Win.

Before:
Completed 200 OK in 2101ms (Views: 1228.7ms | ActiveRecord: 82.3ms)

After:
Completed 200 OK in 345ms (Views: 28.8ms | ActiveRecord: 2.3ms)

That's a few hours well-spent.

Allo?

Funny thing.  When Russians answer the phone, it's almost universally with a word that is "Allo?".  It seems to me like it would be the closest translation (phoenetically) to "hello" that is easy in the language.  I asked Ira about it and she said yes, it's just a word that has no other meaning, it's not a word in the Russian language except it means, "I am beginning a phone conversation with you, can you hear me, is our connection good, etc."  It would not be acceptable to say "Allo" to someone on the street, but it is what you say at the beginning of a phone call.

It seems pretty likely to me that this is simply a case of linguistic 'contamination' where the English word came over due to whatever reason, but only in that role.  Strange.

She vigorously denies this, and insists it's a Russian construction that has nothing to do with English, but oh well...

Comrades

I realized something interesting in a very direct way on the trip to Kazantip.  The ultimate fun for a Russian young man is to get drunk with his buddies.  When it's time to have fun, there is only one thing to do: get super wasted with your boys.  They would roam the party in groups of 5 or so, singing songs, doing shots, and being WAY touchier with each other than I'm accustomed to seeing. 

This, in and of itself, is not so strange, as in many cultures it's fun to get wasted with your boys, but the unique thing is the extent to which it is the objective.  I was running around one night with Josh (an American I met there) and Ira trying to find a girl for Josh.  The details are a bit hazy, but it seems like we started talking to some girls, then they were shortly joined by two big Russian guys.  I was a bit nervous about the situation, but did what I could to be friendly to the guys, and they were SO excited to meet some new boys to party with.  The girls wound up wandering off, and I think the guys had been just starting talking to the girls, and we apologized and they were like.  "No, listen.  Girls are everywhere here, it's not that often we get to meet new comrades."  They were INSISTENT that we come the next morning and find them on the beach and they would help Josh meet girls, and they were true to it. 

We showed up the next morning, but not Josh, and the guys were SO excited to see me.  They RUSHED to buy me a beer.  It's such a different mindset, though I don't feel I can do it justice.

Also, I saw, for the first time since I was probably 10 years old, more than one man using the same toilet.  I was waiting in a line of 3 guys for a toilet at the best-kept restroom there, and I was shocked when the occupant of the stall left and the group of three guys went in together.  They stood there with the door open and all used the toilet at the same time.  I couldn't quite bring myself to either pull out my camera and take a picture, or join them when one of them finished.

KaZantip opening video

I'm still looking for this song in a better format...

This is the text roughly translated:

speaking and showing kazantip
in a couple of moments in a big celebratory speech
we will be talking main specialist in a field of mass illusions and psychosis

the main doctor of the sanitorium kazantip
doctor nikita the first

(then a break, and this is the speech)

if all your life everyone tells you that you are insane
and you can't convince the world that they are wrong
then you can start building your own clinic
for the same insane people as you are

you can make your own rules there that don't work in the regular world
and paint suitcases in yellow color
and wear underwear with word happiness
or not wear any underwear at all
and then pretend that you are a princess
and play legos when you are way over 30 [years old]
or take an elevator to mars
and stuff like that

maybe in your insane assylum there won't be perfection
just let it be
but only those that called you insane
are now also your patients

republic of kazantip
you thought i was insane
but now we have full clinic of us
ku ku ku ku ku ku

dear patients, i don't see your hands
i don't see your hands
i don't see your hands
ku ku ku ku ku ku

and now open your mouth and say aahhhhhulena
dear patients, i don't see your hands
i don't see your hands
kukukukuku

(hymn-y kuku chorus)

but now because everyone is here, i announce the sanitorium is open

(shortly afterwards, though not in this video for some reason, he announced that the prescription for everyone was trance, and Above and Beyond came on for an amazing set)

Good idea, bad idea

Good idea:
Take your super-sexy, super-light, DVD-driveless laptop on an international trip because it's super-portable and you just want to do some coding or writing from time to time.

Bad idea:
Take said laptop, running the latest Mac OS (which does not seem to be available worldwide yet), into a cell phone shop in the Ukraine and let the cell modem you are buying install a bunch of drivers onto your computer.

In my experience, it just ate the computer.  I couldn't boot, and though I was able to get my hands on my OS re-install disk, (which seemed to be necessary because it had screwed up a bunch of kernel extensions - I was able to determine after about 5 hours of poking at it), I could not re-install because there was not another decent Mac to be found anywhere.  Le sigh.  I basically bricked my MacBook Air until my return to Moscow.  It is back alive, thankfully, but I lost a lot of good writing time...

Banking and Training

I am really shocked at the condition of banking in former USSR.  It's crazy the things you take for granted.

We've been on this side of the Atlantic now for a month and a week.  We have been able to use a Visa card a total of three times.  Once at OBI, the big Home Depot equivalent, once at Media-Mart, a big electronics superstore (and actually, I think many of the stores at the big mall in Moscow will take a Visa card), and then to buy our one-way train tickets to the Ukraine.

