in what my parents call their 'icelandic garden...'
in the evenings, we drink (wine, water, coffee) and play scrabble. in the foreground, my not-so-winning hand of letters...
Sunday, June 28, 2009
escenas de verano en nueva york
in what my parents call their 'icelandic garden...'
in the evenings, we drink (wine, water, coffee) and play scrabble. in the foreground, my not-so-winning hand of letters...
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Yelena
Yelena is Russian, teaches Russian, speaks impeccable English, and is working on Spanish because she's leaving Moscow to get married and move to Spain! She has lived in Moscow for ten years (having grown up near Vladimir, several hundred kilometers to the east of Moscow) and has seen it change a great deal. "You feel more wealth here now ... before, it was horrible, it was disgusting, the poverty, the shabby buildings... although there are still now people--especially people from the Asian republics--who come to work here and live in horrible conditions." She says, like most people, that the advantage of living in Moscow is the cultural life, the fact that everything is so accessible, the cinema, theater, ballet, the parks and cafes. But what is beautiful about Russia that people might not realize? "The people themselves are beautiful. On the outside, they look very reserved and unfriendly, but when you get to know them better they are very warm, very hospitable, very generous." So true. Gracias, Yelena, y que te vaya bien -
Sunday, June 14, 2009
fin de semana 13-14 junio
a morning out photographing: a bridge where newlyweds follow a tradition of putting locks on metal trees (and where it is evident that kids the world over feel the same about getting group pictures taken at tourist spots), also a church that was empty, quiet, and cool.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
on holidays, 'art,' and being a bad blogger
...yeah, a bad blogger. it's a combination of not really taking many pictures anymore and being suspicious of technology...mass email...blogging...facebook... texting and twitter... didn't we used to be fine without these things... this cult of the self... and then i remember i have this blog, and i'm like, 'why do i have this blog? this is nonsense.' and i ignore it.
BUT THEN, I realize that of course i really like reading blogs, especially a former Spanish professor's blog and my friend Becca’s blog about her recent move to Costa Rica to be a peace corps volunteer. she posts pictures, she talks about people and language and food and work – and it is fascinating, and i can learn some things. like that pineapples grow in the ground. so as becca would say, CLEARLY i need to just chill out about the existential implications of blogging and share what has been interesting about the life that i am in now. there are 3 recent chapters:
1: the all-russia exhibition center, where soviet stuff meets spongebob
What first needs to be understood is that Moscow is not an easy place to just do stuff. Not speaking Russian is, as would be expected --and even more than I had expected-- a serious barrier to normal life. So in semi-desperation, a friend and I have this spring taken to looking up random events and stuff to do (usually movies in Spanish with Russian subtitles) and a couple weekends ago, went to see an exhibition called ‘Faces and Laces,’ which we read about and assumed to be a celebration of street art and culture. It was at the All-Russia Exhibition Centre a park with many pavilions for different events, which are huge buildings from another era. Among all these imposing buildings, on the walkways, there is an outrageous number of rollerbladers, cyclists, skateboarders, people selling shiny colorful balloons, and cartoon characters sitting in plastic deck chairs inviting you to go take your picture with them.
We walked for 40 minutes through the park until we got to the exhibit we were looking for – which turned out to be a celebration and sale of streetWEAR, skateboarding shoes, major brand names, etc. there were lots of seemingly disaffected teenagers in this kind of attire milling around, sitting around, skateboarding around, inside a huge domed building... there were some interesting things about the scene – the very capitalist nature of the anti-establishment event, the celebration of a modern global counterculture in a soviet building from the 1930s...
...a round photograph of somebody (?) draped in a cloth...
...the colorful booths and products, the noise, the music, the bar, the haircuts, the fact that a man (a 40-year-old man) stuck out his tongue at me and shooed me out of his booth when I peeked through the (I might note: open) door. There was nothing in his booth besides 1 oriental carpet. But whatever, getting publicly ridiculed here for being different is not exactly news. There may be a small irony in the fact that whatever the theme of this booth was, it was called something like ‘American is the best’ – hahahahahaaaaa... we didn’t stay long at Faces and Laces anyway, called it a day and an expedition, as many are here, which turned out not at all how we expected.
