Learning Russian

Propaganda still works

2005-11-14T16:56:00.000-08:00

Talking with a Russian from St. Petersberg, the subject of the pension privileges protests comes up. Civil servants and retired people are being asked to exchange some minimum privileges, like bus transportation, for the equivalent cash, in their salary & pension. "What's the problem with that?", I was asked. "Is something wrong with these people's arithmetic?"

No. Civil servants and pensioners in Russia sometimes don't receive their salaries & pensions. So when you take away their privileges, you may be taking away their very last possibility for survival.

Of course, in Moscow & St. Petersberg, and a few other choice places, civil servants are paid regularly, because the majority population in those cities have more money, and want civil services. But in the rest of the country ...

It reminds me of what I said to a Moscovite when I first saw the city. "Why is everything so well kept?" I said, having seen other parts of Russia first. "Well, there's 18 million people in Moscow," I was told. "The number of people doesn't matter," I said, "what matters, is the proportion they get of the resources." Which in Moscow is something like 75% of the country's wealth. "It's always been that way," an old Russian field director told me: "... you either got onto Moscow's train, or you lived in the country".

But, of course, it's still amazing that professionals in Moscow & St. Petersberg are unaware of this. Despite endemic cynicism among the Russians, propaganda still works.

High School

2005-10-29T17:59:00.000-07:00

There are many facets to any human culture, and it takes some time to tease the patterns from the background.

Among modern Russians, there's a pervasive tendency to needle each other, especially in groups. It's very competitive, and meant to deflate people, to put them down, to make them conform. I think this can be found anywhere ... but in Russia there's very little counter force. There's no corrective to the behavior, as we have in the US: 'don't put me down'.

This tendency towards extremely negative and gratuitous criticism, towards one's comrades, is probably a remnant of the Soviet system. A command economy is rather like a cradle-to-grave high school.

Russian reality & the impoverished world of the rich

2005-08-29T19:43:00.000-07:00

Since my trip, I've noticed that articles about Russia, in the US, sound completely insane.

Especially travel writing. Take this one, from the NYT/IHT.

"I remember when Tverskaya was dark," said Carrie Barich-Hart, a transplanted Minnesotan who has lived in Moscow since 1992, referring to Moscow's main boulevard, "when there were no restaurants except for a few hotels. In the last three or four years, Moscow really started coming alive again."

I think everyone should visit Moscow ... but, you know, here's a Reality Check. Never believe the New York Times.

Everyone in Moscow eats in the most drab, low-quality fast food restaurants imaginable. Because they are kind-of affordable. The slightly better restaurants, are usually terrible, and ridiculously expensive. There is nothing like the small "excellent food, reasonable price" family-restaurants that you can still find in, say, Paris, New York or Naples. The single best thing I ate in Moscow was some kind of hot freshly-made flatbread, at a metro station, for 10 rubles. The second-best thing, quite far down, was a crepe from a "Russian Blini" stand ... which tasted only like an approximation of the real thing. The best food in Russia can only be found outside of Moscow. And it's not in restaurants, but in homes.

Both these spots are D.J.-soundtracked restaurant-as-theater spectacles of bankers, models, stars, molls and hangers-on nibbling $30 salads and coolly ogling each other. "Right now, Moscow is younger and wilder than ever," said Barich-Hart. "It's as if the whole city just turned 21."

I'm sorry to be burdening the Internet, by repeating this kind of crap. People who write for the New York Times travel section live in a kind of "Sex in the City" pseudo-world, where rich people can always buy better lives than the rest of us. Luckily, the world isn't really like that. You can get better experiences simply by meeting some Russians, and hanging out with them. Do it in the countryside, and it will be even more wonderful. Russians love to go to the country, and that's where the real culture is. DJ's & performance artists in snobby clubs, trying to impress the nouveau rich, is a pretty thin, Las Vegas-L.A. limo lifestyle, where nothing is real. Far better to just wander around Moscow on the Metro, meet people randomly, try to find colleagues in your area of interest, and try to understand what's going on. That's travel. The rest of it is mindless, tasteless, meaningless consumerism.

A million "sister city" relationships

2005-08-11T17:20:00.000-07:00

This is just a thought.

Eugene, Oregon, the city I live in, has a sister city relation with a Russian city in Siberia: Irkutsk. But, why does Eugene have only relations with one Russian city? With the number of Russian scholars associted with the University of Oregon, and others with relatoins in Russia, why aren't there official relationships with all those cities defined by real interactions with them? This could keep the transnational municipal foreign-relations movement alive, and also strengthen ties in the local community. Why have just one sister city in Russia, or France, or Egypt, or Nicaragua? The point of transnationalism is to erase national boundaries, not reinforce them.

