Rive Gauche

Yves Saint Laurent markets a brand of perfume named after a famous Parisian neighborhood, Rive Gauche. But apparently, Rive Gauche -- spelled Рив Гош -- is also a Russian chain store that sells perfume (yes, Yves Saint Laurent among others) and make up. Apparently, this store also gives out plastic bags, because I see these bags everywhere in the city. They must be good, strong plastic bags, the kind that can hold an umbrella and a pair of spare shoes, a book to read in the subway and a few grocery items. Carrying a plastic bag in addition to a purse or a messenger bag is part of the local fashion, and local Rive Gauche provides not only the durable kind, but also colorful. Their red, green, pink, blue, and black logo can match virtually any type of outfit and especially a coat. It's versatile. I feel like buying a bit of lipstick just for the privilege of carrying around a bag like this.

The weather finally is turning wintry. Today was sunny and frosty -- my hands and ears took the brunt of it. I didn't walk much today, but it's clearly time to move into my winter coat and boots and a Rive Gauche bag for slippers to change into when entering someone's house. No snow on the ground, unfortunately. This is bad. If it gets any colder, and the snow won't start falling soon, all the plants will freeze in the ground.

Movies with my brother

The Internet is sickly. Not doing well at all. It's coughing and sneezing and turning to the wall and refusing to talk to me. I go away, work on my translations, brush my teeth, read a book, go out to buy milk and cookies, and then come back and prod it again: come on, don't be a baby, talk to me. It opens one eye, looks at me attentively, I scarmble for the right words, the right way to touch it so that it finally talks to me again -- but no, no use. It closes its eyes and pulls a blanket over its head. It's done for the day.

True, in these last few days of my trip, I don't have a lot of time to play with it anyway. I'm scrambling to meet friends, family and business associates one last time. Petersburg is not a very large city -- until you try to combine three dinner dates in three different parts of the city. I invite my second cousins to meet me at my aunt's place. I invite classmates from my first school to meet me at the apartment of a classmate from my second school. My brother organizes an outing to the movies (The Private Lives of Pippa Lee with Robin Wright Penn and Alan Arkin, I highly recommend it, might be the best movie I've seen all year -- after Star Trek) so that I could meet two more family friends. Classic Petersburg: everything is arranged last minute, and the two girls arrive from the opposite directions at exactly the same time, five minutes after the movie was supposed to start. Kiss on the cheek, kiss on the cheek, and the four of us run up the four flights of granite stairs to the movie theatre -- the best and the shabbiest in the city. They play art films, with subtitles instead of awful dubbing. Therefore, no popcorn, old Soviet-style humongous auditorium and chairs in front of a smallish screen. But the sound and the projection system have been updated, and really it's not that much different from watching movies at the Castro theatre.

After the movie, we go across the street to a tea-house called Marakesh, where we drink tea by the teapots. Kostya and I drink Masala -- which is the only exception I've seen him make to his no food or drink after 6 pm rule. Other parties at this tea-house are also smoking hookahs -- a popular local past-time -- but we are drinking tea and talking about literature and the arts. Both of our friends are students at the University, one studying politics and another studying French language and Comparative Literature. Both of them are also journalists or aspiring journalists, writing about film and popular culture -- there are lots of stories to be exchanged and joint projects to plan. At the end of the evening, Kostya drives everyone home. It's after midnight, but the city is still trafficky. Kostya drives deliberately slowly, stopping for the pedestrians and red lights -- he refuses to be rushed -- and his strategy usually pays off, but sometimes he still gets into scrapes with people sidling him and cutting him off. Yelling is always the first go-to method of communication in such cases. Still, Kostya seems to be surprisingly successful in his personal quest to minimize the levels of agression in the atmosphere around himself. He practices yoga each morning, sings, studies Spanish, takes artsy photographs, has a regular job, watches Futurama in English, makes chocolate cheesecakes at night that he won't eat until breakfast, and all of this seems to help.

Yanina Maximovna

For me, time in Petersburg moves in a definitively non-linear way. It doesn't flow -- it leaps, and not only forward but also backwards. There are certain ritual things I do every time I'm here -- from buying a certain type of chocolate-covered cheesecakes for breakfast to visiting my literature teacher -- and there are certain ritual emotions I experience while doing these things. No matter how many times I've done it before, every time I bite into the thin chocolate crust and feel the soft, mushy sweetness inside -- I am always seven years old, rushing to eat the entire cheesecake at once before I have to share it with my brother. Every time Johnnie and I go to visit Yanina Maximovna, we are always precocious 17- year olds, recent high school graduates, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things we don't know and will never learn.

Things do, of course, change. Yanina Maximovna is approximately 86 now, and when Johnnie and I went to visit her on Saturday, she could no longer get up and open the door for us. She broke her hip a year ago, and now she sits up but doesn't walk. It's not all bad: some of her students found her a helper, and in fact, she looks a lot better this year than when I saw her during my last visit. A few years back, we would bring her a cake and she would serve us tea, now we bring her money and don't stay very long. In fact, Johnnie has been going to see her every few weeks -- to help, to bring more money. Medicine costs a lot, help costs a lot, and the only savings old teachers have in this country are what their students can spare.

But so many other things stay the same! The portraits of Yesenin (a poet) and Yevstigneev (an actor) on her bookshelves, a rug and a plate hanging behind her couch, two large barking dogs and Yanina Maximovna's son or daughter in law who are always unfriendly when we run into them outside her room. Yanina Maximovna and Johnnie always discuss new TV shows and actors while I sit and listen; then, she asks me about the US, and I do my best to answer for everything that is wrong or right with its foreign politics. I usually try to guide the discussion toward literature, and when Yanina Maximovna is in a bad mood, she always slips into remembering all the recent deaths of writers and actors. She used to regularly visit graves of her favorite authors, and when she was much younger, even took some of her other students (not us -- she was already too old to travel with a bunch of teenagers when we studied with her) on overnight trips to visit graves of famous writers.

We didn't stay long enough this time to remember the dead -- we had to mention a few in passing, but did not linger on the subject -- but she did ask me about Obama and if the Americans are happy with him. Yanina Maximovna is a huge fan of the US. In the seventies, she got in trouble for wearing a denim skirt to work -- she refused to budge and wore that same skirt to school late into the 90s. She visited the US twice, in 1998 and 1999, on the invitation of her former students and colleagues, and I took the bus from Rochester to NYC both times to visit with her and her friends. I remember walking around NYC with her, gazing up at the skyscrapers, looking at them through her eyes -- this was what being "free" and living in a "free" world meant! -- and then we shared a room at one of her friends' apartments, and she made me a gift of earrings: two thin silver spades she had inherited from her mother. I've always wondered -- what moved her to give them to me? Did she realize how much it would mean to me? My college years were a strange time in my life -- I missed home a lot -- and Yanina Maximovna's visit made me see what a privilege my life in the US truly was, what opportunities it offered.

This Saturday, after we left Yanina Maximovna's flat, Johnnie and I agreed that she looked good, better than last year, and that our visit was good. It was good, good, a good, short visit, and we didn't talk much about disease or death, and instead talked politics and discussed a new TV series based on the biography of a White Guard admiral, Alexander Kolchak. Johnnie and I rode the always dark elevator (it's dark because the light bulb is always missing) to the ground floor and talked about how good it all was, and tried not to cry. But maybe time did move forward a notch this year, because tears do not come as easily as they used to and when they do, they are easier to hide.

Saturday night, Russia ended its summer light savings time. A week earlier than the US, and well timed: my brother celebrated his birthday late into the Saturday night, and an extra hour of sleep allowed me to stay awake during Moguchij's staging of a new play "Isotov" in Aleksandrinsky theatre tonight. For the next week, the time difference between St. Petersburg and San Francisco is only 10 hours.

Moscow contemporary art scene

Contemporary Russian cuisine knows two types of pancakes: thick, small and simple are known as oladji and thin, crepe-like, yeast-based are the blini. Oladji (or, tenderly, oladushki) can also be made from a yeast-based dough, but this kind of defeats the purpose: this is the simplest dish, flour and eggs, made on the spot, to be eaten immediately. If you want them to be fancy, mix the dough in milk or kefir instead of water, add some salt and soda. But, for god's sake, don't spend more than 7 minutes mixing the ingredients together. My parents don't ever make oladji: they try to stay away from flour altogether. It's an honorable goal and I support them wholeheartedly, but OMG oladji are so tasty. Particularly when they are served with raspberry jam and smetana (Russian version of sour cream) and the jam gets mixed in with thick sour cream on my plate after excessive dipping. In American Jewish cuisine, potato pancakes are served in a similar way, with apple sauce and sour cream. Small potato pancakes also look a lot like oladji. And in fact, when oladji are made from grated potatoes, they are called kartofel'nie oladji or potato pancakes. Meanwhile, both blini and oladji are breakfast, lunch and dinner food. I feasted on oladji on my second day in Moscow, when my new friend Olga made them for breakfast.

