A decrepit Soviet-era factory and natives being restless

For a change I thought I’d keep my inane commentary to a strict minimum and instead just share a few pictures.

Last week I got up at silly o’clock on a day off and went on a little field trip with a couple of colleagues to the Klavdievskaya Christmas Decorations Factory, about 40km from Kyiv. The factory, first opened in 1949 with production starting in 1952, was one of three companies in the Soviet Union which specialized in the production of Christmas ornaments.

Today the place is a shell of its former self. In its heyday, it employed around 1000 people (or so our guide thought, her estimates ranged from 700 – 1500, so I’ve compromised with my figure), yet we saw only around 20 souls working away in cold, gloomy conditions. Still, it was interesting to watch these women at work glass-blowing, silverworking, painting and ornamenting.

Because my camera is crap, and because I’m a lousy photographer, my pictures hardly amount to much. If you’re interesting in seeing more, this link offers a far clearer picture of the painstaking process of making these ornaments.

Later in the day, I walked to Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), where I watched bored locals in another one of their almost daily protests. The latest gripe is the new tax reform legislation that Parliament has adopted and President Yanukovich is soon to sign into law. The details are long and drawn-out, but in a nutshell, it’s seen as severely harmful for small and medium-sized businesses, and there have been swathes of protests across the country in recent weeks.

The mother of all boycotts: you’ve really pissed me off now

Part II. For part I of my in-depth look at boycotts, click here.

‘Everything conspires, elements and actions alike, to harm you.’

EM Cioran, ‘The Consciousness of Misery’

I’d like to say that I’ve got some simple rules for instituting boycotts, but I’m not sure if I do. On the one hand, you have to consider where you are. Being in Ukraine, where the standards of customer service are different from what we might get expect in other parts, it might seem petty or out of bounds to boycott an establishment on the slippery basis of lousy customer service. But on the other hand, part of what makes boycotts so much fun is the absurdity of it all. Like I mentioned before, the funnest boycotts are oftentimes the most ridiculous.

Arizona BBQ, a dedicated American expat hangout, has recently gone to the top of my boycott black-list (which basically means that it’s on the permanent boycott list, with a slim, slim chance of removal after 1 year). It takes a lot for a place to get on this list, and rack my brains as I might, I’m hard pressed to come up with any other locations that have attained a similarly lofty status.

So what have they done? It’s not so much what they’ve done – yes, that is part of it, naturally – as much as what they are. And the scene they cater to.

Kyiv is probably the first place I’ve lived in that has a sizable, socially influential American expat community. Everywhere else has either had no expat community or one limited to Europeans. Not to name drop too much here, but let’s start with Lviv, for instance. When I lived there, there was virtually no expat community. There were a fair few Peace Corps volunteers, but they seemed to rarely venture out, and most of them stayed in their towns and villages on the outskirts of town. Basque Country had virtually no expats other than non-American English teachers, Riga’s were mainly British and Irish (a lot of them lumberjacks), and in Nigeria, American oil workers never strayed from their heavily-fortified compounds, while the Scots were frequently out and about on the town. Bishkek had the American military presence, but you’d see the same small coterie of expats – a core group of 5-6 that quickly became very recognizable – at the same places. Kyiv, on the other hand, features a plethora of oversexed, overpaid and over here Yanks. And yes, I realise that that is one of the worst sentences I’ve ever written. (And yet I leave it.)

Frankly speaking, and for largely inexplicable reasons, massive groups of Americans abroad make me nervous in ways other nationalities don’t. Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not saying that I can’t be around Americans abroad. I just can’t be around enormous swarms of them in one small place. With Thanksgiving just days away (click here for a remembrance of Thanksgiving traditions past), there’s no way in hell I’m going to any parties catering to home-sick Americans in dire need of turkey and cranberry and stuffing and whatever else is part of the tradition. And yes, I know all the traditions, I am American after all, it’s just that they differ so much from region to region. Personally, the only food item from Thanksgiving I really enjoy are sweet potatoes.

So, strike one against Arizona. Is it the establishment’s fault? Perhaps not, though it’s a classic chicken and egg argument here: did the place set itself up as an American hangout, or did the Americans descend on the place after it opened? Hell, it’s called Arizona after all, so you be the judge.

