Tom and I used to debate whether there were actually more crazy people in New York or whether they were just more visible. Some days it seemed like every corner and every subway stop revealed someone collecting used metro cards or talking into a shoe. These are the weirdos you generally avoid. But there are other weirdos with stories and they linger in your caged city imagination. Why is that man walking down the street with a cat on his head? Who is that guy on the blue line who yells at me to Help Feed the Homeless, and why does he have such a large duffel bag?
There's a universal rule of travel, the law of Weirdo Gravitation. When you're traveling, you're immediately attracted to oddballs for the possibility of an adventure or an easy anecdote. This was definitely the case in August in Kyrgyzstan. There was the policeman we met in a yurt camp on Lake Issakol who announced that his daughter was looking for a husband, and later offered to "introduce" Nick to her if he had over $40,000 or an apartment with more than two rooms. There was a Canadian defense attorney who had quit his private practice to travel the world for two years because he was "sick of whiners who don't want to pay."
In the hostel in Bishkek we met a guy we called "The Otherworldly Dude" (for his serene manner) and "German Taliban" (for his long beard and strange dress). By his own description, he had been traveling continuously since 1993, stopping for a few years at a time in various African countries and in India, where he founded a commune. With traditional clothes and his beard as a guise, he had walked across northern Afghanistan sometime after the start of the war. He wore baggy black capri shorts which were tied around the waist with a cloth belt. When asked where he got them, he sighed with otherworldly indifference and said: "They're just ordinary Thai fisherman's pants."
One of the more detailed and unique stories I heard was from an Iranian student in Bishkek. We'll call him "S." I've told his story to a number of friends and the usual reaction is skepticism. I met him over beers and shashlik four or five times and he seemed like a genuinely nice and interesting guy.
It starts like this: S was an art student living in Tehran until about two years ago. He came from a secular family with little interest in the regime or Islam. Looking at him, he could have just arrived from New York - tight pants, checkered slip-on shoes, metal studded belt, ironic t-shirt, earrings and hair to his shoulders. Not the sober ideal of a revolutionary Muslim.
In Tehran he met a girl whose grandparents had moved to Iran after the Russian revolution. Her family, too, was secular. She spoke both Russian and Farsi, and didn't look like an Iranian girl - her skin was paler, her features lighter. Clearly a foreigner, not Persian.
After dating for a while, they decided to move together to Bishkek so that S could learn Russian. Living there for a few months, making some friends, they decided to get "married." The quotation marks indicate that it wasn't a marriage that the Islamic Republic of Iran would recognize when they returned home, but something they did for themselves.
Eventually they did return to Tehran, in time for Nowruz celebrations in March. This was when things started going very badly for S. While home, his Russian love left him and moved in with someone else. S was so distraught that he spent the next week wandering aimlessly in the mountains outside of Tehran and roaming the streets of the city. At the end of that week, tired, disheveled, disoriented, he was sitting on the sidewalk when the religious police approached him. They thought he was a drug addict. They hauled him to the basement of a local mosque to interrogate him.
While they were asking him about his long hair, his piercings, his possible drug use, they went through his backpack. They turned on his laptop and found video clips that one of his friends had taken of the wedding in Bishkek. They immediately recognized that the bride wasn't Iranian and that it wasn't a standard Muslim ceremony.
They held him in the prison for days, beat him, tried to find out his connection to the foreigners, the infidels. Who are these people? Why are you drinking? What were you doing in Bishkek? S claimed that it was a video he shot as part of a drama production for a university project. They didn't believe him.
They only released him after his father came to the Mosque and signed over his house and car as bail for a future hearing in a religious court. Out of jail, his father bought him a plane ticket for the next flight back to Bishkek. He fled the country. The next day, S was back in Kyrgyzstan where Iranian citizens can easily get an entry visa.
Using the money left in his bank account, he enrolled in Russian classes at the university in Bishkek and was therefore able to get a longer-term student visa. He kept in touch with a friend in Tehran by email, using a new address and never including his name or important information. A few months later, the friend reported that his father had been arrested. At the time S told me this story, he said his father had been in jail for about a year and he had heard nothing from him since.
S says he applied for refugee status but it went nowhere. With limited opportunities to work and study in Kyrgyzstan, he was looking for visas to Russia or Europe, but passport issues are tricky when you're an Iranian on the run from the government. The last time I saw him, we met for breakfast and he introduced me to his girlfriend - an employee of the American embassy.
It's a strange and almost unbelievable story. Almost. I'm inclined to take it as a live confirmation of everything I know about the Iranian regime, and another reason why change is overdue in that country.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Litter Box Theater
I went to Moscow last weekend on Saturday November 7, the former Day of the Revolution (the big one). It's no longer an official government holiday, but there were still parades on Red Square and I saw lots of wreaths in Victory Park. I celebrated like a proper revolutionary - with a trip to the Moscow Cat Theater.