This trip to Moscow came together more or less spontaneously. Two weeks ago, when I met Olga and her husband Sasha (Aleksandr) for the first time ever at Konstantin and Polina's house, I happened to mention that I have a birthday party in Moscow to go to -- and immediately received an invitation to stay with them if I do come. They are both former journalists who have very recently been squeezed out of journalism by unstoppable political forces, so they have some free time on their hands -- and some important decisions to make. The conversations that were started at Polina and Konstantin's place were so fascinating that I could not let this opportunity pass me by. So I bought a ticket to Moscow and back. (The cheapest ticket goes for approximately 750 rubles or $25, in a platzkart car -- Wikipedia translates the term as "couchette" car, but the description fails to highlight the local specificity. Basically, Russian platzkart is a train car with beds for roughly 100 people, where compartments are not separated from each other by any doors, curtains, and states of mind).

I spent two full days with Sasha and Olga -- visiting contemporary art exhibits by day and drinking Martini (which is not a martini, but vermouth) by night. Everything was a surprise to me, their hospitality, the places they took me, the food they made, the stories they told, the books they gave me to take home. I am encouraging Sasha to write down some of his stories so that I could translate them to English (and maybe send in to New York Times) -- there's no way I can do them justice in retelling. Sasha is working on a book right now, and I'm sure it's going to be an epic geopolitical thriller, even though -- or especially because -- it's nonfiction. We talked about everything, from method acting and mainstream movie business to the notion of migration and the (failing?) idea of a melting pot (shared by the USSR and USA alike). In the post-Soviet space, most of us are migrants to some extent, and in many cases, we are children and grandchildren of migrants, so what is it that keeps us attached to a place and when and how do we finally stop moving? How screwed up it is that these questions never become idle for us.

We went to five different exhibits in two days, most of them related to the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary art, a project based on the idea of the Venice Biennale. The theme of the festival this year is "against exclusion" and it included work of Russia-based and foreign artists. Pieces in the main exhibit space called Garage (the story of how the space came to be is fascinating in its own right) that excited most conversation between us were Cheri Samba's political art, Chiharu Shiota's piano, and a work on migration by a Korean-born author Kimsooja. Unfortunately, we only got to see about two thirds of the collection: my visit to Russia is charged with technical difficulties. This time, the entire neighborhood lost power -- and all the electricity-based art went out of commission. Seriously, artists, think twice before you rely on electricity for the display of your art! Or donate to the development of the alternative sources. (Note to self: should I rewrite my blog by hand? ;)

Some of the best contemporary Russian art we've seen is assembled by a famous Moscow "gallerist" Marat Guelman -- and particularly for the project called "Russkoe Bednoe" -- "Russian Poor" or, the way they translate it, "Russian Povera." This is an attempt to get regional artists involved in the project of making contemporary art, and so the main exhibit space for it has been created in Perm (a city of mining and heavy industry in the Ural Mountains). For the Moscow Biennale, a few works are also being exhibited in a space of a former chocolate factory Krasny Oktyabr (Red October). This exhibit space is not to be confused with another new Moscow exhibit space, housed in the former wine factory, and called accordingly Vinzavod (I've also seen it spelled Winzavod -- Wine Factory). Vladimir Anzelm's piece "Skull" made of charcoal illustrates the idea of "Russian Povera" best of all. (Compare this to the famous Damien Hirst's "Skull").

Lots and lots of fun pieces there, but the one story that might have touched me the most relates to the art of Nikolay Polissky. He has assembled a team of builders from a Russian village, and makes absurdist but also very meaningful, ironic and sweet, constructions in the woods and in the fields in the villages and in the outskirts of cities -- and I guess also in galleries. Fun videos on his website. I particularly like The Taming of the Fire. At the moment, the art of Polissky and his crew struck all three of us as very positive -- and when at night we drank fake martini and ate spagetti with meat sauce Uzbek style, Sasha, Olga and I talked about what it takes to stay positive in this world. The next morning, Olga made us a batch of oladji.

Superstitions

The first snow of the season was on the 12th of October, it snowed the next day, too. This is a good omen, my dad said: for once, the the snow came before Pokrov, it means the winter will come soon. Cold, snowy winter is what we want, it's what makes the next year's crops come in stronger. Although Pokrov is celebrated as a Russian Orthodox holiday on October 1st by the "old" church calendar and on October 14th by the current Gregorian calendar, the holiday predates Christianity, it comes from older slavic pagan feasts marking the end of the harvest season. And indeed, the harvest has been harvested: last weekend, my friend Konstantin helped me and my dad to gather apples from our apple tree. The type of apples we grow is called "autumn stripes" and, as far as I know, it's unique to Petersburg? Russia? Former SU? Europe? In any case, I know of no "Western" equivalent to this yellow and red striped apple, tart and sweet, hard at first and softer the more ripe it gets.

When we arrived to the country house this weekend, the snow was still on the ground. In the city, the first snow melts right away: the earth is still warm, and the air temperature is above freezing. But in the country it always stays longer. It lay on the grass still green (later in the fall it grows dirt-colored), on the trees that have only began yellowing, on the blooming roses and hydrangeas in my mom's garden. "Ikebana Russian style," joked my parents' friend who has just returned from a holiday in Barcelona where she was swimming in the Mediterranean and sunbathing. My dad and I were going to replant a young chestnut tree -- we had replanted one two weekends ago, but the second one was left over -- and will probably stay left over until the spring. Everyone is predicting a long, harsh winter.

We spent the night and then returned to the city Sunday evening to attend Roman Viktiuk's staging of Jean Genet's play The Maids. Viktiuk stages dramatic repertoire Meyerkhold style, with actors whose faces are masked (painted white, in this case) and movements are choreographed and turn into dances several times during the performance: it's as far removed from representational theatre as anything I have seen on stage. The only problem, this staging is quite old: they first performed it in 1988, and it seems they haven't updated it very much since then. All four of us (my brother included) fell asleep at different points of the production. The play ended with a dance routine to retro music, including for some reason what sounded like a Turkish melody (none of us could tell what language it was) and male dancers dressed in Genie-style robes. Why?? What was this a commentary on? The repertoire of this troupe also includes M.Butterfly, and so they should know all about East-West sexual/power stereotypes, but I can't figure out how this relates to Jean Genet.

Sometimes the local habit of reading between the lines makes us blind to the actual words on the page. My mom says that in Viktiuk's interpretation, this play aquired a dimension of relevant political commentary ("the slaves must always hate each other"), but I wonder if this is not happening at the expense of the play itself.

I am taking a night train to Moscow tonight, will spend 2 days there and will return on another night train Thursday morning. Before I leave today I must replace my cell phone. Yes, one more thing broke during this trip: my Russian cell phone. It has served me for 6 years, and it's mostly working still -- except now whenever I receive or make phone calls, all I hear is silence. And what is there to do in Moscow without a working cell phone?

Internets

I could be blogging about lots of different things. About the sky in Petersburg, for example, how it's mostly gray, but today some sun seeped through and I ran outside in tears of joy. It's dark here, oh, so dark that at 8 am when I do my morning run, it's like I'm running at the bottom of a deep well. Not much breathable air in my neighborhood because of all the factories. Tomorrow, in honor of Saturday, I will go for a run at 10 am, and I'm already anticipating it like a holiday.

I could be also blogging about happy things, about two events I attended at the Akhmatova museum, two events in one night, two events about two things that if I were not writing fiction I would be writing about: one, a presentation of a book called "Gender Theory for Teapots" (Russian takeoff on "books for dummies"), and the other one, a film about Viktor Shklovksy and Roman Jakobson, two Russian formalists one of whom emigrated and the other one tried to but eventually returned to the USSR, it's a good story, the story of their friendship, with lots of dramatic twists and turns. I could write in lots of details about this.

Or I could be writing about meeting my classmates again. We try to do this every year, I went to two different schools, and both sets of classmates try to meet when I visit. This one tonight was my math school classmates, the ones who know me as a not-so-troubled teen (I was too fond of reading to get into any real trouble). Two girls are expecting their second daughters, two boys are now working together, designing computer games. I fought with one kid who insisted that all movies are by definition commercial projects. Later he told me that "it was nice to know that I was still easily tricked into an argument." As if we lived a Monty Python sketch! Another kid tore a 100 ruble bill ($3 approx) in two halves -- just because.

But I can't write about any of these things, not really, not in good style and with amusing details because one more thing broke in this house: my brother's DSL modem. He took it in to be fixed yesterday, and they said, "call us next week, and we'll let you know if we have mailed it to the central warehouse for repair yet." He called another company, the one that operates a LAN in our apartment building, and they will come tomorrow to hook him up, and if they manage to find a "technical hole" in his apartment, and if they manage to pull the cable in, tomorrow he will have Internet hookup in the hallway of his house. Until all of these details are worked out, I have to survive on the sparse diet of Internet cafes and my dad's SkyLink on his minature ASUS netbook. It's not so bad, I did a lot of good translating work today. Although maybe this was not so much due to my Internet situation but because the sun broke through the clouds in the afternoon.

