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.

Here is another post on the subject.

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Some of you might have noticed that I mostly retired from writing about restaurants, not that it was a large part of this blog anyway. There are many food blogs out there, ranging from awesome to annoying (no links here), and even more reviews posted on a variety of special sites, so I have no interest in being just another one. However, sometimes I find something new, exciting and not beaten to death by everyone with a smartphone and a greasy finger, something that I feel needs to be shared. A while ago I wrote about my favorite hot dog dealer vendor Clay’s Curbside Grill and today’s post is about the Indios Carbonsitos – a Mexican food truck roaming the neighborhoods in Kansas City, KS and the only one I know of (could be wrong) to be registered on the Kansas side.

I first learned about Indios from a comment on one of the Fat City posts and tracked down their twitter and facebook pages. From there on, it was a just a matter of time before I got my hands on and in one of their tortas ahogadas.

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You might have noticed more activity than usual on this here blog and it’s not because I am less lazy, but because the time is running out and I have less than a month to say everything I’ve ever wanted to say.

This fine specimen of the religious billboard art is located around Truman Rd. and HWY 71. Notice a Bible Seal of Approval at the top left and a person in the position painfully familiar to anyone who ever used a squat toilet at the bottom right.

In any case, I suggest you repent soon, use up your vacation and deplete your savings accounts.

You have been warned.

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Just like many other great speeches, Churchill’s Sinews of Peace address delivered on March 5, 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri was reduced to a few soundbites that everyone recognizes but can’t necessarily put in a context. In this case there is probably not a person alive who haven’t heard about the Iron Curtain, a Cold War reference to the division between the Soviet- and Western-influenced zones in Europe. For almost half a century, the Iron Curtain dominated the international relations, as well as lives of hundreds of millions of people. Today, its legacy is still haunting the world and, on a smaller scale, provides inspiration to a large section of this blog.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

httpvh://youtu.be/P8_wQ-5uxV4

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I wrote previously the propaganda surrounding the Soviet people at all the usual and unusual places. People nostalgically musing about the “olden days” when there was practically no outdoor advertisement in the USSR, forget about all the hammers and sickles, red banners, communist party slogans and whatever else was supposed to inspire us to keep building, fulfilling, laboring and rejoicing.
A recently posted set of photos taken by a Western tourist in the 1984 USSR has some great examples of the ubiquitous outdoor propaganda in Moscow and Leningrad. I added some translations to the photos that needed explanation and I recommend you take a minute to flip through the rest of the set in the slide-show at the end of this post.

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