Nepal toasts Obama

Getting ready to go to “The Unofficial Obama Ball with DJ Yanik” at the Shankar Hotel, Kathmandu, Nepal.  Everyone the world over, it seems, is excited, bubbly and bursting at the seams with hope and change for Obama to take office.

The Road calls; E&B answers

Facing the grim prospect of ever colder and darker days in St. Petersburg, Eagle and the Bear has hit the road and will be traveling for the next three weeks.  The “plan” involves wandering around old churches and baking in a Finnish sauna in Helsinki, then hopping a flight to Delhi to enjoy the simple pleasures of sunny (?) India, where I hope the local cuisine will be a Viagra boon to my taste buds, which have settled into a premature, dull middle age after six months of pickles being the spiciest thing on the menu.

Then it’s on to Nepal, to visit Eli L of in Kathmandu, where I’ll lasso a few elephants, learn to tune up a Royal Enfield under monsoon conditions, and contemplate climbing Mount Everest.

Look for photos, tall tales and dispatches from base camp K2 (after the Everest climb, I mean).

New Year’s Feast

Ded Moroz, or "Grandfather Frost." He's like Santa Claus, except he comes on New Year's, wears blue and doesn't bring half as many presents.

I swayed slightly, the champagne bubbles working themselves into the lining of my empty stomach like so many grains of sand. I pictured myself face-planting into one of the ten or so Russian salads spread on the table before me (Russian New Year’s is traditionally celebrated “at the table”).

When I say salad, I mean it in the Russian sense, which is a heavy meat-and-potato based mixture designed to simultaneously soak up alcohol and put on a layer of blubber against the cold. No lettuce is involved; instead, the ingredients list resembles all those leftovers you might consider feeding your cat: Liver and eggs, beets under a layer of sour cream, pickles with potatoes and some form of grey meat, various mixtures of all forms of fish and root vegetables. Two standouts were “Silyotka under a Fur Coat” – potatoes, eggs, beets and apples on top of fish in oil – and the traditional Salad Olivye – potatoes, pickles, peas, onion, eggs and beef – that is always eaten on New Year’s.

It goes without saying that the second largest ingredient in any of these recipes is a coating of mayonnaise or sour cream. All were served cold. A mix of rice, crab, eggs, mayonnaise, onion, peppers and crab meat under cream sauce was the token international flavor at the table.

After I packed my gut like a real Russian muzhik and botched a toast to my hosts’ “gostepriimstvo” (hospitality), we headed over to a friend’s for a taste of Ukrainian New Year’s.

At least in comparison to the initial smorgasbord, the table here was still feeling the effects of the Ukrainian Famine. Three unidentified salads – one looked to contain either sardines or burnt string beans – glistened next to a platter of smoked fish.

As we sat down, Babushka Yulia, come from Ukraine to celebrate the New Year, just stared at me through the topography of her wrinkled face. Her wispy hair bound up in a platok and feet wrapped against the cold, she was a picture of the world-weary complacence that is so often found on the countenance of those who have lived through the Soviet regime.

I was too full to eat more than a bite of the “sala,” which, to put it nicely, is bacon’s sickly cousin. To put it bluntly, gelatinous pig fat. But my curiosity got the best of me when my attention was drawn to a 2-and-a-half liter water bottle of samogon (moonshine) glistening like pure glycerine on the headboard.

To the New Year!

Christmas in Peter

“I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams …”

Holyfield to meet the Beast from the East

Why is Evander Holyfield planning to step creakily into the ring against the current world heavyweight champion Nikolai Valuev, a St. Petersburg fighter who’s a quarter of a meter taller and 11 years his junior?

It’s not delusions of grander.  Far from resembling the hulking, near-mute Mohammad Ali, Holyfield seems to have a grasp of the unforgiving reality he faces as a 45-year-old fighter whose glory days are long gone.  The view has to resemble something like a toilet bowl as your head is propelled toward it by the school bully, in this case played by Valuev.  In Holyfield’s last bout, a loss in Moscow, the role was played by another Russian, Sultan Ibragimov, with all the intensity of DeNiro in “Raging Bull.”

Holyfield insists he has to keep setting a good example for his son, who apparently still hasn’t learned the lesson of perseverence in the 16 years since Holyfield first reconsidered retirement for this reason.

Why is it that great athletes see all of life as a playing field, or, in this instance, boxing ring?  As a Wisconsinite, I still hate to see Brett Favre in a Jets uniform, even if he is going strong, and it’s practically like crying in my borsch to see Holyfield cruising for a bruising against a seven-foot tall Petersburgian.

Now Holyfield’s likening himself to Obama.  From a recent New York Times article:

“This country is built on proving you can do it,” he said. To heck with prevailing sentiment: “I came up on the wrong side of the tracks, so nobody ever believed in me anyway.”

I respect the insistent never-say-die mantra.  I admit it’s rotten luck to be best remembered for having your ear bitten off by Mike Tyson.  But you’re just tarnishing your own already fading legacy.

And it should be said that a loss to the “Beast from the East,” which is predicted even by those who categorize Valuev as a novelty act, will only fuel to Russia’s xenophobic anti-American posturing, and, even in certain circles, racism.  Chest-beating, of course, will seem petty in the face of Holyfield’s calm modesty, but that’s all the more reason why Holyfield’s master-stroke at this stage would be to back out.