Leaving Russia & entering the US -- the gauntlet

2005-08-08T08:55:00.000-07:00

Sheremetyevo Airport (SVO) Moscow

Trying to figure out the system at the Moscow aitport (SVO): you walk in, and besides some typical modern Russian kiosks, you see a ticket purchase counter -- not useable for getting your boarding pass. All the activity is on the right wall, at customs/departure. So already, the system's different than at US airports.

Instead of checking in and getting your boarding pass first, choose whether to go into departure customs: green line (nothing to declare) or red line (something to declare).

I said my goodbyes, then went through the green line. First thing was security. Woman asks "Seattle?" "Yes, Seattle", I say in English, to make it clear that I'm a foreigner and am, consequently, too silly to be dangerous. They x-ray the bags. And when I went to my baggage, the fellow said, in passable English, "please take your large bag to be inspected". I don't think I was being singled out. It seemed, I must say, much more like a security search than a "customs export" search. Not much vigilence about taking historical items out of the country, or lots of cash, or whether you were leaving with more than you came with. Inspector was very nice and completely minimal. Helped me shut my bag again, sent me to get my boarding pass.

Presented ticket & passport at the immediately subsequent ticket counter. Checked the large bag. No tag for the carry-on. Got the boarding pass, and went to the "passport departure" line. Wordlessly, the passport lady took my passport & ticket, communicated with the computer for a minute or two, stamped my visa. I went in ...

... to the Moscow airport gated section, for ticketed passengers only. Quite a scene: a dozen duty-free shops of fair size, not very busy, a bunch of bars, even an Irish pub and an Indian Restaurant. Smoking common, but not overwhelming. There's an upstairs area where people camp out, because you're not allowed into the gate until just before your flight (there's another security check there). This upstairs areas is a 15-foot-wide balcony, that wraps around the gated area, and looks over all the gates. It obviously had a different purpose, at another time. Right where the balcony turns, there's some power outlets, so if you have a russian plug, you can hypothetically sit and work ... without benefit of a chair, and on a floor that's mucky in places. Sitting against a wall, cross-legged, typing, balancing a notebook, is very hard on my 45-year-old back ... I really need to start doing yoga.

There's fee-based Wifi at the Moscow airport, by Tascom. You apparently pay for it in one of the shops downstairs (maybe -- there's a list of vendors at their website) but I enjoyed being offline.

Your flight boarding time is on your boarding pass, in a big font, and that's when the security check starts. Very thorough. Women do this work, searching you, waving wands, make you take your shoes off, X-Raying, metal detector walk-through, and going through every single thing in your carry-on luggage. This seems completely security-oriented, not customs-oriented.

Flight was uncomfortable for me because I had an aisle seat, and couldn't fall asleep in it. I couldn't get a vegetarian meal ordered -- Aeroflot is impossible to reach by telephone: get your ticket right, and get your meal right (all their US - Russia flights are non-smoking), when you buy the ticket, because you won't get another chance -- but luckily there was an extra in 1st class, and the crew gave me that -- potato & mushroom raviolis with asparagus. Not bad.

On the plane, you get a customs declaration. If you're a US citizen or green card holder, you can take up to $800 worth of purchases into the US. I guess you don't need receipts for this, if the value's pretty obviously low. Customs doesn't care about personal items at all -- your electronics, your shirts purchased in Russia, etc.

USDA-wise, as far as agricultural products go, I did have some rasberry jam with me, little hedgehog that I am, but I said I had no food. Jam is a condiment. I don't know if they would have taken it, if I brought it up, so I didn't. My wife & family spent hours in the forest picking those wild rasberries, so I wasn't keen to mention it. I know that the commercial grade stuff would probably pass, and that homemade stuff might not. Which is hugely unfair, so I was quiet on the subject.

At SeaTac, US Customs is pretty lenient towards native english speakers, I'd say. I interacted with five of these border cops. The first one, at the passport counter, asked me about some questions to determine that I was legit -- the passport could be fake, after all. He was making conversation "who do you know in russia?" "what do you do for a living?" etc.

You get your bags, in an interminable wait inside customs. When you get them, you head towards the exit, slowly, looking for one of the wandering customs agents. The one I got asked me what I had -- gifts etc? I said "small stuff, worth less than $100 ... I bought some shirts" and at that he handed me back my passport & form & waved me on. The next guy said less (he saw the previous conversation), another guy nodded me on, and the final guy took the form, on the way out. No inspection, but I think that's because I don't fit their profile.

Street snapshot of the Russian commodity economy in 2005

2005-08-01T06:20:00.000-07:00

Nestle is everywhere in Russia, selling ice cream. But so are the competing Russian brands. Of course, Nestle is trying to capture the money spent already on ice cream here ... and bring the profits to 'Switzerland' where they are 'based' (but really, the profits go to their major stockholders). Nestle (and Danon, ADM etc.) are agressively sourcing from the Russian milk industry -- so Russian cows will soon be treated as badly as US cows --systems of abuse are very much 'prototyped in the US' by capitalism, prior to export.