This is a real thing, it exists and it is well known. If you say the words "cat theater" in Russian (teatr koshek), many people will immediately say "Ah, Kuklechev!" That's the founder, Yuri Kuklechev. When I told one of my Russian friends that I was going to go to the cat theater, she replied "Kuklecheva?" This puzzled me for a moment as I contemplated the possibility of more than one cat theater in Moscow.
Anyway, at some point this clown (not derogatory, he's actually a clown) got the idea to train cats and dress them in outfits and put them on scooters and other incredibly cute and freakish things. One of my professors told me she saw the show as a child and it featured a cat dressed as a chef, stirring a boiling cauldron with a pawed spoon. Muscovites apparently love this sort of thing, because when I called to ask about tickets the woman on the phone told me good seats were available for 1400 rubles (that's about $45). Last time I was in St. Petersburg, I paid 800R ($25) to see the world famous Mariinsky Ballet Theater perform La Sylphide. There had better be some pirouetting.
When I got to the box office, I looked at the seating plan and ticket prices. Luckily, tickets for the furthest two sections were 200R and 150R. I asked for a pair of either and she told me there weren't any available. This was a lie, because after we bought our 350R ($11) tickets and took our seats eight rows remained empty behind us. Something about my black hooded sweatshirt, baseball hat and North Face jacket must have said "I will pay any price for this."
I somehow convinced Micah (picture below) to go with me. Micah is a smoking, drinking Kentuckian known to sport a handlebar mustache and complain loudly about the quality of his morning BM. The main audience for cat theater is three year olds and parents who look like they've run out of ideas. There was one couple in the corner who cuddled throughout the entire performance which was touching and creepy. We were clearly the oldest males in the theater not accompanied by a child or a female (the only two segments of society permitted to fawn and pet things).
I won't spend a lot of time outlining the performance, because it's much funnier to watch somebody step in a puddle or slip on ice than to describe it afterward. There were cats on scooters, cats hanging from half-moons, cats hopping between clouds above the stage. There were dance scenes that had nothing to do with cats and an impossible to follow plot involving a detective, a janitor and three scantily dressed dancers. (Micah: "I bet the one on the right knows how to work a pole.")
There were some highlights. Towards the middle, the human performers / cat herders brought out the feline equivalent of parallel bars. Through some more than obvious coaxing, the trainer managed to get one of the cats to monkey across the two bars using only its front paws, its back legs dangling in the air. And for the finale they brought out a small padded seat attached to a 15 foot pole. A different cat scaled the pole, sat atop it a moment to heighten the tension, then leaped down onto a cushioned pad held by a different performer. It was very dramatic.
After the show ended, the performers tossed balloons into the audience for the kids to take home with them, but none of them reached our back row. Micah and I left the theater bewildered and aimless, unsure what remained for two 20-something guys do in Moscow at 8pm on a Saturday night.
This is a real thing, it exists and it is well known. If you say the words "cat theater" in Russian (teatr koshek), many people will immediately say "Ah, Kuklechev!" That's the founder, Yuri Kuklechev. When I told one of my Russian friends that I was going to go to the cat theater, she replied "Kuklecheva?" This puzzled me for a moment as I contemplated the possibility of more than one cat theater in Moscow.
Anyway, at some point this clown (not derogatory, he's actually a clown) got the idea to train cats and dress them in outfits and put them on scooters and other incredibly cute and freakish things. One of my professors told me she saw the show as a child and it featured a cat dressed as a chef, stirring a boiling cauldron with a pawed spoon. Muscovites apparently love this sort of thing, because when I called to ask about tickets the woman on the phone told me good seats were available for 1400 rubles (that's about $45). Last time I was in St. Petersburg, I paid 800R ($25) to see the world famous Mariinsky Ballet Theater perform La Sylphide. There had better be some pirouetting.
When I got to the box office, I looked at the seating plan and ticket prices. Luckily, tickets for the furthest two sections were 200R and 150R. I asked for a pair of either and she told me there weren't any available. This was a lie, because after we bought our 350R ($11) tickets and took our seats eight rows remained empty behind us. Something about my black hooded sweatshirt, baseball hat and North Face jacket must have said "I will pay any price for this."
I somehow convinced Micah (picture below) to go with me. Micah is a smoking, drinking Kentuckian known to sport a handlebar mustache and complain loudly about the quality of his morning BM. The main audience for cat theater is three year olds and parents who look like they've run out of ideas. There was one couple in the corner who cuddled throughout the entire performance which was touching and creepy. We were clearly the oldest males in the theater not accompanied by a child or a female (the only two segments of society permitted to fawn and pet things).
