Kafka-esque situations in Kyiv

I'm too busy to blog nowadays, so let me just quote a funny column by one of my favourite writers at Kyiv Post, Paul Miazga. It was just put online at 21:45 tonight. The point here is that such situations are not uncommon in Moscow or other Russian cities (although I must say, St Petersburg has a great deal more sophistication in dealing with foreigners; they live and breathe tourists, after all.)

Here is the column in its entirety.

As the old saying goes, if you get good service, you’ll tell 10 people. If you get bad service, you'll tell 100.

Despite my reputation for being a real whiner about various service-related issues in Kyiv, I feel compelled to return to this topic due to a series of what can only be described as Kafka-esque situations in Kyiv of late.

Situation #1: The Call

In my work at the Post I'm often calling various bars and restaurants to find out if they serve this item or the next and what the cost of the item is, or, if a sports bar, who's playing and when. Invariably, with few exceptions – despite my often calling so-called English-speaking bars, restaurants and the like – this is what I get:

“Hello. Do you speak English? Yes? Great. I'd like to know if you serve cheesecake."

Thank you. You would like to make a reservation?”

“No, I don't want to make a reservation. I want to know if you serve American cheesecake.”

“I’m sorry. I don't understand. You want to see our menu?

“Cheesecake – is it on the menu? Do you serve it?”

“Just a moment, please.”

New voice comes on. “Hello. Would you like to reserve a table?”

“No! I just want to know if you serve American cheesecake. U vas amerikansky syrny tort yest?”

Rustling sounds, then the first voice comes back on. “You want to reserve a table?”

At this point, I hang up. Everyone in the office stares at my face, which has turned from pink to red to purple. One staff writer asks me where I’m calling, and as it turns out she used to work at said restaurant. She tells me they do have cheesecake.

This is typically how information in English is gathered in Kyiv.

I swear, just replace Kyiv with Moscow, I'm sure I've been in this situation. Typically the person who answers would be a young employee or a newbie (whether guy or girl) and the person who comes on would be the supervisor.

Situation #2: The Refund

This is the kind of stuff that the Slavic student comedy troupe KVN gets so much mileage out of: pathetic customer service.

Want your money back from that cellophane-wrapped, State Customs Service-approved DVD you bought from that big electronics store downtown? Try this on for size:

“Hi. I just bought this DVD in your shop and, though it says it's in English, I just played it at home and it's not. Here's the receipt. I'd like to have my money back.”

“But it should work. It says on the box it's in English.”

“Yes, but I just tried it at home and it's not; it's in Russian. Here's the receipt. Can I just have my money back?"

“But it says it's in English. Look: it says right here on the box, ‘English version 5.1.’”

“I just told you it doesn’t work. Is there somewhere you can play it in your store, so you can see that it's not in English?”

“No, we don't. It says right on the box....”

At this point, hair is normally pulled out at the roots, or it at least withers to gray. Twenty minutes tick away until finally, after a more senior manager appears, the money is refunded.

Things have improved over the years in terms of customer service, but there's still a long way to go, I'm afraid. But at least Ukrainians can laugh at this.

I guess there's very little else to do than laugh at it. That's what people have learned to do both here in Moscow as in Kyiv.

Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé

It's that time of the year again, when vinotecas take advantage of this marketing phenomenon known as the Beaujolais Nouveau. The release of this wine, which provides an opportunity to sample the first fruits of the year's harvest of grapes in autumn and the start of their manufacture into vintage wine, has been commercialised into a grand event in the last decade or so.
I remember how, in Japan, the arrival of the year's Beaujolais Nouveau, would be greeted with so much fanfare and marketing glitz. When I was still a student at Kandaiji dorm, the kombini (or produkty in Russian terms) -wait, I guess it was more a Mom-and-Pop's type of business- stocked up on the flowery-labeled Georges Duboeuf wines for sale late in the year. A good number of utterly bourgeois Japanese fell hook, line and sinker for this commercial tactic and bought this new wine by the crates. I kid you not. The frenzy was such -and this, I also remember more keenly from the Seijo Ishii, Tokyu and Coop supermarkets I frequented near my Ichigao station- the release of the wine was celebrated in the same fashion as one would anticipate St Valentine's Day or Halloween. This account is illustrative:

Unbeknownst to many, Beaujolais actually has a long history of producing top-flight wines. Although it is politically classified as part of Burgundy, geologically the Beaujolais region is really part of the Northern Rhone, as both share the same unique granite soils. The Gamay grape -- despite its lack of success elsewhere -- has thrived in Beaujolais for centuries, and during this time various sub-regions have been discovered that consistently produce the best grapes.