2: Victory Day, May 9
Above: the view out one of my front windows, of the apartment building across the street, and the blissfully blue skies we are seeing a lot of these days. the tassel hanging into the top of the window belongs to the huge red banner just outside my window - the banners are put up in the middle of the night, on the buildings all down the street, ahead of major holidays.
On this, victory day, one of the biggest holidays here, to celebrate peace at the end (almost) of World War II, I have not so much to say except that as hard as you try, I wonder if it is ever possible to really understand another culture – or even your own. the history, the collective emotional investment, the ceremony and ritual and the idea of the nation... the celebration here was, for me at least, overwhelming, in the size and quantity of military machinery on display, the sheer number of people in the metro and in Victory Park, and was all just kindof massive and military and abstract except for the park, where people were giving flowers to veterans, enjoying the sunshine and listening to an orchestra...
3: moscow museum night
... when all moscow’s museums are free and open until the early hours of the morning. having read that 450,000 people attended last year my friend erika (to whom I really have to give all of the credit for our cultural exploration agenda) and I decided to go to some smaller photo galleries, not the big museums where we’d heard the lines were hours long. Turns out that the place we went was a conglomerate of a lot of galleries, including the one we wanted to get to, and was also the only place in the city you actually had to pay to go to that night, and though we saw the photographs we went to see – some neat portraits taken in rural Russia – we also saw lunch meat cut and arranged into crosses, a man stirring red water in a bathtub while another man talked into a megaphone, and an entire gallery devoted to paintings of the milky way. Viva la avant garde (I guess).
BUT THEN, I realize that of course i really like reading blogs, especially a former Spanish professor's blog and my friend Becca’s blog about her recent move to Costa Rica to be a peace corps volunteer. she posts pictures, she talks about people and language and food and work – and it is fascinating, and i can learn some things. like that pineapples grow in the ground. so as becca would say, CLEARLY i need to just chill out about the existential implications of blogging and share what has been interesting about the life that i am in now. there are 3 recent chapters:
1: the all-russia exhibition center, where soviet stuff meets spongebob
What first needs to be understood is that Moscow is not an easy place to just do stuff. Not speaking Russian is, as would be expected --and even more than I had expected-- a serious barrier to normal life. So in semi-desperation, a friend and I have this spring taken to looking up random events and stuff to do (usually movies in Spanish with Russian subtitles) and a couple weekends ago, went to see an exhibition called ‘Faces and Laces,’ which we read about and assumed to be a celebration of street art and culture. It was at the All-Russia Exhibition Centre a park with many pavilions for different events, which are huge buildings from another era. Among all these imposing buildings, on the walkways, there is an outrageous number of rollerbladers, cyclists, skateboarders, people selling shiny colorful balloons, and cartoon characters sitting in plastic deck chairs inviting you to go take your picture with them.
We walked for 40 minutes through the park until we got to the exhibit we were looking for – which turned out to be a celebration and sale of streetWEAR, skateboarding shoes, major brand names, etc. there were lots of seemingly disaffected teenagers in this kind of attire milling around, sitting around, skateboarding around, inside a huge domed building... there were some interesting things about the scene – the very capitalist nature of the anti-establishment event, the celebration of a modern global counterculture in a soviet building from the 1930s...
...a round photograph of somebody (?) draped in a cloth...
...the colorful booths and products, the noise, the music, the bar, the haircuts, the fact that a man (a 40-year-old man) stuck out his tongue at me and shooed me out of his booth when I peeked through the (I might note: open) door. There was nothing in his booth besides 1 oriental carpet. But whatever, getting publicly ridiculed here for being different is not exactly news. There may be a small irony in the fact that whatever the theme of this booth was, it was called something like ‘American is the best’ – hahahahahaaaaa... we didn’t stay long at Faces and Laces anyway, called it a day and an expedition, as many are here, which turned out not at all how we expected.
2: Victory Day, May 9
Above: the view out one of my front windows, of the apartment building across the street, and the blissfully blue skies we are seeing a lot of these days. the tassel hanging into the top of the window belongs to the huge red banner just outside my window - the banners are put up in the middle of the night, on the buildings all down the street, ahead of major holidays.
