Almost a year after I was there, I now offer you the fourth-and-final instalment of our 5-day trip to the Arctic city of Murmansk.
Let us start shortly after where we left off – upon waking on the morning after our trip to the banya – and continue until my return to Moscow.
We woke up: a good start to any day, and had breakfast, just to make the start complete. We bundled up in our cold-defying garb and struck out into the Arctic for another day of exploring the city of Murmansk.
Our goal for this day was the Alyosha statue, a war memorial on the summit overlooking the bay. The crow-flying route was across a frozen lake, up a hill, then up a much bigger hill to the towering statue behind. If there is a lesson to be learnt from this, it’s that crows have a distinct advantage over humans when making a direct route towards something.
The snow covering the lake was shin deep, but luckily for us there was a well-cut track across the entire width of it, giving the impression that there would be an easy route to lead us directly to where we wanted to be.
The lake came to an end, indistinctly beneath the thick snow. The two strongest indicators of this were the tall, leafless bushes clawing up through the snow, and the sudden cessation of the walking track. In retrospect it would have been sensible not to listen to a certain member of our party (who I shall not name; although I will do myself the service of pointing out that it wasn’t me), who described the idea of pushing on as “fine”. In retrospect it would have been far more sensible to sit in a café and discuss how cold and grey Murmansk is in the winter.
Retrospect is almost always discussed in the context of bad ideas.
We took turns cutting a path through the snow, carving a way up the first hill. It was, as my father might call it, “a tough slog,” the snow always at least calf-height, and approaching our knees in some areas. This meant that each step forward had to be accompanied by a step up to lift the foot clear of the snow. In a warmer time or place I wouldn’t be able to say that we were dressed for the conditions – instead of over-trousers, as I would normally want to wear when trudging through snow, we were all wearing jeans. Jeans have a justifiably bad reputation regarding the outdoors. They are pretty heavy to begin with, but they have a large saturation potential – they absorb a lot of water – and are incredibly slow to dry. This can lead to fatigue and, if not dealt with well, hypothermia.
In warmer conditions, that is. Where we were, in the frozen north, our jeans didn’t absorb a single drop of water. Paradoxical? Consider the fact that it was, at best, 10 degrees below zero. Our body heat wasn’t capable of melting even a flake of snow. Instead, the snow simply caked onto our jeans in a thick, cracking layer. No problem.
We surmounted the first hill with no issue, giving us the sense that things would remain that way. After all, it had only taken us about half an hour to get this far. We pushed on.
At that point in any trip where it is no longer smarter to turn around, we realised that, up until now, we had been sheltered from the wind by the very peak we were now ascending. With the wind now coming at us from the North Pole, we were feeling even colder than before. Plus, Radim kept stopping to take photos.
He had fair reason to, though. Beautiful is never a word I would use to describe Murmansk; we were looking down into a long, deep bay – a canyon beneath the sea – that lead directly to the Arctic Ocean. Across the bay were moving huge transport ships, lumbering tugs and nuclear-powered ice-breakers; from the shore projected long, wide concrete piers, being lapped at by a thin membrane of ice, loading cranes that looked like they could lift the ship as well as the cargo, and an entire city grown up the valley beside and because of that. Beautiful, no; but, beneath the halo of a grey twilight, illuminated from itself far more than from the sun, I will call the view “striking”.
That being said, it wasn’t warm enough for me to stop for the sake of any more than two photos. We had a hill to climb, a statue to visit, and a here to get the hell out of.
After almost a two-hour push uphill, through snow and wind, we surmounted the hill. What we found on top was a massive statue of a Soviet soldier: a 35 metre-tall tribute to the role of Murmansk in The Second World War. It was looking down over the bay, seemingly ready to step down from its 7-metre base to defend the city if ever called forth. With the famous exceptions of Stalingrad and Leningrad (now Volgograd and Saint Petersburg), Murmansk suffered more destruction than any other Soviet city during World War Two. As the USSR’s only year-round arctic port, it drew an attack from a combined German/Finnish force, in an attempt to cut off the Karelian supply route that ran south into the heart of European Russia. Precedent prevailed, however, and operation Silver Fox was brought to a grinding halt by the winter of 1941.
At the feet of the statue was an eternal flame burning from the ground and surrounded by a perfect circle of snowless marble. If it hadn’t been for the twisting winds around us, I would have tried to warm myself near it; but I was wearing a down jacket, and feeling especially combustible, so decided to view it from a safe, cold distance.
The entire journey, from the edge of the lake to this point, had taken almost two hours, and I was beginning to notice something alarming.
Not every part of my body was warm (for a reviewed definition of warm). My arms and torso were OK – under four layers, including the down jacket; my head, with two beanies and a hood, was actually a little uncomfortably warm. I was wearing sturdy gloves, merino socks (thanks Mum) and in spite of the relatively little covering them, my legs were benefiting from having gotten me this far in the first place. But there was still something that I had overlooked.
Above my legs, but not off them, it wasn’t getting any warming exercise; below my torso but not of it, it wasn’t under four layers of insulation; and unable to wilt to the extent demanded, my penis was becoming painfully cold (my testicles were fine though, having retreated to somewhere near my diaphragm). With disturbing notions of frostbite taking root in my mind, I quickly became leader of the Leave Now faction of our group, and we were soon on our way down hill, this time following the paved road that rounded down the hill.
25 minutes later we were back at the head of the lake from where we had started – climbing into a bus – then a café, to sit for much of the remanent of the afternoon, discussing films, Murmansk, and our new-found appreciation for asphalt.
***
While Mike, Radim and I had arranged to stay here for one more day, it was time for Peter and Pascale to return to Moscow. Extremities warmed, we set of for the train station to see them off.
When we returned to Vadim’s house, we found that he was accommodating another couch surfer, a young Tunisian woman by the name of Sondes, who was studying air-conditioning engineering at The University of Saint Petersburg. If anyone had ever told me that I would one day meet a Tunisian student of air-conditioning engineering while on holiday the world’s largest Arctic city, I would probably have replied “that’s very, specific, of you to say…”
And thus was our second day in Murmansk.
