Tashkent - beneath the surface

I returned yesterday from my trip to Uzbekistan; thanks to Aeroflot's flight schedule - 0430 departure from Tashkent with an 0810 arrival in Moscow - I slept about half of the day and was up all last night reading at home. Even though I had only a week to spend there, my first trip to Central Asia definitely lived up to expectations, and fortunately failed to justify the misgivings of some of my relatives about traveling to an area which is portrayed so often in the press as "unsettled."

The itinerary was 2 nights, 2 days in Tashkent; 2 nights, 2 days in Bukhara; 2 nights, 2 days in Samarkand; and 1 night, 1 day in Tashkent. Mainly I wanted to get just a small taste of life in this country which first drew my attention when I closely followed developments after the Andijan massacre back in May of this year. I also wanted to visit some of the country's "must-see" architectural treasures, although I wasn't able to make it to all of them (Khiva, for example, will have to wait for next time).

I didn't glean any particularly original insights into people's quality of life there - by "original" I mean observations which are not already conventional wisdom (e.g., people are friendly and hospitable, but this is a pretty poor country, everyone seems to want to emigrate, etc.) and/or have not already been bandied about on Registan.net - but that wasn't really my primary goal anyway. As for those observations I had which might be interesting to a wider audience, I may post them here later once I've had time to digest them a bit myself.

For now I just wanted to post a couple of photos from the Tashkent metro - the two which I had time to snap before being approached by a cop and told that photography in the metro is not allowed. Luckily, he was not in the mood to extort money from a guest, so he told me that while some of his colleagues might have berated me (he used the Russian word rugat' - the conversation took place in Russian, and I identified myself as being "from Moscow," as I did in many instances on the trip), he wasn't going to do that, and let me go on my way.

This was probably as far beneath the surface of things as I got in Uzbekistan. Both of these photos are from the Hamid Olimjon station, which seems to have a cotton-related theme like so much of Tashkent's Soviet-designed architecture, and were taken around 1:30pm on July 20. In general, Tashkent's metro stations are beautiful and seem to be designed with the idea of echoing or repeating the grandeur of the Moscow metro. I saw at least one instance where Soviet-era wall decorations (mosaics? bas-reliefs?), whose message presumably did not suit independent Uzbekistan's ruler, had been ripped out of the wall, with nothing left in their place.

My trusty guidebook, MacLeod & Mayhew's Uzbekistan: The Golden Road to Samarkand, mentions the photo ban in the metro and directs readers to a website which I couldn't get to open for photos - perhaps this resource was disabled by the Uzbek powers-that-be due to security concerns.

Other places online where photos of and information about the Tashkent Metro are available are the following: Tashkent Subway (in English), the Toshkent (Tashkent) Metro page on UrbanRail.net (in English), Tashkentskoe Metro (in Russian), and this photo gallery. None of these sites, though, has photos which do justice to the more spectacular stations.


This is probably the only Uzbekistan-related post for which I'll have time before leaving for Moldova tomorrow morning. That promises to be another interesting trip, although I've been to Moldova many times (at least once in each of the past 5 years) since it's my wife's homeland. For that reason, the trip to Moldova will have more the feel of a comfortable trip down memory lane, as opposed to the Uzbekistan trip's rush of new impressions.

Since I probably won't have time to post anything while I'm in Moldova, further updates will come no sooner than next Thursday, when I'll be back in Moscow (leaving Chisinau at 0615 on the brutally scheduled Air Moldova flight).

"Ignoring the facts..."

Yulia Latynina (always a favorite pundit of mine) has a great column in today's Moscow Times about how dangerous it is that people surrounding Russia's leaders are afraid to share bad news with them. The final graf is right on the money:

The Kremlin is a lot like a driver whose windshield has been replaced by a television screen. Instead of the mountain switchback ahead of him, the driver sees only an open highway. Under such conditions, the joy ride won't last long.

"Russians Detest Lawyers" - Mosnews.com

I heard about this survey on Ekho Moskvy radio this morning and thought it was funny. However, the announcers reporting it seemed a bit concerned, as though a dislike of lawyers could be translated into a populace which doesn't respect the rights of the individual. Here are the facts, as reported by Mosnews.com:

Another group whom most Russians do not like is lawyers, according to the results of a survey by the Public Opinion Foundation published by the Lenta.Ru website. It transpired that only 55 percent of Russians believe that lawyers enjoy respect in Russia. 21 percent of respondents are convinced that lawyers are not worth any respect whatsoever.

