Live from Austin!

While we were in England, we got the train from Bournemouth to visit London.

London was an important part of my life as soon as I was old enough to be allowed to travel there without adult supervision. Some people are naturally country folk, some people are city people; even though I grew up in small villages and quaint towns, that was never where I really wanted to be.

I was curious to see how London had changed since I last saw it, nearly 10 years ago. We arranged to stay overnight with Shimrit in Stoke Newington, which Sara amusingly misheard as “Stoat Newington”.

Memories fade, and my main reason for going to London was to take my new video camera and visit a bunch of familiar places and record them; the streets, the buildings, the traffic, the crowds.

We arrived at Waterloo Station, so we started off by wandering towards the Thames and taking a look at the London Eye. The Eye had been built some time after I left the country. I’d seen it on Doctor Who, but not in real life. We didn’t actually go up in it; there was a long queue, and the ride itself would have taken another half hour or so out of our busy schedule. There were more important places to see.

We crossed over to the Houses of Parliament. They were protest-free, thanks to the new “Serious Organized Crime and Police Act”, which bans such serious crimes as holding up a banner outside Parliament. We continued on to Parliament Square, where some Iraq war protesters were quietly camped out along the fence facing Parliament. Across the street, heavily armed police kept everyone away from their elected representatives.

We turned right and headed along Whitehall, past the Treasury and Cabinet Office. Some tourists were gawping at guardsmen outside Horse Guards; it’s good to see that the Queen is doing her duty and keeping the Colour regularly Trooped. We passed the old War Office; and defra, who were probably busy panicking over the latest outbreak of foot and mouth.

Trafalgar Square was disappointingly blemished by scaffolding, tarpaulins and wooden hoardings. It was also full of sky rats, of course, but they’re expected, so you can’t really call them a disappointment. We stopped at a small Italian restaurant nearby for a spot of lunch, then continued towards Leicester Square.

As we walked past the Odeon towards Piccadilly Circus, everything started to get very familiar, and I started to get tearful. The Swiss Centre is still as it was, and the Trocadero hasn’t changed much. Apparently the former is due to be modernized a bit, so I was probably lucky to get to experience it in its retro cuckoo clock glory.

We visited tate modern, of course. One thing we always missed in Boston was a decent modern art gallery, and Austin isn’t much better, though the Blanton does try.

By the evening, we were exhausted. We had some vegetarian curry at a restaurant near Shimrit’s pad, then crashed on the futon.

The next day we tried to take things a little easier, and started off at Oxford Circus for a day of shopping.

Now, I could be misremembering, but it seemed to me that the crowds were far worse than ten years ago. It was a rainy English summer day, but the herds of people reminded me more of the run-up to Christmas. We struggled towards Tottenham Court Road, ducking into stores here and there.

Given the current exchange rate, we tried to buy as little as possible; but inevitably, there were books, CDs and DVDs unavailable in the US which we were unable to resist. We went in to HMV, but tried to limit ourselves to stuff with a single digit price.

We had lunch at The Plaza, which had mysteriously moved the food court up to the second floor and made the basement vanish entirely. Baked potatoes. They’re not nearly as popular in the US. I used to buy one most Saturdays, from a guy with a cart in the Market Square in Cambridge.

Tottenham Court Road is still just like it used to be. I even recognized several of the gadget stores. The infamous Centre Point is still there, and still unnavigable by foot. The Telecom Tower is still visible from Oxford Street, but sadly sanity has prevailed and its existence is no longer an official secret.

The biggest change to London is that there are now coffee shops everywhere. Back in the 90s I had to bring an espresso machine back with me from Italy; now, you can’t walk for more than a minute or two without finding somewhere offering Illy or some other variety of “Genuine Italian espresso”. And tasty snacks, too. I definitely approve.

One good English food item I had forgotten about until I saw them at Waterloo Station was the pasty. I wonder if there’s somewhere in Austin that will sell me a good pasty?

Anyhow, we finished up our day with a little book shopping at Foyle’s and Borders, then got the train back to Bournemouth.

