Regina Glei's Blog, page 17

From Russia with Love – Part 2

Part 2: Everyday life in Russia

No Russian? Basically you are screwed. I have hardly ever been in a country yet where they speak so little English. Amazingly you somehow get by also without speaking the language.



One word in advance, I felt quite safe during my entire stay in Russia. There was not one hairy situation. Which, however might also be due to the horrendous amount of security everywhere. There must be millions of people employed in security jobs. Every department store, every subway station, every museum has metal detectors and security guards. You just gotta accept that and comply nicely with a smile and if you do you might even get a smile back and one guard at Kitay-Gorod subway station, my home base in Moscow, saying his only English words to me, “take care and good bye”. They are just people too and might look scary but if you are nice to them, they are mostly nice to you as well. There are also police men walking through town all the time. Blue uniforms, police, green = military. They are everywhere. The train ride from Moscow to St. Petersburg and back was very important to put things into perspective. While downtown Moscow and St. Petersburg are shiny and pretty, offering one culture world heritage site after the next, the country side is so sad.

The ride takes four hours by bullet train and the almost completely flat landscape consists of four things, birch and fir trees, mud, villages, run down factories.



Whatever the 143 million Russian eat, is it not growing between St. Petersburg and Moscow. I saw maybe ten potato fields and that’s it. I saw not a single cow, sheep, pig, not one animal during the whole 600 km between the two cities. The factories are all old and completely run down or in ruins.



The houses in the muddy villages without asphalt streets, accessible only via mud roads, are more shacks than houses and most look old and cold. I wonder if they have decent plumbing and running water. They seem to have electricity. It is cold in this country for maybe eight or nine out of twelve months. While it was and exceptional 25 degrees on the day of my arrival, the weather was dismal temperature-wise during the remaining entire two weeks. It was never over ten degrees Celsius and it snowed twice in Moscow while I was there. I was super happy for having brought my winter coat. I really really needed it.



I don’t know what the people living in these shacks between Moscow and St. Petersburg do for a living, it can’t be farming. In the big cities, outside of the old and shiny city centers are huge mostly old and ugly concrete blocks where the people live who work in the city and its factories. One thought lingered when I rode through the country side and that is, when I have to be poor I pray I’ll be poor in a country where it’s warm!



Some praise though for the subway systems of St. Petersburg as well as Moscow. The trains are old but are frequent, I’ve seen no delays, they are safe and used by “normal” folk also at night. People are sleeping in the subway, which I always interpret as a good sign of safety, there are kids around. Even if everything is in Cyrillic, you can still somehow read it and figure out where to go. I didn’t get lost once in the subways. You can get to basically all the major attractions via the subway in both cities and I didn’t try out the buses.



In supermarkets they have mostly European stuff that I am quite familiar with, they even have a lot of German branded products. Food is bread and potato based. I relied on food courts and fast food I must admit though, unable to order anything or read a menu in a restaurant, I needed food where I can point at.

To conclude, you get by without Russian, but it needs some patience and modesty on the traveler’s behalf and I don’t recommend Russia to inexperienced travelers. The supermarket staff is astonishingly friendly though and count the Rubels correctly out of your hand with a smile at the poor foreigner who has no clue. I wonder though what they will do next year with all the foreigners who will come for the soccer World Cup

From Russia with Love – Part 1

To post a day by day report on my quite epic trip to Russia would fill too many “blog weeks” and would also be too much detail, therefore I’ll try a summary under the following headlines:

1) Why Russia? And how to get there

2) Everyday life in Russia

3) History before World War II

4) World War II …

5) Ballet and Heavy Metal

Part 1: Why Russia? And how to get there

Most the time I use Japan’s golden week for island explorations, but this year was different.

Why did I go to Russia? Two reasons. When I was a kid, the Soviet Union was a very scary thing and not for the life of me could I imagine to be traveling there one day. Then came Gorbachev and he is kind of a personal hero of mine, because it is my firm belief that if it was not for him, East and West Germany would not have been united. He initiated some kind of mild romanticism for Russia in me, and I even took some Russian courses at an adult education institute before I left my hometown to study in Munich. There was always that thought that one day, I want to stand on the Red Square in Moscow.