The ultimate korm: Russian shawarma

As I’ve previously mentioned, going out in Petersburg means staying out until the bridges come back down and the metro opens at 6 a.m. But keeping a shivering, half-drunk rogue on his feet for some four-odd hours after his eyes have glazed over and his tongue has begun lolling around in his mouth requires some serious feed, namely drunk food. In local slang, it’s “korm,” which literally translates as “animal fodder.”

To fill the void that appears in the swollen belly between the first swig-session of malt liquor and the final slug of vodka arises the phenomenon of the late-night shawarma stand, known here as “shaverma.”

This Central Asian fare sold here is a sickly, unmarriagable cousin in relation to the spicy Middle Eastern shawarma hawked by New York street vendors. But when the moment is right, a Russian shaverma is close to heaven as a man can get on this cold earth, a magical, mysterious mixture of greasy goat meat, pure China white and the sweat off David Bowie’s sequined leg. Pure rocket fuel.

At 4 a.m. on a December night near the Grazhdanskii Prospekt metro, it rejuvenates the body and the soul like a dose of uncut adrenal fluid. You sure that was the final slug of vodka?

*Disclaimer: No animals were harmed in the research for this report, besides a few unlucky Uzbeki goats.

On a serious note, another appeal of shaverma is the element of risk involved: Many Russians, even those who occasionally partake in the carnal rituals of the shaverma stand, will warn you not to eat shaverma more than five times, the implication being that by the fifth time, you’re asking for trouble. Given the generally seedy premises in which shaverma is prepared, the Russian disregard for consumer safety, and the lack of stringent food service regulations and enforcement, you’re bound to get food sickness at some point. The guitarist for the local metalcore group Greenouer, who has a sizable experience with food runs in the wee hours of the morning, noted with great gravity that several friends have gone to the hospital after succumbing to the deceptive allures of shaverma. Better to eat McDonald’s, he says (how I cringe).

Bashing Bond’s Russian translation

My review of the Russian version of “Quantum of Solace” won’t go any further than the title.

For one thing, I missed the beginning, since I had to sit through far too much of the abysmal Russian slapstick drama “Technology” before we could snatch a seat on the sly in the supposedly “sold-out” Bond flick 20 minutes late.

But more importantly, the Russian translation of the film’s title is “Квант Милосердия”, or “Quantum of Mercy,” which boggles even the most popcorn- and beer-dulled mind (you have to love how they sell beer in Russian movie theaters).  One Russian online forum post argued that this translation “sounds flashier” and “the meaning doesn’t suffer” because of it, but this explanation holds up like an ice-cream cone on hot asphalt.  Russian friends and teachers are as baffled as I am.

It’s not like there isn’t a perfectly good Russian translation of “solace”; “consolation” is the only definition listed for “утешение” in my dictionary, which is a fine word according to all concerned.  And it’s not like the original title doesn’t fit; Bond spends more of the film looking for a little bit of consolation after true love Vesper Lynd’s death in the last film, whether he’s banging hot redheads, bagging baddies, or leaving the villain to his death with a can of oil in the middle of the desert.  None of the actions exactly smack of mercy.

– By the way, the chick in the last film was named “Vesper Lynd”!?  Even with the giant strides “Casino Royale” made, apparently it still couldn’t touch the tradition of horrendous names for the female leads (“Christmas Jones,” anyone?). –

Anyway, I don’t know who the Russian film translation guru is, or what delusions of grandeur or illicit substances are making his brain squirm in the old cranium cage, but this has got to stop.

I mean, cut it out already with this habit of messing with film titles in some sort of vain attempt to encapsulate the message of the film. For example, the Russian translation of the 2005 “Chronicles of Narnia” film was “The Lion, the Witch and the Magic Wardrobe.”  Sure, it’s not technically inaccurate, but it makes it sound like I’m about to watch a stoner flick, rather than the film adaptation of a classic piece of literature.

Speaking of which, “Pineapple Express” in Russian became “Pineapple Express: I Sit, I Smoke.”  As if I didn’t think a film by Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow wasn’t going to feature such themes.

Likewise, “Cloverfield” became “Monster.”  Again, accurate, but completely banal.  Oddly enough, Will Smith’s “Hancock” remained unchanged, unless you count the fact that Russians pronounced the word with a heavy Cyrillic “Х” (“kh”).

Can’t a film title be ambiguous?  This isn’t the Soviet Union anymore; you don’t have to hit everyone over the head with the official message anymore …

Unfortunately, the damage has been wrought: Multitran now includes “solace” as a definition for “милосердие,” citing the film.

Sorry for the unexplained absence; went on a Volga adventure

Before I left for my boat trip down the Volga River a week ago Thursday, I tried to hit an Internet cafe to post an “On holiday, be back later” message.  Unfortunately, the electricity was out and there weren’t any live computers, let alone working Internet.  Explanation?  Renovations somewhere had renovated a hole in the power grid on Kazan’skaya Street.  Typical.

To make up for the absence, I’ll be posting photos from each of the cities I visited in the course of our cruise down the longest river in Europe.  Stay tuned for episodes in Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Ulyanovsk, Samara, Saratov, Volgograd, Moscow.

It’s alive, and online …

Добро пожаловать (“dobro pozhalovat’”), or welcome, to Eagle and the Bear, a blog of one American’s thoughts from the other side of the world in St. Petersburg, Russia.  See below for a whole slew of cultural impressions and international commentary.