Tennis in Ahmedabad: Traveling as a Single Woman in India

Dear Family and Friends,

I think that even I have finally gone too far. I am sitting in the
Indian-Chinese restaurant of the local club to which my tennis pro
belongs. This is a family restaurant with tables of 8 and 12 people and
young children running on the tile floor. As I walked in and headed for
a booth, all of the 12 people at the long table turned to stare at me,
as if to ask just what a single white woman might be doing in this
restaurant. It was also my question.

Last summer, when I visited Lake Manitou in Ontario, I met a group of
very good tennis pros, all of whom came from the city of Ahmedabad in
northern India. They told me of their tennis facilities and suggested I
come to visit. In all their years at Manitou, many guests had
apparently said that they would come to visit, but none had—except for
me.

Ahmedabad is the fourth largest city in India, and the second most
properous in western India. It is an industrial city known for its
textiles—and I am finding, a level of pollution that exceeds that of
Delhi. Getting off the plane, none of the officials could believe that
I wanted to disembark here. They repeatedly asked me if I was going to
Bombay. “No, Ahmedabad” was my response.

My “world class” club has no bath but a shower that fails to drain
completely and thus attracts mosquitoes. When I arrived there were no
towels but after pointing out their absence to the reception, a man
with white towels on his left arm arrived. I was allocated one skimpy
large towel for the shower and another tiny towel for my hands. Lacking
a shower mat, I decided to reassign the hand towel to the role of a
mat. I can hear the conversation of the club staff and their television
through the walls as well as sounds of construction. Ahmedabad is in
the midst of a construction boom and from the pool, I can hear four
different construction programs underway.

The table of 12 has stopped staring at me but now I find out that the
state where Ahmedabad is located is a dry state and I can’t order a
beer. The local staff are doing their best to communicate with me but I
have not yet learned how to disentangle the Indian accent in
English—and I may be resigned to my meal of spinach and bean curds,
Indian Nan bread and Aquafina water. It would be nice to have something
more but I don’t know if this is the Palak Paneer that I ordered or if
it was just a complementary appetizer.

Now, more of the same has just arrived. I thought that I was just
saying yes to more Nan. This is rather like the early stages of
learning a new language. You never quite know what you ordered until it
arrives, and then you feel obliged to eat even if it wasn’t quite what
you wanted. There is only so much spinach I can eat without turning
green.

I am not sure quite what to do. TP, the tennis pro, implied that
he had used all his connections to get me a room at the club. He
explained that it is wedding season and so all the hotels are booked.
Also the Lion’s Club is having a conference in Ahmedabad as are some
5,000 physicians. I am supposed to stay in this club for two days and
then move to another “next door” for the balance of the week. I thought
it might be worthwhile to see if the other club also was undergoing
renovation.

I wandered up on the highway, past the camel hauling cargo, past the
trucks and the buses and the bicycles and the motorized rickshaws. The
first building was a restaurant catering to large parties and the next
still wasn’t a club. I had walked for almost 15 minutes and figured
that I had gone in the wrong direction. It turned out that “next door”
was two kilometers away or over a mile. I gave up but decided to see if
my club had internet facilities so that I could check out the option.

The library with its silenced cell phones had two computers but
terminals were not connected to the internet, or so explained the nice
man in the library, who went on to tell me that one of his sons worked
for Verizon and another was working on IT and living in Redwood City. A
lady listening to the conversation then offered me a ride to a cyber
café. She was walking with an older woman who seemed to be her mother.
She seemed so nice that I accepted the offer. We drove through the mass
of traffic, participating in the use of the horn as a means of friendly
communication. The traffic here seems to have several cadences.
Beep-beep. “Here I am,” says one horn. Another beeps in and out to say
that he is also there. A third just screams at a level pitch.

We finally found the internet café and I spent an hour looking for
alternative hotel accommodation in Ahmedabad. Nothing was available,
but even the Meridien was priced at about the same rate as the
club--$42 a night. Then I found a cellular provider whose prepaid SIM
cards would work both in Ahmedabad and Delhi and it was time to get
back to the club.

Several people had suggested that I use the “auto-rickshaws.” I found
one that sitting waiting for a fare and showed him the name of the
club, Rajpath Club. When I asked him if he knew where it was, he said
yes and then stopped to ask the market-sellers on the corner where the
club might be found. Finally we arrived, after driving through bumpy
streets with no springs or seatbelts or even doors. All I had was a bar
to hang on to, as the rickshaw forced his way into the oncoming traffic
and crossed three lanes. When we arrived, the driver announced the
price was 15 rupees, about 25 cents. He had duly checked his meter,
which looked more like a round scale for measuring weight than a taxi
meter for measuring distance.

Now it’s after midnight and I am lying on my bed, listening to the
horns and the loud conversations of the club staff as they walk past my
room. It’s going to be a long night and not one that will give me the
strength I need for the hours of tennis I want to play tomorrow.


December 20, 2004

After such a disastrous start, my trip to Ahmedabad has improved. After
being awakened at 4:30 am by the constant horns, I decided I had to
find alternative accommodation—or head to Delhi right away and camp out
in Dede’s apartment with its cook and houseman. However just calling
Delhi was likely to prove difficult. The staff at the front desk of the
club understood not a word of my requests. It would surely be difficult
to figure out the necessary dialing instructions. What was needed was
modern technology—a cell phone number.