Ice cream manufacturers in Russia, under this intense competition, will probably mostly sell out, to appease Nestle's desire to re-brand Russian ice cream ... if that hasn't happened already. Most of these 'native manufacturers', when they really are native, are the nouveau rich, broadly called oligarchs here, who stole the country's resources during Yelstin's great sell out. Ironically, many of them have swiss bank accounts ...

So, after having destroyed the Soviet economy through economic-political opportunism under Yelstin, the West is playing hardball, grabbing what resources they can ... in a never ending destructive cycle.

People seem to be very aware of Nestle's rapacious imperialist habits, and that of all these expanding Western companies, whether consumer-branded or not. But they seem pretty cynical about Russian companies too. "You can't trust what it says on the package!" some babushka advised us in a grocery store, about a Russian fruit juice. True of all modern production.

So is the answer in the villages? Is that where there's still some way to escape the insanity? Well, villages often have their petty oligarchs too now -- Lords, who mostly keep to themselves but, like those nobles of old, tend to treat normal people like dogs.

The answer: is in coalition, of course! The tools to solve the problems are there, and some are using them in Russia. The most we can do in the US, to help, is to stop the World Bank, and related programs, which endlessly fund destructive empire-building for the benefit of a few.

Time habits

2005-08-01T06:01:00.000-07:00

Russians, at least the urban kind, are surprisingly obsessed with the clock. Things should start & finish on time. Trains should run on time. You should work "from bell to bell", and then rush to do something else. Russians on the Moscow Metro definitely outpace the Japanese in Tokyo. Such determined bursts of energy ... to get home, go out, or go relax. They really seem to make transition time as short as possible. This 'culture' is very much the residue of top-down optimizations. It takes getting used to, seems both unnatural, and surprisingly anti-cooperative.

Robustek ; fragiletek

2005-07-26T23:50:00.000-07:00

I'm in an old village in Russia, collectivized after the revolution but still a subsistence village today. There's a great "cobbling technology" tradition in these places ... new fences look ancient, even when they incorporate new materials. Well-made, sturdy, practical ... beautiful. There are lots of useful patterns here to study, lots of promising design/build sequences that lead to good results.

It's not just fences. The locks people use here, interestingly, are clearly modern, but have a very solid, reliable, medieval feeling to them. The soviet technologists didn't see a need to change these designs, I guess, so there are millions of locks in Russia that make western locks look ... very wimpy. They're fun to use. In the village, they lock some things up which they probably don't need to, I think partly because these big locks are just so handy & handsome. Robust technology.

Contrast this with modern commercial technology ... many Russian children have their own cell-phones. Young Vasya here has a new bluetooth Sony Ericsson phone-camera, which he knows like the back of his hand. So we linked it up to Olga's new Apple powerbook with built-in bluetooth, running Mac OS X 3.9. We were able to browse the camera's files, send files to it, and use the camera as a remote control for the Powerbook. And no doubt, if he had GPRS, we would get that working.

But it's demo technology only.

Once you try to actually use this pair for something, it gets horribly tedious. That's true of some basics on Mac OS X too. For example, the file browser gets stuck on the previous directory download, gets confused, and hangs up. Eventually, you'll have to shut down the powerbook to fix this problem. The phone may not be discoverable forever ... no matter how often you click the "discoverable" button. So you have to turn it off too. If you're trying to resize a photo so it fits on a phone, with the default software on a Mac, good luck to you. iPhoto can't do a genuine resize. And if you do it without creating another user account, and without importing the photos to that user's iPhoto, you may destroy your original photo trying to resize. Fragile technology.

Everyone in the computer industry knows what's going on here, and most consumers know too. Innovative, deeply robust technology can only be built under certain circumstances ... strong public funding, well-protected R & D laboratories, slow product cycles, etc. Even when this happens, and private industry moves in to capitalize on it, they inevitably screw it up. Apple spends far more money on advertising and industrial design than on functionality, engineering and QA. The same is true of Motorola, SONY & Ericsson. There have been pockets of exceptions, and this is promising technology ... But, seriously, bluetooth is just two radios sharing data. Why can't it be reliable, now? I'm sure the first locks worked pretty well, right off the bat ... There are plenty of engineers who would love to be given the chance to really make this technology work ... including those who created these products. But profits come first.

Which makes me wish that the people who made these locks, and the R & D lab cum factory they worked in, could have survived to make these products today. Because then, they would work.