Onto the charges and what I’ve witnessed in this ghastly place

On my first visit many weeks ago, I went on a Saturday night to watch a highly billed college football game between Miami and Ohio State. There were advertisements in the local rag, the Kyiv Post, mentioning this game as one of Arizona’s featured matches. I got there around 11pm to find exactly 7 people sitting at one table, all glued to the Vitaliy Klitschko title fight (for the uninitiated, that’s boxing, and the Ukrainian Klitschko brothers, Vladimir is the other one, each hold various boxing belts; hell, I don’t follow boxing, I’m not sure how to describe this stuff).  All the televisions were tuned to the battle royale, so the staff very obligingly took me to another room and offered to put my game on the big screen. It took the morons 45 minutes to figure this out, by which point the game was in its later stages. By the time my game finally came on, I was completely engrossed in the boxing, something I had never thought possible. So engrossed, in fact, that I failed to notice the football had come on and ended up missing a crucial play that went against Miami (my team, again for the uninitiated). Almost at the same point as this pivotal play, Klitschko knocked out his opponent, thus retaining his title. Afterwards, the 7 locals rapidly filed out, and the staff then duly informed me that they were closing and I’d have to be leaving. At this point, there was still a good 45 minutes left in my game, and I had ¾ of my beer to drink. I was annoyed, but not too perturbed, for I hardly expected them to stay open and waste all that electricity solely on my account. So thus, this is all a non-starter and didn’t contribute at all to my boycott. In other words, this paragraph has been a completely pointless, endless harangue about nothing at all and you might as well just purge it from your mind right now (though I’m afraid to say that it all gets worse from here: I’m only warming up).

I went a week later on a Sunday to watch football. There was a large-ish American contingent, and I found myself at a table with a couple of young basketball players fresh off the boat. They were quite interesting to talk to and I felt pretty much at ease with these guys.

Then a couple of weeks later, it was a disastrous Sunday of utter carnage.

It goes something like this/these are the types of idiots you get there/this is what the service is like/etc/etc…

…guys high-fiving and giving each other man-hugs…one guy derisively complaining that the previous night in Berlin he wasn’t able to watch some college football game because at every bar he went into the people were watching soccer: ‘I couldn’t believe it, all they were showing was soccer, I was like, are you kidding me? soccer? doesn’t anyone like football around here? what’s with this place’ (this guy has a valid point: can you believe the audacity of those Germans to be watching soccer on a Saturday night in a Berlin pub?!)…the chubby teenage daughter of the main ringleader- a guy from DC who prances around like he owns the place and is one of the most obnoxious pricks I’ve ever met abroad - demanding her steak medium-rare, loudly exclaiming ‘can’t they get it right, why do they always mess it up?’…a child-care room for the expats to bring their kids, only the brats don’t stay in their dedicated room, but instead are running around the place…

This place is an ADHD’s dream. I appreciate and love my sport. For important matches, I want to focus on the action and I tend to eschew social gatherings where people are more into ‘the atmosphere’ and having a good time than in actually watching the finer nuances of the game, hence my avoidance years ago of American Super Bowl parties where the girls are more concerned with the commercials. Here on the main screen was some football highlights programme which constantly jumped between games (around 10 are being played simultaneously across the US on any given Sunday) at crucial moments. It’s impossible to get too engrossed in any one game. On TVs on either side of the room two different games were showing, but on this particular day, neither of them featured the game I wanted. One featured a game that no one was watching. When I asked the waitress to change the game, she pointed me towards obnoxious prick, who flatly turned me down, on the grounds that a friend of his was watching the game. Which friend, I asked, not seeing anyone.

‘He must have gone to the bathroom, man. Chill out, man, watch the game.’

What a…

Nostalgia again: when sports were so much easier

These days, everything has to be on demand: news, sport, weather…in the good old days – here we go again – it was all so much different.

Witness: when I moved to Spain from the US at the age of 9 – this a time when I definitely preferred American football to the world variety – I was devastated that I wouldn’t get to watch American football. Live satellite TV was still a few years away from being able to broadcast games across the Atlantic. Luckily we had the Armed Forces Radio Network, and the David Halberstam in me is tempted to pen an ode to growing up surreptitiously listening to games on my staticky radio under the covers at night to prevent my parents from catching me.

As far as television went, we’d get to watch one game, not of our choosing, on tape delay exactly one week later. That was it. We wouldn’t even be able to get the results of any games until the newspaper 2-3 days later (if we were lucky, the Stars & Stripes – the military newspaper – would have the results in its Tuesday edition).