Of the approximately 22,000 hectares under vine, roughly half are classified as simple "Beaujolais," and a quarter as the somewhat better "Beaujolais-Village." The remaining 25 percent of the vineyards are divided into 10 smaller appellations, or "Crus," which have proven to be the region's exceptional growing sites (the two most well-known are Morgon and Moulin-a-Vent, both of which make age-worthy wines that are certainly worth seeking out).

The double-edged sword for Beaujolais, however, has been the Nouveau "phenomenon."

In the Middle Ages, wine rarely made it through the spring without turning to vinegar, so by the time fall arrived, there was quite a bit of thirst built up for the next vintage. Noticing that the Gamay grape produced a wine that could be drunk only a few weeks after harvest, enterprising bistro owners in nearby Lyon used to ship barrels of young Beaujolais, some still fermenting, via a train of oxcarts each fall.

Having aged only a few weeks, the young wine certainly wasn't complex and was often still "gassy" (from the dissolved carbon dioxide from fermentation that hadn't yet had time to come out of solution), but it was refreshing, alcoholic and a welcome harbinger of fall.

Paris merchants tried similar promotions with young local wines, but only the soft Gamay grape from Beaujolais could be drunk in such a short cradle-to-goblet cycle (just try to imagine a Bordeaux Nouveau . . .), so the trains of oxcarts soon stretched all the way from Beaujolais to the capital.

As distribution by barrel became less common in the postwar years, the wine no longer had the luxury of finishing fermentation while still on the back of the truck. To avoid exploding bottles, it had to be degassed, filtered and chemically stabilized -- all within a few weeks of harvest. Yet despite this brutal treatment, people still enjoyed this new wine from Beaujolais, aka "Beaujolais Nouveau."

With the diffusion of French expatriates around the world, and the return of misty-eyed tourists with fond memories of quaffing just-harvested wine, the tradition of drinking Beaujolais Nouveau began to spread outside of France.

For a good while, the going was really good for the producers. In fact, there was even a much anticipated Beaujolais Nouveau Day, the first day that the eponymous wine goes officially on sale. Annually, this is the third Thursday in November - a week before Thanksgiving Day for Americans. Its release, in belaboured mimicry of New Year's Day, is announced, banners fluttering, with much fanfare: "Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!" (The New Beaujolais has arrived!). Pushing the envelope, a pop song "Beaujolais Day" was even written by Scottish pop rock artist Fish for his would-be fifth album with Marillion to make sure everyone in France, from Burgundy to Paris, got the message. Into Wine calls it one of the "most frivolous and animated rituals in the wine world".

I never really understood the phenomenon. Well, it turns out that people have caught on and are no longer buying crates and cases of the wine as they used to.

William Campbell of Japan Times says that sales had gone down following a disastrous sales campaign in 2004. "By 2002, the supply-demand imbalance in Beaujolais had become so bad that the EU was forced to buy back more than 10 million liters of unsold wine, which ended up being converted into everything from wine vinegar to industrial ethanol," he said in an article published on 11 November 2005. The United States dropped off as the principal market, to be replaced by Japan.

So now the Beaujolais PR machine has "been looking to the unexplored markets of Asia and Eastern Europe to sop up excess supply", Campbell says.

Japan has been a dream come true, with Beaujolais imports reaching a whopping 717,000 cases in 2003, up from a mere 66,000 cases in the mid-'90s. 2003 was widely, and wildly, touted as the "vintage of the century" in France, and the buzz helped the '03 Beaujolais Nouveau to sell out in Japan in just a few days.