Crossing the road

In May, Pres. Medvedev signed a law, increasing fines for drivers who are not letting pedestrians cross the street from 100 to 1000 rubles. Most people I've talked to mentioned this law to me, in the context, did you notice that the cars these days wait for the pedestrians once in a while? And, indeed, half of the time the cars do let the pedestrians cross the street. The funny thing is, we the pedestrians are so conditioned to mistrust the drivers, everyone's behavior on the road is, at the moment, more erratic than ever. Today, for example, my mom called me from her walk to the subway station. She has only one street to cross to get there, and, crossing this one street, she and another pedestrian inadvertently caused a traffic jam. They both started crossing the street at the same time, in perpendicular directions. They walked cautiously, as usual, testing the waters at first, and returning to the curb once or twice before eventually venturing across. Meantime, some of the cars and the trams did stop and others didn't want to but were forced to stop because their path was blocked, and finally they all got so stuck, nobody could move forward for good ten minutes. Both my mom and the other pedestrian stood there and waited until all the cars drove away before they felt safe to move on their way as well.

Banya

The institution of public banya (traditional bath houses) in post-Soviet Russia has grown a long beard of mythology, but has fallen into obscurity in practical terms. During the Soviet Union times, when each apartment housed several families, and sharing one tub between 20 people was very tricky business, the public banyas were located in every neighborhood, and everyone went there on a regular basis (once a week? once a month?). In fact, I can see an old banya from the window of my parents' flat as I'm writing this. I'm not sure if the building is used now -- for years, it just stood there, boarded up and growing grayer and shabbier by the year. If it's used now, it might be a flower shop or a casino. The banya in front of my cousin's house is also closed up, used as a place of refuge for the homeless and the drunk. Does repurposing of old banyas require an unusual amount of work? (real estate is not cheap in SPb anymore) -- or is this because everyone is still secretly hoping that the banyas will come back to life?

Many reasonably wealthy people who have their own dachas or country houses also build private banyas on their properties. They usually build more Finnish-style saunas rather than Russian banyas -- I think they must be easier to make and maintain in modern houses -- but some go the extra length to create the authentic banya. The thing is, it's not simply an engineering problem, banya is also a tradition and, as I'm learning, can be an art. My family doesn't really practice (although my parents have a sauna in the basement of their dacha). Most of my friends use showers for everyday convenience. Until last year, I wasn't even aware that any public banyas still survived in Petersburg. I got invited to go last year by my friend Polina, who is an expatriat from Moscow, and a banya enthusiast. She took me to the public banya last year, and once again last night -- but she herself and her partner Konstantin (my classmate from grade school) go twice every week, on Thursdays and Sundays.

Polina complains: "In Moscow, people know what banya is all about," she says. "Here, people sit on the benches and hit themselves with birch branches, but what's the use if there's no steam?" I take off my clothes and my glasses -- and I become a child lost in the big world. She takes off her clothes, leads me to the washing room, picks up a bucket for the two of us, fills it up with hot water, throws the birch branches in to loosen up, hands me a hat. "Let's go into the parilka -- the steam room -- to warm up." First time we go in, we stay for a few minutes just to look around: the room is crowded this Sunday evening, most of the places on the benches closest to the stove are taken, but the steam is low to non-existent. It's just hot, but there's no humidity in the air. I don't feel any of this -- I just feel the heat, but Polina does. "Okay," she says, "let's make some steam."

We go back to the washing room, shower in cold water -- she remembers to take the hat off my head, I'm a newborn babe, completely helpless. "Sit down, rest, drink some water," she says. "You haven't been here in a year, you'll get tired. I'll do everything and then call you." I drink mineral water -- she had provided me with a two-liter bottle -- and watch as she disappears back into the steam room. The women file out of it immediately: she needs to open the doors and windows to air the room out, to dry it out first. Then she throws cold water on the hot stones, washes the room out of the birch leaves and sweat, starts throwing wood into the stove, sets out armoatic spices on the stone and on the backs of the wooden benches. First round, the smell is chamomile. When she waves me to come back in (I remember to put on my hat again), the steam in the room fogs up the lenses of my eyes (I'm not wearing glasses!) -- it's hot, hot! once I remember to close my mouth (my throat is burning), I start to smell the spice -- chamomile. "Take some with your hands, crush it between your fingers, smell it, massage it into your face, skin," Polina advises. The room is crowded again, all the women are back, all of them are fascinated by Polina's activities. "Go ahead, all of you, try this, there's enough for everyone!" Polina has her fan club among the regular banya visitors, women who come back every Thursday and Friday, who help out to wash and air out parilka before the new steam. They tell me, "Polina, she's such an amazing girl, there's no one like her, we are so lucky to have her here." They worry about her and wish her well: "Does she have a good husband?" they ask me. "She deserves the best. Anyone would be lucky to be with her." I speak up, yes, yes, she is an amazing friend, and her husband is a good one, of the best kind.

Polina has time to make four or five steams this night. First, with chamomile, second, with wormwood -- Artemisia absinthium -- a grass, from which absinthe is made. Polina regrets doing this one so early: too many people in the parilka, not enough steam, we didn't get to have the full experience, should've done this one last. She follows wormwood up with lemon and mint -- mint feels cool on my cheeks and lips, on my hands and breasts -- then with orange blossoms and mint. Between the rounds in the parilka, we rub things into our skin. Honey, later oil with salt from the Dead Sea (Polina and Konstantin went to Israel twice this year, are still using the stuff they bought there), followed up with coffee grains. We run out of time to use the mud from the Dead Sea, but no worries, save it for next time. Once you rub honey all over your body, you go to stand in the parilka for a few minutes -- we don't sit down or use birch branches this time, just stand there, wait until your body washes the honey off your body with sweat. Leave the parilka -- cold shower -- wait a few minutes until Polina organizes the new steam. New steam, sweat, birch branches, then new skin cleansing procedure. Oil clings to the body, no way to get it off -- no need to get it off. Coffee grains absorb some of it but not all, coffee exfoliates, enriches.

Everyone asks Polina: "What does this do? What is this good for?"

But Polina doesn't like to explain: in Moscow banyas it's forbidden to talk in the first place. Here, everyone gabs. Why is it forbidden to talk? Who knows, banya is a ritual, it is the way it is.

As the evening progresses, the washing room empties and only Polina's fans are still there. It's almost 10:30 pm, time to close up, but even the lady who watches over the womens' baths -- her name is also Olya -- she is also Polina's fan, she accommodates, waits, until Polina gets her reward. Here's the ultimate banya experience: parilka is steaming with the last round of added heat and water. One of the women still there turns out to have lots of experience, she asks Polina to lie down on the bench (on the towel spread across the hot! hot! wood), takes the two brooms of birch branches into both hands, starts slapping them across Polina's back, asks me to bring a tub of ice-cold water. When I come back with it, she's almost done. With the last, swift movement, she pours the water over Polina's backside. "Oh my god!!" Later, in the car, Konstantin is driving me home, Polina says, this was an orgasmiс experience, no other words to describe it. "I haven't had a steam this good in years," she says. After this supreme gesture of gratitude and good will, we file out of the steam room and go take the final showers, wash our hair, throw out the used up birch branches, go get dressed.

Polina goes to the banya twice a week. But this week she might go to Moscow, and I might go to Moscow the week after.

It's snowing today. The first snow of the season. It was warm and sunny all day yesterday, and all of us, Polina and Konstantin included, walked in the woods around my parents dacha and I found two maslyenka, an oily mushroom, Boletus luteus. But today the sky is gray, and snowflakes have been getting progressively heavier all morning.

Opera

Going to the opera with my aunt Maya is a full blown affair. We meet up two and a half hours before the show at Stolle, a local chain of German bakeries that makes the best pirogi (the Russian variety, not dumplings but large pies) in town. My aunt orders: two cups of coffee, two pieces of savory pies, two pieces of sweet pies. At the end of the hour, we chase this down with a pot of tea and two more pieces of pie. Refusing under the pretense that I'm not hungry is not an option. "You're starving yourself!" she yells loud enough for everyone in the shop to look me over--and then orders for me anyway. When we sit down again with our pie and tea, she pulls out a bar of chocolate from her purse--this, I can't resist.

We leave Stolle an hour before the show and proceed to a flower shop, where Maya picks out a bouquet for Akimov, the tenor who's singing Sir Edgar in tonight's Lucia di Lammermoor and who over the years has become a family friend. Seven roses, several branches of green shrubbery, tall white bell-shaped flowers, everything wrapped in the sheets of painted straw, and an envelope with Maya's letter stapled at the front. Maya writes these letters ahead of time, based on previous performances. To receive such a letter: the highlight of any singer's-actor's-writer's career.

