If Irkutsk is “The Paris of Siberia” as locals claim, then Cleveland can be rightly called “The Paris of Ohio”. It’s not a bad town (especially by Siberian standards) and has a nice riverfront location, some ornate old wooden houses here and there and an especially beautiful church with medieval icon painting on its exterior. But mostly it’s your average developing world town with lots of old cars in various states of disrepair clattering along the roads, clusters of appealingly dingy storefronts and factories dominating most of the sidewalk views, and stray dogs running the streets at night like they own them.
I stepped off the train in Irkutsk two mornings ago but didn’t stay long. I was headed to Lake Baikal, a cavernous blue behemoth in Siberia’s center over 400 miles long and holding 20% of the planet’s fresh water, more than all of our five Great Lakes put together. Sitting as it does atop a continental divide, Baikal is deep as an ocean and will eventually become one as the tectonic plates continue their eternal shifting, colliding and stretching over millions of lifetimes. So deep that Vladimir Putin recently descended in a military deep-sea sub to see the vast harvest of crystallized natural gas deposits that lie at its bottom.
So first to the bus station to find a rickety local van to take me and a dozen cramped fellow passengers to Baikal’s shore four hours away, past larch forests burning bright yellow and long stretches of cattle country, where Buryat cowboys range the broad plain on horseback driving herds of steer from here to Tuva of throat-singing fame, finally arriving at a lakeshore steamboat that ferries us to Olkhon Island. During summers when tourist season is high, the line of cars to catch the ferry goes back for two kilometres, and tempers run hot; last summer a man was shot for cutting the car line and trying to force his way on.
By February this deepest lake on the planet will be so frozen over by the biting Siberian zima that they’ll be driving trucks over it. From December to January the island is cut off from the mainland, as ferries can’t navigate the jagged floes. I don’t want to be around for either; it’s already impressively brisk in September, and we’re all on deck freezing our asses off as we stare out drop-jawed at this imperial blue so clear that you can see forty meters and more down into it, and the glacier-peaked Matterhorn clones that ring it to the north for as far as the eye can see.
Olkhon itself is a craggy, forested island a little smaller than Manhattan with cliffs as high as Moher in places and lots of majestic rocky outcrops from which to stare down and across to the mainland and beyond. Western Ireland on one side facing Switzerland and its Alps on the other, with the world’s only freshwater seals living along both sides. It is massively beautiful on a scale one shouldn’t bother trying to describe with mere words. An Alaskan passenger says it reminds her of Kodiak. All I can say is I’ve never seen anything like it. It is inhuman in scale, more like a dwelling for Norse gods or a hyperbolic medieval Icelandic saga, and the few small settlements that exist here seem so inconsequential in comparison that they look as if they could be wiped off the map by one strong wind.
The village where I’m staying is typical Siberian, which is to say it’s little more than a Hollywood Western movie set. Sand roads meander through rows of clapboard wooden cottages, with Soviet-era vans puttering past from time to time and the occasional cow lazing about. The town grocer is a one-room affair with pretty basic foodstuffs and a wide selection of beers. The post office sells canned goods and packets of pasta, and boasts the one Internet access point on the island. It looks much like the Swedish island village featured in Ingmar Bergman films, perhaps even more austere if that’s possible, with stereotypical rural Russian types chopping wood or loading a crate of eggs into the back seat of their car.
I’m staying at Nikita’s Guest House, a set of cottages with attached cafeteria, bar and a banya that got a positive write-up in Lonely Planet and is now crammed with backpackers, mostly from Europe and Australia. And now that I’ve suddenly hooked into the scene I find they all stay at the same places at each stop. All thirty of us or so are booked at the same hostel in Ulaan Bataar a week hence. Nikita’s has become such a popular stop-off that new cottage construction is ongoing at the edge of town to handle the summer overflow, with talk of an official hotel and paved roads a few years hence. Ten years from now the place will likely be unrecognizable, with a Club Med, a McDonald’s and a row of tatty souvenir shops. But for now it’s still the same old little peasant village that it has been for centuries.
The food is hearty and good here, blinis with elderberry sauce and something that tastes suspiciously like grits for breakfast and fresh fish and potatoes for dinner, with strong Siberian tea and mulled wine at the café until midnight or so. The bathroom facilities leave much to be desired but are at least an authentic Siberian experience: flush-it-yourself with a bucket of water toilets and an outdoor banya (traditional Russian bath) that’s open at night where a crusty old man named Nikolai thwacks you with tree branches before you jump in a steam bath, then (if you’re especially masochistic, which I am not) you pop off and drop yourself in the freezing waters of Lake Baikal for the official end-to-end Russian bath experience.
Just outside town is Shaman Rock, a soaring stone outcrop that the Buryat treat as one of the four important spiritual poles on the planet. I’m unfamiliar with Buryat cosmology, but they signify its importance with a wooden pole that looks decidedly Native American (as do some Buryats) and is decorated with colorful patches of fabric, scarves and baseball caps that have been nailed or tied onto it.
At night the sky above Baikal is packed with an impossible freight of stars. Shockingly, they have wifi here, so I’m able to load Google Sky Map on my phone, point it up and discern the names of various stars after drinking in the café has wound down and we’re headed back to our cabins. Thanks to Patrick Schoonveld for getting me to upload that app, it’s especially cool when you can actually see the stars!
But then the phone battery winds down and we’re left to our own devices in the chill night air as we stare up at the cosmos – the northern lights blinking spectrally along one end – and several of us come up with names for our own constellations. For example, this one here is the last woolly mammoth that ever lived; to escape the Buryat hunters it kept trekking north with that spear in its side until it fell off the top of the Earth and was enshrined in the heavens. And that one there is a drunken Cossack from the time of Ivan the Terrible who was shot into the firmament by a cannonball that misfired while he was loading it. He chases the mammoth all night and never catches it. And do you see that one there, with a necklace of pearls? That is Admiral Kolchak’s wife, a noblewoman of Irkutsk; when her husband was beheaded by the Bolsheviks, she threw herself from Shaman Rock and was swallowed by the sky.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Crossing Siberia
It is midnight in Moscow, 6am in Vladivostok and I lie somewhere in the expanse between, God knows where or when exactly, barrelling through the night, lurching further and further into Siberia, the bone-chill outside licking at me as I weave a bit drunk between cars, from the pectobah to my sleeping compartment. Outside you can see only the shadow-tree line flying past and a milkspill of stars like a million eyes passively looking back at you, a disinterested pantheon.