Cell-band in Russsia: iBook, Mac OS X, Motorola v551, Beeline, Bluetooth, GPRS -- connecting to the Internet by mobile phone

2005-07-25T09:09:00.000-07:00

Cellphones that seem cheap in the US are, in fact, worth less: they are locked, with something called a "subsidy password", making your phone only work with the SIM card you bought the phone with.

For some reason, of the two Motorola v551's with me (one is mine, one is my wife's), one phone is locked, and one is not. Just my good luck, I suppose, or maybe I'm part of somebody's experiment. These phones sell in Russia for 6,000 rubles just now, or about $200.

I went to Beeline, the most pervasive cell phone company here, and who's network my phone found immediately. I bought a SIM card, which fits under the battery. You pay into the SIM card's services ahead of time, like a rechargeable phone card.

Luckily the Motorola v551 GSM does work in Russia -- in fact the signal seems much stronger than Cingular's in the US (for comparison, I'm taking the I-5 corridor in the Pacific Northwest in the US, from Eugene to Seattle, against the Moscow-Tver corridor ... )

Beeline also has a pay-ahead internet connect option, and it uses a system known as GPRS. On the v551, at least, you can talk and stay connected at the same time. Just don't flip the phone closed ... this closes the connection for some reason.

Since I have an older iBook, I also needed to buy a bluetooth USB dongle for it ... the Motorola data cables are available nowhere ... even in the US I found dealers who didn't have them -- "too expensive", they said -- and no one, certainly, has them in Russia. But electronics stores do have bluetooth dongles.

Beeline's GPRS guide, which is in Russian, didn't have instructions for Mac OS X ... so that's why I'm including them here. It took an awful lot of experimentation to figure this out.

One thing: you'll need a Motorola Mac OS X modem script called "Motorola CID1". Nothing seems to work without it. It's available here. Put it in your Macintosh HD->Library->Modem Scripts directory.

On the iBook:
1. Put in your Bluetooth dongle. It should autodetect, and be ready, on MAC OS X -- I'm using the 3.9 version of Panther.

On the Motorola v551:
2. Click your 'menu' button (top middle).
3. Click the 'tools' image (Settings)
4. Click Connection
5. Click Bluetooth Link
6. Click Setup
7. If power is off, change power to 'on'.
8. Click 'find me' You're discoverable for 60 seconds. Run back to the iBook.

On the iBook:
9. Click the bluetooth symbol on the top bar
10. click "Set up bluetooth device ..."
11. the setup assistant starts. Click 'continue'
12. click 'Mobile phone' then continue
13. When it finds your phone, click continue.
14. It shows you a 6-digit passkey on the screen, run back to your cellphone

On the Motorola v551:
15. it says 'Bond with your computer name'? Click yes.
16. It says 'Enter Bluetooth passkey'. Type in the passkey, click OK. It says 'bonded'.
Nothing else to do here, but leave the phone flipped open.

On the iBook:
17. It gets some more info from your phone. Then it asks if you want GPRS. Make sure it's clicked, and click continue.
18. Bluetooth Mobile Phone Setup values:
username: beeline
password: beeline
GPRS CID String: internet.beeline.ru
Modem Script: Motorola GPRS CIR1
Check 'Show bluetooth status in the menu bar'.
Click continue
19. Click Quit
20. Open System Preferences. Click Network. If you haven't already, create a new location, say, "GPRS Beeline".
Under TCP/IP:
Select "Using PPP" but also use these DNS Servers:
217.118.66.243
217.118.66.244
Under Bluetooth Modem:
Check everything
make sure Motorola GPRS CID1 is selected
Under PPP
Account name: beeline
Password: beeline
Telephone number: internet.beeline.ru
(... and that is not a typo)
PPP Options:
I checked everything, except the top three options.
20. Click "Dial Now ..." this opens up the Internet dialer.
All the settings we've typed in should be in place. Click "Connect".
21. At some point, a blank terminal screen comes up. Click "Continue"
22. After a minute or so, some send/receive bars should show up. You're connected!

The big surprise is that only step 20 gets easier, unless you know applescript. Still, it works! Fast enough ... dial-up speeds.

A note on the Motorola V551 -- not my favorite cellphone. The little plastic tabs on the back are terribly made, and will fail if you change your SIM card too often. And there are definitely times when you have to power down, and back up again, in order to connect with bluetooth. On the other hand, the bluetooth setup assistant also has a tendency to crash, with the spinning pinwheel of death.

A note on the iBook ... my favorite mac notebook ever. It's very sturdy ... as opposed to the Powerbook's 'titanium' shell, which seems to carry a light current all the time when plugged in ... I don't know if this is an artifact of using Russian power ... perhaps the power transformers aren't as clean as they could be ... but it definitely 'buzzes' when plugged in. I'm in a village (a poor one, yet it has cell coverage) and the humming powerbook on recharge seems to attract more flies than either I or my cup of tea ... I guess flies like that sort of thing. The Powerbook has more sleep mode failures than the iBook does, and the Powerbook's bottom gets more overheated ... and yet it costs more. I'm talking about the model that came out earlier this year.

