I'm at the NAMM Russia Show in the Moscow IEC Expocentre, from Wednesday to Friday this week. I'm working on behalf of Suzuki with a couple of Russian music companies:
Dynatone (www.dynatone.ru) Forum Pavilion, Stand 81C
Music Art (www.musicart.ru) Forum Pavilion, Booth D6
I'll be between the two booths demonstrating the HRT-10 Reed Repair kit, the Olive and other Suzuki harps.
I'm also doing a Masterclass: Friday, May 18, 12 am - 1 pm (concert hall No. 5 pavilion No. 2).
This is open to all, answering any harmonica-related questions and presenting Suzuki harmonica models via live demonstrations. I'll be talking about my looper and effects as well.
If you know anyone in Moscow who might be interested, tell them to come along and say hello!
I only see two pins in the forum map from the former Soviet Union. Ones far north of Moscow on the arctic coast. The other is the Ukraine.
In the former Eastern Block I only see one more outside of Germany (a flag in Bulgaria for Jim). We need to get more pins in the map. It actually presents some interest demographic information. There are tons of pins in Western Europe. It would be interesting to see similar maps for unrelated web groups. I wonder if it's saying something about web penetration, language barriers or harmonica enthusiasm. :)
In Russia fewer people understand/speak English than, say, in Germany. As simple as that.
My vk.com harmonica group counts 7972 members, which is more than all harp-related FB groups together. (by the way, this is a way more advanced social network than FB...)
Bluemoose- I'll see if I can't scrounge up some more pins!
Dave, Lol! I was a Blue Thunder guy myself, but I think Airwolf stood up better over time.
Jim, that would have been my guess, probably across in Eastern Europe as a result of Cold War stratification.
They've still got a way to go, but software translators are kind of fun. I've popped in to foreign forums once or twice. America doesn't really emphasize foreign languages in school and they start teaching them much too late. I managed to limp through the language requirements and really can only ask where the bathroom is, if it's time to sleep and what's for dinner. I can show off at Mexican restaurants by pronouncing the foods correctly. My father, at one point in his life, was fluent in French. My mother was fluent in Latin and my uncle was/is fluent enough in Russian so that he used to make insane money translating scientific and mathematics papers. My cousin, I think, is fluent in Japanese. Me, I can roll my R's when I ask for a burrito. :( (I can muddle through Middle English, which was nice for reading literature but not so helpful for communicating with other people.)
@Nate: I don't think the problem is a lack of opportunity to learn, it's a lack of opportunity to use, which has changed since I was a student, because now there is the Internet. I went to a small, rural high school - Herbert Hoover - on the very banks of the Elk River in Clendenin, West Virgina. My graduating class was entirely white, if that gives you an idea of how non-diverse we were. But, we had Russian, Japanese, French, Spanish, German and Latin available for learning. I was required to take Spanish - and I don't remember enough of it to order a taco. I also took two years of German in high school, then I took German I, II, III, IV and V in college, which culminated in a semester in Austria. I could speak some damn fine German when I got out of college. That's not the case now. There really wasn't any opportunity to use it after I got out. Had there been internet then, as there is now, I could have kept myself refreshed. As it is, I'd have to travel a thousand miles to go someplace where they speak another language. It's not the same in other places. In Austria, for instance, in just a few hours, I could be somewhere where they speak, Italian, French, Hungarian, Croatian, etc. They can learn languages over there and actually do stuff with it. The funny thing is I learned to read Middle English and I can get along better with a Middle English text now than a German one.
Music is the international language, cutting across not just cultures but age, race & gender barriers. I'm getting good crowds at the Dynatone booth here in Moscow, who even enjoy things like my beatbox rap song 'The Old Nep Tune', which is about an English pub!
Dynatone deal both Hohner and Suzuki, but the biggest harmonica presence here is Hering - Alberto Bertolazzi is manning the booth himself. Moscow NAMM is a nice show, not too big and not nearly as deafening as Frankfurt or LA.
Thus is why you can't get Herings in the US. That's Herings main market outside Brazil. Gets priority. Sorry I can't make it. Ernest Borgnine just told me a helicopter can't fly from Alaska to Moscow on a tank of gas. Airwolf is no Prius.