The trans-siberian is old school like an old Hitchcock movie. A period piece during wartime as you slide through the forest in the middle of the night toward an abandoned nineteenth-century train station lit up with hammer-and-sickle, the clack of the tracks scraping the bottom of the car as it turns, mile-long coal caravans slithering past, lumber stacked on flat-beds, in the rail yard random passenger cabs lit up and moving by slowly but with no people on them, linking and unlinking, ghost cars in a ghost station.
On the platform uniformed female attendants stand at attention outside each open doorway of our train, chit-chatting a bit as a robotic female voice makes pronouncements in Russian over the loudspeaker to an empty station. The sharp smell of creosote and woodstove. A mechanic pings the engines under each car with a rod, looking for leaks; they sound out like random marimba notes. A young German couple with backpacks wanders from door to door looking a little nervous. Inside the station there is only a sour-faced woman selling vodka and salami from a kiosk.
The stations are lively during the day. The platform is dotted with extremely nice old peasant women with headscarves selling whole smoked fish from wicker baskets, fresh yogurt with berries, sunflower seeds, tangerines, apples and bread. You can wander around for a bit, always a little nervous that the train may take off but elbowed forward by the desire to see a bit more, moving past Uyghurs and Tatars and Kazakhs, some oddball new thing sitting there waiting to be discovered, if you’re willing to take a risk.
The train compartment is old school, too. I had it to myself for the first two nights but a polite man named Sergei stepped aboard at Omsk (the city to which Dostoyevsky was exiled) and now lies snoring across the cabin from me. Two couch-beds facing one another in the narrow space with pillow and blanket and a small table in the middle, room up top for stuffing your luggage, a light socket for powering the laptop and a view out the window. Sergei has a coffee mug with a picture of his daughter on it that he keeps filled with some sort of carbonated home-brew. When you lie back and close your eyes the roly-poly back-and-forth rock of the train eases you into sleep rather quickly. On one side of each cab is a samovar, on the opposite an admittedly basic lavatory. No showers, but you can clean up a bit at the sink.
My fellow passengers are less aggressively interesting than one would hope, but pleasant. A number of middle-aged Russian men, some couples, a soldier here and there, and a smattering of tourists like myself. Easy enough to drink vodka with in the restaurant car, and I spent several hours yesterday getting my ass kicked repeatedly at chess by a banker named Vladimir who, aside from chessboard skills was notable for his persistent desire to discuss NHL hockey with me in excruciating detail – though his broken English combined with my grand total of ten Russian words and the black hole of my NHL knowledge-lack left him a bit heartbroken:
“Chicago Blackhawk. Very. Gut. Team!”
“Yes, the Chicago Blackhawks.”
“The goalie, what is name? He is strong.”
Blank stare.
“Their coach, he is gut man. They have same coach? What is name? Oh wait, checkmate! Haha. My friend, what you know about less, hockey or chess? Bahaha.”
Those who know me well know few statements could have burned my ass more than that one. I love chess.
Unfolding for us out the windows on either side of the car were an array of idyllic pastoral scenes as we passed over the Urals, none of the vast tulip fields I was promised by Dr Zhivago (what a rip-off), but still beautiful with the autumn leaves ripening into reds and golds over the ghost-white of so much birch-bark, bucolic farming villages with pretty wooden cottages and those omnipresent old ladies in babushkas carrying milk pails on either side of them, attached via long metal poles that are bent over the shoulders like in those great Flemish paintings. It’s no wonder Tarkovsky chose paintings by these Old Masters in the original Solaris to convey life on Earth to that strange alien being – so much of rural Russian life is captured in them. Further out, though, in Siberia proper the land flattens out into Kansas without corn for a day or so before resolving into more rolling hills beyond Krasnoyarsk.
The cities that punctuate this landscape are, for the most part, the most impressively depressing I’ve ever seen in the industrialized word, especially as you head further east. They seem like science fiction mining colonies on Mars. Some of the older ones have charming little city centers with parks, but even then these are dwarfed by massive dull-grey concrete block housing resembling penitentiary life. Tough places to live; the people here are hard-scrabble but warm enough in their way, certainly hospitable. They have the same jury-rigging skills as denizens of African cities; just now we’ve stopped in Tatarsk and a van rolls past held together with what looks like packing tape, a strategic bit of rope and a prayer, exhaust fumes belching loudly out of what passes for a tailpipe.
Weirdly, despite Stalin and his wholesale destruction, each town retains its shiny, ornate orthodox onion dome bell tower after all these years. It reminds me of three days spent travelling by boat down the Niger River seeing every wattle-and-clay hut village along the water with its own dry-mud mosque minaret. Even in the vodou regions of the Dogon there were giant stones in the center of villages meant to provide some manner of supernatural protection. In New York I suppose the World Trade Center used to stand in for the church tower. Perhaps the first thing an alien might remark on after visiting us is the omnipresence of these edifices, part flagpole, part antenna to the sky god.
Attached to these urban outposts are one or more of the Mordor nightmare complexes that pock the region and provide all the jobs, coal mines and chemical plants, grain depots and Godzilla-sized lumberyards, smelting foundries the size of cities, sometimes giving off an eerie effervescent red smoke overhead for a mile or more and crammed with elaborate industrial machinery which few people know the name for. It reminds me of nothing so much as driving through Nitro, West Virginia or Gary, Indiana on our way back from visiting relatives down south when I was a kid. These are the hidden sewers of western civilization, producing most of the power and much of the chemicals and raw materials that make Europe run from day to day. Whenever Russia threatens to cut off the Siberian spigot, panic ensues from Reykjavik to Kiev.
It’s hard not to think of the multitude of political prisoners transferred to Siberian gulags via this very rail line, some like Lenin and Dostoevsky by the czars but a vast majority of millions during Stalin’s extended reign of terror, in train cars like this one. Sometimes you can’t help but look out at this tremendous expanse of nothing through their eyes. A terrifying journey with an unspeakable end. When I mentioned this leg of the trip to my Latvian improv teacher and friend Silvija Ozols, her face jumped back for a millisecond as if I had said I was going off to a beach holiday in Birkenau. There are one or two small museums along the way at the site of former gulags, and a statue stands at the head of the Road of Bones further east, north of Vladivostok – where dead prisoners’ corpses were crushed and incorporated into the road itself. But for the most part all those millions of people were simply swallowed up whole and never heard of again, engulfed by this immeasurable, desolate landscape, so vast the human mind cannot quite compass it, even standing within it.
