Читать книгу: «My Discovery of America 1993 – 2004», страница 2

How can I forget New York City with the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, Madison Square Garden, where I watched a hockey match between the New York Rangers and the Winnipeg Jets? Broadway Theater, where I listened to the Miss Saigon musical, Times Square and Fifth Avenue, Central Park and Grand Central Station, the Russian neighborhood of Brighton Beach – my dear Little Odessa – and Coney Island?

Paraphrasing a verse by a famous Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 – 1930): “I would want to live and die in New York City if there had not been such a place as Moscow.”

I recollect my 30-hour ride in 1993 from New York City to Miami on a historic Amtrak Silver Star train via Washington, D.C.; Richmond, Virginia; Raleigh, North Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; Jacksonville, Florida; and Tampa, Florida.

I reminisce Disney World – the largest and most visited amusement park in the world, consisting of four theme parks with the four icons: Cinderella Castle at Magic Kingdom, Spaceship Earth at Epcot, Hollywood Tower Hotel at Hollywood Studios and the Tree of Life at Animal Kingdom.

I will never forget San Francisco with the famous Golden Gate Bridge spanning the Golden Gate, the one-mile-wide strait connecting San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean, the Alcatraz prison; lobster restaurants on the waterfront and a giant redwood forest the Half Moon Bay Area.

I will always remember towers in downtown Chicago, looking towards Lake Michigan, and skyscrapers overlooking Millennium Park and Grant Park; beautiful Naperville – a suburb of Chicago, and huge 1,700 acres Argonne National Laboratory in the woods.

How can I forget driving a beautiful rental American car along empty Florida highways in the middle of the night because my son Misha and I refused to switch to Florida time zone and lived according to Moscow time, awake at night and going to bed in the afternoon. On our way, we stopped at plazas for snacks and on empty Miami beaches for a swim. We drove up to the main gate of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on Merritt Island, near Cape Canaveral, after midnight and troubled the guards there, who politely directed us back to our hotel in Orlando.

EVENTS

Of all events that happened to me in America, the most memorable was my work as interpreter at the White House in Washington, D.C. in 1998.

In April 1998, an official delegation from Turkmenistan, headed by President Saparmurat Niyazov, arrived in the United States. It was the first visit of the president of independent Turkmenistan to the United States, and it was largely facilitated by the Mobil Oil Corporation in order to start oil exploration and development in Turkmenistan. It looked like a deal. It was a tremendous information campaign. In order to sign a cooperation agreement with Turkmenistan in the US, as Niyazov insisted, Mobil had to do a lot of preparatory work, primarily, via the US mass media, to form favorable attitude of the American public towards the internal policy of President Niyazov in Turkmenistan and turn a blind eye to human rights violations in the country. In particular, Mobil sponsored publications of positive op-eds in the leading American newspapers, which described favorable prospects for American corporations to do business in Turkmenistan, and, sometime later, the respective public opinion was formed and Niyazov was invited to visit the United States on an official visit.