Clusterfuck!

SUKHBAATAR, Mongolia — I love the word "clusterfuck."

It's a wonderful piece of slang, a precise word to describe the epic, swirling disasters that appear so often in the comedy of life.

My father adores the word, and uses it liberally: The mall in December. The post office on tax day. Pretty much every part of an airport. They're all clusterfucks. Coming out of my father's mouth, it's not a compliment.

Especially egregious situations - perhaps a five-mile backup on the Interstate during a rainstorm - require a modifier. In his lexicon, these are not merely clusterfucks, they are Mongolian Clusterfucks. Growing up I knew whenever the words "Mongolian Clusterfuck" were put together, it was time to shut up and give my father some room to vent: we were in a bit of mess.

Until this very moment, I never thought about why the word "Monoglian" was used to emphasize the worst type of clusterfuck. Now, after only two hours in the country, I realize that the slang-coiners were dead on this time.

I needed a train ticket to the capital city, Ulaanbaatar. The crowded van I took from the border dropped me and my rolling suitcase right in front of the gray, Social-Realist train station. I rolled into the waiting room, a box filled with two rows of decaying plastic seats and an ugly shade of lime green paint peeling off the walls. It took much of my concentration to stay awake. I'd been traveling for 12 hours, difficult ones punctuated by yelling at various customs officers and bank tellers.

I focused on the occupants of the room. They're weren't many, and the few people were huddled in the corners, guarding their bags. The faces here are sadder and thinner than the faces I had seen over the border in Buryata. These people, in their tattered clothes, with their dust-covered possessions, wear their poverty as an outer layer. Yet they also seemed stoic, as if showing that years and years of abuse and hard conditions wouldn't crush their will to go on.

A small movement broke the peace. A young staff member removed a sign that was next to one of the ticket windows; pandemonium ensued. Every person in the station went toward that window at a full sprint - mothers grabbed their kids and forced them to lunge, an old man abandoned his bag of dirty vegetables - and they formed a massive huddle. People from the outside streamed into the station, and soon a dozen became nearly a 100.

Being mostly British, I made a move toward a shape to the right of the window that somewhat resembled a line. A uniformed train employee arrived and an attempted to make the line mandatory, with little success.

It took 15 minutes to get in front of that window. I was next in line three times, but each time I went to make that final step a skinny Mongolian wiggled his way around me. The fourth time I felt someone behind me attempting the same maneuver, but I'd had enough. I threw a right elbow out and blocked the deviant. Then I turned around to discover that I'd just hit a young mother in the side of the cheek, and come within a foot of giving her young son brain damage. But after fighting through that sea of humanity, I didn't feel guilty. I bought my ticket, one first-class upper berth, and ran out of the station.

It was an awful, awful time; the worst ticket buying experience ever. This is why a really bad clusterfuck is called a Mongolian Clusterfuck.

The Exile

KYAKHTA, Russia – On the road out of Russia, I passed only a single vehicle: an aging brown tank driving on a dirt road parallel to the main highway. As my rudimentary taxi got closer, two heads popped out. They wore the Russian army uniform, had shaven heads and couldn't have been older than 19. The tank operators had to stop because their mode of transport got completely ensconced in mud. The tank moved feebly forward and backward, but as my car drove into the distance it wasn't going much of anywhere.

That tank neatly represents what I will take away from two weeks in the Russian Federation. Russia is a powerful country, one that is becoming even more powerful with surging energy commodity prices and new mineral discoveries in remote areas. It is an important actor in global geopolitics, one that can still make waves in international affairs. But I'm not sure that the person driving this heavily armored tank is qualified for the job. Instead this lumbering giant might just be piloted by a scrawny, inexperienced teenager.

I didn't see Russia; I saw Russias. On the streets of Moscow I peered in restaurants where oligarchs and their progeny snarf down $100 mayonnaise-covered salads and saw one country. I saw that place again in the Sony store, where everything costs twice the price in the United States and there were two salespeople for every customer. To dodge the cold, I wandered through the GUM Department Store. Once a few mostly-empty Communist shops, the turn-of-the-century structure has been renovated and subdivided into dozens of fancy boutiques. This is the fanciest mall I have ever been to, anywhere on the planet, and inside the shoppers were privileged, mega-spenders with $2,000 clutches and matching designer boots.