The trans-siberian is old school like an old Hitchcock movie. A period piece during wartime as you slide through the forest in the middle of the night toward an abandoned nineteenth-century train station lit up with hammer-and-sickle, the clack of the tracks scraping the bottom of the car as it turns, mile-long coal caravans slithering past, lumber stacked on flat-beds, in the rail yard random passenger cabs lit up and moving by slowly but with no people on them, linking and unlinking, ghost cars in a ghost station.
On the platform uniformed female attendants stand at attention outside each open doorway of our train, chit-chatting a bit as a robotic female voice makes pronouncements in Russian over the loudspeaker to an empty station. The sharp smell of creosote and woodstove. A mechanic pings the engines under each car with a rod, looking for leaks; they sound out like random marimba notes. A young German couple with backpacks wanders from door to door looking a little nervous. Inside the station there is only a sour-faced woman selling vodka and salami from a kiosk.
The stations are lively during the day. The platform is dotted with extremely nice old peasant women with headscarves selling whole smoked fish from wicker baskets, fresh yogurt with berries, sunflower seeds, tangerines, apples and bread. You can wander around for a bit, always a little nervous that the train may take off but elbowed forward by the desire to see a bit more, moving past Uyghurs and Tatars and Kazakhs, some oddball new thing sitting there waiting to be discovered, if you’re willing to take a risk.
The train compartment is old school, too. I had it to myself for the first two nights but a polite man named Sergei stepped aboard at Omsk (the city to which Dostoyevsky was exiled) and now lies snoring across the cabin from me. Two couch-beds facing one another in the narrow space with pillow and blanket and a small table in the middle, room up top for stuffing your luggage, a light socket for powering the laptop and a view out the window. Sergei has a coffee mug with a picture of his daughter on it that he keeps filled with some sort of carbonated home-brew. When you lie back and close your eyes the roly-poly back-and-forth rock of the train eases you into sleep rather quickly. On one side of each cab is a samovar, on the opposite an admittedly basic lavatory. No showers, but you can clean up a bit at the sink.
My fellow passengers are less aggressively interesting than one would hope, but pleasant. A number of middle-aged Russian men, some couples, a soldier here and there, and a smattering of tourists like myself. Easy enough to drink vodka with in the restaurant car, and I spent several hours yesterday getting my ass kicked repeatedly at chess by a banker named Vladimir who, aside from chessboard skills was notable for his persistent desire to discuss NHL hockey with me in excruciating detail – though his broken English combined with my grand total of ten Russian words and the black hole of my NHL knowledge-lack left him a bit heartbroken:
“Chicago Blackhawk. Very. Gut. Team!”
“Yes, the Chicago Blackhawks.”
“The goalie, what is name? He is strong.”
Blank stare.
“Their coach, he is gut man. They have same coach? What is name? Oh wait, checkmate! Haha. My friend, what you know about less, hockey or chess? Bahaha.”
Those who know me well know few statements could have burned my ass more than that one. I love chess.
Unfolding for us out the windows on either side of the car were an array of idyllic pastoral scenes as we passed over the Urals, none of the vast tulip fields I was promised by Dr Zhivago (what a rip-off), but still beautiful with the autumn leaves ripening into reds and golds over the ghost-white of so much birch-bark, bucolic farming villages with pretty wooden cottages and those omnipresent old ladies in babushkas carrying milk pails on either side of them, attached via long metal poles that are bent over the shoulders like in those great Flemish paintings. It’s no wonder Tarkovsky chose paintings by these Old Masters in the original Solaris to convey life on Earth to that strange alien being – so much of rural Russian life is captured in them. Further out, though, in Siberia proper the land flattens out into Kansas without corn for a day or so before resolving into more rolling hills beyond Krasnoyarsk.
The cities that punctuate this landscape are, for the most part, the most impressively depressing I’ve ever seen in the industrialized word, especially as you head further east. They seem like science fiction mining colonies on Mars. Some of the older ones have charming little city centers with parks, but even then these are dwarfed by massive dull-grey concrete block housing resembling penitentiary life. Tough places to live; the people here are hard-scrabble but warm enough in their way, certainly hospitable. They have the same jury-rigging skills as denizens of African cities; just now we’ve stopped in Tatarsk and a van rolls past held together with what looks like packing tape, a strategic bit of rope and a prayer, exhaust fumes belching loudly out of what passes for a tailpipe.
Weirdly, despite Stalin and his wholesale destruction, each town retains its shiny, ornate orthodox onion dome bell tower after all these years. It reminds me of three days spent travelling by boat down the Niger River seeing every wattle-and-clay hut village along the water with its own dry-mud mosque minaret. Even in the vodou regions of the Dogon there were giant stones in the center of villages meant to provide some manner of supernatural protection. In New York I suppose the World Trade Center used to stand in for the church tower. Perhaps the first thing an alien might remark on after visiting us is the omnipresence of these edifices, part flagpole, part antenna to the sky god.
Attached to these urban outposts are one or more of the Mordor nightmare complexes that pock the region and provide all the jobs, coal mines and chemical plants, grain depots and Godzilla-sized lumberyards, smelting foundries the size of cities, sometimes giving off an eerie effervescent red smoke overhead for a mile or more and crammed with elaborate industrial machinery which few people know the name for. It reminds me of nothing so much as driving through Nitro, West Virginia or Gary, Indiana on our way back from visiting relatives down south when I was a kid. These are the hidden sewers of western civilization, producing most of the power and much of the chemicals and raw materials that make Europe run from day to day. Whenever Russia threatens to cut off the Siberian spigot, panic ensues from Reykjavik to Kiev.
