Latest / International Flavor: Where the Truth Tastes Better / Moscow Then and Now: A Traveler’s Eye on History, Sanctions, and Everyday Life

Transcript

Moscow Then and Now: A Traveler’s Eye on History, Sanctions, and Everyday Life · International Flavor: Where the Truth Tastes Better

• 0:02
  I believe we are now on the air.
• 0:09
  Hello, good evening and welcome.
• 0:12
  My name is Samuel Trapp.
• 0:14
  You are listening to International Flavor.
• 0:19
  And I am coming to you live from Moscow, Russia.
• 0:26
  Tonight where I just, what I really wanted to do today was spend a little bit
• 0:32
  of time talking about my impressions of Moscow now versus what they were
• 0:42
  the quite a few times that I was here between 90 and 95 when I worked as a
• 0:50
  diplomatic interpreter.
• 0:51
  While I served in the Army and for the State Department.
• 0:58
  And I worked for an agency called the On-Site Inspection Agency.
• 1:05
  So if you're listening to the live podcast right now, you can absolutely click
• 1:12
  and do a call in.
• 1:13
  But I'm coming to you live from Moscow.
• 1:15
  And I spent the day, today I did an interview with a television station here.
• 1:23
  And I had met these people in a television atmosphere last year when I traveled
• 1:30
  here to Russia to Kazan for the BRICS conference.
• 1:35
  And I was in the BRICS conference and met a good number of people that were in
• 1:42
  journalism.
• 1:42
  And at that time I was pretty well, I don't want to say the only American here,
• 1:49
  but very, very few.
• 1:50
  There were no Americans that were in attendance in Kazan during the BRICS
• 1:57
  conference.
• 1:58
  It was really interesting to me.
• 2:00
  There was a couple of journalists, I believe they were from the New York Times,
• 2:06
  and they were together.
• 2:07
  And then there was me.
• 2:09
  And then there was one professor.
• 2:11
  What the heck was his name?
• 2:13
  That I met who was wandering around giving interviews.
• 2:16
  And then I met George Galloway from England.
• 2:21
  And he had given quite a few interviews while he was over there.
• 2:27
  And I gave a number of interviews last year, not because I'm any sort of expert
• 2:31
  or anything, or I wasn't on BRICS.
• 2:34
  I am pretty much now, or I know as much as anybody else in the West, I suppose.
• 2:41
  But at that time, it's not like I was some kind of a learned scholar.
• 2:47
  I went over there because I think BRICS is somewhat a wave of the future sort
• 2:52
  of thing.
• 2:53
  And I was very much interested in it.
• 2:56
  And so I wanted to come over and see what it was all about.
• 2:59
  So I got my travel shoes on.
• 3:03
  I got approved by the Russian foreign ministry to be in attendance.
• 3:10
  And I came over and I went to the BRICS conference last year.
• 3:13
  Well, while I was here, I met a whole good number of journalists.
• 3:17
  And while I'm here in Moscow right now, I have some interviews lined up.
• 3:22
  And I did an interview today in Russian with a Russian television station.
• 3:27
  My Russian is good, but I'm still a little worried about having been on TV for
• 3:34
  that because I do definitely worry about it.
• 3:38
  It's not like I prepared a whole long sort of speech that I was going to read
• 3:42
  or something.
• 3:44
  But I wanted to get to you about my impressions of Moscow now versus what they
• 3:49
  were in my younger days in the 90s.
• 3:52
  And so in the 90s when I was over here, I was in the military.
• 3:56
  And we all had diplomatic passports and we all wore a suit and tie basically.
• 4:04
  And we were over here doing arms control elimination.
• 4:09
  So I was here for two programs.
• 4:11
  The first one was the INF Treaty.
• 4:13
  And the INF Treaty was the United States and the Soviet Union and then Russia
• 4:19
  getting rid of intermediate range nuclear weapons.
• 4:25
  Or intermediate range nuclear carriers that were capable of carrying nuclear
• 4:31
  weapons.
• 4:32
  So you hear about these ICBMs and these intercontinental missiles that are able
• 4:38
  to go a certain distance.
• 4:41
  The INF Treaty was to limit those between – I can't remember the exact number
• 4:47
  of kilometers.
• 4:49
  But I want to say 500 kilometers to 5,500 kilometers.
• 4:54
  But I could be mistaken on the upper end of that.
• 4:57
  But at any rate, those that weren't permitted to go too far.
• 5:02
  Your intermediate range, not your intercontinentals that would go – that are in
• 5:07
  silos that can go from Russia to the United States without stop or vice versa.
• 5:13
  But these are the ones that – I always make the joke about the Spies R Us movie
• 5:21
  with Dan Aykroyd, if you remember that.
• 5:23
  Because you would see him over there.
• 5:26
  And it had something to do with one of the systems that are on the back of a
• 5:31
  large semi-tractor trailer with the rockets that go up on that.
• 5:38
  And we had, during that time period, our Pershing 1s and Pershing 2s.
• 5:43
  And that's what we were trying to get rid of.
• 5:45
  And the Russians were getting rid of their – basically their SS-20s and
• 5:49
  smaller.
• 5:49
  And so, we were doing something very useful at the time in getting rid of
• 5:58
  intermediate range nuclear weapons.
• 6:00
  And now, the U.S. under Trump in 2019 backed out of the INF Treaty.
• 6:08
  Russia just said, couldn't have been two months ago, maybe less, that they were
• 6:13
  no longer going to honor it.
• 6:15
  Although after 2019, they continued to honor it on their own.
• 6:19
  But they're worried about what's going on in Ukraine right now because now
• 6:23
  Ukrainians are starting – they bombed a factory.
• 6:28
  Oh, geez, could have been last week.
• 6:30
  It wasn't that long ago where they claim the Ukrainians are making missiles
• 6:37
  that are in contravention of this treaty, which no longer is in effect, by the
• 6:44
  way.
• 6:44
  But that doesn't mean they want them to be manufactured next door in the
• 6:51
  country, next door in Ukraine on behalf of – with German funding, by the way,
• 6:56
  in Ukraine.
• 6:58
  And so, basically, these are kind of big deals that they're talking about.
• 7:04
  And at any rate, years ago, I was over here for those sorts of activities.
• 7:10
  And I was over here with a diplomatic passport as an interpreter for the on
• 7:17
  -site inspection agency, and later with the U.S. Agency for International
• 7:21
  Development on loan to them from the U.S. military because I was a military
• 7:27
  interpreter.
• 7:28
  And so, then I would do – that was after Russia was allegedly our friend.
• 7:32
  And so, I've seen all the mistakes firsthand.
• 7:36
  I've listened to all the speaking firsthand in Russian from Putin, from
• 7:41
  everybody else.
• 7:42
  And I've seen the mistakes our own government has made.
• 7:46
  Now, I'm no certified expert from anywhere.
• 7:51
  I'm a hobbyist, and I knew what the hell I was doing back then.
• 7:55
  I know what the hell I'm doing right now.
• 7:57
  I can read a treaty.
• 7:58
  I went to law school.
• 8:00
  I have a jurist doctorate.
• 8:02
  I don't practice law anymore, but I have a doctorate.
• 8:06
  I read treaties.
• 8:07
  I've been reading them my whole life.
• 8:09
  And I know what we were supposed to do.
• 8:14
  I know what we did.
• 8:15
  And I feel that in the beginnings of all of these, we actually were doing a
• 8:21
  good thing for the world.
• 8:22
  And I think that part of what is going on in Ukraine now is due to the mistakes
• 8:28
  that we made for years.
• 8:32
  And we have made horrible mistakes ever since the 90s, ever since the Bush won
• 8:39
  administration when they said, we will not go further to the east.
• 8:43
  Okay?
• 8:44
  So, with that as the backdrop, I wanted to make sure that I gave my impressions
• 8:51
  of what happened.
• 8:52
  When I came over here in the 90s, I was a pretty young man in a highly
• 8:57
  responsible position as far as, you know, I was just a sergeant in the
• 9:05
  military.
• 9:06
  I was a staff sergeant.
• 9:07
  And, you know, I loved my job.
• 9:11
  I was having a good time.
• 9:12
  And I got to come over here and see the world and see what we were doing.
• 9:16
  And it was an exciting period of time because the wall had come down.
• 9:19
  We were getting rid of the Soviet Union, the big bad wolf that was on the other
• 9:25
  side of the planet, allegedly.
• 9:28
  And things were supposed to get better.
• 9:32
  And when we came over here, this was after the Reagan, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down
• 9:38
  that wall.
• 9:39
  When he came, we came over here.
• 9:41
  And I always felt like Reagan outspent all the Star Wars stuff.
• 9:49
  He outspent.
• 9:51
  They were somewhat collapsing under their own weight anyway.
