Traveling Without Moving

The world is shaping up to be a very strange place. At the end of a very long trip last week, I had a stark reminder of exactly how small it has become.

I flew back to the United States for the holidays on the 22nd, which turned into one of the longer days of my life. A three-day snow shower settled over Moscow, which prompted my colleague Josh and me to head out to the airport earlier than we had intended just to be on the safe side. Once there, we discovered that the flight was already delayed well before its take off time. In airport terms, that’s preparation for even longer delays.

We were right. The delay kept creeping on in small increments. In the hallway near all the perfume shops I bumped into an American friend, and together the three of us headed off to the airport’s Irish bar to kill some time. Sitting at a table across from an impressive array of taps, we all silently assessed the situation. Then I tried to sum up my fears – “I don’t want to miss the holidays with my family because I inadvertently had way too much to drink in an airport bar in Moscow.” We all laughed a little, safe in the collective decision that we didn’t have to drink alcohol simply because of our location.

We were there for a long time, and got kind of rambunctious anyway. We drank strong coffee which we bought each other by the rounds. The tally was somewhere around 5 to 6 cups of coffee before we headed to the plane.

The flight was as uneventful as long stretches of boredom interspersed with sleep can be.

After all that time in the air and a quick glimpse of New York City at night, I felt as though I had slipped out of one reality and entered another – a la Billy Pilgrim. But after I collected my luggage, that illusion all came crashing down.

The strike was still on at that point, so I piled into a cab with some Norwegian tourists to share a ride into Manhattan. Russian-style, I sat in the front seat. In Moscow, the standard behavior is to sit next to the driver when riding in a cab.

As we pulled out, I heard the driver mutter under his breath a little. Something familiar. “Are you Russian?” I asked.

“Ahhhh,” he said, “We are you from?”
“I only just flew in from Moscow to see my family,” I answered.

So we chatted (all in Russian) for a while - and then for a while a longer. Thanks to the strike-induced traffic jam, our trip into the city took over 2 hours. I heard about life in Tashkent, how the taxi stands at JFK work, reminisced a little about Moscow, and generally shot the breeze with “Misha” all the way into the city.

It was fun, informative, and interesting to see a side of the Russian diaspora in New York. I'm quite sure the Norwegians in the back seat thought we were about to rob them, strip them naked, and leave them standing along side the Van Wyck Expressway but in truth we weren't paying them much attention.

After 10 hours at breakneck speed through the stratosphere, I was home again and feeling as if I had never left Moscow at all. Call it the global village, call it the interconnectedness of the world’s major urban centers, call it what you will. But sometimes the whole world feels like it’s shifting under your feet, racing around to catch up with where you’re going.

Sunrise Sunset

Today is the shortest day of the year. Our progress toward this date wasn’t unnoticed, as I’ve felt a bit like a vampire over the past week or two. And I suspect that I’m coming down with a seasonal affective disorder that tea with honey just won’t cure. I guess the real problem is that, in Moscow, there’s both a front and back end to this situation.

Take a look at today’s stats, for example, with New York as a bench mark:

21 December 2005
Moscow: sunrise was at 8:59 and sunset at 3:56 for 6 hrs 57 minutes of daylight.
New York: sunrise was at 7:16 and sunset at 4:31 for 9 hrs 15 minutes of daylight.

The truth is that its never really that bright to begin with since its snowy and cloudy while the sun makes its low arc across the sky. It is still pitch black well after I’ve already arrived at the office, and pitch black again hours before I go home. My actual outside time is spent in total darkness.

It makes me feel like the only thing I do is work, when in truth my hours aren’t particularly strenuous. And I find it a little disorienting, too. Lack of sunlight has unlinked me from a certain type of rhythm; I find myself inadvertently staying up very late. Surprisingly, I haven’t had trouble getting out of bed in the morning – which is fascinating since darkness and cold and snow are usually a pretty good combination for sleeping in.

But I remember having a similar problem when I first arrived in Moscow. Take a look at the data for that day, too:

4 July 2005
Moscow: sunrise was at 4:53 and sunset at 10:15 for 18 hrs 22 mins.of daylight.
New York: sunrise was at 5:30 and sunset at 8:30 for 15 hrs of daylight.

The near-constant presence of the sun was equally disorienting. I had to rearrange the furniture in the apartment so that I could get some sleep. Again, the whole rhythm was different – it was easy to take the long way home and go sightseeing since the sun would stay up so long. At twilight, I’d start thinking I should stop for dinner when actually I should have been thinking about going home to bed.