It’s hard not to think of the multitude of political prisoners transferred to Siberian gulags via this very rail line, some like Lenin and Dostoevsky by the czars but a vast majority of millions during Stalin’s extended reign of terror, in train cars like this one. Sometimes you can’t help but look out at this tremendous expanse of nothing through their eyes. A terrifying journey with an unspeakable end. When I mentioned this leg of the trip to my Latvian improv teacher and friend Silvija Ozols, her face jumped back for a millisecond as if I had said I was going off to a beach holiday in Birkenau. There are one or two small museums along the way at the site of former gulags, and a statue stands at the head of the Road of Bones further east, north of Vladivostok – where dead prisoners’ corpses were crushed and incorporated into the road itself. But for the most part all those millions of people were simply swallowed up whole and never heard of again, engulfed by this immeasurable, desolate landscape, so vast the human mind cannot quite compass it, even standing within it.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Moscow's Bowels
I love my little hotel in Moscow. It’s on a quiet street with a bunch of great old buildings in various states of decay, an outdoor farmer’s market, a local café chain outlet and a dribble of stolen wifi access. I trust the nation’s deteriorating relationship with the Ukraine to ensure that none of these farmer’s market pears are in fact from Chernobyl. And one block away a portal into the Moscow underground, by far the coolest subway system on the planet, redolent as it is of faded social realist opulence. I ended up spending much of the day travelling from one station to another and then getting out and exploring the environs for an hour or so. A great way to get to know the city, lots of surprises. And a great way to start this massive train voyage to end all train voyages.
Each Metro station is unique, apart from being slathered in high-end marble blocks head-to-toe. In one there is an impossibly enormous chandelier and preposterously imperious marble benches, in another there are mosaics with tractors in wheat fields and schoolchildren cheering as Soviet bombers pass overhead. One has cartoonishly huge marble Olympic torches punctuating the train platform, another is dominated by a series of social realist sculptures of workers heroically plowing fields, and Bolshevik insurgents male and female armed with rifles and accompanied by their loyal dog companions as they crouch and lie in wait for a whiff of the bourgeoisie. Muscovites touch the dogs’ noses for good luck as they pass en masse through the transit system, so that the snouts are rubbed to a shiny silver. Perhaps that’s why so much Egyptian statuary is missing the nose? The dogs’ won’t last into the twenty-second century. And it’s funny to see given the context; just as bland, rote superstition infected the monotheism that prevailed before, so it did into these temples of the communist mythology, and survived it. Knock on wood.
Inserted into all of the little unobserved bits of the train stations are jaw-dropping old deco light fixtures, air vents shaped in the form of stylized wheat stalks, etc. They are modernist aesthetic statements to rival the Chrysler Building or the Empire State, and it becomes clear that at the same time these two capitals, Moscow and New York, were engaged in a deadly serious, tooth-and-nail brinksmanship and competing global reaching there was a common aesthetic undercurrent at work in the great towers and infrastructure that nodded to one another and acknowledged they saw something common and new, and were creating it together. Art Deco really consists of borrowing all of social realism’s aesthetic trappings and bleaching out the ideology.
Over nine million people pour through this underground transit system each day, more than London and New York combined, and there is an etiquette to the chaos of being buffeted like a log down the Moscow Metro rapids that I haven’t managed to quite pick up. The New York choreography doesn’t cut it, I’m invariably in someone’s way. The locals seem nimble enough, even effortless as dancers, though mornings on the subway all of them are gruff as the stocky female attendants with scratchy woollen military uniforms, seemingly ripped from the era of Stalin, who sit in booths on either end of the platform and glower in an authoritarian manner to no apparent purpose.
Trying to make out the Cyrillic station names is no fun. Earnest as ever, your brain’s pattern recognition system keeps telling you it’s about to sort out the whole puzzle, there are short little stretches where they seem to converge, but for the most part it might as well be in “Alien”.
Things are considerably more chilled in the evening as people come home. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and heads to the nearest bar. As you rattle up the steep white semi-circular canyon of the station’s surface tunnel via escalator, you pass couples making out with abandon, teenagers surreptitiously passing around a bottle of vodka, businessmen with their ties askew and an unlit cigarette at the corners of their mouths, and an avalanche of handheld texting that could probably bring down a mid-sized cell phone tower. Up top, Moscow at the end of the workday becomes a vast sprawling hang-out, as if that rural Duane Reade parking lot where the kids from your home town in Topeka, Kansas hung out sitting on car hoods smoking, drinking and blaring crackly FM tunes from the dashboard radio exploded out into a vast multi-million-person mega-labyrinth. There are few more fun places to hang out at night, and with a distinct, unbending blue-collar “back in the concrete high-rise” vibe.
Finally, the musicians of the Moscow subway system are so far superior to those of New York that it’s like comparing John Coltrane to a junior high school kid learning to play a plastic recorder. And they have the guitar case out just like any random shmuck playing Hotel California over and over again at the Coney Island stop. In one station outside the Kremlin I saw a wind group nailing the Stravinsky Octet. A string quartet under Pushkin Square was rocking out to Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue. A lone violinist parted the commuter waters of Mayakovskaya like a dangerous rock in the middle of a river and planted every note of one of Paganini’s most perilous caprices. That was some bad-ass shit.
Oh, the city’s pretty cool too. Everyone is guarded here, but can be goaded into flashes of genuine warmth. It’s not even remotely as dangerous as Muscovites try to tell you, partly as a matter of pride – sorry buddy, you’re no Bedford Stuyvesant, you’ll have to try harder. There is radical affluence in many sections of Moscow, lots of jet-black Jaguars and Maseratis prowling the impassable ring roads, and some bang-up restaurants and clubs (thanks to Tim Evans for steering me to Propaganda). But the prosperity here is more widely shared than originally advertised back home. The post-apocalyptic expanse of concrete block skyscraper housing ringing the city is delivered almost as promised, except that most are clean and well maintained, have pleasant adjoining parks and posh adjunct shopping malls with neon movie multiplexes and brand name shops inside like Ikea and J Crew. There are even new, swankier looking high-rise concrete housing projects with signs up offering units for sale; the collectivist urban way of life appears set to continue under an improved economic setting. In the city center you have a real restaurant culture for all classes, with restos and cafes packed late into the evening across all of Moscow. Downtown is decidedly European, imposing urban piles tattooed with adverts for Nikon and Pepsi in Cyrillic, and the Kremlin is flatly magnificent. Unnoticed in the corners are all manner of hidden architectural gems like surviving wooden houses from the nineteenth century stranded on residential blocks, factories tattooed with hammer-and-sickles, used book stores with unwieldy piles of scientific texts stacked to the ceiling, and lost little stone churches that look more like Turkish mosques, boarded up for decades and starting to crumble.
