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This past Saturday some friends and I took a daytrip to Suzdal’, one of the Golden Ring cities. It rained the whole drive there, but as soon as we pulled into the quiet city the the skies dried up and we were able to walk around without umbrellas. I’d been there several times before, so this trip was more for the company and interesting photographs than anything else.

Here are a few things I saw:

The L.A. Times had an article last week about the evolving state of piracy in Russia. Though it mentions the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade estimate that over 50% of all consumer goods in Russia are pirated and how intellectual property rights are the major obstacle to Russia’s entry into the WTO, the focus of the piece is on some of the more amusing recent manifestations of forgery:

Always wanted to brag to your friends about your trip to Brazil, but couldn’t afford to go? No problem!

For $500, nobody will believe you weren’t sunning yourself last week on Copacabana Beach, just before you trekked through the Amazon rain forest and slept in a thatched hut. Hey! That’s you, arms outstretched like Kate Winslet on the bow of the Titanic, on top of Corcovado!

Persey Tours was barely keeping the bill collectors at bay before it started offering fake vacations last year. Now it’s selling 15 a month — providing ersatz ticket stubs, hotel receipts, photos with clients’ images superimposed on famous landmarks, a few souvenirs for living room shelves.

If the customer is an errant husband who wants his wife to believe he’s on a fishing trip, Persey offers not just photos of him on the river, but a cellphone with a distant number, a lodge that if anyone calls will swear the husband is checked in but not available, and a few dead fish on ice.

It reminds me of the short story by Philip K. Dick, We Can Remember it For You Wholesale, in which a company would sell fake vacations complete with ticket stubs, manipulated photographs, souvenirs and implanted memories, all with the guarantee that you’ll never figure out it’s not real. It was later adapted into the screenplay for Total Recall.

The article also briefly mentions the sale of forged university diplomas and terms papers, which I’ve written about earlier here and also here.

Lonely Planet Guide to my Apartment (via Nick)

WiFi really seems to be catching on in Moscow. Yandex already has 199 free hotspots in cafes and restaurants and Golden Telecom has announced that they plan to set up at least 5000 paid hotspots across the city in 2006.

Jason Kottke and Hanna have started up a ‘Year in Cities’ meme. It’s basically a list of cities visited (for one night or more) in the 2005 calendar year. Here’s mine:
Duluth, MN*
Salt Lake City, UT*
Moscow, Russia*
Antalya, Turkey
Yellowstone NP, Montana
Lincoln, NE
Bryce Canyon, UT
Balabanovo, Russia
Baku, Azerbaijan
Sofia, Bulgaria
(a * denotes cities visited multiple times on nonconsecutive days)

It’s a depressingly small list for a seasoned traveller such as myself, I must admit. The previous year (2004) would have been at least twice as long. Of course, I could add another 20 cities I visited but in which I did not stay overnight. How many cities are on your list?

Whenever I travel to another country, I do my best to try and learn a few of the basic phrases necessary to make purchases, thank people, ask directions, and so on. My latest adventure in Azerbaijan was no exception. Though my trip was quick and I knew that I could get by with Russian there, I still managed to pick up a few words.

First of all, I should note that Azeri is sometimes also referred to as Azari, Azeri Turkish, or Azerbaijanian Turkish, and it’s not only spoken in Azerbaijan. According to this Wikipedia entry, Azeri is also spoken in Russia proper, Russia’s Republic of Dagestan, south-eastern Georgia, northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, and Ukraine.

Learning to count in Azeri is not so difficult, and it’s a definately necessary to get a handle of the numbers as I’ve found they’ll sometimes try to charge you more as a foreigner. Here’s how it works:

zero - sîfîr, nol
one - bir
two - iki
three - üç
four - dörd
five - besh
six - altî
seven - yeddi
eight - s?kkiz
nine - doqquz
ten - on

Past that, you just have to learn the words for the tens, hundreds, and thousands and slap the above digits onto the end. For example, eleven is on bir (ten, one). Fifty-three is ?lli üç (fifty, three).

Some basic phrases that anyone going to Azerbaijan should learn:

Salam (hello)
S?n nec?s?n? (how are you?)
Yaxshiyam (fine)
Babatdir (okay)
Sag^v ol (thank you)

Though I found out that you can also say the phrase teshekkur ediram, which is what I learned to say when I was in Turkey last May. Apparently they also say that in Iranian Azeri.

Here in Moscow we have several Azeri restaurants with Azeri names. I made it a point to find out while I was in Baku what they mean. There’s an Azeri buffet chain here called Shesh-Besh. I knew that besh meant five, but what about shesh? Well, I found that it means six in Farsi. It turns out that 6-5 is a roll of the dice in Backgammon, which is probably the most popular game in Azeri culture.

There’s also a cafe place here called Chaikhana. I could easily figure out that it was basically tea-shop or something like that, but I wanted to find out exactly what the khana particle meant. An Azeri friend I met told me that ‘khana’ means place in Azeri. So Chaikhana means place for tea. As I strolled the streets of Baku I found tons of examples of this type of construction. For example:

Poçtxanaz - post office (place for post/mail)
X?st?xana - hospital (not sure exactly what X?st? means)
B?rb?rxana - barbershop (place for barbers)
Kitabxana - library (place for books)
M?hmanxana - hotel (place for guests)

I’m sure there are tons more of these type of words.

My Azeri friends told me that Azeri would be a much easier language to learn than Russian. This could be the case, but I have to admit that it is a very intimidating language at first. Russian was that way for me at first too.

A few great online resources for learning about Azeri are:
Learn Azeri
Articles about Azeri as spoken in the Azerbaijan Republic
Azeri Language Tutor