We hand off the bouquet to one of the ticket takers inside the theatre, they place them in the buckets of water until the end of the show and then distribute between the singers at the end of the show, between the bouts of applause. Everyone knows Maya: the women who work at the flower shop ("We hope you come back soon!" -- "I'll be back here on the 20th, he's singing Pierre in War and Peace!"); the ticket takers at the theatre; the women who take our coats and dispense opera glasses ("What happened to the older lady, the one who used to work here?" -- "She retired! Here's the new girl, she's very nice.")

"Mouse!" Maya commands me. "Follow me, we need to get programs!"

A young man overhears this, asks me: "Did she just call you mouse?"

Soon, my parents show up. At the last minute, they decided they wanted to join us. My aunt Anya and her school friend tag along. When all of us yell "Bravo" at the end of every tenor part, the theatre trembles. When the singers come out to take the final bow, Akimov has three times more bouquets than the soprano, Olga Trifonova, who was excellent tonight, her voice the color of amber and the texture of honey. Akimov, of course, never dissappoints.

Everyday

My parents claim that this only happens when I'm in town, but I wonder.

On Monday, the electricity went out in my brother's apartment, adjacent to my parents'. Nobody was answering the phone at the municipal administration when we called to request an electrician who comes for free (he's paid by the municipal authorities), so we called a paid service. They came within an hour and told us that it was our good luck that someone was home: one of the wires in the electric meter had been too short, and it wore off and already burned part of the meter. Could've started a fire. They charged 1000 rubles ($35) for a half hour's worth of work. Half an hour after they left, somebody rang the bell from the downstairs door to the building: "Did you call for an electrician?" A scam or a legitimate mix up? No way for me to tell, so I just talked to the guy through the intercom and didn't let him into the building. Four hours later, somebody rang my doorbell from inside the building, offering to sell us potatoes from Pskov. A scam or a legitimate offer? The light bulb on our floor is permanently out (and now the municipal authorities placed a shield around it so that we couldn't replace it ourselves), so when I looked through the peephole all I saw was a dark shape. I didn't open the door. Later that night, my friends told me that it was probably legitimate: people are making money by going from house to house and selling potatoes and apples from the countryside. But I grew up in the 90s, behind two doors with two locks on each one. I only open them when I know who's coming.

On Tuesday, the water went out in my parents' apartment. It went out at 9 am, just after I got out of the shower. I tried to fill up a few canisters, but it was too late. I ended up spending most of the day at a coffee shop. When I left the apartment, I noticed a note posted on the door: The water was going to be out from 9 am on Tuesday morning until the end of the day. I should get into the habit of reading these notes more closely. My parents had seen it but forgot to warn me.

Wednesday was an adventure free day. I went to the MDT (the best theatre in town) to see a play loosely based on Andrey Platonov's Chevengur. Chevengur is a town, the citizens of which have succeeded in building communism. At the end of the performance, everyone picks up a heavy rock and walks into a lake (the theatre is built to accommodate water).

Today my parents went to work, and then my mom came back an hour and a half later. What happened? They never left our block. When they got to their car, parked in the back of our apartment building, their side mirrors were missing. It was a clean, professional job: all the wires were intact and everything. My parents had to report the incident to the police, because without the police report, the insurance company is not going to pay for it. Apparently, my dad had just replaced a broken side mirror a couple of weeks ago. He says, he should've waited for them to get stolen. But: would the mirrors get stolen if he hadn't replaced the broken one? More likely, the people, who had repaired his broken mirror, tipped off the people who stole the new ones today. On the other hand, I shouldn't be so cynical. The potatoes from Pskov, after all, were legitimate. Some police representatives showed up quickly, but after an hour and a half, my parents were still waiting for the insurance representative and for another police commissioner. My mom just came upstairs to use the bathroom. Good thing, the water was running.

Last night, my parents and I watched a part of Dan in Real Life on broadcast TV. The movie is barely watchable (the dubbing is horrific, the intrigue is too corny, anything that's not funny is extremely predictable), but my parents seemed to enjoy it. Where would we be without Hollywood's fairytales?

SPb

The city overwhelms me very quickly. My first full day here, and I'm already on the verge of tears. Why? No reason. My cousin called and wanted to change his plans from seeing me today to seeing me some time during the week, and I couldn't explain to him on the phone why it offended and upset me. Things here move too fast and too slow for me at the same time. Cell phone conversations definitely move too fast: he hung up before I was able to think, I can't do this. Cars move much too fast. But dinners last forever, especially long country house dinners with all the family and guests at the table talking about completely random things. Tonight, the guests were two Russian-Armenian brothers, an artist and a wholesale reseller, who got to hear my parents' story about their 2 week trip to Armenia at the end of August, and who were telling stories about surviving the winter in Yerevan in 1991-92 without gas or electricity, and who were also telling stories about buying a 30-ft used boat and trying to outfit it with a used motor, and who were also philosophizing about the invention of vaccination with the use of human subjects (children), and who were eating chicken again and drinking cups after cups after cups of tea. These evenings are wonderful, and they last for so long that it's very important to stop thinking, what's next, when's the dessert, when's the singing part, when do they go home, when do we drive back to the city, when do we go to sleep. Meeting new people, we stay till they stay, and if it's 12:30 am when we finally pack up the remnants of smoked salmon and French stinky cheeses and chocolate treats and fruit tarts and go home, then that's how it's going to be and we'll get home at 1 am and then hopefully go to bed soon afterward.

There are many things to get used to again, the gray sky always on the verge of raining, how everybody smokes and doesn't shake hands until I give them my hand first, the constant admonishments I get from my family for wearing only one sweater instead of five, the way Russian language feels in my mouth at the end of the day. Otherwise, I fall into my this life so completely that in a week or two it will be impossible to imagine that another life does exist, that San Francisco is not just a myth, a set of words that I've constructed. It's already hard to believe that just yesterday Dave and I were leaving Vienna, and all I have to go by is Dave's latest blog post about it: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/2009/10/102-vienna-doesnt-disappoint-except.html. This is not because the world rotates around me, but because this particular world feels like a different universe. In less than 24 hours, I have a different routine for doing anything: washing up before going to bed instead of in the morning like I do in San Francisco, drinking tea instead of coffee, eating massive quantities of smoked fish and boiled chicken, going to bed late and getting up hopefully not too late, sitting in the back seat of my parents' car, always being on alert for parents waking up and discovering that I'm still awake. And I really shouldn't be awake right now.

Wien Oper

Tonight is the last night of Dave's and mine joint trip: he's flying back to San Francisco in the morning, and I'm going on to St. Petersburg. We finished our day in Vienna with a visit to the opera, the standing room tickets here are surprisingly cheap (we paid 4 euros each!) and easily available, vs the sit down tickets that are sold out weeks in advance. The standing room was literally a mob scene, with several hundred people trying to fit into a 10 sq meters. There was also a screen set up right outside the theatre with a few chairs in front of it, and a simulcast broadcasted the opera to the enthusiasts who couldn't or wouldn't get inside. We fortified ourself plentifully before and after the perfomance with Sacher tortes and other treats.

The opera performed tonight: Pique Dame, a Tchaikovsky classic (in an anti-classic staging). A kind of an opera where every tune is familiar since childhood, a funny thing to see here, seeing how I'm going to St. Petersburg tomorrow. Seiji Ozawa, previously of the Boston Simphony Orchestra, was conducting. Dave and I are long time fans, and so it was a pleasant surprise to see him as the conductor of the Wien Staatsoper. The orchestra was impeccable and the singers were excellent (except for maybe the two main characters who were okay). I don't have the program and time is too short to google the names of the bass and the alto, maybe I'll do it later. It would be great to see Faust on this stage one day.

I've been out of the country for 2 weeks now, and I can already feel my language disintegrating, sentence structure becoming wooden in a way not native to English, word choice collapsing to English 101 vocabulary. My Russian is worse at the moment. Four more weeks between languages -- there's creative potential here to be explored, but it requires a leap of faith. Vienna reminds me how much I love German. The sound of it, the way it looks on street signs and ads, how it immediately makes everything seem old-fashioned. It's good to know that I haven't forgotten all of it yet.

Cafe closing. Gotta go.

Budapest

It's after 11 pm right now and I'm sipping a local Riesling and blogging from the bed of our hotel room. We just got back from taking the baths at the Széchenyi medicinal baths in Budapest (according to Wikipedia, the largest medicinal baths in Europe). My feet have been thoroughly massaged and my skin feels like it's been scraped off of its outer layer. I needed that. I have two pinky toes that are so used to wearing sandals all year long in San Francisco that they don't take well to wearing shoes. The funny thing is, with the weather the way it's been I would've been totally fine wearing my sandals here.

