Hat People," although they've had to set up a research group to find out just what the black hat was (80 years of communism will do that to an ethnic minority).

We ventured on to Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand, and then back to Tashkent. I'm struck more now by the tragedy in the western half of the country than by beauties of the east. But of course, they were beautiful...

August 2006

Summer in Moscow is lovely, the sun toasting strollers during the day and neon lights shimmering through a heat haze at night. I met my boyfriend and we've rented a flat together, opposite the monastery where Chekhov and Shostakovich are buried. I travelled to Yekaterinburg and Israel. Tomorrow I'm going to Uzbekistan to follow the Silk Road from Tashkent to Samarkand. Winter is on the horizon: Russian summer officially ended a few days ago.

Journalism is fine. Russian frustrates me, but I've written articles on celibacy groups from India and pseudo-aristocrats from France. I'll update this more often..

Gone Religionin'

Am going to Israel in the morning for Passover. See ya later alligator.

Tubular Tallinn and Heavenly Helsinki

Last Thursday at 11 p.m. I found myself at Moscow's Leningradsky Station, straight from a long day's copy-editing and after a quick dash to the SOS International Clinic for stomach-infection-conquering antibiotics, meandering down the long departures hall, complete with a bust of Lenin on a tall column in the center, to my overnight train bound for Helsinki. Cabin attendants were stationed at the door to each carriage making for a sight as if from 100 years ago, in long fur-lined coats with gold buttons and a Russian shapka hats with the crest of the October Railway (a reference to the revolution) stitched to the front.

I was going to Helsinki to renew my Russian visa; the regulations stipulate that once your visa has expired you can't get a new one in Moscow, but instead must leave Russia, get a new one at a Russian Embassy abroad, and then return. Kiev costs $500, Riga $400, and Helsinki $250. London is one of the cheapest, at £150 for a visa in one day, but still a £220 plane journey away.




The train ride felt like a ride back to civilization. I was genuinely excited about the European Union: clean, everything works, faultlessly English-speaking, coffee shops, and even now I look back fondly. The concept of Europe has taken on a rosy glow in my head.




After a wonderful train sleep, rocked to sleep in a small, cosy cabin with the gentle clunk-clunk of rails below, I emerged in something of a masterpiece. The station is meant to be the crowning glory of some architect or other; Gotham City-style statues guard the entrance.




I decided to make my visa run into a holiday, and to spend the weekend in Tallinn. The ferry was rammed full of weekenders, and the Baltic Sea, magically, was frozen. It appeared that it would be perfectly possible to walk across Helsinki harbour itself to get to the boat, and on the sea there was a constant shuddering as ice broke apart on the bows. Seals, and their pups, were sat on ice not 100 meters from where we passed. I bought a 6 euro salad (natch, Europe), and for the three-hour journey read the "Da Vinci Code" (I couldn't be a snob about it forever).






Later I met a Latvian girl who was studying philosophy in Helsinki, and we huddled underneath the powerful hot air vent on the side of the funnel on the otherwise bitingly cold, windswept deck, chatting about our favourite French arch-theorists.




Tallinn is said to have the most complete medieval city center in Europe, and it felt to me like a refuge. It's only small, and surrounded by a more modern, perfectly pleasant center, but from Friday night to Monday morning I didn't want to stray outside its limits. It was as if there was a spell there, down its winding, cobbled alleyways, with its rows of crooked buildings and white-plastered churches, boutique coffee ships with rich cakes and coffees and restaurants at every turn, that I didn't want to break. In the evenings, flickering candles were placed outside the door of every restaurant and bar, and spiced almonds were roasted in the street. It was bitterly cold, hovering around zero with patches of snow in the street and ice on the hilly patches lethal, but the sky was pure, rich blue, seagulls cried overhead, the brilliant sun glinted off the meltwater, and tourists sat outside the cafes bundled up, drinking tea, staring up at the buildings around them.









Tallinn was a kind of intoxication for me. I ate so well there, and went to restaurants better than the last every night, all in 15th and 16th century buildings - I learned how much good food can contribute to a sense of wellbeing. Olde Hansa was medieval-themed, and although it sounds tacky now, in the setting of Tallinn it was perfect. The light were low and warm, the interior of massive timber beams, the tables rough hewn, waitresses in medieval getup, even the toilets featured a pot from which you were to ladel water rather than a sink. I was with my roommate in the hostel (below a strip club, but I never accidentally bumped into anyone entering or exiting -- perhaps unfortunately?), the owner of a winery in Oregon who fought in the Vietnam War (it was only a bit like "Apocalypse Now," he said), and we ordered mulled wine and honey beer, and vegetables and fish pickled and spiced, with subtle and multi-layered flavours that were entirely new to me.