Tower Records holds a special place in my heart. The store in Piccadilly Circus was one of the places I would try to visit every time I traveled to London. Back in the early 80s the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street was the place for obscure music, but by 1990 they had jacked up the prices and cleared out the unpopular stuff. Tower kept the prices reasonable and had an unrivaled selection of imports and obscurities. It was there that I discovered DEVO, and later completed my collection. It was there that I found Holger Hiller.

When I visited the US, Tower in Boston was second only to Newbury Comics. But another ten years went by, and Tower started to go downhill. Prices rose to HMV-like levels, and some idiot decided it was a good idea to file every disc by genre, a decision made worse by splitting electronica into ambient, house, techno, acid, dub, trance, and so on. Quick, where’s the Aphex Twin? Err…

So I wasn’t surprised when the company filed for bankruptcy in 2004. And I’m not surprised that they’re filing for bankruptcy again now, this time for good. A quick browse reveals only 2 Tangerine Dream albums, both priced at $38 (yeah right). There are practically no CDs priced below $18. Thom Yorke’s solo album isn’t listed (who he?), and if I didn’t already have Hail to the Thief I wouldn’t buy it from Tower for $34.

So it goes. Music sales is an unforgiving business. Stores seem to go through a golden age of awesomeness, but at some point the prices get too high or the selection gets too poor and they slide into irrelevance. Newbury Comics was heading that way when we left Massachusetts, sad to say.

So where do I get CDs now? Mostly from half.com and Amazon marketplace; stores typically break the $12 limit.

In case anyone’s slightly interested, my new Birkenstocks are Richmond in Cordura. I think I’m going to have to order a second pair and stash them away.

See, when I listened to the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy radio series season 2, I didn’t feel that the whole Dolmansaxlil sub-plot was excessive at all. Like Douglas Adams, I had had the experience of walking the length of Oxford Street, visiting every wretched shoe shop, in the futile hope that one of them might have a pair that would actually fit my feet.

The strange thing is, I knew so many people in England with the same problem. Go to America, they’d say. Or Germany. You can get shoes that actually fit your feet there. Only in England could an entire industry ignore the fairly basic requirements of its customers.

Which is not to say that it’s easy to find shoes that fit in America; however, it’s possible. Whereas I only once recall finding well-fitting shoes that didn’t need insoles in the UK.

God, what a pointless and trivial journal entry.

We walk to the waterfront again in the morning. In the daylight we can see how shabby all the buildings are.

It was once forbidden to take photographs of the bridges; they were considered military targets. Nobody seems to care now.

We go in to a featureless shabby building. It turns out to be the bank; there’s a guard behind a screen in the outer lobby. Everything looks typically Soviet—faded painted official notices, dim lighting, institutional color paintwork, bored clerks. However, on one wall is an electronic display showing exchange rates.

Today’s official rate is 1416 rubles to the UK pound. We walk back out again. A soldier sitting in a jeep watches us, and makes a note of something on his clipboard.

Once we’re a discreet distance away, we suggest to Olga that an exchange rate of 1000 rubles per pound sterling seems very reasonable to us. She protests, and starts trying to work out the right amount on a piece of paper. I hand her £15 and badger her to hand me a round 15,000 rubles. She gives in.

A private currency transaction like this is still strictly illegal, though we suspect nobody will care too much for such a small amount of hard currency. However, we have other police business to attend to. Olga must report that we are staying with her, or she will risk a hefty fine for harboring foreigners illegally.

We call in at the police station, and check the times for reporting ourselves. Wednesday and Friday, 10-12a.m., so we’ll have to come back another time.

We cross the bridge to the Hermitage and the Winter Palace, now a giant museum of fine art. In spite of the peeling paint, the buildings in this part of the city are beautiful and majestic. The gold-coated domes of buildings in the distance glint in the sunlight.

I feel like I’ve landed on Mars. Having grown up during the Cold War, Russia has always been the distant enemy you’ll never see unless they invade… and now here I am, standing in Russia, surrounded by the enemy—and their children at play. It doesn’t seem real.