I won't spend a lot of time outlining the performance, because it's much funnier to watch somebody step in a puddle or slip on ice than to describe it afterward. There were cats on scooters, cats hanging from half-moons, cats hopping between clouds above the stage. There were dance scenes that had nothing to do with cats and an impossible to follow plot involving a detective, a janitor and three scantily dressed dancers. (Micah: "I bet the one on the right knows how to work a pole.")
There were some highlights. Towards the middle, the human performers / cat herders brought out the feline equivalent of parallel bars. Through some more than obvious coaxing, the trainer managed to get one of the cats to monkey across the two bars using only its front paws, its back legs dangling in the air. And for the finale they brought out a small padded seat attached to a 15 foot pole. A different cat scaled the pole, sat atop it a moment to heighten the tension, then leaped down onto a cushioned pad held by a different performer. It was very dramatic.
After the show ended, the performers tossed balloons into the audience for the kids to take home with them, but none of them reached our back row. Micah and I left the theater bewildered and aimless, unsure what remained for two 20-something guys do in Moscow at 8pm on a Saturday night.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Happy Unity Day!
Another week, another holiday. This time Russia's Day of National Unity. My Russian friends tell me that, despite the government sponsored commercials, it is not actually a holiday. Wikipedia tells me that it was celebrated until the revolution in 1917 then reinstated in 2005 as a replacement for the former Day of the Revolution (November 7); that it commemorates an uprising which expelled Polish-Lithuanian forces from Moscow in November 1612; and that it used to have the catchy title "Day of Moscow’s Liberation from Polish Invaders." Wikipedia:
Happy sort of Holidays!
According to a recent poll, only 23 percent of Russians know the name of the holiday, up from 8 percent in 2005.
Happy sort of Holidays!
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Bath House of Pain
In honor of Halloween which doesn't really exist here, seven of us dudes reserved a public banya. What's scarier than having this man's naked body permanently imprinted on your visual memory?
Just kidding Micah, you're an adonis.
It was my third banya. For neophytes, a banya is basically a "wet" sauna. That is, after you simmer in your own sweat for a while you go to an adjacent room to douse yourself in cold water. Over the summer I visited the banya out at the dacha, a small one with just a changing room and a combined washroom/sauna. Imagine a shed with two levels of wooden slats for seating, and a small hole in the ground to let the used water run off. The Halloween banya was a bathhouse mansion by comparison - there was the sauna itself, a couple showers, a small swimming pool, a pool table and a room with TV for relaxing. They had shot glasses too, but BYOV.
The most memorable banya was two weeks ago when I went to visit my friend Julia in Tver. We had spent the day before at a village wedding, which meant we started drinking vodka at breakfast, "So we'll have a good mood." I'll leave it at that. But the next day at breakfast Misha (Julia's husband) explained how the banya would help us sweat out the alcohol. "You can drink five shots, spend 15 minutes in the heat and be ready to drive," he explained while packing the car. Then he threw a shotgun on the stack of towels and handed me a size 8 cartridge. "For wild boars."
We drove out to Misha's country house with two of his tattooed friends. It was a secluded hovel with a fireplace and not much else, but there was a large three-room banya and a big table outside for dumplings, chocolate and vodka. After toasting to international friendship, we stripped down in the changing room. I started to go into the sauna when Misha said "Wait" and put a pointy, gray wool cap on my head. I'm still not entirely sure what this was for. To protect my hair? To keep in the heat? Maybe when you're sweating naked in front of three other grown men, you need to preserve your dignity by looking like a Napoleonic cavalry officer.
Banya's are often done in stages, three rounds of sweating and bathing with breaks to drink and stand outside in between. Round one was enjoyable. As the guest, I was offered one of the upper spots to recline in. "Lie down," Misha said. Then trying to be hospitable he said in English, "This is total relax." Ten minutes later we were standing outside in the dark, towels on, drinking Baltika and talking about Putin ("A product of the system," he said). In retrospect, I think this was how I had imagined the banya experience.
Until round two. I will never forget the smell of boiling beer. When you pour a can of Baltika 7 over hot coals - as Misha now did - the steam it produces feels like someone is injecting molten hops into your sinus cavity. It is oppressive, suffocating, and wheaty. Luckily, I was sporting that woolen fedora which I used to cover my face. "No, no," Misha said, "breathe it in. It's good for the lungs." The others were stone-faced with their eyes closed, like they were either trying not to cough or were attempting to get high from the vaporized alcohol.
We took a break. Sat by the fire, ate, drank beer straight from the can.
Round three. As a general life rule I do not take advice from a naked man, especially one wielding birch branches. So when Misha told me to lie down on my stomach with my hands at my sides it was with reluctance that I did so. Travelers will be familiar with the concept of oppressive hospitality - the overbearing hostess who wants to feed you too much, the excitable acquaintance who wants to show you the town when you only want to sleep. Sometimes it's easier to go along, to placate your inebriated host with lashing instruments. "Total relax," I thought and lay my head on a small pile of hay. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him soak the branches in water and shake away the loose leaves.