***
Our party now at minus two plus one, and we were looking for something new and interesting to do. Vadim told us that there was a snowmobiling place in Murmansk, where you can rent the vehicles, and drive around a specially designed circuit. So the four of us piled into a taxi, and headed off to try our hands at snowmobiling.
A little something about Russian taxis, if you’re interested. Or, even if you’re not interested.
They don’t have a fare-metre. That is, the fee isn’t $X per minute, plus $Y flagfall as it is in New Zealand; instead, prices are decided upon in advance. In the case of a so-called gypsy cab, which is just some guy driving around in a 1970s Lada hoping to make a bit of extra cash on the side, the price is negotiable, and bartered over before you even get in the cab. In the case of registered taxis, there is a fixed zone-price, a little like a bus or a train plan, which is non-negotiable.
We took a 45-minute (registered) taxi ride into the range of hills behind the city. Once at the snowmobile place, we arranged to have the taxi driver wait for us (for which the driver had to radio in to central office to establish what the non-negotiable price for sitting around was), while we did our snowmobiling, calculating that it would be cheaper and more convenient than having another taxi come up the hill to collect us once we were done.
First, we dressed up in windproof overalls that were so bulky that they offset the bulbous helmets we were wearing; leaving us looking like the front cover of a 1940s pulp-fiction sci-fi. Then we got a brief instructional talk, climbed onto the snowmobiles, and were following our guide into the forest.
I have an admission to make. I have never learnt to drive. Going beyond this, I have never, in fact, driven anything larger than a go-cart – and that was over 10 years ago. I was put off doing it again after I confused the accelerator and brake pedals while free-wheeling down a hill towards a wall.
Between then and now, though, I had accrued hundreds of hours of driving practice on my Playstation, and was thus able to hold my own driving a snowmobile. If I had had that much experience in a plane, I would probably have received a pilot’s licence long ago. As it was, I didn’t crash into anything, which shows that playing Gran Turismo isn’t an absolute waste of time.
Perhaps I’ve overlooked the appeal of the internal combustion engine. It doesn’t seem to me to be about the power that comes from however many horsepower I had sitting beneath me. Here I was, in the middle of a forest, in the middle of winter, in Northern Russia, travelling through the snow at upwards of 40 kilometres an hour. Had we been on foot, this wouldn’t have been so much a fun experience as character building. I suppose what I’m getting at is that the appeal wasn’t coming so much from the vehicle itself, but from the sense of control that it offered: I, a fairly fragile creature when all is tolled, not only moving faster than any human could do on his own, but doing it through falling snow, across fallen snow, at temperatures that should, by rights, have left us dead in short measure. Despite where we were, we still had complete control over the situation – or at least the sense of. Perhaps this is the appeal of cars that I have always missed: the ability to be nothing but human, at yet do super-human things at a whim – to be one thing and do another.
***
We arrived at the train station. Mike and Radim’s 15 hour train to Saint Petersburg was due to leave only a few hours after my train, a 37 hour journey directly to Moscow.
“It’s not too late to change your mind and come with us to St. Pete’s,” said Mike.
“Nah,” I replied. “I’m planning on going there in the spring with my brother. I’ll save it until then.”
(As it happened, I didn’t make it to St. Pete’s in the spring. Alex decided not to come to Russia, on the grounds that Russia’s visa policy is, quote: really confusing. In fact, I haven’t made it there at all. Which is OK, because there is still time, and where there is still time, there is still time to procrastinate.)
On the return trip I was in a kupe berth, which is four beds in a lockable room, rather than the open ploshkart bunks we had on the way up. I boarded the train, alone this time, and, would you have guessed? I misread my ticket. Instead of going to bed number 8, I went and started to set myself up in cabin number 8. Thankfully, the nice family of four who turned up at the door moments later were more than happy to help the idiot foreigner work out where he was supposed to be.
When I arrived in cabin number 2, home of berth number 8, I found that the occupants of the bottom two bunks had already arrived. They were two friendly middle-aged women, who, between them, didn’t speak a word of English. As the train pulled away, they invited me to sit with them as they had dinner. Having conveyed that I’m a teacher from New Zealand, that I have just been on holiday in Murmansk and now returning to Moscow, and subsequently learned the corresponding information from the women, I found that I had completely exhausted my supply of Russian.
The conversation came to an anti-climactic halt. There was one of those periods of silence in which no-one is quite sure what to say or do next – the kind of silence that follows a comment like “this one time I had to have a parsnip surgically from my rectum. Did that put an end to a great night, or what?!” We suffered a few moments of this, following which the women began conversing in full-speed Russian. I sat where I was for a few minutes, unsure what to do, glancing between the two of them. Eventually I stood up, clambered up onto my bunk, and opened my book.
Lesson of the day: if you’re going to be trapped on a train for a day and a half, functionally alone, carrying only one piece of reading material, make sure that the book isn’t Moby Dick. Don’t take this as negative review of Herman Melville’s classic tale of pacifists stabbing whales; but when faced with the dilemma of reading a 50 page discussion of the philosophical implications of the colour white, and doing completely nothing, one can find oneself entertaining fantasies of being stabbed in the eye with a knitting needle.
The following morning, after a night of travel, a man boarded the train to occupy the remaining bed in the cabin. He was a smiling, stocky man of middle age. (It seems that my idea of middle aged is something like a real adult, with responsibilities that extend beyond showering regularly, and decisions more complex than which brand of frozen pizza to invest in. People like that make me feel a little like an impostor, as though I’m only faking it as an adult, and, one day soon, someone or something will find me and issue a test of my adult-hood; a test which I will fail so amazingly that I will be issued with the two-way choice of either getting married, or going back to live with my parents until I have mastered the art of separating my colours from my whites. And let’s be honest, from a practical perspective it isn’t really a choice. I would have to go back to my parents.) Once again I exchanged life stories for as long as my Russian held out, there was an uncomfortable period of silence, then the real conversation kicked off without me, and I went back to reading, in great detail, about the 19th century process of removing and melting the blubber of a sperm whale while on the open ocean.