• 9:56
  I'm not so sure they would have if Reagan hadn't have pushed.
• 10:00
  And I'm not saying good, bad, or indifferent.
• 10:03
  It's history.
• 10:04
  It is what it is.
• 10:05
  I try not to say, oh, I wish this and I wish that.
• 10:08
  I try not to because we're dealing with the realities of what is going on in
• 10:14
  the world right now.
• 10:15
  And a lot of it is due to mistakes we made.
• 10:18
  But those mistakes are already made.
• 10:20
  It doesn't do us any good to go back and wish that we had done something
• 10:23
  different.
• 10:24
  And it would be nice if we had, but that's not the point of anything that I'm
• 10:29
  saying here.
• 10:30
  We are where we are, but we've made some mistakes.
• 10:34
  But if you learn from your mistakes, you can correct them.
• 10:37
  But it seems like we never do.
• 10:40
  It just seems like we have.
• 10:43
  And I'm going to pick on him again because he's such an easy target, is Lindsey
• 10:48
  Graham.
• 10:48
  We have people like him that just want to have more war everywhere.
• 10:54
  And so he's helped a lot create an enemy that is not an enemy, in my humble
• 11:03
  opinion.
• 11:04
  Now, you can call me wrong.
• 11:06
  You don't have to agree with me, but I have a pretty good grip on what Russia
• 11:10
  as a government has been saying for the last 30 years.
• 11:15
  What we said while we were making or assisting them in their collapse.
• 11:21
  What we did after that time period.
• 11:26
  What the Russians did.
• 11:27
  The horror story of the 90s for them.
• 11:30
  Going through an American depression-like time period.
• 11:38
  And then having someone like Putin pull them out.
• 11:44
  Not alone, by the way.
• 11:46
  But having him pull them out of their depression-like period.
• 11:54
  And change their country.
• 11:56
  And change the way they felt about themselves as a country.
• 12:05
  And build on something generally positive.
• 12:10
  Okay?
• 12:11
  Now, can you nitpick?
• 12:13
  Sure.
• 12:14
  Can I nitpick America?
• 12:15
  I do.
• 12:16
  And I do it vocally.
• 12:19
  And I'll nitpick some of Russia.
• 12:25
  What I've noticed here as well.
• 12:27
  Because it's a new experience for me.
• 12:30
  In Moscow.
• 12:31
  Last year I was in Kazan.
• 12:33
  The year before I was in Naberezhnye Chelny.
• 12:36
  The year before that I was in Ufa.
• 12:38
  The year before that in Baku.
• 12:39
  I've come over here quite a few years in a row in different areas.
• 12:43
  But I've never gotten to Moscow.
• 12:45
  And I've been very eager to get to Moscow because I haven't been here in so
• 12:49
  long.
• 12:50
  And so I told you a little bit in a several days ago show about my trip from
• 12:58
  Miami to Istanbul.
• 13:02
  Spent the night in Istanbul.
• 13:04
  Flew into Vilnius, which is in Lithuania.
• 13:08
  And then flew from Lithuania.
• 13:11
  I'm sorry.
• 13:12
  Took a bus.
• 13:14
  This was really cool.
• 13:15
  Took a bus from Vilnius to Minsk, Belarus.
• 13:20
  And if you get your visa checked in Belarus, you're good to go in the Russian
• 13:28
  Federation.
• 13:29
  Because my Russian Federation visa is good for another God knows how many
• 13:33
  months.
• 13:34
  Not quite a year.
• 13:36
  And I'll have to get a new one probably when I get back this time.
• 13:40
  I'll have to get a new visa.
• 13:41
  And so which is coming through Belarus.
• 13:44
  And then from Belarus, stayed in Belarus five days, four or five days, don't
• 13:49
  know.
• 13:49
  And then took a train, which was a great experience.
• 13:57
  Took a train from Minsk to Moscow.
• 14:00
  And that was a cool experience.
• 14:03
  And it was a very nice train.
• 14:05
  I took a lot of pictures.
• 14:07
  I took a train several times in America.
• 14:10
  I've been on the subways in America, in Boston, and in New York.
• 14:15
  Granted, not recently.
• 14:17
  But the last time I was in the one in New York was five years ago, six?
• 14:26
  And it was a shit show.
• 14:28
  Pardon my French.
• 14:29
  But that's an embarrassment, you know, to have a city that big go in.
• 14:35
  And it's a frightening experience.
• 14:40
  And I don't mean that, you know.
• 14:42
  I'm not afraid of New York or afraid of the city.
• 14:45
  But, boy, it's not pretty.
• 14:50
  And Boston, I haven't been in a Boston one since the 90s.
• 14:54
  But, geez, what a dump, you know.
• 14:58
  You get on these things and you're like, it's like riding the Greyhounds years
• 15:02
  ago.
• 15:03
  They were just crap.
• 15:04
  I took a train once from Jefferson City, Missouri, to St. Louis, Missouri.
• 15:13
  That's a two-hour train ride, you know, with stops and everything.
• 15:21
  Crap service.
• 15:23
  Crap interior.
• 15:26
  Old, crappy trains.
• 15:30
  Disgusting.
• 15:31
  You don't want to be in there.
• 15:32
  You know, it's not like it's a noble form of transport.
• 15:38
  Now, I assume that there are some positive train experiences in the United
• 15:46
  States.
• 15:48
  Infrastructure in the United States generally doesn't include, you know,
• 15:53
  trains, you know, stuff like that.
• 15:57
  You know, we don't have any high-speed rail.
• 15:59
  We don't have any, you know, decent cross-country train services that take you
• 16:08
  from one state to another.
• 16:12
  Maybe in the Northeast, you know, there's some.
• 16:15
  But the ones I've been on, and I can be convinced otherwise.
• 16:20
  But I'll tell you what, I don't have that good of an impression.
• 16:24
  There's a reason Americans drive themselves everywhere.
• 16:28
  It's because the infrastructure interstate, the best infrastructure we have are
• 16:36
  the roads.
• 16:38
  You know, and they're not railroads or nothing like that.
• 16:41
  And I think we're missing the boat in some of that.
• 16:44
  So if I could start with my discussion of the metro in Moscow.
• 16:50
  So basically, we got in late at night into Moscow from Minsk.
• 16:57
  It was a, I don't know, five, six hour, five, six, something like that.
• 17:04
  Five hour, six hour train ride.
• 17:08
  And it was quite comfortable.
• 17:11
  The stewardess-like girls coming in, men too, serving food.
• 17:18
  You know, you could buy things to drink, and you could buy small
• 17:28
  food items.
• 17:29
  You know, nothing crazy.
• 17:32
  But I had some kind of an omelet that I purchased that they heated up for me
• 17:38
  and brought to me.
• 17:39
  There were sandwiches you could buy and, you know, little snacks and whatever.
• 17:44
  Nothing crazy expensive.
• 17:46
  The prices were generally pretty good.
• 17:50
  And so then you get into crossing the border from Belarus to Russia.
• 18:01
  It's easier than us in America crossing the border from the U.S. to Canada or
• 18:10
  vice versa.
• 18:11
  Or from Mexico coming back in.
• 18:15
  Okay.
• 18:16
  Or the horror story of the airport when you fly in from a foreign country.
• 18:24
  Even with a fast, what do they call that?
• 18:30
  Your, whatever your quick stuff is.
• 18:34
  But this was across a travel border in a train.
• 18:39
  Okay.
• 18:39
  And it was nothing.
• 18:41
  Now, I was the only one checked because I was the only one on the train with an
• 18:46
  American passport.
• 18:47
  Everybody else was either from Russia or Belarus.
• 18:50
  And everybody started getting their passports out because at the first stop
• 18:58
  when you crossed from, I forget the name of the city that we stopped in.
• 19:03
  But you come into the city from Minsk into Russia.
• 19:09
  And it's probably in the first hour.
• 19:12
  You know, after Minsk.
• 19:13
  Maybe an hour and a half, two hours.
• 19:15
  That you come in the train from Minsk.
• 19:18
  And I'm, you know, sitting on an inside row.
• 19:22
  There are five chairs across.
• 19:24
  Six chairs.
• 19:26
  Five or six chairs across each the train, you know.
• 19:31
  And I'm sitting in an aisle seat.
• 19:35
  And the train stopped.
• 19:39
  We're at the town.
• 19:41
  In walks a guy in a military uniform.
• 19:44
  Now, nobody's been in military uniforms yet.
• 19:46
  And this guy comes in.
• 19:48
  And everybody instantly sat up.
• 19:50
  And they're looking around, you know.
• 19:52
  And everybody starts digging in their bag to get their passports.
• 19:57
  And he walks up to me because, you know, they figured they're getting checked,
• 20:01
  you know.
• 20:01
  But they weren't checking anybody except me.
