People who park their cars in glass houses shouldn’t … build them in Russia

Over at the hilarifying blog English Russia, they’re raving in their endearing, barely grammatical English about how new “multistory automated parking garages” are going to save the commuter’s hell of Moscow from its dearth of available parking.

On paper, this idea makes sense.  Too much sense.  Nobody comes to Russia for convenient parking.  That’s like going to a biker bar for a Blueberry mojito.  Russia is supposed to be impenetrable, foreboding and crude, a kind of embodiment of shiny-happy American customer service’s worst nightmare.  It’s supposed to be illogical.

Needless to say, I was immediately against the idea the minute I heard it. Western capitalization of post-Soviet Russia almost turned Moscow into a McDonalds and may still yet, but its inexorable flow toward a smiley face-plastered future was luckily perverted by Russia’s prickly and brutal illogicality.

Of course, there’s still a good chance this sheer illogicality — I would say zaniness, if that didn’t bring to mind a Tom-and-Jerry cartoon instead of eternal, purposeless misery — may still wipe the pimple of this parking garage idea off Moscow’s greasy face.  Just looking at the complex gears required to raise and slot the cars into their parking spaces, it’s easy to imagine some drunken idiot jamming his Lada in like a well-placed wrench. Or figuring out how to overload the thing, bribing the supposedly competent “operator” to let him fit an extra car in, then another, until the whole “steklyashka” comes crashing down like a house of cards.  Or paying someone to shoot up a rival mob boss’s car on the third tier — I mean, the thing’s made out of glass for chrissakes!

In downtown London — wait, “Moscow-on-the-Thames” has already been overrun by the half-a-million Russians, let’s say somewhere a bit blander, like Toronto — this idea would undoubtedly take off, and probably earn some environmental credits from the government or something in the meantime.  But in Russia it’s just not meant to be, and I hope Moscow spits the first of these glass houses out like a rotten tooth.

End of the water

The water, in the Russian parlance, “ended” this morning as a result of a recent plunge in temperatures, putting a number of interesting developments in motion. First thing, Vadim, the master of the apartment, set up next to the toilet a bucket of water with a pot floating in it. How exactly this would counteract the temporarily out-of-service flushing mechanism remains unclear.

Later on, I went to “Planeta Fitness,” thinking to take a shower there after a nice workout and a spell in the sauna, as is my custom. All went according to plan at first; I knocked about the weight room, then sweated ten times more in half the time trying to outsit the burly Russians in the sauna. But soon word reached us through the shimmering-asphalt heat: “Goryachoy vodi net,” or, “There’s no hot water.”

I guess the old pipes throughout the city had given out like so many overridden nags under the freeze. It’s a real problem here in Petersburg, where everything’s old and under constant stress from the brutally damp, cold climate. And so the facilities at the health club had undoubtedly been overtaxed, putting me in an interesting sort of dire straits: Sweaty, between a Russian (read: insanely hot) sauna and a shower so cold it gave me an ice cream-cone headache within 30 seconds.

I might describe the sounds emanating from that sauna while we jumped between two temperature extremes as a celebrity deathmatch between Marilyn Manson and Ren and Stimpy, in Russian.

When I arrived home late tonight, water had been restored thanks to a jury-rigged hose running from a manhole on Fontanka street to the back of the apartment building. I asked Vadim if water often cut out during the winter (a clear yes), and why.

“The machine (water heater) is new, but the pipes are all old,” he said.

I asked why they didn’t renovate the local system. After all, they’ve been merrily tearing up Kazanskaya Street all this fall and winter, leaving me to step over discarded sewage pipes on my daily walk to class.

Vadim said the money just isn’t there. It turns out that it costs more to build a kilometer of road in Petersburg or Moscow than it does anywhere else in the world, as a result of the Russian-sized (i.e. huge) amounts of corruption and bureaucracy. So infrastructure projects don’t come easy, however desperately they’re needed.

If tomorrow’s this cold, looks like I’ll be taking a shower out of the teapot.