The local wine has been delightful. I've been drinking a lot of sweet white wine, Tokaj muscat is the only name I know. In all the English language guide books, the town of Eger is being advertised as a particularly good wine region, but my information comes from elsewhere. As a Soviet child, there were certain things you knew. I've forgotten most of them, but things like Tokaj wine (Tokaj is apparently a part of Slovakia, but a former part of the greater Hungarian Kingdom) and Budapest operetta do pop up once in a while. I continue my way through the former Soviet bloc countries incognito, as an American tourist. Being Russian here simply doesn't pay off. Today, a drunk beggar almost spit in our food when we betrayed a knowledge of Russian. We were eating dinner at a street cafe, and he was passing by, asking for money. Seeing that we didn't speak Hungarian, he went through the list: Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Parlez-vous Francais? Atah Medaber Ivrit? Говорите по-русски? Dave said, pa-russki. The man got all offended and said something in Russian about how they've worked for the Soviets for many years, and now don't want to have anything else to do with them -- and went on his way.

I find it very surprising on this trip to what extent the Soviet Union has become identified with Russia in the post-Soviet space. In a photo exhibit in downtown Krakow entitled "New Europe," for example, a photographer and a writer have traced the development of several post-communist countries, including Kaliningrad (Königsberg before WWII), but excluding Russia proper. "Since 1989 New Europe has become a fact," explain the artists. They are missing other countries, too: Lithuania and Moldova, for example. But no other cities are highlighted either except for Kaliningrad-Königsberg (a former Polish and then Prussian town, now an island of Russian territory on the Baltic squeezed between Poland and Lithuania, with no land connection to Russia proper). This exhibit makes an unambiguous statement about Russia.

The anger against Soviet Union is understandable, but equating Soviet Union with contemporary Russia seems unfortunate and unwise. It's kind of like being angry at all Americans (including Canadians and Brazilians) for electing George W. as president. Peoples living in Russia proper were frequently the first victims of Soviet politics -- and the fact that today Russian politics resemble SU closer and closer only goes to prove the effectiveness of the brainwashing all of us had undergone. Russia's new wave of nationalism is being met with the rejection of everything Russian by its neighbors (even Matryoshka dolls are being sold in the local touristy shops as "Slavic" souvenirs) -- and while all of this is perfectly understandable, it is also kinda scary. Increasing isolation has never led to world peace.

But of course contemporary Russia is a hard place to like, and why on earth I should ever be moved to defend it is a mystery. The Krakow exhibit definitely upset me: apparently, I am still thinking about it 2 countries later.

Gotta go repack again. We're leaving tomorrow morning to visit two small towns in Hungary where Dave's great-grandparents emigrated from. One of the towns has three hotels with the most expensive room going for $15 a night. They also rent camping spaces for your tent.

Dave's blog about what we actually did today: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/2009/09/928-waiter-there-is-too-much-pepper-on.html

Prague, Budapest

I'm thinking about a phrase from my Skidmore notebooks, smth Lawrence Weschler had said: "Our brain secretes stories -- this is how we appropriate the world." Blogging about our trip, trying to describe what our experiences have been like, we're already constructing the first version of the story of our trip. The more we travel, the more aware we are about the construction of an interesting story at the moment that it unfolds. If we keep trying to follow the map straight from one sight to another, the story we're constructing is as straightforward as can be, simply "checking things off a map." The plot thickens the moment we put the map away and turn off the main street.

There's an art to making travel stories textured and complex. Sometimes it involves putting ourselves under unusual constraints (Howard Norman, for example, who followed the footsteps of a Japanese poet Basho -- that's hard core; or us, spending one night in London walking around from dusk till dawn). Sometimes it involves simply talking to people, asking questions, pursuing leads. The other day when we walked up to Frank Gehry's Dancing House in Prague, we saw a sign that said "Admission to the top is free if you buy cocktail of the day from cafe Celesete." So we walked into cafe Celesete and Dave asked the bartender: "What's the cocktail of the day?" The bartender got excited: "Watermelon! I invented it myself. Have you seen that movie, Get Shorty? With Danny DeVito? Danny DeVito's perfect in that. There's one scene where he orders a drink--it was not watermelon, but I was thinking of that movie and came up with this drink!" He proceeded to make the drink, throwing the mixing cup into the air a-la Tom Cruise and spilling half of it on his apron and the floor. Not because he was incompetent, simply flamboyant. We and another couple who happened to wander into the cafe at the same time watched him, mesmerized.

Equipped with the our drinks, the four of us rode the elevator to the top, 7th floor. The Dancing House consists of two parts, one roughly looking like a man with a spiky head, and the other is a woman with her skirt swinging. The guidebooks provide a nickname, Fred and Ginger. The elevator dropped us off at a white tablecloth restaurant still setting up for dinner from which we walked out on the terrace around Fred's head. The sun was shining. Vltava river spread before us, a castle on the opposite side, old town in front of us, Soviet apartment buildings towering on the horizon. There were boats on the Vltava, catamarans and wooden swans. We exchanged cameras with the other couple and took pictures of each other. The fancy drinks were quickly warming up our tongues. The other couple was from Sweden, he an architect, infatuated with Gehry, and she described herself as a farmer. The discount airlines are so cheap, that it costs them more to take a cab to downtown Prague from the airport than to fly from Stockholm. They flew in Friday night and were going back Sunday morning. They are both in their 50s, together only for 6 years. Her husband had died, and she has three adult children who inherited his pig farm. Two oldest children run the farm, and the third one, a 14-year old, stays at home with her. Her architect partner "makes the big bucks" and so buys the weekend trip tickets, and her job is to find a home for the teenager while they are away. Teenagers, when not properly looked after, can make very expensive damage. Their friends have a house in Seattle, and--we were one step away from exchanging emails with them, inviting them to visit, getting invited to visit Sweden. What stopped us? I don't know. The sun was getting low, and we had lots of other sights to see. We left, and they waved at us from the top of Fred's head.

Perhaps, I tend to think too much of the fleeting connections we make on the road. Other people's stories enrich my own, and I can't get enough of them. I write not so much because I have something to say but because of this constant compulsion to storytelling. The stories we hear on the road carry particular significance because travelers have to find the common language with each other fast, in a matter of minutes. At lunch at the beergarten and hotel where we stayed in Prague, U Medvidcu, we met two women traveling in Eastern Europe from Japan. Mother and daughter. They were sampling the local beer and were curious about the beer we were drinking. They were going to shop for some Czech crystal because it was good (although not as intricate as Hungarian) and seemed cheap. The daughter (about 22 years old) was interested in sampling the street food, something with chocolate and caramel that we looked for later but didn't find. Mother had been an exchange student at Stanford in 1979 when the band Chicago was still good; daughter had studied in Italy for a year. They live in central Japan -- they didn't mention the name of the city. The daughter's father is an American. They had already been to Budapest and further south in Croatia, so they advised us to take a boat tour on the Danube and/or take a boat instead of train from Budapest to Vienna. Also, to bargain with the tour guides. And when we're in Japan, we must try shōchū, the Japanese vodka.

Our first day in Budapest was packed with stories. The first thing we found on our walk through the town was a synagogue, and since it appeared closed, we sat down in a cafe in front of it. We ordered breakfast and Dave went to walk around the temple, to see when it was going to be open. Apparently, we were there on the day of Yom Kippur, and the synagogue was closed for the day. In front of it, Dave met a young woman who invited us to attend the services. She showed him the tree of life in the back of the building, closed in by a metal fence, and explained: antisemitism was rising again in the last few years in Hungary. Which was also why the building was surrounded by a dozen of security guards that day. Sandra was going home to have a traditional feast with her mother, and then was coming back later.

The young man working at a cafe across the street from the synagogue gave us our first lesson in Hungarian: how to say "thank you" -- köszönöm [køsønøm]. We saw him again later in the day, when we came back later in the day to attend the Yom Kippur services. Dave had a camera with him, which was apparently against the rules (silly, because every cell phone comes with a camera these days -- and everyone inside had a cell phone), so he went across the street to leave the camera at the cafe, and the young man was still working there. Apparently, he works 15 hour shifts 2-3 days a week. He has another job, tutoring students in math and physics, and another job building websites, and he is a student himself at two different universities, studying physics and computer security at the same time. He was asking Dave what was going on at the synagogue: he noticed that it was closed, but wasn't sure why, and when Dave tried to explain, he seemed surprised by the idea that Jews had special holidays.

At the synagogue, we also met Pam from Canada. She also had a camera with her, and had to follow Dave's lead to go across the street to the cafe, to leave her camera there. She was also doing a similar trip around Eastern and Central with a small group. They traveled by bus and train, and went to Krakow and Prague and also to a few different small villages and hiked in the Carpathian mountains. We talked to her about genealogy for some reason. Her family is originally from Poland and Lithuania, and she has a cousin who's really into genealogy, so he does all the research about that.

Dave gives more details on what we've actually seen & done in the last two days in Prague and Budapest.

Krakow, Praha

Two days, two countries, currencies, languages, two Old Towns, castles, clock towers, Jewish quarters, two hotels and train stations. Which castle had that well-restored Florentine Renaissance courtyard? Where was that gate with the moat? A courtyard of the university from the 14th Century? Where was that ancient synagogue we looked into through the window and saw pews and vaulted ceilings? All the sights have been strung together like a long run-on sentence. Later, I'll go through the pictures, look through the brochures I've collected, read Dave's blog: ah! of course, the university was in Krakow! The old-new synagogue was in Prague! Right now, what I want to remember the most are the details, the silly things, the insignificant.