These days…forget it. We can get what we want, when we want. There are pluses and minuses to both sides.

Generally, very few people were actually focused on any of the games. I’m perfectly ready to admit that the problem here is me, not them. I’m just an anti-social bastard who loves his sport. It’s just a case of this place and the people in it rubbing me the wrong way. My powers of explanation are failing me here and I’m not sure I have it in me to describe more of the antics of this crowd. Other than the basketball guys, it was a weird gathering of expats. This is probably not what you’d call a Catch-22 situation, but it’s the best I analogy I can come up with: I’m somewhat dying to know that these guys do for a living, but at the same time I can hardly bring myself to ask any of them for fear of being ensnared in their ‘conversation’. So I keep schtum and watch my games.

It wouldn’t be a proper boycott without some real controversy with the food, bill and service

It all started when I ordered the BBQ chicken. And therein lays the first problem. I don’t exactly call myself a vegetarian, but I do try to avoid meat at all costs. In her blog, Elizabeth once wrote about being a ‘defensive meat eater’, which I could identify with. But because I like to overcomplicate everything, let me come up with my own label.

I suppose I could call myself a fair-weather vegetarian, a non-confrontational-when-I-need-to-be vegetarian, or a research-purposes meat eater. The research-purposes part I’ll get into when I eventually write up my restaurant reviews from Lviv’s exciting newish scene. It’s rather self-explanatory.

I don’t want to delve too much into any gory detail here, but generally speaking, if I’m invited to someone’s house for dinner, I eat what I’m given and I make no demands ahead of time. If I’m travelling and there’s a local delicacy that involves meat, I make no hesitation in trying it. If I’m staggering home biscuit-arsed late at night in a residential neighbourhood and I’m utterly starving and I see a stray cat on the prowl…well, you get the idea. I eat meat when it’s there to be eaten in a non-guilty manner.

How could anyone pass up this tempting delight from a Bishkek wedding?

A flimsy interlude of sorts

Just because I feel like it, I’m going to drag my sister into this whole mess and embarrass her a bit. It’s a related story so I can get away with it.

She’s a vegetarian through and through, no ifs, ands or buts. For a while she was vegan. Travelling, however, presents a whole host of problems, for it’s difficult enough being a vegetarian, let alone a vegan, in many parts of central and eastern Europe. We spent Christmas and New Year’s together in 2007/8. We were to spend Christmas in Bielefeld, Germany with the family of a friend of hers. I was very much looking forward to that fine German tradition of Christmas goose. Because of her, we instead all got given a coconut milk infused vegetable, couscous and rice casserole concoction. I should be fair and point out just how sweet and touching it was of her friend’s family to give up their tradition to do that for her, even if we all had to suffer in the process.

Vegan casserole in Bielefeld

For the remainder of the trip, which took us to Vienna, Bratislava, Horny Bar and Budapest, she decided to forego being a vegan and instead concentrate on the vegetarianism. After all, a bit of butter or eggs mixed into a dish here and there isn’t the end of the world, right? The whole point of this temporary state of convenience is that there is no way to really be sure some kind of animal products aren’t included in a dish. But at the same time, you ought to try and be as close to vegan as possible. Or something like that.

Instead, the fool took it as her license to make up for lost time and eat as much chocolate and cheese as she could shove down her throat, completing defeating the purpose of it all.

Predictably, not being used to such amounts of dairy, she got terribly constipated and moaned about it the entire trip. And yet, with each meal, what did she do? Order more fried cheese. And then eat more Kinder chocolate for dessert. And so the cycle continued.

Honestly…she might as well have eaten meat. It’s often easier.

The tranquil calm of the Slovakian village of Horny Bar (yes, it's a real place)

Interlude over

It’s thus hard to justify me ordering BBQ chicken then, when there were vegetarian alternatives. I can’t justify it. I just wanted it. I hadn’t had meat in weeks and was feeling myself lacking in protein.

‘Oh no, sorry we don’t have it,’ said the waitress.

Damn.

‘Perhaps you would like a gamburger or cheeseburger?’ (In Russian it’s pronounced like ‘gamburger’. There’s also Garry Potter, Gannah Montana, Gerpes, Gighway to Gell, Garvard, Gonogulu, Gerbert Goover, Gorton Gears a Goo, gim/ger, etc)

(okay, so I made just about all of those up. I think only Garry Potter is true, but I always say Gannah Montana.)

