Bad Company

After my anti-KLM rant earlier this week, I thought it time to exclusively reveal some of the other major companies that have incurred my wrath and made me resolve to never use their services again. This is a list of companies that have bothered me personally rather than the usual list of companies that are run by known fascists, do cosmetics tests on animals, dissuade mothers from breastfeeding, and are in bed with the Israeli army, are into the factory farming of animals, and just generally clog up the planet with shit food and worse packaging (list available on request). It goes without saying that these companies are the lowest of the low. (Before long a comment will appear on here accusing me of being "feel-good" and "knee-jerk" because of this paragraph.)

So, anyway, companies that I want to name and shame here are:

1. UPS. Some time ago I ordered a laptop computer over the Internet and had it delivered to a friend in the US who was coming over to visit. There wasn't much time between the order and the time of his departure, so I paid extra for super fast overnight delivery. But the computer didn't arrive. Even three days after I had ordered it overnight. It finally showed up 5 days later, after my friend had left. Obviously this meant I had to make other arrangements for getting hold of it and had to wait a while longer to receive it.
   
   Now, in the grand scheme of things, this inconvenience was minor and no more than an irritation. What bothered me about UPS's role in this was their refusal to offer me an apology, despite repeated complaints and requests. Also they didn't offer me a refund of the extra payment I made for overnight delivery. They refused anything. So, these days whenever I order anything online I ask the seller if they use UPS and choose not to buy if the answer is yes. Which will probablynot bother UPS in the slightest, but if they;d been prepared to just send me an email saying "Sorry, we messed up your order" I would be quite happy to use them. I'm guessing that lack of apology has cost them about $50 to this point, and will continue to do so. Hah. Take that, Useless Pathetic Scumbags!
   
   
   
2. Mastercard. I have a bank accouint in the US, for which I have a cashpoint card issued by my bank in association with Mastercard. This allows (or allowed) me to access my money wherever I am, which was very convenient. But then, without warning, and for no apparent reason the card stopped working. It came while we were away for a few days, and left us with no money.
   
   I later discovered that this was a decision of Mastercard rather than the bank and involved them denying the use of their cashcards in Romania, through some kind of racist caricature of Romanians as corrupt thieves. As far as I can tell, this only applies to Romanians (I found I could use it in Ukraine, for example). Once again, while the policy itself is merely a minor inconvenience, the lack of warning and the complete lack of apology when I complained, was the thing that really bugged me.
   
   "Pissing off your customers by arbitarily fucking with them? Priceless"

I have to go now, you'll be sorry to hear, so any further vitriol aimed at unfeeling multinational conglomerates completely uninterested in the individual customers will have to wait.

The bird flu

We've got it. We (and by we, I mean the Romanian nation) have been sniffing and coughing all week, and now the doctor has confirmed that it is indeed bird flu, or, as it more commonly known to the layman H5N1.

So now, nobody's buying Romanian poultry, and all the hens and stuff in the Danube Delta region are being slaughtered. It's not clear to me exactly why this is, so I thought I would use this space to see if I could work it out. This is what I know:
1. So far bird flu has passed to a few humans, and it's pretty deadly when it does. The big fear is that eventually the virus will mutate into a form (H5N2? H5N1b?) that can be transmitted between humans.
2. To contract bird flu you have to be pretty much spending your working life knee deep in chicken shit (you can't get it from eating chicken or eggs for example)
3. Bird flu has arrived in Romania in ducks that have migrated to (or via) the Danube Delta. It wasn't some chicken who hitched a lift from Kazakhstan
4. Birds fly, and migrate, and will therefore spread the virus whatever we do (aside from killing the entire avian population of the planet)
5. The way that we have of dealing with this problem is to kill all poultry in the areas where bird flu has been found.

So, the logic behind 5 is , I presume, that by killing poultry you lessen the chances of people catching the virus, which in turn lessens the chance of it mutating into some new virulent form. Which does in fact make sense. Bit of a bummer for the people who keep chickens (the majority of whom in Romania are just normal folk with a few fowl in their back garden, and who are therefore not in any danger - if I've understood correctly), but still I guess not an especially illogical policy. I had been thinking that it was a bit futile what with the fact that birds fly around and stuff, but I do see the point behind it.

