We waited over a month to do our McDonald’s video for Thailand, knowing that if we did, we’d be able to wrangle our friends into trying it with us after they arrived.  That was a long time to wait to try a Samuari Pork Burger, let me tell you!  Was it worth the wait?  You’ll have to watch the video to find out…

Not much to say about Thai McDonald’s that we don’t already say in the video.  I will say that it’s darn difficult to find cover footage for editing when you’re shooting five people with one camera.  See if you can may spot any editing tricks I might have used to avoid a jump cut!

Thanks again to Wendy, Dusty, and Sarah for helping out (we certainly wouldn’t have tried so many things without them!)  We’ll eventually see them one more time when I put together a video about our shared experience at a Thai cooking school.  In the meantime, be sure to read about their take on Thailand on their blog, Roam the Planet!

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Thailand
2. PVX: McDonald’s in Argentina
3. PVX: McDonald’s in Estonia

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment |

Out of all the countries we visited on our trip around the world, Thailand was the one in which we spent the most time. 61 days, over two visits.  It has since gone down on our list of places we want to return to someday, but when we first arrived, we were not impressed.

We had been traveling fairly quickly ever since Africa and by October we were both ready for a break.  While we were still in Russia, we planned out the last three months of our trip.  In order to conserve money – we had just officially gone over our travel budget – we wanted to find a place to sit down and rest for a while.  I sent out a request on Facebook and Twitter and asked our friends and followers for their recommendations in Thailand.

We received a lot of good advice, but ultimately had a hard time taking advantage of it because we were set on a month-long rental.  We checked Craigslist and various vacation rental websites, but the vast majority of listings were only available in the largest cities or most touristy areas.  We debated traveling out to the remote islands until we found a place to our liking, but ultimately took the easy way out.  We spent just a couple days in Bangkok, recuperating from our jet lag, before flying to Phuket and following up on some leads there.

The first place we stopped was in party central, Patong.  I can’t even remember why we chose that town, because foam-party nightclubs, seedy massage parlors, and plentiful weed are not on our list of travel necessities.  Nevertheless, Oksana found us a cheap hotel away from the beach, and we stayed there a week.

Prices were low, as October is still officially the off-season.  And no wonder – it rained hard just about every day we were in Patong.  That didn’t bother me especially much because I had just come down with my first cold since leaving home almost a year and a half before.  For the next week, all I wanted to do was lie in bed and sleep.  Easier to do during the day – night were miserable… at least until I visited the pharmacist, a real life anime character, who prescribed me some heavy sleeping pills.

Unfortunately, just as I was about to get over my cold, Oksana picked it up.  Most of our month off was spent battling head and chest colds.

Eventually, we left the Starbucks and McDonald’s behind by moving just four kilometers down the island to Karon Beach.  The oceanfront was prettier, the tourists more family oriented, and both of those things suited us just fine.  For about $19 per night, we stayed in a huge hotel room, venturing out once a day to the pool or to place an order at the on-site restaurant.  We caught up on some internet stuff, rested our travel-worn feet, and worked on our tans.

Prices went up on November 1^st with the official start of the high season, but we didn’t mind.  Our friends from Roam the Planet were due to arrive any day and, with our batteries recharged, we were ready to hit the road again.

Because of the record flooding that was going on in central Thailand during our stay, we didn’t get to see as much of the country as I’d hoped.  Most of the things I noticed about Thailand came from the few places we did spend some time: Bangkok, Phuket, the Phi Phi islands, Chiang Mai, and Koh Mak.

Hello!

“Have you showered yet today?”

That’s apparently a colloquial greeting in Thailand.  Kind of like, “Hey, how’s it going?”  When our host in Koh Mak told me that, I had to get the full story.  How in the world does “Have you showered yet today?” mean “Hello?”

He explained that it’s very hot and humid in most parts of Thailand and when welcoming someone into your home, it’s considered polite to offer them the opportunity to freshen up before socializing.

That makes sense, I suppose.  Definitely more than “How’s it hanging?” or “What’s up?”

Bowing

You’ve probably seen the typical Thai greeting, or wai, in movies or on television at some point.  Palms together, prayer-like, accompanied by a short bow.  Not knowing what was socially expected of me, I usually just nodded my head in response and said “thank you” or “hello,” whichever seemed more appropriate at the time.

Reading up on it now, I see that there’s a lot of room for nuance in the gesture.  How close the hands are to the face, how deep the bow goes.  I guess if you’re being polite, you’re also supposed to perform a wai when asking permission to leave someone’s house.  All these unspoken rules remind me of the warning to never point your foot at another person.  Just another peculiarity of the Thai culture.

As an American uninitiated to their culture, I something think I must have been the equivalent of man swaggering down the street, middle fingers raised to shoulder height, belching and farting at everyone that passed.

Dancing

Can you picture a traditional Thai dance?  The slow, undulating movements of colorful and elegantly dressed women?  The lithe and gentle movements from the wrist and elbow, the tips of the fingers lightly touching and forming intricate shapes?  I think of it as a “hand dance,” though I doubt that’s what it’s called.

We were discussing this dance with a couple from Oxford who happened to be traveling on the same bus one day.  Zissy (I think her name was; wish we’d exchanged contact info!) wondered aloud if the slow and meticulous dance could be a result of their living in a hot climate.  It wouldn’t take much to work up an unsightly sweat in Thailand.

What a fascinating idea!  We started comparing other cultures’ traditional dances.  Do colder climates have more energetic dances in order to raise the body temperature?  I couldn’t help but think back to a cold night on an island in the middle of Lake Titicaca, where our entire Spanish class was pulled into a scene straight out of National Geographic.  While the Quechua men got drunk and played their instruments, the women cut loose and dragged us onto the darkened city hall, their makeshift dance floor.  Their dances were all energetic skipping in woven formations while legs and arms pumped up and down.  The musicians must have been jamming – I swear each song lasted at least 15 minutes.  We were dying from the altitude.

Anyway, I think Zissy might be on to something.  There’s got to be a doctoral dance thesis in there for someone.

Photography

I learned to travel at the same time I learned to take pictures.  I bought my first 35mm SLR just before going to Ecuador, which was essentially just my second trip out of the country.  In hindsight, I regret that my eye for composition developed in Latin American countries.  Why?  Because I learned not to point my camera at people.

In most of Latin America – South America especially – it’s considered rude to take someone’s photo without asking.  I can understand why.  If you’re a photogenic, traditionally-dressed Peruvian living in, say, Cusco, you’re going to have a lens shoved in your face every day of your life.  It’s like being famous – stalked by paparazzi! – without any of the perks.

So as I was learning to use a real camera, my subjects were ruins and landscapes.  I always felt guilty when I tried to take market photos and saw all the vendors turn their heads and hide behind upraised arms.  Sure, I could buy something from them first, or give them a “tip,” but I wouldn’t capture anything spontaneous or candid if I did.

In Thailand, I noticed, everyone liked having their picture taken!  At the Festival of Lights, we’d get right up close with our cameras and they would actually stop what they were doing and pose for us.  As we walked alongside a parade, you could tell the participants on the floats would actively seek photographers out.  They’d lock eyes with you, through the viewfinder, and then nod and smile after you lowered the camera.  It was a novelty for me.

(Oksana, by the way, is much better at people photography than I.  I would guess that she took most of the people photos you’ll find in our photo albums.)

Language

Let’s get this out of the way right now: There’s no standardized way to spell Thai words with the Roman alphabet, but place names with a “ph” in them are most definitely not pronounced with an English “F” sound.  The “h” in “Phuket” is pronounced as a tiny puff of air, hardly said at all:  “Pahoo-KET.”  So, no, you can’t have much fun with the name of that island. Don’t worry.  We’ll always have Koh Phi Phi.

I thought it would be Africa or Eastern Europe that would have tripped us up, but Thailand was the first country in which we really had difficulty communicating.  Just like anywhere else, there are plenty of people who speak English circling around the tourism industry.  It was when we left that protective bubble that we were in trouble.

In the Thai language, simple, monosyllabic words can be have different meanings depending on the tone in which they are said.  The five basic tones are easy to remember.  They are rectus, gravis, circumflexus, altus, and demissus.  Ha ha, just kidding!  They’re also called mid, low, falling, high and rising.

Think of it this way:  The word “mai” can mean either “wood,” “silk,” “burn,” “new,” or “not,” depending on how you pitch your voice when you pronounce it.  I remember a story my uncle told me about learning the language in a classroom (he lived in Thailand for a couple years in the early 70s.)  His whole class was driven crazy by a single, tone-deaf student endlessly repeating the instructor’s words in a flat monotone.  Thai would be hard (for me) to learn.  I can hear the different tones; I just can’t keep them straight in my head.

If you’re at all interested (and like having your mind blow), watch the first minute of this video on Youtube (decide for yourself if you want to continue after that; it only gets more confusing as you go!)
Thai Language Lessons: Tone Rules Explained

In all honesty, it was even difficult for me to speak English with Thai people.  For one thing, it was almost literally impossible for them to pronounce my name.

“Arlo.”

“Aaah-ro?”

“No.  Ar. Lo.”

“Arrrooo?”

“Close.  Ahr. Lho.”

“Allll rrrro?”

“Okay, sure.  Let’s move on.”

(I didn’t take offense; I couldn’t pronounce their names, either.)

Just listening to the musicality of the language, it seems to me that Thai is all about the vowels.  Words flow into sentences very smoothly and consonants are rarely harsh or abrupt.   Because our own languages influence how we learn others (which is why practically everyone has an accent when they speak in a foreign language), Thai people can be especially difficult for an American to understand, even when they’re speaking English.

I once stopped in at an airport McCafé to grab some drinks to take to the gate with us.  I asked for a mango tea and a caramel macchiato.  The girl behind the counter looked up and asked, “Aaah oh eye?”

“Excuse me?”

“Aaah oh eye?” she repeated.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”  I looked quizzically at the other girl standing behind the counter.

“Aaah oh eye?” they said in exasperated unison.  “The macchiato. You want it aaah or eye?”

“Oh, ‘iced!’  Yes, I’d like it iced please!”  Hot or iced.  I was blushing in embarrassment as I paid for the drinks.

Apparently, this is a common problem.  The next time I tried to order something in a McDonald’s, they slid a big, plastic, picture menu across the counter and asked me to point and what I wanted.

The only other interesting tidbit I have about the language is that people in northern Thailand are able to speak with people from Laos.  I asked the woman who ran our hostel in Chiang Khong if it was the same language.  She said it wasn’t, but explained that Northern Thai (there are four distinct Thai dialects) is about 90% the same as Laotian… or at least the Laotian dialect they speak right across the border.

“Wat,” did you say?

I always thought the word “wat” meant “temple” in Thai.  Turns out, it means “school.”  Which makes sense, when you consider all those temples are actually monasteries.

I don’t know much about Buddhism, monks, or wats, but I enjoyed taking pictures of those monasteries.  The architecture Thais use in their places of worship is so colorful and ornate!  Plus there are dragons and elephants and demon warriors!

Food

How can I write about Thailand and not mention Thai food?  Looking over my notes, it’s surprising how many things fall into that category.

I assume most people are already familiar with Thai food.  I’ll just say that I was surprised how much better it can be in the country itself.  When their curries and soups are made with fresh local ingredients, it’s like everything I had before was a shadow of what it could have been.  Plates are cheap (though portions are small by American standards) and we tried everything from seafood to chicken to pork and beef.  Overall, Thailand is a delicious country in which to find oneself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean everything is good…

Oyster Sauce

What exactly is oyster sauce? It’s on every table in Thailand.  Is it for oysters or made from oysters?  You know what?  Either way, it’s not for me.

Mayonnaise

There’s not a lot of mayo in Thai food, but we were living there for a month and there were certain things we stocked up on.  One was mayonnaise, or whatever that creamy white stuff they call mayonnaise is over there.  Sorry, but mayo shouldn’t be sweet.

Dyed Food

When we first arrived in Thailand, both Oksana and I noticed some unnaturally bright and colored foods in the markets.  Inky wet fruit that looked like it would stain your clothes, candy-green mussels spread out on ice, eggs and lettuce that were a shade of green I’ve never seen in nature before.

At first, I would have sworn up and down that they’d been dyed to make them look more appealing on display, but after two months in the country and seeing the same colors in different cities, I’m starting to wonder if that might not be the case.  Who knows?  Maybe the colors are just brighter over there!

Fruit

I thought the jungles of South America had the best, most exotic fruit in the world.  I was wrong.

What fun we had touring the fruit markets of Thailand!  Our favorite fruit there, hands down, was rambutan.  I’d never seen it before a trip to Ecuador a couple years ago and introduced Oksana to it in Zanzibar last year, where they called it mshokishoki.  The red and yellow fruits are covered with soft spines and contain a seed inside, surrounded by sweet white flesh.  You pop them open, eat the flesh and spit out the seed.  Rambutan are nature’s gummi bears.

Oksana sampled everything.  There were dragonfruit, which was kind of bland, but looked like cookies and cream flavored ice cream on the inside.  Tamarind grew in long pea-pods, but dry and brown like a giant, segmented peanut.  Inside were sticky red seeds surrounded by a network of ropy red veins reminiscent of that alien fungus in the latest War of the World’s remake.  Lycee was like rambutan’s less flamboyant sister, while Longan fruit was its dull, earthy brother.  And of course, there’s durian, which smells as bad as you’ve heard, but actually tastes better than you’d expect.  Kind of like a citrusy-banana-y kind of thing.  I never tried sugar apples nor purple mangosteen, but Oksana said they were both good, too.

Bananas, pineapples, papayas, coconuts, mangos, guava, melons, jackfruit, oranges, pomelos, starfruit (carambola), and strawberries: Thailand also has all the things we’re already familiar with.  It’s a fruit-lover’s paradise!

