About
I'm an expat Californian who is obsessed with traveling to strange and exotic destinations in the former Communist Bloc. I also like tacos, surfing, and the geopolitics of oil. I currently live in Arlington, Virginia and work in Washington, DC. Read more about me here, check out my photo album, or send me an e-mail.
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In an effort to improve my Russian (aka no longer sound like an illiterate peasant) I have signed up for yet another Russian class. The last time I took a formal Russian class was in 2005 while at the LSE. Since then, I have basically forgotten everything, except how to order borscht and tell the taxi driver to take you to the military museum (but really, what else do you need to know?)
Anyways, I can’t wait to start conjugating verbs again and participating in those fun role play scenarios (”No, officer, there is no contraband in my luggage. May I pay you a ‘fine’?”). Good times.
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If you work in DC no doubt you’ve seen Chevron’s “I will” ad campaign posters plastered all over the metro and bus stops. Here is CEI’s version, starring Putin, and it’s actually pretty amusing:
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Dudes, I’ve got a serious case of wanderlust right now. As such, I’ve spent way too much time researching possible travel destinations. I’d love to go to Turkmenistan…maybe in 2010. According to the WSJ, Turkmenistan is becoming more “tourist friendly”:
Since Mr. Niyazov died in 2006, the country has tentatively begun to open up. Regular visitors say it used to take two hours, and wads of dollars in bribes, to get out of the arrivals lounge of Ashgabat airport. Now passengers are waved through in minutes.
Tourist visas are a bit easier to come by — though you still require a letter of invitation that can take up to three weeks to arrive — and Turkmenistan is now a fixture for specialist tour operators geared to Central Asia. Ashgabat-based Ayan Travel says it handled 2,200 tourists in 2008, up from 1,500 in 2007. “People’s perception of Turkmenistan is changing — it’s seen as safer and more accessible,” says Ayan sales manager Dovran Orazgeldiev.
Certainly access isn’t a problem for the capital’s sights. The city comes across as a kind of Soviet Disneyland, with Mr. Niyazov taking the place of Mickey Mouse. The manicured parks and squares are full of golden statues of the portly president, who called himself Turkmenbashi, or Leader of the Turkmens. (He named one month of the calendar after himself, another after his mother.)
Must. Go. Soon.
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One of their pilots is drunk and the passengers demand that he be removed before the plane leaves Moscow for New York. Aeroflot’s response?
At the same time, an Aeroflot representative sought to assure them that “it’s not such a big deal if the pilot is drunk.”
“Really, all he has to do is press a button and the plane flies itself,” the representative said. “The worst that could happen is he’ll trip over something in the cockpit.”
The Boeing 767 – so easy to fly, even a drunk could do it!
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I really wish Gazprom would post videos of their press conferences, because it would be rather hilarious to see Sergey Kupriyanov and Alexey Miller shouting their statements to reporters:
As of January 7, when Gazprom was forced to cease gas supplies, the transit pipelines in Ukraine were filled with Russian gas. Therefore, the pipeline pressure is supposed to be sufficient for ensuring synchronous gas flow at the entry and exit points of the Ukrainian gas transmission system. Once we feed gas to the entry point, it is to appear at the exit point!
Russian gas supplies to Europe through Ukraine should be commenced in the earliest time possible. However, now everything depends only on Ukraine!
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Zookeepers at the Kaliningrad Zoo showed up for work one morning and were shocked to discover that their hippo had turned pink overnight.
One onlooker told the Austrian Times: “He looks very pretty but that colour might not help him much when he gets around to breeding. He doesn’t look very manly.”
Indeed.
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I never thought this day would come. The CPC Consortium has finally agreed to expand the pipeline’s capacity, which will carry some 1.4 million bpd of Kazakh crude by 2013.
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No promises from Russia on production cuts, but I thought this was interesting:
In a speech to the assembled OPEC ministers, Mr. Sechin said that Russia’s beleaguered oil producers had already pruned production in November, and could cut still more if market conditions warranted. But he gave no promises.
Instead, he put forward a list of changes that Moscow would like to see made to the international pricing and trading of crude.
First, he said, the world needed to establish some other recognized benchmarks than those now used in New York and London for trade in West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude oils. Those benchmarks, he said, were “inappropriate and unfair.”
It was also “worth discussing” scraping the U.S. dollar as the primary oil currency and replacing it with a basket of currencies—a pitch made from time to time by Iran and Venezuela.
The world, Mr. Sechin said, also needed “new trading floors” in other parts of the world to counterbalance the power of the New York Mercantile Exchange and to better reflect the “actual turnover volumes” of crude itself, as opposed to the mere “financial instruments” traded on the Nymex. The Kazakh capitol of Astana, he said, would be one good location.
Mr. Sechin then pitched Russia being granted permanent observer status within OPEC. That way, he added, Russia could host an OPEC meeting sometime next year.
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Dzerzhinsky would be proud:
New legislation backed by Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin would allow Russian authorities to label any government critic a traitor. The bill, which is expected to pass in Parliament, would expand the definition of treason to include damaging Russia’s constitutional order, sovereignty or territorial integrity. That, critics said, would essentially let the authorities interpret any act against the state as treason, a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison. A group of human-rights advocates issued a statement on Wednesday saying that the legislation “returns the Russian justice system to the times of the 1920-1950s.” Existing law defines state treason as actions harming external security by passing information to “foreign organizations.” The new bill would add nongovernmental organizations based anywhere in the world that have an office in Russia to the list of banned recipients of state secrets. The government has repeatedly accused foreign spy agencies of using the organizations as a cover to foment dissent.
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