Mind you I've written all this now, so while it may have been rendered utterly pointless by me actually applying the miracle of reasoning to the sounding off I was about to do, I'm not about to delete it. So, well, here you go.

We've got bird flu. That's the extent of the value of this post. And you probably already knew that anyway.

Sorry to have wasted your time.

Kyiv (4) - a bunch of pics

Kyiv's most famous confectioner and his master work. 


A cathedral with green trim 


A cathedral with blue trim 


That square where everyone revolted 


Kyiv Richards 


Main street, at the weekend when it's closed to traffic 

Kyiv (3)

Other random things:

Fans of Reginald Perrin will be delighted to learn that there is a fairly expensive looking shop right in the centre of Kyiv called “Grot” (or “ГРОТ” actually, but believe me it’s the same thing)

One afternoon I came upon a platoon* of soldiers cleaning up the autumn leaves from the streets, which seemed like a remarkably good use of an army. Much better than sending them round the world to kill Iraqis or whatever my country does with its army. During their free time (which in autumn when you’re on leaf sweeping duty isn’t that much probably), the same soldiers seem to congregate in downtown Kyiv at specially set up booths where you can pay a small sum to test your punching power by wellying a leather sack as hard as possible. (*I’m not exactly sure what a platoon is and how it compares to a troop or a battalion or a division or a flock or whatever other collective nouns for soldiers there are, so I may be mistaken there)

Kyiv is one of the world capitals for sex tourism, as I was reminded regularly by the English language local press all of which seemed to have faux-shocked articles about how big a problem it is, and listing the websites one could visit to prove to oneself about how shocking it indeed is, and filling up their advertising space with escort agencies and massage salons (in one case under the charmingly euphemistic catch-all classified heading of “Acquaintances”). Given the prevailing street fashions I’m not entirely sure how the would be sex tourist goes about deciding which girls are actually on the game – while in most cities a group of girls standing around a street corner wearing the shortest possible micro skirts and knee high leather stiletto-ed boots late in the evening might be assumed to be of a certain profession, here they’re probably just waiting for a taxi.

Completely unrelated to that last paragraph, though it amuses me to deny the non-existent link in order to conjure up an image in your mind’s eye, Kyiv airport on Sunday was packed with orthodox Jews. Really. Loads of them. It was like being in Tel Aviv (well, Tel Aviv airport without the hours and hours of mental torture masquerading as security, without the interminable and insane questions “You’ve been in the West Bank? Did you meet any Palestinians there?” “What’s in this toothpaste tube?” which are all designed as a not so subtle way of letting you know that you’re not welcome in Israel and that in order to dissuade you from returning they’ll make your last memory of the country as hellish as possible.) I’m not sure if they’d all been attending some orthodox Jewish conference where they discussed the best way to get your hair into those long ringlet things, or new designs in small plastic boxes to strap to your forehead, but they were certainly out in force. I imagine the conference had been obliged to finish on Friday but all of them had been forced to remain until Sunday trapped in hotel rooms unable to turn on the TV or call room service. I know that Ukraine had a big Jewish population before Stalin and Hitler got their insane genocidal hands on it, but I wonder whether there’s much of a community left these days (or whether people have started to return).

The ones on my flight must have really suffered though. For reasons known only to themselves it seems KLM have decided to cut costs on their flights by vastly reducing the service on offer – no more can you get special food, so my orthodox companions were stymied for a kosher snack, and I was unable to eat the cheese-filled rubbish they thrust at me. Also, there is no alcohol served on KLM now (well outside of first class) – this was possibly less of a problem for the orthodox Jews, but it certainly bothered me unreasonably. Why they have done this is not clear to me – in order to compete with the low cost airlines you’d think that normal airlines would have upped their service offerings since they can’t lower their fares to the EasyJet level. But hey, maybe they’ve seen a niche waiting to be exploited in the high cost, no frills airline sector. Idiots.

Kyiv (2)

To start with, and since it’s a bit of a tradition on this blog, name 5 famous Ukrainians (my answer is below).