Bread

Throughout our travels, Oksana and I have made it a habit to seek out decent bakeries.  I enjoy stopping by in the morning and grabbing a quick and inexpensive breakfast to go.  At some point we realized that we hadn’t come across a single bakery in Thailand.

I’m sure they exist, but it’s rather surprising how little Thais use bread in their cuisine.  I got to wondering why that is and realized that it probably has something to do with rice.

When we flew into Bangkok, I remember looking out the window and seeing nothing but miles and miles of flat land, endless fields filled with nothing but water and rice. Seeing all that stagnant water, I couldn’t help but think about snakes and mosquitoes and how we skipped our Japanese Encephalitis vaccinations.  I wondered why Thailand didn’t raise a less water-intensive grain…

…and then I realized I had it the wrong way around.  The heavy monsoon rains that hit Thailand every year mean that rice is the only thing they can grow.  So maybe a lack of wheat is one reason they don’t have much bread in Thailand.  Or it may just be that all the noodles they eat fulfill the same dietary requirements.  At any rate, we wouldn’t find a decent bakery again until Laos.

Drinks

The drinks in Thailand – the soft drinks and juices and such – are amazing.  I don’t know what they are, but they’re amazing.

The cooler section in the stores are filled with dozens (if not hundreds) of varieties of drinks.  I wish I could tell you what they all were, but often they didn’t have any English on the label.  Those that did were often meaningless.  “The Original Soy Peptide: Peptein!”  What do you suppose that tastes like?

Oksana and I experimented a bit the first month we were there, but when our friends arrived, we recruited them into sampling some of the crazier stuff with us.  We recorded a video of the drinking game we played.

Aphrodisiacs

If, despite the ubiquitous prostitutes, go-go bars, and seedy erotic massage parlors, you somehow missed the fact that Thailand was a sexually liberal country, all you’d need to do is check out the coolers in the local grocery stores.  Sprinkled in among all those crazy Thai drinks are a huge variety of liquid aphrodisiacs.  Granted, many of them are probably just energy drinks marketed toward a different crowd, but still.  Would you want to be seen sipping on a tiny vial of something called “Hang Foreplay?”

Straws

Every time you buy a drink at the store, whether it’s a soda or a juice or an iced coffee, the cashier will hand you a straw.  They have tons of them up by the counter.  Makes me wonder about the sanitary condition of the lids – we definitely found a few cans of Diet Coke with crud smeared all over the top.  We felt safe drinking from the plastic bottles, however.

Beer

Thailand doesn’t have a lot of variety in its beer.  You’ve basically got three big brands to choose from: Chang, Singha, and Leo.  To me, a micro-brew only kind of guy, they all taste about the same.  Bad, that is to say.  Except that, on a really hot day, and when the beer is really cold, they somehow transcend their badness and become pretty good.

But that’s neither here nor there. What surprised me about beer in Thailand is that they often serve it over ice.  That’s just weird.

Service

When Oksana and I ate out together, I’d say there was a 50/50 chance we’d be served at the same time.  When we ate out with our friends, it never happened.  In Thailand, they serve food when it’s ready and the cook doesn’t make much of an effort to time the dishes so they hit the plates at the same time.  This often resulted in four hungry people waiting for the last person to be served while pointedly ignoring the delicious, cooling food in front of them.

Eventually we made a pact. Forget being polite; eat when you’re served.  Besides, Thai food is meant to be shared around the table anyway.

Cinemas

I’ve been in some good movie theaters in my time, but nothing like they have in Bangkok.  I’d trade every Cineplex and IMAX I’ve ever been in to have a good Thai theater near my home.  They’re amazing.

Oksana and I only had the opportunity for one high-end cinema experience, when we watched Contagion in a Nokia-sponsored “Ultra Screen” in Bangkok.  It cost us $45 USD just for just the two tickets, but that was okay, because it was almost a religious experience.

First, we were given the option to relax in a comfortable lounge where an usher promised to escort us to our seats just before the previews and commercials ended.  Our seats were leather recliners paired off and separated from the other 20 seats in the room by a semi-circular divider.  There were even pillows and blankets, if we wanted to get more comfortable.

One thing you have to do in a Thai cinema, however, is rise for the national anthem that plays as a music video just before the movie begins.  “Long live the king!”

I get the impression that Thais really get the cinema experience, too.  They’re very respectful during the movie.  They don’t talk or use their cell phones.  Hate to say it, but I think I value their cinema culture even more than the U.S.’s.

May be a good thing we don’t have many theaters like that in the States, though.  I’d blow my paycheck every weekend.

Shoes

Everyone takes their shoes off when they go inside.  Everyone.

Surprisingly, even the hotels and hostels we stayed at contained two pairs of flip-flops so no one would have to walk around barefoot.  In that respect, it was a lot like Russian homes.

But in Thailand, they take it to extremes.  All of the temples (sorry, wats), as well as most of the smaller businesses – dentists, doctors, offices, dive shops – request that you to leave your shoes at the door.  Fortunately, restaurants and supermarkets had no such rules.

“No shirt, shoes(!), no service!”

Fingernails

In Thailand, it’s not uncommon to see a man with a pinky fingernail grown out to ridiculous lengths.  Having grown up in the 80s, all I could think was “cocaine user.”  That couldn’t be it, though.

Turns out, it’s most likely a symbol of social status.  People who have to do hard, physical labor for a living are not able to grow their fingernails out.  If, on the other hand, you have a nice white collar job (or whatever the equivalent is over there), then I guess a well-manicured pinky nail is something you can devote your time to maintaining.

That and, the internet tells me, they’re good for extracting boogers and earwax.

Personal Safety

There are plenty of rundown neighborhoods in Thailand, but Oksana and I never felt threatened walking through them.  After awhile, we lost a bit of our street paranoia because we just didn’t feel like we were ever in danger there.  Granted, there are plenty of places in the seedier parts of Bangkok or Pattaya where stupid or drunk tourists are involuntarily separated from their money, but we didn’t frequent those places.

The biggest crowd we ever wiggled through was during the Festival of Lights in Chiang Mai.  It was chaos.  Five of us spent two or three hours wandered around the river, most of our attention focused on our cameras settings.  I worried about my backpack, constantly being bumped and nudged, and my shorts’ pockets filled with wallet, iPhone, and GPS.  Nothing was lost.  We discussed it later and decided that none of us felt like there were any pickpockets lurking around at all.  Except for the fireworks exploding around us, the whole night felt quite safe.

(We also realized that hardly anyone was drinking!  A huge, city-wide celebration and only a handful of obnoxious British hooligans to spoil the mood.)

Transportation

Traffic, in many ways, was different in Thailand, but there were some similarities to the way we do things in America.

First thing you notice is that they drive on the left.  (Well, I guess that would be the first time you’d notice if you were coming straight from the U.S.  After 31 countries, we’re thoroughly confused.  I can no longer remember which countries drive on which side of the road.)  The second thing you notice is that the direction of travel is really only a suggestion.  We saw plenty of people nonchalantly steering their scooters into oncoming traffic.

Traffic in Bangkok is predictably bad.  Often the best way to get around is on a tuktuk, or motorcycle taxi, if only because they can sometimes weave between the cars and buses.  In an effort to alleviate traffic, Bangkok has built up miles and miles of giant cement overpasses.  Huge, eight-lane freeways act as arteries into the city.  Rush hour is so bad, they actually change the direction of travel on these freeways throughout the day!  In the morning, lighted signs indicate that most of those eight lanes are one-way streets into the city.  In the evening, they flip them around so that there are more avenues out to the suburbs.  I have no idea what you’re supposed to do if you’re driving down a lane when it switches!

Our first hotel, the Amari Atrium, was like most other large businesses in Bangkok and had hired a man with an orange safety vest to stand at the end of the driveway.  His job was to step out into the street with one of those lighted, handheld, airport-runway batons, blow his whistle, and stop traffic for anyone needing to leave the hotel.  Otherwise, you’d never get out.

Scooter Culture

Outside Bangkok, scooters rule the road.  There are thousands of small-engine motorbikes in Thailand and a culture has sprung up around them.

Lots of people conduct their businesses from motorcycles.  We saw all manner of creative examples (like the cable company motorcycle with a 12-foot bamboo ladder strapped to the sidecar), but by far the most popular were the food carts.  At first glance, they could be a simple tin shack or canvas tent with a kitchen-counter-top flat area, complete with charcoal grill for cooking or displaying whatever they had to sell.  Above their heads might be some shelving or a sign with the business name.  Look closely, though, and you’d invariably find the whole thing was welded onto a scooter.  They’d simply drive up to a curb for the dinner rush, then drive back home after selling off a few hundred kabobs or pancakes.

Most gas stations in Thailand are small mom-and-pop businesses and they can be found on practically every street corner.  A “big” enterprise might be two fifty-gallon drums hooked up to a manual pump.  The gasoline is pumped up into a clear cylinder so that you can measure the amount before it’s drained into your gas tank.  Seeing them in operation, with the Mountain Dew-yellow tinge to the liquid, reminded me how infrequently you actually see gasoline in the States.

With a scooter, sometimes all you need is a single liter of petrol.  Most of the smaller “gas stations” were nothing more than a set of shelves propped up outside a convenience store or someone’s house.  Rows of 1-liter glass bottles line the shelves with a big, bold price printed above: “Gasoline! 40 baht!”  Driving by, you could almost be forgiven for thinking they were Corona ads.

Highways

With all the differences, I found it surprising that the highways in Thailand were like their counterparts in the United States.  The roads were in good repair, making it possible to keep speeds up.  Sometimes there were toll booths along the way.  Some big gas stations along the way had restaurants, convenience stores, and even separate (free!) public bathroom structures.

But just when you begin to marvel at how things are like you remember them, all the little differences remind you that you’re still in a foreign country.  The “gas” that’s being pumped into the tanks is actually natural gas.  They have a vacuum seal on the nozzle for safety, but even so, it’s against regulations for you to stay in the vehicle while they refuel.  Our minivan driver, more often than not, wandered around the convenience store and bathrooms with the rest of us while we waited.  When the station attendant was finished, he would jump in and move the driver’s van out of the way for the next vehicle in line.  I can’t imagine people in the States being comfortable with that.

Hotels

I guess because tourists tend to leave the air conditioner running when they leave their rooms, most hotels in Thailand have little credit card-like slots next to the light switch by the door.  Usually you get a card (or thick slab of plastic) attached to your key ring and the first thing you do when you open your door is slide that card into the slot.  Otherwise, no electricity.

We went on to see these in practically every hotel and hostel in Southeast Asia.  I guess saving money on electricity is very important in those countries.

I get why they do it, but it’s still annoying. I’m the kind of guy that always turns off the lights.  If we’re going out all day, I’m okay turning off the AC, too, but when you need to head out into the heat of the day for just a half hour?  It’s nice to come back to a cool room.

There were also times I wanted to leave my computer on (to upload photos, for instance), but 10 seconds after you remove the key ring, all power to the room is cut off.  It was frustrating enough at times that we started to experiment by putting other things into the slot.  Who would have thought a Costco membership card would be useful in Thailand?

Franchises

If you ever look around your neighborhood and think, “Where have all the 7-Elevens gone?” well, the answer is Thailand.  There are 7-Eleven franchises everywhere.  Like the joke about finding competing Starbucks directly across the street from each other, we routinely saw 7-Elevens placed the same way.

I was surprised, too, to see the franchise image is mostly unchanged over there.  Big selling points were hot dogs, Slurpees, and cheap morning coffee.  Many drinks were spread among half a dozen different cooler cases (including beer and wine.)  About the only thing that was really different, I’d say, is that they devoted one whole aisle just to Ramen and Cup o’ Noodles.

Oh, and all the chip flavors were like “Spicy Crab Seaweed.”  That ain’t American.

(In fact, I just learned 7-Eleven isn’t American, either!  In 1991, a Japanese corporation took a controlling interest in the franchise.)

Also, besides the ever-present McDonald’s, KFC, and Subway, Thailand also has a bunch of Sizzlers (of all things!)

Copy Culture

This idea, which I’m calling “copy culture” for now, isn’t specific to Thailand.  The idea has been percolating in my head for awhile now and it just started to coalesce while we were there.

In Chiang Mai, a vendor set up shop in the Sunday market.  A sign above their cart proclaimed “ONLY banana wrap in Sunday market! Accept no imitations!”  There was an air of desperation about it, as though the proprietor were saying, “I had the idea first!  It’s not fair!  That other guy stole my recipe!”

Let me paint you another picture, before I get to my point:  Walking down the street in Patong, we came across a store selling paintings.  Obviously, this was an “artist-in-residence” or “artist-as-owner” sort of place, not an art gallery.  There were large, frameless canvases covering every vertical surface.  The usual Thai themes of sunsets, palm trees, and tigers were represented, but the piece that catches the eye is a painting of Heath Ledger, as the Joker, with his head out the driver’s side window of a speeding police car.  It was a scene from The Dark Knight.

Okay, nothing too weird about that.  It was a competent painting; someone might buy it. Heath’s former agent, perhaps.  We continued on down the sidewalk.

The next store was also a painting shop.  And the next, and the next, and the next.  All the way down the block, small stores filled with dozens of paintings.

You want to know what every single one of them had?  A painting of Heath Ledger, as the Joker, driving a police car with his head out the window.

It’s like one guy got tired of painting tigers and decided to work on a passion project… and it sold!  All his jealous artist competitors said, “Well, I can do that!”  So they all paused their DVD players in the same place and got to work.