I have been wandering through central Europe, the Caucasus and the
Middle East with my triband Nokia that I bought in Dubai last July.
TP was confused on the technology, but fortunately had provided a
car and driver for me during my stay. Laxman’s English was not much
better than that of the front office staff but I told him that I wanted
a prepaid SIM card and he was off and running. We tried two offices.
The first was Hutch (which is presumably a short form of Hutchinson,
the Hong Kong telecommunications company). I became nervous when I
found I could understand of the words emanating from the nice
receptionist. Her hand signals suggested that I should sit and wait.
But the room was full of people waiting and after five minutes, I
decided to try another carrier.

“Idea Cellular?” I asked Laxman, hoping he might know where the office
is located. At the cyber café from the previous evening, I had asked
the receptionist to write down the address for the other cellular
carrier. I handed the little piece of paper to Laxman but again
wondered about my decision-making. We drove through street after street
of people living in makeshift tents and water-buffalo roaming loose
rummaging through the street trash. Such slums were hardly the place
one expects to find a modern office building. And yet, we finally found
an Idea Cellular office with no one waiting and a receptionist that I
could understand. Twenty minutes later I was equipped with cellular
service that would allow me to call TP and my driver when he was
sleeping in the shade—and Delhi.

With success under my belt, I decided to see if I liked the second club
that I was supposed to move into the next day—if I could survive
another night in my dungeon. The second club, Konavrati, was an
improvement, still not a five-star hotel but it was a little further
from the highway and I found a front office clerk with whom I could
communicate. I asked if I could see the rooms and he showed me three
that were available that night. I chose the one with wood floors and
felt that I had climbed the affluence ladder since the new room had two
skinny white towels instead of just one.

My few days have since improved dramatically. That evening, I went out
for tea with TP and his wife and kids. When I returned, the Lions’
Club celebration that had taken so many rooms in the Club was hitting
its final notes. As I stood by the edge, a handsome 40-something man
invited in, past the security guards. I watched as women in saris and
men in suits danced in big groups and finally one of the men dragged me
into the dancing area and handed me two plastic sticks. To Hindi music,
he showed me a three-part dance where you hit your own sticks once and
then the other person’s sticks from one side and then the other. It was
an easy rhythm to follow and when the announcer asked for all the women
to come on to the stage, my dancing companions pushed me up the stairs.
The beautiful women in the saris were initially none too happy to have
among them a western woman in jeans and an African shirt that says “my
boy” on the back. However after a while, a couple of the women started
showing me some the dance moves and I found myself part of a big
circle, dancing towards the center and then out again. When it came
time for applause, I was at the far end and did a curtsey, which seemed
to be an appropriate ending.

When I came off the stage, I found the good-looking fellow and said to
him, “You are responsible for this,” with a smile. The other men with
whom I was dancing gave me their business cards and asked for my mobile
number, which I refused to divulge. The good-looking fellow tried the
hardest, though. It turned out that he was jewelry merchant and he
showed me his booth of beautiful gold and diamond necklaces. His six
friends stood grinning waiting to see what would happen. I wished them
a good night. My friend gave me his business card and a gift of a small
red jewelry pouch.

Another evening TP invited me to dinner with his sister and family
and they told me how various family members had 20 houses in a gated
community that the family members owned. “What happens if someone gets
divorced?” I asked. The property, of course, stayed with the man since
the definition of their family was through the male line.

In the meantime, TP's coaching of three hours a day has done
wonders for my tennis—and I found a huge supermarket where I could buy
accepted handsome and a full role of toilet paper. The Club is not
particularly quiet, but with earplugs I can sleep through the night and
the reception staff and I can share meaningful conversations on such
important issues as to whether the cleaning staff will still clean my
room that day. Night after night I watch as the Club hosts receptions
of hundreds of people. As TP's sister explained over dinner,
Ahmedabad society likes to enjoy all the celebrations—Christmas, the
new season and their Lord Krishna. They also don’t seem very stressed,
as if life is fairly easy for them. It is a very different life from
that of the ball kids who can’t afford shoes to protect their feet, or
the women construction workers in saris who carry heavy loads of cement
on their heads, or the gypsies who live by the highway in their
makeshift homes of old cloth and wood, or the passengers falling out of
crowded mechanized-rickshaws.

December 23, 2004

My final night in Ahmedabad is in a five-star hotel--the type that I
thought did not exist in the city—and lo and behold the computers in
the business center are using Windows XP.

Merry Christmas to all.

Sue

M6 and Macedonia after UN Sanctions: A Few Days in Skopje

Dear Friends and Family,

Greetings from Skopje. I am sitting in the bar of the Holiday Inn eating once more at 11pm, trying to relax after days and days of late nights and early mornings (at least early for me.)

It has taken me more than a week here to figure out how I felt about Skopje. It has been very unreal. Last week the hotel was full of Lieutenant-Colonels from the armies of the NATO of 2004—from Poland, Germany, Uzbekistan and many places in between. This week I see placards for a crisis planning meeting on WMD, which presumably refers weapons of mass destruction.

