Message from Moscow

We have just returned from our annual ten days in our hometown of Portland, Oregon.  There could not be two more different places than Moscow and Portland, but wait, they do have some similarities….they are both located on a river, they are both in the northern hemisphere and they both have iconic statues – Moscow with its gargantuan Peter the Great, and Portland with its feminine Portlandia, but that’s about it.

We decided to try and make the journey more bearable by taking an evening flight direct to Amsterdam (checking our bags all the way to Portland) and spending the night in the airport hotel, which is literally above the concourse.  We got up at eight, and had a leisurely breakfast before boarding the ten-hour direct flight to Portland, where we arrived at noon.  It was way more relaxing than taking an early flight from Moscow, having a 3 or 4 hour layover in Amsterdam and then the long flight, which would have brought us into Portland at almost midnight.

We arrived to a welcome heat wave, so had the chance to wear summer clothes for a little longer, although after a few days it grew autumnal and chilly.  We had a lot of meetings planned with our business administrator, accountant, rental manager, lawyer, our teachers etc.  We also had a friend’s 60^th birthday, organizing repairs to our car so we can sell it, some shopping, and Solihin had five days of work with certifying practitioners, teacher training and a workshop.  We did manage to see some friends and I did a quick trip up to Vancouver to visit our youngest daughter Miriam, who is studying theatre design at UBC, which was a lovely treat, and I managed to squeeze in lunch with a dear friend too.

It is always interesting to return to the place we lived for eighteen years and called home before we moved to Russia, just as it is always interesting to visit England and see how that feels in terms of home and place.  What struck me this time was how relaxed and laid back Portland seemed.  People going to yoga classes, having coffee, talking to friends, walking with babies and children, a lot of life on the street, especially in our South East Clinton/Division neighborhood. There is a yoga studio below our flat on 26th, another on 32nd and another on 22nd with equivalent numbers of coffee shops!  I noticed how many small creative entrepreneurial enterprises there were everywhere, often with deliveries by bike.  Many streets now have groups of food carts around a collection of tables, offering a variety of sustenance for all tastes.

Portland has a worldwide reputation for its dedication to sustainability, and is often used as a model of urban planning, and its environmentally friendly way of life with locally grown food available in restaurants and farmer’s markets, the largest bike riding population in the US, and as a pioneer in recycling.

I was a dedicated recycler, bike rider, cloth bag user, filling my own containers with bulk produce, buying local and organic food from farmer’s markets, only buying free range, grass fed or wild meat and fish, using VOC free paint, growing and preserving some of our own food, gardening with native plants and low water use, and there really was the feeling that all the choices we made, helped to make a difference because so many of us were doing it.

When we moved to Moscow almost none of that was available. There is, understandably, very little environmental consciousness here as yet.  My attempts here have been cloth bags for shopping, but trying to stop the cashier putting everything in plastic bags before they fill my bags is always a challenge!  We drive rarely, and take the metro or walk to most places.  We carbonate our own filtered tap water rather than buy imported foreign glass bottles that we cannot recycle.  When possible we buy nuts, seeds and dried fruit in bulk. I make my own yoghurt, nut butters, almond milk and tahini.  We had to accept that organic produce, meat, eggs and dairy were not available and eat what is.  When we can we buy fruit, mushrooms and veggies from old ladies who sell their own produce on the street.  We hardly use any paper at all, now that everything is by email, scanned and saved as pdfs.  Unfortunately, we are working when the local street market is here, but we now have a woman who has set up a fruit and vegetable stall on the back of an old abandoned car just up the street and she is there each weekday.

In Portland I was surprised to catch myself thinking, as I watched people earnestly recycling their glass bottles and cans, how futile it all seemed, from the perspective of living in a city of around 15 million people where virtually no one is doing any of those things.  How much of a difference does it make? It doesn’t stop me doing what little I can, but it does remind me what a small percentage of the western world is doing anything.  As a total contrast, while in Portland I had to go to the mall for something, and could hardly find a parking place as the parking lot was full, the mall was packed with people, all buying, and I wondered who the recession is affecting, it doesn’t seem to have stopped anyone shopping.  I found it all a bit much and left feeling completely exhausted, I cannot see how people go there for fun!

Arriving back in Moscow we were met by the taxi guys who stand at the customs exit.  They all wear official looking laminated cards round their neck and come and ask you if you need a taxi.  We know that to get a regular taxi into town from the airport is 1200-1400 rubles.  These guys start off asking for 5000 rubles! When we speak Russian and name our price they will usually come down to 1500, after a bit of wangling.  This time they would not go below 2000 and were getting annoyed with us.  I was determined not to be at their mercy.  It is a real taxi mafia there, these guys control all the taxis in the airport and the ones negotiating with customers make their cut before giving something to the driver himself.  I had the bright idea of going back inside and upstairs to arrivals and catching a taxi that is dropping someone off.  We found a nice taxi driver and agreed on 1500, as by now we just wanted to get home.  In future, if we can’t take the train and need a taxi we will arrange for one to meet us and avoid the confrontations with, and attempts to rip us off by the taxi mafia.  Welcome to Moscow!

Muscovy ducks on autumnal pond