You see the same thing with trinket and souvenir vendors all over the world.  How many stalls sell the exact same crap as the one right next to them?  Why is it that every tagua nut store has the same few animal carvings?  How is it that the exact same pottery can be found for sale all over East Africa?  It’s because someone became successful and everyone else is trying to recapture the magic.

Two things about the painting shop tableau jump out at me.

Firstly, entrepreneurship.  I remember a professor once gave our business class a scenario to think about.  “Let’s say a guy opens up a hot dog stand on in the middle of a long stretch of beach,” he began.  “He’s immediately successful, and you decide there’s room for some healthy competition.  Where do you set up your hot dog stand?”

He gave us a minute to think about it.  “Place it at either end of the beach,” most of us thought.  “But which end?”

Neither, it turns out.  We should have set up our shop exactly adjacent to his hot dog stand.  Why?  Let’s say you set up at the far end of the beach, thinking you’ll get half the beach’s business, right?  Well, not exactly.  Take the case of the hungry customer that’s in the exact mid-point between both hot dog stands.  He should be the only indecisive customer, as he has to walk the same distance in either direction to buy himself a dog.  Theoretically, everyone on one side of him will come to your shop – because it’s closer – but everyone on the other side of him will go to your competitor, because his shop is closer.

Better to set up shop right next to original hot dog stand.  That way, at least everyone on one side of the beach will encounter your stand first.

Is that why developing nations always have a “shoe street,” a “muffler street,” and a “gallery street?”  At first blush, it seems like sound reasoning.  If you set up shop next to your competitor, you could capture half his business.  But what happens when there are seven competitors in the same location?  Shouldn’t you then think of moving across town, capturing that whole market for yourself?

While we’re still on the subject of entrepreneurship… In the U.S., we’re taught that we can make a name for ourselves – get rich, climb the social ladder! – if only we can come up with the next great idea.  Maybe we can invent that one niche product that no one else has thought of, yet everyone needs.  The ShamWow, the Snuggie.  Red Bull or Twitter.  If our ideas are unique and we’re the first ones to market, we’ve got it made!

I don’t think most American’s first reaction to someone else’s success is to copy it for themselves.  I think our first reaction is more along the lines of, “Why didn’t I think of that? Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.”  It seems to me that perhaps the Thai attitude is more along the lines of, “I’m pretty sure I can do that better than he can.”

Which brings us to the second thought I had: Copyright.

The U.S. has some of the most stringent copyright laws in the world.  We value our intellectual property so much that we have made the unauthorized duplication of digital media a criminal act.  How much of an impact – good or bad – has copyright law had on our businesses?

• People don’t make a living selling bootleg DVDs and software in the U.S.  It’s big business in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia.
• People don’t sell paintings of scenes from movies (at least not on a large scale), lest they be sued into financial oblivion.  Artists don’t have to worry about that in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia.
• Artists and inventors in the U.S. set their sights on patenting and securing their ideas, to ensure a lifetime of royalty payments.  I wonder if Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia even have patent offices.

Personally, I think some aspects of our copyright system are hopelessly broken.  I respect the idea that artists and businessmen should be able to control their intellectual works; in fact, I think the protections we afford them are vital to their ability to profit from it.  That banana-wrap vendor in Chiang Mai: What legal recourse did he have?  None.

On the other hand, I disagree that Disney should be able to sue someone 70 years down the road for using one of their cartoons in a Youtube video.  Or that shadow corporations should be able to buy up software patents and make a killing suing Silicon Valley startups out of business.

But does that mean the developing world has the right of it?  No, I don’t think so.  I don’t know how a society pulls itself up out of the “copy culture” mentality and replaces it with a rule- and regulation-heavy entrepreneurial culture, but that might just be one of the (many) things that has to change in order for it to become a first world nation.

Related posts:

1. PVX: McDonald’s in Thailand
2. Thoughts on Russia
3. Thoughts on Jordan

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

• 00:00 – Introduction and Rules
• 03:52 – The Reveal
• 06:31 – First Round
• 16:23 – Second Round
• 26:22 – Credits and a Dare

The first time I walked into a 7/11 in Thailand, the sheer number of drinks in the coolers blew my mind.  There were dozens of brands and flavors and I because couldn’t make heads or tails of their swirly writing, I had no idea what most of them were.  I wanted to try them all…! but with my luck, I knew I’d end up with something like “Shrimp-Mussel Juice.”  Sampling a random drink in Thailand would be like Russian Roulette, only my taste buds would be at stake.

Knowing that our friends were on the way, Oksana and I decided to wait for them before playing “Thai Roulette.”  I mentioned the idea to Wendy and Dusty (from Roam the Planet) and their friend Sarah.  They were game!

We decided to film the whole thing, because it seemed like it might be entertaining for you to watch us taste all these mystery drinks and because  Wendy and Dusty had just brought us a new point-and-shoot camera (to replace our ailing Panasonic Lumix.)  It was a Sony TX10, which boasts 1080p video.  Since they had the exact same model, we shot with both cameras to see if the footage would match well in editing.  It was also a good test for me, to find out if our new camera could double as a camcorder in a pinch.  (Answer: No. You can read my thoughts on that after the jump.)

During one of our first meals together, I laid out the ground rules for the little drinking game I’d created in my head.   Then we hit the stores, buying our drinks in secret, and then revealed them to each other later that evening.  Unfortunately, when we did, it was raining outside our hotel and the cameras picked up a lot of street noise while we were recording.

This video turned out much longer than I expected — close to half an hour!  Now, I could spend many more hours whittling it down to just the funniest parts, but that goes against my self-imposed guidelines for these “Postcard Valet Extra” videos.  (Also, it sounds like a lot of work!)  So I left pretty much everything in, including some awkward jump cuts and blurry video.  On the plus side, if you stick it out, you’ll get to see every little grimace as we sample 10 crazy Thai drinks.  If half an hour is too much of a commitment, feel free to use the time markers above to jump to the section that sounds most interesting.

The Sony TX10

There are some things about the Sony TX10′s video recording that I liked, but for the most part, color me unimpressed.  I do like that you can zoom in while recording — that’s a feature we missed on our old Panasonic Lumix TZ5.  On the other hand, the start-up time is terrible and the auto focus is all over the place.  It’s quite nice to have a small camera that can track a subject that moves toward or away from the camera, but in my experience, this model has trouble staying locked onto subjects and, as you can see in the video, the focus tends to roam while you’re recording.

The audio recording isn’t that great, either.  Both cameras we used picked up the background whine and amplified it.  At least you can still hear what people are saying.

After a few months with the TX10, I have to say I’m mostly unimpressed.  I will admit that I found one fantastic use for it, however.  Slap a mini-GorillaPod on the sucker, drop it to the bottom of the ocean while snorkeling (it’s waterproof to about 16 ft), and you can get some fantastic video!

Related posts:

1. PVX: McDonald’s in The Kingdom of Jordan
2. PVX: McDonald’s in Estonia
3. PVX: McDonald’s in Turkey

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

You always feel like you’re getting short-changed when you’re only in a country for a day or two.  We had only 17 hours to spend in Dubai, but I’m surprised how much we got to see and do.  We wandered two gigantic malls, went snow skiing, walked the base of the world’s tallest building, road around the city on a tour bus, and of course we ate at McDonald’s for lunch!

Most of the menu in Dubai’s McDonald’s was the normal fare;  the stuff that wasn’t was almost exclusively vegetarian.  We tried the Veggie Burger, spring rolls, and a McPuff!  I could have trimmed this video down a little more — it’s one of the longer McDonald’s videos we’ve made — but there are a couple funny moments that I just didn’t want to cut out.  (Plus there’s a bit of background on that whole Orbitz fiasco thing we went through.  I forgot that by this point, we still weren’t sure if we were going to get reimbursed for our new plane tickets; we eventually did!)

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on the United Arab Emirates (Dubai)
2. PVX: McDonald’s in Finland
3. PVX: McDonald’s in Estonia

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

At the end of September, we went through a huge fiasco with Orbitz that completely changed our travel plans.  Months before, we had purchased tickets to fly from Moscow to Bangkok by way of Sri Lanka.  The day before our flight, we learned that it had been rescheduled and we’d already missed it.  Fortunately, we managed to iron everything out with Orbitz, but not before we had to purchase a second set of airline tickets at the last minute.  Our new flight plan included a 17-hour layover in Dubai.

I never expected to travel to the United Arab Emirates and the only thing I knew about Dubai was that it was the most “Westernized” of the cities in the Middle East.  We had zero time to research, but I was still excited.  If nothing else, I’d get to see the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa (formally the Burj Dubai!)

The Weekend

Friday is Sunday in Dubai.  Or something like that.  I’ve since read that Thursday and Friday used to be the Arab world’s weekend, but in Dubai that’s officially shifted over to Friday and Saturday.  All I know for sure is that getting around on a Friday morning is problematic.

We arrived at the Dubai International Airport, around 5:30am, on a redeye flight from Moscow.  Even after we’d taken the time to figure out the immigration process (no visa needed for U.S. citizens – at least not for those that just want to spend a day wandering the city!) and passed our bags through customs, it was still too early to go anywhere.  We used the time to caffeine up at a café, repacked our day bags and left our bigger packs with the Left Luggage desk, and then set about figuring out how we could get into the city.

We found an information desk and asked.  The easiest way, they said, was to take the Dubai Metro… but it was closed until 1pm today on account of it being Friday.  Okay, then.  What’s the next cheapest option?  The bus… but they don’t accept cash and you can’t buy a pass because, well, it’s Friday.  The only thing left was an expensive taxi.  We eventually paid a woman wearing a silk burka and pink leather racing gloves to take us to the Emirates Mall in her taxi… but only after killing several more hours in the airport – the mall didn’t open until 10am on  Friday!

Language

We had only ever visited two other Arabic countries in our travels – Egypt and Jordan – so, we didn’t quite know what to expect when we arrived in Dubai.  It wasn’t too much trouble communicating in those other countries, but that was only because we were always on the tourist path and tourism attracts English-speakers.  Still, there were often times when we tried to ask someone for directions or how much an item cost and we were completely unable to converse with them.

Dubai surprised us in that practically everyone we came across spoke English.  Not only that, but their English was good.  Taxi drivers, store clerks, waitresses – everyone we talked to spoke our language.  I was especially impressed with the supermarket cashiers (a position that typically doesn’t employ bilingual staff!)  They would glace up at the next patron and take their best guess on which language to open with.  If you replied in a different language, they would seamlessly shift.  We got a “Hello, did you find everything okay, today?”

English speakers in Dubai still had an accent, but it was slight.  They must begin learning English at a young age.  I’d be curious to learn more about their early schooling (public or private?) at least with respect to languages.

It’s no wonder Dubai is the most well-known Arabic city in the Western world.  By speaking and conducting their business in English, they’ve made traveling there much more accessible for us.

Wealth & Shopping

The wealth on display in Dubai is staggering.  The Burj Khalifa dominates the skyline, but there are half a dozen other famous buildings and landmarks that were designed and built as a testament to just having enough money to do so.  That same concept applies to shopping.

Good God (I mean Allah!), you have no idea.

Shopping malls are a staple now in the United States.  Every community has one and they’re known for putting mom and pop shops out of business.  Seeing the old market mentality struggle to fit into the new strip-mall architecture in Russia, I realized that most countries’ malls aspire to U.S. standards.

American malls should aspire to Dubai’s.

We started out at the Mall of the Emirates, where we wandered through the electronics stores and shot our McDonald’s video in the food court.  After walking from one end to the other to see what movies might be playing at the cinema (which we skipped, though I wish I could have justified the $40 ticket prices to try out the VOX Gold cinema!), we decided to go skiing.  On snow.  In the mall.  While it was 100 degrees outside.

The mall was immense, easily the biggest I’d ever set foot in.  At least until later that afternoon.  At 12 million square feet, the Dubai Mall, which we visited next, is the world’s largest.

We walked through The Dubai Mall on our way to the base of the Burj Khalifa.  If not for the distinctly airport-like direction signs located at every corner, we never would have found our way through.  Having informational displays with the maps at the entrance is not enough.  By the time you’ve walked a half-kilometer toward your destination, you’ve been distracted enough by the dazzle of shops (and, say, a full-size, world-class aquarium!) to forget where you were going.

Oksana and I didn’t do too much shopping while we were there, though I did pick up a reasonably-priced USB3 cable for one of my hard drives.  I enjoyed wandering through the electronics stores there.  Dubai not only has good prices – UAE was the first country we visited where things like laptops, hard drives, and iPads have prices comparable to those in the U.S. – but they also had every newfangled gadget you can imagine.  800mm lenses for you Canon or Nikon DSLR?  Unboxed and put on view.  Dyson bladeless fans?  On display and rotating.  The thinnest of thin flatscreen TVs?  In 3D demo mode, perfectly positioned in front of a comfy couch.

The malls weren’t necessarily where the greatest excesses were to be found, either.  There are “hypermarkets” in Dubai.  We had time to visit one.  Imagine a Costco, Home Depot, Best Buy and an immense grocery store under one roof.  I’m not even kidding; that’s exactly what they’re like.

At the base of the Burj Khalifa, there’s an ATM that dispenses gold.  That’s right, gold!  Put in your PIN, empty your savings account, and walk away with your choice of gold coins or actual nuggets.  99.9% pure, 10-day, money-back guarantee, try not to spend it all in one place!

You know how some people are thrilled to pass through the duty free shops in the airport so they can load up on fancy alcohol or expensive chocolate?  In the Dubai International Airport, they advertise duty-free cars! I have no idea how that works. They most certainly are not going to meet you at the gate with your purchase…

Morality

Dubai might well be the most Westernized city in the Arabic world, but it’s still very conservative by our standards.  The most obvious sign is the number of women walking around in burkas, but if you look, you’ll see other indications.  On the brochure for the mall, there was a section on appropriate behavior.  No kissing.  No public displays of affection.  No clothes that reveal either knees or shoulders.  To be fair, the women wearing skimpy attire – tourists, mostly – did not seem to be judged on their attire.

