Ben Haines

A Canadian economist asked me for a note, so I thought I might copy it more widely. <BR> <BR>It's easy to answer you on Moldova, since I've just answered a correspondent, "Rex", on the Lonely Planet travel forum, so shall cheat and copy that to you now. <BR> <BR>I was there over the Easter weekend, so the only museum open was the open-air museum of military hardware, tanks, fighter planes, rockets, helicopters, and ther relics of the Cold War. Children knew a way through the fence, and were using the hardware as an adventure playground. All in all, a sight to gladden the heart. <BR> <BR>On Easter Monday I took the bus down to Transdneistr, the area that has a Russian majority, and wishes it were independent or better still that Putin and Bush would bring back the Soviet Union (you recall that Mr Bush senior tried to hold the Soviet Union together, I think wisely). Russian army peace-keepers keep Transdneistr from fighting Moldovan Moldavia by doing just the job there that NATO does in Bosnia. Not my usualpicture of Russians, so good for my thinking. Transdneistr has a fine statue of Lenin in front of a classical House of the Soviets. Food is cheap, because money is short: as a rebel territory Transdneistr receives no foreign aid at all. They have their own coinage, with Soviet star complete. <BR> <BR>With little to do I went to a new and small studio cinema to see two American films, one with Julia Roberts running the campaign against the polluting water company, and the other that slips my memory. Both were shown from DVD to audiences of ten, with no subtitles or dubbing. Like much of eastern Europe, Moldova has young people keen to learn and enjoy anglophone culture. Even on the bus from Chisinau to Moldova I was picked up by a final-year university student who had the text of his 20-page essay on the reflection of philosophy in the plays of Shakespeare. It was good, especially in finding parallels, new to me, with lines of Bhuddist thought. He agreed to correect two points that I saw as errors. One, he took words in the plays and said they were Shakespeare's view. Maybe, maybe not. All we know is that they were views that Shakespeare rightly thought that that person would hold at that time. The other, he claimed that Shakespeare was the world' greatest teacher and greatest philosopher of all time. Since both he and I are Christians he had to concede that Jesus Christ gets top place as teacher. As to philosophy, we don't know. Neither he nor I have read the Upanishads, nor the Arab philosophers of Abbasid Baghdad or of Cordova. <BR> <BR>Slightly embarrasing was that when I corrected points of idiom in his Engkish he told me (and showed me a draft to prove it) that he had begun rightly, but that his university teacher of English in Iasi had "corrected" him amiss. Oh dear. <BR> <BR>(Continued) <BR> <BR>Ben Haines <BR>

Ben Haines

I didn't take to Kyiv, and gave it just a day. It has 3 million people, and feels like it. It has a grid pattern of wide streets, with many traffic jams: the Soviets did not build for car-owners but for grand parades, and the post-Soviets have not learnt traffic calming (Bucharest has the same problem, on narrower streets). Kyiv is hilly, and after so long touring my ankle was getting weak. There were good busses and minibuses everywhere (as in Chisinau), but I didn't know their routes. <BR> <BR>Lutsk was altogether a different kettle of fish. Lviv is a place that could be the next Krakow, a city of graceful streets of ornamental buildings that draw on the traditions of Romania, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and the Hapsburgs, with a great multicultural past. Lutsk is a smaller and quieter version, with a pedestrianised road from the central square where stood my hotel, the nineteenth century kind that I like, to the splendid castle, with walls and galleries complete. The best moment was in the city museum on my last morning, when a curator with good English collared me to ask me to explain to her what a King James' Bible was. She said that the museum was to open an exhibition later that week of bibles, and that since she was the one English user on the staff she had been asked to say what they were showing. I ran through the history - John Wyclif, the Edwardian and Elizabethan versions, the royal commission, the Royal Authority, the use by all Anglophone Protestant churches, the spread across the globe with the Empire, the continued use by Protestants and the black Pentecostal churches and in cathedral and college worship -- and right here in our parish church, if it falls to my happy lot to read Isiah as first lesson. She took notes, with vigour. I think we both had a good time - people who read English but think they don't speak it are often surprised at how well they can do with an English listener who doesn't fuss about grammar. She told me twice that I was sent from God, which seems to me to over-egg the cake. But there, she's not English, and probably lacks a stiff upper lip. <BR> <BR>Thanks for the quotation from a P M: please, do you know which ? I don't want to be unfair, but those are so much not the words of any US president since Jack Kennedy. Which is part of why it's Canada I'd want to see if I flew over. Perhaps not before May ! <BR> <BR>Now to your question, changes over the decade. Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary have made great strides. I first met my friend Zoltan as a bell-boy in the best hotel in Pecs in 1987. With the change he moved on to work in an Italian insurance firm's Pecs office, while selling watches in his spare time: his partner Alys taught primary school French. When I stayed with them in 1993 they lived in a small flat in a dull suburb of their beautiful city. They said they had a guest room, but in fact when I arrived I found they were sleeping on the couch in the living room, while I borrowed their bedroom. They married two or three years ago, and invited me (this time in an excellent, cheap, central, two-star hotel). I was a bit of a feature of the wedding, evidence of those intimate contacts across Europe that are now the norm in Hungary. I went home at two. At breakfast at eight I was visited by a couple of other guests, come to be sure I'd got home safely. They said they'd just left the party, as it was ending. Hungarians know how to run a wedding. Three weeks ago the two of them met me off my morning bus and drove me in theit new car to their new house in a suburb of Pecs. It has a new garden, and an upper storey, though that storey is yet incomplete: they'll complete it as money comes in. They gave me a barbecue supper, with much red wine. <BR> <BR>Sorry, rather a long tale. But it is close-up that you can see young people working all hours, gathering the money to live like any other European. <BR> <BR>(Continued)