At last the train pulled into Moscow. I subsequently discovered that it had been colder in Moscow than in Murmansk while we were gone, which made me feel a little bit cheated. In spite of everything that happened in Murmansk, I felt that the warmth of it detracted from the legitimate of the experience. I had travelled half way to the North Pole, gone into the Arctic, for a certain, boundary exploring adventure, only to discover that, regarding the temperature, it would have been a more legitimate Arctic experience to have just stayed at home. My balmy arctic winter holiday. On the other hand, if I had stayed in Moscow, then I would have just written 8,000 words of book reviews, or more likely, just not.
I leave for Siberia tomorrow. Maybe (hopefully?) it will be properly cold there.
Showing posts with label Murmansk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Murmansk. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009
The Banya
If you're reading this, then I'm going to assume a certain modicum of relief at the return of my blog, after a four-odd month hiatus. All going to plan (although plan isn’t a word I let myself get carried away with), I should be updating periodically (I want to say weekly, but am being realistic enough not to,) with an instalment of my account of those three months when I wasn't updating my blog, but instead finding things to write about.
Eventually, though. I still have a few tales of adventures in Murmansk, Suzdal' and the daily adventure of a Moscovian commute, before I begin recounting my European sojourn.
And what better place to begin than where I left off but the Arctic north of Murmansk?
If you recall, I and my band of adventurers (for is the narrator not inherently the leader of the party?) were in the frozen north, in January, had just finished our first day of exploring the city, and were on our way to visit a Russian, or sauna-house. And so we continue with our story.
In the centre of the city, around a corner, down a short, snow-covered road and into a dead-end and a courtyard surrounded on three sides by a tall, U-shaped building, there was no way we could have found this place without the guidance of a local taxi driver.
We walked up to the main entrance of the banya-house in the centre of the U, and a young woman admitted us and led us downstairs into the private banya. The room immediately at the bottom of the stairs was a small locker room, where we changed from our clothes into a sheet and plastic sandals. Through the other door of this locker room was a large kitchenette/sitting area, for the time in-between sauna sessions. Through the kitchenette and up another flight of stairs was a swimming pool, then a pair of showers, and finally, through the glass door at the far side of the shower room was the sauna itself.
I don't believe that I have used a sauna since I was a child, when I visited one with my old school-chum Joseph Lawless. It was a memory that over the course of 15 years was sequentially demoted the status of something I forgot. Stepping into the sauna -- and encountering all at once the terraced, slat seats, thick, hyper-humid air expanding in my throat after every breath, and, most of all, that smell that I had only encountered once before -- had my brain tearing through whatever filing system it uses to find what that spark of memory was.
Sauna smell, sauna smell . . . Where's the file on Sauna Smell? Ah, here it is. God dammit, why is the Stuff I Forgot file so damn full? And, while we're here, can we please review this But I Intend to Re-Learn it sub-folder? Seriously, this thing is getting ridiculously big: rock climbing, double-bass, Japanese, squash, basic outdoor survival skills and. . . what the hell? Female anatomy? When did we even create this file?
Alright, we'll look at this another time. Right now, Sauna Smell. Let's see. . . vacation with Joseph Lawless and his family, 1993. Where's the file on Joseph? Ah, here, under Old Friends. Let's see. . . He went to school with me, and lived just around the corner, in that huge house with his huge family. He usually ate ham and mustard sandwiches for lunch, which bugged me, maybe because at the time I didn't like either ham or mustard. He moved to England in 1996, I kept in touch with him as a pen-pal for a few months -- he even wrote me a letter written in code once, which included the P.S. "Sorry if this was too difficult to crack," but that was written in the same code. Hey, I'll put a new entry in the To-Do file: look up Joseph on Facebook.. . . Jesus! This file is even bigger than the Stuff I Forgot folder! Look at some of these entries: get a haircut, wash bed sheets, stop eating McDonalds. Hey, I have three ideas that will make this file smaller: Get a haircut, wash the sheets, and stop eating McDonalds! And look at these two entries: Write a Symphony and Write a Novel. Both? I don’t think so. And when was the last time I even composed anything, let alone a large scale orchestral work? . . . Hey! No looking in the Stuff I Forgot file! No, I doubt that I'll ever do this. I'll re-file it in the . . . But Let's be Honest. . . sub-folder. Alright, I'll leave Write a Novel where it is -- but I'll do myself a favour: I won't experiment with stream-of-consciousness writing when I do. I'm also going to leave Write a Screenplay in there, even though it's a bigger pseudo-intellectual cliché than novelistic ambitions, but only under the condition that I make a sub-folder called But Missed the Chance, to include things like, oh, let's say Study for Year 13 English Exam: yes, I think we can call that ship 'sailed'. And, while we're at it, how about we put all of these Ask [BLANK] Out on Date files in there too? Seriously, some of these files are 10 years old. God, look at all of these. Should I give some advice? No? OK then. . . We'll make a new folder called Missed that Chance, and put those files in there. . . Yes, we'll re-file this entry too. I know I still see her regularly, but any chance I ever had has long gone, she has already re-filed me as a swell friend, so we'll have to move this entry to Missed that Chance as well.
By the way, I have one more entry for this To-Do file: "Shut the Damn Door, You're Letting all the Heat Out".
We stepped into the sauna and shut the door. Immediately, Vadim and Radim both regular banya users, casually shed their anti-naked sheets and sat down. The rest of us (Pascal excluded, having chosen, in the interests of decency, to wait until all of us were out of the sauna before using it herself) were a little surprised. Any good Anglo-Saxon man is never more naked than he needs to be.
When our surprise subsided, though, we adopted a "When in Rome" approach to the situation, and soon I was sitting in a small dark room, sweating heavily, surrounded by naked men and reminding myself that I am broadening my horizons . . . culturally.
10 or 15 minutes later and I had raised my core body temperature enough to warrant concluding banya-round-1. I stepped out of the room, quickly showered off the sweat, and jumped into the pool -- which I understand to be the tradition -- covered my lower half and returned to the sitting area. The shower is meant to be warm, and only for the purpose of cleaning oneself. The pool is something to do with rapidly lowering your body temperature after the sauna, although the pool was in fact quite an agreeable temperature, and was a pleasant sorbet between courses.
