footprints
Grah. Somewhat ill - some of what was stolen in Amsterdam was medication, and there was a bit of a gap between when the emergency backup supply ran out and when the package rushrushrushrushed from the states got here. I had the entertaining experience of stumbling out of bed in the middle of the night only to realize I was vomiting into the bidet whatsit; I'm sure it's very nice and all if you're used to it, but as far as I can tell, the primary purpose is to bang shins on.
All in all, haven't really felt up to leaving the hotel except to deal with paperwork and visit a shopping mall (completely indistinguishable from an American one1) to buy a long sleeved shirt for Chernobyl. Bleh. Grouchybird.
One of the things that repeatedly strikes me as strange when traveling outside of the states is the sense of history, that things one reads about in books happened here, to real people, to the people I'm looking at right now, to that guy right there. On one of the school-building trips in Nicaragua, the family I was staying with put me up on a cot in a shed. So at my feet there was this big pile of tools - shovels for digging latrines, twig brooms, nets, that sort of thing, and so they made this vague pile of shadows I was gazing at when I fell asleep and when I woke up. And I'd been there about a week and a half when I suddenly realized that one of the shadowy blurs was a machine gun.
And I knew the history of the village - they'd been up near the border, they'd had a lot of trouble with Contras, finally there was a massive attack and all the men of the village loaded their women and children into trucks and moved to this new place, the place they still were, and the men stayed behind a bit, with the guns. But I'd never really though this guy, the cheerful avuncular soul I was staying with, who asked me endlessly to describe every baseball game ever - I never really put it together that once upon a time this guy stood on a hill with a machine gun (that machine gun), this guy kissed his pregnant wife and handed her up into the bed of a truck, this guy right here hammering away next to me. Changed the shape of the whole world, that moment.
It's a truth you sort of know abstractly: everything you read in the history books happens to someone, some real person - but for me, feeling that truth thrashing against the inside of my ribs was very different.
Every person I see in Berlin who is my age was born in a divided Germany, everyone I see in Kyiv who's my age attended a communist school. It's dizzying, sometimes, to be places that have felt so much change so recently, and it's interesting to try and see how people relate to it, and how entire cities deal with the weight of so much past and so much change. It's a hard thing to talk to people about, though, and I suspect some of my questions are pretty annoying. :)
Berlin is a City of Memory. They've left the scars showing. A bronze statue of a lion hit by a bomb, gazing impassively ahead while his tail and back legs melt away, flow down the pedestal - I don't know if he's stoic or unaware. This church, the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial, is in ruins, broken bell tower clawing at the sky, home to mournful birdcalls and the curling wind.
(There used to be a hideous, twisted wrought-iron statue of the four horsemen of the apocalypse outside, the sort that made you want to look away very badly, but sadly, it is gone.)
And this is the new church, where caladri and I lit a candle for nephrozym. It is hexagonal concrete - the locals call it "the hatbox" - built in the shadow of the ruins. Wierd combination of stone and light, soaring weight. Nothing is forgotten here. The new church can't replace the old, and Berlin doesn't try.
I just liked the way this looked - light splashing over the side of one of the pipe organ ranks. And it's a smaller picture than the previous one. :)
Berlin's graffiti is apocalyptic; it shows ends and beginnings, sunrises and loss. Lots of religious imagery, lots of war imagery. Though to be fair, there's certainly the sorts of name-tag and penis silhouettes you'd expect; just - lots of fire, lots of endings, too.
Praha is very different. It looks back much further than Berlin, I think. Berlin Remembers; Praha Endures. It knows that this, too, will pass. The EU is viewed as just another occupation, like the soviets but more friendly, and one day there will be somethign else, but there will always be Praha.
Cobbled streets, baroque Hapsberg buildings and buildings built in imitation of that style. Coats of arms on everything - every city has its rampant and its dancetty, its fields of or and sable. You can see which families were where when by how the same twelve heraldic devices show up with second-son marks and marraige marks in this town or that.
History is very heavy and very real here, coats of arms shaped from human bone, angels made of the space between breath and bone.
Even the graffiti is heraldic designs.
I don't have many pictures of the city of Warsaw itself, mostly because it is going to take someone more open-minded than myself to find something likeable there. But it's very different. Warsaw has no future and no past, only a grimy, mechanical present. The buildings are squat and heavy - they have industrial design but no function. It is gray and rigid, and people are silent and scowly. Police stand menacingly over transients and flex their muscles. Warsaw is a machine, poorly designed, grinding along without much idea of purpose or identity. I don't know why, honestly.
Warsaw's graffitti is beautiful, but wierdly mechanical. I don't have colored version of these pictures yet (caladri took them), but this face is mostly grey with bue sheen on, and looks very metallic. It is on a wall looking towards downtown Warsaw.
These three appear to be naked, female robots. One of them is various shades of yellow, one orange, and one greenish. I found the combination of "naked" and "made of plastic" oddly suiting for Warsaw.