• 20:05
  And the guy walked up to me.
• 20:06
  And he tapped me.
• 20:07
  Came right up to my chair.
• 20:08
  Tapped me on my shoulder.
• 20:10
  And said, you know, give me your documents.
• 20:15
  And so, you know, I need to see your passport.
• 20:18
  So I got my passport out.
• 20:20
  He checked it all out.
• 20:22
  He didn't ask one question.
• 20:24
  Didn't ask anything.
• 20:25
  Handed it back to me.
• 20:28
  And that was it.
• 20:29
  And then he turned around and left the train.
• 20:31
  He didn't check anybody else.
• 20:34
  He was only checking me.
• 20:36
  And I'm assuming it's because I was from America.
• 20:38
  Now, same thing.
• 20:39
  Not the same thing.
• 20:40
  But when I came across on the bus from, because from when I came into Belarus
• 20:47
  from Lithuania, there it was a, you have to get off and drag, do a bag drag.
• 20:56
  You got to drag all your bags across the entry point as well.
• 21:01
  And so when I came into Minsk, into Belarus, there, you know, I'm coming in
• 21:08
  from a western country into an eastern country, one that is subject to Russian.
• 21:14
  Belarus isn't subject to Russian anything.
• 21:17
  But they honor Russian visas.
• 21:19
  But if you get checked by a Russian or by a Belarusian Belarus border guard, it
• 21:26
  counts for getting into Russia, obviously, because that's what happened.
• 21:30
  And when I came in, I was there, did the bag drag, and got into the, there was
• 21:37
  a big line because everybody off the bus was dragging their crap through the
• 21:41
  checkpoint.
• 21:42
  And you, you get off and I come up to a young girl in a window and hand her my
• 21:50
  passport.
• 21:51
  And she kind of looks at me like, who the hell are you?
• 21:57
  And, oh, geez, you know, one of those things, like, why me kind of thing.
• 22:02
  And she doesn't ask me any real question.
• 22:06
  Where are you going?
• 22:07
  You know, she said, how long are you going to be in town?
• 22:11
  And then she asked a question.
• 22:13
  She said, do you need to register?
• 22:16
  And I said, I don't know.
• 22:20
  Now, registration, I've registered before.
• 22:22
  When I come into Russia, Russia, if you stay somewhere longer than a certain
• 22:29
  period of time, and I believe that period, I could be mistaken in the amount of
• 22:33
  time, but I believe that period of time has been explained to me as 14 days.
• 22:38
  That if you're going to be there longer than 14 days, you have to register with
• 22:42
  the local, like police, local authorities, local
• 22:52
  services.
• 22:54
  And so I, of course, and usually that is the requirement of whatever
• 23:02
  hotel service or usually I'm in a private apartment somewhere, you
• 23:12
  know, that I rent for the time period.
• 23:15
  And that person who owns the apartment has to register you, so they take a copy
• 23:21
  of your passport and they could take a copy of all of that.
• 23:25
  Well, I don't know the rules in Belarus.
• 23:27
  I just knew that my visa was good.
• 23:29
  So I expected she would tell me whether or not I had to register or anything
• 23:34
  like that, but she never did.
• 23:36
  She asked me, do you have to register?
• 23:39
  And I'm like, I don't know.
• 23:41
  You know, you got me.
• 23:42
  And all this is going on in Russia anyway.
• 23:45
  And she said she just looked at me for a while, like quite a while, a couple,
• 23:54
  three minutes, no more questions.
• 23:57
  She just kind of stared at me, stared at my passport, stamped it, handed it
• 24:04
  back to me and let me go.
• 24:06
  And I don't know.
• 24:07
  You know, I was checked by a border guard.
• 24:10
  I know the law in America and the law in America is if you are checked by a
• 24:16
  border guard, you are legal.
• 24:19
  OK, so that's how it happens.
• 24:22
  Then you get checked by that border guard.
• 24:24
  You're suddenly if you've if you've come in, you're you're granted permission
• 24:29
  to be there by the executive branch of government.
• 24:33
  They've allowed you to come in, even if you're an alleged illegal.
• 24:39
  If they allow you in, you came in legally.
• 24:42
  Now, if you stay longer than what your visitor visa allows you, you become
• 24:47
  illegal after that.
• 24:50
  And so the same thing happens in other countries.
• 24:53
  If you get checked at the border, they put that stamp in your passport.
• 24:57
  You're legal.
• 24:57
  And you have to comply with all the laws and say you can't stay longer in this
• 25:02
  amount of time, that amount of time, whatever it is.
• 25:05
  Well, for me, mine says I can't stay longer in Russia than six months at a
• 25:10
  time.
• 25:12
  Under the the rules that I am under and I wouldn't anyway.
• 25:18
  You know, the longest I've ever stayed was six six weeks.
• 25:22
  I think it was traveling around.
• 25:25
  I've done that twice, traveling around a lot of Kafka's area last year and then
• 25:31
  a couple of years before being in Tatarstan for that long period of time.
• 25:39
  And beautiful parts of the country.
• 25:42
  Anyway, that's how the that is how the visa scenario passport scenario
• 25:52
  works.
• 25:53
  OK.
• 25:54
  And it.
• 25:57
  That is how I got in.
• 25:58
  But when I came in to Russia, Russia, that's how I was.
• 26:05
  Checked in to get into Russia.
• 26:07
  And so you come across on the six hour train ride into Moscow.
• 26:12
  Moscow, the.
• 26:14
  That night you come into a big train station.
• 26:18
  There's no real verification of anything.
• 26:21
  You just get off the train like you would in any American American city doing
• 26:27
  the same thing.
• 26:28
  You get out and you then have to figure out how to get to the place where your
• 26:35
  apartment is.
• 26:36
  Well, there had been some bad news about our apartment and this this I thought
• 26:41
  was a little bit of a.
• 26:47
  I don't know whether to call it a scam or something, something irregular.
• 26:53
  Let's call it that.
• 26:54
  And this is the first time this sort of thing has happened.
• 26:58
  And had gotten an apartment through a service and on the train
• 27:08
  into Russia, received notice that the apartment was not going to be available.
• 27:16
  And was offered a different apartment.
• 27:23
  In a different area of the city, a quite different area, the city farther away,
• 27:31
  quite a bit farther away.
• 27:34
  And but it's all, you know, still Metro line line.
• 27:40
  You know, you got to attend, according to the host, you have a 10 minute walk
• 27:46
  to the Metro and then you get in, get and get on the Metro and you can go
• 27:51
  anywhere in the city.
• 27:51
  They have a great Metro system.
• 27:53
  Now, the Metro system I wanted to talk about quite a bit of.
• 27:58
  And that was my first impression getting in the Metro and trying to remember
• 28:03
  what it was like.
• 28:04
  I remember the Moscow Metro from the 90s being worse than the
• 28:14
  Metro.
• 28:16
  Of Boston.
• 28:18
  And that was a shit show.
• 28:20
  And I remember Moscow being just frighteningly nasty.
• 28:30
  And I can tell you some stories about that.
• 28:34
  It was dirty.
• 28:36
  It was stinky.
• 28:37
  It was scary.
• 28:40
  It was damp.
• 28:44
  Perhaps I was in the one bad area of town, but I don't think so, because they
• 28:50
  still had a pretty good Metro system even back then.
• 28:53
  But when when we came in on the train from Minsk, Belarus, and
• 29:03
  came across the border, the train was great.
• 29:07
  The train was clean and we pulled into a great big station, did the bag drag
• 29:13
  and went around across a couple of rails and suddenly you're in the underground
• 29:18
  Metro system.
• 29:20
  And the difference between the 90s and now is
• 29:29
  astronomical.
• 29:32
  It is a Metro system to be proud of.
• 29:39
  It is clean.
• 29:42
  It is professional.
• 29:45
  It is modern.
• 29:49
  They're rebuilding different areas in different parts.
• 29:56
  They have escalators that go huge distances, like way up.
• 30:03
  You're on the escalator for several minutes.
• 30:08
  You're on the escalator that take you up to the next place, the tunnels and
• 30:14
  paths and guards everywhere and professional people.
• 30:19
  And then when you get on the subway themselves, I have some pictures and some
• 30:25
  photos that I would like to upload.
• 30:28
  And I'll try to at some point to upload them to make sure that they are well,
• 30:37
  well put, you know, so that we can hear them or I mean see them and listen
• 30:47
  because it's it's they're quiet.
• 30:50
  They're not crazy loud.
• 30:51
  They're not.
• 30:52
  People are not rude.
• 30:54
  They have these.
• 30:58
  They have these announcements that come up pretty regular, like on the ones you
• 31:04
  hear in New York or in Boston.
• 31:07
  Next station, next station, Tretyakovsky, you know, please stand away from the
• 31:16
  doors and blah, blah, blah.