Then there is the Other Russia, the one I saw mostly on transport. It was in van taxis, long-distance buses, on the subway and that epic train ride I came elbow-to-elbow with those not doing so well. The ones with cheap Chinese T-shirts and faded designs, carrying old backpacks back and forth from a block flat in a small suburb. They live lives without flash or glamor, eating out infrequently and . Dying early from poisonous liquor and poor working conditions. Subsiding on a pension that wouldn't be adequate in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Then there are the have-somes, the Sergeis and Vasilys that are doing O.K. Things are better than 1998, when the currency collapsed and the International Monetary Fund forced economy policy down Yestlin's throat like he was in charge of Sierra Leone. Their lot's improving, but life is still a slog.

These Russias should be in open conflict, with daily protests as the poor try to institute the Orange Revolution on a massive scale and those with a stake in the current system fight back with their superior resources. Instead, people from all walks of life accept Vladimir Putin as the driver of the country. He and his cronies get to decide where to point the tank, at defiant ex-Soviet Republics and democratic elements in the West.

I personally believe that the people with grapes should take them up with the driver. Make him pass a more difficult test before renewing his license. Try someone else at the wheel for a while.

But I'm no longer in the car, I just came for a test spin. I couldn't buy Russian. For all the friendly people I met here, meals I shared and wonderful literature and art I exposed to, I could never live here. The Russian deposition is too solemn for my extroverted personality. The skies are too gray and too cold someone who loves the beach. The quality of life is shit. It's a police state, somewhere where I had to worry about being written up for small infractions by an underpaid man in uniform. Most services are corrupt, so if I got in real trouble I wouldn't know where to go.

Russia is lurching in three directions. It may explode or prosper; I'm not sure. After spending some time here, it's no longer a black spot on the map. I'll be closely monitoring how things develop here – from a safe distance.

Previously: "Do Svidaniya"

Babushka With a Side of Fries

MOSCOW — I wanted my dozen or so meals here to be representative of the cuisines and tastes of the Russian Federation. As the capital and largest city, Moscow is in the best position to showcase Russian cooking as more than just smelly borscht. I wanted to go low, high, and find some tasty treats.

Me and my plans. The reality has been that I've been so busy running from one side of the metro station to the other reading Cyrillic and quizzing people on scholarships that food is an afterthought. Moscow on 800 rubles a day leaves no room in the budget for a splurge at a fancy, elitny restaurant. The only oligarchs I spotted on this visit were zooming by in their Black Bentleys as I stumbled around to the nearest subway station. Thankfully I've not gotten so lost in Moscow to run into a place where it's possible to eat out of a tent, although I hear that these "refugee restaurants" exist in some outer ring roads.

No, I've been sticking to meals on demand, and during the day that means blinki (a savory crepe) joints near museums and monuments, and at night, restaurants along the Arbat. I've made it twice to Mu-Mu, the canteen where I had an interesting meal with Helen, once to a Turkish place with a great Donner kebab, and another time to the ultimate Russian restaurant. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's called McDonald's.

I dine at the Golden Arches once in every country visit without apology. There's so much to learn about a culture by seeing how they've refined the ultimate American tradition to suit local conditions. The brutal Russian winter prevented me from visiting the most historically important McDonald's outlet – Pushkin Square – where thousands of Soviets camped out overnight on January 31, 1990, for their first taste of an American made meal. This massive facility, which seats 900 people at once, is a shrine to capitalism's arrival in Russia.

The Arbat outlet is little different. It has recently been remodeled, much like the one in Pushkin Square. The sleek steel counter tops and faux-mahogany wall panels resemble the bridge of the Enterprise more than my McDonald's down the street. There are 17 cash registers, all open during dinner hour visit.

Some McDonald's innovate with different cuisine offerings, spinach curry puffs in India and lobster rolls in Maine, but McDonald's Russia offers a straightforward American burger and fries. While the decor is fancy, it is standard-issue McDonald's Europe, and soon will be found in restaurants from Reykjavik to Istanbul. Uniquely Russian is the attention to the queue management and the flow of people. On entering the restaurant, an attractive young woman assigns diners to a line. On my visit, the line is quite long for a fast food restaurant, and it takes about 15 minutes before I get to the front.