What’s really surprising to me is that relatively small changes on the margin can have such a large effect on simple, but deeply held, patterns of life. The length of day isn’t radically different from a latitude like New York, but it is definitely very noticeable in how I actually go about living.

I suppose I’m just grateful that I don’t live in St. Petersburg. Today, they can expect a whopping 5 hours and 53 minutes of sunlight.

California, Here I Come

Evidence

In my last post, I wrote about how Santa often causes terror in children around the world. Then, I found this picture on the web. It is the perfect piece of evidence on which to rest my case.

The Chicago Tribune encouraged readers to send in pictures of kids freaking out in the presence of St. Nick and then published the hilarious results.

I love this picture since its only a pint-size representation that's causing a full blown freak out. But I especially love it because we have the exact same Santa statue. Mom made it out of ceramics (the caption at the website says this one is plastic, however) many years ago. As far back as I can remember, anyway, that Kris Kringle was a focal point of our Christmas decorations in the house.

The odd thing is that I have always really liked this figurine. The countenance is almost zen-like in its knowing wink and smile. But then again, I suppose I have always liked Santa in all his various forms.

I guess I still really like Santa, even though I now realize that it was Dad who ate all the snacks we left out on Christmas Eve. "No, kids", he'd say looking over our shoulders in the kitchen as we assembled a plate, "Not those cookies; Santa likes the other ones better. And not so many carrots."

Happy Holidays - Call it What You Will

If Lucy Van Pelt, the lemonade-stand psychiatrist from Peanuts, were to give a diagnosis of Russia she might say that this country has a lot of “baggage”. A rather creaky autocracy gave way to a not-always-so-rational communist totalitarianism. The 20th century has left the country with a lot of challenges that need to be addressed. The Russians have conquered some, struggled with others, and have some more that they have yet to face. In all, I believe that they’re doing a good job. But in one area, at least, history has provided a clear advantage over the annual hand-wringing in the US. And that’s the Holidays.

The communists tried to do away with Christmas, but eliminating a fun holiday is unlikely to be popular or particularly successful. So in the Soviet Union all the non-religious trappings of the Christian holiday migrated to New Year’s. An old man with a flowing white beard still leaves presents under a decorated pine tree. Except here he’s Дед Мороз (Dyed Moroz) - Father Frost - leaving New Year’s presents under the New Year’s tree.

The result of this, after some 70 years of official atheism, is that the two holidays are distinct and separate. Everyone participates in the New Year’s festivities. And a few days later on Jan 6th (the date of Russian Christmas), Christians are now free to celebrate the religious holiday with traditional foods and church services, etc. No messy mingling of the secular and religious.

This year, the US seems to be going through a particularly bitter battle in the culture wars with its arguments over “Merry Christmas” vs. “Happy Holidays” and whether or not that’s symbolic of a nefarious, creeping plan to de-Christianize our end-of-year rituals. It seems to me that Christians have done a pretty good job of de-christianizing it ourselves; some churches are closing this year since Christmas inconveniently falls on a Sunday. Anyway, momentarily reflecting on the true spirit of the holiday before tearing into a pile of gifts that represent the GDP of a small African nation isn’t exactly keeping things kosher, in my opinion.

One of my favorite writers, David Sedaris, penned an essay where he said that the two surefire ways to understand a foreign culture were to ask about their gun laws and their Christmas myths. Russian Christmas isn’t as scandalous as his story of the “7 to 10 black men” from the Netherlands, but there’s room for gossip.

Father Frost is always accompanied by Снегурочка (Snegurochka) - Snow Maiden. She’s from an ancient Russian fable about a lonely old couple who made a daughter out of snow to keep them company. She came to life, but melts each spring and returns each winter to visit them. It’s a lot like Frosty the Snowman but a little more melancholy. No button eyes or carrot nose here, though; Snegurochka is always portrayed as a very beautiful young woman in traditional peasant costume. No one has been able to sufficiently explain her exact relationship to Ded Moroz, so I’m inclined to believe the worst.

Its all very similar to St. Nick, or Santa, or whatever you call the standard Anglo-American version of the jolly elf. But there’s something rather weird about the persistence of such a mythos when it clearly alienates its primary target audience. Children around the world seem to be terrified of meeting the annual gift man. They cry, they scream, or they simply freeze up. I saw this at GUM this weekend as Ded Moroz and Snegurochka walked through the massive department store.

