Europe

Just Hanging Out

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Yesterday an older woman from Ireland and I tried to find the Night Market at the end of the bridge over the Mekong River where you used to be able to get great BBQ meat cooked over coal fires. Not found.

Of the many uninterested Chinese we stopped along the way to get information, a young strolling couple with a few words of English helped us. The man called his old English teacher from school on his cell phone so we could explain what we were looking for. But after my simplified request, she kept asking “what do you want” obviously not understanding me. And she was his English teacher, I thought!

Finally we gave up the idea of the Night Market when they said “follow us.” They took us to an open-air shack near the new beautifully lit bridge. In the “kitchen” we pointed to a few vegetables and some pork. In a matter of seconds we were feasting…on delicious food so full of flavor but probably loaded with MSG. Turns out the woman is a doctor at the local hospital but her husband said he “lost his job” at the same hospital. I was curious as to why he “lost” his job but didn’t want to pry. She was six months pregnant. “I want a boy,” her husband said. Knowing the Chinese can pay a fine for a second child I asked how many children they intended to have. “I only need one,” she said with finality!

Later, back at the Mei Mei Cafe where foreigners hang out, a 45 year old good-looking adventure-hooked guy from Belgium who has lived here several years regaled us with stories…many of them dealing with corruption. For example, a few years ago he, through his girlfriend, rented a building to remodel for a cafe. He signed a contract for the rental for five years. But after two years he was informed by the police they were tearing down the building for a big high-rise. So he lost his investment. A contract in China means nothing, he said.

The Night Market is no longer, he says. The Chinese are glad to be rid of it…having been full of prostitution and the drugs coming in from nearby Burma.

Then we discussed the latest biography simply entitled “Mao” that is banned in China. “Yes,” he said, I have it locked up in my room!” “My god,” he said, “if only 5% of it is true…!” We talked about “The Coming Collapse of China” written by a Chinese Professor at an American university which I had mischievously passed on to a Swiss girl studying Chinese economics in Shanghai on my last trip to China a couple years ago. Steven agreed with the tenuous situation in China where the dangerous rate of growth of the GDP can’t continue indefinitely. But the book was written when Deng (who said it was “glorious to be rich”) was President. President Hu, Steven says, is trying to help China avoid a crisis.

Steven, the Belgian, is planning on taking his Dai girlfriend of three years to Belgium for a 12 week visit. He said he could hardly wait to see her eyes! Getting her a tourist visa will be very tedious because so many Chinese try to get into Europe using falsely filled out papers. “They all lie because all Chinese want out of China,” he said. Besides the bureaucratic red tape, they will have to travel to Guangzhou for an interview at the Belgian Embassy. She will only be able to visit with a “Schengen” visa while there. (If you don’t know, the Schengen countries are the ones in Europe (I think there are four) who no longer recognize borders.

Then we talked about the attitude of the dominant Han Chinese toward the ethnic “minorities” as the ethnic groups are called. About one third of the 800,000 people of this region are Dai. Another third are Han Chinese and the rest includes the Hani, Lisu and Yao as well as lesser-known hill tribes such as the Aini, Jinuo, Bulang, Lahu and Wa. These beautiful friendly self-sufficient intelligent people, who live in the mountains with views that Californians would kill for, have historically been viciously discriminated against and the attitude of the Han is that they are dirty and stupid. Consequently the minorities are turning against their own cultures…so Steven has been teaching his Dai girlfriend, Orchid, about her Dai history and origins including that fact that many years ago the huge Dai army once defeated the encroaching Han dynasties. Ironic that it takes a western foreigner to counsel his culturally bifurcated girlfriend. The 37 year old Orchid, who owns and manages the Mei Mei Cafe, is certainly not stupid. Also ironic that since China has discovered that Western tourists are interested in seeing the minorities, it is starting to help promote their welfare as a source of tourism.

With my Irish friend off to Dali, I had breakfast this morning with a lovely woman from Holland who has traveled all over Indonesia. Hmmm. Think Sumatra may be next after Thailand. This is a good time to visit there, she said, as it is not the rainy season. Good! We had a long discussion about China. We agreed that one does not “like” China so much as one finds it incredibly interesting!

Other travelers can be just as enlightening as the country one is visiting…

End of a Disastrous Experiment

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I want to emphatically state (and I think Bob would concur) that I have nothing but admiration for this proud and resilient people who have survived 70 years of this “ideological tidal wave that affected virtually the entire globe,” according to Robert Harvey in his “Comrades…The Rise and Fall of World Communism,” “that left maybe 100 million dead in its wake, as well as twice that number homeless and suffering, and more than 30 million as slave labor of one kind or another and that shaped the lives of billions.”

