ransvestia

Then it was back to Tashkent for another day. Again I proved that the idea that one can't go where one wants in Russia was wrong. I took off one afternoon on my own to go to the local museum. I had in- structions about what bus to take and I did, found it and got back safely with nobody on my tail. Bus fare was four kopeks or six cents incidentally a little difference from the 40-to-60-cent fares in America.

Next day we flew to Alma Ata which means, strangely enough, "father of apples." Here we were taken on a visit to a nursery school and were met by the children handing out flowers to us and bits of chocolate candy. They had a very well put together school both from an educational and health point of view. The place was very clean and well organized.

Alma Ata has one of the biggest and best ice skating rinks in the world. It's way up in the mountains outside of town and has been used for a lot of international ice events. It is, as is everything else in Russia, a giant place. I went for a walk one evening and about 9 P.M. was walking back to the hotel past the big department store. I was stopped by two boys about 17 and 19. In broken English they asked if I had any jeans to sell. I don't wear them so I didn't have any but it would have been asking for trouble to sell them if I did. Then they wanted gum. Every kid in Russia wants gum. I wish I could get the gum concession from Breshnev, I could make a tidy pile of rubles. Anyway while we were talking, a couple of older men came up and acosted the two kids in Russian. I couldn't understand the words but the facial expressions were reasonably clear. The kids were told to cut out talking to a foreign woman and to bug off which they did. The men turned to me, bowed and said "Thank you very much" which was probably all the English they knew. What they meant was, "Excuse it please." It wasn't that talking to foreigners was forbidden but pestering them to sell various things was. So the men were merely protecting me from harassment. In Russia the citizenry is organized into neighborhood groups so that a couple of men walk around their precinct each night and break up fights, pick up drunks and control "hoodlums" young bucks out proving their manhood one way or another. They are not police nor are they vigilantes, they pick people up if necessary and take them to the local police station. They generally help the police as a sort of citizens militia. Maybe if we had a similar arrangement here we wouldn't have so much mugging, purse snatching and such.

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