Note that both the iBook & the Powerbook can get damaged in travel ... the notorious 'keys-through-the-screen' problem. Buy a hard notebook case that does not let the computer torque at all.

Stalin's buildings

2005-07-18T00:19:00.000-07:00

The first thing you notice about almost any city in Western Russia, is that aside from modern International-style construction, its buildings look like a cross between those of St. Petersburg & old Paris. Outside of Moscow, they are mostly falling apart, like everything else. But almost everywhere they are beautiful and touching, with everything done right, and often with great sensitivity to people's needs.

However, these buildings are modern. They were part of massive work-making building programs of Stalin's. They look 18th century, but many are from the 1950's. It's incredible, especially if you've spent any time tracking architecture in the rest of the world. It's as if an entire country is trying to fool you ... very successfully.

Of course, the Metro is a major example. Each station looks like a palace. But it is a metro station, so you know it's not very old ... this contradiction makes each trip on the Moscow Metro extremely surreal.

Stalin was a monster, but his construction people really knew their stuff. The horrible International style movement in the USSR, in the post-Stalin era, was obviously a reaction to Stalin, avoiding anything he would like ...

This avoidance is similar to the situation 10 years earlier, in post-WWII Europe, when people stopped building in the old manner, partly to escape association with the war, but partly to join the US-led new world order.

The good news is that these buildings are mostly protected in Russia (loopholes aside). The bad news is that, outside of Moscow, there's no money to maintain them.

Tver

2005-07-17T23:49:00.000-07:00

In a city of half-a-million, you expect to find some internet connectivity. But very few parts of Tver are ADSL-ready, so don't expect to create a high-speed nest for yourself. Internet 'Salons' come and go quite easily here. Right now, after a pretty exhaustive search, it seems like there are two active salons in Tver -- one in the back hallway of the third floor of the "tourist hotel" across from the train station -- that's the nicest one. The other one, though, is downtown ... in a hot basement, on a street just off the main pedestrian promenade. Not very pleasant to work there, but ok. Neither salon has WiFi. Even the Internet Salons in Moscow don't have WiFi. That's not their game. (Games are their game, from what I've seen of the Moscow scene).

But Tver itself is fascinating.

The Volga river promenades & parks are especially lovely. The thousands of old buildings make it look like a potential UN World Heritage site -- sometimes I think of all of Russia should become one. The beautiful 18th-century art museum, which is falling apart, and whose scaffolding for repairs has fallen apart, is in real need of rescue, both for the building and its priceless collection. Of course, no help comes from Moscow, which assigns governors to Russian regions with the sole purpose of extracting as much wealth as politically possible.

Power converting in Russia

2005-07-17T23:09:00.000-07:00

All notebook computers sold in the world today come with a "brick", a step-down-transformer/power-supply which transforms wall voltage and frequencies to something appropriate for the notebook. All notebook computer bricks will say something like "110-240v, 50-60 HZ". They are non-polarized, and non-grounded. So all you have to do is make the plug fit in the wall. This is done with $10 gadgets, "universal plugs", available in many flavors even at Staples, and they always include the "two big round prongs" which fit into the wall in Russia & elsewhere. You can probably get these in Russia, but I haven't seen any at the many electronic stores I've been to so far, so it's best to get one or two before you leave.

The converters are probably not available because it is hard for russians to travel outside of the country ... not many countries let Russians in unless they have some money. The EU apparently has a "$10,000 in the bank" rule for Russians, so the average Russian can't travel to countries their parents saved from Hitler. The minority of rich Russians can, of course.

Note that not all electronic devices have "good bricks"! My cellphone and my wireless router had them, but my razor, and my Altec-Lansing iPod speakers did not. Luckily, electronics are cheaper in Russia than in the US. That includes things like batteries and blank CD's & DVD's -- it is absurd to bring these to Russia. They are everywhere. A good electric razor will only set you back a couple of bucks.

If you have a few US electronic devices, it's a good idea to bring a little power-strip, or a three-way plug -- anything that lets you plug more than one US device into a single US socket. You won't be able to get such a thing here. The Russian equivalents are available everywhere, of course, and they come in handy for other reasons.

Note that it's no problem to bring these things into the country, if you go through the green "nothing to declare" line at customs. There's a "personal use" allowance ... or that's what I read on the Internet. There's no sign anywhere here of such an official policy. Of course, I haven't left Russia yet ... maybe that's when they tell you the rules.

Wifi Moscow

2005-07-17T14:23:00.000-07:00

Don't expect to randomly find Wifi outside of Moscow. Even within Moscow, you need to know where you're going. Even with companies actively unwiring the cafes, like yandex.ru, your chances of bumping into WiFi are slim.