‘No, I’m a vegetarian, I don’t want a gamburger.’

The bemused look on her face cracked me up.

‘But you want chicken, no?’ (wanted, idiot)

‘Yes, but since you don’t have it, I’m a vegetarian.’

And so I ordered a vegetarian calzone.

(Pizza and sushi are ubiquitous in Kyiv these days, and most of the time they appear at the same restaurant. Half the menu is pizza, and the other half, flipped upside down, is sushi.)

The quality of the pizza here varies. Most of it is above-average, not much of it is truly good. But you reckon a place catering to American expats would at least try and replicate a typical American-style pizza, right? Or at least stick to familiar elements?

This might have been the worst calzone I’ve ever had. I’m not entirely sure what all of the ingredients were, but I’m certain it had cucumber inside. It also had chopped up hard-boiled eggs – I’ve had some strange pizzas in my time (haggis and black olive in Edinburgh, for example, which was gorgeous), but this was really taking the pie. There was another mystery vegetable ensconced amongst the folds of bland cheese and burnt dough as well.

On top of this, the waitress kept bringing me small beers. Me, order a small beer? Nah...

The previous time I’d been to Arizona, obnoxious prick went around collecting 50 hryvna ($6) from everyone as a ‘cover charge’. I absolutely refused to pay it on principle and left without doing so. I haven’t paid a cover charge for a sporting event since I had to fork out $10 a pop to watch Euro 2000 matches in Boston. Back in those days there were no American television coverage deals with European football and the only way to watch matches was at Irish pubs. I thought the days of bars charging for sporting events were long gone.

You can see where this one’s going

Eventually I asked for my bill, and there it was, the fat little 50 hryvna cover charge. On top of that, I was charged for large beers. Now, despite our meat misunderstanding, the waitress had generally been affable enough up until that point. And her level of English was decent. Suddenly, when I asked about the large beers and the cover charge, she couldn’t speak a word of English. She looked at me like I had antlers sprouting from my ears. She started jabbering away in Russian. She then left, and over to my table walked a guy who can only be described as gormless and imbecilic to the highest degree.

Displaying excellent English and a sinister grin, this unctuous character inquired whether there was a problem. I said yes, and pointed out the misdemeanors. After minimal haggling, he agreed on the beer discrepancies, but he wouldn’t budge on the cover charge.

The bill, cover charge included, came to 218. I left 220.

Take that, you pricks!

And just to put the nail in the coffin

Trust me when I say this: it was one of the most exciting Sundays in the NFL (for my non-American readership, that would be National Football League) in a long time. On the big screen with the 10 alternating matches, at least half of them went down to the final minutes. At this point, it was genuinely thrilling stuff, and I sat there glued to the action. I literally couldn’t take my eyes off the screen; I didn’t even want to blink. We’re talking 2-3 minutes of game time left in these affairs, which translates to about 12-15 minutes of real time, tops.

And then, the inexplicable. Right about this time, the vast majority of the crowd got up to leave. It was around 10.45pm, certainly not late. There’s no traffic to beat. Public transport runs till after midnight. There were no excuses for this. Real sports fan do not leave games early, especially in situations like this.

Seriously, this is bewildering. I hate to make this comparison, but you’d never in a million years see a crowd of British or Irish fans walking out of a pub like this. You stay until the final whistle. No exceptions.

Congratulations, Arizona. You’ve entered the Darnell Pedzo Pantheon of Permanent Boycotts. It takes a lot to reach such lofty heights.

The look of constipation in Budapest



Commenting on my comments

I see my last comment has been deleted. Did you report the broken equipment? Or was it easier to go home and write several hundred words whining about it, than send a two line email reporting it...maybe the technology isn't the problem?

By Anonymous on Another one of my anti-tech rants, plus a frightfu... on 11/2/10

The above comment following my anti-technology rant has just been brought to my attention by a friend who wishes to remain anonymous – for now, anyway. I confess that I don’t always keep up-to-date with my comments. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate them – I very much do, and I have to thank Elizabeth for being such a reliable, frequent and astute commenter. I should also add that many of my friends comment by emailing me directly.

I’m no great fan of those who hide under the cloak of anonymity (something that should be reserved for alcoholics, overeaters, chronic gamblers and sex addicts), unless it is clear to me who has written it. So to those friends who have written anonymous comments in the past, don’t worry – I know who you are. But there’s good reason why many publications even refuse to publish or respond to anonymous comments or letters. However, aforementioned friend actually suggested I provide a riposte to the comment, and I didn’t want to let a good friend down. So I shall, in the interests of fairness and to clarify anything that might have been misleading.