Macedonia presents itself as central European. The staff behind the front desk, the taxi drivers, the government ministers, they all look like central Europeans. Yet the city feels empty, not empty of people but empty of soul. Even the museums look like 1970s high schools built on three floors designed by a low-budget architect and built by a low-bidder construction company. The most interesting part of the city has Turkish influence. The most beautiful church is a mosque, down the street from the Turkish Embassy, where one of the men let me go in and watch the prayers. The interesting part of the old city is the Albanian section, which is also the place where there are few stores open. Yet the Ottoman Empire has not extended as far as Macedonia for the last four hundred years.

In the bars and the cafes, I listen to the conversations of foreigners—Americans, Swedish, Germans. Those not with the military seem to be working for NGOs. Some have escaped from Kosovo for a week-end of shopping, although to me the shops seem to be over-priced.

I am here with a large group of about 18 staff-members. My role is to identify ways in which we could assist the government in dealing with corporate governance issues. Unfortunately my key government counterpart, the head of the securities commission, has not yet found time to meet with me. She is very busy. Her job is part-time. She is also professor at the university. The seven commissioners represent 41 percent of the entire staff of the commission and they have trouble identifying priorities.

But then, they don't have too much to do. There is a stock exchange but it is not very active. If you offer to buy shares and you have not been pre-approved by company management, no one will sell you their shares. It's not part of the law. It is just part of the local business culture. Owning shares in a company is rather like becoming a member of a club. The existing members have to decide that you are ok before they will let you in. So much for liquid capital markets.

My local counterparts tell me that about 80 percent of the Macedonian economy is controlled by six men, known collectively as “M6.” There are some women in the next category, that I call the M20 but none among the key M6.

I met one of the M6 last week. His company is the second largest in the country. Yet no one could give me the street address.

The secretary to the bank manager who set up the meeting didn’t have the address. Our local office didn’t have it. The front desk of the Holiday Inn said that they didn’t have it and when I insisted they find it, they gave me the address of the company’s customs office on the outskirts of town. The taxi driver wasn’t certain where it was. Finally I insisted that the taxi driver help me.

He told me that I should walk on the street and ask for the “Lotteria,” the lottery, which is one of the company’s subsidiaries. I tried this but still had no success. Finally I gave up asking for the company name and started asking for the name of the big guy. (The names of all MG are well-known.) Everyone I asked knew where to find Mr. Lottery, even the construction workers fixing the gutters on the street.

I told Mr. Lottery this story. “Everyone thinks I own Macedonia,” he said and then complained that it wasn’t true, or maybe just partially. I then asked Mr. Lottery my standard question of who owned and controlled his company. He gave me an approximate answer, which I assumed covered only some of his businesses. I asked if the Macedonian business community would likely be willing to publicly provide the names of the "real owners" of their companies. "Yes, but not right away," was the answer from Mr. Lottery.

I sat in the meeting, wondering why so many local people were reluctant to tell me where to find the company. It was like asking where to find the Trump Tower and finding no New Yorker able to give you the address.

Macedonia has suffered from two blockades—the UN sanctions that closed the borders with Bosnia and Serbia during the Balkan War and the blockade from Greece. The UN sanctions were not Macedonia’s fault. The blockade with Greece was a different story. Greece complained that one its provinces is also called Macedonia and foreigners would be confused by the two Macedonia's. Officially Skopje is the capital of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (described as FYR of Macedonia and pronounced as "FROM", rhyming with prom) and the Greek province kept its name. Perhaps no one explained that Moldova and Romania have the same problem and it doesn’t seem to be an issue.

However the impact on Macedonia was disastrous. Just after becoming a separate country, Macedonia found all of its border officially blocked. The businesses that survived were often “black”, criminal activities involved in smuggling of tobacco and oil derivatives.

The blockades ended by 1998 but by then, the Communist left-over party had been turned out and the new party wanted its share of the spoils. The major corporate governance abuses that I have discovered occurred between 1998-2002 when politicians established their personal fortunes for life. The former Communist party was reelected in 2002 and is still trying to find a workable economic development strategy. They know they have to include the 24 percent of the population classified as Albanian, but they have no strategies to achieve ethnic integration. Walking on the street, what I feel is the violence of a youth that has been abused.

My recommendations on corporate governance are likely to receive a polite but cool reception: require that owners of companies disclose their ownership positions, apply international standards to preparation of financial reports, make boards of directors effective supervisors of company management and provide some teeth for the securities regulator. It would be hard to believe that M6 wouldn’t oppose such recommendations and undermine their implementation, but I am convinced that such ideas that will one day find their way into Macedonia's business culture.

It’s now midnight and I am surrounded by locals—a table of eight men, several of which could be bodyguards of the old school (heavy-set and smoking) and two couples ignoring the bartender who seems determined to close on time.

Am off next to Romania, wondering if I will come back to Skopje and if it will be a very different place the next time.