Most respondents were critical of lawyers’ performance. 41 percent said it was unsatisfactory, while 14 percent said it was bad or very bad. Only 17 percent praised lawyers for their work. Half of those who had sought legal counsel in the past said they were dissatisfied with the quality of service they received.

25 percent said all lawyers were corrupt, greedy, incompetent and unscrupulous. Only one-third of the respondents believed that lawyers were honest and law-abiding.

Still, the legal profession remains one of the most prestigious in terms of pay in Russia. Nearly 70 percent of the respondents agreed with that.

What I'm wondering is, why is this news? Does anyone doubt that the results of a similar survey would be as critical or more critical of lawyers in the United States, where lawyer jokes proliferate and slurs like "ambulance-chaser" are common?

Blogging in the rain

I feel like I've been falling down on the blogging job for a while now - something like 6 posts in the past 6 weeks, which just doesn't cut it. Happily, we're now fully moved into temporary quarters - a cozy apartment right next door to the Aeroport metro station. I'm blissfully unemployed and have caught up on sleep following a virtually sleepless few days in St. Petersburg last week, and I have some time free for blogging before undertaking some more travel: to Kaluga this weekend, then to Uzbekistan for a week, and then to Moldova for 5 days or so, which means I'll then have the middle two weeks of August in Moscow to say a long good-bye to the city before leaving for Washington on August 22.

My only complaint about our new Aeroport location (that's actually just the name of the metro station, it's mercifully nowhere near the airport) is the lack of easy internet access in the neighborhood. The Zen Coffee around the corner has outrageously priced - 120 rubles, or about $4, per hour - and buggy wi-fi provided by the Time Online franchise. Happily, I remembered a place I had noticed several months ago that had free wi-fi - the Moka-Loka cafe near the picturesque Novoslobodskaya metro station - and a visit here today has shown that they still haven't caved to market pressure and started charging, as so many of the once-free Moscow hotspots have. Let's hope that holds for another month and a half at least.

So, I'm sitting here with a bird's-eye view of the intersection of Dolgorukovskaya St. and Selezniovskaya St. (2 blocks from my favorite banya, in fact), and the fact that a vicious thunderstorm has just broken and all of the passers-by are sprinting for cover and hurriedly deploying umbrellas is doing nothing to dampen my summer spirits.

I'm trying to take advantage of the free wi-fi to upload a bunch of photos for this blog and for my other neglected project, Moscow Graffiti. Probably I'll get the most recent ones up first, but hopefully I'll have time this summer to post some of the better photos from this spring as well, before I'm swallowed up by the demands of my first year of law school.

A Swede's take on Moscow

I found this excellent photoblog, which (if I understand it correctly - it's mostly in Swedish) is by a Swede named Erik Petersson, who's living in Moscow. It has a graffiti photos (including a Zachem tag), at least one Moscow metro photo, great Moscow scenes like this one, and seems to also have photos from other towns where Erik travels from time to time. Definitely recommended viewing. He has even been thoughtful enough to put some of the photo captions in English for those who are not worldly enough to know Swedish. Keep up the good work, Erik!

Aeroflop

At 10:07 PM, Tim said…
Ah, Aeroflot.....all the comforts of a military transport without the organisation.

Tim, would you believe it if I told you they delayed our departure for 2 1/2 hours AFTER the plane had been fully boarded? Of course you would... I then overheard a stewardess threatening a stroppy passenger with revealing to all of the other passengers that he had been the tardy one responsible for us missing our take-off slot and being delayed. Shut him up real quick.

Sitting on the tarmac, thankfully we were able to activate the seat-back ventilators (unique to the IL-86 and IL-96, as far as I've seen), although mine emitted a subtle odor of indeterminate origin which was extraordinarily foul when inhaled deeply. This photo shows the seat-back fan, as well as revealing that if you want to hang a coat on the back of the seat AND have personal ventilation, you're outta luck on this airplane:

An additional design flaw that's visible here is the placement of the seat numbers on the back of the seats - this never fails to cause mass confusion during boarding.

And a killer design flaw that's sort of visible here is the not-so-ingenious seat-back table, which folds in half when not deployed. The problem with this space-saving measure (necessary to make room for the seat-back ventilator) is that the table won't fold or unfold unless the person in front of you has their seat fully upright. So, getting ready for a meal and tidying up afterward involves manhandling your neighbor's seat forward in order to deploy or stow the troublesome table.