The Hard Rock Cafe has free wifi -- go have a quesadilla, download your e-mail, and check out the ragtag commercialization of the beautiful pedestrian street of Staryi Arbat.

Business visa for Russia

2005-07-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

You should get your visa before your airplane ticket, but it's possible to go the other way around. I can only say what I did, which is apparently quite normal. I ordered a 90-day business visa.

I used an "agency", this one, in my case, which sends you an image of a certified "business invitation" for you, which you've paid for, and which you then print out and send to the Russian Consulate near you (with application forms etc.). Mine had an error in it, but it didn't seem to matter. The Consulate sent me back a visa in record time (I paid the extra fee, and provided the registered Fedex envelope for returning my passport). In moscow, I went to the address of "the agency", within three business days of coming to the country, and the agency called the government and stamped my migration card.

Things seem pretty relaxed in Russia, immigration-wise. Just read the instructions carefully, and you'll be ok.

stream.ru ADSL in Moscow for Mac OS X

2005-07-17T13:57:00.000-07:00

For those with Mac OS X who want to connect to the stream.ru ADSL service in Moscow -- you don't need to do anything to your ADSL modem. If you were playing with it, it's safe to reset to the factory settings.

In my case, the ADSL modem Stream.Ru sold me was an Aus.linx AL-2007VA, which is also a router/DHCP server. In your OS X system preferences, make a new location, set TCP/IP to DHCP, apply, and set the PPPoE section to the second username & password pair in the little secret tearsheet given to you by the stream.ru people. Apply, and PPPoE will connect for you. This was a useful link, from the major Mac people in Moscow. I can't read all the instructions, but I found that I didn't need to do anything to the modem. I did need to get the username/password from the tearsheet.

Hooking up a Wireless Access Point is much easier. Hook the ADSL's ethernet out into the uplink for the WAP, connect wirelessly in the normal way, surf to the address for your WAP: mine was a new linksys wireless-G broadband router, with address 192.168.1.1, default username: WRT54GC default password: admin. Select PPPoE, give it that second Stream.Ru password, save settings and wait. Then apply your normal "DHCP through airport" setting, as you would anywhere, and you'll be live.

The Stream.ru ADSL is quite fast & robust ... I can SSH, FTP, Workspot ... all ports seem to be available. This is not true at all WiFi & Internet Salons around Moscow. The Workspot demo is a particularly good test, because if it can't connect, the only port available is 80 (HTTP). My ADSL line was the first Workspot connection I managed to get here. I don't know why ... this isn't China, there's no Internet censorship. I don't see the point. Anti-hacker precaution, perhaps?

Formerly existing socialism

2005-07-17T13:33:00.000-07:00

I saw the most extreme version of the Russian alcoholic today. They tend to hang around in children's playgrounds, which are between and around all apartment buildings. They dig through garbages, competing with the wild dogs. But today I saw one who had become one with the garbage. He was covered in dirt, and was moving from garbage to garbage. He looked like he'd become a worm. No social safety net for him ... but he's free to buy a rum & coke or a gin & tonic in a pull-tab soda pop can.

I also saw an armless & legless veteran, crawling on the metro, asking for help. No social safety net for him. But he's free to beg, and compete with people hawking handbags on the metro.

Saw a boy, about five years old, playing accordian and singing soulfully on the metro. The boy was quite good, a natural musician/performer. Who might have been nurtured twenty years ago ... today he's free to pursue a career as a street urchin.

Back in the ссср

2005-07-17T13:11:00.000-07:00

When here, it's striking how much of modern Russia is obviously the Soviet Union. You can feel it ... all the buildings, all the social relationships, the culture, the Dostoyevsky depression, the Moscow snobbery, the Moscow/non-Moscow divide ... this is the USSR. What's different?

Less social expenditure, of course. More violent crime, certainly. More corruption too. People more extraordinarily enriching themselves at the expense of others. The death of manufacture & agriculture. A deeper distrust of people. A torn social safety net. A general reduction of happiness ... note that there's a small percentage of the Moscow population who might disagree with me. And, I'm comparing it to the 1980's of course, not Stalin's day.

These are huge changes. But the USSR is everywhere, pervasive, and it's not going away. But it's completely lost what little was left of a people's ideology.

Town & country

2005-07-17T12:36:00.000-07:00

Moscow is extremely well maintained, when you compare it with the rest of the country. 145 million people in Russia, and 80% of the resources go to a small percentage of the population of 11 million in this city. You can feel it. Modern neoliberal capitalism is doing quite well in russia.