How lucky we are with the weather. So far, only half a day of light rain in Krakow. Otherwise, sun and blue sky.

If we had another day in Krakow, we could've rented bikes and gone outside the Old Town.

A good website to find restaurant recommendations in Poland: http://www.gastronauci.pl/ (Recommended by Agata and Artur). Basic understanding of Polish is helpful.

Cobblestones are not a good pavement idea outside of a train station.

Nobody in Prague seems to have the right change. Is this a reflection on the local banking practices or a form of tip enforcement?

In Krakow, as we approached the main cathedral (the one with the bugler) and wanted to go in, two young women at the gate told us: "You can buy the tickets across the street!" -- and when we followed the direction they were pointing, they started closing the gate behind our backs. We were there a minute too late!

Misdirection -- a form of shyness?

We arrived to the hotel in Prague at 7:30 am. A woman who greeted us in the morning was still there at 11:00 when we returned from a full day of sightseeing. Dave asked her if this was a long day (did she take a break in the middle?) and she said, "It's not so bad." In the morning and at night, she was equally friendly and helpful.

In Prague we paid for a 4-hour walking tour to see the sightseeing highlights this city has to offer. Our guide, Kate, spoke with a semi-permanent smirk, as if she found most of the sights in Prague rather silly. Some of them really are: the gargoyles representing the devil on the St. Vitus cathedral, for example. The devil was supposed to see his face reflected in them & run away. Kate told an anecdote: the sculptor didn't know what the face of the devil looked like & so asked the priest: what should I do? The priest told him: look at the face of your mother in law. Heh. Kate got particularly excited when talking about Prague's long history of defenestrations: politicians here tend to die by *accidentally* falling out of windows.

In Krakow, there's a vibrant chain of Piekarnias, and on our continuous quest to exhaustively sample their inventory, we bought a single cookie in each one we walked by. At the fifth Piekarnia where we asked for a single cookie the girl behind the counter laughed at us and gave us the cookie for free. A zapiekanki salesman also kindly laughed at us when we wanted to combine a spinach sauce with sausage on a sandwich. Apparently, the thing is not done. But he humored us anyway. In Prague, the staff at a buffet-style dinner place were raising eyebrows when I tried to order dill sauce for dinner. After unsuccessfully trying to get me to reconsider my order, they offered a piece of beef to go with the sauce. I accepted.

Two young Americans in our walking tour of Prague had just come from Dublin and London. They hated Dublin, and London was even worse. Why? Everyone speaks English. There wasn't even a sense of adventure. They felt like they were just checking things off their sightseeing list. Prague was a lot more to their liking. Although everyone speaks English here too, American English. The two kids are going to Budapest by bus tonight. We're going by train, so the chances are, we'll run into them again in Budapest. They are from Connecticut by way of Nob Hill in San Francisco, practically neighbors.

Last night, we went to a marionette theatre in Prague, to a performance of Don Giovanni. I've spent a better part of two years at San Francisco State thinking and writing about marionettes, commedia dell'arte, European theatre -- it's funny that only now I finally get to see a show. There is a marionette theatre in St. Petersburg in the back yard of the apartment block where my grandmother lived, and I think I was there once or twice as a kid. Enough to have an idea what a marionette performance is like, but not enough to appreciate the adult humor of it. The puppets are extremely tactile. All they seem to want to do is to slap each other, to kick each others' butts, to fornicate, to give each other massages. During a particularly sentimental aria, the other puppets get embarrassed and try to sabotage the singers by covering their mouths or they get anxious and start banging the rhythm with their feet; they simply can't stand any excesses in the operatic music. During a particularly colorful vibrato, for example, they decide to take a hot bath and have to jump in and out of the tub as the voice goes from high to low over and over again. A puppet Mozart was conducting the performance and he was particularly silly. He got drunk, for example, and kept losing his sheet music. At the end of the performance, the puppeteer finally got fed up with their antics and had to come down and hang them up on their hooks. They didn't rest until the puppeteer shushed Mozart.

I know of Prague from novels. Kafka, of course. Milan Kundera. Lieutenant Shvejk, who is an all but forgotten in the States but still a very famous in this part of the world hero of the World War I. Most recently, Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Klay, both sold in a local English-language bookshop on the Tyn Square called Anagram. I bought there a translation of a novel by a local writer, Bohumil Hraval, "I Served the King of England." Vaclav Havel, of course, the former president of Check Republic, is also a playwright.

Krakow and Auschwitz

Young playwrights frequently hear this advice: if you want to intensify the conflict in your play, create very stringent time constraints for your characters. Oscar Wilde provides great examples: the proposals, prior love affairs, incriminating letters and long lost aunts surface all at once. A travel story lends itself very well to a dramatic treatment, because time is always an issue. Careful planning (watching the number of attractions per day), an adjustment in attitude (relax!!), and regular feeding help to relieve the dramatic tension in the life of a tourist, but, nevertheless, occasional slips seem inevitable.

Yesterday we had one major activity planned: a trip to Auschwitz (in Polish, the town of Oświęcim). The bus was going to pick us up at 8:40 am. At 8 am, we left the hotel in search for breakfast. We had researched online a number of potential Piekarnia (bakeries) and bar/cafes the night before, but none of them were open yet, and we ended up at a cafe on the main square. The interior of the place looked very much like what I imagine old English gentleman's clubs looked like: two long rows of tables, heavy chairs with decorative cushions, darkened window to the street, lots of drapery. Dave ordered eggs and I muesli and waited. There were two other couples waiting for their food at the same time. A waitress brought our coffee and a huge basket of bread. As the time approached 8:30, we started watching the clock. Should we say something to the waitress? The other couples were there before us, and they didn't have their food yet either. If she brought the food out within the next 5 minutes, and if our bus was 5 minutes late, we would be okay. But still, should we say something? But what was she going to do if the food was not ready yet? Should we at least give her the money? At 8:35, she brought their plates but not ours. Dave took the money and followed her to the register -- to pay, to ask if she maybe could give us the food to go. After some confusing conversation, she brought us two bowls of muesli with yogurt. We stuffed a few spoonfuls of it into our mouths, left the money on the table and ran. In the bus to Oświęcim, we ate the two pieces of bread (with butter and jam) that we had stuffed into our pockets.

Auschwitz-Oświęcim was the second concentration camp we've visited after Dachau in Germany a couple of years ago. There are three different compounds on the territory known is Oświęcim, and by far the largest is the camp at Brzezinka (Birkenau). Unlike the camp in Germany, this territory remained unused after the war, and the former prisoners returned there a few months after the liberation to start rebuilding what the Nazis had burned as they evacuated. For example, at Birkenau-Brzezinka, the Nazis had taken down the ovens of the crematoria, but the former prisoners restored them using the original metal pieces. What I remember being very surprising about Dachau was the long lists of manufacturing companies that had used the prisoners' labor. I remember the crematorium there that (I think) had remained intact. The exhibits at the Oświęcim-Brzezinka camps were very much about highlighting the inhuman living conditions, the constant abuse by the officers and the other prisoners, the medical experiments including the experiments on children, the methodology of killing. Jewish victims left very few traces: some hair, luggage, shoes. As our guide reminded us (her voice was breaking, on the verge of tears), when the order to exterminate the Jews came, most of them were sent to the gas chambers straight from the trains, without processing or registration. Prisoners from an earlier time were frequently photographed, and some photographs remain -- copies were lining the walls of the corridor of one of the exhibit barracks. On the fields of Brzezinka, where the busloads of tourists disperse and are lost between the platform and the barracks, the sheer scale of the operation acquires some very concrete dimensions.

When we went through the gas chamber and the crematorium in Oświęcim, the guide asked us to remain silent. There were a few signs posted: Because so many people have died here, please be silent in their memory. I found the restriction to be hard to maintain: I wanted to point out to Dave the size of the holes in the ceiling of the gas chamber (they were a lot larger than I had expected). I wanted to share with him the observation about the train-like tracks and metal carts that were attached to the ovens: the burning of the corpses was streamlined, automated like a conveyor belt. I left these observations for later. But still, I wonder: where does the tradition of remembering someone by silence come from? Why is it we think that by speaking we can remember less well than by staying silent? Why is it that silence is a sign of respect and speech in sacred places is a kind of transgression?

Tourists in general and Russian and American tourists in particular are frequently perceived as being loud -- a notion that frequently goes together with the idea of disrespect to the traditions and culture of the countries that we visit. And yet speech, being bothersome, asking needless and meddlesome questions, is the only possibility the tourists have of connecting to the people of the places we visit. If we don't accost strangers with questions our trip can be easily reduced to a series of silent, next to meaningless monetary transactions.