Following a trees-grow-to-the-sky "planning" philosophy, Japanese importers brought in an astounding 1 million cases of '04 Beaujolais Nouveau, almost all by ruinously expensive airfreight. While Nouveau is best consumed within a few weeks of release, and generally never after Jan. 1, WANDS magazine reported that Beaujolais Nouveau was spotted lingering on retailers' shelves well into the spring, and in some supermarkets even into August -- so much for a refreshing, just-picked taste.

Georges "The King of Beaujolais" Duboeuf personally attended the Tokyo Nouveau release parties for the past two years, perhaps not unsurprising given that Japanese now consume (or more accurately, that Japanese importers now buy) more than 50 percent of all the Beaujolais Nouveau exported from France.

Given last year's tepid demand, and a damaging investigation by French authorities into a Duboeuf blending scandal, no one knows how this year's campaign will play out. What is clear, however, is that even though Beaujolais may be a series of small villages in France's deep south, come the third Thursday in November, all eyes in that part of France at least will be focused on Tokyo.

It would be interesting to know how much longer would Japanese sustain this artificial product and the phenomenon behind it.

Russo-Japanese War 100 years on

On a long and busy day, this brief Kyodo News article on the Japan Today news site caught my eye: "Descendants of Russo-Japanese War commanders to meet in Nagasaki". The article, with a dateline of Sasebo, where the Japanese Self-Defense Maritime Forces maintain a base near the city of Nagasaki on the southernmost main Japanese island of Kyushu, said two great-grandchildren of the commanders of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) will meet in this city next Saturday to talk "about peace and friendship on the centennial of the Sea of Japan Naval Battle".

I knew that most of the anniversaries were supposed to be observed earlier this year, in particular in January for the siege of Port Arthur and in May for the decisive Battle of Tsushima. Understandably there was little motivation in Russia to commemorate the event. The loss was so traumatic for Russians, it triggered a march against the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in January 1905, one of the seminal events that sparked the bloody Bolshevik Revolution 12 years later. The Japanese, meanwhile, were too polite to celebrate a major victory, which signaled in many ways Japan's rise as a global power at the start of the 20th century.

While Russians in general have much respect and admiration for Japan and the Japanese, in general, they are still sore about losing this war, the first lost by a European power to a non-European power. The merest slight is enough to trigger literally violent reactions among Russians, even those normally not given to khuliganizm (hooliganism or mischief). Take for example the case of the riots that erupted in central Moscow on 9 June 2002, when Russia lost to Japan 1-0 in Yokohama in the World Cup.

The Moscow Times in a report the following day said at least one man died and dozens more injured in the worst street violence the capital had seen since the bombing of the parliament building in 1993. The crowd, made up mostly of young men, set fire to cars, broke windows and beat up anyone from fellow fans to police officers in the area intersecting Tverskaya and Mokhovaya streets. "Some 7,000 to 8,000 fans had gathered at Manezh Square, a stone's throw from the Kremlin, to watch the afternoon game on one of several huge screens set up by the city government," the report said. Many fans were drunk and prone to violence even before the start of the match. The melee began during the second half of the match, soon after the Japanese had scored. This caused the crowd to start tossing beer and vodka bottles in the face of Russia's impending defeat.

By early evening, several hundred rioters moved up Tverskaya Ulitsa smashing store windows and glass advertising stands. Most windows on the first two floors of the Moskva hotel were broken, as were several windows at the State Duma and the historic Yeliseyevsky food store on Tverskaya. Half a dozen restaurants on the fashionable pedestrian strip Kamergersky Pereulok were also vandalized.

At least seven cars near the Duma had been torched and dozens throughout the downtown area had been overturned or smashed.

As of 10:30 p.m., some 60 people had been detained and about 50 hospitalized, Interfax reported, citing police and health authorities.

"The fans' actions were barbaric," Deputy Mayor Valery Shantsev told reporters. "We put up these screens for them, like in civilized places, but it turned out they were not ready for this."
...