This was a particularly evil incarnation of visiting Santa at the Mall. No long line, no time to prepare, no warning. Happily shopping with mom and dad until you turn the corner and BANG – face to face with roaming Dyed Moroz AND Snegurochka! It’s like the childhood equivalent of standing before St. Peter at the Pearly Gates answering for all your sins.

Except in the world of children, the stakes may even be higher.

I don’t know if Dyed Moroz and Snegurochka did any good-cop bad-cop interrogation, but it was hilarious to see the reactions of these kids to double-barreled questioning. Most of them simply shut down – saucer eyes and subdued nodding in response to questions. I can empathize. Father Frost carries a huge staff with a rather pointy looking star at the end. And Snegurochka – well, I always freeze up when talking to pretty girls.

Anyway, Russian Christmas looks like ours in a lot of ways – presents, decorations, same underlying messages of family and loved ones. Its just that they’re doing a much better job than we are of keeping different ideas separate and not letting some trivial arguments ruin the whole thing.

He’s Not Crazy; He’s Having Camera Problems.

Blogs seem to come in all shapes and sizes. Photo-heavy blogs that are more about images. Text-only blogs that are about the power of emotion through words. Or perhaps more common, the text blog that invariably relies on lots of photos when the author runs out of things to write. This one appears to be a text blog – but it may only be by default.

I have taken lots of interesting pictures related to most of the recent entries on my blog. Or tried to, that is; my camera has decided that it can’t go on any longer. I thought at first that it was a power malfunction. Despite a new battery, though, the mechanical glitches keep getting worse. At first, the camera just shut itself off. Then, the zoom lens would move all on its own. Then, the camera would simply power down with the lens still extended. Now when I do manage to actually take a picture, the camera can’t tell if it’s a still or a video and ends up corrupting the file so badly that it can’t be recovered by the computer.

All through my childhood, Mom had a beautiful Argus 35mm camera – a wonder of engineering and probably one of the most finicky things ever designed for a consumer. Whenever we were on vacation, invariably, the camera would act up. Mom, all stressed out from her horrible children, would eventually snap and lash out at the camera, the children, and whoever or whatever else nearby that she thought might be contributing to the problem. It was all very funny in a don’t-you-dare-laugh-or-Mom’s-really-gonna-go-bonkers sort of way. At least, I think we can all look back on it and laugh.

I did, anyway. On Sunday. As I stood in the middle of the Arbat trying to get a photo of snow-covered portrait artists for the fourth attempt in a row. I started loudly cursing at my malfunctioning camera for betraying me when I most wanted it. Passersby were kind of looking at me askance. Suddenly the image of Mom doing the exact same thing entered my mind and I started to laugh. The askance-looking passersby started looking, and moving, in the other direction. Quickly.

It very nearly turned into a scene from a movie. Me as Charlie Sheen at the end of Platoon, on my knees reaching up to the sky with both arms. Or Kirk in Wrath of Khan, screaming upwards into space as the view pulls back.

Both of those would have made great photos. On someone else’s camera, that is.

General Winter

The Russians have long relied on the ice and snow as a military strategy. Napoleon and Hitler’s problems are only the most recent examples of a heritage that stretches at least as far back as Alexander Nevsky’s battle with the Teutonic Knights – when the heavily armored germans cracked through the ice of a lake and drowned in mid battle. Now, I may come to regret this in short order, but so far this year “General Winter” has turned out to be a paper tiger.

There certainly hasn’t been any lack of snow in Moscow. It seems most days are overcast and likely to provide at least some flurry activity. In fact, 10-day forecasts are usually just a string of clouds and snowflakes in the newspaper. But the variable so far has been the temperature. Snow accumulates at night and then melts off significantly, and messily, during the day.

Of course, I come from the snow belt and I’m no stranger to sudden, massive accumulations of snow. But my frame of reference for city life is Manhattan. And in New York City, a minor squall can cause all sorts of havoc. Mass transit malfunctions, people stay home, garbage collection is suspended since garbage trucks are also the snow plowing trucks. In that context, then, it’s a little bit weird for me to see a massive city continuing to operate at breakneck speed in what would be a crippling snowstorm back home. Maybe this is what life is like in Minneapolis or Chicago?

Now, that being said, there have been a couple of brief, brutal cold snaps here. And that has been the most interesting part of winter so far. Those are the times that Moscow shows you exactly how it deals with the weather. Or that is to say, comes close to completely ignoring it.

The Arbat, Moscow’s main pedestrian street, is lined with souvenir stalls and artists who draw portraits and caricatures. This weekend, they sat in the same places, bundled up, next to samples of their artistic wares. Snow piled on top of them at a furious pace. Patrons getting their portraits drawn sat quietly and patiently as snow piled up on top of them, too. Occasionally, the artist got up and brushed the snow off himself and his subject, and then off his plastic-covered samples.