(and I’m not sure about the comment being deleted – maybe Anonymous has one or two problems with technology. Remember kids, in order to post a comment you actually have to click on ‘post’!)

I’ll start with the most salient point: it might not have been easier to go home and whine (sic) about it, but it was certainly a helluva lot more fun! That’s half the point of a blog anyway, for people to complain and crap on about, well, crap. Clearly, Anonymous didn’t read all the way through to end - which I can’t blame him for seeing as the post was on the dull and soporific side – where I mentioned that by nature, Teflers are a bunch of whingers. It’s in our blood!

Besides, who wants to hear lovey-dovey things like ‘oh, I love life, I love technology, I love birds, isn’t the world such a wonderful place, blah blah blah…’ Human nature dictates that we want to hear the bad stuff, hence the reason news is so rarely good.

I’m only going with what my audience wants here. In surveys I’ve conducted amongst my readers, a whopping 81% said they wanted more ‘rambling anti-technology diatribes that lull us into torpidity’, followed closely by those who want to hear, in intricate detail, about my ‘trips to cafes, what kind of coffee I like the most, how I like to boycott every other café I visit, and what I like to do with the coffee cup when I’m finished’. That came in at 72%. As for ‘well-crafted, structured, concise, witty, to-the-point, cultivated reflections, followed up with erudite commentary and carefully thought-out descriptions of the quirks and foibles of where I’m living, chock-full of unnecessarily big vocabulary words’, well that only got a measly 7%. So that option is out.

Though come to think of it, a letter to someone who cares might be a good idea. To Whom it May Concern: Can you please do something to prevent the sun from shining on Saturday between 10.30 and 16.35 so that my students can actually see the IWB? Or can you please give me candles or mounted wall lights so that the students can see what they are writing, since in order to be able to see the IWB in one classroom I use, I actually have to turn all the lights off? I mean, the ambience and camaraderie in there is great, but it’s not terribly conducive to learning.

Okay, I admit: I have attempted to solve the issues. And here’s what I’ve been told: ‘try’ rebooting the computer. That ‘should’ work. Well, sometimes it does, but it also takes about half an hour. Honestly, is that the best solution?

Moreover, this is a bit like the 'ticking time bomb' scenario scenario used to justify torture. Let me attempt to make one of the most tenuous, ridiculous analogies of my life. This probably won’t even make sense to me.

I’ve never bought into this scenario, which basically states that it is okay to use torture on a suspected terrorist because there could be a bomb ticking away, set to go off in downtown [insert your city here] in the next 15 minutes. Thus, the only way to save lives is to torture this sonofabitch and get the whereabouts of the device out of him. Great, except for one fatal flaw in the logic: this is a completely hypothetical situation which can only be proven true in retrospect. We can’t use this justification for every case on the off-chance that there’s a bomb hidden away somewhere. After the fact, if there were a bomb, defenders of torture can point to this fact and proudly say, ‘we told you so!’ But this will only ever be something that can be applied retroactively after the situation has unfolded. Thus, it’s a lousy argument. Much like mine here.

What the hell’s the connection? If I’ve got a problem in the classroom, then I’m potentially SOL for that lesson. I can report the problem afterwards, but that doesn’t do anything to solve the problem that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Look, once or twice or every now and then is tolerable; the trouble here is that it happens more often that not. That’s unacceptable.

Seriously, though, I’ve been waiting a long time for a moment like this, where I can try and make a parallel with the ticking time bomb scenario. Hell, I’ve been desperate. But just when I’d given up all hope, the opportunity presented itself on a silver platter. I’ve been waiting so long for this, there’s no way I was passing up such a golden opportunity. I can now check this off my list of things to do in life.

Not to big myself up or anything, but I’m pretty good at improvising and thinking on my feet, and yes, I do have backup plans. So I can worm my way out the situation. But if I’ve got a whole lesson devoted to presentations, and some students are giving Power Point or IWB presentations, and if something goes wrong…well, then we’re fucked. And a phone call or email after the fact won’t help matters in the slightest.

For an interesting and at times downright terrifying look at the potential pitfalls of technological ‘progress’, give John Gray’s Straw Dogs a read. You’ll come away from that collection of essays convinced that technology is more a force for harm than good. And Gray is one of the sharper minds around, and certainly no luddite like me.

