Sochi, "City-Resort"

I've got an opportunity to spend three days in Sochi this week, and so here I am reporting from the Caucasus mountains region, from the shore of the Black Sea. If you haven't heard of Sochi yet, you will in 2014, when it will host the Winter Olympics. The running joke in Russia is that Sochi, the Southernmost region of Russia, has been picked to host winter sports. Is the rest of the country much too cold? Of course, all the Olympic stadiums are being built from scratch, and it hardly seems to matter what the weather conditions are like. The Caucausus mountains are topped with ice (lately, receding) and already house first-class skiing resorts. Another curious factoid -- Sochi is located at the same latitude as Nice and Toronto.

The climate in Sochi is actually characterized as subtropical--it's moderately hot in the summer (in the 80s) and humid. The city is laden with palm trees, boasts its own unique varieties of yew and boxwood trees. Administratively, Sochi is labeled as a city-resort -- it's hardly a city at all, but rather an agglomeration of Soviet-style health resorts stretching along a thin strip of land between the Black Sea and the mountains. The city, at closer approximation, breaks down into several small coastal villages (and one inland village, in the mountainous valley, where the Olympics will actually take place), united together in one administrative body. The downtown area is quite small, although it too is undergoing major construction before the Olympics. Construction of everything is booming in the area -- from new hotels and stadiums to new roads and bridges through the mountains to new apartment buildings and beaches. At the moment, it can take up to an hour to drive the distance that normally takes 15 minutes.

What immediately struck me upon arrival is how young a city Sochi is. The territory was acquired by the Russian Empire in 1838 as a result of a war with Turkey. The local peoples--Shapsugs, Circassians (?), other "Caucasians"--were pushed out or left on their own for Turkey and Iran, and later in the 19th Century settlers moved in from all parts of the Russian Empire, from Estonia and Germany to Ukraine and Russia proper. Later, closer to the turn of the 20th Century the area became developed for dachas -- country houses for the aristocracy and for the growing middle class. They formed the first spas and parks in the area. The administrative city buildings and most of the largest health resorts were built after the Revolution, starting from the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike Moscow and St. Petersburg, where Soviet construction was only one of the historical layers imposed upon pre-existing cities, here the Soviet city plan and aesthetic is the basis upon which the contemporary construction is developing.

Talking about the Soviet aesthetic, there weren't brand names in the Soviet Union. A grocery store was simply called "Produktovij Magazin" -- "Grocery Store." A restaurant was "Restoran" or a "Stolovaya" -- "Cafeteria." A bath house was called simply "Banya" -- "Baths." If there was more than one restaurant in a city, they would be numbered: "Restoran N1," "Restoran N2," etc. In Sochi this is still very much so. The first thing I noticed across the street from my hotel (a contemporary construction by a Western chain) was a "Stolovaya" and a "Konditerskaya" (Pastries) across the street. A downtown bookstore is simply labeled "Knigi" -- "Books." The attractions that do have names, are named (by pre- or post- Soviet settlers) after other places: Park "Riviera," Cafe "White Nights." There's a general sense that changes of the new, post-Soviet era, came to Sochi much later than they did to Moscow and St. Petersburg (contemporary Russia, after all, takes after the Soviet Union in that all decisions and changes are usually transmitted from Moscow out to the peripheries), and that they are coming now, with the Olympic Games, in the proportion never seen before.

Upon closer examination, the "Konditerskaya" across the street from the hotel sells goods produced by a local pastry factory that does have a name, "Kaskad" -- "Cascade." (This is another peculiarity of the Soviet labels -- when things do have them, they are very arbitrary). I've tried to Google this factory, but came up with nothing. I'm quite sure though they have been in business since the 1960s or 1970s, because the pastries I tasted are very much like the delicacies from my childhood. Long waffle rolls stuffed with baked sweet condensed milk. Choux pastry with scalded creme. Eclairs. Quality eclairs are very hard to find in this world.

Borges the bookstore

At the end of last week, I attended two literary events at a brand new bookstore on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg--a bookstore with a telling name, "Borges." Unlike San Francisco and most other cities in the United States, St. Petersburg is experiencing something of a bookstore boom: in the fall, I presented my collection of stories at a brand new location of a local chain, Bookvoed. Now, Borges opened a block away from Bookvoed. A few more blocks away, there's a bookstore called "Poryadok Slov" -- "Word Order," selling "intellectual literature." This bookstore opened in January 2010, and I haven't had a chance to check it out. Perhaps this is because they (and the events they book) focus on non-fiction and film.

Browsing bookshelves on my first visit to Borges, I overheard a conversation between another customer and the administrator. The customer wondered why the store's inventory has changed so dramatically, and the administrator was confused because the store had only been open for two weeks. Eventually, she realized the source of confusion: Borges opened in the space previously occupied by an LGBT store "Indigo" (the term I overheard was: "the bookstore for sexual minorities"). Indigo is still in business, although they moved to a different location--the other part of Nevsky, closer to Vosstaniya. As far as I know, Indigo is the only store in the city targeted directly toward the LGBT community. When I started asking people about it, it turned out that some of my friends had heard of it--Indigo advertised on Nevsky as an Internet hot spot. They also sold (and probably continue to sell) a good amount of English-language books (hard to find in St. Petersburg), Russian-language books from smaller publishers, and stocked cute t-shirts and underwear.

Unlike Indigo, Borges does not (yet?) advertise on Nevsky (the store, although it has a Nevsky address, is located deep inside a courtyard, and is not visible from the street). Perhaps they advertise in other ways; as far as I know, they only advertise to the literary community. Does this mean that the literary community in this city is vibrant and wealthy enough to carry one more bookstore? I wonder. The two events I went to were attended both nights by many of the same people and certainly not all of them were buying books. I am really hoping this bookstore has a long-term business strategy that will enable them to prosper for years to come--it's a cute little space, selling excellent books, and friendly to the local authors. Yay!!

The first event I attended was dedicated to Phillip Roth. Two of his translators to Russian led the debate about the significance of the International Booker Prize he recently won. Also, one of his translators, Vera Kobets, has just released a book of short stories, and so the event was also meant to mark the publication of her book. The second event was dedicated to the publication of a new anthology that contains the work of Andrei Bely Prize laureates. The prize committee and a few of the current and past laureates were in attendance and talked about the future of the prize, the future of literature, and the future of the book. The consensus here is divided, some people think that most interesting stuff these days happens on the Internet, while others think that Internet is inundated by trash and that the only books worth reading are published in paper form. Interestingly enough, nobody mentioned ebook readers -- for one reason or another, they are not making as huge of an impact on book publishing here (yet?). One philosopher (with a large local following) argued that copyright in the contemporary world is becoming meaningless, that works are created by consortium of people and no longer by an individual, and that we're witnessing the complete breakdown and end of an era of individual authorship.

One thing I found interesting during both events is that both the authors and the audience were reluctant when it came to reading from the books. During the second event (the anthology release party), nobody read from the book at all and one of the authors even said "I don't want to bore everyone." During the first event, Vera Kobets did read a short-short (a tiny two page story), but also apologized in advance about reading in general and about the quality of this particular story (she said that its inadequacies are quite blatant but hoped that the audience might find this interesting). I bought both books, and have started reading Kobets's work over the weekend -- I'm enjoying it a great deal. The quality of the prose is impressive, there is a lot of character depth, a large range of subject matter. It's as good of a book as any I've been reading lately in Russian, and yet I wouldn't have ever thought so from the way it was presented. She (and everyone else who spoke about the book, including the man who wrote the intro) spoke about it as a slight but worthy effort of an insignificant woman-writer with a lyrical, poetic style (as opposed to Rothian, detail-oriented and dry). It seemed to me as though the author and her editors were too shy, too reticent, too concerned about the opinion of their peers to speak well of the book (to praise? never!). I registered this as a major cultural difference from the San Francisco lit scene.

Another cultural difference--attitude to cell phones. Cell phones rang throughout both literary evenings; some people even picked up the phone and held brief telephone conversations during the talks. In a room the size of an urban living room, this affected everyone's ability to concentrate on the authors--and yet nobody (except me) seemed to be disturbed or bothered by it. At one point, even one of the speakers got a phone call. Instead of muting his phone and apologizing (what I with my American attitude toward cell phones would've expected), he picked up the call and yelled into the receiver: "Call me back, I'm at a bookstore, in the middle of a speech!" Then, I started to wonder whether this kind of attitude was possible because everyone in the room knew each other quite well and were like family to one another. Considering the fact that I, too, were slightly acquainted with a few of the audience members, I think this is not a bad theory. A book event at a store is not necessarily all that different from a family gathering in a large communal kitchen or a living room. But can one family really sustain even a living-room sized bookstore? Luckily, I've brought my aunt to the first event, and they've now got her to advertise on their behalf.

Autobiographic Geography

St. Petersburg is a fairly large city with a sizable historical downtown, and yet the routes that I traverse on my visits here include only few places of historical or cultural interest; I spend most of my time in the nondescript residential neighborhoods where my friends and family live. And even when I do get to go downtown, I tend to visit the same places over and over again, and never set foot in other fascinating parts of the city. I've spent three afternoons on Nevsky Prospekt--at or around Dom Knigi--the "House of Books"--a centrally located bookstore. Three times I've been to Vasilyevsky Ostrov, the island on the Neva where St. Petersburg University is located. I've gone to the same theatre complex twice, to see shows by two different companies. The Hermitage? The Peter and Paul fortress? The Russian Museum? The Neva embankment? On this trip, I haven't had time to walk around the city at all. I am proud though of making it to the new art museum, the museum that's opened just this fall, Erarta--the museum of contemporary St. Petersburg art. How cool am I to go to a museum!