Speaking of gender, there’s obviously a huge divide between men and women in the United Arab Emirates that’s far too complex for me to grasp after just one day’s visit.  I did see two hints of the inequality with my own eyes, however.  First, the light rail that serves as the Dubai Metro had one full car completely reserved for women and children (we only noticed the small sticker on the door after Oksana and I were prevented from stepping into it by a kind security guard.)

Second, there’s something going on with the “family taxis,” which I didn’t quite understand.  When we were trying to leave the airport Friday morning, we were told we had to take a family taxi at a slightly higher cost.  I wasn’t clear if this was because it was the only taxi available at the time or if it was because Oksana and I were a couple.  At any rate, a little cursory research seems to indicate that there’s now a whole fleet of female-taxi drivers that are a big hit with women (and children) who need to travel without a male escort.

It’s depressing to think that the women of the UAE feel they need a service like that, but on the other hand, it’s good to see Dubai making some inroads into equaling the sexes.

The Burj Khalifa

We didn’t get a chance to ascend to the observation deck of the world’s largest building, and I now regret wasting so much time in the malls.  When we realized the Burj Khalifa’s line was too long, we decided to walk around its base instead.  It’s difficult to put into words how beautiful, daring, and amazing that building is.  It’s hard to wrap your head around the scale even when you’re standing at the base, at least until you look around and see all the other “tiny” skyscrapers clustered around it.

Seeing the Burj Khalifa up close was the highlight of my day in Dubai.

Related posts:

1. PVX: McDonald’s in the United Arab Emirates (Dubai)
2. Thoughts on Egypt
3. Thoughts on Russia

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

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The third Indiana Jones movie, The Last Crusade, made the ruins of Petra, in the Kingdom of Jordan, famous.  I’ll admit that the imagery in that movie – namely the huge architectural façade carved out of the face of a sandstone cliff – inspired me to travel there when we found ourselves in the Middle East.

While Petra’s Treasury (or “Al Khazneh,” as it’s known in Arabic) is the most famous monument in the park, I actually found other parts to be more interesting.  The colors of the rock inside the Urn Tomb were much brighter and had intricate veins throughout, while the biggest and most impressive rock-cut temple, the Monestary, stood at the top of a long stone staircase that rivals anything on the Inca Trail.  The Siq, though… The Siq was my favorite part of Petra.

“Siq” is an Arabic word meaning “shaft,” and what an impressive shaft it is!  Beginning at roughly the entrance to the park, it winds gently downward almost a full mile before opening directly in front of the Treasury.  Except for perhaps an hour or two during midday, the sun never touches the bottom and while the rocky walls towering above you are aglow with sunlight, the floor is below is nice and cool.

The walls of the Siq were pulled apart by geologic activity and the lower sections have been worn smooth by countless flash floods.  Part of the restoration of Petra was building a new dam to hold the waters back.  Without the dam, the Siq would be a very dangerous place to be during one of the rare rainy days in that part of Jordan.

Taking a good photo in this natural canyon is more difficult than you might imagine.  During the day, the sky and upper walls are incredibly bright while the bottom lies in shadow.  Expose for the lower walls and the top will be totally blown out.  During the golden hours of sunrise and sunset, the sun is at such an extreme angle that it barely illuminates the edges of the cliffs 600 feet above your head.  Without illumination, those rich golden colors in the wall seem dull and grey.  Sunrise and sunset are usually the best times to take pictures of landscapes, but canyons only benefit from that soft lighting when they’re running exactly east-to-west.

Looking over my Siq photos, I found a few with compositions that I really liked, where the wall’s curves snaked through the photo’s third lines and created interesting shapes with light and shadow.  Unfortunately, the best of those had the sun directly overhead, rendering the floor of the Siq as nothing more than a hard white line.  The sky is blown out in this photo, but it’s such a small element of the overall composition that it doesn’t even matter.  The walls are beautiful, just as I remember them.  I love the lone janitor with his bucket, too, about to go around the corner.  Without him, we wouldn’t have the proper sense of scale.

Canon 5D Mark II
Date: 11:34am, 3 August 2011
Focal Length: 24mm
Shutter: 1/50 sec
Aperture: F/4
Exposure: -1.3 step
Flash: No
ISO: 100
Photoshop: Auto levels, minor saturation increase

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Jordan

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

The first time I traveled to Russia was in 2006.  Oksana and I split our time between Moscow and St. Petersburg, because while she is originally from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy in the Far East, her family happened to be spending time in the big city.  Her brother, Andrey, played host and seemed to have an all-day itinerary planned for us every day we were there.  We were exhausted by the end of our “vacation,” but looking back through our photos, I’m amazed at all the things we got to see and do in just three weeks.

I always felt guilty for not writing much about our first trip through Russia.  Even way back then, I had a mental list of things to write about for one of these “Thoughts On” blog entries.  When we crossed the border into Russia again last September, my notes were already full of half-remembered items that I jotted down on the bus from Estonia.

Russia

Asking “What is Russia like?” is like asking “What is the United States of America like?”  How do you answer that?  When a country spans most of a continent, has citizens from every socioeconomic background, as well as a history dating back thousands of years, you can’t just sum it up in one or two sentences.

I’ve seen two of the biggest, most prestigious cities in Russia, a couple larger cities in the east, and passed through many a rural town on the rail line between St. Petersburg and Irkutsk.  About the only thing I know for sure is that Russia isn’t easily summed up.

I can tell you, however, that there’s a strange dichotomy when Russians think about their own country.  On the one hand, there’s the feeling that Russia is the greatest country on the planet.  Mention that you’ve been to the world’s largest lake and they’ll tell you that Russia has the world’s deepest.  Describe to them how something is done in the States and they’ll explain to you why the Russian method is better.

Then there’s the flip side.  A Russian who has traveled outside their country can’t help but see how bad their own roads are upon returning.  Engage them in conversations about why their tax dollars aren’t being used to repair said roads and they’ll complain bitterly about how the high level politicians are pocketing billions of dollars and what money is level over is being funneled by the government into Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Even as they complain about how bad things can get in Russia, though, they manage to maintain a sense of “Only in Russia” pride.  After an eight-hour day spent driving less than 30 kph on truly horrible roads, Oksana’s brother said to me, “Now you can say you’ve seen real Russian roads!”  I wasn’t impressed, but then I hadn’t applied for my tourist visa in the hopes of seeing spectacular potholes.

Later, there was a strikingly similar incident when we pulled into a parking lot behind an old concrete apartment building.  “Now this is the real Russia,” he said in almost the exact same way.  “This building hasn’t had maintenance done on it since the day it was built!”  It didn’t seem like I was supposed to be impressed because it was still standing.  It was more of a “Can you believe what we have to put up with?” vibe.

I think this patriotic feeling of superiority come from Soviet times, when Russia was a superpower vying for a lead role on the world stage.  Even then, living in Russia wasn’t necessarily better than living in any other country, but the Soviet propaganda was intense and citizens were told daily that their country was the best in the world.

I don’t mean that to sound derogatory, either.  We Americans suffered through the same media-delivered, government-sanctioned news during the Cold War.  Most every American growing up from the 40s onward probably still thinks the U.S. of A. is the greatest country on the planet, too.  And now, with the political divide between the left and right so wide, as well as congressional approval ratings at a 235-year low, I think it’s safe to say that we Americans have the very same love/hate relationship with our own country.

Women

I have a theory that there are only two types of women in Russia.  Supermodels and babushkas.  Walking the streets of Moscow, that’s all you ever seem to see.  We were there during a heat wave and all the teens-to-twenty-somethings were dressed in the skimpiest of clothing, showing off their long limbs and rail-thin frames.  Older, matronly types often sported the thick, square bodies I associate with Russian grandmothers.  All they’d need to complete the look is a thick shawl over their shoulders and a bandana tied down over their hair.  Some actually had them.

Of course, the women of Russia come in every shape and size, but much like a nation with a tiny middle class, the extremes get all the attention.  I found myself wondering why the younger women were generally so thin, while the older women so stocky.  Is the courting process so competitive that women have to look like supermodels in order to attract a mate?  (Maybe! Wikipedia says the ratio of males to females is .86/1. That’s a huge disparity.)  Once married, do they quit the fight and let their waistlines go?  Does the butterfly spin a cocoon and emerge a fat caterpillar?

Another thing I learned while studying these supermodel types (yes, studying! But I’ll have you know that my wife was the one pointing out the best examples!) was that “thin” does not necessarily mean “fit,” or even “healthy.”  Seems obvious to me now, but I think that my impression of body types has been affected by living in the States.  More often than not, when an American woman is that thin, she got that way by working hard at the gym.  “Thin,” in the case of Ms. America, usually comes with strength and some obvious muscle tone, which, if we’re being honest here, I find more attractive than heroin chic (no surprise, considering that I’m talking about my cultural norms here.)  I have the sad suspicion that much of the thinness in Russia comes from anorexic and/or bulimic tendencies.

You can also see many – many! – examples of plastic surgery on the streets of Moscow.  Enhanced breasts, Botoxed foreheads, duck lips.  “Beauty” can be bought, apparently, in the motherland.

We worry about how fashion supermodels and Photoshopped celebrities on magazine covers are making young women in American dangerously image conscious.  If you want to see that taken to its logical extreme, I’ll bet you can find it on the Moscow nightclub scene.

Semi-Unisex Bathrooms

I noticed a few public bathrooms that were almost, but not quite, unisex.  They shared a common washing area with sinks and mirrors, but the men and women went into different attached rooms to find the toilet stalls.

Not a big deal, really, and also a pretty good space-saving idea.  Still, I bet it screws with certain social dynamics.  I doubt the women hang out and gossip while putting on their makeup if any old guy can eavesdrop while standing in front of the urinal.

Smiling

Oksana and I have a running joke when we take part in her family photos.  “Wait!” I say to her. “Is this photo going to be Russian- or American-style?”  Meaning: “Do we smile or look deadly serious?”

Having been with Oksana over 10 years now, it’s nothing new to me.  Russians just don’t smile when posing for photos, whereas in the US, we’re trained to say “cheese” because the word tugs up the corners of our mouths and we can maintain the last syllable for as long as we need to smile.

When I met new family members in Irkutsk this time around, I was momentarily taken aback by how friendly they all seemed.  Big hugs, kisses on both cheeks, and excited ramblings I didn’t understand but ones which Oksana was happy to translate.  Why is this so surprising? I wondered.  Then it hit me: These were the people I’d seen countless times in photos and I’d unconsciously formed an opinion about them based solely on the way they gazed, stern and stiff-backed, into the camera lens.

It only takes one walk in a major metropolitan area to realize that Russians don’t casually smile at strangers on the street, either.  I have a distinctly American habit of unconsciously nodded my head or smiling at someone when I make eye contact.  In Russia, I never got anything back.

When Oksana’s brother visited us last year in the States, he noticed the difference, too.  Why was everyone smiling at him?  We talked over our differences in expectations and each learned something new about the other’s culture.  For example, he learned that Americans are courteous to strangers while I learned that when an American smiles at someone on the streets of Moscow, the Russian is most likely thinking, “Who let the village idiot wander free?”

Heating

Many (most?) people in Russia heat their homes with hot water.  That, in itself, isn’t all that special; it’s how they do it that intrigued me.

In the cities, it’s the municipality that supplies the hot water.  There’s a huge network of giant pipes that move the water all over the city.  It’s a closed circuit that eventually leads back to a steam plant – a huge factory that does nothing more than heat water and force it into the system.

The pipes enter practically every building within the city limits and the heat from uninsulated pipes (radiators) is what keeps everyone’s living space toasty warm throughout some extremely cold winters.  A side benefit is that they never have to wait for the water to warm up in their showers!

There are, of course, some problems with a system such as this.  In the warmer summer months, they often take the system offline for repairs, meaning people have to have backup hot water tanks if they want warm showers.  Also, there are outages – a broken pipe somewhere in the city or, God forbid, a steam explosion at the plant, can take out the whole system.  I can’t imagine how dangerous something like that could be to the population in the dead of winter (I suppose no more than an extended power outage in Alaska.) Not only does a shutdown put the primary method of heating for most people at risk, if it’s not quickly fixed, the whole citywide network of pipes could conceivably freeze and burst.

Shoes

You know how some people in the States ask you to remove your shoes when you come into their homes?  Maybe it’s just the circles I frequented when growing up, but I always thought that was the exception to the norm.  Not in Russia.  Everyone takes off their shoes when they enter a home.

When we take off our shoes in the States, it’s usually perfectly acceptable to walk around the house wearing socks.  (If not, no one has ever said anything to me about it!)  In Russia, that’s not normal.  There’s always an extra pair of slippers by the door for visitors.

Personally, I never took them up on their offer – seems weird to me to put my feet into a shoe that other people have worn.  Oksana cautioned me that my socks would end up getting dirty, but that’s why we wear socks, right?  So our feet don’t get dirty?

The slippers-for-guests thing in Russia must be deeply ingrained.  In the airport security line, they have to remove their shoes and send them through the x-ray machine, just like we do.  However, people are not expected to walk through the body scanner in their socks.  Right by the belt is a huge barrel full of disposable elastic booties for the 10 steps it takes to get to the other side.

Once again, I opted not to wear them.  If everyone was wearing booties, I figured that stretch of carpet was the cleanest section of floor in the airport!

Alcohol

All those rumors and stereotypes about how much Russians like to drink?  Totally true.