A place subtitling itself as "The Embassy of Pure Food" was my secod night, with a Finnish flag hung outside colored green and white instead of the usual blue and white. Inside, serene and draped in plants, there were LCD TVs framed as if they were paintings, showing a slowly rotating selection of famous artworks.






The most magnificent eatery was Balthaser, calling itself a garlic restaurant, on my final night. Every item on the menu contained garlic, and was accompanied by little drawings of one, two or three garlic bulbs, signifying the strength. I of course decided that three was the only way to go, and so first course was garlic soup with roasted slivers of smoked salmon. It was beyond exquisite -- every mouthful burst with warmth and richness, I was actually smiling to myself. I had chili tuna for the main course, and -- in a garlic restaurant, what else -- garlic ice cream in a crushed almond biscuist for dessert. My taste buds had certainly already lost some sensitivity after their blasting from the soup, but still I could tell the ice cream was delicious, a garlic taste that couldn't quite be grasped but was definitely there.

I could write more for that soup, for those days in Tallinn when I wandered in and out of churches and perfectly kept museums, learning about wars long past and virtually forgotten - the Livonian War, various incursions by the then-mighty Swedish empire and counter-invasions by Russia, momentous battles that today earn little more than a footnote in history books. Plagues and beheadings, events so defining then, and more distant every day now.




Unavoidably, I'm remembering everything as being much too perfect. There were moments too when I was lonely, when I was tired of walking around, when I didn't want to go back to my hostel to bed but equally wasn't brave enough to go into a bar on my own. Travelling alone is difficult -- I found it tough for 4 days in Berlin, and it was only a little easier here. Like most people I have an ambiguous relation to my own company anyway: some days I want nothing more than to be reading a good novel (in this case, Coetzee followed Dan Brown) and drinking green tea in a Tallinn-Helsinki-Moscow coffeeshop, and on others I'm fidgety, and need distraction other than sentences.

It's like writing too, that awful oscillation of writing, when some days (or even hours) the words gush, and others everything sounds poorly crafted and naive. It's a question of practice, I hope.

The nationalism in Estonia, with flags outside many houses, especially in the old wooden district - where it had just rained and the whole street smelt of damp timber - was not offensive as it might be elsewhere.








Estonia sees itself as the victim of three occupations in the past 60 years -- the Soviet occupation in 1941, the Nazi occupation for the rest of the Second World War, and then the Soviet occupation from 1945 until 1991. They're not afraid of pulling any punches in lumping these two rulers together, of placing the creators of concentration camps squarely next to the Soviets. This is in the defiant Museum of the Occupation:




The swastika and the red star right next to each other, considered equally offensive and noxious. What a remarkable idea, given the continual glorification of the Second World War victory even now in Russia (just today I saw such a poster in the metro), the evils the Nazis are remembered for.

Estonia always considered itself a natural partner of Finland, and has even proposed a union with it in the past. Their languages are very similar -- neither related at all to the Slavic languages, or indeed any other European language; Finnish and Estonian, and their cousin Hungarian, are linguistic aliens among the Romance and Germanic variants -- have similar (blond, blue-eyed) colouring, and, according to a drunken Estonian I met in a bar at least, have similarly slow-burning and still, icy depths. It takes a lot longer to get closer to an Estonian than it does to a Russian, he said. I think I admire that. My Lonely Planet suggested a certain beach was good for long, reflective, soul-searching walks - "a favourite Estonian pasttime," it suggested.




The Monday-morning ferry to Helsinki was a delight. At 8:15 a.m. I was sat by the window in the sun-washed dining room, eating gravadlax and camembert, as the ship shuddered its way through the ice back to Finland, the occasional clear patch of water plunging the ship into smoothness and silence.




I spent the first day in Suomenlinnen, a fortress built by the Swedes in the 18th century on an island just off the main headland that the city is located on. Winter is not Helsinki's prime tourist season -- I felt a little sad that all the pictures in the tourist brochures were of people sitting in outdoor cafes in the sun and wearing shorts in the main square, as if the city lived for the 3 months when it was actually possible to do so, and was otherwise always awaiting its brief flowering, suspended in a deep wintry sleep -- and so the handful of tourists wandered between the three sites, of 18, that were still open out of season.






Tramping through the snow, I found myself at a frozen beach, guarded over by cannons on the hilltop next to it, and past them old bunkers slumbering under the snow high atop the fortress walls, creating a funny, hilly landscape that looked more than anything like someone had buried giant snooker balls there. I was presented with new and more delightful vistas at every step -- looking out to a white, frozen sea, ringed by snow-covered cliffs, the sun glorious overhead, the wind pummelling me, every stop provoking a smile, I even laughed out loud, couldn't hold back the occasional half-utterance to myself with a broad grin about the majesty and beauty of it all.