My parents flat (where I lived from age 8 until 17) is located near "Kirovsky zavod," a famous old factory that stands just outside the historical downtown area. In 1905, the workers of this factory (it was then named after its owner, Putilov) started a strike that became Russia's first revolution (the strike was brutally suppressed by the tsar). My father's father was an engineer at this factory, made a long career from the 1930s until 1970s. When the workers of this factory started a strike and walked from here to the Winter Palace (where the Hermitage is now located), this walk must've taken them at least two hours. Nevsky Prospect is ways away--I've walked the distance only once or twice in my life; measured in subway stops, it's at least five stops away.

It's possible to live in a residential neighborhood and never make it to the historical downtown. In fact, many people who have kids make the trek downtown only a few times a year, to take the kids to a museum or to a show. In my childhood, I remember that every trip downtown was an event, a treat. When, as a 15-year-old, I went to math school that was located in the downtown itself, I loved the experience of traveling to school every day. At least once or twice or three times every week, I would make a detour on my way home from school. I'd walk down Liteyniy Prospect to Nevsky, and head for Dom Knigi--the House of Books, where I'd stand in front of the counter and stare at the books displayed behind the glass and on the opposite wall. I had other routes. I'd go to the Summer Garden. I'd walk across the river to the Finland Train Station. I'd stop by my parents office near Vosstaniya. Many times, one or two of my classmates would come along--we'd buy ice cream on the way and try to get into strange and silly adventures. Talk to foreigners on the street. Walk into a residential building to see if we could find access to the roof. For many years, during my visits back to St. Petersburg, I liked to check up on my favorite side streets and buildings. Now I can hardly make time even for this simple exercise.

Dandelions

This week, parts of St. Petersburg--not the historical downtown where
there are few trees and little greenery of any kind--are covered with bright yellow flowers. Dandelions in Russia are considered a weed: if you are trying to grow a field of potatoes, dandelions are a nuisance. And yet in the city, even today when mowing lawns has become fashionable, nobody has the heart to mow the blooming dandelions. The Russian word for the flower, oduvanchik, originates from the verb "to blow," it means something that's being blown at or away--something very transitory--referring to the phase that comes after the blooming, when every gust of wind sends little white dandelion paratroopers afloat to establish new dandelion colonies out in the world. Dandelions are ubiquitous.

Yesterday, my friend Lyona, his wife Yulya, and I went to "TsPKO"-- "Central Park of Culture and Recreation" -- a largish park in the Northwest part of the city. Built in the 18th Century in the English style, the park is a system of canals and islands, with a very popular boating house where people can rent traditional wooden boats and row around. Booths selling ice cream abound; also games like darts--the goal is to hit several balloons; if you hit at least three balloons, you get a prize. Yulya did really well at this game, she was able to hit 4 or 5 balloons with 5 darts. I didn't hit any (despite considerable practice several years ago at a bar in the town of Sonoma). On a neighboring island, there are larger attractions--"American slides" -- roller coasters and other rides. My friends and I had ice cream and walked around. Somewhere in the park, there is an old palace that now houses some kind of a museum, but we didn't walk far enough. It was a beautiful warm day. Cheryomukha, "bird cherry," is also blooming. Cheryomukha is a medium sized tree that blooms with small, incredibly fragrant white flowers. I've been a little sick all week--my nose is stuffed--so I'm missing a large part of the spring experience. The dandelions, though, the dandelions--I feasted on the very sight of them.

Dandelions, I know, are a very useful plant. Wikipedia tells me that in China (where Dave is currently partying), it's considered a vegetable. Roasted dandelion roots can be used as coffee substitute. Young dandelion greens are very good in a salad. The yellow flowers themselves can be made into jam or wine (I'm remembering Ray Bradbury's story, "Dandelion Wine"). Honey made from dandelion flowers has a very potent taste and fragrance. In Russia, though, as I mentioned earlier, we mostly treated dandelions as a weed. At the beginning of every summer my grandmothers would concern themselves with making dandelion juice--for vitamins. We, the kids, collected the flowers and helped our grandmothers clean them and stuff them into the large glass jars with a bunch of sugar. In a day or two we were supposed to drink the sweet and slightly bitter mixture. I remember being thoroughly grossed out by it, but it wasn't the worst thing we were supposed to consume for our health as children. Something about the experience was oddly pleasant. It was like drinking the concentrated taste of summer itself.

The main reason my brother and I loved dandelions was because we could make striking gold crowns out of them. My grandmother taught me to weave dandelions into garlands--the stems of freshly picked dandelions are perfect for weaving: they are supple yet bendable. The stems are also full of sap, white when it first leaks out and gray-green when it dries on your hands, on your dress, on your face. It's almost impossible to make a garland or a crown without getting your clothes, your arms and legs and face completely smeared in dandelion sap. To make a thick wreath, we used two or three flowers at once; and the trick was to work fast and to try not to damage the flower. The yellow flowers are very fragile, they remain full and fluffy for only a few hours after picking, and if you're rough in handling them, they wilt immediately.

This is what the summer is like at its best: barefoot in a dandelion patch with a dandelion crown on my head, a dandelion garland around my neck, another dandelion crown I'm making for my brother.

Theatre

A few days before I was due to arrive in St. Petersburg, my mother was introduced to an administrator of one of the small local theatre companies. This woman turned out to be a huge theatre popularizer and a ticket resale agent. Clearly good at her job, she talked my mother into buying tickets to at least four shows in the upcoming weeks, and maybe more that I don't yet know about. As a result, I've been splitting my time in St. Petersburg between working (among other things, I'm preparing to give a talk at a major city library about my recent book, Keys From the Lost House), visiting friends--and going to the theatre.

On Friday, we went to see "Скамейка [The Bench]," a Soviet play from approximately 1960s. A man and a woman meet at a bench in the park, and it turns out that they'd met there before and had gone home together. The man is a habitual liar and a womanizer, and the woman is a naive and yet relentless detective, determined to help him and help herself. The production was stylized to the 1960s aesthetic (this didn't please my brother and his partner who came with us), the two actors of "Our Theatre" did a very good job, he, playing a man with many different faces, and she, a woman who constantly wavers between her desire to believe him and her lack of trust in his words. This play would be a great subject of analysis from the feminist point of view: I found it interesting that she initiated all the action in this play, and he was the one constantly on the defensive. They played traditional gender roles in that she was looking for a man to marry, while he was looking for a one night stand, but then it was also quite clear that this particular man would be a huge nuisance to her as a husband, and he thinks of one night stands as a kind of a chore.

On Monday, my parents, my aunt Maya and I went to the opera at the Mariinsky theatre, to see "Boris Godunov." Blame a young conductor or the ancient staging (the theatre restored Tarkovsky's production from 1960s or 1970s), this particular opera was a slow, depressing bore. This, despite the fact that all the singers were in excellent form, and our family friend, Akimov, sang the major tenor part, Grishka Otrepiev. His sweet, colorful voice woke us up once in a while, but by the end of the performance most of us were overcome with deep, albeit fitful, sleep.

Tonight's theatrical engagement was with a company named "Not Very Big Dramatic Theatre" (as opposed to the local "Bolshoi Theatre" and "Malyi Theatre" -- the Big and the Small theatres). The play was called "The Orchestra," written by a French playwright Jean Anouilh in 1962. After WWII, a man obsessed with an orchestra imagines the difficult private lives of the musicians. The acting was excellent, once again this week, especially parts of the play that were mimed or done in incoherent speech. I was not a huge fan of the dialogue--some of it felt much too melodramatic. The staging was very imaginative and inventive--characters used very simple and clear signs to indicate change from realist mode into a more introspective scene. Great use of simple props--like buckets of water to wash the floor of the theatre at several key moments during the play. What was particularly unexpected about this play: I think, this is the first time, when on the stage of a St. Petersburg theatre, I get to see a love scene between two men. It was the best scene of the play, too. The actors had great chemistry with one another, and although they stopped shy of a kiss, they seemed completely in love. There was also a hint at a sexual relationship between two women, little more than a hint, really; worse, intimations of an abusive relationship. I wonder what this relationship looks like in the text of the play. Would love to see other productions!

Both of the plays we saw ("The Bench" and "The Orchestra") were produced by small theatre troupes. Each of these companies employs about 10-12 actors. Both of these small troupes are sponsored by the government. The Russian government pays actors salary, also pays rent. This enables them to stage rather ambitious plays (like "The Orchestra" that seemed to require the participation of the entire company) in small spaces. The auditoriums at these theatres are limited to about 200 people, and despite their excellent qualities, neither of the plays sold out. I kept expecting the actors to ask for money at the end of the performance, but they never did. Such a thing is unheard of here; instead, at the end of the performance, dedicated theatre patrons give their favorite actors flowers--and applaud until their hands develop callouses.

By the way. One of the pieces "The Orchestra" played (in addition to a bunch of French chanson) was a Squirrel Nut Zippers song, straight from the 50s, right! Go Zippers! Except, I bet the theatre never paid the band any kind of usage fee.

Dave is in China, and blogging from China again: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-road-again-in-shanghai-5182011.html

Eating fish in St. Petersburg

I am in St. Petersburg again. It's warm here, in the 60s, but there's still a sense of everything waking up after a long winter. The trees are still budding, the fragile green leaves are slowly unraveling, turning towards the sun. The grass is coming up from under the ground in uneven patches. Lots of sand dust in the air. Pale yellow and beige buildings look like they need a new coat of paint. The good weather feels tentative.

In St. Petersburg, it's koriushka season. Koriushka, "European smelt," is a small white fish, traditionally fried with some breading. They say, fresh koriushka smells strongly like cucumbers -- not sure if that's the most accurate analogy, but it certainly has a peculiar smell. They also say that in the old days, in the spring, the whole city of Leningrad would smell of koriushka. The fish is found in all the northern seas, including the Baltic. It also lives in the lakes and rivers, including the Ladoga lake near st. Petersburg. It spawns in the spring, when ice melts and water warms up to +4C. This is also the fishing season. The traditional recipe is as simple as can be: clean off the scales, take out the guts (leaving the roe and the head), coat with flour and salt, and fry in butter or oil. Some people add eggs and breadcrumbs to the flour before frying.