More robots. "WTK ZFA"? Maybe somebody's initials?
Tangles of pipes going nowhere. Warsaw's graffiti is kinda creepy, no? :)
And then there's Kyiv. Kyiv is Praha's mirror: it looks to the present, and the future. Kyiv is drunk on capitalism and its trappings. Here on TV there are commercials where women wearing pearls feed fat fluffy cats salmon in front of silver vases of roses and a dishwasher. The message is "rich people use this dishwasher! Don't you want one?". It's backwards from what I'm used to, which is "this dishwasher is cheap (and/or saves you money by using less water)! don't you want one?" There are several fur coat stores, even in the height of summer. There are casinos everywhere, including the above, which appears to be a "My Little Pony" Casino. (?!) There are hundreds of little kiosks selling drinks, batteries, cigarettes, and old women selling buckets of raspberries. Everyone seems to have suddenly realized, all at once, "hey, I can get MONEY for stuff!"
I'm convinced all the shirtless guys you see out in the countryside suddenly realized they could SELL their SHIRTS for MONEY, woohoo!
I think part of the reason I like Ukraine (even though they nearly didn't let me into the country because they refused to believe I was the sex listed on my passport) is that it reminds me of Nicaragua, but a Nicaragua that actually functions. Out in the countryside, you can see teenagers watching cows and playing guitar, or little kids playing soccer with improvised goalposts. At gas stations, the employees have planted a row of sunflowers or two, or bring a cow to work to graze on the median. In villages, everyone sets out buckets of whatever they have extra: yams, beets, apples, little red apricots, round green pumpkins, and they trade amoung themselves for whatever they need. People like color here, especially blue - houses are riotously bright.
(Though, like the Nicaraguans, they have an unhealthy fondness for gold spraypaint. One time in Nicaragua I talked to a sculptor who would spend a week carving a statue of the Virgin from this lovely rose-colored marble in painstaking detail, and spraypaint the whole thing gold when he was done. Perhaps in Ukraine, like in Nica, there's some association with wealth and gold people are responding to.)
All the churches are shiny and new, rebuilt after the fall of communism.
(As an aside, does this church (Saint Andrew's) look like a merry-go-round to anyone else? It could have saints instead of horses! Very small children can ride on the merry-go-John-the-Baptist, who's extra short because he's missing his head!)
The graffiti here, though, is all echoes of the past, as if the city looks forward by day, and dreams backwards at night. There are many Russian orthodox crosses, prayers to forgotten saints, communist slogans. And the soldiers, like this lost paratrooper, spraypainted in alleys, waiting and watching.
Tommorrow: Chernobyl.
[1] caladri says I'm all sorts of wrong and the layout was totally different.
All in all, haven't really felt up to leaving the hotel except to deal with paperwork and visit a shopping mall (completely indistinguishable from an American one1) to buy a long sleeved shirt for Chernobyl. Bleh. Grouchybird.
One of the things that repeatedly strikes me as strange when traveling outside of the states is the sense of history, that things one reads about in books happened here, to real people, to the people I'm looking at right now, to that guy right there. On one of the school-building trips in Nicaragua, the family I was staying with put me up on a cot in a shed. So at my feet there was this big pile of tools - shovels for digging latrines, twig brooms, nets, that sort of thing, and so they made this vague pile of shadows I was gazing at when I fell asleep and when I woke up. And I'd been there about a week and a half when I suddenly realized that one of the shadowy blurs was a machine gun.
And I knew the history of the village - they'd been up near the border, they'd had a lot of trouble with Contras, finally there was a massive attack and all the men of the village loaded their women and children into trucks and moved to this new place, the place they still were, and the men stayed behind a bit, with the guns. But I'd never really though this guy, the cheerful avuncular soul I was staying with, who asked me endlessly to describe every baseball game ever - I never really put it together that once upon a time this guy stood on a hill with a machine gun (that machine gun), this guy kissed his pregnant wife and handed her up into the bed of a truck, this guy right here hammering away next to me. Changed the shape of the whole world, that moment.
It's a truth you sort of know abstractly: everything you read in the history books happens to someone, some real person - but for me, feeling that truth thrashing against the inside of my ribs was very different.
Every person I see in Berlin who is my age was born in a divided Germany, everyone I see in Kyiv who's my age attended a communist school. It's dizzying, sometimes, to be places that have felt so much change so recently, and it's interesting to try and see how people relate to it, and how entire cities deal with the weight of so much past and so much change. It's a hard thing to talk to people about, though, and I suspect some of my questions are pretty annoying. :)
Berlin is a City of Memory. They've left the scars showing. A bronze statue of a lion hit by a bomb, gazing impassively ahead while his tail and back legs melt away, flow down the pedestal - I don't know if he's stoic or unaware. This church, the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial, is in ruins, broken bell tower clawing at the sky, home to mournful birdcalls and the curling wind.