Robert Conquest in “Reflections on a Ravaged Century,” argues that a group of sub-intellectuals fastened upon Marx’s convoluted and half-baked theories because of the new turn-of-the-century faith in science as the answer to every problem, including human ones” which was one response to a bewildering new world of social upheavel and unseen forces as lost men sought to gain control over the destiny of their lives.

I mention to three of our homestay hosts that I see T-shirts with CCCP (USSR or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and hammer and sickle on the backs…black humor born of a young generation that did not have to live through the bloodbaths…and when I see the responses on the faces of these women, I know I will not wear this T-shirt. It is not funny.

Are not some Muslim men today, full of shame because they are jobless and without family also reaching from out of a medieval creed with a leveling response in a desperate attempt to gain control over their lives? From communism to this?

To Siberia & Lake Baikal

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Video

We boarded a Moscow train at midnight. We are headed across Russia on the trans-siberian train system. However we will be breaking up the trip by getting off in Yekaterinburg and Irkutsk, with a side excursion to Lake Baikal, in Russia and Ulaan Bataar in Mongolia on the way to our final destination…Beijing China.

The next morning one of our cabin-mates, (there are four of us…two racks on each side of the cabin) Vladamir, starts his day with a bottle of beer. Enjoying the changing colors of the trees as we climb and dip through the Urals our cabin mates and we share all our packed lunches with each other and Vladamir, who knows no English shares his vodka with us. Diana, who is a translator in German/Russian for a Moscow law firm) does speak English, tells me there is no Russian like Frank Sinatra…and that she doesn’t like Antonio Banderas because he is “dark.” (We have discovered that anyone “dark” is called “black” and is discriminated against…as are homosexuals…hardly anyone out of the closet here.)

Unknown to each other, they are both traveling to their home town of Yekaterinburg, the third biggest city in Russia, to visit their parents. On the way our rich Moscow train passes through dirt-poor even though picturesque villages and Vladamir gets off at a town famous for it’s glass factory to buy a set of crystal glasses (about a dozen glasses for about $20) and bag of apples from the sellers who are tapping at our window. Regulars know what to buy at each stop-whether a bag of berries picked by bucket in the forest or a baked chicken from a babushka (grandmother). We even saw men hawking huge chandeliers. One man was trying to sell a stuffed bird with a wing span six feet wide!

An ex-pirate by the name of Yermak, who is recognized as the founder of Siberia, crossed the Ural mountains and challenged the fur traders for control of the land. In November 1581 he raised the Russian flag. By 1900 over a million people had made he long march to the squalid and overcrowded gulags of Siberia and the word, Siberia, came to mean a place for criminal and political exiles.

In 1891 Tsar Nicholas III began construction on the railway from Moscow to Vladivostock on the east coast of Russia near the Sea of Japan. The greater part was built without heavy machinery bu by men wit nothing more than wooden shovels. Nevertheless, they could lay up to 2.5 miles of rail in a good day, according to the Trans-Siberian Handbook. Most of the labor force had to be imported as local peasants were already employed on the land and the workers came from as far away as Italy and Turkey but the Chinese coolies were terrified of the Amur tigers with which the area full and the government subsequently turned to the prisoners in the gulags to relieve the shortage of labor.

The trans-Mongolian line (to Beijing) branches off from the main Trans-Siberian route (to Vladivostock) at Zaudinsky and follows the well worn route of the ancient tea caravans that traveled between Beijing and Moscow in the 18th and 19th centures. In those days traders made the 7865km journey in no less than 40 days. Since the railroad began operating in the mid-1950’s the journey now takes about 5.5 days.
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A Day With Sasha

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I had watched “Russian Ark,” a movie about the history of the Hermitage before I left home so I was excited when we found Sasha, a university educated art historian, to take us through the museum (actually 5 linked buildings) set in a magnificent palace from which the tsars ruled Russia for one and a half centuries. Sasha had an unusually sophisticated command of the English language and an ironic sense of humor and made sure we knew the history and context of each painting we viewed…until we were absolutely exhausted.

We managed to keep up with him, however, when afterward he says “da da, you must experience a few more places” so off we trudged to see babushkas selling a few possessions…knick knacks, flowers and little piles of vegetables on the street, to buy historical propagada posters designed by Soviet-era Futurist artists in a little hidden art supply shop, to see the little Dostoevsky Museum which unfortunately was closed and finally by 10pm to view thirty-somethings drinking beer in a modern upscale bar right out of the Village in Manhattan…we were even instructed to go upstairs to see the industrial design bathrooms which had fixtures that looked like they were designed by Siemens and purchased from the KaDeWa Department store in Berlin.

Sasha was obviously very proud of this new Russia. Only we already knew that about 1% of the people, who buy everything they own on the black market, can afford a place like this where a beer will cost the equivalent of 20% of their monthly wage.