I can remember the first meal I shared with Oksana’s family, when they came to Juneau for our wedding.  Her father poured each of us a shot of vodka to toast our union.  I hardly drank at all back then, but I thought it would be impolite to refuse.  We had a second round to toast… I don’t know what. Their safe flight to the States?  I cut myself off after the third shot, when we toasted the freshness of the salad.

I can’t keep up and I don’t even try.

Once, when we were out on the town in St. Petersburg, our friend, Andrey, kept refilling my drink after I’d already achieved a more-than-sufficient buzz.  We were talking iPhones and travel apps, so I decided to show him the Translate part of the Google app.  (Not to go too far off topic, but have you played with this app yet? We’re this close to having Star Trek universal translators, people!)  I hit the microphone button, spoke into the phone like I was making a normal call: “Please, no more drinks. I’m already drunk!” I checked to make sure that the voice-to-text recognition worked (it did, perfectly) and hit the translate button.  A second or two later, the text changed to Cyrillic, so I hit the speaker button and a computery monotone spoke the Russian words out loud.  He laughed, and I was off the hook, drinking-wise, for the rest of the night.

Over the years, Oksana’s brother has scaled back his drinking offers, but I enjoyed having evening meals with him at his home in Kamchatka this time.  Rather than vodka, he’s more interested in cognacs and he was eager to show off the local beers, too.  I just wish we’d visited shortly after our stay in Argentina.  With all the wine we consumed there, my alcohol tolerance had been at an all-time high!

Another obvious difference between Russia and the U.S. on the drinking front is how often you see people who are completely wasted walking down the street.  I’m used to seeing falling-down drunks when the bars close back home, but you can spot them any time after sunset on a Friday or Saturday in Russia.  The drinking age is lower in Russia; that probably has something to do with it.  There’s nothing stopping kids right out of high school from drinking past their limits.  Also, no open container laws.  It’s perfectly acceptable to stroll down the street with a big ol’ forty or a bottle of vodka.

I shudder to think what the drunk-driving accident statistics are like.  On that front, at least, it sounds like they have zero tolerance laws in place.  If you’re pulled over with any alcohol in your system, you’re busted.  No leeway like we have with a .08 blood-alcohol or anything.  If the breathalyzer registers anything, your license is automatically suspended.

Finally, one last note on alcohol in Russia: They sell beer in plastic bottles.  We can debate the merits of aluminum cans vs. glass bottles, but plastic?  That’s just wrong.

Water

Oksana and I have gotten used to bottled water.  We’ve done so much traveling that we can’t keep up with which cities do and don’t have safe drinking water.  I did notice that many homes in Russia had two faucets built into the kitchen sink, though.  The skinny one with the thin stream was for drinking, while the big one was for washing dishes and the like.

Wonder if that has something to do with the endlessly-recycled hot water system?

Bread

Russian like their rye bread.  While staying with Oksana’s family, we went to get a new loaf every other day or so.  Meals always had a stack of sliced bread sitting nearby to go with just about anything: Soup, pasta…maybe even more bread.

Admittedly, this could just be an Oksana-family quirk, but I noticed that for most meals, many items were just spread out on the table and you were expected to grab what you wanted, sort of “tapas style.”  Breakfast usually had two or three different kinds of cold-cut meats or salamis, cheeses, bread (of course), and yogurt or cottage cheese.  Also, the idea of using two pieces of bread for a sandwich is foreign over there.  They like theirs open-faced.

Platonic Tomatoes

I’ve seen a lot of good tomatoes in my life – at the supermarket, growing in my grandfather’s garden – but none like they had for sale on the street next to a random metro exit in the middle of Moscow.  A taut skin, with an even Pantone 199 Red, stretched almost to the size of a grapefruit and perfectly round.  The flesh parted for a sharp knife with no loss of juice and the taste… the taste was so sweet!  You know that old debate on whether tomatoes are fruits or vegetables?  When you bite into one of Russia’s finest, you’ll know that they’re a fruit.  You’ll want to eat them like apples!

We picked the perfect time to visit Kamchatka, too, as her brother was busy harvesting all the ripening vegetables from his giant greenhouse.  Every night we devoured a huge bowl of salad, made from fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers pulled from the garden that afternoon.

In fact, this is a staple of Russian life.  It seems like everyone from the lower-middle class on up has a summer home, or dacha, where they retreat from the city during the hotter summer months and grow endless amounts of fruit, vegetables, and berries for a fall harvest.  Anything that isn’t eaten on the spot is pickled, or jammed, or in some other way preserved for the winter.   Oksana’s brother was no exception; his dacha just happened to be on the same property as his house.

Eating

While we were in Bulgaria, we stayed with one of Oksana’s friends who was living with her babushka.  There were on an extended summer vacation and had fallen into a set routine.  The grandmother took it upon herself to make sure there were heaps of food on the table every day at 8am, noon, and 5pm.

During our travels, Oksana and I had fallen into a routine of our own.  A typical day would see us eating a large breakfast (if it was included at our hostel), skipping lunch, and then having a late dinner.  Sometimes, if we slept in, we’d skip both breakfast and dinner, letting a big lunch and a snack suffice.  Come to think of it, our eating “routine” was probably not having a routine.

At any rate, three big meals a day were more than we could handle, especially considering how we were being fed.  It took me a while to realize that Babushka made multiple courses for each meal.  She would leave the second simmering on the stove.  I’d load my plate up with all the food on the table and eat my fill… but the second my plate was clear, Babushka would be up and filling it again with the main course.  And naturally, I had to be polite…

Americans and Russian families both seem to a “you have to eat” mentality, but they’re different in execution.  Parents pile American kids’ plates high and demand they “clean their plate.”  In Russia, there may not be as much food on the plate initially, but it will always be refilled.

Superstitions

Living with a Russian, I’ve learned a few new superstitions.  Never kiss in a doorway.  Before leaving home on a trip, take a moment to sit down on the couch.  If you have to return because you forgot something, be sure to catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror.

I totally don’t understand any of those.

I learned a few others while we were visiting this time around, mostly having to do with “cold.”  Don’t drink cold liquids before going to bed.  Don’t sit on a cold floor.  Always wear slippers indoors; don’t ever let your feet get cold or wet.

Also, it’s unlucky to pass a funeral procession.

It makes all sorts of sense that Russians would worry about cold weather.  We all know what Siberia can be like in the winter and superstitions are, at heart, there to warn us away from things that might do us harm.  It’s bad luck to walk under a ladder… because there’s probably someone working on it and they could drop a bucket on your head.  It’s bad luck to open an umbrella indoors… because you’re more likely to put someone’s eye out or knock over a lamp.  It’s bad luck if a black cat crosses your path… because, well hell, I have no idea.

Oksana and I discussed all the Russian cold-superstitions we could think of and we eventually agreed that they’re not any more based on reality than the black cat thing.  You can’t get a urinary tract infection from sitting on a cold floor, anymore than you can come down with a cold from going outside without your coat on, getting your feet wet, or having a glass of water before bed.

But still.  When you consider that these superstitions were probably created hundreds of years ago, long before modern medicine established that sickness is caused by viruses and bacteria, you can take them for what they are: Common sense and cautionary advice.

I still don’t know why I can’t kiss my wife in a doorway, though.

Tea Culture

Russia is big on tea.  And not the bag-with-the-dangly-string kind we’re used to seeing in the States.  More often than not, they brew the real stuff, dried tea leaves of all different kinds, and filter them out in the teapot as they pour.  You can plan on having hot tea for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Or rather, I should say, you should plan to have tea after breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Russians rarely have anything to drink while eating their meals.  They save theeir tea for after and claim it aids in digestion.

More superstition?  Maybe that irrational distrust of cold is why Russians drink so much hot tea.  That seems right to me – you should see the way Oksana’s family looks at me when I crack open a can of Diet Coke for breakfast.

Camouflage

We toured a big chunk of the remote Kamchatka peninsula with Oksana’s brother.  He took us to the hot springs, to a geothermic field with geysers, up volcanoes, to the ocean, and fishing in the rivers.  We saw a lot of outdoorsmen along the way and, almost to a person (including Andrey himself!), they were dressed in camo.

I guess what surprised me was not so much that they were dressed in camouflage, but that I never saw an orange safety vest.  Camo is made for blending in, which is perfect for hunting when you need to sit in a blind waiting for a deer, but it’s also dangerous.  In the U.S., enough people have been shot wearing camo that it’s pretty much expected that everyone will wears orange during hunting season.  Considering how many Russians drink while out in the bush, I’d cover myself in orange from head to toe.  And maybe strap a pair of those disposable air-horns on my shoes, too.

I’m guessing all this camouflage-as-an-outdoor-fashion-statement comes from the military.  In Russia, everyone has to put in a couple years of service when they turn 18.  Even if they don’t get to keep their gear when they get out, the camouflage patterns are so familiar by then that they probably wouldn’t think of buying anything else.

Metro

What does it say about my childhood that the first real experience I had with a metro was in Moscow?  (Hint: It says I grew up in small-town Alaska.)  Thinking back, I guess I commuted a time or two on the Mexico City metro before we visited to Russia, but because I was mostly following other people in our group there, it didn’t leave as big an impression on me.  We used the metro every day in Moscow and I quickly became familiar with it.

Technically, the metro system as a whole is quite impressive.  Most stations are underground – the deepest is over 275 feet deep! – and long escalators are used to ferry people down to the platforms.  During peak hours, the trains are never more than a few minutes apart and above every tunnel are digital readouts telling you when the next is due to arrive.

The Moscow Metro isn’t only an incredible feat of engineering and a testament to efficient management; it’s also a work of art.  Each station has its own theme.  You might arrive at one stop strung with old chandeliers, make a connection to another with polished marble floors, then get off at a station with walls tiled with intricate mosaics.

I could spend an entire vacation exploring the Moscow metro, just learning about and photographing the different stations.  I’ve been on many more metros since our first trip to Russia, and some of them have been quite good, but none of them compare to Moscow’s.

Driving in the Far East

We’ve traveled through so many countries at this point in the trip that I’d have a genuinely hard time telling you which ones drive on the left and which ones drive on the right.  It’s best for me, at this point, to simply look both ways before crossing any street, lest I be clobbered by a car driving in a lane I wasn’t expecting it to be in.

But Russians share the same side of the road with us in the U.S.  The right side of the road!

Things get a little crazy once you get to Siberia, though.  (In fact, things are crazy enough in Moscow and St. Petersburg.  Think “Los Angeles” with less respect for the rules and more traffic jams.)  Near Lake Baikal, they still drive on the right side of the road, but three out of four vehicles have their steering wheels on the right side of the car, as well.  Think about that for a minute.  It’s as if 75% of the population is driving U.S. Post Office delivery vehicles.

Why?  Well, it’s because Siberia is surrounded by Asian car markets.  Japan, Korea, China… importing from these countries is cheap, so they can have their pick, but most of the automotive manufacturers are saving their best work for the cars they drive in their home markets.  They export inferior vehicles to markets where they drive on the right.  When faced with an either-or decision between quality and steering wheel placement, apparently three-quarters of Russians prefer quality.

With some effort, a driver can make most of the necessary adjustments.  It’s not all that hard to retrain your brain to shift gears with your left hand or to mentally swap the turn signal with the windshield wipers.  You could overcome those muscle memories with an afternoon of practice.  What you can’t overcome – ever! – is the fear that wells up inside you when you decide to pass another car on the road.

Think about this for a second.  You’re behind a big semi; it’s going too slow on a two-lane rural road.  You decide you want to pass it, so you start to inch toward the oncoming lane to see around him… but wait!  You’re driving on the right side of the car, so that means you have to maneuver your whole car into the oncoming lane before you can see around the semi!

There are probably all sorts of infrastructure problems that arise when there isn’t a standardized driver’s side of the car, too.  I noticed at least one.  Ticket dispensers at the entrance to paid-parking lots had to be placed on both sides of the car, because they can’t be sure which window was going to be rolled down.

The roads in the Far East are terrible, too.  There’s one major thoroughfare through Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy that’s in decent repair – four lanes, two in each direction – but that’s only because the president came through a few years ago and was appalled by the conditions.  I guess he was able to channel some money toward PK once he returned to Moscow.  While we were there in September, they were repaving some side streets and one or two roads out of town, as well, because he’s due for another visit soon.

Driving anywhere outside of the city can be pretty rough.  Lots of dirt roads with huge potholes reduce your speed to almost nothing.  Everyone has an SUV; it’s the only reliable way to get around.  It’s not so bad when you take the time to negotiate all the bumps and holes, but even so, after three or four hours of driving on roads like that, your neck is sore and your nerves are shot.  Winter’s much better.  People just drive on the snow.

One last thing about the frustration of driving in PK.  The main road has two lanes in each direction, but it can take forever to drive from one end of town to the other.  First off, there is no bus lane, or even bus stops, so big buses are constantly blocking the right-hand lane while picking up or dropping off passengers.  Second, there’s no left-hand turn lane at the stoplights, so whenever a car is waiting to turn left on a solid green, it’s also blocking one entire lane.  These two events often coincide to bring everything to a standstill.  If they had the same rules against excessive lane changing as they do in the States, no one would ever get anywhere at all!

How important do you think roads are in the economic development process, by the way?  I got to thinking about that as we sat in a PK traffic jam for an hour or two.  It seems to me that paving roads and maintaining them might be one of the best values for a country’s tax dollars.  I couldn’t help but think about how much business wasn’t being done while all those cars sat bumper to bumper, not to mention how much time is wasted when you can only drive 30 KPH because everything but the main avenue has reverted back to dirt roads with lake-sized, water-filled potholes.