It took me a while to realize the promise, but now i did it.

I flew with Aeroflot from Tokyo direct to Moscow and my has it changed. Actually, I flew Aeroflot during my very first trip to Japan in 1993 (No, no, no, I’m not that old ;-)) via Moscow of course, because I was a poor student at the time and Aeroflot was the cheapest thing around.

It was a horror trip! LOL. I sat in an old Ilyushin machine, with half torn seats and nets above your head like in a bus instead of overhead compartments. The plane went from Munich to Moscow and then the same machine would go from Moscow to Tokyo. I got only one boarding pass for Munich to Moscow and when I wanted to re-board the plane to fly to Tokyo, the lady at the gate didn’t let me in. “You no boarding pass!” She sent me to some office at the other end of the airport and I ran there past scary army guys with kalashnikovs. At the service counter some fifty people were shouting at one lone unnerved lady wanting something from her. I managed to get through, in complete panic, since pressed for time, fearing the plane would leave without me, and begged her for a new boarding pass. She took my passport and the print out of the ticket and left the booth! I stone-cold panicked that moment, thinking I’d be stranded in Moscow without a passport. Heaven thank, the lady came back with some paper and my passport and told me that would allow me to get back onto the plane. I thanked her and ran back through the airport to my gate and hallelujah they let me on board just in time. The return journey through Moscow went smoother, but I was scared shitless on the flight back. Ever since I did not fly Aeroflot again.

Nowadays Aeroflot is a member of the Sky Team alliance for more than ten years already. They fly Airbus and Boeing and behave like any other airline.

When I checked in online the plane was packed. Hm, so many people are going to Moscow? So many people are bothering with the horrendous visa requirements?

A word on those later.

The miracle was solved when I got to Narita airport. The plane went to Paris via Moscow. It was packed due to start of golden week and tons of people going to Paris.

Arrived in Moscow, 80% of the travelers went to the international transfer lane and a few lone Russians and some Japanese and myself went to the “stay in Russia” lane

Some More Movie Reviews

Manchester by the Sea

At first, I must admit that I was confused. I thought this would happen in England, but I was already wondering, because the British Manchester is not exactly by the sea. It took me a bit to realize that there is a town called Manchester-by-the-sea in the US and that’s where the story happens. It’s a drama about a guy who lost his three children to a fire accident because he was drunk and who cannot forgive himself, who is confronted having to take care of his brother’s son after the brother dies. That’s it. Nothing more and nothing less. The film also has no resolution, at least none that I found satisfactory. Though the main character grows a bit, his grief is not dealt with at the end and he stops taking care of his nephew unable to deal with the situation. Hm. Realistic perhaps, but what’s the point? The acting is fine, but the story left me unsatisfied.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Finally saw that one. Don’t get me wrong, I like Eddie Redmayne and I think he is one fine character actor and he was excellent portraying Stephen Hawking or in the Danish Girl, but for me he is not a lead character that can carry an “action movie” like this. There are some nice J.K. Rowling ideas about fantastic creatures, and the whole world in a suitcase was lovely, but all in all the piece left me quite unaffected and unmoved. I best liked the side kick Kowalski who was very nicely portrayed by Dan Fogler and I rooted more for him than for the main couple.

A Hologram for the King

That movie surely wasn’t a big box office hit, I never heard of it before it showed up on the plane’s choice of movies. I have very mixed feelings about it. It’s set in a supposed Saudi Arabia and mid-life-crisis American business man played by Tom Hanks travels there to close a business deal with the ruling family involving holographic projections.

Modern day Saudi Arabia is rarely featured in movies, but I strongly wonder how much of the movie depicted reality over there and how much of it was fiction. I think a movie like that does have a certain responsibility towards reality despite being fiction, since its sole reason for bearing any kind of fascination is the portrayal of that hidden world.

