Oh Trader Joe’s, Your Croissants Are Calling,
From end to end with chocolate at heart.
I should have bought a case of those pastries
But I did not, I wasn’t very smart.
The next morning:
Twenty five minutes later:
Oh, Trader Joe’s!
There are two kinds of people in the world – selfless dreamers and the rest of us. Selfless dreamers are busy dreaming up ways to make the world better, feed the starving, enrich the poor and keep the Earth at some temperature that they know to be perfect for all of us to live happily and comfortably. The rest of us are lazily pointing out why these dreams will never come true and why they shouldn’t, at the same time hoping that there is enough medication to keep selfless dreamers sedated or at least writing another unsellable book. Sometimes the dreamers manage to convince the weakest-minded among the rest of us to follow them and that’s when we end up participating in wild social experiments like the one in the USSR that lasted for over 70 years.
I am sure in 1917 the idea of communal living sounded great: rich people where enjoying palaces and nice apartments with heat and indoor plumbing, while the poor where huddling in shanties, dorms and dirty cramped tenements with no running water and freezing outhouses. People reasoned that they could use an upgrade, kick out or downsize the rich oppressors, move into their posh apartments and share the amenities with their working class brethren. Thus was born a “kommunalka” or a communal apartment where many families were crammed together in a formerly single-family apartment. I am not sure how many days it took the new kommunalka dwellers to realize their mistake, find the dreamers who promised to make their lives better and beat them senseless, but they and their families had over 70 years to regret that move and some are still facing their neighbors every morning in the line to use the restroom.
I guess it takes a generation to grow up without knowing any better to have a completely opposite reaction to something that would normally be considered abnormal. I’ve seen all kinds of living arrangements but I never thought that any of them were weird, no matter how ugly, overpopulated or cramped some of these places looked I always thought that was business as usual. I wrote about communal living before and originally planned to expand on the subject but I found a virtual museum with plans, photos and videos, with English captions and transcripts which thoroughly covers every aspect of life in a kommunalka. You wouldn’t find any of this in the glossy cheery photo albums that somehow made it into this country.
However, for your enjoyment I uploaded and tagged a video clip from the movie Russian Dolls in which the characters arrive at the typical apartment in St.Petersburg.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HcNmpEiNdU
Another clip is from a recent Russian movie Stilyagi which also depicts a huge communal apartment, although it may be a dorm. I think in real life the happiness was dialed down a little (or a lot). Also notice neighbors always being in your business and a lot of times in your food (imagine your office fridge times 10).
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyGOf0jdOoQ
Thin walls, whole families in the same room with kids and grandparents, often separated only by curtains, fights, hate, backstabbing, stealing, it wasn’t a communal dream that the dreamers promised. But at the same time there was love, care, lifelong friendships, memorable times and helping hands – some things cannot be killed by years of inhuman living conditions.
Let me preface this by saying: I despise ugly video-bloggers. If you don’t look like this but still have something important to say, please do everyone a favor and type it; your wife lied to you when she said you were handsome, you are not. That said, my charity participation gives me a temporary excuse to use any means possible to collect the money and help out the people with prostate cancer.
So far my team has almost $500 collected and even more pledged. Thanks to your generous support and your sudden unexplained interest in Google Ads on this website I collected $50 so far and another $90 was donated to me and the team as a direct result of my various forms of begging for money on Facebook, Twitter and in person. As a cheap person I feel your pain, but extend your hand and feel the pain of prostate cancer (not there…little lower…still lower…to the left…right here…ooooh) and you will understand why I defaced my own face by growing a mustache.
As the Month of Movember progressed along, my uncanny resemblance of a certain celebrity became obvious.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W-dD-hSPgc
I am sure after seeing this you immediately recognized my mustache-double, but below is a clue for the slow ones among you.
A recent trip to Charritos Taqueria on Independence Ave. was a success. Aside from a homeless guy trying to start a conversation with me of which I only understood the word “Oklahoma” , the food was cheap and delicious. Tacos are $1.85 and I purchased one with pork (puerco) and another one with steak slow cooked in pineapple sauce. Delicious. They have more expensive items in $4-12 range. Service is a little slow but it’s worth the wait. I also tried horchata which I always wanted to try, it’s somehow made with rice and tastes like cinnamon. It wasn’t bad, but I like cinnamon in moderation. I will move on to another agua fresca next time.
This area is not the safest part of town and gets mentioned on the news almost daily. Thankfully, concerned citizens are making contributions, albeit involuntary, to improve the safety and security of Independence Ave.
And the guy who tried to talk to me? He understood the international sign of “I don’t understand what the hell you just said” and went back to pose for the picture.
Few photos from the dedication of the Mennonite Settler Statue in Newton,KS in 1942. Mennonites immigrated to Kansas from Ukraine in 1874 and are credited with helping to turn Kansas into the breadbasket of America and subsequently placing images of wheat on our license plates.