Russian winter vs. Petersburg rain

St. Petersburg rain wins.  We had over a week of beautiful snow cover, allowing us posers here in Russia’s “Window on the West” to play at experiencing the Russian winter.  But this week things took a turn for the warm and rainy, so it’s back into the muck of overloaded sewer drains and never-ending street construction, only this time in the dark.

We’re down to six hours of light a day, but as darkness continues to linger longer past the proverbial first crowing, soon we’ll be down to two hours of blessed light before night envelopes us in heavy slumber again.

Если есть в кармане пачка сигарет

I’ve always been jealous of smokers.  Standing around Joe Camel-cool, puckering your lips as you gaze heavenward and contentedly release a plume that will help kill the chelovek standing down the street, is a great way to relax.  I mean, what am I going to do when I need a break from the books?  Go get a cookie?  Even a cup of coffee’s out of the question here in Russia, since the bean choice ranges from watery espresso to instant coffee.

I hate having cigarettes on my breath all day, and the headaches that sometimes follow the buzz, so I’ve restrained myself thus far.  Even when I came to Russia and found that a pack of cigarettes costs as much as a pack of gum.

But at a concert or bar, I do like to wash my beer down with a few drags on a cig.  When I was in Italy, we drank our Chianti with Muratti cigarettes.  In Madison, Eli L of KATHMANDUMA always had me puffing “P-Funks” after a night at the bars.  And in Petersburg, we like to smoke Corsar [sic] of the Queen, even though they’re outrageously expensive, relatively speaking.

Today I found all three at the same cigarette stand.  Total cost: 120 roubles ($4.37).  Three packs of Russian Styles would have only cost me 63 roubles.

So now we understand why 60% of Russian men smoke, and one reason why the population is plunging.

“Но если есть в кармане пачка сигарет,
Значит все не так уж плохо на сегодняшний день.” – Виктор Цой, группа Кино

“But if you have in your pocket a pack of cigarettes,
It means everything’s not so bad, at least for today.” – Victor Tsoy, of the band Kino.  Listen here.

Back in Nizhny Novgorod

And it’s reminded me that the farther away from urban centers you get, the nicer people are.  We Midwesterners have always said so, and it’s true.  Here in this provincial big city (over a million people, but spread out, giving rise to a little-city feel), I can already feel the difference from the Petersburg-Moscow idea of velkommen: Glare at you and spit out a one word answer, how dare you ask a question, especially if you’re a foreigner, and most likely one of those hedonistic Americans, to boot!?

To give you a concrete example, I simply asked the ticket collector today if this was the most direct tram line to the Belinskovo, and she made sure that the new ticket lady after the shift-change tell me when to get off.  Now I really feel bad for all those times I “rode rabbits” (a colloquialism that means “to use public transport without paying”).

Hare Krishnas in the former capital of Bolshevism

So I was walking down the street in Moscow Monday when my new aquaintence Testa, an ethnic Indian now studying in here, pointed out the Hare Krishna temple near Khodinko Field.  The “temple” was actually a combination of trailers and other temporary housing in the kind of makeshift structure elementary schools put up after a natural catastrophe.  Only in this case, the catastrophe was caused by the Russian Orthodox church and the stolid workings of the government bureaucracy.

Russian Hare Krishna followers have been trying to build a temple here for years but have run into opposition from the government, which sympathizes with the Russian Orthodox Church as the traditional national faith.  I was told that now most of the bureaucratic hurdles have finally been cleared and a real temple will soon be built.

We decided to check out the temple and wound up seated in a circle around a Russian devotee who lulled us into a stupor with his gentle religious entreaties and philosophical musings.  “Religion without philosophy is fanatacism,” he began (in Russian), “and philosophy without religion is empty words.”

We finished up the lovefest by singing the Maha Mantra and eating coconut baked goods.

No converts were made that day, but I do have to respect the Russian Hare Krishnas, who are still trucking after years of Soviet, and now Russian, government oppression.  Since Russian Orthodox is now becoming a de facto state religion due to the happy cohesion of its anti-Protestant direction with the government’s anti-Western streak, I’m all for anything that will prick the little toe of the Russian Orthodox giant.