Shantsev said the city would reimburse car and store owners whose property was damaged during the rampage. But victims of the violence said this could prove difficult, as many police officers refused to fill out reports or document the damage.

A number of witnesses and news reports said that some rioters were screaming out racist and neo-fascist slogans. The crowd included some vocal supporters of Alexei Podberyozkin's nationalist Spiritual Heritage movement and other waving the ultra-right's yellow, white and black flag.
...

State-run RTR television, which often displays a pro-Kremlin stance in its news programs, tried to shore up some political capital after the riot. Commenting during the Vesti program, anchorman Yevgeny Revenko pointed out that the violence broke out meters away from the Duma, where just last week deputies gave initial approval to a controversial bill on extremism, which human rights activists have condemned as a potential Kremlin tool to suppress public protest.

Having said all this, however, there is little clear connexion between Japan's victory over Russia in the football match and the century-old war. No, this is not the Football War or La Guerra de Fútbol - even though the adversaries here are less fanatic about football that El Salvador and Honduras were in 1969. (One of history's quirky footnotes, which seals a country's reputation in a not very positive way, this conflict - also referred to as the Soccer War, for youse Yankees - notched a decidedly unfunny death toll of 5,000 military and civilian deaths. The war lasted only 100 hours, a peace treaty was not signed until 1980. The original territorial dispute was resolved by the World Court in 1992.) The involvement, however, of xenophobic right-wing groups (which specialise in remembering and capitalising so-called historical insults, no matter how slight) and the beating of four Japanese students who were attending the 12th Tchaikovsky music competition at the nearby Moscow Conservatory of Music even before the match do make it likely that some Russians still do take umbrage at this monumental defeat.

There are other questions. I wonder if the crowd would have been allowed by the police to reach unmanageable levels if President Vladimir Putin had been at the Kremlin, just a 100 meters away. As it was, Putin was in St Petersburg at the time. Now of course such widespread public disturbance is almost unthinkable. This is less of a testament to the efficiency and effectiveness of Moscow police than an indicator of increased confidence and, arguably, improvement in the lives of Muscovites.

Then again, who knows, football hoodlums would behave in the same way, even in such "more developed" countries as Britain and Belgium. Fortunately we will never know how Russian football fans will behave this time since Russia failed to qualify for the World Cup in Germany next year after drawing 0-0 with Slovakia in a match in Bratislava on 13 October.

Heavy snowfall blankets Moscow

I've just talked to my Inessa, who's now at home studying. She proposed that we see a Charlie Chaplin film while munching takeaway pizza. We have so little time now, we resort to stealing snatches of it instead of making it. We've been having a bit of difficulty adjusting to each other's schedule, mainly due as I see it to a sense of overambition or optimism on our parts to squeeze as much as we can into a 24-hour day. For the meantime, we have reached a modus vivendi. Tonight, at least, I've agreed to go to her flat so that we can spend a bit of time together side by side. Admittedly this is not the kind of quality time I have in mind whenever the idea of being together pops into my workaholic mind. For the moment there's little else to do but to carry on, or as Americans say, get over it. (Maybe I should just read up a bit on Kazan, where I plan to spend our second long weekend in the coming fortnight.)

Anyway, today was marked by at least a couple of things. The first was the logical conclusion to my report yesterday about the first snow falling and a freeze settling over the city. Still it took me by surprise in the morning, when I peered out to the backyard from my kitchen window: masses of the white fluffy stuff falling from the heavens. It didn't stop until way past lunch hour. From my oversized wooden-framed Soviet-style windows at work I glanced occasionally at the seemingly interminable descent of snow, snow and more snow.

"It's beautiful," remarked my boss' teenage son, now back on a weeklong furlough from final year lyceé in Sophia Antipolis, a technopark founded in the 1970s between Nice and Cannes on the French Riviera. "Especially when the snow's freshly laid, before it gets covered with footprints," said Fidel, sounding almost wistful - suprising for a young man his age who normally eschews putting on overt displays of sentimentality. "But don't you think it's also lovely when there are solitary prints leading out the gate?" I countered, pointing at the visitors' entrance. "Yeah, Darius'", he retorted, somewhat recovering his bluster in referring to the house Yorkshire terrier (named after the first and most accomplished in a line of Persian kings, added to their family after my boss' previous posting in Tehran). Pronounced properly of course in Farsi as "Dâriûsh".