Once all of the men were out of the sauna, Pascal took her turn, complaining about being the only woman, and having to sit on her on own in the sauna.
Banya-round-2, and I asked Vadim and Radim what the purpose of jumping into the pool was. Neither seemed especially confident of an explanation, but a really authentic banya is a stand-alone building, usually near a river, and one alternates between the banya and river, sometimes needing to break a hole in the river-ice before jumping in. And in places where there isn't a river to jump into, banya goers instead roll around in the snow. . .
The look on the face of the woman who ran the banya as we ran past her and outside, wearing nothing but sheets, made me think that maybe it wasn't all that authentic after all.
saunas are fairly common-place throughout the world, and stepping naked into a small room with about 1000% humidity didn't much jar my sense of cultural familiarity. Running outside and leaping into the snow scored a few points higher on the Oliver Burns "Wait, What?" scale, but was offset by the fact that I can now say "Yeah? Well once I rolled around mostly naked in the snow, North of the Arctic Circle in January."
A part of the banya experience that I found a great deal stranger than a coincidence of snow and nudity related to birch leaves and their application.
For reasons that require a great deal of hand-waving to complete the explanation, it's healthy to hit oneself all with a handful of short, leafy birch branches while inside the banya. It's not a self-inflicted beating, the idea isn't to destroy the leaves (or the skin) but rather a series of vigorous taps across the torso and limbs. It has the supposed benefit (can you sense a limited feeling of credulity on my part?) of drawing the blood closer to the surface of the skin, thereby being. . . good. It would appear to be taken for granted that it is a sensible idea, so, naturally, I joined in.
My Wait, What? scale was set to skyrocket further -- from code Eh? OK, as I stepped into the banya and stripped naked; to code At Least I Have a Good Story to Tell as I lay in the Arctic snow; to code I can't Believe Nobody's Pulling my Leg About This as I flagellated myself with foliage. But there was more room left at the top of the scale. My Wait, What? scale in fact reached its second highest possible rating: code Comfort Zone? Oh, Yes, I Used to Have One of Those, a Long, Long Time Ago, only one degree short of code Fuck This! I'm Going Back to New Zealand!
Not being a typical line of thought for me to have, it didn't occur to me that it is virtually impossibly to hit oneself on the back with leaves. A man needs help.
At first there was a bit of controversy, as my inner dialogue, overworked as it was, did battle with itself, one voice in the back of my mind kept saying I don't know if you've noticed, but you’re lying on your stomach, naked and sweating so much that it looks like you've been submerged, as your friend, who is also naked and covered in sweat, beats your back with leaves. Go on, anchor this to your past experiences, go on. I dare you to find a way to make this familiar! While another voice was saying Shut up! This is culturally authentic!
The truth is, though, that is was actually quite relaxing. It's easy enough for an outsider, viewing a novel cultural experience, to pass a qualitative judgement from the perspective of his-or-her- own culture. For instance, an unfamiliar outsider, looking in on the sporting traditions of New Zealand, may see it as a bizarre to consider it recreational for a man to take in hand an a-spherical orb of synthetic leather, stand in front of a line of 15 large, powerful men -- who are united in their desire to forcibly bring to the ground the first man -- and running towards them. Repeatedly. On the other hand, most New Zealanders don’t call this “strange”, they call it “rugby”, or occasionally “Rugby”.
Where an outsider sees naked men hitting one-another with sticks, in insider sees a normal night at the banya; where an insider sees an ordinary game of rugby, an outsider sees 30 men with a poor sense of self preservation. This is one of the things I find that I most like about the world – my view of things is inherently embedded in my background and experience, as is everyone else’s. It is only by exposing myself to different people, with different backgrounds upon which they base their thoughts and views, that I am able to approach the unattainable goal of objectivity: the ability to see things for what they are, and not simply for what I have convinced myself that they ought to be.
Eventually, though. I still have a few tales of adventures in Murmansk, Suzdal' and the daily adventure of a Moscovian commute, before I begin recounting my European sojourn.
And what better place to begin than where I left off but the Arctic north of Murmansk?
If you recall, I and my band of adventurers (for is the narrator not inherently the leader of the party?) were in the frozen north, in January, had just finished our first day of exploring the city, and were on our way to visit a Russian, or sauna-house. And so we continue with our story.
In the centre of the city, around a corner, down a short, snow-covered road and into a dead-end and a courtyard surrounded on three sides by a tall, U-shaped building, there was no way we could have found this place without the guidance of a local taxi driver.
We walked up to the main entrance of the banya-house in the centre of the U, and a young woman admitted us and led us downstairs into the private banya. The room immediately at the bottom of the stairs was a small locker room, where we changed from our clothes into a sheet and plastic sandals. Through the other door of this locker room was a large kitchenette/sitting area, for the time in-between sauna sessions. Through the kitchenette and up another flight of stairs was a swimming pool, then a pair of showers, and finally, through the glass door at the far side of the shower room was the sauna itself.
I don't believe that I have used a sauna since I was a child, when I visited one with my old school-chum Joseph Lawless. It was a memory that over the course of 15 years was sequentially demoted the status of something I forgot. Stepping into the sauna -- and encountering all at once the terraced, slat seats, thick, hyper-humid air expanding in my throat after every breath, and, most of all, that smell that I had only encountered once before -- had my brain tearing through whatever filing system it uses to find what that spark of memory was.
Sauna smell, sauna smell . . . Where's the file on Sauna Smell? Ah, here it is. God dammit, why is the Stuff I Forgot file so damn full? And, while we're here, can we please review this But I Intend to Re-Learn it sub-folder? Seriously, this thing is getting ridiculously big: rock climbing, double-bass, Japanese, squash, basic outdoor survival skills and. . . what the hell? Female anatomy? When did we even create this file?