Ben Haines

On the streets in these three countries the changes are legion. Hotels are private, and staff are good. All "global" goods are on sale - Japanese or American cars or computers, French perfumes, Italian shoes - though few can buy them. But everybody can buy at supermarkets and central fruit and veg markets, goods from anywhere at fair prices. Beautiful central town squares are decorated or marred by café umbrellas marked "Coca Cola" - except that often in Bohemia they're marked "Pilsener" or "Staropramen", which is certainly a decoration. <BR> <BR>In Poland there's a special feature. Within five years of the change, hardly a single toilet (bathroom) was left unreformed. Now in hotels, railway stations, bus stations, restaurants and pubs - anywhere - you walk into fresh-smelling lavatorial palaces with marble floors and fine stone walls, spotless bowls, plentiful paper, new and elegant handwash basins, liquid soap, and hot air hand dryers. All fittings are shining chromium. Here we go beyond the limits of economics. It seems to me that the Poles asked themselves how to mark their return to Europe, and selected an original (and well-chosen) form of celebration. <BR> <BR>Now I move beyond the magic three to Romania, Moldava, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. In centres of great cities there are the same goods in the shops, the same advert umbrellas, and a multitude of banks. But in the next streets there are holes in pavements, plaster off Baroque walls, old women selling distressed carrots. I knew three of these countries before the change: except in Ceascu's last years people were richer then. My friend in Cluj Napoca, a retired museum director, cannot afford to heat all her small flat in winter: she heats just two rooms, and switches off lights. To her distress, her son has settled in Australia. With much good sense, she is learning English - after retirement (actually, she's learning well). <BR> <BR>I lived in Kumsasi two years after Structural Re-Adjustment and know what you mean about SRA's punishing effects. <BR> <BR>We had only a week's light snow in the whole winter, and can garden well enough, but I'm told it rained most of March, and certainly growth looks slow. Still, the rhubarb is up. In March 2000 in Lviv I bought seed packets for small strawberries (frais de bois) and for radishes, my brother (who gardens for both of us) planted them, and both were good -- the strawberries were excellent, and have grown happily through to this year. So now in Kyiv central market, a splendid place where I was buying materials for a picnic supper on the train to Lutsk, I bought seeds for more radishes, and for snapdragons and cornflowers, the choice of my tenant downstairs, Gennady, who gardens the small front patch. He'll plant them soon. He's a Russian professor of medical mathematics, a faithful Orthodox Christian, with a wife in Moscow and a student daughter in Bonn. They manage together well, gather in Moscow for Christmas and Easter, and the daughter comes (by overnight bus, poor soul) to stay with her father about a weekend a month, in our shared guest room. You're an economist. I do hope you foresee an end to this hard living for Russians, Ukranians, and others. I rejoiced at the pictures of the lads atop the Wall in November 1989, an rejoice now to see the wealth and good future of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, but I never thought that now, a decade later, we'd still find so many of their neighbours still stuck in grubbiness and corruption. I suppose Jefferson would tell me that wealth demands a habit of freedom. <BR> <BR>Ben Haines <BR>

Rex

Thanks, Ben <BR> <BR>I appreciated the first third (in your e-mail to me) - - didn't realize that the whole thing was posted on lp/tt - - I go there so rarely. It was probably for a brief "fix" while the Fodor's forum was down earlier this month. <BR> <BR>Best wishes, <BR> <BR>Rex <BR>

Art

Thank you so much for your posting, especially with my trip coming up. Your observations are very interesting. <BR>Regards <BR>Art Hussey - California

Judy

Thank you for great report, alive,refreshing and reflecting.