I like Kyiv. The Ukrainian spelling works better I think since people seem to pronounce it Kee-uhv rather than Key-ev, the way I’ve always assumed and heard it pronounced by British football commentators. By the way, and on a totally unrelated tangent, someone recently pointed out to me that football is the reason why a lot of British men have a fairly good knowledge of geography (in the capitals and other major cities sense of geography rather than the formation of U-shaped valleys sense). We know where Tbilisi is, and Liege and Malmo and Porto and Krakow and Craiova and a hundred other European cities, purely because of the club competitions. We also have a fairly good idea of Latin American geography for the same reason (we find it difficult to pinpoint Surinam or Guyana on a map of South America because they’re the countries that aren’t in the CONMEBOL qualifiers). With the recent rise of African football, I imagine that the younger generation are becoming familiar with Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire and Cameroon. This is why young US Americans are lagging behind in geography – not because of bad teaching but because they’re not interested in football.

But, as usual, I digress. Kyiv. Big wide 19th century boulevards flanked by large imposing buildings, in the style of Paris or Barcelona (or not really, but you get the idea). I imagine Bucharest was possibly once like this too, before Ceausescu got his hands on it. I know I keep banging on about the destruction of Romanian cities at his hands, and obviously in the grand scheme of things knocking down a few old buildings was one of the least of his crimes, but it’s just the major remnant of his regime that you can’t avoid seeing everywhere. [On another architectural note why were the years of the mid to late 20th century so godawful? Who told architects that what the world needed were large monolithic hideous in your face concrete clad monstrosities? It’s not just in the communist world either – I lived in Coventry and spent a lot of time in Sheffield, two cities greatly damaged by bombings in the second world war, and they too, were rebuilt as if by someone with a grudge against society and aesthetics. What was going on?]

Today (actually Saturday - that's when I wrote this, but haven't been online until now) I went around the city, guided ably by Tanya my host, and saw some of the sights. It’s a nice place. We went to some orthodox cathedrals, and the old bit, and the river bank, and this long winding steep street full of people selling things I didn’t want. One church I actually went into – Tanya not, because she had forgotten to bring a scarf for her head. Obviously Ukrainian orthodoxy is a harder version than Romanian since I’ve never seen women unable to enter a church for want of a head scarf at home. It throws up quite a contrast in fact as the prevailing fashion among young Ukrainian women is something which should be, but probably isn’t, referred to as “slut chic”. So you get the slightly paradoxical sight of women in miniskirts, fishnets and 10cm stiletto heels donning a head scarf in order to wander round a church and pay their respects to some saint or other. Pictures will follow (of the buildings and so forth, not the scantily clad Kyivans, you’ll be sorry to hear).

So, five famous Ukrainians. I imagine that it is a measure of my lack of culturedness that the ones I can think of are all politicians recently in the news and sports stars. Sergey Bubka, Andrei Shevchenko, Viktor Yushenko, Yulia Timoshenko and Leonid Kuchma. Last time I was in Ukraine I was introduced to a famous opera singer (not literally, but by name and reputation through a small museum in Lviv), but I have no idea of what her name was. Bit sad really. Mind you, even though I do know some Romanian writers and architects and stuff, the first five Romanians that I’d think of for a similar question would be Ilie Nastase, Gheorghe Hagi, Nadia Comaneci, Nicolae Ceausescu and Ion Iliescu, so it still ends up the same.

Small pleasures

One of the things I like to do in a new city is to work out how to get around. Above ground I find that pretty easy - for whatever reason I am pretty good at working out where I am and how to get to where I want to go on foot. I have the kind of mind/learning style that lends itself to mental cartography or something. Really, I'm much better at it than almost anyone I know. It's not an especially proud boast, but it is, I suppose, a boast. So sue me.

But one of my favourite things in a new city is to use the metro system, and work my way around underground. Last night I did just that with my first free evening. The metro station is fairly close to where I'm staying, so I wandered over to the big green "M" that I had seen hovering up a large pole. There were food stalls, bus stops, kiosks, tons of people, but nothing that I was looking for (viz: a large hole in the ground with steps leading down). I wandered for a while, following groups of red herrings disguised as people, until finally I realised that the biggest crowds were entering and exiting a nearby office building. This, as you may have guessed, turned out to be the station.