I went to Tver, a city of half-a-million outside of Moscow. It looks like a gigantic squatter village ... unmaintained public spaces, rubble falling off the buildings, a kind of wild west with a Baroque backdrop. I'm told that St. Petersburg is very much the same. Parts of Moscow, off the beaten track, are similarly abandoned-looking, but not for long, with property so expensive there.

People feel rather unempowered, as they do in the US and elsewhere. "Moscow is a train" and old communist director told me "it sets a direction, and you either get on, or you stay off the train." Happily, there's lots of people very interested in staying off Moscow's train ... in the same way that most of the US doesn't give a shit whether Manhattan thinks it's the center of the universe or not.

Even Moscovites get off the train.

Every weekend, the road from Moscow is packed with people headed towards country life -- either villages or dachas. It's a major part of modern russian culture to return to the country, whether an old village that was collectivized in the 1920's, or a settlement of dachas (country houses). The culture in these places can be extrordinarily bucolic, almost a subsitance level of existence. And people love it. With good reason -- it is very real, and very wonderful: fetching water from the well, taking wood-fired saunas, jumping into swimming holes, making tea in a samovar, drinking homemade liquor, eating fresh vegetables, using the outhouse, keeping a garden and barnyard, interacting with your neighbors etc. This movement is the great hope of russian culture, really. It's an aboriginal culture, a native one, that is deeply ingrained, and which acts as a counterbalance to the anti-people policies of the national government. It makes russia seem more ripe than the US for, I dunno, a "green revolution". Combine the people in the country & cities outside Moscow, with those who want to escape Moscow, and you have a super-majority ready to demand social expenditure again.

Aeroflot - Аэрофлот

2005-07-17T11:58:00.000-07:00

Аэрофлот has flights from Seattle to Moscow. New Boeing 767's, bought no doubt with US government & World Bank guarantees & loans. Very nice Russian staff at baggage check in -- 32 kilos was our baggage limit, and we were two kilos over -- it would cost a fortune. But the check-in girl told us to move some stuff to the carry-ons ... quite nice of her.

The London bombings happened the day of our flight, and while we were waiting to board, we had to listen to the extreme, virulent, US news propaganda about the bombings. The fact is, you're more likely to die being hit by a cab in London. But no government reacts to the 'cab crisis' by tearing away our freedoms and spending billions invading auto companies & slaughtering the workers. The death of these commuters, and the abuse of the catastrophe by the powerful militarist publicists, was quite disgusting, and a disturbing way to leave the US.

But the media response was indentical in Moscow. The russian government has it's own agenda, indeed, almost every government in the world has its own agenda, its own abuse to squeeze from this explosion. Every state needs to scare it's people into subservience, and needs to invent an enemy. But the governments, of course, are by far the biggest sponsors of death and destruction.

The flight was lovely. A beautiful trip over the north pole. Arriving in Moscow ... the immigration people silently stamp your passport, and the customs people are no where to be seen, if you follow the green lane.

First lesson

2005-05-12T15:36:00.000-07:00

If you are a US citizen, trying to travel to Russia, you should know that you can only stay, as a tourist, for 30 days. You cannot stay for 31 days. So the first thing you need to do, when buying an airplane ticket, is to count the days, so that you are not staying longer than 30 ... inclusive of your arrival & departure days.

Aeroflot will sell you a ticket for 31 days, and charge you $150 to change the ticket, when you learn your lesson!

Cultural habits

2004-12-25T10:55:00.000-08:00

There is another deep kind of communication that takes place through cultural habit.

In Russia, for example, before you go on a trip, everyone in the house sits down, and is quiet, until someone feels that's enough, and they say good, and everyone gets up.

Every student knows that you must do these sorts of things, to get any understanding of a culture. And you can't understand a literature without experiencing the culture. Even further, you can't read the language ... references to these sort of habits are sometimes in idiomatic language, often derived from literature. But, really, a word can't resonate for you in quite the same way if you haven't certain experiences. Now, there's limits ... many of these habits get lost, and many are unavailable for other reasons. And it really isn't possible to become another person. But it is important to try.

Communication by gesture

2004-12-25T10:44:00.000-08:00

Gestures are symbols made by human movement and shapes ... some, again, are cultural, and some universal, or a combination. As symbols, they need to be learned.

The only gesture I seem to have confirmation of, is this "thumb pointing through next two fingers" gesture, which apparently means 'not a chance' or 'you get nothing', when someone asks for something. It doesn't look like a very serious gesture, but I'd only use it among friends.

Communicating by expression

2004-12-25T10:37:00.000-08:00

Vocal emotion is usually accompanied by reinforcing expressions. These are actually quite difficult to hide, and micro-expressions are quite famous for revealing secrets. These expressions aren't all universal, but those that are can add a layer of depth to your communication. Many of these expressions, of course, are culturally transmitted, and so need to be learned. You can see this in the expression mimicry (as well as the emotive delivery mimicry) of mass media entertainment in your own lifetime.