Sue

Tennis in Prague in the Spring

Prague, May 2004

Dear Friends and Family:

Am staying in a hotel with tourists, lovers in their 60s and families with pre-teenage children in tow. Our group had trouble finding a business hotel with three available rooms for this last week in May, the only time when all three of us could come to Prague. Tonight, though, I am suffering from the flu and I begged off our formal dinner. I spent a few hours on email, took a warm bath and now am enjoying lobster bisque in the hotel’s bar with a glass of Czech cabernet sauvignon.

I am very happy in this bar. The walls are covered with black and white photographs of Prague in the 1930s and one can imagine the beauty and elegance of Prague in the pre-war years. The photographer seems to have preferred a particular street corner where pedestrians were more concerned with avoiding the deep puddles of water than in avoiding the lens of the camera.

It’s hard not to fall in love with Prague. It’s an old city, preserved by accidents of history where the old streets are still very narrow and maddeningly complicated. They were streets created by people who walked on rural paths until one day houses started to be built, and then rebuilt and then rebuilt.

However the legacy of the Soviet period is still evident in Prague. Many of the cities of central Europe benefited from being under Soviet influence. Some new buildings were built over the years but the old sections of the cities were protected from modern development. However the Soviet mentality was not always such a blessing.

Earlier this week when my room still had not been made up at 5pm, I called the hotel’s front desk. “I think that the maid has forgotten me,” I joked. “Didn’t you put up a paper?” the receptionist asked, initially suggesting that it was my fault that the room hadn’t been cleaned. Her remark was a hint of the former Soviet approach to customer service: the client is always at fault. It’s hard to believe such traces continue, even as the former Soviet hotels increased their prices from$1.25 a night (for bare-bones rooms in 1990) to $125 a night for the same rooms in the same hotels a year later to now $300 a night for very new hotels with very nice rooms. “Your room will be made up immediately,” the receptionist then responded, catching herself and following the contemporary mantra that the customer is always right.

However some of Prague's residents would prefer still more modernization. Last week-end after several desultory efforts, the hotel's front desk found a tennis coach with whom I could hit balls. Tomas is a bored (and single) civil engineer, who told me that he would rather spend his life teaching tennis than working as an engineer. He described Prague as a museum--an old town with no economic life. “Nothing is working in the Czech Republic,” he complained when I remarked that the temperatures at the end of May were still just above freezing. “Nothing is working here. Why should the weather be any better?”

At 40, Tomas is just a little too old to have benefited by the accession of the Czech Republic to the European Union this Spring. The economic reforms to permit accession to Europe brought Czech-land(as we used to call the Czech Republic) into conformity with all the rules and regulations of western Europe—but they haven't yet created a business environment with good jobs for this smart, single, energetic, and handsome 40-year-old from Prague who is still looking for love (and a good job) in all the wrong places.

Sue

The Hazards of Being a Woman in Moldova

From May 2004

Dear Friends and Family:

As I lie on my bed in the luxurious Renaissance Hotel in Prague, my memories of Chisinau are beginning to fade. Before losing them entirely, let me write to you about my travels.

In many ways, Moldova is a forgotten country. It lies on an inland strip between Romanian and Ukraine—abandoned by Romania but considered an agricultural backwater by Ukraine and the Russian orbit. Two million people, of which more than half live in abject poverty, constitute this quiet nation.

It feels as if Chisinau is in a time-warp, stuck in a time (as Russia was in 1995-96) when legitimate businesses and criminal syndicates were largely interchangeable. As one prominent expert explained last week, money-laundering is generally thought of criminal proceeds being invested in legitimate businesses. In Moldova, those who make money legitimately invest it in the underground economy—to take cash out of the country or just avoid burdensome taxation, which in some cases can exceed 150 percent of a company’s annual profit. But today’s Moldova, it’s impossible to separate the legitimate from the illegitimate.

I find highly work in corrupt countries to be exhausting for two reasons: (1) it’s difficult to obtain reliable information from official sources and (2) living conditions even in the best of local hotels are uncomfortable.

Regarding the quality of information, refusing to talk about the serious problems of the country seems to be a form of patriotism in Moldova. As an outsider, one needs to find out a certain base amount of information in order to show that one understands what’s going on. Only at that point can one be considered as an insider, worthy of hearing the true story. But that first piece of insight can be difficult to obtain—and it is only then that one can start working in earnest.

Nine banks have collapsed in Moldova, of which at least two have involved criminal charges of theft and fraud. Yet there are no stories in the international press. My interpreter was the only one who put the pieces together for me—and this only after two weeks of working together day after day.

Over coffee one morning, I asked her what her father’s profession had been. She confessed that she is the daughter of a famous Moldovan dissident, who went to jail and suffered physical abuses for his political views. Anna finally told me that her father had been good friends with Alan Ginsberg and other famous intellectuals of that period. But she also told me how upset her mother had become, having to raise her children without an accessible husband. He was in his element in jail, surrounded by other intellectuals who debated the important issues in the evenings. By contrast, her mother was shunned by their former friends, who would cross the street to avoid saying hello. Even with such a history, it took Anna days and days to tell me the true story of fraudulent activities in the banks.

In my analysis, I found that one-third of the Moldovan banking sector is controlled by business groups, mainly in off-shore zones for which virtually no information is publicly available. The controlled shareholder of at least one major bank has been subject to FBI investigations and, according to the press, is thought to have ties with Russian criminal groups. He was the same person who had owned, or perhaps continued to own, my hotel.