Last night, my parents treated me to some koriushka that they bought already cooked. To warm it up, my mom fried it again. "You can never fry koriushka too much, that's the best part."

Here's a picture of koriushka from a blog that also has step-by-step cooking instructions:

FL-AL-MS-LA-TX

I didn't have time for the daily blog on this trip, so here is a single gigantic post about the week's events.

Day 1: Woke up at Disney World, drove about 2 hrs to St. Petersburg, to the Dali museum. Listened to the Junior Docent tour -- 5th graders each chose a painting, wrote an essay about it, then lectured the visitors to the museum on their painting. My dad asked one girl, "What do you mean, 'hallucinogenic'?" She thought about it for a moment, then said: "You know, honestly, I don't know."

The museum has a very good collection of early Dali works, before he went to the Madrid Art school. They clearly show the genealogy of his work from post-impressionism and his affinity to figurative painting versus abstract, something that defined the rest of his career. When he outgrew surrealism, he turned to classicism and Christianity for inspiration and themes for his new figurative works.

Next, I took my parents to the St. Petersburg's Fine Arts museum, where they were introduced for the first time to the work of Georgia O'Keefe. Her paintings are virtually unknown in Europe, and they made a big impression. I think I had given them postcards and albums before, but it's not at all the same thing. At the museum, we met a very friendly security guard, Rosie. She heard us talking Russian, and volunteered to help. She herself was from Bulgaria, and could speak several Slavic languages equally well. She told us where to go for a Russian store in St. Petersburg, also pointed out a few interesting destinations in the area (like the Greek beach and neighborhood to the North of the city) that unfortunately we didn't have time to see.

We walked to the St. Petersburg pier and the upside down pyramid. On the way, stopped to take pictures in front of the history museum that had good signs of "St. Petersburg" -- the two St. Petersburgs are as different as two cities can be, and a picture like this tells a good story. Saw pelicans. Watched them for a while. Took pictures of them. My aunt particularly is very attentive to all life forms, she likes to pet dogs and cats, to feed birds, to look at alligators.

Next, we drove to the beach on the other side of St. Petersburg and took a swim. Luckily, we got there when the sun was about to set -- otherwise, the heat would've been completely intolerable for my parents. We went into the water altogether, meantime plucky seagulls almost stole a plastic bag we left behind. My dad saw the thieves and ran out of the water to fight the birds for our belongings. We hung around the beach waiting for the sun to set, and saw another magnificent bird: an egret or a heron who like a little puppy begged every passerby for food.

We had dinner in the old Latin quarter of Tampa, Ybor, then checked into our hotel, then walked around Ybor some more. I think my parents were slightly intimidated by the quantity of tattoo parlors we passed (they were closed for the night, but still impressive), loud clubs with long lines in front of them, dark alleys of small office buildings, and the heat that persisted into the night. The hotel where we spent that night, right in Ybor, turned out to be a major honeymoon destination -- we ran into at least two wedding parties that night.

Day 2: Woke up in Tampa, drove all the way across Florida to the Kennedy Space Center. My dad's engineering firm does some business with aerospace construction bureaus in Russia, and so we enjoyed the opportunity to hit at least two major NASA sites on this trip. While at Disney World, he and my mom took a ride that recreated the experience of take off and heightened gravity. They almost lost their breakfast, but enjoyed the thrill.

In the aftermath of the latest nuclear disaster, my aunt had brought a Geiger counter with her from St. Petersburg. She measured radioactivity in all the suspicious points on her route. It turned out that on board the plane we're exposed to radioactivity 10 times higher than normal. My aunt showed her findings to a flight attendant and the flight attendant took the counter to the pilot to confirm that these findings were within expected parameters. They were. In Dave's and mine apartment the radioactive elements were at about the same level as at my aunt's own flat in St. Petersburg. When she pulled out the counter in the parking lot of the Kennedy Space Center, the results were slightly lower than at her flat.

At KCS, my mom and my aunt went to the 3D movie that told the history of the Space exploration -- they were very impressed with the quality of the movie and with the number of Russian cosmonauts featured in the story. Having grown up with the cult of cosmonauts and space exploration, we know surprisingly little about the history and mechanics of space flight. My aunt loved the experience of catching with her mouth little drops of juice spilled in weightless 3D world.

My dad and I went to the briefing on the upcoming Shuttle mission, saw pictures of the crew scheduled to go up April 19th. Later in the week, we found out that the flight was moved to 29th because of "a scheduling conflict" with a Russian flight. The last flight of the last shuttle is planned for June, but its status remains unclear. They have the Congress's authorization for it, but due to the current budget crisis, they don't have the money and might not have the money by June.

We took the bus tour through the Center, making two stops: one at the observation deck from where we could see the booster already on the pad. The orbiter, they said, was still inside its hangar, going through the final checks. I never quite understood when and where they hook up the orbiter to the booster -- inside the hangar or on the pad? The second stop of the tour was at the museum dedicated to the Saturn rocket -- the rocket that delivered men to the moon.

My aunt was most excited by the alligator sightings in the ditches by the side of the road inside the KCS. The bus driver joked that alligators were their additional level of security, and after I translated the joke to my aunt, she believed it literally for the rest of the week.

After leaving the Space Center, we drove two hours north to the town of St. Augustine, "the oldest continually settled European settlement in North America." On approach to the historic downtown, we drove by the ruins of a fortress, very much like something you'd see in Spain or France. The small old town is very lively with tourists by day, and closes down quite early in the night. My mom couldn't resist buying an alligator head for souvenir in one of the first shops we saw. Then we walked to the Atlantic coast and tried some crab cakes and flounder at a local restaurant. There was a lovely band playing on the terrace, but outside was still much too hot for my parents, and we hid in the air conditioned inside.

The evening was long and exhausting. My dad's back was hurting. We were exhausted after spending a lot of time out in the heat at the Kennedy Space Center. Wine at dinner improved everyone's mood a bit, but then we had another 3 hr drive ahead -- we were scheduled to spend that night in Tallahassee. We got to our hotel at 1:30 am and were asleep by 2.

Day 3: Drove around downtown Tallahassee with its one tall building. Then headed out en route to New Orleans. The drive was about 6,5 hours long, and we hit four states in one day: Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. We made two stops, one in Pensacola, one in Mobile. Pensacola was hot, hot, hot! I started to become concerned about my trip plan: my family was getting cranky with the lack of sleep, with various aches, with unusual food, the heat was getting to them. We had no patience to look for quality lunch, and so stopped at a bar in the middle of the historic town (Spanish town?). The best thing we found on the menu were tomatoes stuffed with tuna salad. My mom made a meal of chips and salsa. We packed half of all of this to go: we were too exhausted even to eat.

Mobile surprised us all with a humongous cruise ship we found docked there, and with the lovely colonial houses on the Government Street. I'm not sure what I expected of Mobile -- I know of Alabama primarily from the Civil Rights era history, which means a few very random tidbits. Every town we passed had some kind of cultural center with museums and theatres and stadiums. We kept talking about what we'd find in small cities in the middle of Russia. Somehow the idea of a trip like this through Russia seems prohibitive. Lately, we've been hearing of a few brave souls who've attempted this, but these adventures require weeks of careful and clever planning (such as renting a Russian-made car that could be easily repaired outside of the major cities). And what one finds on the road except shabbiness and desolation is not exactly clear.

This drive took us through some amazing landscapes. The seemingly endless Appalachian National Forest in Florida. The giant bridges over bays and rivers. Later, the many mile long bridges through the swamps and the bayous. My one major regret is that I didn't schedule enough time to visit one of the parks or springs we passed.

Finally, at 8 pm, we arrived to New Orleans. This was Saturday night on the weekend of the French Quarter Festival, and so we drove straight into town, parked on the perimeter of the Vieux Carre. Dave and I had been to New Orleans once, nine years ago, for New Years, and so I had a rough idea of the geography of the town, but really didn't have too much to go on. I asked the parking lot attendant for a map. He didn't have one, but he gave advice. Straight ahead was Bourbon street and the river embankment, to the right was Canal street, and to the left--Esplanade. "But don't go there," he said. "There are a lot of bad people out that way." He looked us over and then added, "Carry all money and valuables in your pockets, leave your purses in the car. There are a lot of bad people in town for the festival." He was clearly unhappy with the influx of people into town.

Luckily, I was the only one in our group who understood him--my dad speaks English quite well, but in the South the accents were unusual for him, and he only got the gist of what was said. New Orleans was partying. People of all ages were out in the streets, drinking rum cocktails from funky tall glasses, smoking cigars, dancing. The French Quarter Festival was a lot like New Years but with less topless girls and with lots of great music. It seemed like there was a band playing on every block -- and that's not counting the five or six big stages constructed in different squares and on the riverfront. No matter how tired and achy we all were after the long drive, it was impossible to remain cranky in New Orleans. We walked out to the embankment of Mississippi in the last moments of sunlight and photographed the barges on the river and people sitting on the grass listening to the music. We got dinner at a nearby bar, then continued to walk the streets and people-watch. My aunt bloomed. "I had this feeling in San Francisco, but then I wasn't sure yet," she said. "Now I know: I love people." She walked up to somebody on the street and asked her: "You're beautiful. Can I take a picture?" My dad was into rock, my mom was into jazz, my aunt was into dancing, and we got to do a little bit of it all.