By late afternoon, snow had turned into sleet and by early evening, rain. Even though I found my car covered with snow, it was easy to slide it off Balios as the drizzle had made the snow water-logged and heavy. On our sidelane puddles formed in the depressions between the pavement and the road itself, making it inconvenient and uncomfortable for pedestrians.

The second event was choir practice. As I may have mentioned, I attended chorale rehearsals last week for the first time in five weeks. There I met Anne and Ian, two Scots newly arrived in Moscow. Apart from Andrew, there weren't any tenors around so it was rather difficult to conceal myself in that rather sparse gathering from Sasha's increasingly shrill expressions of displeasure. This time, even though I had to hurry home to feed Mishinka first and to get my music notes before going to the Gymnasium No 14 along Novinsky Bulvar, I still managed to arrive at rehearsals at 19:15 - quite an accomplishment all considered. In fact the choir was still doing the usual warmup vocalizations, which I never really caught last season because we were perennially at least a half-hour late for practice.

What pleased me a lot was seeing Nicole and - yes - Jennifer back. Nicole, of course, has always been here, working now for the British Embassy. But she hadn't been to rehearsal herself for two weeks. As for Jennifer, it was a surprise to see her visiting from Kiev, where she moved to in July. Apart from them, Andrew was there, as well as new members from France, Finland and Norway. Tom, our American baritone, was so surprised to see so many tenors at one time. I hadn't seen Stéphane for a while as well. It was just like in the early part of the year, when I first joined. Quite a warm feeling it gives you.

Neo-Cromwellian way forward

As a follow-up to that question I raised a couple of weeks ago about over-consumption, I stumbled on this article on The Observer Online that took my questioning a notch further: living a simple life as the New Puritans. "A generation of young, educated and opinionated people determined to sidestep the consumerist perils of modern life. So if you own a 4x4, spend all your time shopping, or are simply overweight - watch your back," says the subtitle of article written by journalist Lucy Siegle about a new moral minority.

According to the Future Foundation, the trends forecaster that coined the term, Britons are "increasingly curbing our enthusiasm for profligate consumption, and health and environment-threatening behaviours." Sure, I'm all eyes as I continue reading down the article. "Gone is the guilt-free pleasure-seeker, to be replaced by the model well-meaning citizen, the New Puritan - a tag interchangeable with neo-Cromwellian, if you really want to seal its 17th century origins - who thinks through the consequences of activities previously thought of as pleasurable and invariably elects to live without them."

Any sensible person in this day and age would probably agree with the principles of this movement, if one can call it such. In many ways my riling against the me-generation and the society of instant gratification as symbolised by the United States has been distilled in purer form in this new movement. I personally subscribe to it. It is, however, important to note that this code of conduct does not stop at being personal or private decisions; they would only be effective, the Future Foundation explains, if the curbs are also "extended to other people's behaviour, and wherever possible enshrined by legislation - for New Puritans do not fear the nanny state". Whoa - move aside Singapore, the anti-consumerist Commonwealth is here! It's like saying, it's no longer enough to talk about faith as internal; if we truly believe, we should now all go out and fulfill an Evangelical type of global commission here.

There are certainly elements of this movement that I heartily approve of, in particular the attack on the aptly described "menace" of the Sports Utility Vehicle. "Part of the New Puritan brief is to penalise those who make poor choices on behalf of the rest of society - in this case the gas-guzzling, emissions-generating Montessori wagons that choke our town centres." The article goes on to describe a well-organised and -supported band of SUV vigilantes in Paris, a sort of earthbound Yamakasi against the Cheyennes, X5s and Explorers of the banlieus. Les Dégonflés (The Deflated), as they are called, quietly run round in the middle of the night deflating the tyres of SUVs and splattering them with mud. Why, this is a tactic straight out of my own book. Something I secretly wanted to do myself but just never had the gumption to. (In Britain, the equivalent is called the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s, which takes a less violent tactic using fake fixed penalty notices.) If they had such a band in Moscow, 40 SUVs a week would probably not be enough.