I definitely did not like my hotel. I arrived on a Wednesday almost three weeks ago and was upset to find that my room was almost directly above the kitchen and the bathroom had a small shower but no bathtub. I wandered around the hotel looking to see if there were any rooms that might be more pleasant for my stay. I started on the top floor but was uncomfortable having the maids watch my activities very carefully. (It turned out that the top floor was where the hotel’s owners conducted their business, or at least part of it.) I finally changed my room to get away from the hotel’s kitchen but couldn’t get a bathtub. And then I found that I wouldn’t have wanted to take a bath anyway. The water was both very hard and very brown and after two days had started to turn my chemically-treated hair into a shade of orange. By the end of the second week, the water situation got still worse: for hours we had no water at all. By then, I had stocked up on mineral water and was boiling mineral water for tea and using crystal water from the Carpathian mountains of Ukraine to wash my hair.

Working out at the hotel turned out to be difficult as well. The hotel’s publicity has beautiful photos of its facilities, complete with on-site trainer. This was a lie. The gym certainly had no trainer, just an elderly lady of the type that would used to survey each floor in a Soviet hotel. The gym’s machines, reputed to be of the highest quality, looked like the low-budget machines one might buy on the Home Shopping Channel. Walking on the treadmill caused it to sway from one side to another.

But then, the gym was not really intended for use by hotel guests. The second day after I arrived, I asked the front desk for directions to the gym. “It is occupated,” said the snippy woman behind the desk. It tuned out the gym had not only some workout equipment but also two easy-chairs (for the bodyguards) and a full formal dining-room (for the hosts and guests). The gym was used for private parties by those who insist on entertaining in a window-less dining-room located between the weight-machines and the swimming pool and sauna. In the Soviet era, the gyms were a center where criminal groups congregated—and according to the press, plan their activities. However in 2004, it’s hard to believe that a fitness center could be anything more than a place to work out.

Just as the hotel lied in their advertising, so the Government was less than accurate about its statistics. The official numbers are that the stock market capitalization is 18 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) but the stock exchange could not substantiate the number, which is more likely to be less than one percent of GDP—negligible was my description in my reports. Such deception makes me angry and forces me to check and recheck every piece of information that we receive.

To make life still worse, the two Sunday mornings that I was in Chisinau were full of very noisy celebrations. The first Sunday was Victory Day when the Soviets defeated the Nazis in 1945. Rockets were blasting before 8 am that morning. I wasn’t certain about the second Sunday, but by 9:00 am the park across from the hotel was full of marching bands with loud drums that made it difficult even to hear the T.V.

Observing daily life in Moldova also made me angry. In the evenings, as I waited for my dinner to be delivered, I watched night after night as the thugs and the prostitutes conducted their business in the hotel and the restaurants nearby. Moldova is the primary exporter of prostitutes into Russia and the activity is so pervasive that some seems seem as young as 15 or just 14. Prostitution is one of the primary sources of income for the local crime groups. The international press indicates that in Moldova, the market price to buy a woman (as a slave) is just $49. Nowhere else in eastern Europe is the value of a woman set so low.

My evening analyses gave me a chance to refine my analysis of how to identify a prostitute. If she is wearing a shirt, then the skirt’s side-slit (or even the entire skirt) must come to the panty-line. Jeans not only should be skin-tight, they should separate the two checks of the butt. Three-inch skinny heels are also a minimum requirement but behavior is probably the best indicator. Prostitutes in this part of the world seem to come in pairs. In bars, they sit at tables across from each other with a single drink or coffee in front of them for hours on end. But they don’t generally talk. They just sit at their table, watching their cell phones. Moldova has so many prostitutes that it’s possible to separate the amateurs from the pros. The amateurs talk among themselves and may be in groups of three or four. The amateurs will also reject an approaching male if he tries to touch one of them too early in the process. It is rumored that the current fiancée of one of America’s tycoons comes from Moldova—a beauty-queen by all accounts—but I wonder how one can come from such an environment and not be desperate for wealth.

I think that for women in poor countries, beauty is needed for economic survival and good looks are a commodity in which women invest money and time. Such emphasis on beauty turns out to be helpful for me. Days of internal anger and insufficient show their effects on my nearly 52-year-old face. As is my custom, I selected the woman at the front desk with the best skin and asked for her recommendation of a facialist. The best facialist in all Moldova was working in the hotel, I was informed.

When I arrived to visit the facialist (also called Anna), I told her that I was from Washington. She mentioned that one of her former students was in Washington and that I should visit her former student, Svetlana. After a few minutes, while Anna was doing the massage, I asked her for Anna’s last name. I couldn’t believe that Anna was referring to my facialist for the last ten years. Anna told me that she was Russian, from Moscow, and had never mentioned Moldova or other Soviet republics in all the years that we had discussed the former Soviet Union. At some point in her life, Svetlana was in Chisinau and had learned her trade from Anna, this 62-year-old lady working in a windowless basement in a hotel thought to be owned by mafia. Anna was very good. She told me her hand-made creams had won international awards and they proved to be better than the creams that I buy for $80 a bottle.