Day 4: Two weeks before the trip, when I had started looking into hotels in New Orleans, it turned out that all hotels in or near the French Quarter were already sold out (because of the festival). I got two rooms at a hotel across the river, in Gretna, which, in retrospect, may have been a good thing, because we were able to get a few hours of sleep uninterrupted by drunk loud people. With our intense sightseeing schedule, were getting about 6-7 hours of sleep a night, and every moment counted. When we woke up on Day 4, a Sunday, we drove back to the city, and I took my family to the restaurant called The Court of the Two Sisters, where Dave and I had eaten years ago, on our first trip to New Orleans. Back in 2002, Dave and I were only a couple of years out of college, and this was one of our first joint trips together. We were enchanted by the buffet brunch at this restaurant, by the feel of the New Orleans courtyard, by the jazz band that accompanied the dining experience. Now, nine years later, it all seemed a little cheesy, overpriced, overcrowded with tourists. The food was good but not great, the band was mediocre. Perhaps my tastes have grown more sophisticated with age, or perhaps the restaurant has really changed in the intervening years -- the experience was not the same. Nevertheless, my parents and especially my aunt seemed to enjoy the place as much as Dave and I had done once; for my aunt, I think, this courtyard brunch has become one of the quintessential New Orleans moments.

New Orleans was hot, and we didn't have a precise sightseeing plan. We meandered the shops--my mom was impressed by the quality of art and souvenirs available in almost every window--then hid from the weather in the museum of Voodoo. Almost all other museums were closed for Sunday. Even the famous cemeteries were closed, or closed at noon, which I should've expected but didn't. My parents had been to Argentina and France, so they think they saw similar cemetery structures, but still it would've been interesting. I sent them to take the boat tour on the Natchez -- something Dave and I also did in 2002. They saw a lot of industrial activity on the river, and probably heard some historical information about New Orleans, but missed most of it due to language barrier. My aunt, looking for something in her purse, dropped her Swiss Army knife into the Mississippi. But none of this mattered, because party on the streets was still continuing. The city was the spectacle, and we roamed the streets as much as we could in the heat, and listened to the different bands. I met the owner of one of the souvenir shops, and she told me she divided her time between New Orleans and San Francisco. In New Orleans, she missed the BART system and also good restaurants -- I didn't catch whether she meant all restaurants (that seemed a little drastic) or all certain kind of restaurants, like Mexican or sushi. She too seemed jaded from the influx of people that weekend, not particularly interested in talking about the good parts of New Orleans.

That night we drove to the Oak Valley plantation, about an hour northwest of New Orleans, up the Mississippi River. We spent the night in one of the two-bedroom cottages on the property. This was our one experience with something like the local nature--we got bit by the local mosquitoes and got to walk on the lawn around the property. They still grow lots of sugar cane in that area, and we saw some of it in the form of unimpressive little sprouts. Apparently, sugar cane is a late summer crop.

Day 5: In the morning, we toured the Oak Valley plantation, learned some of the history of its owners and a little bit of the history of the people who worked on the fields. Then, we drove a few miles to tour another plantation, by name of Laura--both stops recommended by my friend Suzanne. Their tour is based on the memoirs of a woman who remembered four generation of her family living on this plantation. The tour focused on the creole lifestyle and management practices. They also had an interesting tour of the property, including one slave cottage that would've housed two families. On this tour, we learned a little bit more about the slave system on these plantations. Apparently, this plantation is associated with the history of the Brer Rabbit tales. A folklorist Alcee Fortier, who lived nearby, collected stories told by the plantation slaves and eventually translated them and published in English. Wikipedia is a lot more tentative about this origins story: "Fortier did publish such a book and may have collected the tales at Laura and his own family's plantation."

Later that day, we drove another 6 hrs west to Houston, making two stops on the way, one in Baton Rouge and one in Lake Charles, LA. The downtown Baton Rouge seemed boarded up -- we were looking for lunch, but saw only sketchy pizza places. Eventually, I found a very lively university area, where we got fantastic sandwiches. In Lake Charles, we stretched our legs and walked around the very pretty lake in the middle of downtown. We didn't dawdle very much -- we had a friend to see in Houston that night, and so we were focused on getting there. Also, my mom had started reading us a book from my aunt's ebook reader collection -- a post-Soviet science fiction novel (Boris Akunin's Фантастика) -- and, even though the book was very intellectually problematic, we were all hooked.

That night in Houston we met Grisha, a son of my parents' friends, architects from Ufa, the capital of Bashkiria (Bashkortostan), a region in Russian Federation. Grisha's grandparents and cousins live in the States and he too is a resident here, trying to make a living as a geologist, working on the Gulf and looking for more oil digs. He was telling us about all the people who were put out of work when after the BP explosion and fire all the drilling in the Gulf stopped. Grisha drove us to the Kemah Boardwalk--sort of like Pier 39 here in San Francisco, but with bigger restaurants--but since it was after 10 pm, all the restaurants and oyster joints were closed. We went back to our hotel, and had a party in my parents' room with leftover sandwiches and sweets.

I spent the week rooming with my aunt. As far as roommates go, she was an extremely easy-going one. Most of the time, she didn't mind that I was on the computer while she was trying to fall asleep. A couple of nights, she had trouble falling asleep and so I took my work to the bathroom. Every morning, she woke up with or even before the alarm clock, set up an ironing board and proceeded to iron the clothes for the day. Along with the Geiger counter and a hair drier, she had brought an iron from Russia (even though, as it turned out, most hotels had one in the room). She was also going to bring an electric tea kettle, but at the last minute decided against it. We ended up drinking a lot of the hotel coffee.

One thing that she noticed at every hotel and at every restaurant bathroom was the uniformity of most plumbing equipment in the US. In all the States she has visited on this trips, in all of the hotels and private residences, in all the airports, and in all of the restaurants, there was very little variety in the models of toilets (and all have water in it--unlike the European toilets, where water is only at the very bottom of the bowl) and faucets. In contemporary Russia it has become a point of pride with the different restaurants to install inventive faucets. And in every European country, one spends quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to operate the bathroom machinery. In the US, the standardization was disconcerting.

Day 6: Tuesday, April 12, 2011 was a day of triple significance. On this day 50 years ago, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to be rocketed into space. Then, twenty years later, this was the day that the US flew the first space shuttle--a ship that could return back to Earth and land like an airplane. Thirty years later this day signaled the end of the shuttle program. We were in Houston, and so we went to the Houston's Johnson Space Center to take another tour. Unlike KCS in Florida, the Houston facility does not have an airfield, there are no pads and landing strips. But this is where all the administration and research facilities are housed. Here, we got to see the giant building, where astronauts train for upcoming flights. They have an exact model of the International Space Station, a shuttle, Soyuz capsules, etc. We also saw the Mission Control room from where the Apollo missions to the moon were managed. When the Apollo program ended, this room lost its practical purpose and became a museum.

When we got to the Mission Control room, our tour guide turned on live TV, and we saw the current Director of NASA, Charles Bolden, give a speech in which he marked the ending of the shuttle program and listed the museums around the country that would receive the remaining shuttles when the program would be finally shut down. Atlantis would go to Florida, Discovery to the Smithsonian, Endeavor to Los Angeles, Enterprise to New York. Houston was not on the list--they didn't even get to keep the training shuttle they already had, that was scheduled to go to a museum in Seattle. Disappointed, our tour guide turned off the TV and cut short his presentation. It was an emotional day for a lot of people involved with NASA. Even Charles Bolden, making his speech on TV, broke down to and almost cried when remembering his dead comrades and when trying to envision the future of the space exploration. Now that the shuttle program is ending, the American astronauts are scheduled to use Russian Soyuz capsules to go up to the International Space Station for at least three years, while NASA and Boeing design and test their new generation rocket. The future of American space exploration will depend, in a large way, on private enterprise, so for NASA this definitely means an end of an era.

We continued this conversation later that day when we met up and had dinner with a man my dad had known from college back in the 60s and 70s. Peter works for NASA as a translator from Russian, he and his team translate technical documents to English, interpret live conversations, and also train astronauts in the basics of the Russian language. Peter lives a couple of miles away from the Space Center, and pays to access a NASA satellite channel and also Russian TV channels. He made us a traditional and delicious Russian soup, a rassolnik (a soup with pickles) with chicken kidneys. Also Russian traditional blini with homemade (Peter had made it himself) cottage cheese. Peter and my dad were doing vodka and cognac shots, and reminiscing about their youth, telling stories, and talking about space exploration. Back in the 60s, Peter had been a member of a very popular Leningrad rock band. He was a couple of years ahead of my dad and his classmates, and so when my dad and his friends started their rock band in college, Peter's band were their heroes. I haven't seen my dad drunk on more than a couple of occasions before, so this was fun on all kinds of levels.

Meanwhile, no alligators on the property of the Johnson Space Center, but we did see a herd of generously horned cows. The tour guides were joking that these are "Moooon Cows," genetically modified cows for tests in space; but really this is an award-winning herd being raised by the local high school students and exhibited at state fairs, etc.

Day 7: We had breakfast at the hotel, toured the excellent Menil Collection, and drove to the airport. The Menil Collection is a great museum, not very large, but organized as if around a single strand of thought, on the intersection of the tribal art and the high modernist-surrealist art. The highlight to me were the Rene Magritte paintings -- I have seen so many reproductions of them before, but I don't think I've seen any of them live. A wine bottle painted over with a clouded sky entitled "The Curvature of the Universe"--I love that. But all of his work is equally playful and thought-provoking.

Messy travel

I'm not, not ready to step away from my writing desk, where piles of books and magazines ground me in the sense of things moving, work being done. And yet here I am at the Disney Coronado Springs Resort in Orlando, Florida, where hotel building are named "Cabanas," "Ranchos," and "Casitas"; terra-cotta and cement galore; a small cup of watery coffee costs $2,25, Internet access is $10 a day; and drinks at the decorative pond in the middle of the resort are being charged to my dad's credit card. Who cares about the seedy showiness of it all when I'm here with my family--my parents and my aunt--whom I haven't seen since September, so many new stories, work dramas, snow plowing accidents, rainfall, thought-provoking literary gatherings ago that it feels like forever.