All in all, a good day. My one disappointment is that they’ve shut down the Bolshoi ballet house for renovation. But then I remembered the night in music school when the Bolshoi came to town, my friend Karl Seeley snuck them out from under their handlers’ noses and brought them to a party at Jennifer Griffin’s house, and we proceeded to get them completely wasted -- until the US Secret Service showed up, castigated us menacingly and banished them back to their hotel. So I guess I’ve already had my Bolshoi experience.
Each Metro station is unique, apart from being slathered in high-end marble blocks head-to-toe. In one there is an impossibly enormous chandelier and preposterously imperious marble benches, in another there are mosaics with tractors in wheat fields and schoolchildren cheering as Soviet bombers pass overhead. One has cartoonishly huge marble Olympic torches punctuating the train platform, another is dominated by a series of social realist sculptures of workers heroically plowing fields, and Bolshevik insurgents male and female armed with rifles and accompanied by their loyal dog companions as they crouch and lie in wait for a whiff of the bourgeoisie. Muscovites touch the dogs’ noses for good luck as they pass en masse through the transit system, so that the snouts are rubbed to a shiny silver. Perhaps that’s why so much Egyptian statuary is missing the nose? The dogs’ won’t last into the twenty-second century. And it’s funny to see given the context; just as bland, rote superstition infected the monotheism that prevailed before, so it did into these temples of the communist mythology, and survived it. Knock on wood.
Inserted into all of the little unobserved bits of the train stations are jaw-dropping old deco light fixtures, air vents shaped in the form of stylized wheat stalks, etc. They are modernist aesthetic statements to rival the Chrysler Building or the Empire State, and it becomes clear that at the same time these two capitals, Moscow and New York, were engaged in a deadly serious, tooth-and-nail brinksmanship and competing global reaching there was a common aesthetic undercurrent at work in the great towers and infrastructure that nodded to one another and acknowledged they saw something common and new, and were creating it together. Art Deco really consists of borrowing all of social realism’s aesthetic trappings and bleaching out the ideology.
Over nine million people pour through this underground transit system each day, more than London and New York combined, and there is an etiquette to the chaos of being buffeted like a log down the Moscow Metro rapids that I haven’t managed to quite pick up. The New York choreography doesn’t cut it, I’m invariably in someone’s way. The locals seem nimble enough, even effortless as dancers, though mornings on the subway all of them are gruff as the stocky female attendants with scratchy woollen military uniforms, seemingly ripped from the era of Stalin, who sit in booths on either end of the platform and glower in an authoritarian manner to no apparent purpose.
Trying to make out the Cyrillic station names is no fun. Earnest as ever, your brain’s pattern recognition system keeps telling you it’s about to sort out the whole puzzle, there are short little stretches where they seem to converge, but for the most part it might as well be in “Alien”.
Things are considerably more chilled in the evening as people come home. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and heads to the nearest bar. As you rattle up the steep white semi-circular canyon of the station’s surface tunnel via escalator, you pass couples making out with abandon, teenagers surreptitiously passing around a bottle of vodka, businessmen with their ties askew and an unlit cigarette at the corners of their mouths, and an avalanche of handheld texting that could probably bring down a mid-sized cell phone tower. Up top, Moscow at the end of the workday becomes a vast sprawling hang-out, as if that rural Duane Reade parking lot where the kids from your home town in Topeka, Kansas hung out sitting on car hoods smoking, drinking and blaring crackly FM tunes from the dashboard radio exploded out into a vast multi-million-person mega-labyrinth. There are few more fun places to hang out at night, and with a distinct, unbending blue-collar “back in the concrete high-rise” vibe.
Finally, the musicians of the Moscow subway system are so far superior to those of New York that it’s like comparing John Coltrane to a junior high school kid learning to play a plastic recorder. And they have the guitar case out just like any random shmuck playing Hotel California over and over again at the Coney Island stop. In one station outside the Kremlin I saw a wind group nailing the Stravinsky Octet. A string quartet under Pushkin Square was rocking out to Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue. A lone violinist parted the commuter waters of Mayakovskaya like a dangerous rock in the middle of a river and planted every note of one of Paganini’s most perilous caprices. That was some bad-ass shit.
Oh, the city’s pretty cool too. Everyone is guarded here, but can be goaded into flashes of genuine warmth. It’s not even remotely as dangerous as Muscovites try to tell you, partly as a matter of pride – sorry buddy, you’re no Bedford Stuyvesant, you’ll have to try harder. There is radical affluence in many sections of Moscow, lots of jet-black Jaguars and Maseratis prowling the impassable ring roads, and some bang-up restaurants and clubs (thanks to Tim Evans for steering me to Propaganda). But the prosperity here is more widely shared than originally advertised back home. The post-apocalyptic expanse of concrete block skyscraper housing ringing the city is delivered almost as promised, except that most are clean and well maintained, have pleasant adjoining parks and posh adjunct shopping malls with neon movie multiplexes and brand name shops inside like Ikea and J Crew. There are even new, swankier looking high-rise concrete housing projects with signs up offering units for sale; the collectivist urban way of life appears set to continue under an improved economic setting. In the city center you have a real restaurant culture for all classes, with restos and cafes packed late into the evening across all of Moscow. Downtown is decidedly European, imposing urban piles tattooed with adverts for Nikon and Pepsi in Cyrillic, and the Kremlin is flatly magnificent. Unnoticed in the corners are all manner of hidden architectural gems like surviving wooden houses from the nineteenth century stranded on residential blocks, factories tattooed with hammer-and-sickles, used book stores with unwieldy piles of scientific texts stacked to the ceiling, and lost little stone churches that look more like Turkish mosques, boarded up for decades and starting to crumble.
All in all, a good day. My one disappointment is that they’ve shut down the Bolshoi ballet house for renovation. But then I remembered the night in music school when the Bolshoi came to town, my friend Karl Seeley snuck them out from under their handlers’ noses and brought them to a party at Jennifer Griffin’s house, and we proceeded to get them completely wasted -- until the US Secret Service showed up, castigated us menacingly and banished them back to their hotel. So I guess I’ve already had my Bolshoi experience.