The love story with the female Saudi doctor was very cheesy and the portrayal of the hard-partying foreigners in the country also too black and white for my taste. Because the world portrayed is so far away from what we westerners know, it kept my interest, but I really wanted to know how much here was fiction and how much was supposed to be “documentary”, showing us the life in a country so hard to imagine for someone who has never been there.

Some Movie Reviews

Moonlight

Much acclaimed Moonlight was nice to watch, if a bit slow for my taste.

It’s an interesting decision to have the main character portrayed as a child, a teenager and a grown man and of course by different actors. The concept was good, but I fond it a bit difficult to thus identify with the main character, since as soon as you got used to him, another actor took over. What I did like though was that there were no white people around. A thoughtful piece with well “underplayed” emotions. Another interesting story decision was to have such an introverted character be in the lead.

Toni Erdmann

The German runner up for the best foreign language film at the Oscars this year was a marathon of nearly three hours. Very slow too and definitely too long but it still somehow managed to keep my attention, firstly because of the well portrayed and delicate grown daughter – elderly father relationship and secondly because of the business woman the daughter is, which reminded me a little bit of my own job, if mine is a lot better. I know plenty of colleagues though who forget to live and do only work. Another thing that made me grin was that Germans ask the big questions, sometimes, at least in this movie, and seriously speak about the meaning of life, which frankly, I haven’t heard talked of much in Japan. The naked party was a bit too strange though and if the fathers giant fur costume had any meaning then it was lost on me. Some of my colleagues should watch the movie though and be reminded that there is more to life than career and work, where alpha animals have regular pissing contests.

Passengers

A nice piece of science fiction with a very pretty ship and very pretty actors. The story is simple enough, 5000 people board a ship and go into cryosleep for the 120 years of the journey. Trouble is, the ship gets bombarded while flying through an asteroid field and malfunctions, waking one of the passengers 30 years into the journey. With 90 years ahead of him alone, the guy almost goes mad and almost commits suicide, but then decides to wake one of the other passengers, his dream woman. After a period of happiness, she finds out he woke her up and is understandably mightily pissed at him. But they find back to each other as more and more failures hit the ship caused by that asteroid field two years earlier. Even though they find a possibility to put one of them back to sleep, they decide not to, which is a bit Hollywood cheesy. They stop the story after the duo saved the ship and lived forever happily after. You could make a nice movie out of them hating each other after twenty years together??? Lol. All in all I’ve seen worse SciFi movies and Passengers is an entertaining piece.

Kimi no Na wa – Your Name

This anime movie is a big hit in Japan and has almost if not quite broken the more than ten year old viewer record of “Spirited Away” and rightly so, it’s a pretty damn good story. After a meteorite comes close to earth, a boy in Tokyo and a country girl in Gifu prefecture, both 17 years old, switch bodies for a while, causing all sorts of messy situations with their friends and family. They finally get what’s going on and leave each other messages on their smart phones or on good old pieces of paper or even their skins. At first they hate each other and how the other messes up their lives, but then they slowly start to like each other and the boy is shocked when the body switch suddenly stops. It keeps bugging him and he goes looking for the girl to find that the meteorite destroyed the girl’s town and everyone died three years ago. They do find each other again in the end, but I won’t reveal how. The animation is done with incredible detail and the story is quite unique and fresh and way better than half of what comes out of Hollywood. Very well worth watching, even if you are not an anime fan (like me). I highly recommend this piece.

Working in Germany? No, thanks.

I just flew to Germany for a business trip and after an intense week, there is one thing I’m sure of, no thanks, I don’t want to work in Germany again.

Our working conditions in Japan are not the best in the world and yet I prefer working in Japan ten times to working in Germany and here is why.

Germany is a very individualistic place, which has its advantages and disadvantages. Whilst Germans have more holidays, get on top of that paid leave if a doctor signs a magic paper declaring you are sick, “nobody” gives a damn about you.

The person who was supposed to help me setting up my trainings on Japanese business culture over here, was busy with some customer emergency and not available, and so I stood there alone, having to organize everything by myself in a work place I am not familiar with. People saw me dragging stuff around and did not offer help. When I asked if someone could help, I got blank faces, lame excuses or was outright ignored with the result that I had to do all the crap alone.