My parents and my aunt are visiting from St. Petersburg. My aunt--my mother's sister--spent five days with Dave and me in San Francisco while my parents stayed in Chicago and visited cousins in Milwaukee. Today, my aunt and I flew to Orlando, where my dad was just finishing up a three-day conference. This conference was what had set in motion the planning for this crazy adventure we're in the middle of right now. We're going to explore Central and Northern Florida, then drive to New Orleans--we will be there during the weekend of French Quarter Festival--and then continue on to Houston, Texas.

Life is good, and yet I'm here at the Disney Coronado Springs Resort, spending much of the day in my room in one of the "Cabanas." It's not like I've been dying to see Disney World, but yes, it does feel silly to not see it now that I'm here. My priorities lie elsewhere: I have a cousin in town. She came to meet us here at the hotel. My cousin's name is Muffet, and her mother Fanya was a younger sister of my grandmother's father, Grisha. Fanya had left Russia before 1917, and so we've only reconnected with this branch of the family a few years ago. I've never met Muffet before, and neither did my dad. Muffet's mother, Fanya, had read and kindly commented on a few of my stories several years ago, when I was first starting out as a writer. She and I communicated over the phone, and I never got a chance to meet her before she passed away. Muffet brought picture albums to show -- of her mother, and also other family pictures. Several prints were copies of the ones my parents have at home: my grandmother's grandparents, Mordecai and his wife, whose name none of the cousins can remember.

My mom and my aunt did go to the Animal Kingdom today, and spent most of the time in lines. They saw some monkeys and parrots. The highlight of their day was petting some adorable lamb. They petted the lamb, and then were able to wash their hands immediately afterwards in the washbasin providently provided by the park administration. I love traveling with my aunt who's in the US for the first time. Onion rings are a wonder, airports are a challenging puzzle, giant glasses of water half-filled with ice are a health hazard, public libraries are a pinnacle of convenience, mangoes are to be eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner, while cognac is a rare drink only poorly substituted with whiskey. Why do ATMs speak Spanish and Chinese (in addition to English), but not Russian? Why do you (I) make such a big deal of composting at home, if you leave unfinished salad at a restaurant? Are oysters dead or alive when served fresh in the shell? Aren't they supposed to be breathing and squeaking when you eat them? Do all rental cars have this smell or does it go away eventually? Good questions, all, and the answers I can give are hardly satisfactory.

My aunt doesn't speak a lot of English, but she claims to be able to understand locals wordlessly, by intuition. She finds very clever solutions to the language barrier. For example, she and Dave found a highly technological and yet brilliantly simple way of communicating with one another: two computers and Google Translate tool that now translates as you type, and not only displays the translated word but also voices it aloud. They managed a surprisingly profound conversation this way.

FOGcon and The Fabulist

A little over a week ago, my friend Amber and I went to Friends of Genre Conference (FOGcon) here in San Francisco. I only had enough time to attend a couple of panels, and had to skip even the live action role-playing game based on Hamlet (still waiting to catch up with Amber to see how it went). What I really liked about the panels I did hear ("Race, Class, and Urban Planning," for example) was that they approached writing almost entirely from the thematic point of view vs. issues of "craft." The conversation focused on the problems of contemporary society (for example, gentrification of cities and urban planning projects that cause more harm than good) and how to address these problems in writing (if you're creating an imaginary city, do you think about where the poor people live, or those who have service jobs?). So often in workshops we focus on "how to say something" problems that we forget to address the "what" of what we're saying. I loved the opportunity of reassessing yet again my own approach to writing.

Among other fabulous people at the conference, I talked to the man who edited? published? promoted? The Fabulist magazine. As a fellow editor, I should've known to ask for the man's name, but I got excited about his magazine and forgot to introduce myself or to ask for his name. The magazine has been around for a couple of years (I think), producing in this time two issues. I have seen their calls for submissions, but shied off submitting before reading an issue. Who knows what kind of approach to the fabulous they took? The weird stories that I write are inspired largely by contemporary Russian politics and might not make much sense outside of that context. What The Fabulist proposes to do is to bring together the world of fables, magic realism, and science fiction. Exciting!

I bought the second issue. It intersperses stories with art by the house artist Adam Myers -- a story of his is also featured in the issue. The whimsical art is clearly inspired by the content of the stories. I love the drawing (collage?) called "Knitted, Knotted" that goes with a weird tale by Bosley Gravel. The freaky little devil who emerges from within the body of a wise old woman is a great metaphor and really appeals to my understanding of wise old women. Most stories in the book had a fantastical element to them, but not all. Tram Nguyen's story "Khoa in Chiapas" could easily have appeared in any realist lit mag. Other stories explore fictional possibility of alternative energy, video gaming, plastic surgery; and others, like Gravel's tale, take roots deep in folklore and mythology. The reading experience was very diverse and thought provoking;.

Notable from narrative theory point of view was the way many of these narratives were segmented. Several of the longer stories, including Nyall Boyce's "Gleam" (which I liked a great deal) and Nguyen's story, alternate between different time periods in the life of the same character. Jeremy Adam Smith's story "Centaur in Brass, 2041" unfolds within a single timeline, but alternates the narrative modes in which the main character's story is told. In some segments we have access to the main character's physical reality, in others, we get glimpses of his avatar in the game world, and in third, we get only bits of dialogue as he and his teammates discuss their play by play progress in the game. We very clearly move between the different levels of this character's psyche. And the stories that alternate between the different timelines in the lives of their characters allows one timeline to be a commentary on the action that unfolds in another. This technique is not too far off from a more conventional flashback technique, but by breaking up the narrative into separate segments it forces greater distance between the character's past and future, allowing the two exist in parallel to one another, as if in two separate story worlds. One does not necessarily follow from one another. The causal relationship between the two is the most obvious, but there are other possible ways to interpret the ways the pieces connect.

Links

Two of my stories have been recently published in an online magazine Mad Hatters' Review, in their special section "Back From the USSR." My stories are two humor pieces "How to Tell if a Student in Your Beginning Poetry Class is a Russian Spy" and "Sweet Dreams." I am very excited that in this publication my name is featured next to others whom I respect and admire, in particular a poet Vladimir Gandelsman and a quirky prose writer Linor Goralik.

Another publication I'm very proud of is my essay about Clark Coolidge's book of poetry, "This Time We Are Both," written in 1991 and published last year by Ugly Duckling Presse. This review appears on HTMLGiant, a great blog about all things lit (esp. avant-garde lit).

My friend Genine Lentine has published an essay on her project "Listening Booth" -- I have participated in this project about a year and a half ago, and Genine interviewed me about it. Part of this interview accompanies the essay. The other part Genine has graciously emailed me so that I can remember how cool this project was and continue to wonder why it has resonated so much with me and how I can use the ideas I had generated thinking about it in my work. Genine's own thoughts about the projects are expressed with power and clarity in her essay. Genine also blogs here.

Character in Grace Paley's "Goodbye and Good Luck"

One area where the creative writing community is frequently at odds with literature and narrative theory students is the attitude toward characters. That characters aren't people is one of the tenets of contemporary literary criticism. Suzanne Keen writes: "your work will at some point or other be read by a critic who adheres to the principle that fictional characters should not be referred to as if they were human." (69). And she quotes at length from Richard Posner:

a critical difference between fictional characters and real people is that the evaluation of a fictional character is made within a framework created by the work of literature, and the framework is an artificial world rather than our real social world. ... We cannot say, without seeming ridiculous, that Pip is a better man than Achilles, or Leopold Bloom than Odysseus, because to make such comparisons requires ripping the characters out of their context and so destroying the aesthetic structure of which they are components.

This last quote made me laugh as it brought back a memory from my childhood. When I was in my early teens, I kept a running list of my favorite characters. These were mostly male but some female characters, and while I didn't specifically articulate their qualities I admired, I freely included anyone who I had a crush on, whom I wished I could meet in real life, whom I wanted to be or to be with. Every time I found a new character to love in a book or in a movie (I admitted exceptional movie characters to my list, even though I had a separate running list for my favorite movies.. also a separate list for my favorite ice skaters -- they, too, create very strong characters), I would consider where they fit on my list and reorder the ranks. The character who was never dislodged from the top was Sanya Grigoriev from "Two Captains" by Veniamin Kaverin (I blogged about this book recently). His compatriots on the list included the boy and girl heroes of Soviet literature, Timur and Zhenya from Alexander Gaidar's pioneer novels, Vasyek and Dinka from Oseeva's fiction; characters from foreign fiction -- Pip, ripped out from his "aesthetic structure" might have made the list at one point -- and D'Artagnan and Aramis were always there; characters from Russian classics, like Pechorin, Shtolz (a secondary character from "Oblomov"), Shubin (a minor character from Turgenev's "On the Eve.") As I grew older, I moved on from admiring the heroes and looked for characters who, I thought, weren't given justice by the author. Shubin, in my opinion, was a very charming and interestingly troubled young man -- Turgenev had undeservedly given him short shrift. I came very close to writing what I now know is called "fan fiction."

I'm not alone in this impulse -- to take characters outside of their textual constraints and force them to interact with other characters. I'm thinking of a Hollywood blockbuster, for example, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that pitted Sherlock Holmes against Captain Nemo, Dorian Gray, and Tom Sawyer. (Mostly men; original genres all quite different.) The impulse behind my childhood fantasies and this and similar movies might be "ridiculous" from the literary analysis point of view, but it's clearly a powerful one.