The whole time we were in Ukraine we were unable to use our Visa card anywhere.  That led to a shocking amount of scouring the Crimean Peninsula for an ATM that actually had money in it.  Crazy.  Funnily, the ticket-selling window at Kazantip had the sticker for Visa, Mastercard, etc, but when we asked if we could pay with our card, the woman looked at us like we were crazy.  This prompted a search for an ATM with money in it, since the tickets for the two of us were about $400.

The lack of a functional banking system, and public trust in general, was probably most egregiously a pain when we wanted to come back from the Ukraine.  To do so, we had to actually go to the train station, and then, since there was no information posted, we had to stand in a long line to talk to one of two cashiers at this busy station to find out when the trains were running to Moscow, which classes, which were available, etc.  We found that they did have two tickets on the train in the class we wanted, but we were a few hundred grivnas short (we had 1900 on hand, needed 2200).  Another ATM-finding trek ensued, followed by another long wait in line to actually buy the tickets.

There were posters all over for a company/service that says they will go to the train station and buy your ticket to Moscow for you, but they are widely regarded as scams.  There is no trust in any business - even if they were to deliver a ticket to you, you would not really trust it.  I feel like it's the polar opposite of the US airlines where you can buy your ticket from your smartphone, have it just show a barcode through the app, which the agent scans.

But I think that's a pretty high-level complaint, I spent probably 30% of the trip without running water...

A side note to this, the people in these all-cash societies generally hate when you don't have exact change for things.  Makes it tough when the ATM dispenses random bills, too.  Sometimes it's a 200 grivna note that comes out (generally despised by shopkeepers everywhere, rougly $25), sometimes it's a 50 grivna note (about $6).  This did, however, facilitate my first ever owning of a whole bank-wrapped bundle of bills after we went into one bank one time that was willing to trade our 200 grivna notes for a stack of 10's.

A new level of... Something

I just wrapped up an epic trip to the Ukraine.  We left on the 28th of July and got back last night, the 17th of August.  Phew.  I'll post some musings from the trip, but first...

I have used a new class of toilet:

It was about as exciting as it looks.

I just want my money...

Today we just moved into apartment for the next week and Ira's mom arrived from Moscow this morning.  Funny story.  We were moving and down to like 2400 grivni cash (the Ukraine currency) which is like $300.  I wanted to get some more $$$ so we could pay for this place for a week or whatever the woman wanted in one chunk.  Everything here is cash.  So we went by the ATM in the city we went to to get Ira's mom from the train station. 30 minutes away.  Big city of maybe 100k people.  The ATM was out of $$.   Ok, so we come back, get the apartment, woman is freaking out because she wants 3150 for the week and we just don't have it.  We give her 2k and are down to like 10 bucks to feed ourselves for the day (easy with the big fruits/veggies stands in this town, super cheap).  She says there is ATM in town.  We go by there and it is out of $$.  We call her and tell her and she freaks out, tells Ira that they fill up ATM at 10am and so she wants the $$ at 10:30.  Ira tells her to go pound sand, we will rest then take care of it at our leisure.  Ok.

So we go back by at like 5 and it still has no $$.  We walk the 15 minutes to kazantip, hang out there for awhile, check the ATM there - no $$$.  Grrr.  Had just spent our last 20 grivnas on a cup of coffee and 2l of water we'd since drank.  Walked back home, and while passing the ATM in our village see about 4 people in line.  It looked like someone was working on it.  We then waited in line for about 30 minutes while the line grew to like 50 people.  They got it loaded up and we got the cash at like 9pm.  Phew.  Crazy

But yeah, it's an adventure.  We are learning a lot about the experience and could be great hosts next year.  Land is super cheap here and for about 100k you could open a little hotel type thing no problem.  We're thinking about doing something like that if for nothing else than a good place to stay for our friends that could pay for itself in a few years I'm pretty sure.

The kids (24 year old couple) hired to run the first place we were here were saying that she had left a good job in a city, she had a college education, doing paperwork that paid her about $80/mo.  So labor is basically free.  Crazy. She said someone well off in Ukraine makes $200/mo.

It's a lot of fun and quality of life just improved dramatically with our AC and iPhones.  It feels quite safe from crime, but you are more than welcome to seriously mess up your health in one of a million opportunities.

They also take serious advantage of the non-Russian speakers we have talked to...

Building codes and plumbing

I've been trying to figure out a coherent and complete-ish train of thought about this, as I think it's interesting,

When we arrived at our Moscow apartment, the bathrooms both stunk.  Nothing terrible, just a faint stink of sewage and mold.  The only time I have smelled an equivalent bathroom smell in the US was a couple times when I've lived in houses with a bothroom undergoing remodel.  They have outside-ventilated fans running 24/7 in the bathrooms, which is good, but though at first I was dismayed about the poor plumbing there though confident that I could fix it, I've come to realize that plumbing is an unsolved problem in this part of the world.  HSBC in downtown Moscow, the nice clubs in downtown Moscow, the bathroom in this newly-built nice beachfront hotel in Ukraine...  All have the same stink of mold and sewage.