Back on the mainland the next day I got my visa -- thank you for permitting me to return, Russian Federation -- and spent my last day at Kiasma, the modern art museum there (oh yes, and I also went to H&M, which we don't have in Moscow. It was fabulous, Tom and Alex, enormous and completely free of crowds). Of all the exhibits that have stayed with me, I loved the room of sinister snowglobes;






the projection onto the floor which showed words randomly moving around and crashing into each other (the three fundamental words were love, hate and lies, which invariably becamse death as they hit one other);




and these paintings, with their painful, moving captions.




This one reads:

"We didn't make plans or talk about the future anymore. The future is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you're not going to get there."

I arrived back in Moscow last Monday, to the delights of the old Mayakovsaya metro station (see my very first post for the recently built part).

Jeffrey Colins of Burford Trust bank

I’m hoping that a quick blog entry will ease the extreme pain and mental blockage I’m experiencing trying to write this article.

My editor wanted a new angle on the city's elite gyms for the paper's Spring Guide, so he suggested I write about their bars and all the kooky things you can buy there. And it's true, there's some pretty crazy stuff. One place, aside from the obvious pumpkin and celery juice cocktails, offers portions of Burgundy snails. And they all have the requisite hundreds of giant tubs of whey supplements and ampoules of guarana and L-carnitine juice ("these'll keep you going all day!" said the bartender at Reebok).

After three hopeless days of trying to organize official visits with the gyms' PR departments, my editor said I could just go incognito and - check this! - order stuff and then get refunded by the paper. So I dressed up a bit smarter than usual, went in, gave my name as Jeffrey Colins (my dad's first and middle names), my firm as "a small English bank, Burford Trust" (my dad's company), and calmly nodded at the $2,500-per-year membership fee. "I'm here with my firm," I said, "of course, they're paying." Later I discretely scribbled names and prices down in the gyms' bars, and tried some frankly minging fruit juices which didn't seem in the least bit healthy, and also glugged a test tube-full of L-Carnitine walking up the road to my own £3-per-session gym. Effect? I felt a very slight burst of energy. -Very- slight.




I went to my first ever ballet last week -- an open rehearsal of Shostakovich's The Golden Age. I have the same Russian teacher as a ballet critic just over from England, and so Yelena put us in touch. We went to the Bolshoi's New Stage (the old building is currently under renovation as it's about to collapse) at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, chose our seats in the front row -- there were only a few hundred other audience members there -- and watched as it proceeded with full orchestra. Very excitingly, the head of the troupe kept shouting directions over a microphone. At one point the stage walkie-talkies broke, and the technical director sheepishly came on stage to sort it out. The director was furious - "What's going on?? EXPLAIN!!!" he screamed, terrifyingly.




Of course, I thought ballet was wonderful, and I shall definitely be going again. 'Golden Age' is set in the early days of communism in the 20s, and the characters are wicked capitalists, sinful 'Chicago'-esque nightclubbers or brave Soviet youths. The set style was Constructivist - a visionary communist avant garde that flowered very briefly before being replaced by Stalinism in architecture (which most people love) and Soviet Realism in art (which a lot of people think is quite dull).

We were chaperoned by the husband of the principal ballerina (Anna Antonicheva I think is her full name), and at the interval we all simply wandered where we liked in the working part of the theater. After, Naomi, the critic, interviewed Anna, and I, very poorly, translated. We also went backstage after the curtain fell -- despite seeming enormous on stage, the ballet dancers were mostly only a little taller than me. And all the girls were very thin. Anna, who was lovely, let me take a photo, although I nervously had to ask Naomi beforehand -- is this ever -done- in ballet interviews? Will she think I'm completely daft?




Moscow is all drip-drip-drip at the moment. It's not consistently above freezing, but enough that the dominant sound in the street is the clattering of drops of meltwater onto rooves and pavements, and the occasional enormous crash that makes everyone turn to stop and look as huge pieces of partially melted ice come flying down. The sky is sometimes blue, too.




I'll be on the overnight train to Helsinki this time tomorrow night. I'm going to renew my visa (absurd Russian regulations - for a new visa you have to leave the country and come back, expats call it the "visa run"), but decided to turn it into a little holiday. I think I'll probably catch the ferry to Tallinn, Estonia, as soon as I arrive, hang out there over the weekend as everyone says it's very cool, and go back to Finland for visa and 2 days of sightseeing on Monday.

Am I still writing-blocked? Probably. It it 10:30 at night, have I an article to write, a bag to pack, am I working tomorrow? Yes. Is it pure folly to continue writing this entry? (*click* as Ali closes Internet Explorer).