Olga has a word with a man standing guard at one of the rear doors of the Hermitage. He offers to let us in for free. Olga’s mother says it’s God thanking us for our earlier generosity.

The art collection encompasses European and Russian art, including Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet and DaVinci. I hear an American tour group go past; their guide says “These paintings are by Monet. He’s famous.”

Olga is our tour guide; she worked as an official guide for Intourist during her student days.

The building is incredibly over the top inside, and it reminds me of St Peter’s in Rome. There are dinner tables made of solid slabs of lapis lazuli, giant columns of green malachite, that sort of thing. And of course, there’s gold leaf everywhere.

The Golden Room, incredibly, has even more gold. It almost looks as though the Czar must have had King Midas as a houseguest. There’s so much splendor that it winds the dial right back around to tasteless again.

I find myself understanding why there was a revolution. OK, so Communism sucked, but the Czar wasn’t much better. At least after the revolution the people could look at all this stuff, even if they still lived in poverty.

For an afternoon snack, we have open sandwiches. Apparently Russians typically have breakfast, an afternoon meal at 3 or 4 p.m., and an evening meal at 8 or so.

We head into the middle of the city. At the Metro station there are women selling kotyonki, grey fluffy kittens.

The large state-owned shopping mall (like the famous Gum store in Moscow) has been privatized. The space is now taken up by hundreds of independent franchised shops. LEGO, VRs, Philips TVs, Tampax—you name it, you can get it. Assuming, that is, you can afford it.

The difference is stunning to XQ: “Mathew, I don’t believe it, they’ve got Toilet Duck!”

We consider getting some nice coffee for Olga, since we drank quite a lot of her Russian coffee the previous night. We decide that she would be insulted, and would assume that we were really buying it for ourselves because the Russian stuff tastes awful. Besides, unknown to her we have all kinds of non-perishable treats in our suitcases, including coffee—we’re hiding them until we leave, so she won’t serve them to us.

We walk down Nyevsky Prospekt, which is Leningrad’s equivalent of Oxford Street. (Officially renamed or not, everyone still calls it Leningrad.)

We pass a shiny new hotel, sticking out from its surroundings like a Rolls Royce in a junkyard. There aren’t any Rollers outside it, but there are a few BMWs. It’s a joint Russian-Western venture.

The skyline of the Square of the Uprising has been enhanced with a huge illuminated neon Philips sign. You can still see the Communist red star on the top of the obelisk, though.

We decide to visit a hard currency shop, as XQ has forgotten to bring shampoo. The idea of a hard currency shop is simple: it’s a place which actually stocks all the things you can’t get in a state-run store. The snag, if you’re Russian, is that they won’t take rubles in payment. To avoid time wasters, there’s a bouncer to keep out the riff-raff. He checks that we both have credit cards. This establishes that we have access to hard currency.

We look at the array of goods on offer, and fight off waves of guilt. We leave with shampoo and nothing else. Later at a kiosk we give in and buy two Snickers bars, and a hair band for XQ.

We notice that most of the people going into the hard currency stores look decidedly iffy. I wonder if there’s a special clothes store for con-men and crooks to buy suits at, as they look exactly like you’d expect a con artist to look like at home. Come to think of it, Boris Yeltsin looks like a used car salesman.

We visit the University where XQ stayed during her months here studying. In those days, it was still CCCP. I still can’t really believe I’m here. Everything seems so…normal. Well, apart from the crazy alphabet, anyway. XQ says it probably doesn’t seem strange because Leningrad is such a European city. In fact, walking along the wide streets of Vassilivski Island, I’m reminded of Boston, Massachusetts more than anywhere else.

Dinner that night is a big improvement on the first night. It’s a Siberian dish consisting of bits of meat wrapped up in tiny parcels of…well, pasta really. It’s basically Russian tortellini. They taste great, presumably far too good as they are served with vinegar. I make up for my inability to eat the previous night; this is one special treat I don’t have to force down.

Olga seems much happier once I’ve eaten, and so am I. For a while the day before I had been worrying that I’d find everything inedible, and end up raiding McDonald’s in Moscow.