On the last training day, I held the training in an exposed place where many people pass and three colleagues from my office in Japan walked by, who were on business to Germany as well. They saw me, immediately came in and asked if they could help.

That is why it is okay to work in Japan despite less favorable working conditions. People look out for you, people help you, without even having to ask them. Of course that happens mostly or more easily if you are part of a group.

In Germany people think in boxes and if there is something out of ones own box you very quickly hear the term, “that is not my responsibility”. I’ve come to thoroughly dislike the phrase…

Having worked in Japan for quite some years now, I have gotten used to doing what is needed, rather than doing what is in the realm of my responsibility and my Japanese colleagues do the same. Only to a certain extent of course, but that extent is so much wider than in Germany. I left the German headquarters quite sobered and it is clear to me that I don’t want to work in such a cold and impersonal environment ever again, even if there are more holidays and paid sick leave.

Public Lunch

My new office does not have a canteen and thus the employees have to resort to supermarkets, restaurants or – public lunch.

I didn’t even know before I moved to the new office that the ward offices around have canteens where anybody can go to. In the ward office you get a decent Japanese “teishoku” (rice, miso soup, one side dish, one main dish (you have the choice between meat and fish)) for 530 yen = around 5 USD.

I don’t go there very often, but sometimes I do. The clientele consists of ward office workers, some company employees like me, but also a lot of elderly people and young mothers with babies. You sort of cannot cook at home for that price considering all the ingredients, not to speak of the time it takes to prepare a meal like that by yourself.

I think it is very important to have such public lunch places especially for the elderly. It gives them a reason to get out of the house and it also provides some company and much needed human interaction, not to speak of the lovely shock on their faces to find also foreigners in the canteen

The House Committee

Last year November, I moved into an apartment building (buying the unit, or rather having the bank buy it and paying back now for forever). The building has 65 apartments on 7 floors. There is a house committee whose reports I’ve been getting and suddenly, I get a paper with my name on it, being the vice whatever chairman of the committee and an invitation for the committee meeting, which happened on the 20th of March. I thought I better show up there when my name is on it and it’s good that I went.

Japanese community overdose

Heavy Metal in Open Water

What’s happening on board of the 70,000 tons of metal? 3000 or so fans, 60 bands and their staff. Every band plays twice. The gigs start at 5 pm on the first day and the last gig ends at 5 in the morning. On day two, a full day at sea, there are gigs from 10 in the morning to 5 the next morning. Landfall in Labadee was at 8 in the morning of day 3. No gigs during landfall, all aboard again at 16:30 and off we go back. Gigs again from 17:30 to 5 in the morning. Another full day at sea with gigs from 10 to 2 in the morning, since arrival back in Fort Lauderdale was at 8 in the morning again = you are busy! Lol.

The boat has four stages, the two main stages being the Alhambra theater and the pool deck, the two minor stages being the ice rink and the so called Pyramid lounge, which is a large bar under normal circumstances. The pool stage is literally built over the largest (for the occasion drained) pool of the ship, and only the hot tubs around the pool are in operation. There is a small pool in operation towards the bow and another water park foot bath, waterfall and hot tubs area towards aft.



The Pyramid lounge was kinda sucky, because of a too low ceiling. The stage could not be elevated and if you were not in the front row you literally saw nothing of the bands. You could only get from the Alhambra to the ice rink via the full fledged on-board casino and you were actually walking several miles a day to get from one stage to the other, lol. The elevators are not the fastest, so if you are fed up with waiting for one, up the stairs you go, not to speak of dancing and headbanging. Despite the good food, I don’t think anyone gained weight, since you find yourself jogging through the ship half the time, lol.



The first full day at sea saw high winds and the pool stage was in trouble, especially Haggard with half an orchestra on stage had great sound trouble in the wind and all in all sound trouble was quite common, also in the Alhambra. Apart from that there was a great atmosphere all over the ship. It’s a five star festival with good food, decent beds, showers and clean toilets, no mud! And of course the band members are on the same ship as you are and can’t go anywhere

Six Years Later

Today is the 11th of March and it happens to be a Saturday, which is the usual day for my blog post. It feels kinda weird to ignore the date and to post happy heavy metal memories from the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise, so I shall post them next weekend instead.