• 31:17
  You know, that kind of thing.
• 31:19
  And be safe.
• 31:20
  Right.
• 31:22
  And give up the chair to older people, that kind of stuff, or to people that
• 31:28
  are pregnant or whatever.
• 31:29
  And that they they say some of those things.
• 31:33
  And it's it.
• 31:36
  They have a cool, a cool app that you can download and follow your progress and
• 31:42
  say, I need to go from here to here because it is quite, quite the system of
• 31:52
  underground maps.
• 31:54
  And so we basically had to get off of the train, train, get onto a metro
• 32:01
  system, train, go underground and take three separate legs on three different
• 32:10
  lines.
• 32:10
  It was a green line, a purple line and a gray line, something like that.
• 32:18
  And a total of 20 something stops.
• 32:27
  Right.
• 32:28
  It cost seventy four rubles, which in a dollar there are 80
• 32:37
  rubles plus or minus.
• 32:39
  You know, sometimes it goes low.
• 32:41
  Seventy five a year ago was up to a hundred and something.
• 32:44
  For basically 90 cents, you can go from the center of town to the far part of
• 32:53
  town with, you know, one swipe of your bank card and.
• 33:02
  Seventy four rubles is what it cost.
• 33:06
  And bring all your luggage, bring all your stuff, because we had gotten off the
• 33:11
  train.
• 33:11
  Right.
• 33:11
  Somebody's doing the suitcase drag.
• 33:15
  Right.
• 33:16
  And so that part was a little less than desirable dragging suitcases through
• 33:24
  that stuff, because, you know, if you pull in a suitcase through a an escalator
• 33:29
  is kind of a pain in the ass.
• 33:31
  But either way, it was certainly no problem in a clean and non-stinky, non
• 33:39
  -damp, non-frightening environment of the Moscow metro and professionals
• 33:46
  everywhere.
• 33:48
  There's a lot of railroad and metro workers that are present.
• 33:54
  There are in certain places, there are some military people, but there are
• 34:01
  people there.
• 34:01
  There are plenty of workers around, you know, and during all the time.
• 34:06
  And nobody messes with anybody.
• 34:08
  And I've gone all hours of the night.
• 34:12
  And so the metro was quite clean.
• 34:16
  Now, I'm going to continue the story for when we get to this apartment that
• 34:20
  we're getting into.
• 34:23
  And the apartment's a two bedroom apartment, one bath, small kitchen on the
• 34:30
  first floor of the building.
• 34:32
  And the first impression was, and sometimes the buildings outside are, I
• 34:42
  don't think as much attention is paid as in an apartment complex in America
• 34:48
  would pay to keep in track of the outside.
• 34:52
  In America, they want to keep track of everything on the outside.
• 34:56
  In the inside, it can be as big a dump as you need it to be, right?
• 35:01
  Wherever people live, you know, then that's up to the individual person.
• 35:05
  But outside, they want it to be, you know, some kind of a facade of what it
• 35:09
  looks like.
• 35:10
  I've found the opposite to be true for the most part in Russia.
• 35:15
  That the common areas, although clean, although well taken care of and all well
• 35:22
  presented, are not as well cared for.
• 35:30
  Not as frequently cared for.
• 35:33
  Mowed flowers, you know, stuff like that.
• 35:38
  And it's like each building doesn't really have their own association of people
• 35:44
  that'll clean it.
• 35:44
  It's up to you to do something like that.
• 35:47
  And people don't.
• 35:48
  And they don't keep track of the common areas.
• 35:50
  But when you get into the apartment itself, the apartment itself is usually
• 35:54
  very, very nice.
• 35:58
  Sometimes they're old, but extremely well cared for and decorated.
• 36:05
  And if people are going to, you know, kind of Airbnb, I suppose you'd call it,
• 36:11
  their place.
• 36:14
  In Russia, it better be in good shape, right?
• 36:18
  Well, I was pretty worried about this one.
• 36:22
  Because we were left waiting.
• 36:24
  We got conflicting signals.
• 36:29
  We got, you better get here now or we're not going to wait.
• 36:33
  And then when we got there, it was like, oh, it's not ready yet.
• 36:37
  It'll be ready in a little bit.
• 36:38
  You can't come in.
• 36:40
  The code didn't work.
• 36:41
  And we knew it was the first time this has happened to me in Russia.
• 36:47
  And I was afraid that it was going to be something, a horror story.
• 36:54
  It turned out it's a decent apartment.
• 36:58
  It's on the first floor.
• 37:00
  And I believe there's been some kind of a musty event in this entire building
• 37:09
  before.
• 37:11
  Maybe it's the season of the year.
• 37:13
  Maybe the building itself doesn't have as good a ventilation.
• 37:17
  And the building on the outside has the date 1969 as the year the building was
• 37:25
  built.
• 37:27
  But inside, it's well presented.
• 37:30
  It's decently kept.
• 37:32
  It just has that musty smell, right?
• 37:38
  And so the musty smell I'm definitely against.
• 37:42
  Although there are ways to deal with that.
• 37:45
  But it seems like there's just some dampness here that otherwise wouldn't be or
• 37:51
  shouldn't have been.
• 37:53
  And so at any rate, I don't know why I included that part because I want to
• 37:57
  focus mainly on Moscow itself.
• 37:59
  But it is all part of the trip and how it's gone so far.
• 38:09
  So the price, though, is...
• 38:17
  Think about this.
• 38:19
  For six nights...
• 38:25
  Yeah, I believe by the time it gets all worked out, six nights in Moscow turned
• 38:33
  out to be...
• 38:37
  I'm going to calculate it real quick so I don't get it wrong.
• 38:42
  Because I want to know.
• 38:44
  I've been meaning to do it myself anyway.
• 38:47
  To tell you how much the number is for that amount of time.
• 38:56
  And so basically, a two-bedroom apartment
• 39:06
  of someone's is costing me $40 a night.
• 39:13
  $40 a night in Moscow.
• 39:19
  Private apartment, decent size, two king...
• 39:23
  queen-ish, little larger beds.
• 39:29
  One bathroom includes a washer.
• 39:33
  They don't do dryers in Russia.
• 39:34
  That's a different story for another day.
• 39:38
  And a small kitchen.
• 39:40
  And so the other thing you notice when you come and you get to apartments,
• 39:44
  especially the new ones.
• 39:46
  And if you stay in a brand new apartment in Russia, you're really in for a
• 39:49
  treat.
• 39:50
  Because what they try to do is they're building...
• 39:55
  There's huge construction everywhere.
• 39:59
  Belarus and Russia...
• 40:01
  Well, Belarus, why do I keep calling it Belarus?
• 40:04
  It's called Belarus and Russia have huge construction projects, especially in
• 40:12
  apartment complexes and things like that.
• 40:15
  And when they build them, they're 20 stories high.
• 40:18
  And the bottom floor is set for shops.
• 40:22
  And so you'll have coffee shops and mini-marts and hair places, fingernails,
• 40:32
  another coffee shop, whatever.
• 40:35
  Small businesses on the first floor.
• 40:40
  And then 10 buildings in an apartment complex and hundreds of people, hundreds
• 40:48
  of families living in the buildings.
• 40:50
  And then on the first floor, you'll have all of these places where you can go
• 40:55
  and do your quick shopping.
• 40:58
  And so that is highly desirable.
• 41:02
  And in America, it seems like everywhere we have to go, you have to drive.
• 41:09
  Not so, although there's plenty of cars in Russia.
• 41:14
  Here, you can get places without having a car.
• 41:17
  Now, I've never lived officially in a big city like New York.
• 41:23
  I lived in Washington, D.C. in the suburbs, and I rode my bike everywhere when
• 41:29
  I was a kid.
• 41:32
  But I would never take the bus system.
• 41:34
  I've never been a big bus sort of person.
• 41:37
  I don't want to do that.
• 41:38
  I'll take a bus from city to city, but I don't want to get on a bus to go to
• 41:43
  work.
• 41:44
  I could handle a subway.
• 41:48
  I could handle a train.
• 41:50
  Those I would be okay with, especially if it was in as good a condition as the
• 41:56
  one I've seen here in Moscow.
• 42:00
  This was pretty impressive.
• 42:03
  And I'd like to put up some photos and videos of this.
• 42:08
  At any rate, so for the equivalent of $40 a night, you can stay in a nice
• 42:15
  place.
• 42:16
  The food costs nothing.
• 42:18
  The transport costs nothing.
• 42:23
  Food, let's see, for probably $10, you can
• 42:33
  have a nice, a very nice lunch.
• 42:39
  You know, a tea or coffee, a bottle of water, a soup, some
• 42:48
  pilmani, and all that costs you $6 or something, $7.
• 42:54
  And if you have a, there are expensive restaurants too.