To reiterate, my general premise is this: when it’s working technology has its benefits and does make life simpler. But when it’s not, which happens way too often, then it can wreak havoc on our lives. There’s good reason why the looming threat of cyber-terrorism is considered one of the greatest current security challenges today. Some of the doomsday scenarios being talked about are no laughing matter. (And it all starts with IWBs!)

Lastly, and mercifully, I’m violating one of my promises here, by wading so deeply into the mire of shop talk. For my own sake, I want to get away from blabbering on about work, and so in the future, barring some bizarre and unbelievable situation in the classroom, I shall refrain from dragging work into this.

[I must also make one thing very clear: my anti-technology rant was in no way, shape or form an attack on my place of work – far from it. I’m very happy where I work, and believe it or not, I am thankful that the opportunity for using technology does exist. 100% of the blame rests squarely on technology itself – its very existence is the problem.]

[Okay, so I’ve just blown my whole argument out of the water. Do I like technology or not?]

Thanks for the comment, Anonymous. But next time, please do reveal yourself. I’d even be happy to engage in a bit of debate, if you so desire.

In closing

Two excerpts from Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work:

I felt keenly the painful psychological adjustments required by life in modernity: the need to juggle a respect for the potential offered by science with an awareness of how perplexingly limited and narrowly framed might be its benefits. I felt the temptation of hoping that all activities would acquire the excitement and rigours of engineering while recognising the absurdity of those who, overly impressed by technological achievements, lost sight of how doggedly we will always be pursued by baser forms of error and absurdity…

The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all manmade achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left to wrestle with feelings of envy, anxiety and arrogance that follow from having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.

Prospero's last word?

How many posts have I made about books over the past couple of years? A lot. Will I make any more? Most assuredly. Will I attempt to take a break for at least a little while, and instead share some actual news, or perhaps tell a sordid tale or two? I’ll try.

But I have just a couple more items to share before I put this baby to bed. Remember, the theme here is the charm of books and what they have to offer that e-books never will.

First, let me share a link from Elizabeth’s blog. She’s a fellow book-junkie like me, and I enjoyed this little snippet.

Second, I recall something my sister told me about a library she discovered in Whitstable. I’ll let her tell it:

It was just a travelling library so that messages people put into books travelled around the UK. I think it was called Library of Secrets or something, as they were meant to be things you were ashamed of, or didn't want anyone to know. A few examples:

A couple of funny ones:
I went off the pill and got pregnant on purpose so that my boyfriend would marry me.
I just farted and shat my pants.

Couple of sad ones:
When I worked as a vet nurse at [so and so vet clinic], the vet would abuse the animals.
I never told [so and so] that I loved her/him and will always regret it.

Let me point out here that she almost certainly added a message of her own similar to the second selection in the ‘funny ones’ section. But I don’t know for sure, that’s just a guess.

And finally…because I haven’t been home and back to my precious book collection in many months, I am wholly lacking when it comes to Russian reading material. Okay, so I could go out and buy something simple to read, which I have done with Little Red Riding Hood, but I have a decent collection at home and I’m waiting to replenish my supply over the holidays when I go back. In the meantime, in the photo below, the small book on the right is a translation of ‘Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest’, probably not the most authentic Russian I’ll come across. I wonder how useful it is to use this as a tool to work on my Russian with selections like this:

‘I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare – or, if not, it’s some equally brainy lad – who says that it’s always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.’

‘Oh, well, put out rich raiment of sorts, and I’ll be dressing.’

‘Our heather-mixture lounge is in readiness, sir.’

‘Motty, who was sucking the knob of his stick, uncorked himself.’

And in a passage I can most certainly relate to:

‘There was something about this woman that sapped a chappie’s will-power.’

I suppose it’s better than nothing. It will suffice for now.

My current reading selection

Cafés and consumer boycotts (and consumers boycotting cafés)

They were not true pub-crawlers, who are content to spend hour upon hour in slow tippling and silent reverie in a tavern. No, these two were merely visitors, who went to taverns only for the sake of daily arguments, and once there, cared not a whit about what they ate or drank, minding only what was said. They would have sat around in a tavern forever, if it were a matter of relating some heroic adventure, especially if they were able to weave themselves into the ramifications of the narrative.