More on speech and loud speech and silence later. Here's Dave's blog with lots more details: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/2009/09/923-oswiecim-i-krakow.html

Warsaw -- Krakow

A tourist has a job to do. What distinguishes the tourist occupation from any other job is that the emphasis is shifted from the production of goods, services, information or knowledge to the taking in of information, knowledge, goods and services. Not unlike what a student's job is. Or an academician's. Travel log documents the progress. To do a good job, a tourist must get up at the wee hours of dawn, eat a filling breakfast and start the day at an art or history museum, at a castle or a park, exploring the city by foot, climbing all the high places such as church towers and observation decks to take panoramic pictures, try her best to decipher foreign language descriptions of statues and building signs, study time-tables and maps to fill sightseeing schedules to the maximum, wear good shoes and layered clothing, drink a lot of water, try street foods where it's safe to do so, ask for help when in doubt, patronize local restaurants and partake of local specialties (even if they are called zapiekanka, which reminds her of her worst kindergarten nightmare), talk to as many people as possible, take lots of pictures, buy souvenirs.

If she dawdles around in the hotel until noon and then all the museums turn out to be closed because it's Monday, and the Chopin museum that was supposed to be open is under remont until 2010, she's clearly not doing her job right. There are extenuating circumstances. Blogging is not a bad reason to linger in the hotel. Lifting weights at the gym and taking a dip in a whirlpool are not inherently bad things to do while being a tourist. Ideally, however, everything not related to direct tourist responsibilities should be done at night, when the museums are closed, feet are bleeding, and stomachs near bursting. But if jet lag is making it tough to keep her eyes open through dinner and then wakes her up before 6 o'clock in the morning, well, rules are going to have to be relaxed, priorities adjusted, and precious morning hours sacrificed.

Most museums ARE closed in Warsaw on Mondays. But the museum of Warsaw Uprising is closed on Tuesdays. So yesterday, on Monday, we walked around the city center, drank some hot chocolate (kinda like Spanish hot chocolate -- thick and creamy), ate paczki (doughnuts) with rose jelly, had dinner at a Pierogarnia (where they serve pierogi and more), met up with our new friends Agata and Artur and drank more beer with them at a bar called Antikvariat (spelling?), which is decorated with old black and white photos of naked women and used books on gynecology and other subjects (a picture book of Australia, for example). And today we made an unsuccessful trek to the Warsaw Uprising Museum (closed on Tuesdays), and, for the lack of alternative ideas, headed to the train station and aimlessly meandered at the nearby mall for an hour and a half until it was time to go to Krakow. At the end, we almost missed our train, because there were three different trains departing for Krakow at about the same time, and we couldn't figure out the number of the track we had to be at. Dave blogs about this in greater detail.

Agata and Artur gave us a few recommendations on the things to do in Krakow. We started the exploration of this lovely medieval town from sampling the local vodkas (or wodka) at a place called Szambelan Sklep. Totally awesome and we really needed that. After that, wondered aimlessly around town until found more food. Systematic approach to eating can certainly camouflage a lot of imperfections in an average day of a stressed out tourist.

Agata and Artur also recomended the work of several Polish movie directors. I wonder what we'll be able to find on Netflix. Here's the list:

Agnieska Holland
Krzysztof Zanussi
Jan Jakub Kolski
Stanislaw Bareja (he made Soviet comedies)
Juliusz Machulski (whose movie Vabank from 1981 I might have seen back when).

Dave reminds me to note that Polish zapiekanka is an open faced melted cheese sandwich vs. Russian zap(i)ekanka which is a milk-based omelet. Both probably come from the root of the noun for "oven" and the verb for "to bake."

Warsaw

We travel for days like yesterday. Or today, because San Francisco time Sunday still continues. Our Sunday started on an airplane over the Atlantic, where Dave and I read everything Rick Steves' guide had to say about Poland in general and Warsaw in specific. We studied how to say hello (Dzen dobry) and thank you (Dziekuje) and practiced on the flight attendants (unsuccessfully). I was wondering how much I was going to be able to understand knowing Russian. Turns out, I do okay. About as well as Dave, with his knowledge of Russian. We can count and tell prices. We can smile and say "po-angielsku." I had to photograph a sign in the airport that said "baggage zagubleny" (lost) because in Russian this means "baggage that has been brutally murdered."

Rick Steves alerted us to the fact that on Sundays in the summer there are Chopin concerts in one of the local parks at noon and 4 pm. So after we took the bus to our hotel, we immediately set out to go to the concert. It was 3 o'clock in the afternoon; the weather was perfect, sunny and almost hot; the city was quiet and most businesses we passed were closed (we were looking for ice cream). Warsaw was pretty much completely destroyed during WWII, and the new construction is haphazard. There's the reconstruction of the old city (we haven't seen yet), the dominant Soviet architecture, much of which has already been updated, renovated, put behind glass and fits very well with more modern Euro-style construction. It's very green -- trees everywhere (not many yellow leaves yet). I recognize oaks and chestnut trees. When we got to the park, we saw all the little kids picking up acorns and ripened chestnuts off the ground and munching on them. I tried an acorn and it tasted more bitter than I remember.

On our walk to the park, an older gentleman introduced himself to us. He was going in the same direction, and he said hello in Polish. We told him "po-angliesku," and he was all smiles, asking us where we were from and how long we were going to be in Poland. He had been in NY a year ago, visiting his son, who lives in Long Island.

The scene in the park was idyllic. The concert took place by a larger-than-life Chopin statue (that had been melted down by the Nazis and then recast later) in a rose garden: a piano was set up under a white canopy. There were dozens and dozens of benches among the blooming roses, all occupied by local families and tourists alike, and in the middle -- a lawn where more people were sitting on the ground. We found a spot there and munched on a bread treat (all the packaged ice cream at the park entrance was sold out.) The concert lasted about an hour and ended on a high note, with Polonaise Op. 53 in As-Dur. After that we found more ice cream deeper in the park, by an island-palace, a smallish palace built in the middle of a river.

After the concert, we had no plan other than meander around town and eventually find dinner. The town seemed empty again the moment we got out of the park and until we to the main street, a royal way, connecting the Old Town with a royal residence 30 km or so outside of town. All the boutiques were closed for Sunday, but the street was closed for automobile traffic, and lots of people congregated at the cafes with open seating. Rick Steves says that all the places marked "bar" are really "milk bars" -- cheap (government sponsored??) eateries selling all the local staples, pierogi, salads, soup. We weren't ready to commit -- until we wondered into what seemed to be a local farmers' market: maybe two dozen stands trading in sausages, bread, cheese, beer. We approached the selection methodically and sampled everything from grilled smoked cheese with berry jam to an open sandwich with lard infused with apples and onions to honey beer to a long link of sausage.

There were several communal tables set up between the tents, and the moment we sat down, one of the young people at the table asked Dave "Where are you from?" and "What are you doing in Poland?" Dave might tell the story in greater detail on his own blog, I'll just say that within minutes we were introduced to Martin, Agnes, Agata and Artur, and spend the rest of the evening with them. Martin is a former athlete-champion, who now works as a stunt men in the local movies. Agata speaks really good English because she organizes tours of Poland for Israeli visitors. She told us that the farmers' market was a really special treat, because you can't get this stuff in the stores in the city, and this was the last day of the season. She also recommended more beer to try. Later, after the market closed and the benches were taken down, they invited us to go out with them to another bar, called Indeks. This place had a mini beach set up in the back, with bean bag chairs to sit in, and a stage where a jazz band was setting up. (It was still very early, 8 pm or so). Agata and Arthur are married, have been married for more than a year; they've met online and had their honeymoon in Thailand and Singapore, & are planning their next trip to India and Nepal. Agata has a cousin in Knoxville.

A funny thing: I am shy of being Russian in Poland. Our new friends were wondering why my Polish accent was so good, and I explained only at the end of the night, after a few beers. Then it made sense to them: they can understand Russian about as well as I understand Polish.

Dave has his own story to tell. His blog is here: http://dave-grenetz.blogspot.com/

Notes on Skidmore, Charles Simic

Charles Simic talked about his current work on translating Serbian poetry. Central Europe, he said, has its own very unique poetic traditions. Byron & English poetry in 19th C, 20th C -- large French influence, a few Germans, Russians, Eliot, "some kind of modernist tradition," Rilke. "Communism as a shock to tradition." Mostly, communist era resulted in didactic poems with a message, but "when they were writing about injustice (done to them?), their ranting got very interesting."

There were not very many poems written about the war in the 1990s. "Profound feeling of evil emerging, evil coming."

Simic talked about shifts that occur in one's own writing over a period of a lifelong career (his own). Early years -- series of discoveries. Impulse to imitate your favorite poets. Years of learning & then over the course of your life themes come up. In 1975, he started to write about his own childhood during WWII in Belgrade. "Not just the past that happened to you, but also the past poems you've written -- a feeling that they are not very good -- so you want to do something better." Lately, his poetry is all about death.