• 42:58
  You can go to some of those, but even those here are not, horror story,
• 43:05
  expensive.
• 43:06
  Belarus was expensive.
• 43:08
  Belarus, they're very, very proud of it.
• 43:10
  And I think there's something, whenever you get to the Europeans, you end up
• 43:16
  spending a hell of a lot more money.
• 43:18
  I don't know why, but Europeans are extremely expensive to travel in Europe.
• 43:27
  Not so to travel in Russia or any former Soviet republics.
• 43:33
  Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, those were very, very inexpensive.
• 43:41
  I think I've already told those stories in the last year or so.
• 43:47
  Eh, a couple of years.
• 43:49
  At any rate, the day yesterday was spent on
• 43:59
  the metro, going on a boat ride.
• 44:04
  Now get this, the Moscow metro has introduced a method.
• 44:15
  So the trains, the buses, the subways are all connected.
• 44:22
  So around the city, you get on these lines, it's one fee.
• 44:26
  You pay one fee in the metro.
• 44:31
  It takes you onto the train, onto the bus, and around for this, anywhere in the
• 44:38
  city from point A to point B, basically, costs you this 74 rubles, less than a
• 44:45
  dollar.
• 44:46
  And you can be on the train for an hour to get from, you know, one part of,
• 44:53
  today I went a total of 14 stops on a train.
• 45:01
  That took 40 minutes, and then another 15 minute segment on the metro.
• 45:10
  If you had to drive all of that, it would take you an hour and a half.
• 45:16
  But you can go from point A to point B in the whole city.
• 45:19
  I did it in like an hour.
• 45:22
  And it's faster, it's definitely cheaper.
• 45:28
  And, you know, very little stress.
• 45:33
  Very little worry that you're not going to make it.
• 45:37
  But a system this big has always got its share of repairs going on.
• 45:42
  And you can't get off at this stop because they're repairing the escalator,
• 45:48
  going to wherever.
• 45:49
  Or when I got interviewed today, because I got interviewed by that TV station
• 45:53
  in Russian today, when they were giving me directions, they said, when you get
• 46:00
  off the subway at Tretyakovskaya, then we will meet you there because one of
• 46:09
  the escalators is out, and we don't want to have to explain that to you, so
• 46:14
  we'll just come meet you there and walk you to our building, you know, four or
• 46:19
  five minutes away.
• 46:22
  Which is exactly what they did.
• 46:23
  So I get off the subway and there were two young ladies there to meet me and
• 46:28
  walk me to the building and to the studio where we were going to do the
• 46:32
  interview.
• 46:33
  Which was actually really cool.
• 46:35
  And they met me and we chatted and, you know, very nice.
• 46:38
  Do you want to stop and get coffee?
• 46:40
  You do this and you do that.
• 46:42
  But very clean, very professional, very well run.
• 46:46
  And everywhere you go, you go into a coffee shop, you go into a
• 46:54
  bar, you go into a restaurant or any sort of gift shop that is just
• 47:02
  extremely clean, very well presented.
• 47:07
  The people are very nice.
• 47:09
  I always say everybody in Russia is the same as in any nice American town.
• 47:19
  The people are people.
• 47:21
  People are fantastic.
• 47:23
  And the people are, you know, each going about their own lives in the best way
• 47:29
  they can, trying to make money for themselves and their families and whatever
• 47:34
  it is they do in their free time.
• 47:36
  Whatever hobbies they like to have.
• 47:38
  And the Russians are no different than us.
• 47:42
  In fact, you can see their families there, you know, on the subways.
• 47:51
  A husband and wife will get on, two, three kids, well dressed, well presented.
• 47:56
  Everybody dresses up.
• 47:58
  Do you have your share of people with, you know, body piercings and tattoos
• 48:02
  like you do in America?
• 48:04
  Yes, you do.
• 48:05
  Do you have your share of conservative people that are well dressed and, you
• 48:10
  know, wouldn't wear a shirt with a tear in it?
• 48:15
  Ever.
• 48:16
  You have plenty of those.
• 48:18
  And then you have the people who intentionally tear their jeans and tear their
• 48:21
  stuff just like we do in America.
• 48:24
  It is so American that, you know, there are Burger Kings everywhere.
• 48:28
  You can get Burger Kings, there's coffees, there's O's.
• 48:34
  All of the same things that you have in America, you have in Moscow.
• 48:41
  Sometimes I feel like the quality is just poof, a little bit higher.
• 48:50
  A little bit better.
• 48:52
  A little bit of a higher standard.
• 48:55
  Nothing dramatic, but I don't know how to explain it quite right, but
• 49:04
  they're very proud.
• 49:07
  I mean, just like we are in America, we're proud as well.
• 49:12
  And it's very nice to be associated.
• 49:23
  When I speak to people in Russian, they are just in shock.
• 49:27
  Today, I had, for example, one of the problems I had, I had to go to the bank,
• 49:42
  right?
• 49:45
  You can't use your American Visa or MasterCard or American Express in Russia.
• 49:52
  That ended several years ago when the war started with Ukraine and the sanction
• 49:59
  and all took effect.
• 50:01
  So the first time I really had issues with it was last year.
• 50:06
  This year, I thought I might have gotten around it.
• 50:09
  So I had brought a small amount of money.
• 50:14
  It doesn't take a lot to be here, but I brought a small amount of money.
• 50:20
  And when I was in Belarus, I had to get Belarusian, Belarus rubles.
• 50:28
  And the Belarus ruble is not the Russian ruble.
• 50:32
  And I had to – but in Belarus, your Visa and your
• 50:41
  MasterCard don't work.
• 50:43
  So I got a number of Belarusian notes out of the ATM
• 50:52
  because I thought that you – because I had been told this was the case, that
• 50:59
  you could spend Belarusian rubles in Russia or trade them in in Russia.
• 51:06
  So if I was getting some back then, trading in my dollars, I could have the
• 51:11
  Belarusian and then get into Russia and turn them into Russian rubles instead
• 51:17
  of Belarus rubles.
• 51:22
  However, important safety tip, if you're ever doing what I did, you cannot do
• 51:27
  that.
• 51:27
  That is not the way to go because – and if you've ever done it before, you
• 51:31
  already knew that.
• 51:32
  Somebody could have explained it to you, but it wasn't well explained and you
• 51:36
  couldn't really find it.
• 51:37
  And I had been misled that you can swap them because you cannot.
• 51:44
  So when I came over there, I don't have any dollars left.
• 51:48
  I'm trading them all into Belarusian – Belarus rubles.
• 51:52
  So – but I had a card from last year, kind of like a cash app card
• 52:01
  for Russia.
• 52:03
  And it's given by a bank.
• 52:05
  In this case, it's given by a bank.
• 52:09
  And you just put money on that card, and that card doesn't expire for 10, 12
• 52:14
  years or whatever.
• 52:15
  And you can put cash on it, so you don't have to carry cash.
• 52:19
  Last year when I was here, in Kazan, I had put some cash on a card, didn't
• 52:27
  spend it all.
• 52:28
  So I had a little bit still left on this card.
• 52:32
  And so I was going to use that and take my Russian or my American money or my
• 52:40
  Belarus money and put it on this card too.
• 52:44
  So I wouldn't have to carry cash around, right?
• 52:47
  And so this morning, I was going to get that done.
• 52:52
  So I go to a bank.
• 52:53
  I go to the bank that gave me my card.
• 52:56
  I tried to do this in Belarus, by the way.
• 52:58
  So in Belarus, I went to a bank of the same name.
• 53:04
  And I went to that bank, and I said, okay, I have a card from Russia.
• 53:08
  I want to take some money out of my bank in the United States and put it on
• 53:13
  this Russian card here.
• 53:16
  Nope, you can't do it, even in Belarus.
• 53:20
  And I said, well, why can't you do that?
• 53:22
  They said, because this bank is a Russian bank, and the Russian bank is
• 53:26
  sanctioned.
• 53:26
  And I said, yeah, but you're sanctioned in Belarus too?
• 53:31
  They said, well, we can still do business here, and we can trade, but we can't
• 53:37
  use your Visa MasterCard.
• 53:41
  So in order for it to work, you'll have to go to another bank in Belarus or an
• 53:50
  ATM, which you don't want to do.
• 53:52
  Because if you take cash out of the ATM, they take some huge ungodly percent,
• 53:57
  whatever private owner of that ATM does.
• 54:00
  And if you take out $300, $400, it costs you $100 in freaking fees to take it
• 54:07
  out, which is nonsense.
• 54:09
  So you want to take it out of your bank.
• 54:12
  Well, I thought I had a bank.
• 54:15
  Come to find out, I didn't.
• 54:17
  Well, I do, but actually, all I have is a bank card, but with like a cash out
• 54:25
  card.