Ultimately though I do believe that characters belong to the text, are functions of the text, they manifest reality only insofar as reality is defined by the text -- while readers read both fictional characters and "real" people by the same (or closely related) process, comparing a number of verbal and non-verbal clues to create their own ideas (fictions) about them in their minds. Characters are different from people -- they are defined by fewer variables -- but the reading process is not altogether different from making a new friend. (I wonder if there are neuroscience studies out there testing this hypothesis. Do we use same or different parts of the brain, meeting somebody for the first time vs. reading a novel?)

One of the most revealing parts of Jim Shepard's workshop, was when he suddenly turned to one of the participants and asked her: "Imagine somebody said to you that your eyes shone like those of a wolfhound. How would that make you feel?" He stared at the woman intently, like he really meant it. We laughed, and then realized that the idea of testing lines of dialogue and flashy narrative phrases on a real situation is not a bad one. Words -- characters -- have power. To compare somebody's eyes to a wolfhound is a violent act. A narrator, using a phrase "her eyes shone like those of a wolfhound," expresses an attitude towards a character -- anger, perhaps, or revenge. The relationship between the narrator and the character is immediately circumscribed by this characterization.

On my friend Genine's recommendation, I've started reading Grace Paley's Collected Stories. The first in the book is "Goodbye and Good Luck." In it, Aunt Rosie is telling a story of her life to Lillie, her niece. The niece doesn't materialize as a character in the course of the story -- there's no description of her and she doesn't have any lines of dialogue -- she mostly functions as a listener, as somebody to whom Aunt Rosie is telling the story. And yet the few phrases Aunt Rosie addresses to her every so often do create a viable character. Let me illustrate by copying out a few of the phrases where Lillie is addressed directly:

Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she don't notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canary's ear for thirty years. Who's listening? Papa's in the shop. You and Seymour, thinking about yourself. ...

Don't laugh, you ignorant girl. ...

In those days -- it looks to me like yesterday -- the youngest girls wore undergarments like Battle Creek, Michigan. To him it was a matter of seconds. Where did he practice, a Jewish boy? Nowadays I suppose it is easier, Lillie? My goodness, I ain't asking you nothing -- touchy, touchy ...

Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream. ...

So now, darling Lillie, tell this story to your mama from your young mouth. She don't listen to a word from me. ... Give me a kiss. After all, I watched you grow from a plain seed. So give me a couple wishes on my wedding day. A long and happy life. Many years of love. Hug Mama, tell her from Aunt Rosie, goodbye and good luck.

One reason these bits of dialogue function so effectively as characterization of Lillie is that aunt Rosie uses her as a mirror; in Rosie's eyes, Lillie is clearly a younger version of herself. If we don't know what Lillie looks like (and it's easy to picture her as a slimmer and even more pink-cheeked Rosie), we know what she must think of Aunt Rosie: she's eagerly listening to a rather long and elaborate story, and so she must by fascinated by Rosie, perhaps, admire her; but she's also capable of laughing at aunt Rosie, so she must also find her somewhat ridiculous. The little we know about Lillie turns out to be enough to create a complex, multifaceted character.

Time Capsule

In November, Dave and I received an email from forbes.net with the following message: "Greetings from your past. In the fall of 2005, you agreed to receive this message, which has been preserved in the Forbes.com E-Mail Time Capsule." A message from ourselves was posted below, opening with this: "Don't forget - it's time to move out of London, people!!!!"

Neither Dave nor I remember the specific circumstances of us writing this message to ourselves, but the general context came very much alive when we opened the email. Forbes was running an interesting experiment, asking people to send messages to themselves into the future via the Internet, not knowing whether they will have the technology to deliver the messages after the time lapse. Would yahoo mail still be around? Would google? There were no obvious answers to these questions -- as there aren't now. The experiment is ongoing: people had an option of sending themselves messages 5, 10, or 20 years into the future. Dave and I can't remember, but it's very likely that we signed up for at least two out of three.

Here's a recent blog post on forbes.com that provides background of their fascinating experiment. "We’re excited to see this strange thing is still working, because while it’s pretty simple to preserve a physical time capsule (dig hole, insert non-biodegradable container), the realities of digital preservation are surprisingly complicated."

As someone who conceives of herself almost exclusively in the present, I set great value in leaving messages for my future self. I've been a regular diarist since the age of 9; I store as many college notebooks, old manuscripts, and random scraps of paper as I possibly can without getting buried under the data; I have not only kept copies of every letter and greeting card I've ever received from friends and family members, but at one point even experimented with making carbon and photo copies of the letters I sent myself; same goes for digital communication -- I save everything I can. I'm the first to admit: most of this information is useless, a waste of storage space. When was the last time I have looked at the notes I kept from the Macroeconomics class I took as a sophomore at RIT? Probably three years ago, when we moved to our current apartment and I decided to "clean up," to throw away duplicates and drafts of papers I wrote at RIT, leaving only graded copies in storage. All of my folders from my SFSU days are still intact. Once, I spent an afternoon searching old email, trying to remember the exact year my grandmother died (how come I don't have this written down somewhere accessible?).

When forced to justify this behavior, I claim endless story potential contained in these folders. So far, I haven't written anything inspired by a single one of those scraps. (I have a separate filing system for old story ideas). But, save extraordinary circumstances, I can't imagine myself getting rid of this stuff. How else can I have know who I was before, five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago? By keeping these papers, I allow myself the privilege of purging the memories to the very back of my mind. I want to remember -- I need to remember -- but I don't have to remember anything about it now, as long as I am secure in my external storage system.

Five years ago, Dave and I lived in a tiny apartment on Waller Street. I was in my first year of grad school, still contemplating a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. Dave kept crazy hours working his consulting job. Here's how we described our situation in the time capsule: "Dave: works 12 hour days + 2 hours travel, loves Netflix. We are cooking non-stop thanks to our organic produce delivery service (Planet Organics). Obsessed with Palm Pilot (can't wait to get a Treo!!) Sick and tired of driving my car. Just discoved tea with milk." And Olga? "Olga: procrastinates on writing papers, dreams of ending school and working on more stories. Wendy, Paula, and I started a writing group. Hope to keep in touch with SFSU friends."

Together, we contemplated moving to London after I was done with grad school, dreamed about taking cheap weekend trips everywhere in Europe, easier travel to St. Petersburg and annual trips to Pennsylvania and New York. In our email to ourselves, we looked even further ahead. Dave expressed a desire to end our sojourn in London at the end of these five years: "Prepare to move back to The States and start a biz-natch," he wrote. My immediate plans included "Gotta get over my email hangup where it's difficult to force myself to answer emails," and more long-term: "Plan for 2005-2010: Find a way to earn a living by writing." This last one appears very naive at the moment, but it's great to know I was thinking about creative writing even in the middle of the whole Comp. Lit. adventure, when I wrote at best two stories in two years.

We never ended up going to London. Dave started searching for jobs there, but no immediate opportunities turned up, and then we figured out we liked San Francisco too much to move. I never applied for Ph.D. programs, soon deciding that if I were apply to school again, I would want to do an MFA in writing. I'm still debating this decision once in a while. We signed the time capsule very warmly: "Love you guys! Olgie and Davey." Isn't that sweet? This alone is worth the effort of writing such a message: we gotta keep reminding ourselves of our old, dopey selves.

The Art of Reading Poetry

On impulse, I bought Harold Bloom's "The Art of Reading Poetry" this week -- part of its appeal was surely the brochure size of the book. I could -- and did -- read it in a matter of two or three hours. If I understand him correctly, Bloom claims that the art of reading poetry is the art of comprehending the meaning of poetry, learning the ways the meaning is constructed in poetry, and then learning to interpret the meaning. No argument from me there, except maybe Bloom's "cognitive" quality is not sufficient to characterize the ways poetry affects us on the level of sound.

I'm struggling to find English-language poetry that I could connect with on an emotional rather than intellectual level. The best way I've figured out to approach this project is to read a lot quickly, until something catches my eye, and then read that something more attentively. The line that stopped me in Bloom's book was from Tennyson's poem "Ulysses": "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." Something about this line struck me as deeply familiar, and after a moment's pause -- I suppose I translated the line automatically in my head -- I realized that this line was a motto of a character from my favorite novel growing up. "The Two Captains" by Veniamin Kaverin was favorite to several generations of Soviet children the way children of different generations grew up with Jules Verne or Mark Twain.

The connection between Tennyson and Kaverin immediately made sense when google helped me remember that this line was used on the gravestone of the British explorer of the Antarctica, Robert Scott. Kaverin's main character, Sanya, made it his life quest to find out what happened to an explorer of the North, a fictional figure modeled largely on the British explorer of Antarctica. Scott had reached the South Pole only to discover that he had been preceded there by a Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Dispirited, Scott and his team died on the journey back to their ship. The words on his grave come from the concluding stanza to the Tennyson poem:
"One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

This phrase, "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," -- or its Russian translation, "Бороться и искать, найти и не сдаваться" -- has accompanied me through life in a very literal sense. At the age of nine, I, copying my hero, Sanya, took it up as my motto and wrote it on the first page of my diary -- and have been ritualistically rewriting it on the first page of every new book I've since designated as my diary. (I am very loyal to my rituals).

I've now gone back to Tennyson and reread "Ulysses" several times -- slowly, it's starting to develop some meaning for me on the emotional level. The sentiment -- Ulysses's striving for something to do after the Trojan war and his return to Ithaca -- is colored by what I perceive as the meaning of the sentiment on Robert Scott's memorial and is colored by Sanya's quest -- it signifies to me on all of these levels, and cannot be separated from the later interpretations. Perhaps, to truly commit to this poem, I should memorize it.