Interesting Lithuania

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The Baltics…Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Are these in Central Europe or do we call this Eastern Europe…where is the line? We stop a few days in Vilnius Lithuania on the way to St. Petersburg Russia. It is an interesting country that has long identified itself as European (read–not Russian).

The political centre of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the 13th to the end of the 18th century, Vilnius has had a profound influence on the cultural and architectural development of much of eastern Europe. Despite invasions and partial destruction, it has preserved an impressive complex of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and classical buildings as well as its medieval layout and natural setting. It is an UNESCO World Heritage Site.
In 1989 an estimated 2,000,000 Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians literally joined hands in a human chain stretching the 650 kilometers between Vilnius and Tallinn to protest the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The following December 20 the Lithuanian Communist Party declares itself independent from the Communist Party of the USSR. In January 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev is heckled by 300,000 pro-independence demonstrators in Vilnius and in March the first free elections are held since 1940 but the following April Moscow imposes an economic blockade. The following January 1991 Soviet troops kill 14 unarmed civilians in an assault on Vilnius’ Television Tower. By August the Soviet putsch collapses, troops leave the buildings they’ve been occupying, and Lenin’s statue is removed from the city Center.

Lithuania is gaining status within the world community. The Dalai Lama visited Lithuania in 2001 and in 2002 George W. is the first ever US president to visit Vilnius. And of course, we NBA fans immediately think of the Trail Blazer’s own Arvydas Sabonis who put Lithuania’s basketball program on the map.

On the political front, according to the English language events magazine, “at present people are tired of populist politics, political infighting and they just want stability and peaceful life. Just this year they again voted in the conservative former President Valdad Adamkus (President 1998-2003) who everyone hopes will be a steady and successful person to “stand the test of power” as a partner in the Eu and Nato.

Polish Ancestors

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I am looking forward to visiting my grandfather’s little village in the north. Seven generations of his ancestors were farmers and lived in the same little village of Szczepankowo. In 1893 my great grandfather sold his land and immigrated to Springfield Illinois with 10 of his 11 children…hell no we won’t speak German or join the German military! When they were in their teens, my grandfather and his older sister came over on the ship by themselves first to scope things out…their parents and the little ones following a year later.

My great grandfather moved the family to Illinois and built a big white house on the banks of the Illinois River and went to work with 4 of his sons in the mines until he could earn enough money to send the sons to Iowa to rent farm land where they farmed until they homesteaded among the rocks and sagebrush in SW Montana where many of their descendents remain. My mother fled the farm when she was 14 and worked as a nanny for a family in Miles City, MT.   Then at their suggestion, she worked as a telegrapher on the railroad for 10 years in Idaho until she married a Mormon farmer at age of 25.

Polish was my mother’s first language and I am finally in her homeland…

Former East Berlin

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I am off to Starbucks to spend an hour over coffee while checking my email but their Hotspot internet service is down. It’s a good time to revisit the former eastern sector of the city. Berlin’s architecture is stunning…old and new. Cranes hang suspended everywhere over the city. The Wall fell in 1989 and Germany has not looked back.

The West German Bundestag moved the capital of Germany from Bonn to the eastern sector of Berlin located in the middle of former East Germany and from a former wasteland has sprung a new urban district…a symbol of Germany’s Unity and the country’s success. The Brandenberg Gate is fully visible now with only strips of stone inset into the streets and sidewalks to show a new generation (dressed in retro east German clothing to tweak their parents) where the Wall once stood.

Concrete grey Friedrichstrasse in the former east sector is now the new hip place to be…hardly remembered from my 1965 trip to Europe. I asked a young English speaking guy “(I am German American,” he says) in a music shop to suggest some popular Berliner music but came away with two interesting “out there” Norwegian jazz CD’s.

Checkpoint Charlie that in 1965 released me and a friend from the American sector into the grey colorless landscape of East Berlin is now a tourist site.
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U-2 in Berlin

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Coming up out of the U-2 line of the Zoo railway station and thinking of course of the Irish rock band we enter now-rich, Western, happening Berlin. We pore over maps trying to get our bearings once again. Ah, the pension is close…we check in and nervously wait for a friend to fedex 6 months worth of forgotten pharmaceuticals…missing Austria and Hungary for lack of time.

While Bob explores on his own, I savor raw oysters and beer on the 6th floor of the amazing Ka-De-Wa Department store, the largest of it’s kind in all Europe. I make friends with 3 generations of a German family sitting next to me…the smooth-faced 14 year old grandson will soon be off to a Chicago suburb on a rotary exchange program…his mother is worried…the grandmother is too…walking slowly away she waves goodbye and looks back at me twice with a smile…the second time nodding her head…in assent of our brief friendship I think.The grandfather gives me his business card. We know we will never see each other again.