• 54:26
  Anyway, long and short of that is, the people in Belarus told me, nope, you
• 54:32
  have to do that in Russia.
• 54:34
  So take your Belarus rubles to Russia and trade them in.
• 54:42
  So this morning, I go to the bank, Russian bank, and present my
• 54:50
  Belarus rubles.
• 54:53
  And say, I want to add these to this card.
• 54:58
  They said, get this.
• 55:01
  They said, we don't accept Belarus rubles.
• 55:06
  I said, well, what the hell am I supposed to do with these then?
• 55:08
  And how the hell am I going to survive, because I can't get any cash out of the
• 55:13
  bank from you.
• 55:15
  I only have a little bit left on whatever small amount I had from last year
• 55:20
  left on this card.
• 55:22
  And I can't add anything to it.
• 55:26
  And I have no dollars.
• 55:28
  I can't get any dollars, because all I have is these Belarus rubles that I
• 55:34
  already traded my dollars for.
• 55:36
  And now you tell me I can't put the Belarus rubles into a rubles bank.
• 55:42
  I thought you were friends with Belarus.
• 55:46
  Well, no, we are.
• 55:47
  But this bank doesn't take your Belarus rubles.
• 55:53
  You're going to have to find a money exchange.
• 56:00
  And there's places where they are, you know, center of Moscow.
• 56:03
  I found several of them.
• 56:06
  And so that is what I had.
• 56:08
  I spent a little bit of time doing that nonsense today, trying to figure out,
• 56:14
  because of sanctions that we have put against Russia, their system is
• 56:22
  somewhat isolated.
• 56:27
  For me, I mean, I've never had a huge problem with it, even last year.
• 56:36
  When it first hit me last year that the sanctions were going to kick my butt,
• 56:42
  because even after the war had started, they hadn't taken away the ability to
• 56:49
  use a Visa or MasterCard.
• 56:50
  You didn't have to get a Russian Miracard in order to be able to pay for things
• 56:58
  and not carry cash everywhere.
• 57:00
  Now, there's still quite a few people that carry cash and use everything for
• 57:03
  cash anyway, just like in American society.
• 57:07
  But I didn't want to, as a traveler, in the event something did go wrong, I did
• 57:13
  not wish to be carrying around a truckload, even a small amount of cash.
• 57:21
  I'd rather have a card.
• 57:22
  You can shut off a card if somebody steals it and get your money back, for the
• 57:29
  most part.
• 57:30
  And there's insurance for that sort of thing when you're traveling, especially.
• 57:35
  And even on the Russian side, they have the same sort of protections that we do
• 57:40
  on the Visa and MasterCard side.
• 57:43
  So, at any rate, now I'm sitting there really sweating it.
• 57:47
  What the hell am I going to do, even though I'm only here six days?
• 57:50
  What am I going to do?
• 57:52
  But I did find a money exchange service.
• 57:57
  I paid a little bit for it, but not the crazy amount that you would have had to
• 58:01
  do to withdraw the money from the bank originally.
• 58:06
  So, that all worked out pretty well.
• 58:09
  So, probably a long story to tell everybody that these are some of the problems
• 58:15
  that we have created for our own people traveling.
• 58:20
  This does not create a problem for the Russians.
• 58:26
  They use Russian banks anyway.
• 58:30
  They can freely come the other direction.
• 58:35
  Well, maybe not so freely, but their travel is as free as ours.
• 58:40
  We don't give any of them visas.
• 58:42
  But if they were in our country, they could get a credit card.
• 58:46
  They can use their Visa and MasterCard.
• 58:48
  But now they had to start this MIR program.
• 58:52
  Nobody uses the MIR card.
• 58:54
  But they're starting to be used in places like China, India.
• 59:00
  They're starting to have changes accepting those cards and creating an
• 59:09
  alternative system to SWIFT and to the acceptance of the Visa and MasterCard
• 59:15
  system.
• 59:16
  I've heard that the MIR card is accepted in a few places, even in America.
• 59:23
  And MIR means peace and world.
• 59:26
  Both of them are the same word in Russian.
• 59:32
  But I hear that there are places that you can use the MIR card, like New York,
• 59:38
  Houston, wherever there are embassies and consulates of Russia.
• 59:44
  And maybe some other places, too.
• 59:46
  I don't know, San Francisco.
• 59:48
  But I've heard.
• 59:49
  I can't verify that.
• 59:50
  But I do know that you cannot use your MasterCard or Visa in Russia.
• 59:57
  So far, that's a no-go.
• 1:00:00
  And maybe there's something.
• 1:00:01
  I was wondering if the embassy, if you had any problems.
• 1:00:04
  But the embassies and the consulates are mostly closed or very, very limited
• 1:00:10
  staff and certainly no citizen services, if you want to call it that, that are
• 1:00:19
  there.
• 1:00:20
  So at any rate, I've wandered around quite a bit from my original.
• 1:00:25
  Let's talk about the look at the metro systems, train systems, transportation
• 1:00:34
  system in general.
• 1:00:37
  Extremely impressive.
• 1:00:40
  The cleanliness, the modernization of it all has been pretty damn outstanding.
• 1:00:50
  And so my impressions are quite naturally quite high on that end.
• 1:00:57
  It's also very high on the food end.
• 1:01:02
  Everybody knows I like food.
• 1:01:04
  Everybody knows I like Uzbeki food.
• 1:01:06
  There are plenty of Uzbeki restaurants here.
• 1:01:09
  There are plenty of, you know, I like my coffee in the morning, getting a
• 1:01:15
  coffee shop here.
• 1:01:17
  I mean, geez, you get a coffee and I don't usually eat a whole lot of
• 1:01:21
  breakfast, but I'll get a cappuccino or a latte or something like that and have
• 1:01:27
  that for breakfast.
• 1:01:29
  And very cheap, a couple of bucks.
• 1:01:36
  And you can have a mini breakfast, you know, with a coffee and stuff.
• 1:01:44
  And then the transportation costs nothing.
• 1:01:48
  The food costs nothing.
• 1:01:50
  And there are plenty of sites to see.
• 1:01:54
  I told you a little bit in my past show about the history and whatnot of some
• 1:01:58
  of the things I like to see.
• 1:02:01
  I got to go to Brest when we were in Belarus, and that is an ancient city.
• 1:02:09
  The tour guide was telling us that 1015, the year 1015, 1015
• 1:02:19
  is the earliest reference to the city of Brest, which is on the border of
• 1:02:26
  Belarus and Poland.
• 1:02:29
  And quite a history of being overrun back and forth, which is a lot of
• 1:02:38
  European territory in this area.
• 1:02:43
  And when you think about Ukraine, of all places, think Belarus too.
• 1:02:51
  The entire part of Europe that we are talking about, from Moscow down to
• 1:03:00
  Turkey, from Turkey across to maybe not quite as far as Spain, but Spain was
• 1:03:09
  included too.
• 1:03:10
  All the way up through Europe and across to Poland and Moscow and all of that.
• 1:03:18
  All of that entire area over the last thousand years has been subject to kings,
• 1:03:26
  to monarchies, to war, to overthrow, to tyranny, to government actors and
• 1:03:35
  plenty of colonization.
• 1:03:39
  Huge amounts.
• 1:03:42
  And so the history that you see in a place like Brest was
• 1:03:51
  unbelievable, first of all.
• 1:03:54
  And in America, it's possible that we don't quite understand that because
• 1:04:03
  we've not been overrun.
• 1:04:07
  We did the overrun.
• 1:04:10
  Got rid of the Indians.
• 1:04:12
  They may have overrun each other.
• 1:04:14
  If they were still around, maybe they would be closer to what the Europeans
• 1:04:19
  are.
• 1:04:19
  But because we basically exterminated the Indian nations when the white man
• 1:04:27
  came along, that doesn't exist for us.
• 1:04:33
  There's been hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years of war
• 1:04:41
  between Canada and Mexico and the United States.
• 1:04:47
  And we have dominated that relationship between the rest of the Western
• 1:04:53
  Hemisphere to such an extent that these sort of things have never happened.
• 1:05:01
  But on the other side of the planet, especially in Europe, especially in the
• 1:05:06
  areas that we are talking about, especially in Ukraine all the way up through
• 1:05:09
  Belarus, I mean, think about it.
• 1:05:13
  Mongolian hordes, Turkish Empire, Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Germany,
• 1:05:21
  Germany in World War I, Germany again in World War II, Russia going westward to
• 1:05:28
  a lot of those places.
• 1:05:31
  I don't want to say it's been a constant,
• 1:05:41
  but I believe there's such a thing as a national memory.
• 1:05:51
  Certainly, nobody is left or extremely few people are still alive
• 1:06:01
  from the Poland years when the Ukrainian Banderas, which were
• 1:06:10
  aligned with the Hitlerites, the Hitler regime, and
• 1:06:20
  killed on behalf of the Hitler regime 100,000 to 120,000 Poles inside of
• 1:06:28
  Western Ukraine.
