NATO hater strikes again

This time 100km away!

I was wandering around the office in Sukhodol and what do I see painted on the sidewalk?

It's a little faded, but it reads:

"War = NATO

1941 = 2010?

Wake up."

Scenes from Samara, 4

"Europe's biggest mosque" in Samara. This city also claims "Europe's biggest public square." Having seen both of them in person... I'm skeptical.

Medvedev oversees business in one of our offices.

Our driver catches some z's.

Where else but Russia can you see this combo? Tucked in collared shirt, camo pants, leather handbag, plastic sandals. Rock on sir, rock on.

Preliminary results

My job involves doing 5-15 interviews a day, talking to Russians and immigrants, usually at markets. Some of the results from the survey are interesting in and of themselves, but I can't probably talk about those without violating one of the many forms I signed a few weeks ago. But I can start a tally of the strange but recurring things that happen to me as I try to fill my daily quota:

• Number of times I have been asked if I am married: 5
• Number of times I have been asked by a woman to marry her and take her back to New York: 2
• Number of times I have been offered help in finding a mistress: 1
• Number of times I have been asked to show my passport to prove that I am American: 2
• Largest number of people who have surrounded me as I attempt to conduct a one-on-one interview: 8 (all male)
• Number of times I have been asked for money: 3
• Number of times I have been compared to Phillip Kirkorov:

1. Mercifully.

Бузулук

There was an article a couple of months ago in Kommersant Vlast', one of the more popular Russian weekly news magazines, about what it means to be a "province" in Russia. Basically, the article concluded, it meant anything outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg. No one outside of Russia has heard of Samara - some recognize the name as the girl from The Ring. "Samara is already provincial" one of my coworkers said today. If Samara is provincial, I don't know what you call Buzuluk, a city of 90,000 I visited today, 2.5 hours from Samara and only about 6 hours from Kazakhstan. "The sticks," I guess.


View Larger Map

It's even hard for my Russian colleagues to imagine living there. One kept tripping up on the name, mixing it up with Buguruslan, also about three hours away. As we arrived into the city, he said to the other three of us in the car "Wow, they have civilization here. And they even have cute girls," he said, pointing out the window. "We have everything here," our local guide for the day told us. Half an hour earlier she had told us to stop and eat at a roadside diner because "there's no place in the city." Her pride must have swelled as we rolled into Lenin Square.

Yesterday I visited a couple of similarly provincial towns - Surgut, Sukhodol, Sergievsk. I think the best comparison is to American frontier towns. These are places that were constructed as outposts of the Russian army on the way to the Caspian in the early 18th century. The current drought has added to the atmosphere. Everything is a faded yellow and the streets are dusty. The markets close around 3pm, and you get the impression that by 4 you might see tumbleweed in the streets.

Despite the fact that these are relatively "new" cities by comparison to Moscow or Novgorod, you get the impression that they are old in the sense of abandoned, living in the past. The roads along the way are lined by abandoned farm equipment and burnt out buildings. The tractors and machinery you do see in use are rusty. At one crossroads there stood a monument some 20 feet tall which proclaimed in big block letters "THE COLLECTIVE FARM - ONWARD TO COMMUNISM." Last week a Russian acquaintance complained that Samara was still stuck in the 90s. It could be worse, dude.

The clients were mostly sellers in the market, as usual, hawking Chinese-made underwear and t-shirts. As I interviewed my first client, a young man came to inspect her table of boxer-briefs. He pulled out a pair of black ones with red lips imprinted on the crotch and "Place for Kisses" written in Russian across the fly. Discussing the merits of this design didn't faze the woman or her daughter who worked the neighboring stall. Nor could she be persuaded when he offered 130 rubles instead of 140 (~ $4.75).

Yesterday client income was more diverse - I met a woman who oversees a restaurant-banquet hall-hotel-road stop complex, and later with a woman who sells dried fish by the side of the road. The latter took me to a small shack behind her stall and lay newspaper on a wooden bench before I sat down. She told me she needed 200,000 (~ $6600) rubles for a car. Later she asked me if life was better in the US. "Yeah," I said honestly, "I like Russia, but it's better in the US." She asked me if "even black people" live comfortably there.

The issue of prices and relative levels of comfort and black people comes up a surprising amount. One of my coworkers said that he wished he he could get a 4% loan on a car or a 6% loan on a house - like in the US - so that he could live like "a normal white person." I spoke to an Armenian cobbler today who, laughing, said that life was hard in Russia for "us negroes." But he was jovial, had a pretty wife, and was one of the few people I met who seemed content. For him, Russia was already a step up. I think there was a bit of resentment in his voice when he asked if there were a lot of Armenians in the U.S. - the United States of Armenia, he called it more than once - but only a bit. I don't think there's a lot of work for cobblers in the U.S. anymore, anyway.

Politically Motivated Hooligan Strikes Again

"NATO - Death" and assorted Nazi imagery

"NATO - get out of Russia" (I know, it's small and hard to see)

 "Death to capitalism" (kind of off topic but whatever)

Red Heat

Remember that movie Red Heat where Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a Moscow narcotics officer named Ivan Danko and wears Soviet muffin hats and speaks Russian with the alacrity of a Time and Temperature recording? "DA SVIDANYUHHH, TOVARISH." Anyway, they were showing it the other day on Russian TV which was great because, for once, it meant that some of the scenes in an American movie weren't overdubbed. And the movie is surprisingly relevant, as the head gangster complains to Arnold "Why are you always picking on us Georgians?"