An American-bashing vacation in Moscow

Katya brought along her camera to document the protesters' agenda (which turned out to be nebulous discontent directed at America). "It interests me how the government brainwashes the youth," she says.

I finally had my first run-in with Nashi (“Ours”), that foreigner-bashing, Putin-loving, sex camp-organizing government-sponsored Russian youth movement, and even lived to tell the tale.

Nashi and its “Dobrovolnaya molodyozhnaya dryzhina” (“Volunteer youth brigade”) organized yesterday’s “American show” protest outside the American consulate here in Moscow, which I checked out with a couple Russian friends.  Buses were parked up and down the block, having brought in massive amounts of youth from the provinces.

It wasn’t clear exactly what the protest was about (the announcement on americanshow.ru enigmatically reads “You will find out what the real American show means”), but the theme definitely centered around some sort of vague, anti-American rhetoric.  Attendees were asked to bring pumpkins — Halloween is indeed celebrated in Russia, mainly by nighttime revelers — which were then supposedly going to be decorated with the names of Iraq War victims.

The mysterious protest pumpkins, which were somehow related to the Iraq War.

I kept a low profile given the high number of xenophobes and policemen (also often unfriendly to foreigners), but my friend Katya was luckily up to the task of ferreting out the motivating factor for these young protesters.

Besides a free vacation to Moscow, there wasn’t much of one.  The first “chuvak” (dude) we asked said he was protesting war and especially the wars for which America is responsible.  The second cited the world economic crisis caused by the U.S.A.

“If Europe is also shown to be responsible, would you protest against Europe?” our intrepid citizen reporter inquired.

“I don’t know, it’s all the same to me.”

“And how is the economic crisis connected to the names on the pumpkins?”

“I have to go.”

Admittedly, the U.S.A. is no angel.  But especially now that the ruble is falling, it’s just a convenient scapegoat.

Almost any Russian who actually knows Americans seems to disagree with such comfortably ill-defined hatred.  As Katya said, “No country is all bad or all good.”  But when so many of the next generation here think otherwise, and do so with the Russian government’s wholehearted support, it’s clear we’re careening toward another Cold War-style cultural conflict.

As evinced by the “American Show” video on the Web site, the cheesy propaganda has already arrived … but more on this in the next post.

The Russian academe: “Empty words”

I’ve already griped a bit about how those lucky Russian college kids get to hang out and skip class all semester, as long as they buckle down at the end for the oral final exam. Now, my latest finding: When it comes to academic writing in Russia, he who says the least with the most words achieves success.

I’ve long since come to the conclusion that however much ass the Russians kicked in the sciences during the Space Race and the Cold War, it didn’t transfer over to the humanities, which has gone from a Marxist-Leninist propaganda scheme to a giant playground for anyone slightly inclined to pick up a book now and then. As my American lit-major friend often likes to say, the work demanded of students in the Russian undergraduate lit class he’s auditing is “eighth-grade level.”

Yesterday’s session on how to write a research paper in Russian just confirmed me in my belief.  In the words of our academic advisor, the secret is “many empty words.”  Rather than say something as plebeian and concise as “This is an important topic because …”, it’s much better to ramble on for a few paragraphs to the effect of “We can deduct from the trend arising from such a phenomenon the critical nature of this topic …”

Once you throw in an elaborate table of contents detailing every section and a bibliography that includes any title you can get your hands on, whether or not you used it, a 20-page paper really only requires 10 pages of actual work.

And don’t get too many ideas about the “actual work” you’ll be doing.  In Russian academia, the student is a reflection rather than a product of his or her instructor.  That means you sum up the literature your prof deems valuable and echo the thoughts your prof has on the theme.

The pros: Every paper churned out by this inane mechanism is a great stepping stone for the next student who wants to get a firm grasp of the literature on your topic.  The cons: Too much original thinking is considered a bad thing, and your prof gets their name on the top of the finished product.  And so the notoriously long-winded Soviet political-speak meets Humanities 101.