Slouching Toward Somethingorother
I drive into Dublin from the airport on a drizzly Monday morning at dawn to find the city papered with posters that alternately demand YES and NO. They all seem really reasonable:
“YES to Jobs”
“NO to War”
“YES to Europe”
And so forth, sometimes stacked on top of one another in a surrealist totem pole of jingoistic truisms. I could easily imagine an art experiment whereby the logic is drawn out further:
“YES to sunlight”
“NO to child molesters”
“YES to puppies and grandmothers”
“NO to the bubonic plague”
Given the nonsense going on in the United States, supposedly over health care though the whole thing in the States has taken on more of a one-size-fits-all Timothy McVeigh tone of voice on the right, this smells like a blustery bit of bullshitting on the part of local politicans, but I never could have guessed the sheer surreal pointlessness of the argument in question. Turns out the entire city of Dublin has been tee-peed on behalf of an impenetrable bureaucratic document known as The Lisbon Accord, an effort to revamp EU organizational rules. The treaty is so long and arcane that even its supporters admit to never having read it, but its sheer opacity has turned it into an unlikely Rorschach blot.
Various demagogues are looking to enhance their national image on the back of this long, innocuous document. Taken in itself it has the inherent sexiness of a day spent draining bed pans at a nursing home combined with the soaring, evocative prose style of the interminable cubit measurements found in the Book of Leviticus, but here I am talking about it for several paragraphs so I guess we shouldn’t underestimate its allure.
My taxi driver is happy to propound the various conspiracy theories that are making the rounds at length. If passed, it will require conscription of an Irish force for immediate deployment to Afghanistan. It will force the country to legalize abortion. If not passed, the Euro will be withdrawn and the Irish banking system will collapse. A mysterious new political organization with the sinister name “Libertas” straight out of “The Da Vinci Code” has sprung to life and rallied the Irish people against it. No one knows where they came from our how their leader is funded, though many say – and I quote – “the US Army” backs them in an attempt to drive a wedge in European unity.
Various other fringe groups have jumped on board in an attempt to capture the public’s heart and thus one day the legislature, much to the chagrin of the stale barristers in Lisbon who prolongedly negotiated it into existence and assumed the various national legislatures would duly ratify it. But the Irish constitution dictates that all such treaties go to a vote, and the confused electorate have become fired up on the topic in a way they rarely do with issues that actually impact their lives in some measurable way. They’ve rejected the treaty twice, and the government keeps sticking it in front of them like a used-car salesman who won’t take “no” for an answer.
Meanwhile despite the global economic downturn – which is especially pronounced here in Dublin – Polish work crews are filling potholes and Ukranian baristas pound out lattes at breakneck pace in Starbucks across the city. Migration has slowed to a trickle, but the Europeans who already came here are sticking it out. When I pop into my favourite local pub The Cobblestone, a Slovenian gypsy string quartet still plays in the backroom to a packed audience as top Irish folk musicians jam in the front. Who knows if in twenty years the two styles will have influenced one another in profound and surprising ways.
I’m here for my last bit of work before the sabbatical officially begins, Google’s European Partner Day, where I will present our vision of the future for publishers to a couple hundred website entrepreneurs and big-wigs from across Europe. So I spend the first day tying up loose ends at work, then head out for a kebab at Zaytoon and a Guinness at The Bleeding Horse (a classic old pub featured in Ulysses) with my brothers-in-arms Tim Evans and Jacoby Thwaites from London and Atul Bhandari from Silicon Valley. The Bleeding Horse is old Dublin at its best – lots of nooks and crannies filled with lovers & inebriated mates and an open tap of Guinness at half the tables. Damn that local Guinness is delicious – it’s like ice cream here. And you can see why the city mourns for parochial old Dublin, and half-heartedly wishes to keep the world out despite the economic benefits.
The next morning at seven thirty I am awoken by my manically buzzing Google phone. It’s Pia Maltri, a remarkable young Italian woman who is organizing the event and leaves no stone unturned in ensuring that everything today goes like clockwork. As I sleepwalk through the day, going from keynote address on the future with Google, patiently explaining the intricacies of the new system where we open up AdSense to various and sundry ad networks to create a virtual stock exchange of buyers and sellers (imagine the demagogues getting ahold of that one), to breakout sessions on the importance of display and a panel of experts on the future of Internet advertising, Pia is never far away. When I stray off to a conference room to catch a half-hour nap, she dials to make sure I make it to the next session. At one point she dials my phone while I’m on the toilet. That said, Pia is really a singularly lovely person and it’s a pleasure to work with her; but I start to suspect over time that she has been warned that I am some kind of wild-card, and that it’s her job to keep me on the reservation.
The day winds down and they pack all 200 of us up and take us to a palatial old nineteenth century ballroom where we dine and drink. What an amazing group. There is the French serial start-upper who spends his spare time building cool new applications for our phone. The Croatian social network owner and the Spanish manager of Madrid’s main TV station and the German guy with an insanely successful online game site. There is old media and new,: the struggling Norwegian newspaperwoman and the guy who runs a popular network of blog sites, all of them struggling to find the right answer to how to transmit news and opinion in this strange new era. All of them rely on us to fund their business through Adsense; it’s both energizing and humbling to know we make all of these businesses possible, and that we have a profound responsibility to keep partnering with them properly.
These folks live a lot better than their American counterparts. It leaks out that I’m about to go on sabbatical and I am peppered with stories of the Dutch guy who sailed around the world in 18 months, the Austrian who quits his job every two years and heads straight for unexplored corners southeast Asia, and so forth. These are people I can understand, lions of the new industry though they may be.
Before we depart we are subjected to a Riverdance-style folk dance performance and a soprano singing “Oh Danny Boy”. So there are some aspects of old Ireland that no one can reasonably miss. And I love the new Europe, its energy and openness, the tangled web of languages and influences that enrich one another in surprising instances and point the way toward a better future for us all. Bring it on!
“YES to Jobs”
“NO to War”
“YES to Europe”
And so forth, sometimes stacked on top of one another in a surrealist totem pole of jingoistic truisms. I could easily imagine an art experiment whereby the logic is drawn out further:
“YES to sunlight”
“NO to child molesters”
“YES to puppies and grandmothers”
“NO to the bubonic plague”
Given the nonsense going on in the United States, supposedly over health care though the whole thing in the States has taken on more of a one-size-fits-all Timothy McVeigh tone of voice on the right, this smells like a blustery bit of bullshitting on the part of local politicans, but I never could have guessed the sheer surreal pointlessness of the argument in question. Turns out the entire city of Dublin has been tee-peed on behalf of an impenetrable bureaucratic document known as The Lisbon Accord, an effort to revamp EU organizational rules. The treaty is so long and arcane that even its supporters admit to never having read it, but its sheer opacity has turned it into an unlikely Rorschach blot.