The Great East Japan earthquake happened at 14:46 six years ago and I was just in the Lalaport Yokohama shopping mall today during that time and was pleased that the moment did not pass by unnoticed, but that Lalaport made an announcement and conducted a minute of silence. Most of the people in the busy mall observed the minute, myself included, and it was touching and spooky at the same time to have most the people around you stop walking and close their eyes.

Six years ago our lives here were shaken up and about 18,500 people, including those who are still listed as missing, have died, mostly from the tsunamis that followed, not the actual quake.

It’s quite unbelievable that it happened already six years ago. It was a Friday and I got stuck in the Tokyo office I worked at at the time until 1 in the morning, because also in Tokyo buildings shook massively and all train services stopped for a while.

The wounds of the earthquake and tsunami are bad enough, but what will remain with us for many decades to come is the crippled and melted-down Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant.

Six years on, they are trying to send robots into the melted down chambers to see what’s going on there and to maybe figure out a method how to remove the nuclear mess, but even the robots’ circuits get fried after two hours in radioactivity that would kill a human in two minutes. Nobody knows yet what will become of this stuff and how to deal with it and this story will continue beyond our lifetimes.

I am not categorically against nuclear power but the lessons learned must be: do not build nuclear power plants on the ring of fire next to the ocean……..

I hope that the remaining nuclear power plants in Japan will never get online again. In wikipedia it says that there were 11,450 aftershocks until March 2015… We still get the occasional aftershock in the region. In the meantime it rattled massively in Kyushu last year. On average there is a small quake in Tokyo that you can feel every month. I’m not even tweeting about small earthquakes anymore, it’s a part of life here.

I only hope the Fukushima region does not get hit by a big one in the next 50 years or so that would crumble those concrete chambers where the molten nuclear fuel sits… what a madness.

Still, my opinion from six years ago remains the same, the world cares/cared too much about Fukushima and not enough about the 18,500 who died and the hundred thousands of lives that got destroyed by deaths of loved ones and by displacement because of the nuclear disaster.

My thoughts go out to the victims and to those who were left behind alive but forever damaged.

A Tiny Bit of Haiti – Kinda

The destination of the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise was Haiti this year, a place called Labadee on the north cost of the Hispaniola island. Its western third is Haiti, the eastern two thirds are the Dominican Republic. Royal Caribbean has leased the land around the cruise port for at first 20 years when they developed it in the 1980ties, then they renewed the lease for 99 years and the lease runs now beyond 2050.



I booked a “walking tour” on shore and while it wasn’t what I expected, it did turn out to be quite interesting. I was expecting to be led by a guide to the village or town of Labadee, but I should have known that they don’t let us off the premises of the leased land. On the leased bit there is no passport control, you only indicate to the ship’s computer by registering that you left the vessel with your chip cards.



So the “walking” tour was rather a standing tour with a few metal heads listening to our tour guide and walking only a hundred meters from the ship to the so called Columbus Cove. Our guide was a Haitian and he has never left Haiti (mostly because of having no money to travel). Haiti is the poorest country in the region. I’m not sure to what degree our guide’s words were true, but he said a nurse earns the equivalent of 200 USD a month, a doctor 500 USD and the people who work at the Labadee cruise port earn 700 to 800 USD. The jobs with Royal Caribbean are thus very sought after and the company does a screening every half year with interviews, testing your English skills and whatever else. Wow.



He also spoke of history, that Columbus landed tin Hispaniola thinking he had come to India, how the British and French came, the slaves, that Haiti was the first country to abolish slavery, that they don’t like their Dominican neighbors too much, etc. He thanked us for coming, since not so many tourists come to Haiti, he said. So unfortunately we didn’t see anything of the real village, but at least we heard some interesting stories from our guide.



On the leased patch everything is pretty and well maintained, there are three parlors with again free food. I was at least expecting to have to pay on land, but no, also there the food was free, but of course not the booze