I’m offered some genuine Russian vodka. Soviet issue, in fact. I feel obliged to try it. I imagine gasoline must taste quite similar, and I cough a bit. I decide it’s an acquired taste, and that I’d really rather not acquire it.

We watch the famous “600 Seconds” TV show on St Petersburg’s local TV channel. The camerawork is incredibly amateurish, like a bad home-made video. Afterwards, there are two episodes of a Mexican soap opera dubbed into Russian. The man providing the dubbed voice just speaks the words in monotone over the top of the original soundtrack. As the characters play out their drama, their voices remain completely deadpan. XQ finds it hilarious, and I probably would too if I understood Russian.

Olga tells us a Russian joke:

A tourist from the west is walking down Nyevsky Prospekt, looking at the architecture, when he falls into a pit in the pavement. Some workers are standing nearby.

“Hey,” he says, “this pit is dangerous. You should put some red flags around it to warn people.”

“What, didn’t you see the red flag on the boat on the way over here?”

The sun is still shining at 11p.m. when we go to bed.

We went to the Neuruppin town library and browsed through the bookshelves. Many of the old DDR-produced books are still on the shelf; they can’t afford to replace them all at once. I had a look through some of them.

The Modern English textbook was interesting. It started off in the usual way: “This is John. John lives in a house in England. John has a dog called Fido.”

However, by chapter 8, John was attending Trades Union rallies and campaigning for workers’ rights. Set texts included speeches by union leaders from the British Labour movement. Questions included “Why do workers in capitalist societies need to join Trades Unions?”

There was also a short paragraph which (the book helpfully explained) was what a capitalist had said when asked about an “investment” he had made. This paragraph was followed by some questions:

The capitalist said “I had to risk everything”. What was he risking? Who does it belong to? Who would have suffered if his investment had been foolish? What are the effects on society of his behaviour?

Later, in a chapter on shopping, questions included this one:

Why did John worry that he would not have enough money to buy the goods he needed? How do we avoid such problems in a modern Socialist society?

A follow-up question said:

Write about a shopping trip of your own to your local store. You may find the following phrases useful:

• wide selection of goods
• good quality products
• cheap and affordable prices
• friendly and efficient service

Even XQ laughed at that one. She’s been to Russia.

The picture books are no less bizarre. I looked through a picture book of Berlin. The pictures of happy, smiling people in 70s clothes (this was a book printed in the mid 80s) were interspersed with little poems, like:

Many happy people live and work in Berlin
capital of the DDR
A modern socialist society
liberated with the help of the Soviet Union

The picture book of London was more subtle. The pictures of shopping streets, for example, weren’t taken in Oxford Street, but instead in a run-down district near Soho. There were plenty of pictures of the House of Commons and Buckingham Palace, and pictures of policemen staring sternly at the camera. Pictures which showed people in close-up seemed to be around ten years old; obviously they didn’t want to show 80s fashions or cars.

We wandered through the library to the literature section. Charles Dickens had been incredibly popular under the old regime, although now his novels were clearly labelled Fiction. The old DDR reprints were still on the shelves, though. The English textbook had included some passages from Dickens, of course, with the expected questions about why young children in capitalist societies were forced up chimneys and made to steal by capitalist men.

The text was laughable to my eyes, but the picture books were really quite subtle. They were propaganda exercises of course, but spotting the bias was quite tricky, even for me.

Of course, the fact that many of the pupils in the school remember being a student in the DDR only makes things more uncomfortable for the teachers. Even the non-Party members had to read out official announcements—and read them out with every ounce of enthusiasm and sincerity they could fake lest one of the pupils report them to the Stasi.

As late as 1988, all the teachers in Neuruppin had had to read out a class announcement which had basically said:

“I’m afraid your fellow pupil insert name will not be joining us again. He and his family have defected to the West. This is a time for great sorrow. It is bad enough that his parents decided to defect, but he has betrayed his country by going with them.”

Obviously even the most naïve pupils in the Sixth Form now take what teacher tells them with a large pinch of salt.