a soviet gold mine

My sources tell me that the real money in Moscow is in real estate. To the untrained eye, the thousands of gray, crumbling Soviet era apartment buildings scattered around Moscow look like relics from a long ago civilization. The stairwells painted a uniform lime green, the interiors so cramped that two cooks in the kitchen feels overcrowded, the walls so thin that the muffled sighs of lovemaking have to be consciously ignored by the people in the bed next door. Each unit of these side by side aparment layouts uniformly designed to accomodate the unfullfilled needs of their citizen comrades.

But with property values in Moscow at some of the highest rates in the world, and developers scrambling to throw up cheaply constructed high rises that will crumble as quickly as their Soviet ancestors, the time has come to tear down all those Kruschevys. The only stumbling block for the financiers, developers, and property managers is that most of these apartments are occupied--by people. But minor nuisances have never interferred with the great pursuit of profit before so why should this time be any different. And so enter the Moscow Housing Adminstration. According to my sources, a well placed blonde bombshell with a taste for Armani and plastic surgery, all the former Soviet dwellings now fall under the domain of this particular agency. The managers of this agency have the authority to sell former state owned properties to developers. And considering that one apartment building nestled inside the Garden Ring could easily fetch several million dollars, with the developer then turning around and constructing a new office building or high rise luxury flat facility, the managers might feel a certain temptation to dip their fingers in the honey pot and take a lick. Or on the mornings they forget to eat breakfast, simply plunging their faces right into the pot and slurping like a cow at the trough. Now my sources (see above) tell me that any occupant of an apartment that is on the selling block has the right to refuse to vacate the apartment. Of course, such a decision might result in an inspector arriving to pronounce the wiring in the flat faulty and delivering an eviction notice or a mysterious fire gutting the interior. For those flat owners who see the wisdom in selling, the housing adminstration provides (free of charge) new accomodations. The fact that these new apartment buildings are almost on the border with Ukraine is also to the benefit of the occupants, as many of them are ailing babushkas who can only benefit from the fresh air and country living of being a five hour train ride from their friends and families and the only life any of them have known for the past 75 years.

a morning ride

Morning in the Moscow metro. Waves of commuters flood onto the station platform, standing five deep in expectation of an approaching train, everyone jockeying for position to be in the most strategic position when the doors open. And no matter that the trains run every 60-90 seconds, the tide of humanity seems never to ebb. Like desperate survicors of a shipwreck, frantically bailing out their lifeboat only to watch in horror as the water slowly climbs to the gunwales.

While riding on the metro this morning, feeling an intense hatred for this passive, compliant mass of humanity crushing my internal organs and doing my best to hold my arms stiff by my side to give myself a few inches of breathing room, a woman boarding the train audibly inhaled and then flung herself into the crush. Once safely ensconed, she exhaled even louder and her entire squat body seemed to expand, apparently adopting the blowfish technique for creating personal space.

Not long after, a man wearing a stiff, almost polished brown leather jacket and sporting a shaved head to hid his receding hairline looked at me and snarled something while gesturing for me to move over into the fraction of an inch of free space to our right. I looked him in the eye and with a flash of murderous rage surely passing over my face told him that I don't understand a word you just said, but go fuck yourself is probably an apporpriate reply. Whatever culutral exchange we were on the brinking of having stopped abrubtly at that moment and he was left to perhaps wonder about the astronomical odds of being threatned by a huge foreigner on his ride to work that particular morning while I was left to imagine what life in a Russian prison might be like should I choose to kill this guy. That act of transcendtal meditation thankfully pulled me back from that precipice.

Except for me and my new found friend, however, everyone else on the train looked bitterly resigned to their situation. The Soviets either were blessed to stumble upon the most docile and submissive race of people in the world or more than 70 years of bread lines, housing shortages, cramped Kruschevy life, and the pervasisve threat of informers had broken their will. But unravelling the cause/effect relationship in that equation is probably a bit like untangling a rat's nest of fishing line while wearing oven mitts. I tried to imagine New Yorkers packing themselves into a subway car like the Moscovites. I had a vision of a NYC subway train pulling into a station, the doors sliding open, a wave of human fury pouring out, heading in the direction of city hall where they would burn the place down before hanging the mayor and the entire city council from the Brooklyn Bridge. After which citizen action committees and non-profit organizations would form to unleash an unprecendeted campaign of public outcry. But for whatever reason, Moscowvites display no such righteous indignation, instead choosing to wear faces of perpetual glumness as their form of protest.