Alright, we'll look at this another time. Right now, Sauna Smell. Let's see. . . vacation with Joseph Lawless and his family, 1993. Where's the file on Joseph? Ah, here, under Old Friends. Let's see. . . He went to school with me, and lived just around the corner, in that huge house with his huge family. He usually ate ham and mustard sandwiches for lunch, which bugged me, maybe because at the time I didn't like either ham or mustard. He moved to England in 1996, I kept in touch with him as a pen-pal for a few months -- he even wrote me a letter written in code once, which included the P.S. "Sorry if this was too difficult to crack," but that was written in the same code. Hey, I'll put a new entry in the To-Do file: look up Joseph on Facebook.. . . Jesus! This file is even bigger than the Stuff I Forgot folder! Look at some of these entries: get a haircut, wash bed sheets, stop eating McDonalds. Hey, I have three ideas that will make this file smaller: Get a haircut, wash the sheets, and stop eating McDonalds! And look at these two entries: Write a Symphony and Write a Novel. Both? I don’t think so. And when was the last time I even composed anything, let alone a large scale orchestral work? . . . Hey! No looking in the Stuff I Forgot file! No, I doubt that I'll ever do this. I'll re-file it in the . . . But Let's be Honest. . . sub-folder. Alright, I'll leave Write a Novel where it is -- but I'll do myself a favour: I won't experiment with stream-of-consciousness writing when I do. I'm also going to leave Write a Screenplay in there, even though it's a bigger pseudo-intellectual cliché than novelistic ambitions, but only under the condition that I make a sub-folder called But Missed the Chance, to include things like, oh, let's say Study for Year 13 English Exam: yes, I think we can call that ship 'sailed'. And, while we're at it, how about we put all of these Ask [BLANK] Out on Date files in there too? Seriously, some of these files are 10 years old. God, look at all of these. Should I give some advice? No? OK then. . . We'll make a new folder called Missed that Chance, and put those files in there. . . Yes, we'll re-file this entry too. I know I still see her regularly, but any chance I ever had has long gone, she has already re-filed me as a swell friend, so we'll have to move this entry to Missed that Chance as well.
By the way, I have one more entry for this To-Do file: "Shut the Damn Door, You're Letting all the Heat Out".
We stepped into the sauna and shut the door. Immediately, Vadim and Radim both regular banya users, casually shed their anti-naked sheets and sat down. The rest of us (Pascal excluded, having chosen, in the interests of decency, to wait until all of us were out of the sauna before using it herself) were a little surprised. Any good Anglo-Saxon man is never more naked than he needs to be.
When our surprise subsided, though, we adopted a "When in Rome" approach to the situation, and soon I was sitting in a small dark room, sweating heavily, surrounded by naked men and reminding myself that I am broadening my horizons . . . culturally.
10 or 15 minutes later and I had raised my core body temperature enough to warrant concluding banya-round-1. I stepped out of the room, quickly showered off the sweat, and jumped into the pool -- which I understand to be the tradition -- covered my lower half and returned to the sitting area. The shower is meant to be warm, and only for the purpose of cleaning oneself. The pool is something to do with rapidly lowering your body temperature after the sauna, although the pool was in fact quite an agreeable temperature, and was a pleasant sorbet between courses.
Once all of the men were out of the sauna, Pascal took her turn, complaining about being the only woman, and having to sit on her on own in the sauna.
Banya-round-2, and I asked Vadim and Radim what the purpose of jumping into the pool was. Neither seemed especially confident of an explanation, but a really authentic banya is a stand-alone building, usually near a river, and one alternates between the banya and river, sometimes needing to break a hole in the river-ice before jumping in. And in places where there isn't a river to jump into, banya goers instead roll around in the snow. . .
The look on the face of the woman who ran the banya as we ran past her and outside, wearing nothing but sheets, made me think that maybe it wasn't all that authentic after all.
saunas are fairly common-place throughout the world, and stepping naked into a small room with about 1000% humidity didn't much jar my sense of cultural familiarity. Running outside and leaping into the snow scored a few points higher on the Oliver Burns "Wait, What?" scale, but was offset by the fact that I can now say "Yeah? Well once I rolled around mostly naked in the snow, North of the Arctic Circle in January."
A part of the banya experience that I found a great deal stranger than a coincidence of snow and nudity related to birch leaves and their application.
For reasons that require a great deal of hand-waving to complete the explanation, it's healthy to hit oneself all with a handful of short, leafy birch branches while inside the banya. It's not a self-inflicted beating, the idea isn't to destroy the leaves (or the skin) but rather a series of vigorous taps across the torso and limbs. It has the supposed benefit (can you sense a limited feeling of credulity on my part?) of drawing the blood closer to the surface of the skin, thereby being. . . good. It would appear to be taken for granted that it is a sensible idea, so, naturally, I joined in.
My Wait, What? scale was set to skyrocket further -- from code Eh? OK, as I stepped into the banya and stripped naked; to code At Least I Have a Good Story to Tell as I lay in the Arctic snow; to code I can't Believe Nobody's Pulling my Leg About This as I flagellated myself with foliage. But there was more room left at the top of the scale. My Wait, What? scale in fact reached its second highest possible rating: code Comfort Zone? Oh, Yes, I Used to Have One of Those, a Long, Long Time Ago, only one degree short of code Fuck This! I'm Going Back to New Zealand!
Not being a typical line of thought for me to have, it didn't occur to me that it is virtually impossibly to hit oneself on the back with leaves. A man needs help.
At first there was a bit of controversy, as my inner dialogue, overworked as it was, did battle with itself, one voice in the back of my mind kept saying I don't know if you've noticed, but you’re lying on your stomach, naked and sweating so much that it looks like you've been submerged, as your friend, who is also naked and covered in sweat, beats your back with leaves. Go on, anchor this to your past experiences, go on. I dare you to find a way to make this familiar! While another voice was saying Shut up! This is culturally authentic!
The truth is, though, that is was actually quite relaxing. It's easy enough for an outsider, viewing a novel cultural experience, to pass a qualitative judgement from the perspective of his-or-her- own culture. For instance, an unfamiliar outsider, looking in on the sporting traditions of New Zealand, may see it as a bizarre to consider it recreational for a man to take in hand an a-spherical orb of synthetic leather, stand in front of a line of 15 large, powerful men -- who are united in their desire to forcibly bring to the ground the first man -- and running towards them. Repeatedly. On the other hand, most New Zealanders don’t call this “strange”, they call it “rugby”, or occasionally “Rugby”.