There was a huge queue for the ticket office, so I joined it. It was all very orderly and nobody pushed in at all (although a cute girl sidled up to a boy of roughly her age near the front and sweetly asked if he'd buy her token for him, which of course he did). I was a bit concerned that they would get sniffy at my large notes - the smallest one I had was a 50 hrivna note (approx $10) which I suspected would be a lot for a metro ticket - but when I got to the front I held up five fingers and gave her the note, and she took it. For some reason she actually sold me 10 tokens, rather than 5. Maybe she thought I wanted five return journeys or possibly standard Ukrainian hand gesture interpretation calls for doubling all figures thus indicated. Still, the price of these 10 tokens was only 5 hrivnas, or approximately one US dollar. Which is pretty cheap for metro tickets, in my opinion. You can't even enter the station in London for that kind of money.

The next task was to get the train. This sounds easy, but of course it's easy when you can read the map and follow the directions, but less so when you are doing it in the strange encoded world of cyrillic. So, I went down the ridiculously long escalator (it must be hell when it breaks down) for what seemed like half an hour, but was probably something like 3 minutes, and came to the signs indicating which platforms served which stations. I had previosuly looked at my map and knew I wanted to go to the main street which I knew began in Ukrainian with a Җ, so i just looked for that and then went on to the platform. Spot on, and another notch on my belt of metro travelling excitement. Trains were packed (even when i came back at around 11), but since there are always a lot of scary looking skinheaded young men in Slavic countries (as a general rule) I was not unhappy with that fact. Much better to share a carriage with tons of sweaty people than with two that you are a tad scared of.

I may just spend the weekend riding up and down the city popping out at random stations just to see what's there. After all, I still have 8 more tokens to use up.

(By the way, does getting a small thrill off using underground trains make me a metrosexual?)

КИЇВ

No idea if that title will come out in your browser, but it says (I think) Kyiv in Ukrainian (though it could be Russian since it seems both languages are used almost equally here).

Anyway, not much time to write much save to say that Kyiv/Kiev is big. Very big. It makes Bucharest look like a provincial city - and since Bucharest makes Brasov look like a small provincial town, and Brasov makes Miercurea Ciuc look like a remote hamlet, I think you can imagine the culture shock I am going through. Well, I'm not really because I've barely left the school where I'm working and the apartment in which i'm staying (which happens to be 100m up the road). This morning, I had a spare hour so clutching my map of "Central Kiev" I set off on a walk. After half an hour I'd barely crossed into the next grid reference. It's bloody massive. Anyway, I have some time on Saturday so will check out the interesting bits - various orthodox cathedrals, Dynamo Kiev's stadium, the river Dnipro, Victor Yushenko's skin condition, faded orange TAK! flags, etc etc.

I watched a bit of the music channel on TV here this morning, and noticed a striking contrast with its Romanian counterpart. On the Romanian version to fill up screen space for their attention-challenged teenaged audience, they invite you to SMS your name and the name of your boyfriend/girlfriend and then some random computer generated bollocks pops up predicting the chance of your relationship being "the one", purportdely based on some scientific methodology of name matching. Here in Ukraine you are invited to SMS your name and your year of birth, and the self same scientific computer analysis will randomly chuck out the amount of money you are likely to get (in the next year? in your life? its not clear to me). I'm not sure if this twist tells you anything about the cultural differences between Romania and Ukraine. (The financial gains are written out in Euros which only goes to show how much penetration the Euro has gained. When I was in Lviv in 2002 it was dollars or nothing.)

Work

It never rains but it pours, is, I believe, the pithy saying of relevance right now. And I’m not referring to the weather, although it is apparently flooded in Bucharest again - much to my astonishment since it’s been a glorious Indian summer up here with nary a drop of rain for the last fortnight.

No, I am referring to the life of a freelance* worker. Having spent the last week doing an intensive course on intercultural communication (of which more later, when a moment can be spared), I am now preparing for a team building workshop this afternoon and then later tonight set off for Bucharest for the first leg of my ridiculous journey to Kyiv (via Amsterdam – see previous post on this subject). I’ll be home at about 4am on Monday, and then will start another intensive week-long course on educational management at about 10 that same day. For a workshy fop such as myself, it’s a daunting workload. Is this what fatherhood’s all about? Sacrificing the opportunity to arse about on the internet all day long in order to work one’s bollocks off in the name of financial security?