Leaving Athens

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On our last day in Athens as I was checking email I struck up a conversation with an American guy next to me. He had been on a U.S. city Police Force seven years when he applied for a job with the United Nations police force as a peace-keeper in Kosovo and one of 600 American officers in the country who each get $91,000 a year. Once they sign on they are not allowed to quit.

He talked about the French officers who have “no standards” and protect the Serbs when they try to cross the border even to the point of recently preventing officers from the U.S. from rescuing several Polish officers who had been mortally injured in a grenade attack. Apparently, the French have a vested interest in protecting the Serbs, he says, and the American officers have a “deep hatred” of the French officers because of it. He also said the UN was doing absolutely no good in the country-just keeping people who have hated each other since the 1700’s apart from each other.

He had been on leave in Athens for a week but was already sick of being ripped off by the local merchants.

Santorini & Sifnos

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As the ferry approached the island through the caldera you see a red-brown black and pumice grey terraced cliff face that looms hundreds of feet above the water with brilliant-white buildings with blue trim reflecting the Aegean Sea hanging off the side. But all those beautiful buildings hanging off the cliffs of Santorini, as it turns out, are all hotels, boutique shops, cafes and restaurants with a few blue domed Byzantine churches mixed in.

Walked into a cafe for breakfast of coffee and pastry the first morning to the sounds of Portland’s own Pink Martini playing on the stereo. While walking around the town-Bob in his perennial shorts-we passed a group of Spanish teenagers and one was heard in English “look at that guy-he’s wearing shorts-makes no sense! Do you think it made any impression on Bob?

After exploring the island’s archaelogical and historical sites and lying on black sand beaches there was not much else to do unless you were twenty years old and wanted to spend all night in the discos-so we ferried it six hours to another, smaller island-Sifnos.

Sifnos
At the harbor port of Kamares we took a bus the five miles up a windy road to Apollonia where we checked late into the Sifnos Hotel-tired and hungry. There was only one other patron in the hotel, a French publisher who returns to the island every spring. Apostolos, the hotel proprietor, welcomed us each with an Ouzo. Then he treated the French woman and Bob and I with Mezedhes (appetizers) and we sat for the next two hours eating and talking culture and politics. This is what I had been waiting for! Marie, the French publisher was reading the memoirs of Edward W. Said the professor at Columbia University whose books are popular reading these days for an understanding of the middle east.

Apollonia is an amalgam of three very charming hilltop villages with connecting white-washed buildings with flower-draped balconies lining immaculate narrow marble footways. The people actually live and work here and one gets the feeling this is how they prefer things. The shops are only open during the summer so most of the locals have other work the remainder of the year, Apostolos says.

Sifnos is 16km by 8km-great for walking-so Bob took off the next day for a five hour walk following a trail with one great view after another along the way up to an acropolis with a church and some ruins from 600BC. Almost the entire island was terraced 2-3000 years ago when the islanders supported themselves with agricultural products but since the advent of tourism and vehicle ferries the walled terraces now mostly grow yellow and white daisies and blood-red poppies and support the lonely burro and the goats. It is interesting that the people built their town in and around the many ruins; Greece taking for granted its antiquity.

This island has given us a welcome respite from noise and activity; none of the shops were open yet and their owners were painting, sweeping, repairing all over-preparing for the summer-eager and hopeful.

Apostolos says the Greek Orthodox church is very powerful in Greece-and very conservative-legislating every aspect of family life which is the all-important institution next to the church. Families stay together always-even if/when children move away there is almost daily contact, he says. Marie, the French lady said that yes, the Greeks seem open and friendly but there it stops-they are very clannish and no one on the outside gets into the inner circles. She and Apostolos recommend reading “Three Summers” by Margareta Liberaki published also in English.

Women
My sense about the young women I have seen especially in the less developed countries of Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Greece is that they are a pretty savvy lot. Nothing will hold them back now!

As there was a strike on the day we planned to take the ferry back to Athens, we asked Apostolos if we could have the hotel room for the afternoon. “Of course, of course,” he says, “life is simple, life is simple!” When we were ready to leave, he gave us each a going away drink of Ouzo. I don’t want to leave this place…I am grateful for this journey; I have learned these ways so far to say thank you: Greek-efsharisto, Spanish-Gracias, French-merci, Portuguese-obrigado/a, Italian-grazie.

Back in Athens, I sat in the internet cafe with a young Anglican priest from Britain who was bicycling his way to Haifa Israel. Not worried, he said. The other fellow, was a UN Police Observer from South Bend, Indiana stationed in Kosovo making 90,000 a year. He was in Athens on leave. Meeting people like this is one of the reasons I like going to Internet cafes.