Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
JULY 26, 2022 – (Cont.) In the protracted process, I’d developed a good rapport with the lead investor and spokesman for the group (although I was a lawyer, I was working in my capacity as a banker; ethically, I could deal directly with the investor, while the bank’s outside attorney communicated with the borrower’s lawyer). …
JULY 25, 2022 – Last week an insurance agent in NJ informed me by email that a recent premium refund I’d received had been overpaid. The minimum earned premium hadn’t been taken into account, and the agent’s firm was on the hook for the overpayment. He asked that I call him. I phoned immediately. When …
JULY 17, 2022 – Here in the Northwoods, life used to be far more primitive at our family’s summer cabin. There was no phone, and our grandmother cooked up a storm on a wood-burning stove. A hand-pump outside the cabin provided water for drinking, cooking, and washing. With a bar of soap, you bathed in …
MAY 20, 2022 – In early December I flew from Heathrow to JFK. In New York I presented my passport for the last time on my Grand Odyssey. It contained so many stamps I’d had to have extra pages added by the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm, and the cover was so worn, the gold lettering …
MAY 19, 2022 – The train out of Berlin sped through East Germany to Hoek van Holland. From there I caught a ferry to Harwich, England. After so many months and countries of the world, it seemed strange to be surrounded by English once again. Having started my Grand Odyssey in New Zealand, linguistically I’d …
MAY 18, 2022 – After another day in Moscow, I traveled by train to Leningrad, then westward to Helsinki. From the Finnish capital, I steamed farther west to Stockholm. There I visited my cousin Anders before heading southwest to Malmö to see our cousins Merith and Mats-Åke. The November daylight in Sweden was short and …
MAY 15, 2022 – As the train approached Yaroslav Station in Moscow seven days after departing Khabarovsk, Sasha, my carriage attendant, and Yuri, chief of the train crew, found their way to my compartment. Yuri wanted to give me directions to the upscale restaurant to which he’d invited me for dinner the following evening. Sasha …
MAY 14, 2022 – When the train reached major cities like Perm, Omsk, Sverdlovsk, and Novosibirsk, I was amazed by the size of such places that prior to my trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway, I hadn’t even known existed. Each had a population of well over a million—larger than today’s combined population of the “Twin …
MAY 13, 2022 – After a protracted account of the scenery inside the Trans-Siberian train, it’s time to detrain for a bit to visit grounds beyond the railway. As mentioned earlier, I’d scheduled an interruption of the eastward journey with a stop in Irkutsk, by far the most sizable settlement within a very long radius …
MAY 10, 2022 – (Cont.) “On board our train [from Moscow to Irkutsk],” I wrote home, “was a small group of British and American tourists headed for Irkutsk, Ulan-Bator (capital of Mongolia), Beijing, and Hong Kong. Among them was a bloke from North Dakota named Karl. Karl, about 22 years old, was tall and gangly, …
MAY 9, 2022 – As previously noted, for nine of my 14 days aboard the 18-carriage Trans-Siberian train, I was the sole Westerner aboard, which fact conferred upon me celebrity status, especially given that I was from the leading nation of the West. My unique position allowed me to optimize my time and interactions with …
MAY 8, 2022 – My other prized souvenir from the Trans-Siberian train (see yesterday’s post) was the (real) silver, commemorative Russian tea glass holder impressed with an image of the Kremlin, “CCCP” (“USSR”), and “50,” marking the half-century since the (“glorious”) October Revolution of 1917. These exquisite tea glass holders were available for use aboard …
MAY 7, 2022 – If Russians readily conceded that they didn’t enjoy the same level of material prosperity as Americans, it was because the American military threat had forced the USSR to spend even more money on defense. This was a nearly universal sentiment—er, Communist Party line—among the Russians I met. The truth, of course, …
MAY 6, 2022 – Across my many conversations with Russians aboard the train, I endeavored to find consensus about one subject or another, such as national self-perception, for example, and impression of the United States, and most sensitive at the time—attitudes about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. One person’s opinion is only a data point, …
MAY 5, 2022 – After describing the scenery outside the train, my letter home focused on the highlight of the journey: my interaction with fellow passengers. “By living with Russians for 24 hours a day, for days on end,” I wrote, “I gained much understanding about their thinking and their way of life. I must …
MAY 4, 2022 – I took no photographs from the train or of any of the stations—it was strictly forbidden—but shot a roll of film on my side-trip to Lake Baikal and the village of Listvanka. In my letter home, I recorded visual impressions along the route. “Between Moscow and Khabarovsk there were about seven …
MAY 3, 2022 – My trip along the Trans-Siberian Railway was a signature experience; one revealing the paradoxical axiom that at once our world is too vast to comprehend and too small not to cherish. Timing was everything. The weather brought blizzards to some parts of Siberia, making the trip ever more Zhivagoan than it …
MAY 2, 2022 – “At 9:30 h. on [October 2],” I wrote home, “a big, black limousine picked me up at the hotel and whisked me to one of Moscow’s 11 train stations.” It was the Yaroslavski Station—western terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. For the next 16 days, I traveled across seven time zones to …
MAY 1, 2022 – In Moscow I took mini-expeditions via the Metro. With a Metro map from my hotel, I found the closest station and entered the most ornately beautiful subway system in the world—and so far below the surface, it doubled as a far-flung bomb shelter. It was said that Lenin believed the workers …
APRIL 30, 2022 – In laying plans for my sojourn in Russia, I’d learned that Western tourists had no choice but to stay at deluxe hotels . . . and pay in advance (hence the “payment voucher”) with convertible currency at the official exchange rate. One bonus of this arrangement was access to a large …
APRIL 29, 2022 – If you view Russia on a globe, you’ll see that the country is so vast, as the sun sets in the Russian Far East, it rises on St. Petersburg, f/k/a Leningrad, in the far west. For my three days in Leningrad, I’d barely reached Peter the Great’s “window to the West.” …
APRIL 28, 2022 – My tour of Leningrad was mostly self-directed—strolling along the canals, admiring the Italian architecture, the Bronze Horseman (statue of Peter the Great on horseback; commissioned by Catherine the Great); and inspecting the Aurora (the Russian cruiser that fired a blank shell to signal the beginning of the October 1917 Revolution). In …
APRIL 27, 2022 – As I wrote in my letter home, “The aesthetic shortcomings of my accommodations, though, were compensated a thousandfold by the beauty of Leningrad itself . . . The gilded dome of the imposing St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the tall, narrow gold spire of Peter and Paul Fortress, and the striking gold tower-spire …
APRIL 26, 2022 – (Cont.) My initial reaction was that the two guys had been masquerading as Intourist agents but were in fact, KGB. My second was that I’d been set up for entrapment, and I didn’t want to wind up in labor camp in Siberia. My third thought was, Where the hell is my …
APRIL 25, 2022 – On its way eastward 111 miles to the Russian border, the Soviet train sped through birch forests ablaze with autumn color and past tranquil, mystical lakes. The scenery was reminiscent of music by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. I thought particularly about Sibelius’s Karelia Suite, inspired by the troubled history of Karelia, …