In Chisinau, I also found also the best tennis coach I have had in over five years. Viktor spoke only Russian, of which I know only a few words, but his hours of hitting with me gave new intensity to my tennis strokes. For $10 an hour, Viktor ran all over the court to give me perfect shots from which I could practice different strokes and strategies.

I don’t know if I will go back to Moldova again. I worked out some suggestions to deal with the worst of the corporate governance abuses—such as require that joint stock companies obtain an annual independent fraud and make the board of directors legally responsible if they fail to prevent fraud—but such innocuous recommendations threaten some powerful business interests that have the parliament well under their control.

Just in case, I visited all the other hotels in Chisinau to see if I could find one that was better managed than my hotel and I gave Anna and Anna and Viktor a big hug to say that I hoped I would return. If my ideas are accepted, they could make a difference in moving towards legitimate businesses. But that is a big “if”.

Sue

Restful Days in Djerba: Club Med Tunisia-Style

Djerba, March 2004

Dear Friends and Family:

It’s now almost ten days since I arrived at the Club Med in Djerba in Tunisia and I find myself wanting to stay longer. Days of little more than tennis and sun and eating and a lot of sleep have left me relaxed in a way that I haven’t felt in some years.

Some of my friends ask me why I choose to go to Club Med for solo vacations. It’s because such vacations are easy and provide virtually no reminders of the super-five star hotels that are my home while traveling on business. In Club Med, personal service is virtually non-existent. The towels are changed daily but the sheets are not. There is no welcoming fruit basket or bottle of wine. Indeed there is no fluffy white bathrobe or even a plastic shower cap in the bathroom or a notepad and pen by the telephone. But I like very much the simple low-maintenance architecture of Club Meds and the beauty of the beach and the gardens satisfies me. For me, it’s hard to beat a place that offers a cheap vacation of endless days, a quiet room, easy access to sports facilities and equipment, and no concerns about being harassed by men looking for women available for hire by the hour. Some places, such as this, I feel that I could have stayed a month.

I have the impression that many people come here time and again. Everyone I have met has visited Djerba at least three times in the past, and in one case, 25 times. For the most part, the guests are French couples in their 50s and 60s and 70s but some of the 30 somethings have brought their babies and toddlers. Many participate in the Club Med dances and games and routines. Most are friendly and courteous though critical of America and Americans.

I am reluctant to admit that I haven’t seen very much of Tunisia though, preferring late breakfasts over trips to neighboring cities. However one afternoon, I decided to adventure out. I rented a mountain bike and visited some of the coastal area of the island. I had done the same thing when I was last in Djerba, some eight years ago.

What I found was substantially more development, hotels and resorts specializing in the Senior Tour of German and sometimes French retirees than I had seen some years ago. However it’s not the same extensive development as is present around the Club Med in Agadir in Morocco. On the Tunisian coastal route, about half the cars seemed to be yellow taxis looking for customers. Not many private cars came by, and not one BMW or Audi or other expensive car. It is also not as conservative. In my afternoon on the Djerba roads, I saw not a single woman in a burqa. By contrast in Agadir in a similarly touristy area, at least one-third of the women was wearing one form or another of burqa.

Last evening was little different though. In the main restaurant was a large group of Tunisians, presumably new Tunisians of recently generated wealth. About 11:00 pm, as I was trying to write this note, I took a seat in the empty theater and soon found that a late night show had been planned. I stayed for the show but watched the Tunisians in their conservative dress that covers the neck and head and the arms to the wrists and the legs to the ankles. The show was clearly off-color and I understood very few of what were obviously very crude jokes. I turned to look at the reaction of a group of three Tunisian women in their fine silks. They had understood more than I. They looked displeased and I heard one say to the others in French that they should stay for one more skit and see if the quality improved. She smiled at me as she realized that I had overheard her comment. But the quality did not improve and they left a few minutes later. However the interesting part was that these modern Tunisian women would sit in a French-style café-theatre and watch the show. I didn’t see the same thing in Morocco.

As I was playing tennis this morning with one of the tennis pros, the village chief (chef de village) asked me if I didn’t want to stay. He said jokingly that he needed another tennis G.O. (as the staff are called). I have played so much tennis that I am referred to as “Champion” as often as I am called "Sue". It will be a tempting thought in May as I sit in my hotel room in Moldova, writing yet one more report for the home office.

Sue

Menacing Glances in Casablanca, Morocco

Bratislava, February 2004

Dear Friends and Family:

I am writing to you from Slovakia but wanted to tell you of my short trip to Casablanca before my thoughts turn to Europe.

I had decided to spend an afternoon and a night in Casablanca (or Casa, as it called by the locals) on my way back to Washington from Agadir in Morocco. Three flights and two connections (one in Casablanca and one in Frankfurt) among three continents seemed to be too much to hope for in a single day. I thought it would be better to stop at one of the connection points and see the town. After all, I had always wanted to see the city made exotic by Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart—and for which a song has stayed in my head for years, “You must remember this…”

Casablanca literally means white house, although it is not clear just which white house was referenced. Certainly the city is not white but varying shades of gray—such a difference from the magnificent blues and whites of the beach at Agadir.