Winners and Losers

I just walked the village looking for a few things.  A decent cup of coffee, toothpaste, and Tylenol.  We have walked an insane amount the few days we've been here (the day we arrived we, after exploring the whole town of Yvpratoria, took a taxi over to this town of Shtormovoe and proceeded to walk the 3 mile trip up the beach to Kazantip 3.5 times).  Yesterday we cut it down to only about 3 miles of beach walking, but did plenty of other exploring.  Traveling is tough.

So...  I walked the streets of the entire town and found one coffee machine.  Score.  I found several of the little coffee vending machines that dispense (bad) instant coffee in various forms, but at the little Italian cafe (Cafe Leto), they had an honest-to-god Gaggia machine.  However, they were not open, I think.  I have not learned such key phrases as, "Are you open?" since I normally have my own personal translator, but I need to work on that.  I also don't really know, "Do you have?"  Need to work on that.  So, I decided to try my rusty Russian on a girl at a vegetable stand at the rynochik and got a melon.  I walked up and said, "Dobre ootra." (good morning) and she started blushing.  Apparently it's pretty rusty.  I then asked how much the melon I wanted was (a honeydew-type melon whose exact equivalent I haven't seen in the states) and she told me 4-something (that I understood).  I asked her to give me one, she asked me big or small, I said, good, and she picked one out and weighed it.  All the produce transactions here are done with the scales like they have at delis in the US where they put in the price/kilo and it just gives them the number and they all have a little calculator to keep the total as you get more things.  Those nice scales seem pretty sophisticated - they all of course have cell phones.  Running water, on the other hand, is hit-or-miss.  Anyway, got the melon, it wound up being 4.50 Ukrainian money units/kilogram, so that's about $0.25/lb.  Not bad.

Next, I found an apteka (pharmacy), which in this case was a kiosk in a building hallway, which was a little strange, but oh well.  The kiosks all helpfully have all their product stacked on top of each other in the window.  I browsed around and quickly found Colgate.  Win for their global marketing team.  Ok, noted, I then started looking for Tylenol.  I thought that for sure I'd be able to spot it just by the distinctive red package, but none of the red packaging looked like it might be tylenol.  There's a pretty funny mix of English/Russian on the boxes.  They would have random words like "anti-flu" in English, and then a lot of the words are basically their English equivalents but written in the Cyrillic alphabet.  I couldn't find the Tylenol and all the other customers left so it was just me standing there awkwardly.  The woman rudely said something I couldn't make out, I stumbled through, "Good morning, I want colgate."  She looked baffled, and I pointed.  It says on every side of the box "Colgate", there is no cyrillic equivalent, so I have no idea what it is in her head.  We got that communicated and she was annoyed.  I then asked about Tylenol, and she seemed baffled.  I tried pronouncing it a few different ways but to no avail.  Then tried "ibuprofen", and "aspirin".  She typed something in her computer and then said something that sounded something like "aspirin" but like she'd swallowed a frog shortly before uttering it.  Maybe that was the Ukrainian word for aspirin.  I said sure, and paid up.

Phew.  So in a little Ukrainian town on the Black Sea, coffee is failing to effectively provide a drinkable product.  Colgate is succeeding, Tylenol has failed.

Make a note of that, global marketers everywhere.

Don't speak

We'd just gotten off the train after our 25 hour train ride (4th class) from Moscow to Yvpratoria, Ukraine - a little beach city from which we would head over in a taxi to a little village to stay in because it's cheaper/cleaner/less crowded.  We were walking down the street and saw a little stand with probably 30 different little barrels of wine.  Ukraine prides itself on its wine, and I must say, it's really good.  So we try a couple different styles, and decide on a glass to get.  We say thank you, "spaciba" in Russian, then ask the young kid, about our age or a few years younger, "Oh wait, how do you say thank you in Ukrainian?"  Ukraine was of course part of the USSR, and so everyone speaks Russian, and I think everything had to be officially in Russian, but some Ukrainians speak Ukrainian between each other and many of the signs are in Ukrainian - the instructions we got when buying a SIM card for our cell phone was in Ukrainian, so indecipherable to Ira (and of course me).  I think the language "battle" is interesting as these people decide on an identity to adopt - there are a lot more signs in English around here than I saw in Russia.

So he tells us how to say thank you in Ukrainian, and we say to him, "(whatever that word was)."  His reply, good-naturedly, "Don't speak that dirty language to me, I'm not Ukrainian."

Weird.

Update - on talking to some locals of Crimea (our 24-year old hotel managers), we were told that basically, Ukrainian people speak to each other in Ukrainian only if they are from tiny villages.  Anyone who is from or wants to appear to be from a city of any decent size (like 10,000 people plus) speaks Russian amongst themselves.

Test post.

It is WAY too hot here in Moscow.  Like, whoa.

This is the friendly fruit lady.  I buy a lot of potatoes from her...