(There's an even crazier feature to this restaurant, which I unfortunately did use: a walk-through window. I know some restaurants in cities have an ice-cream machine on the street, but this is a full-service, two-window affair that resembles the drive-through, except its for people wearing fur coats, not behind the wheel.)

I order, but get only my fries and then am sent to a stool near a window. There are few private tables at this McDonalds. The main door is at the middle of the restaurant, and besides the kitchen and line space the rest is reserved for four eating areas. Most parties mix together, pensioners and young couples, tourists and locals at the large tables and stools without backs. My situation does not seem to be unique: most people seem to be given only part of their meals and pointed to a certain table. I hate to draw an analogy too far, but it seems very centrally-planned. Why can't I sit where I want? Is the number of hamburgers deliberately kept low in order to control where people sit?

At least there's been no attempt to mess with the food. Or maybe there has. The fries are crispy and perfectly salted. The hamburger, when it arrives, seems bigger than normal, and has just the right amount of ketchup and mustard.

McDonald's has an incentive to get it right. As recently as eight years ago, the average Russian ate out just once a year. Thanks to rising oil prices, things are a little better now, but people don't eat out all that often. A meal at a restaurant is special, and McDonald's still counts as a special expierence. So there's extra attention put into the food – and where people sit.

Two Rags

ALBANY, N.Y. - Albany is a two newspaper town.

The Times Union is the larger and more respected publication, owned by a big newspaper chain and rich enough to sponsor the city's sports arena for the next five years. It's a paper that people in smaller markets like Worcester and Scranton aspire toward, a place where a good story will be picked up by dozens of smaller papers.

The Daily Gazette is a small family-run organization, the paper that still runs three wires a day on its front page. They don't have an editorial cartoonist, and never send a reporter to New York City for a story. The paper actually is based out of Schenectady, the twin city of Albany, but it competes for an audience.

My family gets the Gazette. Growing up I felt intensely loyal to this locally-owned underdog. Now, after time at a couple papers, I recognize that both papers have strengths and weaknesses. A good way to see the differences is to compare the lead story in this Sunday's paper, the "Sunday Centerpiece" in newspaper lingo.

Today the Times Union leads with "Meet the Clarkes" a Sunday profile on a family with seven wrestling children.

It starts great:

"BALLSTON -- Lines of cars thick with frost shroud the home behind a used-car lot. The porch light flickers on, cutting through the icy darkness. It's 3:45 a.m."

But it quickly degenerates into lazy writing. Here's the very next paragraph:

"It's just another Sunday, just another weekend wrestling tournament for the Clarke household, who are to their rugged sport what the von Trapps are to song."

The Clarkes are interesting subjects, and reporter Bryan Chu introduces dozens of excellent details that add color to the piece:

"Few would be able to stomach Michele's typical day: preparing meals for 11, doing eight to nine loads of laundry.

Everything is clockwork. It has to be."

The story loses focus long before coming to a conclusion. Chu continues generally chronologically to the end of the Clarkes day, but in so doing repeats ideas over and over: sacrifices are necessary for 11 people to live on $50,000, driving to a wrestling tournament in Long Island is a long drive.

Eighteen hundred words later, the Clarkes haven't had to answer the one question I had coming into the article: Why on Earth they think it was a good idea to have nine kids in the first place? And is wrestling really the ticket to an affordable education at a private college, as the parents claim on the article's first page? What if the children aren't good? Furthermore, do all the children really like wrestling? Wouldn't someone rather sit at home and read a book?


Meanwhile the Daily Gazette leads with "Soares getting mixed reviews as DA," a story about the lead prosecutor who's been a media favorite since helping to force out state comptroller Alan Hevesi late last year.

Bryce talks with the right people: the Albany Police Union, colleagues and predecessors, but isn't able to make the procedural story come alive in a way a Sunday centerpiece should.

"Public integrity cases are receiving much more attention than in the past, but McDermott said Soares is not overemphasizing this area."

and

"Soares said the DA's office practices a single standard of justice."

Finishing the story, the reader comes away with a nuanced understanding of a man who's generated plenty of press this week. Unfortunately, it's a story that's not easy to make it all the way through. Kind of like the Daily Gazette.