Simic left Belgrade when he was 15, and in 1963 started going to the Slavic Section of the NY Public Library and read "every anthology of contemporary Yugoslavian poetry." This was his initiation into translation. He copied poems (of a specific poet, I think, whose name I didn't catch) & translated them at home. It didn't sound the same in English! In the original, every word seemed totally inevitable, precise, beautifully phrased, very simple. The poetry (of this particular poet whose name I didn't catch -- Popa might be the last name) came from "very deep in the language." Particular kinds of precise constructions that evoke references, echoes of other sources, connotations, etc. As a translator, this is very difficult -- you have to suggest another layer. Also idiomatic poems, idioms that are somewhat twisted.

"I've learned more from translation than from anything else."

"American poems switch from one level of diction to another very easily, which in translation to French is very hard because it becomes just not good French."

Somebody asked him a question: "How important is it for you to be transparent?" His answer: "If you're writing something that you don't understand yourself -- that too gets boring. [I write as if] I am speaking to someone. The ideal other, some reader or someone. The only time it's impossible to be transparent is when the subject itself remains not transparent (deeper meaning, truths)."

"Majority of my poems probably have something autobiographical in origin, but a lot have been made up."

"Music always gets me in shape. I'm going to write like Scarlatti today." "A series of madrigals for voices; I read a poem & then sing it. It's very ingenious. Some of them I like very much."

Question: "Do you feel there are limitations in relying on the 1st person pronoun?" Answer: "I have held less of it when I was younger. It's inevitable, you can't avoid it." "But then too much I, I, I -- we have to find ways so that it doesn't become overbearing. Any time you can get away from it, get away from it."

This is about it for my Skidmore notebook, and what a good place it is to stop, with translation. Dave stayed up all night backing up our computers, buying our tickets for the next-next trip, packing. I'm browsing instead of sleeping. What comes next will be new and shiny.

Notes on Skidmore, James Miller and Lawrence Weschler

Read non-corrected proof of Ilf & Petrov's comic follow up to "Twelve Chairs": "The Golden Calf," (temporarily?) online! It's a Soviet classic (the kind that poked fun of SU).

My last week at Skidmore, James Miller, the author of a controversial biography, The Passion of Michel Foucault, a former Newsweek book and music editor and critic, and many other things, staged a conversation about non-fiction with Lawrence Weschler, who is an equally controversial writer and a director of the Institute of the Humanities at NYU. The topic was nonfiction.

Nonfiction is a kind of a topic that means very different things to different people. Memoir, biography, newspaper reportage, criticism, theory, perhaps even novels can be united under its shiny new umbrella. Jim Miller, for example, bashed all memoir writing as *bad* writing. His idea was that memoir became in vogue after Frank McCourt's success with "Angela's Ashes" (The news of Frank McCourt's death had been announced only a few days before and William Kennedy, if I remember correctly, read a very heartfelt eulogy to his deceased friend). Is memoir creative non-fiction? Miller wondered. What, if any, obligation to tell the truth does non-fiction have vs. fiction and poetry?

He contextualized his line of questioning in two ways: 1) Literary: Recent excitement in memoir world, scandals of made up memoirs;

2) Journalism: Continuing influence of new journalism (Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Lawrence Weschler). New journalism: "Subverting claims of objectivity by highlighting the subjective position of the writer." + Period after WWII, George Orwell: real risk in modern society: man, media, totalitarian dictatorship of media that within a democratic society creates a pseudo-reality (ex: airbrushing Trotsky out of Soviet history; Abu Ghraib photos; reading NY Times and taking it as a reality)

3) Philosophy/Theory: Derrida, Foucault, etc: alertness of the fictional aspects of all texts, infinite meaning in all texts. Richard Rorty formulating the question of the "Value of truth as a category."

Lawrence Weschler started his answer with the description of a course he teaches in NYU, "The fictional non-fiction." He said that he doesn't read "memoir." (Implication: "memoir" is bad, selfish? lit.) "It doesn't have to be you," he said.

Derrida & Foucault, that strain of intellectual life: "it was fine in chimpanzees in Paris, but when it crossed the ocean it created a new species." (My quote is close, if not exact.)

"I am interested in the fictive elements of non-fictive writing in the context of reportage: structure, irony, voice, etc." (As a true representative of new journalism, I suppose) Weschler also wanted to "demolish expectation of objectivity." He said, "I insist on 'I' voice not in reference to self, but out of modesty, an acknowledgement of subjectivity."

"Borgesian line: Reality and Language do not intersect at any point & fashioning one in terms of another is already a fiction." "Fiction comes of fashioning a representation of reality that's already crumbling." "Borges: any representation of real world is fiction." (I am a devoted Borgesian myself, but even I would abstain from taking anything Borges wrote as a dictum. Or did I miss a humorous strain in this professor's rambling?).

'There needs to be fact" -- but "no objective reality."

An anecdote about the English language: "there is verb 'to lie' but there is no verb for 'to tell the truth'." This words for Russian, too. I think so, for German. And maybe for French.

So, according to Weschler, a non-fiction writer should strive not for truth but "being true to life," and doing so with "accuracy, transparency, humor and judgement." I have no idea what he meant by the expression "being true to life." Again, this is a case of restating an universal statement in different but equally universal terms.

Non-fiction writers must "aspire to a narrative, a story -- a representation of the world in narrative." When Weschler came back from South Africa, people asked him very simply "What was it like?" Which he interprets as them basically asking, "tell me a story." "Our brain secrets stories -- this is how we appropriate the world."

He made a side point about how he refuses to use tape recorders while conducting interviews. When people ask him for permission to record a conversation with him, he answers, "I don't mind it at all as long as you don't quote me verbatim." The important question that an interview attempts to answer is "What was it like?", "it implies what we already talked about -- body language, eye contact." He says with pride: "I've never once quoted people verbatim. I quote what I remember people said." He also says that he always places conversations in interesting places, a real scene requires that you really see things.

"Non-fiction writer aspires to authority, exact opposite of authoritarianism."

"To speak with trustworthiness (humor, voice, modesty) presupposed that people have to learn how to read." The anecdote he provided as an example was a comparison of American readers in the 80s with the Polish readers (his wife is Polish). In Poland, people learn how to read between the lines of newspapers. In the States people were ignorant about the true state of the Cold War because "they believe what they read in the paper." This is an interesting comparison, I think. The problem with this, though, is reading the blank space between the lines one can never reconcile the information with anyone else.

James Miller responds. Borges example is not very useful, he says, because it provides no distinction between fiction and non-fiction whatsoever. "Getting something right? But how do you know what's right."

"Authority is a slippery term."

"I think category of truth telling is foundational to all civilization. Thou shalt not bear false witness."

"Author of non-fiction enters into a contract to tell the truth -- not all truth & nothing but the truth." "Fact needs to be established by interviewing all kinds of eyewitness accounts."

Lawrence Weschler responds: "Every individual must try to tell the truth, without making a claim to objective truth."

"The worst evidence is eyewitness -- it's notoriously bad."

"I don't read novels." (?) "In fiction nothing is ever made up." (He might have quoted somebody to say this." "Non-fiction -- we almost never know the truth of what happened. The facts of the imaginative fiction are always true. The facts of non-fiction are always suspect, in doubt."

From this point on, my notes become muddled as to who speaks. I think, most of the following quotes belong to Weschler. But I might be wrong.

Herodotus & Homer (non-fiction vs. fiction): Distinction is made in retrospect. It's a modern distinction. 17th C. Robinson Crusoe. Frank McCourt. Basis of marketing. It's a distinction made for the consumer. "Writings about philosophers -- the first autobiography and biography in the West." "No hard distinction between truth & fiction until the 18th C." Then, "sharp line is drawn -- what's superstition and mythology in the quest for the *historical* Jesus."

"Big divide of fact vs fiction: what are the political stakes?"

"There are at least 5 strands of non-fiction, some of which are at war with each other."

"The order of being & the order of knowing are different." "Fiction is invention, non-fiction is selection."

"Nietzsche thought historiography destroyed myths. Fact telling can uproot & destroy what is created by myth." What remains is the "mythical significance of the universe."

The conversation ended with another assault on memoirs. "There's a world out there beyond yourself," the two wise men told the crowd. "A lot of the early autobiographies were meant to inspire." These days, autobiographies are written by people "who have no personality." The two unanimously encouraged the non-fiction writers in the crowd to go out and interview the poor or go to the conflict zones in Africa and South America to collect material there. To many of us in the crowd (including several journalists in the crowd) these recommendations seemed very smug and coming from a place of unacknowledged privilege. Because, of course, where is any of us going to get the money to go to South America to observe the conflicts there? And isn't it at least just a little bit wrong, to take on someone else's subjectivity in writing? To go to a conflict zone with an intention 'to observe'? A writer doesn't even have a photo lens to hide behind.

On a related note, I'm heading to Poland on Saturday, and hopefully will blog about my travels from a very subjective point of view. Fictional or non-fictional, I cannot say.