Gyula Krudy, ‘The Journalist and Death’

There are few things I like better than frittering away my afternoons in cafes, comfortably ensconced in armchair with book, bottomless cups of coffee coming my way. So imagine my dismay to discover the other day that Antresol, a café that had quickly become my favourite here, has closed down and is being turned into something else. I’ve suddenly lost one of the only places that cater to solo café-goers like myself. The place had a real readers’ atmosphere as well, with comfortable couches, and plenty of books on display, both for purchasing and perusalising.

If there’s one thing that has changed about Kyiv over the past five years, it has to be the quality of the coffee. To be fair, before the 5 days I spent here over the summer, I only had a whopping 3 days under my belt in Kyiv. Two of those were spent in the icily cold early January frost in 2006 with my sister, and we spent the majority of our time slipping and sliding our way from museum to café to museum. The other was a day later that spring, when I came for Ukraine v Costa Rica in a pre-World Cup friendly. Back then there weren’t so many nice cafes and the quality of the coffee was absolutely dire. So in that regards, things have changed for the better.

Though have they? There’s been a proliferation of chains over the past few years with Coffee House, Coffee Time and Double Coffee (which we had in Riga) all springing up. All seem to model themselves on the Costa/Nero/Pret-a-Manger model, with moderately comfortable seating and a choice of coffees in various sizes. Unfortunately, the quality is iffy, and the coffee is ridiculously overpriced. A small cup of black Americano comes in at about $2.50, and milk or cream will cost you an extra $1. Contrast that with Starbucks’ $1.50 offering with 50 cent refills. I’m not saying that Starbucks is that great, but I like their coffee and I appreciate places where you can sit for hours on end without getting funny looks from people or hassled to leave before your time is up.

However, the quality and selection at other places is fairly decent. There’s Teatr Kavi Kaffa within spitting distance of the school and the coffee there is outstanding, and moderately-priced. There are loads of portable coffee wagons around town selling cheaper coffee in paper cups – an Americano with milk is a mere $1. And though one or two others disagree with me, the quality isn’t bad and is perfect if you’re on the go, or want to enjoy a coffee in the park. But I’ve yet to find too many quaint, cosy places that cater to layabouts like me.

Hence my disappointment to find Antresol closed. I almost wanted to cry.

Here we go again: more drolleries from the past

A similar thing happened while I was living in Riga a few years ago. Two of the city’s nicest establishments inexplicably shut down. One was called Casablanca, and was the scene of a disastrously messy – in a very good and fun way – birthday night out in my honour (from what I remember, it was a great night out). Months later it re-opened as a swank, white-leather clad cocktailish lounge/overpriced restaurant. That was the general trend in Riga: pleasant, affordable places seemed to be slowly winding down operations in favour of posh new places for the fast emerging nouveau riche scene.

There was another place that I particular grew to love, though for a while I had (regrettably perhaps?) boycotted it. Those who know me best know how much l love boycotting establishments, whether shops, restaurants or cafes. You could even call it a sordid hobby of mine.

For the life of me I can’t remember the name of this place, but I do remember it was a wonderful locale for ‘brunch’, not that that’s necessarily my thing. I guess the American in me does like the oversized coffees and diner-type breakfast places where the coffee is best drunk black (a la Dale Cooper), and where the refills keep on coming. This was one such place. I forget why I decided to boycott them, but when it comes to boycotts, sometimes the more trivial the reason, the more absurdly enjoyable the boycott is. I believe it was with my sister when a meal was meant to come with ‘home-fries’ and they tried to charge me extra for mine, refusing to bend when I made the requisite complaint. Boycott!

Previously, this diner had offered up a tantalizingly possibility of what might have been. It was early October and I’d only been in Riga for about 6 weeks at that point. My editor and mentor, the G-Man, was in town and we were whiling away a gorgeous sunny Sunday morning when I spotted a lovely young thing on her own, reading at a table. Few things get me more excited than seeing a woman on her own reading in a café. Goaded on by the G-Man, I approached and gave her my number. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to put the ball in her court, but she had to have been impressed by my gall, and the fact that I gave her no chance to respond. I thrust my number in her face, told her to call me, and left it at that. It’s a bit of a passive aggressive approach, I guess you could say.

Mysteriously, a few days later, I did get a text message. The message was unreadable, coming across as a slew of question marks, with random letters interspersed. In asking a few friends what this meant, I was told that this tends to happen when people send Cyrillic messages to ancient phones like mine which can’t handle such technological advances. I was a bit baffled, because I was about 95% certain this woman was Latvian, not Russian, and she knew that I was an English speaker.