Where an outsider sees naked men hitting one-another with sticks, in insider sees a normal night at the banya; where an insider sees an ordinary game of rugby, an outsider sees 30 men with a poor sense of self preservation. This is one of the things I find that I most like about the world – my view of things is inherently embedded in my background and experience, as is everyone else’s. It is only by exposing myself to different people, with different backgrounds upon which they base their thoughts and views, that I am able to approach the unattainable goal of objectivity: the ability to see things for what they are, and not simply for what I have convinced myself that they ought to be.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Murmansk: Day One
[photos to come]
And so we step off the train.
Law enforcement is
"Hey," said the conductor on the phone to the police in
"What?" came the reply. "Really? Are you sure?"
"Yeah, I'm sure."
"Are you sure they're on the right train?"
"Yes. I checked their tickets myself."
"Do they know what their tickets say?" Asked the police officer.
"It's hard to tell, maybe. But, in either case, they're arriving this afternoon."
"Oh wow, foreigners in
In contrast to what we might have expected from three police officers waiting for us at the platform, our welcoming committee was literally that: welcoming. There was no stoic, our-side-of-the-iron-curtain hostility; instead, what met us was a group of three friendly, smiling (mono-linguistically) chatty men. They seemed intrigued as much as anything as to why a Brit, an Australian, an French-Canadian, a Slovak and some guy from a place they had never heard of would come this far from, well, anywhere, for a holiday. Especially considering that we went past
Every time a foreigner enters a
Had things taken that long in any other country, I might have been inclined to think that something had gone wrong. But this is
Redim emerged at last, bleary eyed, passports in hand, and we finally had the all clear to leave the train station. Mike, the Australian contingent on this trip, had with him directions to the nearest appropriate bus stop, a bus number, and a description of the bus stop at which to disembark. The rest of us followed him.
We got off the bus. There to greet us was Vadim, a local resident and our host for the next three days. We -- we being an extension of the organisational prowess of Mike -- met Vadim on a website called www.couchsurfing.com. The basic manifesto of CouchSurfing is to facilitate a meeting between two types of people: those who are traveling, and would therefore like a couch to sleep on for a night or two, and those who aren't traveling, and would like a complete stranger to sleep on their couch for a night or two. Based on this first impression of the organisation, I joined later that week.
Vadim lead us the short distance to his flat -- like the apotheosis of Russian flats, it was a translationally symmetrical rectangular prism, which appears to have been dropped from the sky at random. The stairwell was equally typical: dark, dank and unadorned concrete. Inside the flat was a different mater. It seemed to have been recent redecorated, with something a real-estate agent might call "easy flow" from the front door, around the corner into the spacious living room and through into the bachelor-sized kitchen. It turns out that Vadim had recently removed the wall between the front hall-way and the living room to open up what was, deceptively, a Russian-sized flat. I didn't ask the question, but I imagine his answer would have been "What the heck is building consent?"
We showered, changed, and headed out into
The city is not exactly what I would have called
Aesthetically, I was struck by how different
With no major fledgling tourist industry or exponentiating commercial sector as imputes,
We strolled thorough the streets in afternoon twilight. It wasn't as bighting cold as it might have been -- the city is know to have, in the past, reached an amputating -39.4 degrees, but, during our visit it can't have been less than - 15 degrees, and as such we didn't have to take too many not outside breaks.
I have been considering for days the best way to describe
As I have already mentioned,
Later on that day we reached the reason for
Looking out over the bay, only a membrane of ice floating upon it, my impression that this was an example of nature denying its own power began to concede to the impression that this was an it was an industrial port at night. Time for a drink in a bar that's at least 40 degrees warmer.
Our first day in the frozen north is drawing to a close. We spend the next few hours in a bar, drinking vodka and discussing things that none of us would expend the effort to commit to memory, before moving on to a restaurant just up the road. Before we left the bar, though, we met a group of Malysaian students who were studying medicine in
Our day hadn't finished yet. Before turning in for the night, we visited a Banya, or traditional Russian sauna house. But that might best be left for another post. . .
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Murmansk: The Beginning
I can now claim to have visited the arctic circle.
Granted, I could have claimed that at any time I wanted to, but now I can do it without lying.
Early in January I, along with four other English teachers, one of whom speaks competent Russian, traveled by train to the military/port city of Myurmansk, the largest city inside the Arctic Circle. (The Arctic Circle, incidentally, is defined as the furthest latitude from the North Pole at which there is a 24-hours of sunlight at the summer solstice, and is currently 66° 33′39″ north. Fact of the day).
I could begin by writing about Myurmansk, but I won't. I'll get to the topic in good time, naturally, but, of equal interest is the trip itself. We took the train; and the experience -- everything about it -- was so different from any traveling that I have ever experienced before that it reminded me, as firmly as anything else that has happened to me here, that I am, most certainly, in Russia.
To begin the trip, I arrived at the inter-city train station in, what I thought was, good time. However, good time runs quite a lot slower as a foreigner, as I am learning.
Wandering back and forth along the intercity train platform in Moscow, I was beginning to feel a little concerned that there appeared to be only odd numbered platforms at this station. I looked down at my ticket once again, and it still read platform 6. With my train scheduled to leave at precisely 20:44, and the time being 20:42, I decided that I couldn't reliably expect to find my train in time without some measure of help. Presenting my ticket to a woman standing in the rear-most carriage of the nearest train, I presented myself as the bewildered foreigner that I can't seem to help being. She looked at my ticket, and began pointing along the length of the train, speaking in full speed Russian. Then she looked at her watch, and decided to change what she was saying. Her colleague, standing behind her, chose to offer her insight into the situation; and thus I found myself confronted by two Russian women explaining the situation to me loudly, and far beyond any speed I could hope to understand. I wish I knew the Russian for "What do you expect from me?!"
At 20:43, the first woman used her whole arm to beckon me onto the train, to which I obliged. At this point, a young man happened to walk past me, leaving the train. The second woman turned to him, and said something like "we have a stupid American here!"