What are the specific articles of faith of the NP or neo-Cromwellian? Sure, the intensity varies but I suppose the basics cover the following: no binge drinking, smoking, buying big brands, flying on cheap flights, eating junk food, sleeping with multiple partners, wasting money on designer clothes, growing beyond one's optimum weight, subscribing to celebrity magazines, driving a flash car, or living to watch television. Although I safely clear the bar on at least half this list, it would be a painful cut to adhere to the rest of it. Lisa Siegle says the list is "likely to grow longer", with 80 per cent of people agreeing that alcohol should not be allowed at work at all; 25 per cent saying snack products should not be offered at business meetings; more than a third agreeing that we should think twice before giving sweets and chocolates as gifts to family and friends, and a further 25 per cent thinking that 'the government should start a campaign to discourage people from drinking alcohol on their own at home' (a figure that rises to 41 per cent in Scotland).

Argh. In a way we've been living for far too long on a post-modernist Sodom and Gomorrah, in which the Pleasure Principle served as the main creed. The article continues:

These are sobering thoughts for anyone connected to the pleasure market. But if you possess a shred of New Puritanical sensibility you're likely to think that the big brands - the junk-food peddlers, alcohol promoters, cigarette pushers and even the supermarkets - had it coming. That for too long these kinds of businesses reaped vast profits while riding roughshod over community spirit, public health and morality. The lack of a liberal backlash against increased policing of previously uncontroversial pleasures is significant, too. And it's a trade-off the New Puritans are clearly willing to make: extra nannying for extra peace of mind.

This is actually the sign of a maturing civil society, according to Dr Peter Whybrow, director of UCLA's Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behaviour, and author of American Mania: When More is not Enough, which charts what happens to society when we are pushed to the limits of our physical and mental tolerance.

'Civilisation offers no gifts to liberty,' he quotes from Sigmund Freud's Thirties essay, Civilisation and Its Discontents. Whybrow suggests that we use America as a cautionary tale, 'an indication of what happens when citizens turn into consumers, solely driven by immediate reward, and when consumerist impulses become substitutes for communities.'
...

So, with a few grand gestures and some high-profile converts New Puritanism offers a powerful escape route from our impulsive, reward-driven lifestyles. It might just have the potential to stave off the horrors promised by an out-of-control consumerist culture in which, according to agrarian essayist Wendell Berry, 'The histories of all products will be lost. The degradation of products and places, producers and consumers is inevitable.'

Consider the New Puritan philosophy from this point of view and it can look like a blueprint for a rather noble kind of empowerment. Our New Puritans become less like neurotic killjoys and more like early adopters, with an enhanced ability to recognise the pitfalls of contemporary life. A battle is shaping up between the New Puritans and the old guard libertarians, but at the moment it's a vastly uneven one. The New Puritans might be a trend, but it's still a small one, swimming against a seemingly inexorable consumerist river.

But New Puritans shouldn't be deterred. As Oliver Cromwell, their ancestral spiritual leader, put it: 'A few honest men [and let's add in women for contemporary relevance] are better than numbers.

I think I'd have to re-examine my own lifestyle to find out what changes I would have to make. At the moment it seems I'm only paying lip-service and not really making the hard decisions. In fact after taking the diagnostic quiz to find out my degree of Puritanism, as it were, I found out I came out middling on most choices. Not impressive at all. Wouldn't make it as a Yamakasi SUV tyre-buster. The verdict, in pastel colours, came out this way: "There is no doubt that you mean well and are flirting with the temperate outlook, but you are still too frightened of being thought of as extreme. In your heart of hearts you know that we eat too much refined sugar, possess too many appliances and watch too much bad TV, but you cannot bear to acknowledge the demise of libertarianism. However, you show promise; all you need is the courage of your convictions."