Either way, I responded to these cryptic messages, only to get similar ones back. I then tried to call, and for a while without any luck. When I eventually did get through, I was met with a gruff male Russian voice, and I had no idea what this not-so-friendly chap was trying to say to me. Probably something like ‘if you try and contact my Latvian girlfriend again, I will come and chop off your whatsits’. I thus gave up, a defeated man. Still, the mystery was fun while it lasted, even if in retrospect it barely seems like a story.

Anyway, many months later, and just weeks after I’d lifted the boycott, it closed down for good. The plan was to reopen it as a – you guessed it – swank cocktail bar for the uber-rich. Damn progress.

A not-so brief interlude on consumer boycotts from the past

We’re not talking just the biggies like Nestle and Starbucks. I definitely went through my Nestle ‘phase’ though I still do my damndest to buy fair trade when I can. I go more for the silly, seemingly inconsequential boycotts. For example, Spar. I boycotted them for quite some when I was studying at Edinburgh because they refused to accept student vouchers for the Guardian. Boycott! Whilst working in the John Hancock tower in Boston all those years ago, I was given a Canadian quarter in change one morning in the lobby shop. The very next day, when trying to pay with that very same quarter, the man refused to accept it. Boycott! My colleagues at the time quickly got into this boycotting thing and everyone kept trying to outdo each other with new boycotts. Some of them were just plain absurd: ‘the newspaper hawker at the station didn’t smile at me, boycott!’ and ‘my Coke was flat in the cafeteria, boycott!’. But for the legitimate boycotts…God help you if anyone caught you violating it. Any offenders were tarred, feathered and ostracised on the work floor. In fact, just days after launching a one-month boycott of the lobby shop, a colleague was caught purchasing a newspaper and was shunned by all of us for a few days. Admittedly, one of the most amusing parts of this particular boycott was how seriously we all took it, many of us complaining of the hassle involved in not being able to use the shop. It was the only place in the building to buy a newspaper and certain sweets.

Here’s one of my all-time favourites though. As ashamed of myself as I am for doing this, I’m actually going to quote myself from a previous blog entry. This was just over a year ago, when I had recently started my course at Keene. This came under the heading of things I’d learnt being back at university in America:

That there are some main streets yet to be invaded by Starbucks. And that not everywhere in America features over-the-top, fake customer service.

The other day at the Brewbaker Café, I was interested in a scone or a bagel. It was 3.30pm:
Me: ‘Have you got anymore scones or bagels?’
Girl: ‘Uh, this isn’t lunchtime, lunchtime was 3 hours ago, we’re not serving food anymore’. (there were decrepit, stale-looking muffins behind the counter)
Me: ‘Oh, sorry, I just haven’t eaten in a while. I’ll just have a coffee then’.
Girl: ‘This isn’t Starbucks you know’.
Me: ‘What, so I can’t have a coffee either?
Girl: ‘You can, you just can’t have any food’.
Me: ‘Fine, a small coffee then’. Which was lousy and lukewarm. I’m now boycotting this place. Surly bitch. I didn’t realise that Starbucks had a monopoly on selling food outside of regular mealtimes.

Funnily enough, this place and another one called Prime Roast quickly became my favourite coffeeshops. There wasn’t a huge selection in Keene with its one Main Street, but I can say in all honesty that these are two of the finest places I’ve ever frequented in my life. Both featured excellent coffee, great selections, cheerful ambience, a good reading atmosphere and, despite this blip at the Brewbaker Café, pleasant customer service. In fact, when I lifted my boycott of the Brewbaker a few weeks later, that stroppy woman was no longer there and the remaining staff was affable and pleasant. I became a regular in both places and was duly rewarded with the occasional free coffee and muffin.

To sum up: these boycotts probably accomplish nothing. But for whatever reason, they are fun. And yes, I do realise how sad that sounds.

In the meantime, I’ll stick to Kyiv’s bars and pubs, where coffee is available, but the beer is much cheaper. You’ve got to love any country where the beer is cheaper than soda, water, tea, coffee and non-alcoholic beer. I can content myself with this.

HOWEVER…a place here has just gone onto my boycott list. And this time it’s serious: I’ve put it on the permanent blacklist of boycotts. And all the juicy details will be revealed in my next post. Stay tuned.