• 1:06:31
  A man named Stepan Pandera did that, and he's revered by Ukraine.
• 1:06:39
  He definitely participated in the extermination of the Poles.
• 1:06:49
  They remember that, and in the back of their brains, and I think this is in the
• 1:06:54
  back of everyone's brain that is a European, is that somehow, somewhere, their
• 1:07:04
  family in the background has been destroyed.
• 1:07:10
  Family being the national family has probably been damaged by some of
• 1:07:20
  these processes.
• 1:07:21
  That will now take place from the side of Ukraine against Russia, as
• 1:07:32
  in Russia is consistently forcing us on these ends.
• 1:07:41
  It has tormented us well.
• 1:07:46
  The story of Brest and the people coming back and forth across those, I just
• 1:07:52
  want to make sure that people understand that the entire area has been overrun
• 1:07:59
  for at least 1,000 years.
• 1:08:02
  I think that you get a good amount of history,
• 1:08:10
  examination, and the saving of historic relics and items that in America we
• 1:08:19
  don't have.
• 1:08:21
  I mean we have them, but obviously they're nowhere near as old.
• 1:08:26
  When you're going down the Volga River on a boat in Russia, and you see this
• 1:08:35
  enormous statue of Nicholas I, wow, that
• 1:08:45
  was impressive.
• 1:08:46
  And when you see the gates of the Kremlin or St. Basil's Cathedral or any of
• 1:08:53
  those things, you can't help but be moved by it, by the sheer history of it
• 1:09:01
  all.
• 1:09:02
  And there is plenty of it in numerous places.
• 1:09:08
  Everywhere you go, there's a Provostsovianskaya Church, Russian Orthodox Church
• 1:09:15
  somewhere.
• 1:09:18
  I have a habit of asking for directions.
• 1:09:21
  I finally learned my lesson, especially, that's the other thing that doesn't
• 1:09:28
  work by the way here, is getting a phone.
• 1:09:31
  They changed the rules on getting phones.
• 1:09:35
  I have to go down this pathway because you want to hear about life, how it's
• 1:09:40
  really like in Russia, yes?
• 1:09:44
  And if you're going to pay attention to this, or something that is different
• 1:09:48
  for an American.
• 1:09:49
  If I'm in America and I want to get a phone, I go to T-Mobile, I go to AT
• 1:09:58
  &T, I go to wherever, and I get a phone.
• 1:10:01
  I sign up for a service, hell, they'll give me the phone, and just bill it to
• 1:10:08
  me along with the service.
• 1:10:12
  When I was here last year, I got a Russian phone number, and I paid for it for
• 1:10:20
  three months.
• 1:10:22
  You buy this phone, you get a SIM card, and it'll last you for three months,
• 1:10:26
  here's your number.
• 1:10:28
  And what I wanted to do, but it was too late because I was already back in the
• 1:10:33
  States, is before I left, I wanted to make that number pay whatever cost it was
• 1:10:41
  per month.
• 1:10:42
  Very minor, nothing major at all.
• 1:10:45
  Their unlimited internet plan for in Russia, their unlimited phone plan is
• 1:10:53
  something like five or six hundred rubles.
• 1:10:57
  If you remember, there's 80 rubles to the dollar, so it's like 10 bucks, it's
• 1:11:01
  nothing crazy.
• 1:11:04
  And you can't use it out of the country, of course.
• 1:11:09
  I mean, you can, but the prices will be dramatically different.
• 1:11:14
  But inside the country, you can use it.
• 1:11:17
  Well, I had gotten this phone, and I wanted to use it because mine was
• 1:11:20
  intermittent from America.
• 1:11:23
  It just wasn't doing what it needed to be doing.
• 1:11:28
  And the stability of the internet was off quite a bit.
• 1:11:36
  And so, I got this number.
• 1:11:42
  Well, my hope was today to be able to go into the phone company and just renew
• 1:11:50
  that same number and keep that number.
• 1:11:55
  But in the worst case scenario, I would just get a different number.
• 1:11:59
  So today, after quite a bit of looking around, trying to find one that was
• 1:12:05
  open, I went to one today that was closed, and it said it was closed because
• 1:12:10
  they were doing an inventory.
• 1:12:14
  So they were closed.
• 1:12:17
  I went to another one.
• 1:12:19
  That one was closed because they were, what was that one doing?
• 1:12:25
  Remodeling or something?
• 1:12:26
  There was some kind of remodeling going on.
• 1:12:29
  And then when I finally get to the third one, that guy says, Well, I wish I
• 1:12:35
  could help you, but I can't.
• 1:12:38
  They have changed the rules.
• 1:12:41
  You're a foreigner.
• 1:12:43
  I said, yeah.
• 1:12:44
  He said, you can't have a phone without filling out all of these documents, and
• 1:12:53
  you have to go to the government services and get a government services permit,
• 1:12:58
  and then you bring it back here, and then we give you a phone, and then you
• 1:13:03
  take that phone number back to the government service people, and they verify
• 1:13:09
  that it's you and your number and your phone.
• 1:13:12
  I said, okay, how do I do that?
• 1:13:15
  He said, here's the list of places you can go.
• 1:13:18
  There's a place called My Documents, and My Documents has locations all over
• 1:13:24
  Russia.
• 1:13:24
  It's basically the ID pass, the DMV, if you will, of Russia.
• 1:13:34
  And you go to those places and get your government service.
• 1:13:42
  New passport, you go here.
• 1:13:43
  New driver's license, you go here.
• 1:13:44
  New apartment that you got to buy in a certain location, you go here.
• 1:13:49
  So it's your courthouse, all in one, any sort of government services, and you
• 1:13:55
  go get your documents.
• 1:13:56
  And now, as a non-citizen, you still have a non-citizen go in and take care of
• 1:14:06
  your getting a telephone number.
• 1:14:11
  I said, oh, geez.
• 1:14:12
  I said, can I get that done in a week?
• 1:14:15
  He goes, well, you'll have to check with them in that regard.
• 1:14:18
  So I said, okay.
• 1:14:22
  Get to the phone company, or to the My Documents place, anyway.
• 1:14:29
  Get in a line and wait for that one.
• 1:14:32
  Get to the front of that.
• 1:14:33
  The lady says, we don't do that at this location.
• 1:14:39
  And I spent a good amount of time finding this place.
• 1:14:43
  She handed me a list of places and said, here's a list of places where they do
• 1:14:49
  handle that.
• 1:14:52
  You'll have to go to one of them.
• 1:14:55
  So I said, okay.
• 1:14:57
  I get out, I find the closest one.
• 1:14:59
  My phone isn't working because my internet is spotty.
• 1:15:03
  And so I wander around in circles for a while, trying to find the right spot.
• 1:15:10
  Get to the right spot, go to the new My Documents place, and in the new My
• 1:15:17
  Documents place, I wait in line for 10, 20 minutes in the line of foreigners
• 1:15:23
  waiting for foreigner services.
• 1:15:26
  And I get to the front, and I say, listen, I don't have a phone.
• 1:15:30
  I mean, I do, but I need a Russian SIM card, and I have one from last year, but
• 1:15:36
  they won't activate it without me getting governmental services.
• 1:15:41
  She says, first, do you have all your documents?
• 1:15:50
  I said, well, I'm not sure what documents you need.
• 1:15:53
  She said, well, we need a copy of your passport.
• 1:15:57
  I said, well, I have my passport here.
• 1:15:59
  She says, no, no, no.
• 1:16:01
  It needs to be translated into Russian.
• 1:16:04
  You have to go see a translator, translate it into Russian, bring me this
• 1:16:08
  document, this document.
• 1:16:09
  She gave me a list of crap I had to do in order to get this phone number.
• 1:16:15
  And last year, it took nothing.
• 1:16:17
  It's just like, you know, it was a simpler process than going to T-Mobile or AT
• 1:16:23
  &T and buying a phone.
• 1:16:24
  You just go in and you buy it, and that's that.
• 1:16:28
  And now, I was like, seriously?
• 1:16:32
  I said, well, why is this?
• 1:16:34
  And she said the same thing, it's because there's a lot of trickery going on
• 1:16:41
  over the telephone.
• 1:16:43
  People from India, people from Russia, they want to be able to track these
• 1:16:49
  people and they have their phones.
• 1:16:51
  And so that is why I thought it was just anti-America.
• 1:16:55
  First, for some reason, I was thinking, because the guy had said to me, you're
• 1:16:59
  an American, you're going to have to do this.
• 1:17:03
  And I was like, well, that's kind of irritating, but I get it, you know?