(Why “freelance”, by the way? Sounds like a campaign to liberate the winner of the last seven Tours-de-France. Or an offer to rid one of boils for no payment. Hmmm. I’ve looked it up in the excellent Online Etymology Dictionary and it seems like it came from a term for medieval mercenary, which I suppose I ought to have guessed.)

We took the opportunity of a free couple of days this weekend to bomb off to see the in-laws in Targu Mures, which was good. I was pressed into picking grapes (as opposed to being picked to press grapes), and found myself quite enjoying it. As a teenager I hated my occasional forays into paid fruit picking work, but maybe this was because I, a criminally under-oppressed middle class white lad who fancied himself as the Cesar Chavez of South Cambridgeshire, was working for the man. In this case I was working for the greater good of my community and family (or something) and so actually felt good about the whole enterprise. I suppose it wasn’t entirely altruistic as I do end up drinking a significant quantity of the wine that is produced from these grapes, but all the same, I feel it added to my sense that we’re all happier when doing work that contributes to something other than a pay packet for oneself and profits/share dividends for someone higher up the chain. I realise this is an old-fashioned viewpoint, but screw fashion.

After the grape and walnut picking activities were over (fresh walnuts, by the way, are gorgeous), we retired to a bar by the river where we met up with various cousins and had a beer or two. There were two blokes there who had clearly been drinking all day – seriously fucked up. I realised that I will probably never be like that again, and while I don’t exactly regret that fact (one day of drinking these days leaves me out of commission for a week), there is a certain pleasure to be had from just sitting down at lunchtime for a pint and ending up losing track of time and sanity.

The scenery right now is gorgeous. Driving to and fro across Transylvania through the multicoloured autumn leaves was frankly stunning. Having lived in Vermont for six years, I know stunning autumns when I see them, and believe me, I’m seeing one here. Hopefully all the leaves will still be on the trees when I get back from Ukraine. Transylvania must mean “beyond the woods” but I’m not sure which woods we’re beyond – seems to me like we’re in them.

Flood season

Obviously the whole year seems to be flood season in Romania if 2005 is anything to go by. But that's your macro-flood. This week is (in Csikszereda at least) micro-flood season. This is inundation not on the river valley or vast plain level, but on a much smaller scale. Mostly confined to the individual apartment, for example. Or often one apartment and all the apartments directly below it.

This is because it's the week that the heating gets turned on. The way heating works here is that each neighbourhood has this large central factory like building in which they generate all the hot water for the whole district. For the warmer months this means just the water that comes out of the taps, but in the winter they have to up the capacity and start pumping it around the radiator circuit as well. It's not in the least bit cold yet, and in fact the last few days have been gloriously warm and sunny, but it's the end of September and hence, by some arcane system it is time to turn on the heating.

But of course when the heating is turned on after 6 months being off, during which time people have repainted their apartments or moved things around or things have rusted or even detached the radiators to clean or paint behind them, there is the very real chance that water will start dripping, trickling or in the worst case spraying wildly out of the joints or out of cracks in the piping. And so, this is the week when there are numerous cases of water dripping from your upstairs neighbours and vast amounts of work for plumbers and radiator repair men.

It seems our apartment and those above us are OK. Which is good news. Erika's school on the other hand had a problem and they got an irate lower neighbour screaming blue murder at them. I've just got back from the shop having bought him a free tub of white paint, courtesy of the school. No idea if that will pacify him, but what else can you do?

Sinking to a new low

This evening I sent my six year old stepdaughter out to buy me a bottle of beer. Which she did. I believe the next step is to send her round the corner to score me some crack.

To be fair (i.e. to make me look not quite as bad), she was going to the shop anyway, and I asked as a bit of a joke assuming that she wouldn't be able to, but then her mother affirmed that she would be able to without a problem. So, I swallowed 6 years of living in the heavily-alcohol-conscious US and promptly handed her an empty bottle to exchange for a full one. (And some money, they don't, sadly, just exchange empty bottles for full ones without accompanying financial inducements).

Bit busy this week teaching an intensive course so may be posting occasionally and at less length than normal.