Various demagogues are looking to enhance their national image on the back of this long, innocuous document. Taken in itself it has the inherent sexiness of a day spent draining bed pans at a nursing home combined with the soaring, evocative prose style of the interminable cubit measurements found in the Book of Leviticus, but here I am talking about it for several paragraphs so I guess we shouldn’t underestimate its allure.
My taxi driver is happy to propound the various conspiracy theories that are making the rounds at length. If passed, it will require conscription of an Irish force for immediate deployment to Afghanistan. It will force the country to legalize abortion. If not passed, the Euro will be withdrawn and the Irish banking system will collapse. A mysterious new political organization with the sinister name “Libertas” straight out of “The Da Vinci Code” has sprung to life and rallied the Irish people against it. No one knows where they came from our how their leader is funded, though many say – and I quote – “the US Army” backs them in an attempt to drive a wedge in European unity.
Various other fringe groups have jumped on board in an attempt to capture the public’s heart and thus one day the legislature, much to the chagrin of the stale barristers in Lisbon who prolongedly negotiated it into existence and assumed the various national legislatures would duly ratify it. But the Irish constitution dictates that all such treaties go to a vote, and the confused electorate have become fired up on the topic in a way they rarely do with issues that actually impact their lives in some measurable way. They’ve rejected the treaty twice, and the government keeps sticking it in front of them like a used-car salesman who won’t take “no” for an answer.
Meanwhile despite the global economic downturn – which is especially pronounced here in Dublin – Polish work crews are filling potholes and Ukranian baristas pound out lattes at breakneck pace in Starbucks across the city. Migration has slowed to a trickle, but the Europeans who already came here are sticking it out. When I pop into my favourite local pub The Cobblestone, a Slovenian gypsy string quartet still plays in the backroom to a packed audience as top Irish folk musicians jam in the front. Who knows if in twenty years the two styles will have influenced one another in profound and surprising ways.
I’m here for my last bit of work before the sabbatical officially begins, Google’s European Partner Day, where I will present our vision of the future for publishers to a couple hundred website entrepreneurs and big-wigs from across Europe. So I spend the first day tying up loose ends at work, then head out for a kebab at Zaytoon and a Guinness at The Bleeding Horse (a classic old pub featured in Ulysses) with my brothers-in-arms Tim Evans and Jacoby Thwaites from London and Atul Bhandari from Silicon Valley. The Bleeding Horse is old Dublin at its best – lots of nooks and crannies filled with lovers & inebriated mates and an open tap of Guinness at half the tables. Damn that local Guinness is delicious – it’s like ice cream here. And you can see why the city mourns for parochial old Dublin, and half-heartedly wishes to keep the world out despite the economic benefits.
The next morning at seven thirty I am awoken by my manically buzzing Google phone. It’s Pia Maltri, a remarkable young Italian woman who is organizing the event and leaves no stone unturned in ensuring that everything today goes like clockwork. As I sleepwalk through the day, going from keynote address on the future with Google, patiently explaining the intricacies of the new system where we open up AdSense to various and sundry ad networks to create a virtual stock exchange of buyers and sellers (imagine the demagogues getting ahold of that one), to breakout sessions on the importance of display and a panel of experts on the future of Internet advertising, Pia is never far away. When I stray off to a conference room to catch a half-hour nap, she dials to make sure I make it to the next session. At one point she dials my phone while I’m on the toilet. That said, Pia is really a singularly lovely person and it’s a pleasure to work with her; but I start to suspect over time that she has been warned that I am some kind of wild-card, and that it’s her job to keep me on the reservation.
The day winds down and they pack all 200 of us up and take us to a palatial old nineteenth century ballroom where we dine and drink. What an amazing group. There is the French serial start-upper who spends his spare time building cool new applications for our phone. The Croatian social network owner and the Spanish manager of Madrid’s main TV station and the German guy with an insanely successful online game site. There is old media and new,: the struggling Norwegian newspaperwoman and the guy who runs a popular network of blog sites, all of them struggling to find the right answer to how to transmit news and opinion in this strange new era. All of them rely on us to fund their business through Adsense; it’s both energizing and humbling to know we make all of these businesses possible, and that we have a profound responsibility to keep partnering with them properly.
These folks live a lot better than their American counterparts. It leaks out that I’m about to go on sabbatical and I am peppered with stories of the Dutch guy who sailed around the world in 18 months, the Austrian who quits his job every two years and heads straight for unexplored corners southeast Asia, and so forth. These are people I can understand, lions of the new industry though they may be.
Before we depart we are subjected to a Riverdance-style folk dance performance and a soprano singing “Oh Danny Boy”. So there are some aspects of old Ireland that no one can reasonably miss. And I love the new Europe, its energy and openness, the tangled web of languages and influences that enrich one another in surprising instances and point the way toward a better future for us all. Bring it on!
Saturday, September 12, 2009
September 11 in New York
Like most people I am lucky in some respects and unlucky in others. Who knows how to balance the two; when it's all over, the blackboard is erased before anyone has time to tally a final count and it doesn't even matter any more. And over time the good and bad get so inextricably mixed up with one another, so dependent in the long, rambling causal chain of events, that it's pointless to think of them as separate things.
I'm setting out on one of life's great adventures on Sunday, starting with a speech in Dublin for Google's European customers, moving on to Moscow and then wending my way across Siberia by train to Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, followed by another train to Ulan Bataar and Mongolia, the Chinese "iron rooster" to Beijing for the 60th Anniversary of the fall of Chiang Kai-shek, a trip to Guilin along the legendary Li River featured in so much ancient poetry, to Chengdu and the mythical mountain of Emei-shan, to Lhasa, Tibet and a drive all the way through the heart of the Himalayas to Kathmandu, a chicken bus through Nepal to India and Varnasi for the Festival of Lights, Agra, Aurangabad, Ajanta and Ellora, the fairy tale cities of Rajasthan and the massive annual camel fair at Pushkar, and finally a stint in the tropical paradise of Kerala to wind down before re-entering the workforce. I’ll be cataloging my experiences in this blog.