Driving Licenses

One day, while we were driving back from the Mutnovka geothermic field on the top of a volcano in Kamchatka, we came across a police officer on the side of the road.  He had obviously pulled over another car (his patrol car was parked behind it) and its two occupants were standing with him alongside the road.

As we approached, he took a step out into the road and motioned for Oksana’s brother to pull over.  After we’d stopped, he approached the driver’s side window and asked Oksana and Andrey to accompany him for a minute.  I, of course, had no idea what was going on.  Oksana told me to sit tight; they’d be right back.

I watched through the windshield as the officer explained something to them and then they all bent down over some papers spread over the hood of the car.  Andrey and Oksana signed some stuff, got back in the car, and we drove off.  “What was that all about?” I asked.

Oksana told me that the couple had been pulled over for speeding – excessively so.  Because of that, the officer was issuing them a ticket, probably involving a fine or a court date or some such thing.  To insure that they would show up to pay their fine, he was revoking the driver’s license.  As long as they showed up and paid their fine on time, he’d get his license back.  If he didn’t, the next time he was pulled over, he’d be arrested.

Oksana and Andrey were needed as witnesses.  They put down their names and contact information, verifying that this cop was revoking that guy’s driver’s license.  The only reason we were pulled over was because we happened to be the first car to come along.

I can’t imagine something like this working in the U.S.  The only way a police officer can confiscate your I.D. is if they arrest you, and they’re not going to do that for a common speeding ticket.

Seems like this is a Russian system of checks and balances to me.  A judicial workaround to combat corruption.  Consider what might happen if the cop didn’t revoke the license.  What would guarantee that the driver would show up at court in a society where he could bribe his way out of such proceedings?  On the other hand, imagine if cops weren’t required to obtain a third party witness to the confiscation?  Corrupt officers could simply take the license and demand a large bribe if the driver wanted it back.

Law and Order

I saw Law and Order: Criminal Intent on TV while we were in Russia, or rather, I saw, “Закон и порядок. Преступный умысел.”  It wasn’t just a dubbed version of the American show.  This was a whole new show, with Russian writers, directors, and actors.

I couldn’t understand anything that was happening, except… well, I knew when the scene changed.  It had the exact same chung-chung sound effect.

Oksana never sat down and watched an episode, so I didn’t get an answer to the first question I had about the series.  They presumably follow cases through the criminal and judicial system, like they do on the U.S. show, but do they address the things that are uniquely Russian or do they simply rehash plots and scenarios from the American version?  For instance, do they address or gloss over the obvious corruption in the system?

That would make for some fascinating television, but I could also see how the “ripped from the headlines” feel of the Law and Order franchise could draw the wrong kind of attention from some very powerful and dangerous Russian authorities.

Language Tangent

As I was writing about Law and Order, Oksana and I were just discussing the show’s Russian name.  Apparently Wikipedia calls it “Law and Order: Criminal Mind,” which is an inaccurate translation.  Oksana said she could understand why someone could make that mistake, though.  The Russian words for “mind” and “intent” come from the same root.

How interesting! I thought.  The word they use for the thinking part of the brain is related to intent.  There’s something almost poetic about that.

It got me thinking about the same words in English.  We say, “mind your manners,” or “mind your parents.”  What does “mind” mean when we use it as a verb?  It means, “to pay attention to.”  Attention. Intention?  Intent!

I love puzzling out languages!

Speaking of languages, the United States always gets a bad rap because the vast majority of Americans only speak English.  After traveling through 25 countries or so and seeing the majority of them with thoroughly bilingual cultures, Russia surprised me by also being almost aggressively monolingual.

Maybe it’s a superpower thing.  “Our country is so big and important, we don’t need to learn how to speak your language; you need to learn to speak ours!”

Also, I don’t know why it took me so long to realize this (being married to a Russian girl these past 8 years), but Russians speak mostly with their lips.

(I think the only reason I noticed was because of all the time I spent as a fifth wheel in dinner conversations.  You still look at people when they talk, even if you can’t understand what they’re saying, and I found myself observing the manner in which Oksana’s family and friends spoke.)

The way Russians speak with their mouths almost closed, made me think of some videos I’ve seen online in which people dissect accents.  There’s a placement element to speaking in an accent where you “move” the voice around your mouth.  Some accents sit way in the back, by the throat.  Some you try to move up toward your nose.  Russian, apparently, sits out on the tip of your lips.

Russians famously have a difficult time with our “th” sound, where the tongue slips through the teeth for just an instant.  I wonder if every sound in the Russian language can be made with the teeth clenched shut.

American Movies

Speaking of American entertainment, I’ve noticed that Russia has a unique way of dubbing, well, everything.  Normally when you dub a movie, you kill the original audio track completely and have new actors give voice to the characters in their own language.  In Russia, they do use new voice actors, but they don’t remove the original audio track.  This is exactly as irritating as you’d think. It sounds like two people talking at the same time, in different languages.

We sometimes see the same thing being done to news broadcasts or on the radio when someone is being interviewed in a foreign language.  They begin speaking, in Spanish, say, and then the editor lowers their volume and has an interpreter come in and speak over them in English.  It’s a useful trick when you want to establish that the original speaker is a foreigner.  It’s completely annoying when a whole movie is needlessly done the same way.

Oksana said they’ve done it this way for as long as she can remember.  Everyone accepts it; it seems like a cultural idiosyncrasy at this point.  I wonder why they do it this way, though.  What’s wrong with subtitles?  Is it because the literacy rate is (or was) too low for most people to understand them?  Can it be that Russians read slower for some reason and can’t keep up with them?  Or is it simply that the Hollywood movies that were originally dubbed into Russian weren’t done with the original edits?  That is to say, maybe there weren’t able to remove the original, English audio track without also removing the sound effects and music as well, so they just dubbed right over the top of it all in Russian.  And then, once everyone got used to it being done this way, it just became a thing.

At any rate, Russia has its own very successful movie industry where everything is produced in Russian.  I happened to catch an action movie where some American soldiers were obviously the bad guys.  When those Americans spoke English, even then, they dubbed audible Russian over the top of their lines so the Russian audience would know what was being said.  No subtitles at all.

Two other notes about Russian movies:  Yes, Americans are always the bad guys.  And now, after having seen a couple movies with Russian actors playing Americans and royally butchering the accent, I finally have sympathy for Oksana and all those times she’s listened to American actors faking their way through their Russian characters’ lines.  So painful it can’t help but rip you right out of the movie!

Customer Service

I’ve told Oksana I wouldn’t mind living in Russia for a time, so that I could learn the language through immersion.  She tells me that’s never going to happen; she has no interest in living there again.

It’s not the country that would bother her.  It’s the business world.  If we move there, she would have to get a job, and working in such a messed up system would drive her crazy.

Partly, it’s because she’s an accountant.  She hates that Russian businesses keep two different books: One with the numbers to show the government for tax purposes, and one that has the real numbers related to the business.  It’s an open secret; everyone does it – everyone has to do it.  An honest business can’t compete in a corrupt market.

The other thing Oksana hates is the customer service – or lack thereof.  This is something that has probably been improving since communism gave way to capitalism back in the 90s, but it’s still a long way from U.S. standards.  No one’s going to get fired for treating customers poorly in Russia.

To be clear, it’s not just the fact that a few jilted customer leave angry after a transaction.  Let’s face it – that still happens in the States all the time.  The problem in Russia is at the institutional level.  Problems with the way customers are handled by a business actually slow the business down.

An example:  When we were at the train station in St. Petersburg, buying our tickets for the Trans-Siberian Railroad, we stood in line at the counter.  While we were waiting, people would appear out of nowhere, cut to the front of the line, and the person behind the counter would stop what they were doing and service them instead of those of us who had been waiting patiently.  This happened two or three times and people were getting seriously angry.

Turns out, it’s policy for employees to help customers who are purchasing tickets for the trains that are departing soonest.  These people were justified in queue-hopping because they’d waited until the last possible minute to purchase their tickets.  Some people gamed the system, knowing they’d never have to wait in line at all, if only they wait until the “10 minutes to departure” announcement for their train.

Logically, this makes some sense: If those customers had to wait in line, they’d probably miss their train and the company is out a sale.  But from a customer service standpoint, it’s idiotic.  The employees are always being yelled at – both by the people who are in a rush and by the people who are waiting patiently.  If they simply banned line-cutting altogether, then everyone would accept that they need to get there early and the whole process of ticket sales would be much more orderly.

Another example: When we were flying out of Irkutsk, Oksana’s check-in bag weighed in at 21.5 kilos.  The airline attendant behind the counter wanted to charge her an extra $25 (or whatever), but Oksana wouldn’t have it.  We held up the line as we pulled stuff out of the bag until it dropped to 20 kilos.  It took some time, too.  Our packs are stuffed from the top, down.

Oksana muttered some things under her breath at the woman, but she just sat there and waited.  As far as she was concerned, she got a 5 minute break from helping customers and she didn’t care a bit that the people behind us were going to be more irritated when they reached her.

After checking in, we still had a few hours before we needed to be at the gate, so before we went through security, Oksana dug out her iPhone and checked the airlines’ regulations on overweight bags.  She discovered that the limit was 23 kilos, not 20!

She marched right back up to the counter and asked the woman why she’d made her take items out of her bag if it was under the limit.  Her response?  It was Oksana’s fault.  It’s the passenger’s responsibility to know that the airline-stated limit is 23 kilos!

(Talking it over later, we decided that this might better fit in the “corruption” instead of the “bad customer service” category.  I’m pretty sure she planned to pocket the oversize baggage fee.)

Shopping

Moscow, of course, is now a modern capitalist metropolis.  Change the language and you would have a hard time telling it apart from New York or Los Angeles.  The shopping there was the same as any other big city in the world.

Out in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, though, I noticed something peculiar.  While malls have begun to pop up all over the city, they’re different on the inside than we’re used to in the States.

Instead of having large department stores and franchise businesses, most malls in the Russian Far East are still stuck with the old market mentality.  Think “cell phone accessory kiosks,” on a mall-wide scale.  Instead of having Wal-Mart and McDonald’s move into the mall and wipe out the all the mom-and-pop operations in town, it’s like all the mom-and-pops just picked up and moved their tiny businesses inside the mall!

Even some of the supermarkets are stuck in this mode of thinking.  On the outside, a supermarket may look just like a Safeway or a Winn Dixie, but when you go in, you realize that each aisle has its own vendor.  Rather than fill your cart with what you want and pay for things near the exit, you instead only put them into your cart after they’ve been paid for.  Because there’s more than one business under the roof, there may be three delis, two butchers, and five bakeries inside the same supermarket.  Buying a package of M&Ms isn’t a straight-forward process, either. You’d do yourself a favor by shopping around, because they might be cheaper the next aisle over!

That said, you can see that they might be leaving the market stall model behind.  Another supermarket conducts business in the traditional way (However, with tiny shops placed side-by-side along the entire perimeter, it appears that they just can’t quite let go of the old market mentality.)  Also, there’s a Cinnabon in one of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy’s malls, too.  Their sticky-sweet cinnamon buns herald future changes, I have no doubt!

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Thailand
2. Thoughts on Estonia
3. Thoughts on Jordan

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments |

Click to enlarge!

Throughout our round-the-world travels, Oksana and I managed to record a whole lot of data pertaining to our trip.  There were certain things we updated every single day (my journal, our travel budget, our GPS track) and some things that we recorded on a less frequent basis (number of buses, trains, planes, etc.)  While it almost became too much to keep up with at the end of a year and a half — I’m still catching up on our GPS page! — we saw it through and now have a huge amount of raw data to examine.  Personally, I find it fascinating to dig into this stuff and I can’t wait to see what it tells us!

• What was our least expensive country?
•  How many photos did we take?
•  How many miles did we cover?
•  How many hours did we spend on buses?
• How much money did we spend?

On second thought, maybe I don’t want to know the answer to that last one…

In the coming weeks and months, as we parse this data for our own curiosity, I’ll be sharing it on our website.  But looking at spreadsheets and numbers probably isn’t fun for you, so I’m going to do my best to present it in a way that’s easier to digest.  I created this first infographic — which we tried to limit to simply time and place – with this in mind.  Hopefully it’ll be the first of many.

Make sure you see the full-size version!

No related posts.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment |

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We only had one day in Dubai, a 17-hour layover between Moscow and Bangkok.  Oksana and I left our bags at the airport and spent the day in the city.  We explored Dubai’s insane malls, giant hypermarkets, went skiing indoors, and tried (but failed) to ascend the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa.

Late in the afternoon, we decided to give the Big Bus Tours company a try.  They run a “hop on, hop off” bus that we, despite the sky-high price they were asking, thought would be a good way to see the city sights.  It wasn’t.  They happily sold us two tickets (for a total of $120 US dollars!) at 3:30pm, failing to mention their buses only run until 5pm.

We chose our seats on the second level of the open-air, double-decker bus and put in our earphones so we could hear the guided audio tour.  We both pulled our cameras out of our bags at the same time and, to our horror (and shame, because we should have known better as Alaskans), watched every glass surface on them instantly fog.  Not only had our cameras been inside a cool, air conditioned mall for the last few hours, they’d also been with us when we went skiing.  By pulling them out of our bags, we’d effectively raised their temperature almost 70 degrees less than 5 seconds.

The air in Dubai is surprisingly humid and after half an hour of frustration, I worried that the inner elements of my lens would never defrost.  Our first few photos were ridiculously blurry.  Finally, by the time we pulled up to the third or fourth gigantic mall on the bus’s loop, the sun had done its job.  My camera was ready to take some pictures again.

