Mementos

 

When I visit a new  country, one of my favorite types of shopping is buying,  some piece of clothing with the name , map , or some icon of the place , printed on it. I have no intention of wearing the piece, just keep it as a memento.

From Moscow, (visited in 2015), I've got three cotton shirts . Two of them (one black, one blue) have the map of the Metro in the middle, under the russian name of the city 'Mockba'  ( I was very impressed with the city's Metro system). 

blue shirt with Metro map

The front of  the third shirt, a white one, has the CCCP letters which stand for USSR  - an abbreviation of Soviet Union Socialist Republics.   In addition , under CCCP,  it has the symbol  of hammer & sickle representing proletarian solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers (adopted at the russian Revolution at te end of world War 2. 

The back of the shirt is covered with  the hymn of the Soviet Union in russian language.

front

back  -  lyrics  of the hymn

In October 2016, I visited the greek island of Crete .I bought a white cotton cap and a black fine cotton shirt with the name  Crete on both items.  The little white cap has , in addition,  a tiny, delicate map of the island.  Now,  autumn 2023, I wear that for the first time and  feel good with the outfit.

One of the advantages of age is that you don't care about what people might think or say. So, there's a name or map there. Big deal.

By the way, I liked everything about Crete, so much so, that I even considered getting myself a small living unit and try life there for a year or two.  Even now I'm inclined to do that; however, islands , in these days of climate change, are a scary option.

Crete-   top and cap

Moscow 1 - Avtozavodskaya metro station

The little hotel I stayed at in Moscow some ten days ago, was located in a nice neighborhood, near the metro station called Avtozavodskaya. The name rang a bell, but I thought it was because lots of russian words have the suffix ..'.skaya'.


The next day, however, I noticed on the inside wall of the station a granite plaque with names and a date on it - and it struck my memory. I remembered that in 2004 (precisely on 6 february, according to the commemorative plaque) a bomb had exploded in one of the metro train cars killing more than 40 passengers and wounding more than 120. Survivors had to walk a long distance through the dark tunnel to get rescued or to find a way out. How horrible!

                            entering  Avtozavodskaya metro station

I stood , for a while, in silence with my head bent, in recollection of those innocent people who were on their way to work, school, market, home - and never made it. They were the victims of a cruel, despicable act of terrorism.

Moscow 2009 - Red Army Choir

The most famous and well-known russian songs such as Kalinka, Katyusha, Ochi Chorneye are best performed, to my mind, by the Red Russian Army Choir. This choir has great voices , and the uniforms that go with it never fail to impress an audience.

However...they cannot go on singing year after year, decade after decade using the same dry army style. 'Kalinka' and 'Katyusha' are songs with a speedy tempo and require choreography, 'Ochi Chornye' needs a woman with black burning eyes on the stage. That's a new era , they have to adjust.

As kids we were crazy about singing the refrain of Kalinka (little snowberry ), and we derived pleasure from the fact that it generates the word... 'kaka' (shit, in many languages). It goes like this: Ka - lin-a- Kaka - lin-a - kaka - lin-a - ka-moya.

[This reminds me of something about the Israelis ( not the kids, the adults).They love the names of two places in the world: Guadalahara in Mexico, and Harare in Zimbabwe. Why so? Well, these two names include the word 'hara' which in spoken hebrew means 'shit'. So the stand-upist will say something like this to his audience: "Last year I was at the soccer games in Guadalahara. Believe me , I didn't lick any honey there." ].

Well, things become more serious when we get to Katyusha, the second song. This song is about a young girl , Katyusha (the diminutive of Katya) , longing for her beloved who's away on military service. So far so good, but the russians gave the song's name to the deadly rocket they had invented. The katyusha , mounted on truck for mobility, is the pride of its russian creators and the sweetheart of the arab terrorists, but our people in Israel get hurt by it.

Now, back to the Red Army Choir. I've been following their video clips of the last years, and there were some minor attempts to introduce slight changes, but the outcome was usually ridiculous. Their main problem seemed to be with Ochi Chornye (Black eyes ,also translated as Dark eyes). It has more than one version . but basically , the song is adressed to a woman with "black eyes, burning eyes/passionate and splendid eyes/how I love you ,how I fear you". It's kind of hard for some colonel in the best and most fearful army in the world to play the role of the unhappy lover in front of some gypsy-like woman.

Surprise, Surprise. The Red Army Choir finally did it all. in its guest appearance at the Eurovision Song Contest 2009 in Moscow . They sang all these three songs and more, with the appropriate addition of dancers and dark eyed women (nice compromise - the colonel doesn't have to sing to a particular dark-eyed woman; he's surrounded by several of them).

Notice the difference between the two soloists: the first one who sings Kalinka, is a light version, in white uniform with licked hair, more like Elvis Presley.
The soloist of Ochi Chorneye is the classical soloist of the Red Army. What a Man! What a Voice!

Enjoy!