The man, turned to me, smiled, and said "you speak English?"
"Yes." I said. I do so without expception, I might add.
"She say that you must to be on car six."
And there lay the root of my problem. While perfectly capable of discerning numbers written on a Russian ticket, I don't have such a knack for deciphering what the numbers mean. As this conformation of my monolinguistic capacity dawned on me, the train pulled away from the station. The first woman pointed along the length of the train, and I began to make my way towards my carriage as quickly as the narrow corridors would allow.
After walking through, perhaps, four carriages, I noticed that I was still dressed for being outside: merino undershirt, merino overshirt, woolen hat, woolen socks, my new boots that I got for when I go to Murmansk, polypropylene leggings and a down jacket. Coupled with the back-pack I was wearing, and having nowhere to shed layers, my back was increasingly adhering to my layers of clothing, to the extent that it took no small measure of effort to peel my shirt from my back, when the opportunity at last arose.
Periodically, I would show my ticket to someone dressed as though in a position of authority, and say "kuda?". They would typically respond by pointing towards the front of the train, and thus I would continue the trek. Nearing my goal, I made the mistake of showing one of the train staff my return ticket -- which resulted in my being pointed back the way I had come. It was only after two carridges of backtracking that I realised the inconsistency of the directions that I had received, double-checked which ticket I had out, and uttered a refelxive obsenity.
I did finally reach my bunk. Naturally, I suppose, but it didn't seem quite so inevitable at the time.
The platskart carriage (cheap seats), a relic of Soviet long-distance travel, is an interesting set-up; my first impression was one of a WWII refugee train. It is crammed full of beds, clustered into groups of six. The central aisle of the carriage separates, to the left, a pair of bunk beds, lying parallel with the length of the train, and, to the right, a cluster of four beds, all perpendicular to the train, arranged in two pairs of bunks. On the left, the bottom bed folds and re-arranges to form a small, square table and two seats for use during the day, and on the right, the two lower bunks double as seats around a larger, rectangular table. Regarding storage: the bottom beds fold up, to create a coffin-sized storage space for the lower bunk-renters, and each upper bunk is laid out beneath a flat board, creating a similarly sized storage area between it and the ceiling. There were, perhaps, eight or nine of these clusters along the length of the carrige, and personal space was, to inadequately describe the situation, limited.
At each end of the carriage was a small, air-lock-like area. It lacked measurable insulation, and had windows that were visually impenetrable due to a thick coating of depositional ice. There were ridged strings of air penetrating the room, and anyone with damp hands adhered to the door handles. Without seeking to convey a lack of faith in your deductive capicities, o faithful reader, I can most succintly describe the area thus: it was fucking freezing. It was also the only place where smokers were permitted to indulge their godless habit.
It was upon his return from one of these life-shortening disappearances that Redim, one of my traveling companions, introduced us to another smoker. Vanya was a volunteer soldier (in contrast to a young man performing compulsory military service), which entails an almost monomaniacal sense of patriotism. He couldn't speak a word of English, and told us via Redim that we were the first foreigners that he had ever met. This instilled in me a strange sense of -- what, exactly? -- pride and intrigue, in equal measures. In a world such as ours is, I wasn't sure how to interpret a man who seemed to live in one of the last remaining corners of society that was still untouched by globalism.
I would be surprised to hear that you are surprised to hear that the toilets on the train were: less than inviting. It was in a small, (preemptively lockable) room at the end of the carriage, and served 54 people with admirable success; a fact I attributed to the fact that passengers would visit the facilities in their own, liberal time -- a natural extension of the fact that there wasn't so much else to do. The uninviting nature of the room couldn't be attributed to efficient Soviet decor, nor the perplexing sliding-puzzle tap at the hand basin, nearly as much as it could be to the floor of the room: it illustrated the insurmountable challenge of urinating on in a moving WC. (I got the feeling that even some of the female passengers were having trouble.)
The toilet itself was made of bed-pan steel, and seemed to flush by simply opening a hatch at the bottom of the bowl, rinsing the contents out on to the track below. From this, it made sense that the toilet cubicle would be made inaccessible while the train was stopped at a station along the way; imagine a world where avoiding creating large piles of human excrement on the ground was not a priority. Yes, splattering it along the train-tracks is certainly preferable.
To return to my mention of the limitations of free space onboard the train: while sitting around the table between out bunks, chatting, playing cards and drinking vodka (god, how much vodka we drank on that train), we caught sight of a young man, leading a comparably young woman by the hand away from the toilet cubicle. His face betrayed little, but, contrastivly, she had a sheepish expression, aimed at the floor in front of her feet. We all knew what they had been doing, or, rather, all lept to the same conclusion, since, naturally, it is much less fun to assume that people have been behaving innocently. The appeals of sins of the flesh are so intoxicating that they can make even sloshing around in congealed urine romantic.
It took only slightly less time to travel to Myrmansk, in the far north of Russia, as we spent in the city itself; I never before imagined that I would, or could, spend 36 hours on a train, let alone twice in one week.
And thus, I have discussed the train. Next episode: Murmansk. This installment story is set to be the next Pacific Peso Adventure.
Granted, I could have claimed that at any time I wanted to, but now I can do it without lying.
Early in January I, along with four other English teachers, one of whom speaks competent Russian, traveled by train to the military/port city of Myurmansk, the largest city inside the Arctic Circle. (The Arctic Circle, incidentally, is defined as the furthest latitude from the North Pole at which there is a 24-hours of sunlight at the summer solstice, and is currently 66° 33′39″ north. Fact of the day).
I could begin by writing about Myurmansk, but I won't. I'll get to the topic in good time, naturally, but, of equal interest is the trip itself. We took the train; and the experience -- everything about it -- was so different from any traveling that I have ever experienced before that it reminded me, as firmly as anything else that has happened to me here, that I am, most certainly, in Russia.
To begin the trip, I arrived at the inter-city train station in, what I thought was, good time. However, good time runs quite a lot slower as a foreigner, as I am learning.