(There used to be a hideous, twisted wrought-iron statue of the four horsemen of the apocalypse outside, the sort that made you want to look away very badly, but sadly, it is gone.)
And this is the new church, where caladri and I lit a candle for nephrozym. It is hexagonal concrete - the locals call it "the hatbox" - built in the shadow of the ruins. Wierd combination of stone and light, soaring weight. Nothing is forgotten here. The new church can't replace the old, and Berlin doesn't try.
I just liked the way this looked - light splashing over the side of one of the pipe organ ranks. And it's a smaller picture than the previous one. :)
Berlin's graffiti is apocalyptic; it shows ends and beginnings, sunrises and loss. Lots of religious imagery, lots of war imagery. Though to be fair, there's certainly the sorts of name-tag and penis silhouettes you'd expect; just - lots of fire, lots of endings, too.
Praha is very different. It looks back much further than Berlin, I think. Berlin Remembers; Praha Endures. It knows that this, too, will pass. The EU is viewed as just another occupation, like the soviets but more friendly, and one day there will be somethign else, but there will always be Praha.
Cobbled streets, baroque Hapsberg buildings and buildings built in imitation of that style. Coats of arms on everything - every city has its rampant and its dancetty, its fields of or and sable. You can see which families were where when by how the same twelve heraldic devices show up with second-son marks and marraige marks in this town or that.
History is very heavy and very real here, coats of arms shaped from human bone, angels made of the space between breath and bone.
Even the graffiti is heraldic designs.
I don't have many pictures of the city of Warsaw itself, mostly because it is going to take someone more open-minded than myself to find something likeable there. But it's very different. Warsaw has no future and no past, only a grimy, mechanical present. The buildings are squat and heavy - they have industrial design but no function. It is gray and rigid, and people are silent and scowly. Police stand menacingly over transients and flex their muscles. Warsaw is a machine, poorly designed, grinding along without much idea of purpose or identity. I don't know why, honestly.
Warsaw's graffitti is beautiful, but wierdly mechanical. I don't have colored version of these pictures yet (caladri took them), but this face is mostly grey with bue sheen on, and looks very metallic. It is on a wall looking towards downtown Warsaw.
These three appear to be naked, female robots. One of them is various shades of yellow, one orange, and one greenish. I found the combination of "naked" and "made of plastic" oddly suiting for Warsaw.
More robots. "WTK ZFA"? Maybe somebody's initials?
Tangles of pipes going nowhere. Warsaw's graffiti is kinda creepy, no? :)
And then there's Kyiv. Kyiv is Praha's mirror: it looks to the present, and the future. Kyiv is drunk on capitalism and its trappings. Here on TV there are commercials where women wearing pearls feed fat fluffy cats salmon in front of silver vases of roses and a dishwasher. The message is "rich people use this dishwasher! Don't you want one?". It's backwards from what I'm used to, which is "this dishwasher is cheap (and/or saves you money by using less water)! don't you want one?" There are several fur coat stores, even in the height of summer. There are casinos everywhere, including the above, which appears to be a "My Little Pony" Casino. (?!) There are hundreds of little kiosks selling drinks, batteries, cigarettes, and old women selling buckets of raspberries. Everyone seems to have suddenly realized, all at once, "hey, I can get MONEY for stuff!"
I'm convinced all the shirtless guys you see out in the countryside suddenly realized they could SELL their SHIRTS for MONEY, woohoo!
I think part of the reason I like Ukraine (even though they nearly didn't let me into the country because they refused to believe I was the sex listed on my passport) is that it reminds me of Nicaragua, but a Nicaragua that actually functions. Out in the countryside, you can see teenagers watching cows and playing guitar, or little kids playing soccer with improvised goalposts. At gas stations, the employees have planted a row of sunflowers or two, or bring a cow to work to graze on the median. In villages, everyone sets out buckets of whatever they have extra: yams, beets, apples, little red apricots, round green pumpkins, and they trade amoung themselves for whatever they need. People like color here, especially blue - houses are riotously bright.
(Though, like the Nicaraguans, they have an unhealthy fondness for gold spraypaint. One time in Nicaragua I talked to a sculptor who would spend a week carving a statue of the Virgin from this lovely rose-colored marble in painstaking detail, and spraypaint the whole thing gold when he was done. Perhaps in Ukraine, like in Nica, there's some association with wealth and gold people are responding to.)
All the churches are shiny and new, rebuilt after the fall of communism.
(As an aside, does this church (Saint Andrew's) look like a merry-go-round to anyone else? It could have saints instead of horses! Very small children can ride on the merry-go-John-the-Baptist, who's extra short because he's missing his head!)
The graffiti here, though, is all echoes of the past, as if the city looks forward by day, and dreams backwards at night. There are many Russian orthodox crosses, prayers to forgotten saints, communist slogans. And the soldiers, like this lost paratrooper, spraypainted in alleys, waiting and watching.
Tommorrow: Chernobyl.
[1] caladri says I'm all sorts of wrong and the layout was totally different.