Entries Tagged as 'travel & foreign lands'

A Young Person’s Guide to Russian Politics

Following the recent street protests in Russia, international attention has been focused on the country’s political scene. A young person tuning in to the news coverage might be confused by all the long names ending with –ov and –sky, and the series of heads that resemble slabs of meat, lumpy potatoes or some other comestible. Too much of the commentary is targeted at initiates; beginners need a jumping on point. After all, today’s 20 year olds were barely crawling the last time Vladimir Zhirinovsky scored serious headlines in the West. So strap on your shapka and let’s go! [Read more →]

Tags: travel & foreign lands, trusted media & news by Daniel Kalder
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Learn Japanese the World War II way!

Recently I was browsing in a used book store when I stumbled upon a soldier’s Japanese phrasebook from World War II. Between faded orange covers I found a treasure trove of fascinating words and phrases- certainly it’s the most useful text published by the U.S. War Department I’ve encountered since that pamphlet on sexual hygiene for GIs I found in a Texas ghost town a few years back. It does lack for detailed diagrams of human genitalia, however.

Like most phrasebooks it contains all the standard terminology related to greetings, asking for directions and finding lodgings, but the structure and at least half of the language is strictly determined by the context of war. Thus it begins not with “Hello” and “My name is…” but rather a set of “Emergency Expressions” the very first of which is: [Read more →]

Tags: ends & odd, travel & foreign lands by Daniel Kalder
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2011: The Year in Dictators

The year 2011 was an alarming one for dictators, as a series of mass uprisings toppled several authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. The so-called “Arab Spring” inspired wild hopes, with some optimists even declaring that the 20th century phenomenon of the dictator was finished, and a new era of democracy was dawning- just like in Eastern Europe in 1989. True? False? Let’s survey the Year in Dictators and find out! [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government, travel & foreign lands, trusted media & news by Daniel Kalder
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Russia, Egypt, Europe and the wind of change

Sometime around the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a long period of abject Western media failure regarding the Putin phenomenon began. Journalists were so busy making fatuous comparisons to Stalin or hyping The New Cold War™ that they refused to address why the president was so popular in Russia. I suspect this is because many of them missed the 1990s, when Americans and Europeans had enjoyed near godlike status. Yeltsin had been no catastrophe for them, even if he was for 99.99% of everybody else.

However, Putin was genuinely popular and until a few weeks ago seemed unassailable. A generous man might read this as proof of success: that life in Russia has improved to the point where citizens are no longer willing to accept corruption in exchange for stability. When I lived in Russia, I attended some entirely futile anti-government rallies comprised of pensioners, punks and nationalists; the latest protests are larger, much more diverse and the Kremlin obviously hasn’t decided what to do about them…yet. [Read more →]

Tags: travel & foreign lands, trusted media & news by Daniel Kalder
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The secret afterlife of Roy Orbison

For me, like most people, memory is intricately intertwined with music. Another Brick in the Wall pt 2 was a hit the year I started school, and so the song always resurrects those early experiences of classroom tedium. Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus,playing on the ferry that brought me from England to Holland in 1986, summons textures of my first trip abroad from the sinkhole of amnesia; while Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity is forever fused with a 6am walk I took around Amsterdam ‘s Schipol airport. Endlessly and subjectively I can listen to a track and landscapes, people, places and moods return.

What is the mechanism behind this? I don’t care. I note only that the links in the chain of music and memory are almost always forged accidentally- standing in a shop, watching TV, sitting in a café. When I was travelling in Central Asia a few years ago however I decided to conduct an experiment- I would intentionally fuse some music with the landscape to use as an aid to memory later. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, music, travel & foreign lands by Daniel Kalder
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Attack of the Little Satan

In June 2009, I found myself glued to the TV set, watching the crowds in Tehran protesting the rigged reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran. I was amazed that things seemed to be falling apart so quickly for the motley crew of thugs, thieves, killers and millenarian fantasists that run the country. After all, their despotic regime was only 30 years old, and at that age the USSR was in the full, terrifying flower of Stalinism. It would be another four decades before it collapsed due to institutional senility and internal decay.

Even so, the revolutionary Islamists in Iran were still virile enough to repress those protests. And as the fists and boots hammered down, and young girls were shot dead in the street, there was precious little light relief until the Iranian authorities declared the British responsible for all the unrest. [Read more →]

Tags: travel & foreign lands, trusted media & news by Daniel Kalder
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Scotland: more than Groundskeeper Willie’s homeland

I recently took a press trip to Scotland, where I spent four nights in four different hotels. All four were delightful (Edinburgh’s The Balmoral, The Fairmont St Andrews, a Taymouth Estate cottage, and Edinburgh’s The George Hotel) and I recommend each of them highly with one caveat: stay more than one night. Or at least, if you stay a single evening, stay later than 9am the next day. In the attempt to see as much of England’s Canada (only sassy) as possible, my group was forced to ignore this simple guideline, with the result I discovered the one thing I do worse than packing is re-packing and in the process acquired a strange sympathy for the higher-end rock bands of the world (we’re talking at least Kings of Leon level). [Read more →]

Tags: travel & foreign lands by Sean Cunningham
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Perspectives

Recently I travelled 3700 miles by car, from Massachusetts to Minnesota, then south to Missouri, and back again. Allowing for the time spent in Minneapolis, the journeyed portion of the trip was only six days. A little over 600 miles a day with many halts and a few wrong turns. It is a small accomplishment I understand, in this modern age, or in the larger scheme of things–even in my own life–but was done for reasons important to me. I had hoped for some perspective on what was to be, and was indeed, a great event, and found more than enough to please me. [Read more →]

Tags: travel & foreign lands by Vincent McCaffrey
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Mr. Gorbachev goes to Mexico

Like many children of the Cold War, I grew up anxious about Nuclear Armageddon, so when Gorbachev eased relations between the USSR and the West I was grateful. For many years I viewed him as a hero, pure and simple. It was not until I moved to Russia that I realized his reforms had been intended to strengthen the USSR, not destroy it.

Oops.

Gorbachev had a rough ride in his homeland in the 1990s, where he was almost universally despised. These days he appears to have settled into the role of Russia’s Jimmy Carter: well- meaning, not quite forgiven, but no threat. [Read more →]

Tags: travel & foreign lands, trusted media & news by Daniel Kalder
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