The above photo shows why so many things have to be on the backs of the seats on this plane - there's no overhead bin unit above the center row of seats. While this does create a rather expansive - one might even say cavernous - sense of space, it does make you wonder what the design goal was. It certainly wasn't to allow them to screen movies using a projection system, as the state-of-the-art IL-96 we were on had (as I mentioned before) nary a video monitor or projection screen in sight.

All in all, the plane we were on was definitely not worthy of its namesake, the Soviet pilot Valery Chkalov.

Then, when we arrived at Sh-2, we made it through passport control quickly, but then had to wait about 45 minutes for our luggage to come out. That is the law of Sheremetyevo arrivals - you will wait somewhere, it's just a question of where. Sheremetyevo seems to have opened a second bank of passport control windows, which is a shocking customer service improvement unless it's just something I didn't notice before, and added - gasp - SEATS in the baggage return area where the little duty-free shack used to be.

I guess they figured that most people would rather sit and cradle their head in their hands in despair while waiting for their luggage to emerge from the wall than shop for overpriced liquor and perfume. Plus, with the added passenger throughput of the new (I think) passport control windows, but no addition of new baggage carousels, all they've really done is moved the bottleneck a bit, since people get pretty backed up at the baggage claim. so there should be plenty of people waiting and looking for a seat.

OK, I've spent way too much time on this subject already, and now I must get some sleep, so the blogging on more profound topics (which you have of course come to expect in this space) will have to wait for another day.

Heading home

It's been a great week in Shanghai, I am not sure how representative this city is of the rest of China, but the development here is truly amazing. We are on our way back to Moscow now; found a China Telecom internet access point at the airport, which once again will not allow me to access blogspot websites, so responding to comments will have to wait ntil we're safely at home. Also, I had to give the attendant my passport number to use the internet, although it seemed like a very pro forma thing.

I can't say that I'm looking forward to this flight. On the way here, I had been assuming that Aeroflot would fly decent equipment on such a long flight, and was unpleasantly surprised to find myself seated on a Russian-made IL-96. Forget the in-flight movie (in Aeroflot economy class they always seem to have "technical difficulties with the video system" anyway) - this plane didn't have a single monitor or TV screen anywhere. And rather uncomfortable seats, which made the redeye here less than restful. I'm expecting the same on the flight back.

At least we will have very pleasant memories of this trip. The wedding last night was at an incredible venue, a club situated in a villa in the French Concession which apparently used to be the British Consulate and is quite posh.

Greetings from Shanghai!

We finally made it to an internet access point after being here for 4 days. Internet access is hard to come by, and here in the basement of the Shanghai Library I'm unable to access any "blogspot" sites for some reason (although accessing the blogger site to post has not been a problem), so I can't use this time (as I had hoped) to respond to some of the comments I've received in the past few days.

Shanghai is an amazing city. There is definitely lots to see here. In the interests of seeing more of the city and less of the basement of the Shanghai Library, I'm going to make this post short and promise to post some photos from here later (perhaps much later) once we're back in Russia.

Технический перерыв

Among the Multitran.ru on-line Russian-English dictionary search results for "технический перерыв" ("tekhnicheskii pereryv"):

Деловая лексика (business lexicon):
перерыв по техническим причинам - interruption for technical reasons

Техника (equipment):
перерыв по техническим причинам - maintenance outage

Телекоммуникации (telecommunications):
перерыв по техническим причинам - out-of-service

Some people talk about their blogs "going on hiatus," or "taking a break," or use other phrases to describe what happens when they don't have time to update as much as they would like. I prefer the all-encompassing Russian phrase "tekhnicheskii pereryv." Literally, it translates variously as the phrases listed above. In addition, I actually found - at a website called for office workers called klerk.ru - a lively online forum discussion of the legal meaning of this concept, which is worth checking out for laughs if you know Russian.

In practice, though, as anyone who's ever needed to (just for example) urgently change money in a one-exchange-booth town knows, it's a phenomenon that can occur at any time, although generally at an inconvenient time, and for just about any reason. One cashier and she has to take a bathroom break? "Tekhnicheskii pereryv." The paper receipt roll in the cash register ran out? "Tekhnicheskii pereryv." Smoke break? "Tekhnicheskii pereryv." You get the point.

