Kazan — summer 2014

One of our tour guides asked me to make contact with Inna, a local woman who has written some English poetry for a beginner's English textbook. Inna wanted some feedback. She and I exchanged a few e-mails, and today I went to visit here.

Inna's apartment is on the sixth floor of a local apartment building. She has multiple sclerosis, which effectively limits her walking. Normally she tries to get around her apartment with a walker, but today she was making use of a fairly effective electronic wheelchair.

You have no idea how difficult life is for a handicapped person in Russia. Sure, her building has an elevator, but to access it, you have to enter the building from the ground level and then go up a set of narrow steep stairs to the first floor where you can get into the elevator. It is impossible for her to do it by herself, so if she wants to leave the building, her son has to carry her in and out of the building in his arms.

In some ways Inna is fortunate. She had six months in the States in Savannah, GA, back in 1985, an almost unheard of thing back then. She worked as an Inturist guide, which means her English is very good, and that's how she supports herself; she gives English lessons in her home. She has both a desktop and a laptop in her home, which makes for much better contact with the rest of the world than would have been possible in the past. She has a set of excellent friends that help her cope. She writes English and Russian poetry, so she actually contributes to the creative/intellectual life of the planet.

Yesterday she walked from the living room to the kitchen with the walker and then fell down. She couldn't get back up for three hours, but while down on the floor, new rhymes came to her, so she counted the time as not a waste. (She prefaced the story by saying, “Don’t feel sorry for me.”)

It's funny. There are times in life when one is tempted to self-pity, but taking one look at Inna, I get the feeling that I have no right to ever being unhappy. Life has been so very gentle with me, and if I am ever unhappy, then most likely it is my own fault.

It's been a cool summer here, as a result of which there have been significantly fewer mosquitoes. But now they have returned. Gods, but I hate them. Some varieties actually make a buzzing sound, and if you think you can fall asleep with that buzzing going on in your bedroom, then you are quite mistaken.

What is it about these critters that makes them go for my ankles? Most likely my feet stick out from under the bedspread, and thus I wake up each morning now with itchy, bitten ankles. Time to buy a refill for the electric mosquito killer that I have left here in previous years.

President Obama recently gave an interview to The Economist (article|mirror) in which he made several errors of fact. The offending bit is this:

Russia doesn’t make anything. Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking.

Let's address those one at a time:

• Russia doesn’t make anything: Completely wrong. It doesn't even work as hyperbole. If you just look at weapons, it's the second biggest supplier on the planet. It makes cars, rockets that carry *our* astronauts into space. It makes every possible good you can imagine. Heck, I even bought a Russian-made coffee grinder this summer, and that thing works great.
• Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity: Again, completely wrong. Again, it doesn't even work as hyperbole. All sorts of immigrants from the fUSSR are coming to Russia and to Moscow in particular in order to make their fortunes. And in fact these immigrants are experiencing very similar problems as Mexican/Central American immigrants in the US. Many ethnic Russias frankly despise these folks, and this is one of the biggest politicial topics of discussion in Russia.
• The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old: That information is outdated. Life expectancy has increased recently.
• The population is shrinking: This also used to be true, but recently the population has been increasing.

It is not too surprising that Obama should get the facts wrong about life expectancy and population size. He knew the old information, and the info is not particularly germane to his dealing with the current Russian crisis; he is not a demographer, so those lapses don't horrify me. The manufacturing error is a big one, and one that he shouldn't have made. The immigration issue is also not immediately relevant to the current situation he is dealing with, but it does show a profound ignorance of the realities of Russian life.

So why does it matter? It matters because the anti-Obama sentiment in Russia is very strong, and when he showed his ignorance, he gave the thoughtless part of the populace that much more reason to dismiss him as unimportant. Here you can see the reaction (mirror) of Russia Today. RT is not a place you can expect balanced reporting, but it is worth looking at to know what the party line is.

On the whole I think Obama is probably the best president of my adult life, but even a president that one supports can make errors, and sadly this is one of those times.

What an interesting day. My friend Danila had said that his roommate from Sochi, Anton, wanted to meet me. That surprised me. I asked what was interesting about me. He responded that he had talked a lot about me, and that made Anton want to meet me. I again asked why. Danila became cagey and wouldn't give me a direct answer. "Hm," I thought to myself, "is Danila trying to set me up for a gay date? That would be a first in my Russian experience..."

So Anton surprised everyone by flying into town, and this evening Danila and I and Anton went to a cafe and chatted. It turns out that Anton wanted to hear my political opinions on the Ukraine situation. I mostly keep quiet about them here, but I was directly asked, so I answered in detail. Anton is an interesting guy. Full of energy, a businessman, knows why he thinks what he thinks, so the conversation was intense without being hostile. Very interesting. By personality I'm not much into that kind of discussion, but I've reached the point of life where I'm beginning to think I may have a moral obligation to have those conversations more often.

One point in the conversation quite surprised me: Anton stated that generally there wasn't corruption in Russian business. I couldn't believe my ears, and I told him the reasons that I thought there was.

Long and short, eventually Anton had the look on his face that he was no longer interested in the conversation. Eventually we parted ways, and on the whole I thought it was one of most interest evenings I have ever had.

2014-08-09: This evening I asked Danila whether it made sense that Anton thought that there was no corruption in Russian business. Danila responded that no, it wasn't sensible, and that Anton really loves the process of argumentation and that he probably had just said it to see what I could come up with in response. Hm. Interesting. I always try to take people at face value, assuming that they are discussing what they actually think. I can see that I need to add another set of complexity to my conversations to account for that.

As strange as this sounds, despite my many visits to Russia I've never entertained in my own place in Russia. Saturday I will do so. Here is the tentative menu..

Main dishes

• Spicy chipotle ground chicken with cabbage, just so that at least one dish kicks them in the teeth
• Unstuffed cabbage, which is a ground beef and tomato dish with touches of cinnamon
• Afghani chicken and rice, which has cumin and cardamon

Sides

• Buckwheat with mushrooms and onions
• Cheese and garlic salad
• Arugula, tomato and feta salad with balsamic vinaigrette

Other stuff

• Bread, butter, jam
• Some sliced sausage
• Sliced cheese

Drinks

• Six types of fruit juice
• Ice water

For post dinner and guitar playing

• A bag of peanut M&Ms
• A bag of plain M&Ms
• Hot tea
• A kiwi cake (very pretty, store bought)