In good weather, Muscovites sit on the park benches much like they would their own sofas. Friends crowd around, they all have a few beers, and in general the outdoors becomes the preferred social space for a city of apartment dwellers. In the winter, the groups of people congregate in the underground pedestrian passages instead. Cigarette smoke lingers in the low-ceilinged passageway and voices bounce noisily off the tile and cement.

Most wonderfully of all, all the ice cream stands remain open. People stroll leisurely down the street with cold beers in hand. At some point, they'll squint at each other through the snow flakes, take off their gloves to look for change in the pockets of their heavy coats, and say to one another - I could really go for some ice cream right now. Then they'll climb over a little snowbank to get to the kiosk.

So now I’ve probably doomed myself to several months of teeth-cracking cold weather, but in all I thought it was worth saying that winter hasn’t been nearly as bad as I had feared.

Congratulations! What Did you Bring Me?

Ahhh, the Russians. They aren’t that different from us, are they? Sure, there are small indicators of stylistic differences all around Moscow. For example, people don’t really smile unless they’ve got a good reason. The first answer to a request is usually no, but they don’t really mean it. However, I’ve run up against a behavior so at odds with my background, that its thrown the better part of my world view into disarray. I’m talking about Russian birthday parties.

Its always somebody’s birthday at the office - or at least it seems that way – so I’ve had a healthy amount of opportunity to analyze the differences. To begin with, the person celebrating the birthday does all of the treating. The celebrant brings cakes and invites everyone to partake, while close co-workers might respond with flowers or wine. Thus, our coffee room is constantly full of tortes and chocolates.

Frankly, it’s a miracle that everyone in the office isn’t fat. Quite to the contrary; everyone is thin no matter how undeserving. As I was making tea this morning, two of my more attractive co-workers were chatting and finishing off yesterday’s torte.

Upper-level staff birthdays are celebrated in a more formal fashion. The birthday boy/girl hosts a huge spread of zakuski (hors d’oeuvres) and beverages and desserts in the conference room at the end of the day. The quantity of the spread seems to move along the scale of seniority. The birthday feast for our head of fixed income investments, for instance, was a scene of nearly obscene plenty including red caviar and other local delicacies.

Once everyone is served wine, the most senior executive proposes a toast. A Russian birthday toast is no trifling affair. Its usually really long, very detailed, highly emotional, funny, and floridly extravagant in its praise of all the toastee’s attributes – both personal and professional. The birthday boy/girl then walks through the crowded conference room and clinks glasses with each person.

The next most senior person gives the next toast. The long toasts are dragged out by rowdy interruptions from the rest of the guests. And this cycle keeps going until everyone who wants to gets a say.

Usually, there’s hard alcohol on the table that has been presented as gifts to the birthday boy (women aren’t given gifts of alcohol). I haven’t seen it get opened, however, at any of the parties so far. Wine only.

Birthday parties outside the office are the same. The birthday celebrator treats all the guests, even in a restaurant or bar. The toasts proceed very much the same way, too. The big difference is that the hard alcohol starts to flow at these types of parties. Well, it does when I’m there anyway. (Moskvichi don’t drink nearly as much as you may think, by the way. I feel somewhat confident in saying that Manhattan is a boozier atmosphere among working professionals.)

So that’s the upside-down world of birthday celebrations. Call me cheap, if you like, but I plan on being in America on my birthday.

A post-script: Gifts from colleagues and vendors have been flowing in for one portfolio manager this week. He asked if he could store things in my office since he’s quite convinced that our colleagues will steal them if he leaves them in his own. “They’ll be too afraid and too ashamed to steal from you,” he said. So here I sit surrounded by bottles of wonderful scotch and expensive cognac. Fox. Henhouse.

You’re a Strange One, Lev Nikolaevich.

I went to Tolstoy’s Moscow house over the weekend. He’s one of the more interesting men of letters in the 19th-20th century, and far more vivid than a dusty pile of “classics” in some library somewhere.

The house is a beautiful, 2-story rambling wooden structure with a very large garden and several outbuildings. In the nearly 100 years since his death, the area seems to have gone from suburban to industrial to successfully post-industrial – two of the city’s hottest night spots are right across the street. The ticket office is in one of the outbuildings across the yard from the gate. I entered a low-ceilinged room and found two babushkas drinking tea at a desk surrounded by display cases of Tolstoy related writings. One of them took out the ticket book and asked if I were a student. “No,” I said, flattered by the question, “I’m already too old to be a student.”