A return to Hanoi

Step out of the metro at the Dubrovoka station on the Moscow light green line and you'll find a world bathed in infinite shades of gray. Slate, steel, steely slate, stalin monolithic, soul deflating soviet. All the numerical representations of the grey scale. Inside the two story market located maybe 250 meters from the metro, you won't find a great deal of color either. Monotone jackets hanging from the seller's stalls, pairs of brown and black leather shoes lined from floor to ceiling, a few jewellery stores scattered about. But what you will find is Hanoi. And for a guy who's been in Moscow just short of three weeks, a trip back to my former temporary home of two years was a much needed excursion. Just as in Hanoi, the vendors sit on wooden stools just outside their stalls, calling out to you as you pass. Just as in Hanoi, the vendors are often young women with flawless skin and radiant faces. And just as in Hanoi, the sellers do their best to rip off the foreigners. While in search of a spring jacket, the first guy (who I even impressed with my pathetic knowledge of Vietnamese) tried to overcharge me about 500 rubles.

But it was the pho that made the journey worthwhile. Tucked away on the side of the market was the Dilmah Cafe. That being a hugely popular brand of tea in Vietnam, and seemingly half of the cafes there having the same name, I already feel a nostalgia creep up on me. But mostly it was just hunger. Three weeks in Moscow, three separate dining experiences, three exceedingly bland meals, and three eyebrow raising checks had left me in despair about the culinary scene. Until I read about the Vietnamese market. Wherever the Viet in the world so goes cheap tasty food. And at the Cafe Dilmah, I was not disappointed. Maybe six or seven tables pushed close together, a massive photo of a young Vietnamese girl in an ao dai, some chili pepper sauce on the tables, and a distinct air of Vietnam. Svetlana and I had a couple of really fucking tasty bowls of pho bo, some green tea, and a pair of cafe sua da. All for about $12. Hands down the best godamn deal in this overpriced culinary wasteland.

We chatted (actually just like in Vietnam, Lana did almost all the talking) with the owner who went by the name Tulia but who's real name is Thanh and is a viet kieu in Mosocw for the last twenty years. And just like in Vietnam, the guy was in awe to be talking with foreigners in his own language, displayed amazement at my ability to cough up a couple of convoluted questions in Vietnamese while being somewhat blase about Sveti's fluency, and in direct contrast to most of the denizens of this city--smiled! So basically to sum up. I was a total fucking idiot for not appreciating what I had going in Hanoi.

what did i do

9:46 a.m.

I took no notice of her. She was a middle aged woman wearing an ankle length gray coat. There are probably in excess of 700,000 women in this city who look exactly or nearly identical to this one. She was maybe 1.5 meters in front of me on the sidewalk which bordered the eight lane boulevard that city planners seem so fond of in this city. My head was down practicing my new found technique of closing my eyes for brief interludes to lift my exhaustion. It seems to work, but this was the first time I'd ever tried it while not standing stationary on a metro car.

And then the non-descript broad whirled and unleased a tirade on my ass. An invective of a very Russian magnitude. I never got close enough to actually invade her personal space, even by Moscow's particularly frigid standards. But there she was veering off towards the bus stop just laying into me with a string of words that I couldn't catch,despite my diligent study of Russian profanity (think of the gold mine I could have unearthed if only she'd given me enough time to jot a few of those gems down!).

The Brown Revolution

Russia, having had its share of revolutions in the past, has apparently decided to forgo the green one. My girlfriend's friend keeps a model GMC Suburban in a prized spot on his bookshelf, dreaming of the day when he can load his mountain bikes in the back and take of for the Crimea (or more likely spend hours every day snarled in Moscow's gridlock). A tall, blonde bombshell, employed as a General Director at an energy consultant firm, told me the other day, "I vould rather be sit in my car three hours and not moving, than go by metro." And judging by the general lockdown of traffic by 6 p.m, quite a few others share her sentiment.

suka with that

On my very first rush hour metro commute in Moscow, having waded through a sea of dreary brown and black leather jackets and been funneled onto the escalator that plunged me into the very bowels of the post-Soviet earth where without a doubt the old commie leaders planned to stash the populace in the event of a nuclear showdown with the Yanks, I reinforced a word practiced assiduously the day before. Spelled phonetically the word is best approximated as suka but honestly I'm too lazy to go look up the correct Russian spelling so this is gonna have to do.