On this, victory day, one of the biggest holidays here, to celebrate peace at the end (almost) of World War II, I have not so much to say except that as hard as you try, I wonder if it is ever possible to really understand another culture – or even your own. the history, the collective emotional investment, the ceremony and ritual and the idea of the nation... the celebration here was, for me at least, overwhelming, in the size and quantity of military machinery on display, the sheer number of people in the metro and in Victory Park, and was all just kindof massive and military and abstract except for the park, where people were giving flowers to veterans, enjoying the sunshine and listening to an orchestra...
3: moscow museum night
... when all moscow’s museums are free and open until the early hours of the morning. having read that 450,000 people attended last year my friend erika (to whom I really have to give all of the credit for our cultural exploration agenda) and I decided to go to some smaller photo galleries, not the big museums where we’d heard the lines were hours long. Turns out that the place we went was a conglomerate of a lot of galleries, including the one we wanted to get to, and was also the only place in the city you actually had to pay to go to that night, and though we saw the photographs we went to see – some neat portraits taken in rural Russia – we also saw lunch meat cut and arranged into crosses, a man stirring red water in a bathtub while another man talked into a megaphone, and an entire gallery devoted to paintings of the milky way. Viva la avant garde (I guess).
Monday, March 30, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
mary takes the wrong bus to the wrong metro line and meets the right people
this incident didn’t happen this week, but I remember it now because for most of this week I was so worked up about a couple of things that I couldn’t handle anything. any thing, like small, unrelated things, like noise, traffic, the metro, and moscow, and people. people walking slowly and getting in my way. people walking fast and pushing me. and people speaking russian. how dare they. so as i was being crushed into a crowd at belorusskaya metro station on tuesday i was near-meltdown... (when it’s crowded it’s like those videos you see of water buffalo or cattle crossing a river or something.... hundreds of people squish into the mouth of an escalator) so i bailed out of the stampede and headed home on foot...
and it was while i was stomping around the city tuesday night drenched in mud and ire i remembered how one night in november i left school, at 7:30, ran down the hill to the road just as the minibus was approaching the stop, and of course i assumed it was my minibus (HELLO, it arrived just when I did) so I got on it and tuned out. Then I got out when it stopped.... at not a place I recognized. I asked some of the other passengers for this one metro station, they pretty much said, no way, not that metro station, but here’s this other one. turns out i had been there too and totally knew my way home as soon as i saw it, but these two ladies from the bus, it seemed, had established with some dismay that i lived in russia and did not speak russian, that i was here by myself, and that I appeared not to know how to get home from work. clearly, i was a danger to myself. they were both several decades older than me, had a commanding air about them, and so as they talked over what route would be best for me to take and what they were going to do about me, i realized i would have to play along (which wasn't hard to do, since i certainly didn't know how to say in russian 'it's okay, i was mistaken at first but i know where i am now and i'll be fine'). They made a decision, told me the name of my station and the number of stops like six times, and hauled me onto a seat with them on the metro. at one point i leaned forward to double-check the stations on the map and one of them whacked me and said, in English: ‘Don’t Vourry. We will put you.’ And they did.
and it was while i was stomping around the city tuesday night drenched in mud and ire i remembered how one night in november i left school, at 7:30, ran down the hill to the road just as the minibus was approaching the stop, and of course i assumed it was my minibus (HELLO, it arrived just when I did) so I got on it and tuned out. Then I got out when it stopped.... at not a place I recognized. I asked some of the other passengers for this one metro station, they pretty much said, no way, not that metro station, but here’s this other one. turns out i had been there too and totally knew my way home as soon as i saw it, but these two ladies from the bus, it seemed, had established with some dismay that i lived in russia and did not speak russian, that i was here by myself, and that I appeared not to know how to get home from work. clearly, i was a danger to myself. they were both several decades older than me, had a commanding air about them, and so as they talked over what route would be best for me to take and what they were going to do about me, i realized i would have to play along (which wasn't hard to do, since i certainly didn't know how to say in russian 'it's okay, i was mistaken at first but i know where i am now and i'll be fine'). They made a decision, told me the name of my station and the number of stops like six times, and hauled me onto a seat with them on the metro. at one point i leaned forward to double-check the stations on the map and one of them whacked me and said, in English: ‘Don’t Vourry. We will put you.’ And they did.
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