Communicating emotion

2004-12-24T15:38:00.000-08:00

There are many human sounds that work across language barriers. When someone screams, for example. Many sounds aren't universal, and I'd like to make a list that works in Russia.

What is this sub-field called? Many of these sounds are even made by animals, although in that case their meaning is unverifiable in the normal sense. Try just making these emotive sounds without a sentence. Use 'meow', for example.

straightforward query
tentative query
tentative assertiveness
blustery frustration
blustery elation
quiet resignation
assertive, independent resignation
cautious assertion
cautious question
sigh of physical exhaustion
hopeless sigh
frustrated sigh, still hopeful
frustrated sigh, verging on hopeless
tone of regathering energies in face of exhaustion
tickled laughter
appreciative laughter
disbelieving laughter

I could go on. My question is whether these all work equally well across languages. I know many do. While this many not seem a alinguistic subject ... how often would we better be able to communicate if we understood this landscape as well as grammar & vocabulary? While it may seem like the territory of the mimic or the actor, just look at the range of expressions ... these are quite another dimension from vocabulary, and possibly as numerous.

Cyrillic & vowel sound guides

2004-12-23T20:50:00.000-08:00

Online Resources:

Learning Russian
Bucknell
Russian mentor
Reed
CyberUSSR
College Park

The fewest words, the most sounds

2004-12-20T13:33:00.000-08:00

How many words in Russian would you need to know, to cover the entire alphabet? Beyond that, how many are necessary to provide examples of all sound shapes? Is this pedagogically useful?

I'll reduce the set from words in Russian: A Language Map, a guide by Bilingual books.

Need:
а.б.в.г.д.е.ё.ж.з.и.й.к.л.м.н.о.п.р.с.т.у.ф.х.ц.ч.ш.щ.ы.э.ю.я

Доброе утро : д.о.б.р.е.у.т
(dohbrahye)(ootrah)
[good morning]

спокойной ночи : с.п.к.й.н.ч.и
(spahkoynay)(nohchee)
[good night]

извините : з.в
(eezveeneetyeh)
[excuse me]

Вы говорнте по-русски? : ы.г
(vwee)(gahvahreetyah)(pahroosskee)
[You speak russian?]

пожалуйста
(pahzhaloostah)
[please]

хорошо
(hahrahshoh)
[good]

месяц
(myehsyets)
[month]

Ha помощь
(nah)(pohmahshch)
[help]

где кафе?
(gdyeh)(kafyeh)
[Where's a cafe?]

компьютер
(kahmpyootyer)

как вас зовут?
(kahk)(vahs)(zahvoot)

Still need ё

Good exercise. A little schoolroom competition ...

HTML & Cyrillic

2004-12-20T10:12:00.000-08:00

Is is possible to publish Cyrillic here?

дa, дa

I'm on Mac OS X. Click on the little language flag at the top-right. Pick "Show character Palette". Pick Unicode from the drop-down list, and Cyrillic from the left list panel.

Now, if the above turns out to be "da, da" in Cyrillic, we're ok. Most browsers set to Unicode-8 will display it properly. So, I'm on Mac OS X, and the default setting is correct. Note that, unfortunately, if I go to Safari's preferences, the default listed is "Western ISO". Which is not true. Because if you select View->text encoding->Western ISO, the browser displays incorrectly. This is just the Safari bug.

In an old Internet Explorer (5.2 for Mac, which few people use anymore, right?) the default setting doesn't matter -- if there's a unicode-8 character in the text, you cannot select View->Character set->Western Latin 1.

To get a different view (I only have the browsers on my computer, after all) I went to workspot.com. If you click the instant Linux demo button, you get a remote desktop, and today, at least, it launches a Linux Mandrake 9.1 Gnome desktop with Galeon as a browser. Reasonable preferences seemed to have no effect on this page, such as "auto-detect->russian" and "default set->unicode-8" and "language->russian". Only selecting the "view->encoding->unicode-8" in the active window, and refreshing, showed the characters properly.

Well, good for Apple for doing it right with Safari. Unfortunately, it's really sad that browsers don't all do it right. You can see the characters above if you set Unicode-8. Russian websites like pravda.ru sets a Russian text encoding in a meta tag, which is very sensible for Russia, but not quite right for the whole world.

More on this as we go along.

Sounds are centers

2004-12-20T03:11:00.000-08:00

There are 32 symbols used in Cyrillic, the alphabet which the greek-speaking Roman empire, also known as byzantium, gave to Russia. But these symbols represent just a kind of average or approximation of certain noises which Russians make. They are not discrete atoms, but rather centers of sound: they are fields which have no definite boundary.

But, anyway, I must use these symbols before going any further. The thorny problem of HTML & Cyrillic comes next.