When the bus pulled out again, we were the only ones left on the top level.  After 5 minutes or so, we realized that the guided tour was no longer playing through our headphones…

We forgot our worries when the bus pulled onto the highway.  There, in the distance, was the Dubai skyline with the sun sinking into the humid haze behind it.  Oksana and I moved to the opposite side of the bus, leaned over the rail, and tried to frame a photo – any photo – without a telephone pole or an electrical wire in it.

Of the dozens we shot, the one you see above is my favorite.

When we sat back down, we knew something was wrong.  No audio guide and we were moving further and further from the city.  Neither Oksana nor I wanted to go down and ask the driver if we’d stupidly missed the last stop, but of course, eventually we had to.  I walked down when he pulled off at a gas station – the lower half of the bus was also empty – and caught up to him at the pump.

“Um, is the tour over?” I asked.

He looked at me, shocked. “You were on the bus?”

“Yes, upstairs.”

“The tour ended at five! You were not supposed to stay!” He sighed. “Where did you planning to go?” His English wasn’t perfect.

I gave him the name of the mall where we bought the tickets because I knew it had a metro station nearby that would lead us to the airport.  He drove us back as soon as he finished filling up the tank.

I felt guilty, but hey, he should have checked his own bus at the last stop, right?  There was even a security camera on the upper deck, pointed right at us!

Canon 5D Mark II
Date: 5:38pm, 30 September 2011
Focal Length: 82mm
Shutter: 1/8000 sec
Aperture: F/4
Exposure: -1 step
Flash: No
ISO: 100
Photoshop: Minor rotate and crop, Slight crushing of blacks with Levels

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on the United Arab Emirates (Dubai)

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | One comment |

Going to McDonald’s in Russia was almost and afterthought for us.  We spent our first week or so in St. Petersburg without stopping by one, and then, a day or two before we were set to hop on a train to Irkutsk, we realized that we might not get another chance.  I wasn’t sure there was a McDonald’s in Irkutsk, but I knew for sure there wasn’t going to be on on Kamchatka.  We’d already eaten at a Russian McDonald’s in 2006, so it wasn’t like missing it this time would bother me.  Still, we weren’t making videos back then…

So, while we were on our way to buy a new pair of hard drives, we decided to stop off for lunch.  I remembered to bring the video camera, but it turns out I forgot to bring a battery for the microphone.  The on camera mic did well enough, even if it did pick up a bit too much traffic noise.

Couple notes about the video:  I guess we finally found an acceptable answer for why all the McDonald’s managers have been so adamant about us not taking photos.  Copyright infringement, which I think is a pretty silly excuse in this case, is a party line I could see the franchise enforcing.  At least it’s an answer; we usually don’t even get that.

We never did go seeking the rumored “fake McDonald’s of Russia.  Would have been fun to order a Big Mec, or whatever, and see how close it was to the real deal.  Next time!  Also, as you may have figured out from watching the video, we didn’t “get” the Chicken Shake because we didn’t find the curry powder until after we’d finished eating.  I guess you’re supposed to pour that in the bag with the chicken and shake it all around.  Maybe they even have different flavors.

Related posts:

1. PVX: McDonald’s in Estonia
2. PVX: McDonald’s in Finland
3. PVX: McDonald’s in Bulgaria

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |

Last year, on November 10^th, our flight from Miami to Quito kicked off our trip around the world.  Since then, we’ve traveled tens-of-thousands of miles across five continents, seen amazing sites, and met amazing people.  One year later, to the day, we’re still going strong.  We just arrived in a new city, Thailand’s Chiang Mai, and because of a fantastic coincidence, we happened to arrive during their Festival of Lights (Loi Krathong.)  We pretended the whole city was turning out to give us a huge anniversary party!

Originally, our year of travel was supposed to begin on July 1, 2010.  We’d budgeted $100/day for the entire year, setting aside a whopping $36,500 for our trip.  But we had setbacks and delays in the States which eventually delayed our trip by three months.  By the time November 10^th rolled around, we had already been gone from home 140 days.  Assuming we’d stuck to our travel budget, that was $14,000 already spent.  We discussed it and made the tough decision to start again at zero – time-wise and money-wise – when we flew to Ecuador.

We did fairly well in South America (aside from spending too big a chunk on the Galapagos Islands), but Africa pitted our travel budget spreadsheet against us.  We regained some ground when we stayed with friends and family in Europe and Russia, saving on housing, but the transportation costs caught us again.  By September 12^th, we had exhausted the $36,500 we’d set and realized that any remaining travel costs would be coming out of our savings.  We had fallen 58 day – almost two months – short of our goal.

We spent the month of October in Thailand, spending as little money as we could.  By staying close to our hotel (and pool!) and eating out only once a day or so, we managed to get by on less than $45 a day.  That average will probably ratchet back up this month, as our transportation costs have already increased as we begin to travel around Southeast Asia with friends.

We spend a lot of time trying to figure out our budget now.  It seemed so easy when we planned it out.  $100 a day for a year; what could be simpler?  But now we’re juggling three different time periods:

• Time in the US & Canada (July 2010 – November 10^th, 2010)
• Planned year of travel (November 10, 2010 to November 10, 2011)
• Wrapping it up (November 10, 2011 to roughly mid-December)

As well as four different budget breakdowns:

• US & Canada (July 2010 – November 10^th, 2010)
• Actual “year” of travel (November 10, 2010 to September 12^th, 2011)
• Time between exhaustion of funds to planned end of trip (September 12^th, 2011 to November 10^th, 2011)
• Extended travel plans after original end date (November 10^th, 2011 to approximately mid-December 2011)

How much we’ll end up spending on this trip and how it all breaks down will have to wait until we’ve finished recording every expense.  All we know for sure right now is that every penny we spend after September 12^th is coming out of the money we’d saved for a house back home.

So, anyway.  What’s next?

As I mentioned, we’re currently traveling around Southeast Asia with our friends Wendy, Dusty, and Sarah.  We’re moving fairly quickly, which is a necessary evil if we’re going to see some of Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Malaysia before flying from Singapore to Australia in mid-December.

Oksana has been sending out resumes all over Australia, looking to put her Holiday Work Visa to good use.  If she can find a job that pays well enough, we expect to spend almost all of 2012 living there.  While she’s busy with her new job(s), I’ll be working hard on producing something from all these videos, photos, data, and stories we’ve collected over the past year and a half.  Probably a book.  Perhaps something for your coffee table that’s full of photos.  Maybe a DVD.  It’ll depend a lot on what you all would like to see.

I have big plans for the travel blog and podcast once we stop moving around and look forward to sharing them with you in the New Year.  In the meantime, you should know that we’ll probably be posting less in the month to come, mostly because I’m having trouble finding time to sleep, let alone the time to write about what we’re seeing and doing!  Next week will be the first time in months that I won’t be posting a “Thoughts On…” article because I’ve caught up to Russia and that entry is going to take a long time to write!  (Has anyone noticed that we had a consistent posting schedule for a little while there?  Did you enjoy it while it lasted?)  Rest assured that we’ll still be tweeting and Facebooking updates as we go!

Related posts:

1. One Year of Travel

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments |

Keeping to a weekly posting schedule has almost caught us up, too!  After this one in Estonia, we only have Russia and Dubai to edit.  However, by the time we get through posting those two, I’m sure we’ll have a recording for Thailand, too.

Back to this video:  As an intro, I tried to list off, from memory, the 25 different countries where I’ve eaten at a McDonald’s.  Fell three short because I forget Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rico.  Also, yes, I know that Amsterdam is a city, not a country.

Don’t know if you know about it, but we have a page where we track all this: McDonald’s of the World.

Finally, we probably shouldn’t have tried to record this video outdoors on a day with such fickle weather, but the area was beautiful and I wanted to incorporate as much of old town Tallinn into the edit as I could.  Filming outdoors has its own set of challenges, however.  Have you seen the video yet?  Did you, like me, think you were hearing a horse trotting down the cobblestone street?

Related posts:

1. PVX: McDonald’s in Thailand
2. PVX: McDonald’s in Uruguay
3. PVX: McDonald’s in Chile

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2011. | Permalink | No comment |

The easiest way to get from Helsinki, Finland, to St. Petersburg, Russia, is by train.  It’s a straight shot, takes about three and a half hours.  Since St. Petersburg was our next destination, taking the train was everyone’s first suggestion.  We didn’t take the train.

We skipped a lot of Europe when we skipped from Bulgaria to Finland, and I wanted to see at least some part of it before we slipped into Russia.  Estonia, which was right across the Baltic Sea, was an easy choice.  Close, cheap, and also sharing a border with Russia.

We left Helsinki on a giant cruise ship (the word “ferry” just didn’t seem to apply) and a couple hours later, we were in Tallinn.  We spent a night and a day there, exploring the city, and loved every minute of it.

European Union

Estonia was our first border crossing within the European Union and we weren’t prepared for it.  We disembarked from the ship with a few hundred other passengers and followed them through the long and twisting corridors of the ferry terminal.  We passed through a couple glass doors and suddenly found ourselves standing next to a line of taxis.  Hey, what the heck?  Did we somehow miss immigration and customs?

Nope.  There was no immigration, no customs.  As we skipped back into the terminal to withdraw some more Euros from an ATM, I reflected on just how much more convenient life in the Union must be for the people of Europe.  Crossing from country to country didn’t seem to me to be much different than crossing from state to state in America.

Only bummer is we didn’t get any new stamps in our passports!

Castles

To be honest, Oksana and I have had it up to here with museums and churches.  At the beginning of our trip, we sought them out, but after awhile they all start to look the same.  I know that Europe has some of the best churches and museums in the world, but I didn’t miss them.  But the castles… well, now.  That’s a different story!

North America, South America, and Africa have their ruins, but none are what you would call castles.  Of all the places in the world, Europe dominates that particular architectural category.

In the middle of Tallinn, they still have parts of the original medieval walls that surrounded the city.  Inside the wall, much has changed, but they still have remnants of the original structures – turrets, churches, and the like.  Even though the city is milking every last tourist dollar out of the winding, cobblestone streets, we enjoyed walking around all afternoon.

Tallinn gave us just a tiny taste of that old European architecture, but it was enough.  I want to go back for more someday.

Living Conditions

Estonia, which was a Soviet state just twenty years ago, is by all accounts thriving today.  We could tell.

Our hotel was on the outskirts of the city and there were no restaurants around.  Around dinner time, we found ourselves walking a couple miles through darkened neighborhoods to the only open supermarket in the area.  It gave us a good chance to see how people lived (at least in the suburbs of Tallinn.)

Both Oksana and I were struck by the newer, modern architecture of the apartment buildings.  They were all angular cubes and big glass walls.  Further back from the main road, the neighborhoods took on a surprisingly American quality with houses and yards replacing apartment complexes.

Outside the capital we did see the remnants of economical Soviet living – those giant, rectangular monoliths of grey cement – but it appears as though Estonia is distancing itself from that style of construction as fast as they can.

Car Culture

This one, I’m not so sure about, but it seemed like Estonia also has a strong car culture, just like the U.S.  We did see a lot of people driving (and not in old beat up Ladas, either), but mostly it was walking the suburbs that we guessed how prevalent car ownership must be.

We were quite surprised, that first night, how far we had to walk to find any open store.  In Bulgaria, for instance, apartment complexes usually had convenience stores operating on the premises.  If not, you rarely had to walk farther than a block or two to find a store selling water, soda, candy bars and gum.

Perhaps the giant supermarket we found on the periphery of Tallinn simply put all the smaller mom and pop stores in the area out of business.  At any rate, I can only guess that anyone shopping from there would need a car to get their groceries back home.

Language

We passed a mother and her 10-year-old boy on the street as they were headed toward the local cineplex.  Oksana heard him remark excitedly, in Russian, as they walked by, “What do you think, mom?  Should we pick in movie in Estonian, Russian, or English?”

Amazing.

Consider the language influences on Estonia.  First, they have their own language, Estonian, which is probably more related to Finnish than anything else.  From World War II until the 1990s, Russian was taught concurrently in the schools, making most of the country officially bilingual with two state-sanctioned languages.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Estonia has gone back to officially only supporting one language, but in practice there’s a good chance that a person on the streets speaks three different languages!  With their introduction into the European Union, learning English has become much more important.

Rollerblades

I guess rollerblades are still big in Estonia.  As we walked through the park on our way to the city, we saw quite a few people out exercising their legs.  Now that I think about it, there’s probably still a large contingent of Americans who still use rollerblades every day – I’m thinking about places like the beach in Santa Monica – but in small town rural Alaska?  That fad has passed.

Baltic Weather

The weather in Tallinn is extremely fickle.  We spent one full day walking around the city and it rained on us at least half a dozen different times.  In between, lots of blue sky and puffy grey clouds scuttling by.

I would guess the cool climate and turbulent Baltic Sea have a lot to do with it.  Tallinn is probably the sort of place where you always bring an umbrella “just in case.”

The danger in commenting on the weather of Estonia, of course, is that we were only there a day and a half.  Who can say what it’s like the other 363.75 days of the year?

Customer Service

It was a chilly the morning we walked into the old city of Tallinn.  The sun was shining (between squalls), however, so there were plenty of people out in the streets.  We passed one café where a few customers were sitting outside, trying to soak in some sun on what would probably be one of the last warm days before autumn took hold.

Here’s the cool part: They were all wrapped up in blankets.  I’m not sure I would have noticed, except that in the short time it took us to walk past, we saw a waitress come out and drape one over the shoulders of a couple sitting next to each other.

I love that idea!  Besides the romantic notion of sipping a hot mocha under a blanket in the sun, it’s just good business sense to find a way to stretch the allure of outdoor dining a few more days into the colder seasons.

I’m surprised this idea hasn’t caught on in Alaska yet.  There are so many days, especially in spring and fall, when the sun’s out, but it’s just not quite warm enough to enjoy it at an outdoor café.   Someone up there should invest in some Snuggies!

