Notes from a fascinating world.
The world is like a bazaar, full of interesting odds and ends, and I've been exiled into it. This is my all-over-the-map (literally and metaphorically) attempt at capturing some of the world's many wonders.
 TIME Magazine cover featuring the Parkland teens. Fair use. It is by now a cliche that, since January 2017, parody in American life has died. That may be an exaggeration, but it certainly is much more difficult to tell these days what is an Onion article and what is real news coming out of the West Wing.
But now we are living through not parody but a horror film. Specifically, a teen slasher. Think Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, Halloween, The Faculty, and of course related works such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its explicit and oft-referenced antecedent, Scooby Doo. In these products of pop culture, as a trope, the adults in authority positions are always craven and corrupt or simply clueless as to what’s going on. (OK, some exceptions, like Giles on Buffy as an ersatz father figure.) The teen protagonists, and some of their teen friends, are the ones who know the truth and who fight the forces of evil with what wits they can muster in spite of their hormones.  St. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow. Creative Commons. It was only a layover the other day at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, but it still made me tense.
It didn’t help that the uniformed Russian officer immediately began demanding to know the purpose of my trip, never mind that I was clearly not entering Russia and was therefore not his concern. I wanted to tell him not to worry, that I vowed years ago never to return to his country until and unless I obtained diplomatic immunity. More or less on a whim, and as though I didn’t spend enough time in the classroom over the regular college semesters, I decided to spend the summer of 2002 studying Russian, a language entirely new to me. After a few weeks Stateside learning the rudiments, the cohort of us relocated to St. Petersburg for a few more weeks of immersion. When that finished at the end of July, I picked up my backpack and bought a train ticket to Moscow, hoping to see more of Russia and eventually to catch the Trans-Siberian Railway.  The cave monastery of Orheiul Vechi is under this bell tower. Not all of Chisinau (pronounced key-she-now), the capital of Moldova, screams former Soviet provincial city. But its central bus station surely does.
It’s not properly a station, and at the same time it doubles as a market. Dozens of minivans (marshrutky, to use the Russian word in the plural form) are parked along several intersecting streets. Signs are displayed behind the windshields stating the destinations in the Latin alphabet of Romanian or the Cyrillic alphabet of Russian, or both. Due to its complicated history, Moldova, one of the least visited countries in Europe (and once alleged to be the least happy), is bilingual. The principality of Moldavia was historically in the Romanian orbit, and the eastern section of modern Romania is still called Moldavia. But the Russian empire annexed eastern Moldavia in the early 19th century after the Russo-Turkish War and renamed it Bessarabia. After the 1917 revolution in Russia, Bessarabia or Moldova reunited with Romania, only to be ceded back to the Soviet Union in 1940 in the wake of rapprochement between the USSR and Nazi Germany. So even now, after independence in light of the collapse of the USSR, Moldovans almost all speak both Russian and Romanian fluently. |
AuthorWriter, traveler, lawyer, dilettante. Failed student of physics. Not altogether distinguished graduate of two Ivy League institutions. Immigrant twice over. "The grand tour is just the inspired man's way of getting home." Archives
March 2020
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