I quickly became aware that that was not the South Coast tourist city as was Agadir. My taxi from the Casablanca airport was a yellow 20-year old Mercedes-Benz with no seat belts and little underpinning but with a classic Mercedes hood ornament. The driver looked as if he were in his 60s. He wore a long flowing robe and suffered from a less than complete set of teeth—and perhaps not very good hearing. My calls to drive slower than 160 kph in a 100 kph zone were largely unheeded. It was not clear if he spoke neither French nor English or just wanted to drive as he wished, and probably had always done.

Upon arrival at the Hyatt Regency, my first instinct was to see if my dress was appropriate. I had worn jeans and a black tee-shirt for the one-hour flight from Agadir. It seemed not to have been the right thing. When I arrived at Casa airport, I was stared down by a woman in full burqa uniform. Her eyes followed me—and only me—as I walked through the airport terminal. Morocco’s tourism posters present the country as a modern and tolerant, though Muslim, nation. What I found in Casa was different: there were some very modern elements but also some very conservative strands. The woman with menacing eyes seemed to be part of the latter.

So my first step was to review my clothing. From my hotel window, I did an analysis of women walking on the street and sidewalk. Even the most modern women in tight jeans seemed to have loosely-fitting long-sleeved shirts and so I went looking through my suitcase for something suitable. I pulled out a loose-fitting long-sleeved beach sweater. I took a quick lunch in the hotel bar and then it was time to explore.

“Don’t go too deep into the Medina,” warned the very polite front desk staff. “If you do, you’ll get lost.” I thought perhaps the clerk had been told that I am directionally challenged. But there was no one to have given him such a warning about me. It must be their advice for all western tourists.

I wasn’t quite certain what a medina was, but the hotel’s map indicated the Ancienne Medina was virtually next door and I thought it would be interesting. In fact the Medina was just a flea market for junky new stuff, and shirts and slacks hanging from hooks like tree branches in a rain-forest. I kept going deeper and deeper inside, trying to memorize landmarks—a right turn at the stall with plastic dishes, left at the long robes. I received a constant entreaty. “Que cherchez-vous, madame? What are you looking for, ma’am?” “Rien du tout. Je me promene,” was my response, “Nothing at all. I am just taking a walk.” “Venez voir mon magazin,” was the response from inside the stall. But I didn’t want to see anyone’s store or buy anything. Here I was walking through a market that had been in the same place for several centuries, probably selling the same sort of thing. Then I heard some noisy yelling and screaming. A group of about 20 women was crowded around in an elliptical circle. They seemed to be bidding to buy a pair of cotton men’s pajamas. Finally I didn’t matter. For them, I was irrelevant, so much so that I had to hold myself in as I slid past a big woman leaning forward in a burqa. I certainly didn’t want to touch her butt as I slid past but it was nice to be ignored for a while.

I traced my way back through the forest of clothes and watched as a motorcyclist drove through, hardly stopping. It was then that I became aware that I had seen only one police officer. In Agadir—and other parts of Casa—the police were present almost everywhere. But not in the Medina. There the street lights have not been fixed nor the streets repaired. It seemed that this old, once beautiful, area received few public services.

I walked for another hour down by the container port and past the waterfront where prime land stood vacant. The empty real estate looked like it had once been a trash dump. In most cities, the land at the waterfront is some of the most valuable. Not in Casa. Small pieces of plastic bags and odd pieces of glass bottles still remained, but it seemed someone had only recently sent in tractors to clean up the area.

Finally I came to the famous mosque, pronounced as Mos-Kay in French. The mosque was closed. It was after 4:00 pm and I was not Muslim, as I was informed by the guards, when they finally stopped their conversation to answer my inquiry. I also felt badly that I had no scarf to cover my head in a religious Muslim temple. So I walked through the outer courtyard where the afternoon light and a series of steps and arches combined to form a checkerboard of light on the ground. I found women in dark black burqas with children (including girls) in western jeans and overalls. From a distance the mosque looked as if it were floating in the sea. I took photos of the floating mosque and the fishermen as they tried their luck at catching fish, and other men tried their luck at talking to me. “I am a very serious person,” proclaimed (in English) one handsome fellow in his 20s when I refused to talk to him. I finally replied in English, “Then you will stop bothering me.” Even still he followed me for a while. I would guess that it was so unusual to see a woman walking alone in western dress, that that in itself must constitute an invitation.

Later that afternoon I found myself in an artisan’s cooperative craft shop of bowls and other ceramics. I bought some hand-painted containers for potpourri for myself and bowls and boxes for my friends at home. The clerk wore tight jeans and high heels and seemed to be in her 20s. I asked her about living in Casa and told her about the menacing looks I received at the airport. “Je n’aime pas ces dames. Elles font des mauvais choses, ” volunteered the sales-woman. She had said that she didn’t like such women and that they did bad things. I asked what kind of bad things, but the modern Moroccan in her jeans and black high heels wouldn’t say more.

After some deliberation and checking of the map—none of the streets had its name marked—I finally found my way back to the welcoming Hyatt and its sense of modernism. I figured that it would be best to pray that in the morning my airport taxi might have either seat-belts or a driver who obeyed the speed limits. One of the two occurred (there were seat-belts) and I came home safely.