Wandering back and forth along the intercity train platform in Moscow, I was beginning to feel a little concerned that there appeared to be only odd numbered platforms at this station. I looked down at my ticket once again, and it still read platform 6. With my train scheduled to leave at precisely 20:44, and the time being 20:42, I decided that I couldn't reliably expect to find my train in time without some measure of help. Presenting my ticket to a woman standing in the rear-most carriage of the nearest train, I presented myself as the bewildered foreigner that I can't seem to help being. She looked at my ticket, and began pointing along the length of the train, speaking in full speed Russian. Then she looked at her watch, and decided to change what she was saying. Her colleague, standing behind her, chose to offer her insight into the situation; and thus I found myself confronted by two Russian women explaining the situation to me loudly, and far beyond any speed I could hope to understand. I wish I knew the Russian for "What do you expect from me?!"
At 20:43, the first woman used her whole arm to beckon me onto the train, to which I obliged. At this point, a young man happened to walk past me, leaving the train. The second woman turned to him, and said something like "we have a stupid American here!"
The man, turned to me, smiled, and said "you speak English?"
"Yes." I said. I do so without expception, I might add.
"She say that you must to be on car six."
And there lay the root of my problem. While perfectly capable of discerning numbers written on a Russian ticket, I don't have such a knack for deciphering what the numbers mean. As this conformation of my monolinguistic capacity dawned on me, the train pulled away from the station. The first woman pointed along the length of the train, and I began to make my way towards my carriage as quickly as the narrow corridors would allow.
After walking through, perhaps, four carriages, I noticed that I was still dressed for being outside: merino undershirt, merino overshirt, woolen hat, woolen socks, my new boots that I got for when I go to Murmansk, polypropylene leggings and a down jacket. Coupled with the back-pack I was wearing, and having nowhere to shed layers, my back was increasingly adhering to my layers of clothing, to the extent that it took no small measure of effort to peel my shirt from my back, when the opportunity at last arose.
Periodically, I would show my ticket to someone dressed as though in a position of authority, and say "kuda?". They would typically respond by pointing towards the front of the train, and thus I would continue the trek. Nearing my goal, I made the mistake of showing one of the train staff my return ticket -- which resulted in my being pointed back the way I had come. It was only after two carridges of backtracking that I realised the inconsistency of the directions that I had received, double-checked which ticket I had out, and uttered a refelxive obsenity.
I did finally reach my bunk. Naturally, I suppose, but it didn't seem quite so inevitable at the time.
The platskart carriage (cheap seats), a relic of Soviet long-distance travel, is an interesting set-up; my first impression was one of a WWII refugee train. It is crammed full of beds, clustered into groups of six. The central aisle of the carriage separates, to the left, a pair of bunk beds, lying parallel with the length of the train, and, to the right, a cluster of four beds, all perpendicular to the train, arranged in two pairs of bunks. On the left, the bottom bed folds and re-arranges to form a small, square table and two seats for use during the day, and on the right, the two lower bunks double as seats around a larger, rectangular table. Regarding storage: the bottom beds fold up, to create a coffin-sized storage space for the lower bunk-renters, and each upper bunk is laid out beneath a flat board, creating a similarly sized storage area between it and the ceiling. There were, perhaps, eight or nine of these clusters along the length of the carrige, and personal space was, to inadequately describe the situation, limited.
At each end of the carriage was a small, air-lock-like area. It lacked measurable insulation, and had windows that were visually impenetrable due to a thick coating of depositional ice. There were ridged strings of air penetrating the room, and anyone with damp hands adhered to the door handles. Without seeking to convey a lack of faith in your deductive capicities, o faithful reader, I can most succintly describe the area thus: it was fucking freezing. It was also the only place where smokers were permitted to indulge their godless habit.
It was upon his return from one of these life-shortening disappearances that Redim, one of my traveling companions, introduced us to another smoker. Vanya was a volunteer soldier (in contrast to a young man performing compulsory military service), which entails an almost monomaniacal sense of patriotism. He couldn't speak a word of English, and told us via Redim that we were the first foreigners that he had ever met. This instilled in me a strange sense of -- what, exactly? -- pride and intrigue, in equal measures. In a world such as ours is, I wasn't sure how to interpret a man who seemed to live in one of the last remaining corners of society that was still untouched by globalism.
I would be surprised to hear that you are surprised to hear that the toilets on the train were: less than inviting. It was in a small, (preemptively lockable) room at the end of the carriage, and served 54 people with admirable success; a fact I attributed to the fact that passengers would visit the facilities in their own, liberal time -- a natural extension of the fact that there wasn't so much else to do. The uninviting nature of the room couldn't be attributed to efficient Soviet decor, nor the perplexing sliding-puzzle tap at the hand basin, nearly as much as it could be to the floor of the room: it illustrated the insurmountable challenge of urinating on in a moving WC. (I got the feeling that even some of the female passengers were having trouble.)
The toilet itself was made of bed-pan steel, and seemed to flush by simply opening a hatch at the bottom of the bowl, rinsing the contents out on to the track below. From this, it made sense that the toilet cubicle would be made inaccessible while the train was stopped at a station along the way; imagine a world where avoiding creating large piles of human excrement on the ground was not a priority. Yes, splattering it along the train-tracks is certainly preferable.
To return to my mention of the limitations of free space onboard the train: while sitting around the table between out bunks, chatting, playing cards and drinking vodka (god, how much vodka we drank on that train), we caught sight of a young man, leading a comparably young woman by the hand away from the toilet cubicle. His face betrayed little, but, contrastivly, she had a sheepish expression, aimed at the floor in front of her feet. We all knew what they had been doing, or, rather, all lept to the same conclusion, since, naturally, it is much less fun to assume that people have been behaving innocently. The appeals of sins of the flesh are so intoxicating that they can make even sloshing around in congealed urine romantic.
It took only slightly less time to travel to Myrmansk, in the far north of Russia, as we spent in the city itself; I never before imagined that I would, or could, spend 36 hours on a train, let alone twice in one week.
And thus, I have discussed the train. Next episode: Murmansk. This installment story is set to be the next Pacific Peso Adventure.
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