I should start by admitting I've been egged on to take this big trip by bad news. Three months ago a slight tremor below the right eye and at the corner of the mouth triggered a series of CAT scans and MRIs that led to a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. MS is an illness where your own immune system starts eating away at the insulation around the brain, until your neurons becomes islands unto themselves, like a conductor flailing his baton in a closet as the orchestra silently sits at attention in the concert hall awaiting instructions that never come. There are multiple potential outcomes, there are new, experimental drugs, but the whole thing is profoundly sobering and I’m not sure what the future brings.
It’s hard for me to be optimistic because I watched my wife break down a little over three years ago from a similar but even worse illness, PML, an opportunistic infection related to her being HIV-positive (a status I thankfully do not share, VERY lucky) that ended her life in a little over three months. PML is informally called "MS on steroids" and I remember every symptom quite vividly.
So fuck this, I’m enjoying life while I still can.
Google is letting me take the time off as an unpaid sabbatical. I’ve had multiple send-offs from various friends that have made the whole thing seem like a trans-atlantic bon voyage from a previous century. Last night Jeannie Gammon threw a remarkably debauched send-off in the old DoubleClick style complete with dancing, laughter, inadvisable texting to members of the opposite sex, free shots passed around and multiple incidents of a female colleague who shall remain nameless drunkenly ass-spanking male participants. Then my improv group, Lascivious Jones, gave me a really amazing goodbye present wrapped in paper that’s a photo of me in Mali with a kid wearing an Osama bin Laden t-shirt. My mother gave me a bible that her parents gave her when she went off to college. My musician buddies had a last jam session out on a private extension of the High Line. More revelries tomorrow night, and then I’m off.
It is September 11 in New York as I contemplate all of this, driving across the Triborough Bridge and looking out at the two beams of light that shoot upward into the overhanging clouds from Ground Zero. They’re no replacement for what was lost, but they have a singular beauty, built as they are on a foundation of disaster. It was a cold, rainy night like this one, eight years ago after the towers fell, when I wandered the streets of Manhattan and walked past the walls of leaflets flapping in the wind outside the hospitals and scattered across lamp posts along the streets, hundreds of forlorn little love-letters taped together in unruly rows and just about ready to fall down, the dead hope of them congealed into an organic monument with more profundity than anything that could ever be put together on purpose.
After awhile it was hard to keep looking at them and maintain a sense of the humanity of each, but every once in awhile one of them crawled up into your soul and took residence. One that jumped out at me was Winston, a middle-aged man whose face was everywhere then. I finally Googled him and found out that he lived on Long Island and cared for a wife with a profound disability, waking up at 5am to chop her food into tiny digestible bits each morning so that she could eat. I wonder what happened to her. Now that I think about it, she may have had MS.
I'm setting out on one of life's great adventures on Sunday, starting with a speech in Dublin for Google's European customers, moving on to Moscow and then wending my way across Siberia by train to Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, followed by another train to Ulan Bataar and Mongolia, the Chinese "iron rooster" to Beijing for the 60th Anniversary of the fall of Chiang Kai-shek, a trip to Guilin along the legendary Li River featured in so much ancient poetry, to Chengdu and the mythical mountain of Emei-shan, to Lhasa, Tibet and a drive all the way through the heart of the Himalayas to Kathmandu, a chicken bus through Nepal to India and Varnasi for the Festival of Lights, Agra, Aurangabad, Ajanta and Ellora, the fairy tale cities of Rajasthan and the massive annual camel fair at Pushkar, and finally a stint in the tropical paradise of Kerala to wind down before re-entering the workforce. I’ll be cataloging my experiences in this blog.
I should start by admitting I've been egged on to take this big trip by bad news. Three months ago a slight tremor below the right eye and at the corner of the mouth triggered a series of CAT scans and MRIs that led to a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. MS is an illness where your own immune system starts eating away at the insulation around the brain, until your neurons becomes islands unto themselves, like a conductor flailing his baton in a closet as the orchestra silently sits at attention in the concert hall awaiting instructions that never come. There are multiple potential outcomes, there are new, experimental drugs, but the whole thing is profoundly sobering and I’m not sure what the future brings.
It’s hard for me to be optimistic because I watched my wife break down a little over three years ago from a similar but even worse illness, PML, an opportunistic infection related to her being HIV-positive (a status I thankfully do not share, VERY lucky) that ended her life in a little over three months. PML is informally called "MS on steroids" and I remember every symptom quite vividly.
So fuck this, I’m enjoying life while I still can.
Google is letting me take the time off as an unpaid sabbatical. I’ve had multiple send-offs from various friends that have made the whole thing seem like a trans-atlantic bon voyage from a previous century. Last night Jeannie Gammon threw a remarkably debauched send-off in the old DoubleClick style complete with dancing, laughter, inadvisable texting to members of the opposite sex, free shots passed around and multiple incidents of a female colleague who shall remain nameless drunkenly ass-spanking male participants. Then my improv group, Lascivious Jones, gave me a really amazing goodbye present wrapped in paper that’s a photo of me in Mali with a kid wearing an Osama bin Laden t-shirt. My mother gave me a bible that her parents gave her when she went off to college. My musician buddies had a last jam session out on a private extension of the High Line. More revelries tomorrow night, and then I’m off.
It is September 11 in New York as I contemplate all of this, driving across the Triborough Bridge and looking out at the two beams of light that shoot upward into the overhanging clouds from Ground Zero. They’re no replacement for what was lost, but they have a singular beauty, built as they are on a foundation of disaster. It was a cold, rainy night like this one, eight years ago after the towers fell, when I wandered the streets of Manhattan and walked past the walls of leaflets flapping in the wind outside the hospitals and scattered across lamp posts along the streets, hundreds of forlorn little love-letters taped together in unruly rows and just about ready to fall down, the dead hope of them congealed into an organic monument with more profundity than anything that could ever be put together on purpose.
After awhile it was hard to keep looking at them and maintain a sense of the humanity of each, but every once in awhile one of them crawled up into your soul and took residence. One that jumped out at me was Winston, a middle-aged man whose face was everywhere then. I finally Googled him and found out that he lived on Long Island and cared for a wife with a profound disability, waking up at 5am to chop her food into tiny digestible bits each morning so that she could eat. I wonder what happened to her. Now that I think about it, she may have had MS.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Hi all, I'll be using this as a blog that recounts my adventures from sept 15 - nov 15 on my world tour of russia, mongolia, china, nepal and india.
For now, here's a map outlining the course of the journey:
View Sean Harvey 2009 Trip in a larger map
View Sean Harvey 2009 Trip in a larger map
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