Anyway, I've been posting less than I would like to recently, and I'd prefer to just call this my own little "tekhnicheskii pereryv." I'm happy, though, to break with the usual custom and provide an explanation for it. I am going to be transitioning out of my job here in Moscow by the end of June, which is requiring a fair amount of preparation. At the end of the summer, I'll be moving back to my hometown of DC, and getting the move organized and making sure we have a place to live there are also turning out to be labor-intensive endeavors. Also, I'm going to have about 6 weeks free this summer and a bunch of Aeroflot frequent flyer miles to travel in Russia and the CIS, so I'm spending some amount of time just daydreaming - well, and researching on the internet, ordering guidebooks, etc. - about where I might be going.

On top of all that, we're leaving tomorrow (well, today, actually) for a week in Shanghai to attend the wedding of an old, old friend of mine from DC (how often can you travel someplace you've never been to attend the wedding of someone you've known since pre-K?). I'll try to post at least once from there just for fun, but hopefully we'll be busy seeing things we may never get the chance to see again.

Plus, we're trying to get the most out of what Moscow has to offer while we're still here. Tonight, we just got back from an awesome show by Russian punk rockers NAIV at Tochka. In addition to playing a great set, the band screened their latest video, for the song "Chto nam delat'?" ("What are we to do?"), which contains many images from the tumultuous Russia of the 1990's: tanks around the "White House," Zhirinovsky picking a fight on the Duma floor, and Yeltsin dancing drunkenly, just to name a few of the nostalgia-inducing moments. Apparently, MTV Russia has refused to play the video, because it's "too political." And on MUZ-TV (the home-grown Russian MTV clone), apparently, if you don't pay, your video gets no play. But it turns out there are alternative music television channels, such as "Alternative One," which bills itself as Russia's "first alternative music channel" (and which I hadn't even heard of before), who are willing to take the risk.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled tekhnicheskii pereryv...

On power and weakness

I started to respond to a comment, and got so long-winded that I decided to make my response a separate post.

At 5:06 PM, danil said…
hey lyndon where have you been? so much interesting things are going on last time ) khodorkowsky for example and light shutdown in Moscow - btw, did it affect you?

Danil, I was actually unaffected personally by the blackout - I live and work in the northwestern portion of the center (around the Garden Ring), and in our area there were no power outages. I have heard lots of dire prophecies, though, in the past few days, about how this is just the beginning. Mosenergo is supposedly way overextended and does not have the capacity to deal with the increasing power demands of a growing metropolis, and people are saying we will see more blackouts in the future as a result.

Who knows if that's true - back at the beginning of 2003, I seem to recall many people forecasting a "2003 crisis," because that was supposedly the year when deteriorating Russian infrastructure would reach a tipping point and would no longer be able to function without maintenance as it's been doing for over 15 years now (some would say for much longer). That never came to pass, perhaps because Russians are absolutely ingenious when it comes to squeezing the last life out of any piece of equipment that's on its last legs. For example, plenty of cars are on the road here which would be sent to the scrapyard in the US or in Western Europe, held together by baling wire and the figurative equivalent of duct tape, applied by their loving (or perhaps cursing) owners.

I have the utmost respect for the ability of people here to find ways to function under difficult circumstances, but unfortunately that's no way to run a power grid. The problem with always operating on the verge of a crisis and pursuing band-aid solutions instead of making real investments in infrastructure (I leave it up to the pundits - and the courts - to determine if this is the fault of Mosenergo, UES, or the Soviet legacy) is that it eventually catches up with you.

The more immediately disturbing fact which was revealed by the power outage is that many of the "strategic" establishments (e.g., places with nuclear reactors) which we've always been reassured have secondary sources of emergency power were revealed to not have good backup plans in place for an outage. Someone was supposed to buy a generator but pocketed the money instead, or the generator was there but someone had siphoned off the diesel for personal use. I hate to say this, but this underscores how ridiculous it is for people here to say that the US and "the West" are afraid of "a strong Russia." Yes, perhaps there was justifiable fear of the USSR 20 years ago, bolstered by the partial illusion of Soviet military might. But at the moment, I'm afraid the more realistic fear is of Russia's infrastructural weakness and institutional corruption creating environmental or other disasters.

By the way, I may be wrong to reject it out of hand, but I think Basayev's claim of responsibility for the blackout was absurd. He's recently claimed responsibility for some other disaster which was not likely his handiwork (it's escaping me right now what specifically), and I think this is part of a general pattern of him trying to grab the spotlight and show that he's not on the run.

As for your other question ("where have you been"), I'm going to deal with that in a separate post. There have indeed been lots of interesting events here in the past week or so, and the coverage at Siberian Light has been outstanding as usual.