She looked up and scolded me. “You’re never too old to learn, you know.” She also sold me a little pamphlet about Tolstoy and the house, but only after she was sufficiently satisfied that I could actually read Russian. Ticket in hand (for 60 rubles instead of the 30 ruble student price) I promised to learn something that very day.

The house is well preserved and chock full of actual Tolstoy family belongings. After his death in 1909 the family presented it to the city of Moscow for use as a museum. (Actually, it remained closed until 1920 for “political reasons” when Lenin ordered it opened.) So, the old man’s big furry overcoat is still hanging in the hallway, his pens are still on his desk, and his shoes are still in the closet.

Tolstoy was born wealthy, lived a scandalously debauched lifestyle, wrote amazing literature, and then renounced everything in his old age. He corresponded with Mohandas Gandhi – before Mohandas became Mahatma – and helped him develop his philosophy of non-violent passive resistance. His personal philosophy (Tolstoyan) was a blend of pacifism, Christianity, and anarchism – culminating in a tract he entitled “The Kingdom of God is Within Us.” That was certainly considered radical in an autocracy with an official religion. On the strength of his new ideas, he got excommunicated and shunned by the state.

So this is the real intellectual legacy of a man whose major work is now the synonym for “a thick book.” Somewhat controversial, I suppose, but I’ll take it over Ayn Rand any day.

Still, one gets the feeling that Tolstoy could be kind of prickly. For instance, instead of admitting that he needed glasses, he took his desk chair out to the barn and cut the legs down. This brought him a lot closer to the table top, and voila, his vision problem was corrected as far as he was concerned. There it is in his study – leather couches, big desk, and oddly miniature chair.

Come to think of it, that could be Tolstoy’s real legacy – ingenuity and flexibility in defining, reacting to, and trying to change his environment over a long period of time. Maybe I should run that interpretation past the ticket lady - she might just be proud of me.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

My colleagues and I get along quite well. I have a tremendous amount of respect for them, and they seek my input on all sorts of different issues – ranging from accounting to interviewing management teams. But this week, I think I made a leap into another realm altogether.

During our Tuesday morning meeting, the CEO doubted – somewhat idly – that the Russian stock market has been driven by oil prices in the past 6 months. “I’d like to see that correlation,” he said, to no one in particular.

If anyone can stake a claim to being no one in particular, it’s me. So I sequestered myself in my office and started working on the problem. I downloaded tons of pricing data from the Bloomberg and started crunching it in every direction I could remember from my Stats class on regression analysis. I compared absolute prices, relative returns, percentage changes in price, etc. As background, I quantified how closely the Urals Crude price correlates with the West Texas Intermediate price. At one point, I tested the efficient market hypothesis by lagging the data by different time periods. Much later in the day I reached a conclusion on the question at hand and zapped it out to my colleagues.

I entitled it “I’d Like to See that Correlation.”

In it, I show – among other things - that returns on the Russian stock market were driven by oil prices in the January to May period, but that the effect has dwindled in the May to November period so much so that its possible to say that it has almost no effect. And, I established that all the results were statistically significant at the 95% confidence level.

I ended it with “The Boss is right and the numbers prove it.”

A less modest person might say that it was a bombshell. Colleagues were streaming into my office and looking at the data, discussing the implications and reasons.

The boss flipped. He introduced me to the marketing staff and told us to get the material into the company’s presentation. He’s going to Switzerland for the parent company board meeting, then to Austria to meet clients, and he wants this stuff in there. Also, he ordered us to make sure that my complete bio with photo is attached to the investment staff section and posted on the website.

The next morning, my colleagues all came streaming in with new ideas on how to run more regressions. Their ideas were all elegant and sophisticated at the same time. Basically, they boiled down to this – “If it isn’t oil prices, then what is it?”

But the real effect is that my colleagues let me into their little club. They all have graduate degrees in engineering and math and one guy even has a doctorate in finance. Russians in general are highly mathematically competent, anyway, and a lot of professionals of this type love complicated, pointless research. And now my contribution to the world of complicated, pointless research makes them feel that they can talk to me on their elevated level.

They’re wrong, of course. But that will be my little secret.

At the end of the day, the boss told me that I was challenging the conventional thinking of the investment staff and that he couldn’t possibly expect a better contribution from me during my time here.

Quite a week – and its only Wednesday. I think I’ll call in sick for the next two days and end it on a high note.