So here's what happened. A small, dumpish man dressed in a light purple ski jacket was screaming the word, swinging a leather satchel at a thin balding guy with an impish look and a receding hairline. In between, acting apparently as a referee, was a squat little babushka. The fight had a pathetic feeling to it. Like the two guys were just going through the motions, drained of any real emotional feel. But then a week and a half in the land of kruschevy and stalinsky apartment buildings might have just zapped me of any remaining humanity. Other words were spoken of course, but suka, being one of about a dozen words I can comprehend and most of them being some form of profanity, was the only one I registered.

As I bordered the screaming train in that dimly lit station draped in brown marble, with the fight growing in intensity outside the car and security rushing in to dispense the melee, I had an urge to turn to the young women standing next to me, the one wearing the knee high leather boots softly whispering come hither my boy, wrapped around legs that ventured just short of her neck and tell her about my new discovery.

He's calling her a bitch, I would have told her.

a shared taxi

A shattered mazda station wagon pulled up outside our hotel in Mandalay. Like so many cars in Myanmar, this vehicle looked like it was hold together with duct tape and luck. After hoisting our backpacks into the back, we climbed in into the back. Lana sitting in the middle with my at the window seat.

Seated next to us in the backseat was a young kid of about seventeen or eighteen, wearing a blue track suit. His eyes were a bleary red and his skin was stretched tight across his face. He smiled nervously at us and then looked at the women sitting in the front seat, a look of surprise and bemusement about sharing this taxi for the next four hours with a stark blond and a gigantic man. After a few minutes of sitting somewhat awkwardly, not knowing if either of them spoke a word of English, the lady turned in her seat and with a most pleasant smile asked, in halting English, if I’d like to switch places with her. I fumbled for a moment at the question. From the information given to us by the hotel clerk, the front seat passenger paid an extra 2,000 kyat for that privileged position and I wasn’t sure if it’d be polite of me to accept. But overcoming by initial hesitation, I quickly lunged at the chance not to spend the next five hours contorted in the back, my legs already threatening to rebel against me.

The women who so generously offered to take my place in our shared taxi was a short, round woman of about 45 or 50. Her hair was neatly trimmed above her shoulders and she wore a black and white sweater. But more than anything, what I noticed about her was her smile.

She told me that she was a garment factory manager who worked in Yangon, pronoucning it with the colonial “Rangoon.” This was to be her first trip back to Hsipaw, her hometown, in the past seven years. When hearing this, I audibly repeated, “seven years!” in amazement that someone could have been away from home for so long. Her homecoming, however, was not to be a joyous affair. The purpose of her trip, in fact, was to visit her mother who was suffering from a probable fatal heart condition.

I asked her if she preferred Yangon or Hsipaw more and she smiled (a seemingly automatic response to nearly all my questions) and replied that she of course would rather live in the countryside. But her job in Yangon was reasonably well-paying professional position in a country that was in desperately short supply of such careers, and she therefore had to make the move down south.

From the outset of my trip, I’d been curious about the reaction of Burmese people towards the American embarago. In 2003, President Bush enacted harsh sanctions on the country, forbidding any American company from doing business in Myanmar. She told me that the embargo had in fact hurt her company. For many years they’d had a contract to supply inexpensive plain white t-shirts to an American garment company. The division had been the most profitable for her factory but was forced to close after the sanctions were put in place. “My workers keep asking me when it reopen,” she told me with her customary smile, “but I have no answer for them.” When asked about how Burmese felt towards the embargo, she shrugged her shoulders and said “most people understand that it had to happen.”

As we pulled up to her family house in Hsipaw, a squat-one story with a traditional wood shingled roof, a group of what I guessed were family members came solemnly out from the courtyard. I wasn’t sure how they knew we were coming at that moment, but a young boy came up and silently took their luggage.

She turned around to say goodbye to us and I wished her mother good health. She responded in a quiet barely percetible voice with the words, “she will die.” And then she smiled warmly at us and entered the house to attend the vigil.