• 1:17:10
  And so then, come to find out, it's not just Americans, it's
• 1:17:20
  everybody that is a foreigner, that is coming to, especially trickery.
• 1:17:29
  And apparently, and I've read quite a few articles about it, I think I shared
• 1:17:32
  one with you late last week, about they're sending some old pensioneers,
• 1:17:39
  they're trying to figure out how to steal their money, and they talk them into
• 1:17:43
  stuff over the telephone, and they've given up their passwords and their
• 1:17:48
  information, and then they steal all their money, and then they have them do
• 1:17:53
  things on behalf of the Ukrainian government.
• 1:17:56
  There's been quite a few stories of this that have been going on.
• 1:18:03
  And that is somewhat frightening.
• 1:18:06
  So I'm not against the fact that you have to do these things to go get a
• 1:18:10
  telephone, but then again, it's like you're punishing the rest of the
• 1:18:17
  population because of the few group of tricksters.
• 1:18:26
  I'm not a trickster that's going to call people and call old people and steal
• 1:18:31
  their money and then have them do weird things in an effort to get it back,
• 1:18:36
  like deliver bombs, which is what there's been a couple of articles about,
• 1:18:43
  people trying to deliver weapons to military, to blow up military cars and
• 1:18:52
  stuff like that.
• 1:18:53
  There's been some pretty bad stories.
• 1:18:55
  So I get the need for security, especially in today's world, and I get the need
• 1:19:01
  for keeping track of who has a phone.
• 1:19:04
  In America, on my damn radio show, and I know that we have a damn radio,
• 1:19:12
  there's a guy who calls and has like six or seven different numbers.
• 1:19:17
  And he likes to be able to get through and talk to you, but he never has
• 1:19:26
  anything nice to say.
• 1:19:28
  He's always very negative.
• 1:19:29
  And I never, ever understood that.
• 1:19:31
  So I don't accept his calls anymore either when he calls in.
• 1:19:37
  But apparently that's why the rules regarding phone system have changed in
• 1:19:45
  Moscow.
• 1:19:47
  And well, maybe Russia-wide, I presume it'd be in effect Russia-wide instead of
• 1:19:54
  just Moscow.
• 1:19:55
  But I didn't ask that question.
• 1:19:59
  So at any rate, back to the metro stations and the cool part of all of that.
• 1:20:08
  I believe I've given you the highly positive regard of what has gone on from
• 1:20:19
  my point of view, especially with relation to the metro stations and the public
• 1:20:26
  transportation in Moscow.
• 1:20:28
  The other thing is the sheer beauty of it all.
• 1:20:33
  And in a place where however many millions
• 1:20:44
  of people live in Moscow, it's...
• 1:20:51
  I remember coming in on the train from Belarus in the early evening and passing
• 1:20:58
  a few places where there was plenty of graffiti along the side of the...
• 1:21:08
  traveling as you were coming in by train.
• 1:21:13
  There was plenty of that, but no different than any other city.
• 1:21:22
  But I don't want you to say that there's nothing there, but there's also a lot
• 1:21:27
  of people engaged in cleaning, street sweepers, guys that are picking up in
• 1:21:37
  parks, trash guys inside the subway systems, inside the rail systems, all
• 1:21:47
  of that type of thing.
• 1:21:49
  They are nearly always visible.
• 1:21:55
  They, I believe, spend a good amount of effort and money trying to keep things
• 1:22:03
  clean and presentable.
• 1:22:07
  Another thing that you don't see a lot of is trash cans.
• 1:22:15
  And I think that people tend to keep their trash
• 1:22:24
  themselves and throw it away at home on their own.
• 1:22:31
  They don't go out searching for trash cans.
• 1:22:35
  You know, they're...
• 1:22:36
  I don't want to say they're hard to find because they're not, but they're very
• 1:22:42
  small.
• 1:22:43
  It's not like they're going to be big and intrusive and everywhere because they
• 1:22:48
  aren't.
• 1:22:49
  And sometimes you've got to look around to find them.
• 1:22:52
  Like if you buy a coffee to go and you're wandering down the street with your
• 1:22:57
  empty coffee cup and your coffee cup not only can go, it is gone.
• 1:23:04
  And you're carrying around an empty cup.
• 1:23:06
  Sometimes it's difficult to find a place to throw that cup away.
• 1:23:13
  And it's part of the reason, I think, that they must, because you don't see
• 1:23:22
  crap all over the streets and the sidewalks.
• 1:23:26
  And I've seen, and I've done it myself, but I have seen other people pick up
• 1:23:34
  trash that wasn't theirs and drop it in a receptacle.
• 1:23:40
  You know, pick it up and drop it somewhere.
• 1:23:44
  The place is generally clean.
• 1:23:50
  There's plenty of old places that are falling apart.
• 1:23:54
  You know, it's an aging city.
• 1:23:58
  The city is freaking old.
• 1:24:00
  And there are parts of the city, every city's going to have a regeneration
• 1:24:07
  whatever number of years, whatever period of time.
• 1:24:10
  And I believe that Russia happens to be in one or has just had one, especially
• 1:24:19
  with the metro system.
• 1:24:22
  The metro system is fantastic.
• 1:24:26
  I want to point out that I am a patriot for America.
• 1:24:31
  I love my country as well.
• 1:24:33
  And my goals are to make sure that
• 1:24:42
  people understand that Russia is
• 1:24:52
  not the enemy of America.
• 1:24:57
  And I believe that we have, and they're not the enemy of Europe either.
• 1:25:01
  I believe that we have created that enemy, that the people on the
• 1:25:10
  basic level are not your enemy.
• 1:25:16
  America, they are not your enemy.
• 1:25:20
  Europe, they are not your enemy.
• 1:25:23
  Canada or anywhere else that is involved in
• 1:25:33
  any of the war in Ukraine.
• 1:25:38
  And five minutes, please.
• 1:25:45
  And they have been given a bad rap.
• 1:25:53
  Let's call it that.
• 1:25:54
  They need, we all need to take a step back from the information that has been
• 1:26:03
  provided us.
• 1:26:04
  I hope that my discussions on these topics with you are helpful in that regard.
• 1:26:11
  I wanted to point out that there are plenty of other sources, not just me, but
• 1:26:19
  that if you get the chance, Russia is a very large and very beautiful country
• 1:26:27
  with a lot to offer.
• 1:26:29
  And the systems and people are very good.
• 1:26:35
  And they treat you well.
• 1:26:37
  They will take care of you.
• 1:26:40
  I haven't even begun to get into the sanatoriums far enough yet, although I
• 1:26:46
  have talked about them in previous episodes, previous podcasts, and perhaps you
• 1:26:52
  can go back and listen to some of those when you get to them.
• 1:26:57
  And it is certainly worthy of the effort.
• 1:27:00
  Now, I pointed out to you before that Belarus was country number 57 for me to
• 1:27:07
  visit.
• 1:27:09
  I could be wrong.
• 1:27:10
  It may have only been 56.
• 1:27:12
  I don't remember the true numbers, but I'll have to go back and revisit that.
• 1:27:17
  Maybe it's 56, and I don't remember.
• 1:27:21
  But at any rate, having a different perspective is very important to have a
• 1:27:29
  look at some of these.
• 1:27:31
  And these countries are worthy of a strong consideration for a visit,
• 1:27:40
  especially because you get a lot of money.
• 1:27:44
  Money is worth a lot of money value to your vacation, to your trip, and it is
• 1:27:54
  well worth the effort for you to come along.
• 1:27:59
  So my name is Samuel Trapp.
• 1:28:02
  You are listening to International Flavor on DAM Radio.
• 1:28:07
  I am live every night, Sunday through Thursday from 9 p.m. to 10.30 p.m.
• 1:28:15
  Chicago time.
• 1:28:18
  You can listen to that live at damradio.com forward slash live.
• 1:28:24
  I want to put a plug in for our other shows on DAM Radio, many of which are
• 1:28:33
  also quite politically challenged as well.
• 1:28:41
  And those you can get at damradio.com forward slash schedule.
• 1:28:49
  You can listen to this podcast and all the other DAM Radio podcasts at
• 1:28:59
  damradio.com forward slash podcast, and you will get the latest episodes, plus
• 1:29:06
  you can search them all.
• 1:29:08
  For me, I have a Russian speaking channel on YouTube, which is YouTube at
• 1:29:18
  Samuel Trapp is my channel.
• 1:29:22
  And you can go there and listen to the Russian versions of a lot of the same
• 1:29:28
  things that I talk about on International Flavor.
• 1:29:32
  And you can go to internationalflavor.com and listen where you're listening
• 1:29:39
  live now, probably.
• 1:29:43
  Or you can get all my prior podcasts at internationalflavor.com.
• 1:29:52
  And I very much look forward to having you come again in the future.
• 1:29:58
  Have a good night.