Gas attack, round 2: Not the children!

So you didn’t believe me when I wrote about being gassed out of a popular St. Petersburg bar?  Well, it happened again, this time at the St. Petersburg Secondary School Specializing in English and Finnish.

Caveat: I wasn’t there, but I trust my sources.  A group of kids apparently didn’t want to take an exam and went a step beyond playing hooky by dropping some type of heavy-duty tear gas.  It spread throughout the second and third floors of the building, so my Russian friend who works at the school decided with another teacher to lead all the students and staff to the first floor.

Here’s where things get ridiculous.  The director of the school ordered everyone back to work and locked them inside.  The teachers couldn’t open their office window, and the gas soon became unbearable.  Everyone was coughing and crying and generally being miserable, so when a doctor arrived she naturally advised a hasty retreat to the courtyard.  The director again told everyone to go back to work, but this time they remained outside until the gas had sufficiently dispersed.

The worst part is, one teacher experienced some sort of heart seizure as a result of the gas and is still in the hospital.  As for my friend, she has to stick a needle in herself twice a day to ward off lingering effects of the gas.

The hands-off approach to public safety has often surprised me here, but this blatant disregard for people’s — not to mention children’s — health takes it to a new level.  That is, unless you consider the fire at a Moscow business institute last year, when another group of students found their escape barred by a locked door.

At least this time, nobody died. This is a small consolation, however, since safety is obviously still an unresolved issue here in Russia. Unheeded safety codes are undoubtedly a main factor, but there also seems to be a cultural attitude that to prepare for the worst is at best unnecessary and at worst akin to admitting defeat.

Luckily, I spend most of my day on the second floor of my university. And I’m going straight out the window at the first whiff of trouble.

The fire extinguisher my friend's Russian host family is required to keep handy. This regulation, of course, is enforced by Americans. If the Russians don't meet it, they don't get paid.

Ode to a Fly on a Cucumber

A babushka examines the produce at Сенной Рынок (Sennoy Rinok).

An open-air market isn’t the first form of trade when you think of Russia, the country whose winter conquered Napoleon’s and Hitler’s armies, the land whose peasants used to sleep on top of the stove, and the birthplace of the radiator (although this is disputed). Nevertheless, the bazaar-style market (рынок, “rinok”) is an integral part of Russian commerce to this day, and a damn fine thing it is, too. Those rinok sellers are out there hawking pineapples even when it’s a cold and rainy; in other words, every day.

An imposing babushka (notice a trend here?) advances toward the peppers with her bartering game face on.

Granted, the fly maternity ward you’re bound to find on every uncovered pile of “salty cucumbers” (pickles) doesn’t exactly whet the appetite, the giant tubs of goat cheese make you wish you remembered more of your fourth-grade unit on pasteurization, and the pounds upon pounds of steaming raw flesh in the damp meat section are nearly enough to convert you to Hinduism.

Does that smell rotten to you?

But where else can you try everything before you buy, even as you haggle over the price with the ubiquitous Uzbek manning the stall? For that matter, where else can you find prices that are flexible enough to fluctuate wildly depending on the seller’s mood, the short lifespan of natural produce, or the foreign accent of the buyer?

Despite the pitfalls (I’ve spent a weekend hunched over the toilet after a poor choice of salty cucumber), the rinok makes me pine for those long-lost days when not every food product came in a shrink-wrapped, Styrofoam-plated, factory-tagged and plastic-bagged package. When you could taste a product and know you were only one or two steps removed from its producer.

Several of my American friends who just arrived here are losing weight even as they eat like horses (the Russian expression is actually “Eat (guzzle) like a pig,” whereas a boozer “Drinks like a horse”), and the only reason we can figure is the lack of processed food in the Russian home. And no one can begrudge the taste; after you become acclimated, you actually come to enjoy having your salad doused in 80-percent milk-fat sour cream that’s fresh from the countryside.

Now if only the granola bar would finally arrive in Russia …