Here's a great scene from the movie with some Russian obscenities.

I found myself sympathizing with the governator because, actually, his job for the role and my current job are quite similar - they both involve speaking Russian phrases we're completely unfamiliar with and trying to make them sound natural. It's not often in English that I use a phrase like "loan repayment rate" and I think I'm having a hard time pulling it off in Russian.

The other day as I was interviewing a quiet, roundish Kyrgyz woman, a scruffy man with a red t-shirt approached me and asked what I was doing. (This isn't so unusual - people see you in the market talking to one of their neighbors and they're immediately interested. I've been asked if I sell sim-cards, or if I work for the police.) Then he asked why I speak Russian strangely. I told him because I'm not Russian, I'm American. "You mean your parents are Russian and you live in America, right?" "No," I said. "What, you're pure?" "Yup."

Then he asked me to show him my passport. I politely declined and tried to continue the interview. But now I know that was my mistake. I should have thrown him across the room or ripped off his fake leg and extracted a bag of cocaine, then said a one word phrase like "Hooligans" in an English-Austrian accent before I threw him naked out of a banya. Next time.

From the annals of donkey parasailing

If you have yet to see it, please amuse yourself while observing due respect for the suffering of the poor animal by watching video of some leotards sending a donkey parasailing in the south of Russia:

Scenes from Samara, 3

My street.

Children playing in the courtyard. 

The words on the right read: "graffiti is fridom".

Waiting for the bus.

Went to the soccer game, FC Krylya Sovetov Samara (translates as "Wings of the Soviets") versus CSKA Moscow. Samara was ranked 6th going in, CSKA 2nd. Despite the amazing team name, we lost 1-0.

CSKA fans get rowdy (and 3rd degree-burned?) for their victory.

Scenes from Samara, 2

A fruit/vegetable seller on my street.

A FINCA billboard.

Kirov Market, where a lot of our clients work.

Some guys playing ping-pong after they closed their stalls.

A guy pushes shoe boxes on a cart at the market.

Scenes from Samara, 1

T

The courtyard outside my apartment.

The embankment and beach. Stretches for two miles.

The line outside Zhigulevskoe Beer Factory for discounted beer (35rubles / ~$1 per liter).

More on Running in Russia

After Vladimir (a fairly small city) and St. Petersburg (a city with a fair number of large parks), running in Samara has been much more of an adventure. Occasionally I see someone else running, but it's rare and possible they are trying to catch a bus.

There are a few elementary schools by my house which have old, decrepit asphalt tracks, rutted, chewed up and great for rolling an ankle. As always, the streets are dusty and exhausted.

I found one track and field by the University of Tourism which is a bit better, half covered with those 1.5'x1.5' rubber flooring tiles you often see in looker rooms or playgrounds or on patios.

Things I've encountered while running in Samara:
-Chased by dog (x2)
-Drunken passed out person (x2)
-One drunken man falling down the stairs in front of me
-One man asking me, mid run, for 3 rubles
-10+ dog pack (x2)

Opinion page grafitti

While other hooligans are out plastering gang signs and expletives, our local troublemakers are busying drumming protest against NATO.

In two separate locations by my office I've seen the following phrases: "NATO in Russia = War," "NATO - get out of Russia," "NATO = War" and more creatively "Medveputin wants war - we are destroyed!"

I can imagine some officer in the Russian army, sneaking out at night in fatigues, painting the town red with warnings about western military alliances...

Самара

Moved to Samara. I took the two-nights train from St. Petersburg, which at 40 hours is the longest I've ever spent on a train. Luckily I put up for "Kupe", which is basically the business class of the Russian rail system, one large step up from "Platskart" which, in summer, can be an adventure for the senses.

In Kupe, four people share a closed cabin - in Platskart, 54 people share an open wagon. This is a huge difference, especially when many passengers buy and consume dried fish sold by leathery old babushkas along the tracks. Other than the layout and fish, there were three small changes I noticed: the toilet had a "hygienic" plastic cover; the tea cups came with saucers underneath; there was air conditioning. Ok, AC's a big difference.

My cabin-mates were a 20-something female and another 20-something female traveling with her 40-something father. Both girls were cute. The father, in addition to his oversized plaid capri shorts, wore a tattoo on his arm which read "Army Technical Group." This meant that I felt secure from any hooligans straying into our wagon, but nervous about my eyes straying in the cabin.

Here is the summary of our conversation over the 40 hours:

Father: "Is this Chapaevsk?"
Me: "Yes."
Father: "How long do we have?"
Me: "30 minutes."

After spending two weeks out of the country, it was good to get some language practice in.

- - - - - - - - - -

We stopped in a lot of faceless towns, the longest pause for 45 minutes. We'd climb out of the train, most to smoke or buy from the babushkas hawking beer, chips, more dried fish, berries.

At one of the longer stops on the morning of the second day, I saw two of the women conductors racing across the tracks, pushing each other up onto the platform like slapstick, then shuffle into the city as stridently as their blue uniform skirts would allow. Hungry, I wandered into the station and found a small bakery where I bought three pastries with tvorog in them. The woman behind the counter was using an abacus to calculate change.

I went back outside and sat on a bench, eating until the 5-minute departure notice. As I sat, I noticed the women conductors running back to the train in their blue uniforms and decorative epaulettes. They were carrying bags of blankets, linens and curtains. Then I notice four or five other women doing the same thing. Who knew? Ivanovo, or Chapaevsk, or Syzran - you beguiling enchantress city of the Volga, bedding capital of central Russia.