Post-trip randomness

Dave and I returned to San Francisco on Saturday, so technically, the trip is over. But endings are never that simple. For example, I still have about two dozen browser tabs open: research on the places we visited. Some of them I can close with no regrets: I have five tabs dedicated to microbreweries in Beijing we wanted to visit our last full day there. It turned out, most of the pubs listed online have gone out of business, and the only one we found still in business, is a Japanese company that makes beer with a Russian name, Okhotsk. Actually, Okhotsk is a town and also a sea, the sea that separates Japan from the continent, and where the group of the disputed Kuril islands is located. Just the other day, these islands were in the news again, when President Medvedev went there for a visit, and Japan temporarily called their ambassador back from Russia. Never mind, I'm supposed to be closing tabs, not opening new ones.

Two more sites we visited our last day in town: Silk Street and Pearl Market, one of the places to go in Beijing for knock off purses. I wonder what the career paths of the girls who work there will be: the place is an amazing training ground for an army of aggressive sales reps. In the evening of our last day, we ended up at Sanlitun, a neighborhood of all-American bars, restaurants, shopping. There's a mall there that reminded us very much of the refurbished downtown LA (Nokia Center). The place was mildly creepy in its blandness, so we got out as quickly as possible. A couple of days prior, we'd walked by another touristy restaurant area mentioned in many tour guides, Nan Xin Cang, built in a restored old granary. It's another Disneyfied recreation targeted at tourists, and so stripped of any real personality.

Here's a cool discovery: http://www.dianping.com/, a Chinese equivalent of Yelp. The website is entirely in Simplified Chinese, but thanks to Google translation tools that wasn't a problem. We searched it for some fun restaurants and also it led us to a very decent and well priced foot massage place. Meanwhile, according to Dianping.com, the best restaurant in Beijing is a place called ebeecake. Cake sounded good, and we decided to seek this place out -- especially since the address showed it to be located at the 798 Art Space the day we were going there. Big mistake. Turns out, the right way to read the name of the place is e-Bee-Cake, that is "electronic" cake. When we finally found the right building in the middle of the 798 Art Zone, it turned out to be a wholesale bakery, and they asked us where we wanted our cake delivered. They gave us a pretty catalog with over a dozen titles, and told us that there was a cafe next door that served ebeecake. We found the cafe, but out of all the dozen pretty cakes on the brochure, the cafe was serving cheesecake and tiramisu. We turned up our noses at that, and opted for pizza and ice cream at a cafe down the street.

My other open tabs take me all the way back to Shanghai. Here's a blog by an American guy, Jonathan, that's been really helpful to me in finding the foreign-language bookstores in Shanghai. Jonathan is studying at a university in Nanjing, and his blog is a good source for information about the expat life in China. I've added his RSS to my Google Reader.

Dave's coworker, Laura -- she's an interpreter freelancing for Dave's company -- told me the story about the Soong sisters, three very influential women of the 20th C Chinese politics. The eldest of the three, Soong Ai Ling was married to the richest man and a finance minister of China. The middle, Soong Ching Ling was married to the founder of modern China, Dr. Sun Yat Set. And the youngest, Soong May Ling married Chiang Kai Shek. I immediately wanted to know more about them. Apparently, there was a 1997 Hong Kong film made about the three, but what I'm really looking for is a good novel :) While in Shanghai, I went to Soong Ching Ling's residence and memorial, memorial being a museum dedicated to the life of Soong Ching Ling from the point of view of the Communist party. The residence itself was like a small English country house, albeit with a few oddly angled walls. One very neat thing I noticed: she had her typewriter set up in the bathroom, right next to the tub. I wonder what her writing routine was.

Also, while in Shanghai, I walked down Duolun Road, a street famous for many turn of the 20th C writers who lived there. The street is enjoying something of a renaissance these days, and features some new cafes and bookstores and even one Museum of Modern Art. I walked into this museum to discover an exhibit of сontemporary Saudi Arabian art, a part of the World Expo.

Finally (for this mishmash post), David and Cici, our gracious guides through Hangzhou, left me with a list of (popular 20th C) Chinese writers I should check out. I have no idea when I will get to this, but here at least are the names they put down in my notebook: Jin Yong, Wei Si Li, Lin Yu Tang, Zhang Ai Ling, Xiong Yao, Lao She (the only name familiar to me on this list), Ding Ling, Han Han, Bing Xin, Lei Yu, Ba Jing, Guo No Ruo.

Ring 4

My nose seems capable of producing infinite amounts of goo. Both Dave and I have been sniffling all week; it's no big deal -- no other symptoms, except red noses -- but it is making it difficult for me to sleep or lie down in general, my nose gets immediately stuffed up. Yesterday, we decided to get foot massages, and I was breathing so loudly in my reclined chair, that a woman working on Dave's feet brought me some pretty gel-capsuled pills to take, presumably to clear my nose. I took some NyQuil instead, and more or less slept through the night.

On the other hand, stuffed nose is a fine symptom to have when walking through a neighborhood fire. As we were walking back to our hotel last night, having gotten our foot massages, our path took us down a street that was blocked off to automobile traffic. My first thought was that they were clearing an accident: we've already seen one accident the day before, where a motor-powered rickshaw collided with a motorcycle. With the aggressive local driving style, accidents must be frequent. As we kept walking, we started seeing fire engines on both sides of the street, and then finally passed a small crowd gathered at an entrance to a side alley: one of the buildings some ways down the alley had caught on fire.

Beijing's city plan divides the city with wide automobile streets into neighborhoods, rectangular blocks of houses separated from each other by narrow and sometimes very ancient alleys (hutongs). Many of these alleys are inaccessible to cars, and only pedestrians, bikes or motorbikes can get through. So when trying to put out a fire, the firemen had to extend great lengths of hose all the way down the alley, by which time the fire probably spread from the first building to the next and maybe to the next. The buildings are made of brick, but they are located so close to each other, that the fire, once started, is difficult to put out. As we passed that alley, we entered a cloud of smoke so thick Dave thought the cause was a smoke bomb; it was hard to imagine this kind of smoke being caused by a single house burning five hundred feet away.

Beijing is a grid city, but like Moscow, is circumscribed with several concentric ring roads. I am not sure what in Beijing is considered the first ring -- perhaps, the walls of the Forbidden City -- but most tourist sites and activities seem to be contained within the Second ring (except Summer Palace, where we haven't been yet). The residential city is much wider, extending out in all directions to 4th, 5th and 6th rings. This is where most of the millions of people inhabiting Beijing actually live: not in the historical and atmospheric hutongs of the city center, but in the Soviet-style (or post-Soviet, more contemporary) apartment blocks. I feel very much at home in these neighborhoods. Here are the shops for the middle classes: grocery and clothing mega-markets, stores selling washing machines, offices of the telecom companies, bakeries, a random pipe and tobacco shop.

We ended up in this part of town following a lead recommended by my friend Yvette (her recommendations have led us to some very unique and fascinating places this week): to find 798 Art Zone. It's an old auto factory that fell in disuse and was taken over by artist-types that converted it to their own needs. The project achieved legitimacy on the governmental level as Beijing was gearing up for the Olympic games. The old factory neighborhood was re-zoned from industrial to "artistic," and large-scale tourist-friendly construction began. Today, the area features many cafes and restaurants (most of them with some international flare, even if that simply means pizza and tiramisu), bookstores and stores with artistic souvenirs (lots of souvenirs that feature art from 798 galleries), and most importantly, a countless number of galleries, workshops, ceramic studios, etc.

And all of this is located in the middle of the otherwise nondescript middle class neighborhood, past rows and rows of apartment blocks. Tourists who know what they are looking for, find it, but otherwise -- forget it. You're never going to stumble upon it by chance.

Read Dave's blog for more details about the art we've found at 798.

Sightseeing in Beijing

We've been walking around Beijing the last few days, took a bus ride to the Great Wall, but then came back to the city and continued viewing the sites. There are many major attractions here that are on every tourist's must-see list, and we've barely covered those yet. The Wall, for one, also the Temple of Heaven. Planning to spend half a day at the Forbidden City today, and maybe will make it to the Summer Palace on Friday. Distances are huge, and once you get to a site, it absorbs you in a multitude of pavilions, corridors, landmarks -- and soon enough it's 5 pm, when everything closes down. Sure, we're not very dedicated sightseers, we get out of the hotel very late, by noon at best, and prefer to stay out as long as we can in the evenings -- exploring the neighborhoods, getting lost in the alleys, finally finding our way to the night markets, settling down for dinner, going to shows.

I feel very ambivalent about visiting the must-see sites. I am not huge on taking pictures, and the massive hoards of tourists are frightening. The Great Wall, at least the most popular stretches of it, is a huge tourist trap; the loveliest thing about it is the ability to hike from one mountain crest to the next, and to enjoy the autumn. We don't see much of this kind of fall in San Francisco -- the Wall was covered in soft yellow glow from all the trees around it, dry weightless leaves gathering at the bottoms of each staircase and by the parapets. It really seems that the "Wall" is a misnomer -- it's not much different from the Roman road, a way to connect distant provinces to the empire center. Any army that scaled those mountains can easily take the wall, not that much higher than any wall aristocrats built around their palaces and gardens in Beijing or Shanghai.

Yesterday, Dave and I visited the Palace and the Garden of Prince Gong, similar in its vision to Yu Garden in Shanghai, but also featuring a separate mansion with nine inner courtyards. The Garden of Prince Gong is rumored to have inspired Cao Xuequin's "The Dream of the Red Chamber" (or "The Story of the Stone"), the one classic Chinese novel that I've (partially) read. The garden with its multiple pavilions and several man-made lakes was completely overrun by tour groups, so Dave's and mine vague notion of having a tea and resting a while in one of the pavilions seemed absurd. But we did meander around, climbing the rocky paths on the second and the third level above ground, and this way managed to sneak by a few particularly ugly bottlenecks. This, to me, was the most surprising discovery about these traditional gardens: their three-dimensional architecture. Somehow, from the books, this part never became apparent to me, that the traditional garden is not conceived on a plane, but also in the vertical space. This is also one aspect the smaller-scale gardens like the ones in Portland or Vancouver cannot replicate.