Here in Bratislava, my taxi was again a Mercedes but it was a black 730i of recent vintage, with seat-belts and heavy tires that hug the slush-covered roads. And my young driver had a muscular chest, a tight tee-shirt and a full set of teeth. It’s comforting to be back in Europe but there was also an allure to Morocco.

Sue

Sun and Tolerance in Morocco: Learning to Play Golf in Agadir

Agadir, February 2004

Dear Friends and Family,

Greetings from Club Med at Agadir, Morocco. This is the third time I have tried to write to you about my travels. Writing on a laptop seems to be considered working (and therefore verboten). Each time I started to write, one of the Club Med staff (the G.O.s) has come up to me and started to talk. I tried to explain (in French) that I am writing to my family and friends. But it is to no avail. This evening, I have escaped to hide by the pool while the bar games continue inside.

I arrived at the Agadir Airport Friday night after a long series of flights (Prague to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Casablanca and finally Casablanca to Agadir). At the airport, I found a Club Med sign. However the man behind the sign didn’t look very much like the usual Club Med 20-something staff member with a big smile. He seemed to be in his 50s and have only three teeth. He showed me the counter to change some money into Moroccan dirhams and then took me to the taxi line, whereupon he asked for a tip. He was just a hustler with a toothless smile.

I wasn’t certain the taxi would survive the journey to the Club. The driver insisted on driving down the middle of the road, regardless of other traffic. However after a few misses and near collisions, we duly arrived in the center of Agadir. We drove past several dingy hotels and then finally arrived at a big door into the walled compound and other world of Club Med. As the bellman and I walked to my room, I smelled a faint scent of oil as if there were oil tankers nearby. I wasn’t expecting to like Agadir too much.

But as I went to bed, I noticed that I could hear the surf from my room. When I finally emerged the next morning, I found that I was on a semi-private terrace overlooking the beach and the ocean. For the following five mornings I spent hours lying on that terrace, taking a late breakfast and watching Said (the camel) and his owner walk back and forth.

The first afternoon I spent on the beach and wandering around the Club, but on the second day it was time to search out tennis courts. However the tennis club was outside the compound and it upset me. It was located in a newly and partially built community with no people in evidence. I have found in my travels that wealth made from suspect sources seems to be spent on buildings with high walls and shoddy construction. Such was the area near the tennis club. I finally gave up on tennis and headed for the golf course.

So these have been my days, mornings on my terrace watching the ocean and the camel and afternoons at the golf club, learning “the chipping”, “the swing” and finally “the bunker” (or sand-trap). Each day I have taken both the beginners’ and the advanced classes, trying to learn something in each. Of course one downside of learning golf at Club Med is that the self-reminders are also all in French as in, “Tournez bien les épaules.” “Turn your shoulders fully.”

Even apart from Club Med, I have quite enjoyed Morocco, although as the Club Med staff have reminded me, this is really the land of the Barbers, what we would call the Barbary Coast and what the French call the Maghreb. The local staff tell me of Morocco’s high level of tolerance, although I think that my habits are stretching the limit, as I sit by the pool writing on my computer rather joining the bar games.

I see the tolerance in many ways. Last night I decided to walk along the road following the beach. The sidewalk became a boardwalk and there I saw a little of Agadir. I found the men very handsome in their dark skin and black hair. They were all wearing a uniform of standard Western clothing of slacks and a short-sleeved shirt.

However the women’s dress was more diverse. The women seemed to fall into one of four groups. The first was wearing the traditional big loose burqa and scarf, covering head to toe. They were walking badly, not that it must be easy to walk in such an enormous robe. The burqa is so loose that in the wind, you can clearly see the form of the woman otherwise hidden from view. Virtually all who were wearing the burqa that evening had non-athletic shapes as if they had never visited a gym and played active sports as children. The second type of women was also fully covered but the robes were made of fine fabrics with interesting patterns. Their eyes were heavy with black makeup and their bodies were toned and fit. The third type wore veils with fitted slacks over their legs. The fourth type (all teen-agers) wore low-riding and tight-fitting jeans and no head-covering. In some families walking together, I saw all four types of dress. I asked one of the Moroccan Club Med G.O.s about such differences of clothing in the same family and whether it didn’t create strife within families. His responses was no. Each member of the family could choose how they wished to dress.

Such tolerance--and lots of sun--have made Morocco very welcoming for tourists. Similar to southern California, the southern Moroccan coast has the magnificent weather of the desert where it meets the ocean. Every day for the last week, there has been a gentle on-shore breeze with temperatures in the mid-70s. The people here tell me that the climate is moderate all year-round—with the summers not much warmer than the winters. Indeed my room has no air-conditioning and only a small heater. Hussein behind the front desk has been trying to sell me property along the coast. He says that the area 20 kms north in Taghazoule is even more beautiful than Agadir, more rustic and not quite as chic.

It’s been a lovely few days here. I only wish that I could have taken more time to stay and visit the area. My brother and one of his friends have driven through the Atlas Mountains to Marrakech and I long to see the sand dunes of the desert. But I leave tomorrow for an afternoon and a night in Casablanca before heading back home on Friday. Am just hoping to avoid the toothless Club Med imposter at the airport.

Sue