Related posts:

1. PVX: McDonald’s in Estonia
2. Thoughts on Finland
3. Thoughts on Russia

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2011. | Permalink | No comment |

We only really had one opportunity to eat at McDonald’s while we were in Helsinki and neither Oksana nor I were hungry at the time.  Unfortunately, I think that sort of shows in the video.  Hunger being the best spice and all that.

Anyway, we made a big deal about how incomprehensible the Finnish menu was for us, but we actually had a very helpful person taking our order.  He was an older gentleman with perfect English.  When I told him I’d have the 1955 burger, he nodded and said, “Good choice.  You’ll like that one, it’s very good!”  I’ve never had a McDonald’s cashier validate the deliciousness of my order before!

Just for fun, here’s the official Finland McDonald’s menu (at least for the Helsinki restaurant we visited.)  Can someone tell me what a Tuplajuustohampurilaisateria is?

Related posts:

1. PVX: McDonald’s in Israel
2. PVX: McDonald’s in Estonia
3. PVX: McDonald’s in the United Arab Emirates (Dubai)

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 4 comments |

When planning our round-the-world trip, there were a few places we knew we wouldn’t get a chance to visit.  China and India, because they were big and daunting enough to become full trips of their own.  The Middle East, because of the volatility of the region.  And Europe, because we knew we’d never be able to stay within our budget.

We managed to get a taste of Europe though, when we visited Finland.  Why, of all the countries we could have chosen, Finland?  Two reasons:  It’s the closest country to St. Petersburg, our point-of-entry into Russia, and one of Oksana’s college roommates, Kaisa (who came to Alaska as an international exchange student), lived in Helsinki.

Our flight from Bulgaria actually went south first, for a layover in Istanbul, so it was late afternoon by the time we arrived in Finland and we were tired from a long day of travel.  When we reached immigration, the officer behind the counter grilled us.  How long are you staying? Where are you going next? Where are your tickets out of the country? How much money do you have?   

We had answers for everything but the tickets; we told him that our plan was to buy bus or train tickets to Russia within the week.  He was skeptical when we told him we only had 43 Euros on us (which was how much we received after exchanging the remainder of our Bulgarian lev at the airport.)  He demanded to know how we would get more money within the country, so I started pulling credit and debit cards from my wallet and snapping them onto the counter.  He stopped me at four, stamped our passports, and waved us through.

Kasia was waiting for us beyond customs and, after hugs, she whisked us away from the airport and took us directly to her farmhouse in the countryside, 80kms north of Helsinki.  We spent most of the next five days on the farm, enjoying the peace and quiet, but we saw a bit of Helsinki, too, as we somehow managed to make the long trip into the city each and every day we were there.

Geography

The first thing I thought, as we drove toward the farm, was that Finland is flat!  I don’t know why, but I just expected it to be more mountainous.  Perhaps it is in the north, I don’t know.

Despite being flat, the area around Helsinki reminded me a lot of Alaska.  Thick, tall evergreen trees, long summer sunsets.  Makes sense, being at roughly the same latitude as our home in Juneau.  The weather was quite a bit better, however, at least in August.  Much less rain.

Once we left the freeway, we found ourselves in farm country, and that I never expected.  It reminded me of North Carolina, of all places.  Small fields boxed in by small forests.  Hillier than the terrain near Helsinki, it was spotted with small lakes.  Houses were spread out on big plots of land, often with conventional red barns filled with livestock.  Quite picturesque.

I’m sure Finland does quite a bit of importing and exporting of all sorts of food items, especially since joining the European Union.  I have the impression, though, that it is much more self-sufficient than I realized.

Pronunciation

In learning Spanish and listening to other people talk in many different languages, I’ve learned a lot about my own English.  For instance, I have the very (American-centric) habit of accenting the second syllable of any word I’m unsure how to pronounce.  People who live there, don’t pronounce Helsinki the way we do in the States.  It’s not “hel-SINK-ee,” it’s “HEL-sink-ee.”  Reminds me of a similar situation we encountered in Tanzania.

Language

In the short time we were there, the Finnish language was an incomprehensible barrier to us.  In speaking situations, it wasn’t a problem at all, of course, because everyone also speaks English.  Wandering around the city was another matter entirely.

Most of the maps and all of the streets were labeled in two languages, which would have been quite helpful if Oksana or I spoke Swedish.  As it turned out, when we were following directions, we had to double- and triple-check each intersection to puzzle out the long names comprised mostly of consonants.

While Finland makes plenty of allowances for people literate in Swedish, they don’t often do the same for English-speakers.  When we tried to buy tickets for our commuter train into the city from an automated kiosk at the station (the only way to purchase them before getting on the train), we realized we had absolutely no clue how to navigate the screens.  Running short on time, we flagged down a passing Finn and ask them to translate for us.  She was super helpful, running us through the options, right up until it asked us for payment with a “chipped” credit card… which American banks, of course, don’t yet issue.  We ended up buying our tickets with cash, on the train.

Stereotypes

The teenagers on the streets of Helsinki looked like they were putting on a revival of 80s fashion.  Big hair, eclectic clothes, the whole works.  I spotted a fair amount of punk-rock fashion and hairsytles, too.

Toward the end of our stay, I remarked that the younger generation of Finns seemed to be trying to rebel with their fashion.  Any way to stand out of a crowd, a rebellion against the status quo made up of clothes and hairspray.

Jason, another American who had been in Finland much longer than we had, had a different opinion.  His told us that Finland is the most “American” country in Europe and most of the kids we saw weren’t rebelling at all, but rather doing their best to import what they perceived to be our culture in the States.

I’ll defer to his judgment.  He’d spent months there, while we only had a handful of days.

Safety

Oksana and I planned to spend at least one day walking around Helsinki and taking pictures.  Before we did, I asked our hosts how safe it was to wander around with an expensive camera (something I’m always concerned about.)  Helsinki seemed safe to me, but often there are areas in any big city that you don’t want to wander into.

They just laughed at me.  Kaisa’s husband, Aleksis, recalled a time a few years ago when there was a rash of pick-pocketing within the public transportation system, but it became a huge issue – making the news, it was so rare – and quickly faded away.  He pondered the question for a bit, then told us he couldn’t remember hearing of a single mugging.  Nothing where violence, or even the threat of violence, was used.

Public Transportation

It’s easy enough to get around Helsinki, albeit quite expensive, via public transportation.  On our last day, we took a high-speed train in from the countryside and it cost us $9.50 USD each, one-way.  Business commuters, at least the ones living that far out from the city center, must spend close to $20 USD per day on transportation.

Once within the city, there’s a network of trolley cars and buses that will take you anywhere you want to go.  The routes are usually easy enough to figure out, (see the language section, above), but again, it can be expensive if you have to use them all the time.  We paid €5 to get to from the bus station to the port, which was totally within walking distance if we hadn’t had our giant backpacks and if it hadn’t been pouring down rain.  Furthermore, while those five Euros entitled us to ride around on any tram line, our tickets were only good for a couple hours from the time they were purchased.  When our ferry was cancelled due to weather, we had to buy new tickets back to the terminal!

I didn’t remember to write down how much gas prices were in Finland, but I remember them being quite high.  Even so, with public transportation costs so high, it wouldn’t take much to make car-pooling an attractive option.

Perhaps because of the cost of transportation, the city has created an extensive network of bike paths.  It seemed like every street we walked had a thin lane devoted to bicycle traffic.  Trails through parks were often split down the middle, one side for pedestrians, the other for bicyclists.  Oksana and I wandered over the divider many times, not yet used to the concept of such a strong bicycle culture.

Cost of Living

While we were in Europe, we read about Sweden laying down an ultimatum for the European Union.  In an effort to attract foreign markets, the EU has intentionally devalued their Euro, and because of that, Sweden’s kroner has become a very “strong” currency in comparison.  So much so, that people in the European Union are avoiding Sweden because the exchange rate doesn’t work out in their favor.  Sweden told the world that they were prepared to devalue their own currency, by printing more kroner, to bring things back to a reasonable exchange rate.  Of course, we’re doing this with our own dollar right now.

Finland might have to do the same thing.

If anything, Diet Cokes are the “Big Mac Index” for us.  We buy at least one can of Coca-Cola Light practically every day while we travel, so we have a pretty good idea of how much it costs from country to country.  Finland’s Diet Coke was, hands down, the most expensive we’ve ever seen.  Call it $2.50 to $3 USD per 500ml (20oz) bottle.  We drank a lot of off-brand diet soda while we were there.

When we crossed the border into Estonia, for comparison, the price dropped all the way down to slightly under $1 USD for the same amount.

Finland is spendy.

Parking

I haven’t come across a system like this before, so I don’t know exactly how it works, but paying for parking in Helsinki is a bit weird.  As a driver, you get a little code wheel thingie that you put on your dashboard.  I guess you just turn the wheel to indicate what time you parked and leave it in plain sight for the meter maid.  If you exceed your allotted time, I suppose they write you a ticket.

Sort of feels like an honor system approach, but I guess you can’t game the system without some effort.  Best you could do is run down to your car on a coffee break and turn the wheel a bit.  You wouldn’t have to drive to a new spot, but you’d still have to leave work (or whatever.)

Saunas

Much like Russia, Finland has both a sauna and summer house culture.  What this means is that families often have cottages, sort of like we have cabins in Alaska, where people can congregate on weekends and holidays.

Imagine a small, rustic house on the shore of a shallow lake.  Inside is a sauna with a wood stove that heats a small room to an almost unbearable temperature.  You strip down, sit inside with friends for a few minutes, then step outside in the brisk night air just before you overheat.  Have a drink, cool down, and repeat as often as desired.

Oksana and I got the impression that Finns are more sexually liberated and less body-image conscious that Americans.  I wonder how much of that comes from their sauna culture, where it’s socially acceptable to sit around in a group while both naked (or at least scantily-clad) and sweating.

I also wonder if Finland subscribes to the whole “whipping you half to death with birch branches” in a sauna like they do in Russia.  I don’t know; no one offered me a beating.

Alcohol

From reading up a little online, it sounds like Finland, collectively, has a drinking problem.  That meshes with what we saw and heard during our time in Helsinki.

First, there’s the confusing manner in which alcohol is sold.  If you want a beer, cider, or long drink, you can pick them up pretty much anywhere.  In fact, anything with less than 5% alcohol is readily available.  Anything stronger, you can only buy from a government-run liquor store.  On top of that, there are all sorts of restrictions – no sales after 9pm, multiple drinking ages, high state taxes – that don’t seem to be doing much good.  Statistically speaking, alcohol has been the top killer in Finland over the last few years.

Personally, I loved the fact that you could pick up “tallboy” cans of ciders and other “cheerleader beers” at the supermarket.  I’m not a big drinker, but I do have a weakness for a crisp hard cider!  I didn’t get a chance to try any of those gin-based “long drinks,” but I could tell just by the variety on display that they were filling some pretty big niches.

I was surprised to hear our friends – who are only in their early 30s – complain about how bad the “kids” can get on the weekends.  We were there during of once-a-month, city-wide, gallery walk sort of occasion, but our friends wanted nothing to do with it.  Seemed to us like a great touristy thing to do, but they quickly talked us out of it.  Roving bands of obnoxious, binge-drinking high school and college kids throughout the city?  No thanks.

Of course, the government recognizes the alcohol problem and has tried to tackle it.  In the past, they heavily taxed all alcoholic products, but that backfired when Estonia joined the European Union.  Instead of purchasing domestic drinks, which at least had the benefit of helping the local economy, people just made liquor runs on the Tallinn fast ferry.  The government was forced to lower their taxes so that Finland’s companies could stay competitive, but as you can imagine, that didn’t do anything to lessen the country’s alcohol consumption.

Tough problem to solve.  We Americans know, from our own history of prohibition, that banning alcohol isn’t the answer.  (And from further reading, I just discovered the Finland had its own period of prohibition, too!)  If we want to end binge drinking, I guess we’ll just have to dump a ton of money into counter-marketing, over the span of decades, like we did with tobacco.  Education through advertising.

Licorice

The world can be divided into two types of people: Those who like black licorice and those who don’t.  I always thought I was one of the former.

I love black licorice! (Which is, sadly, unfortunate for my wife…)  The best I’ve ever had, we found in the duty free section of Sydney’s International airport – whatever brand we picked up there was both flavorful and oh-so-soft.  I never expected to find anything better, but I have long heard tales about the “salty” licorice of Finland.  I asked Kaisa for a primer during our first grocery store visit.

Salty licorice is known as “salmiakki” in Finland.  It was just about the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth, and yet, I so wanted to like it!  I couldn’t figure out why it tasted like a used cat litter box to me, but others liked it.  Regrettably, I kept tasting different brands and flavors, trying to figure it out.

After reading up on it, I discovered why it tasted more like “burning” to me than “salty.”  It’s not sodium chloride they make it with, but rather ammonium chloride.  Suddenly, I realized where the cat-pee taste came from and gave up on trying liking it.  I still can’t understand how so many Finns can stomach the taste.

Aleksis bought me salmiakki ice cream on two separate occasions.  The sweet licorice ice cream inside was heaven; I could eat a couple pints of that in a sitting.  The outer shell, however, was salmiakki.  The combination of the two forms of licorice resulted in something that was… tolerable… but I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to buy it on my own.

The good news is that Finland has lots of licorice, both salty and sweet.  I was able to find a brand, sold in a candy bar form-factor, that I fell in love with.  Still not as good as the Aussie stuff, but close.

Good thing we’re ending our journey Down Under.  I’m craving licorice again!

Related posts:

1. PVX: McDonald’s in Finland
2. Thoughts on Estonia
3. Thoughts on Bolivia

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