Beijing clearly presents itself as a much older city than Shanghai. Walking down a seemingly random alley, we've come across a sign that marked the existence of this same alley from the 13th century. Also, we've walked into a store with wooden triangle roofs and a series of courtyards, labeled with a plaque: this store was a pharmacy built in 1606 and served the emperor and the court. There were several different shops located on the premises now, but the only one still open (it was after 5 pm) was a state-run shop with traditional souvenirs, tea and candy.

My friend Yvette has been telling me of the ever-present danger in Beijing that the new bout of construction will destroy yet another historical neighborhood; that the traditional compounds will be replaced with ultra-modern office buildings and hotels. She herself has been writing fiction, short stories and novellas, that explore the changing cityscapes and social structures of contemporary Beijing. I am thinking about her stories as I walk around and look at the tremendous construction sites that border every neighborhood, that meet you every time you turn a corner from a well-trodden tourist path. Yvette's project, to reflect and remember, resonates with me: I also keep thinking about the one skyscraper, the infamous Okhta Center or Gasprom tower, that may or may not be built in the next few years downtown St. Petersburg.

Read Dave's blog for a more detailed account of what we've been up to.

Episodic imagination

I've read an essay recently by a philosopher Galen Strawson, in which he argues that people differ in ways they experience self in time. The two polarities are Diachronic and Episodic self-experiences, where a Diachronic person imagines self "as something that was there in the past and will be there in the future," while an Episodic person "has little or no sense that the self was there in the past and will be there in the future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being." I strongly identify with this second type of experience, the Episodic.

An example: I can never pack right for the weather. I look at the weather forecast, I estimate how much hotter or colder it is than San Francisco, I advise Dave (or whomever I'm traveling with) what would be, theoretically, the right clothes to bring, and then I go on to pack my own suitcase with completely random stuff that has no relationship to what I'm going to need on the ground. I don't do this intentionally. At the outset, I firmly decide to break the pattern, to plan the trip right, to pack for all eventualities. And I always end up with the wrong clothes, trip after trip after trip. I seem to be simply unable to project myself into the future, cannot imagine ever needing or wanting to wear anything other than what I'm comfortable with at the moment.

Here, in China, I ended up with a bathing suit and sandals I haven't used once, and without a proper jacket for the low 40F temperatures in the evenings. My suitcase is filled with tank tops and summer skirts, and only three long-sleeved shirts. I did pack an umbrella and several scarves, but I didn't bring a single sweater. I'd worn my favorite sleeveless vest on the plane -- and this was the warmest piece of clothing I had with me. So one of the things we had to do in Hangzhou -- before we got to the supposedly cold Beijing -- was to buy me a jacket.

This is pretty much how I get most of my shopping done. I end up in various parts of the world without necessary articles of clothing and have to improvise. My previous jacket, I got two years ago when I ended up in Ireland over New Years without warm clothes (what kind of a person would show up in Ireland in January without a good jacket? An Episodic, unable to imagine self in the future). And last year, in Israel, I bought two skirts and a dress, because Israel in January was quite summery. In the past, I'd had to buy boots in Spain and T-shirts in Germany. The only reason I rarely buy new clothes in Russia is because I can always wear my mom's stuff there. And also, she has a tendency to plan for me and buy me clothes whether I need anything or not.

My wardrobe is a hodgepodge of uniquely patterned, brightly colored articles from all over the world (but actually probably all made here in China), most of it bought at the time of need and in a rush. A lot of it has been acquired even without my presence. Few articles fit me well, and the notion of matching is unthinkable. Even if I can wear my Israeli skirt with a plain black shirt, it's never going to look right with my purse made of complex geometrically patterned material in moss green, brick red, pale yellow and other colors, a purse I cannot give up because my mom brought for me from Armenia (even if it had been made in China or India, so what).

Here's what happened in Hangzhou. Our friend David had brought the report that Beijing was having a cold spell, that the temperatures in Beijing approximated 0 degrees Celsius (32 F). I was already feeling uncomfortable in my vest (a birthday gift from my mom several years ago, she'd mailed it to me from Israel) worn over a pair of long-sleeved shirts -- and we were still in Hangzhou, where the temperature climbed to 15 degrees Celcius in the daytime. The prudent thing to do was to buy the jacket before we left Hangzhou, especially since we had time to shop after dinner.

David and Cici took us to a few clothing stores -- luckily, they were all on the same street (did I mention I hate shopping? I blame my Episodic imagination for my inability to select what I would actually ever want to wear). Nothing fit right. Everyone was advising me to try larger sizes -- in China, the sizes are marked based on height; I am 164 cm tall, and the sizes range 160 - 165 - 170 -- and I did try 170, but it was no use. I must've tried on ten different models of sweaters and jackets, and it all just felt wrong. This is part of the problem with buying clothes in foreign countries: I never know what the right models for my body type are. The clothes were too tight and too baggy at the same time; one jacket seemed to fit fine but then it had a hood lined with bright orange fur, and even I could tell that I would never wear something like this in San Francisco.

Finally, at what I was determined to make our last stop for the night -- the exercise was getting ridiculously stupid -- Dave pointed to a nice looking men's pea-coat, just for the hell of it. "Try this." The first one I tried on was it. The shoulders were the right breadth, the sleeves the right length, I had enough room in the chest to button all the buttons and still be able to move my arms up and down. The material was thick enough for cold weather and the plain gray color classy enough to look good even when I picked up my crazy purse. The only thing about it, being a man's coat, it buttoned on the right side. I figured, I'd get used to it.

We bought the coat without further ado, and I walked out of the store wearing it instead of my old vest. Will I be able to wear it in San Francisco? I don't see why not -- but of course, I've said so about many things that are currently gathering dust in my closet. Being gray, this coat seems pretty easy to match with a lot of things -- if I were suddenly to take up matching as a hobby. The coolest part about it is the story that goes with it: Hangzhou, hanging out with David and Cici who seemed to get a kick out of the fact that the only thing that fit me right was a men's jacket. Also, the company I bought the jacket from -- Meters/Bonwe, a local chain -- is one of David's clients, and this added to the fun of the experience.

These kinds of stories are the best part of my wardrobe, the reason why I have such a hard time emptying my closets, donating anything to Goodwill. Being an Episodic, I don't have ready access to my memories as a Diachronic person, perhaps, might: to imagine (Diachronics would say "remember") myself in the past, I need the physical objects to prompt the memories. So I insist on wearing my random clothes, even if they make the task of getting dressed in the mornings extremely challenging.

Happy Halloween, everybody :)

Tourist will eat

A tourist moves through a foreign city driven by desire. She is looking for an undefined, unknown experience that will somehow effect change upon her. The more unfamiliar the culture, the more opportunities it seems to offer for radical transformation of her consciousness. She yearns to study, to learn, to grow, to understand. At the very least, she's looking for some kind of human interaction that will allow her to feel less foreign in this formidable city, less alone. She finds souvenir shops and street food. Buns of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves. Hot dogs on sticks. Spinach dumplings. Corn on the cob. Chestnuts. Pearl milk tea. Black sesame cookies and cream-filled pastries. Hard-boiled eggs. Bowls of noodles and cabbage. Pancakes with scallions and unspecified meat. Melon on sticks. Barbecued chicken on sticks. Baked potato. Stinky tofu. She samples these by pointing and counting out coins; at the end of the day she still hasn't talked to a single human being, and if she's been in any way transformed by what she has seen, the transformation has been so minor as to go entirely unnoticed. But the desire--an undefined yearning for something extraordinary--has been successfully channeled into hunger, and the hunger satisfied. Stomach full, she keeps walking, stuffing her purse with baggies of dried fruit and nuts, hard candy, sesame balls, lychees and apples, bars of chocolate, boxes of miniature mints, gum. The desire has been transformed and satisfied, and yet it's still there, burning in the back of her mind, driving her down miles upon miles of narrowly paved roads, through crowds of goal-oriented locals, by ways of hundreds of vendors that offer more opportunities to put off the inevitable realization that what pushes her along has nothing to do with her surroundings. The desire is born of something deep within her self, and must be answered by looking inwards, not outwards. She sits down at a cafe, at a bookstore, at a curbside, leans against a lamppost or a granite facade, and starts writing. This, isn't this what she was looking for in the foreign city: the way to stop looking. This, she thinks, is freedom. This is happiness. Her thoughts are fueled by the full stomach, and the supplies in her purse will ensure that her stomach will remain pleasantly full at least until the next day.

Meantime, Dave's conference ended somewhere between 3 and 11:30 am this morning, and the touristy part of the trip has officially started. Our new friends David and Cici drove us to the nearby city Hangzhou. On the way, we stopped by what looked like a truck stop in a town called Jiaxin to try a local specialty dish, zongzi -- a bun of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves and filled with deliciously soft pork. David and Cici were telling us the tidbits from the history of this dish in Jiaxin, and while they were talking they started remembering all the wonderful Hangzhou specialty dishes: shrimp cooked in tea soup, Beggar's Chicken cooked in lotus leaves and ashes, fried tofu skins dipped in tomato sauce, fried ice cream, Dongpo pork, named after a poet and a governor of Hangzhou from the 11th century, Su Dongpo (also known as Su Shi). After finishing our snack, we rushed to Hangzhou, quickly toured the famous West Lake, had tea with lotus root starch soup in one of the tea houses on the island in the middle of the lake, then took the boat back to shore, and rushed to the restaurant where we could sample all these other famed dishes. Today offered a kind of culinary experience that puts the idea of a "Chinese restaurant" to shame.