Pretty soon they were flailing away like that scene from the Passion. "It's good for the circulation," he reassured me. After two minutes or so he said, "Turn over." This time my hat wasn't covering my face.
After they were done, Misha told me to to keep lying down for sixty seconds while they left. I don't know if it was the thrashing, the beer steam or just the 180-degree heat but I found existence very uncomfortable. At "60" I was out the door and pouring the coldest bucket of water I could find over my head. When I toweled off and picked the remaining birch bits from the backs of my knees, I went outside to watch the stars spin. Back inside, Misha pointed out that my entire body was blotchy with red streaks - "Good for your metabolism," he said.
We all had one more shot. I laughed with a grin that said "I know there's a shotgun around here somewhere."
Just kidding Micah, you're an adonis.
It was my third banya. For neophytes, a banya is basically a "wet" sauna. That is, after you simmer in your own sweat for a while you go to an adjacent room to douse yourself in cold water. Over the summer I visited the banya out at the dacha, a small one with just a changing room and a combined washroom/sauna. Imagine a shed with two levels of wooden slats for seating, and a small hole in the ground to let the used water run off. The Halloween banya was a bathhouse mansion by comparison - there was the sauna itself, a couple showers, a small swimming pool, a pool table and a room with TV for relaxing. They had shot glasses too, but BYOV.
The most memorable banya was two weeks ago when I went to visit my friend Julia in Tver. We had spent the day before at a village wedding, which meant we started drinking vodka at breakfast, "So we'll have a good mood." I'll leave it at that. But the next day at breakfast Misha (Julia's husband) explained how the banya would help us sweat out the alcohol. "You can drink five shots, spend 15 minutes in the heat and be ready to drive," he explained while packing the car. Then he threw a shotgun on the stack of towels and handed me a size 8 cartridge. "For wild boars."
We drove out to Misha's country house with two of his tattooed friends. It was a secluded hovel with a fireplace and not much else, but there was a large three-room banya and a big table outside for dumplings, chocolate and vodka. After toasting to international friendship, we stripped down in the changing room. I started to go into the sauna when Misha said "Wait" and put a pointy, gray wool cap on my head. I'm still not entirely sure what this was for. To protect my hair? To keep in the heat? Maybe when you're sweating naked in front of three other grown men, you need to preserve your dignity by looking like a Napoleonic cavalry officer.
Banya's are often done in stages, three rounds of sweating and bathing with breaks to drink and stand outside in between. Round one was enjoyable. As the guest, I was offered one of the upper spots to recline in. "Lie down," Misha said. Then trying to be hospitable he said in English, "This is total relax." Ten minutes later we were standing outside in the dark, towels on, drinking Baltika and talking about Putin ("A product of the system," he said). In retrospect, I think this was how I had imagined the banya experience.
Until round two. I will never forget the smell of boiling beer. When you pour a can of Baltika 7 over hot coals - as Misha now did - the steam it produces feels like someone is injecting molten hops into your sinus cavity. It is oppressive, suffocating, and wheaty. Luckily, I was sporting that woolen fedora which I used to cover my face. "No, no," Misha said, "breathe it in. It's good for the lungs." The others were stone-faced with their eyes closed, like they were either trying not to cough or were attempting to get high from the vaporized alcohol.
We took a break. Sat by the fire, ate, drank beer straight from the can.
Round three. As a general life rule I do not take advice from a naked man, especially one wielding birch branches. So when Misha told me to lie down on my stomach with my hands at my sides it was with reluctance that I did so. Travelers will be familiar with the concept of oppressive hospitality - the overbearing hostess who wants to feed you too much, the excitable acquaintance who wants to show you the town when you only want to sleep. Sometimes it's easier to go along, to placate your inebriated host with lashing instruments. "Total relax," I thought and lay my head on a small pile of hay. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him soak the branches in water and shake away the loose leaves.
Pretty soon they were flailing away like that scene from the Passion. "It's good for the circulation," he reassured me. After two minutes or so he said, "Turn over." This time my hat wasn't covering my face.
After they were done, Misha told me to to keep lying down for sixty seconds while they left. I don't know if it was the thrashing, the beer steam or just the 180-degree heat but I found existence very uncomfortable. At "60" I was out the door and pouring the coldest bucket of water I could find over my head. When I toweled off and picked the remaining birch bits from the backs of my knees, I went outside to watch the stars spin. Back inside, Misha pointed out that my entire body was blotchy with red streaks - "Good for your metabolism," he said.
We all had one more shot. I laughed with a grin that said "I know there's a shotgun around here somewhere."
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