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.

A Return to Several Things

I have been on a four month hiatus, blog-wise. I can offer a 50-percent explanation in that I was away traveling, thus, by extension, gathering material for my blog, which I am slowly putting together in a form that I can put out there on the internet; but I must admit that I really don't have too much of a excuse for the last two months, beyond I am kind of lazy, and write like a glacier. Maybe you'll see something soon. Maybe not, perhaps, but I'll try my darnedest.

Perhaps another anecdote would serve to whet your appetites?

I had a new student in my class a few weeks ago -- pretty normal in a language school. She was a notably attractive Russian lass, which is also pretty normal, I've noticed. Following the end of her first lesson in my class, she, the secretary of my school and I discussed her place in the class, which is, again, pretty normal -- all part of the fine tuning that goes into working in an ELF school. It was agreed that my class is too easy for her, and that she should move into another, more difficult group. So far, all a normal day at the office.

Following that conversation, the student and the secretary began having a conversation in Russian, which the secretary later relayed to me.

"Oliver's a really cool guy," said the attractive new student. "It's a shame I can't really stay in his class."

"Mmhmm."

"Yeah, the only reason I'm taking English lessons is because I broke up with my English boyfriend, and so I no longer have anyone to practice English with."

"Go on. . ."

"So, yeah," she continued. "I was wondering, if maybe he, you know. . ."

"Yes?"

" . . . has an English speaking friend that he could set me up with."

Uh huh. Well, that was easy. Usually I have to try first, before I fail as spectacularly as that. This, I hate to realise, is a variation on pretty normal for me.

Yes, Oliver. Welcome back to Russia.

How to Leave a Country

I am no longer in Moscow. For the next few months, instead, I'm traveling around Europe, and hoping that bad things don't happen, while secretly hoping that they do. Don't expect too much from me while I'm away: in addition to the fact that I'm now reliant on internet cafes for my interaction with the wider world, I simply don't have the time to write all that much.

I have some half-finished posts to put up, including the final two installments of my trip to Murmansk, a couple about going to a town to the north-east of Moscow called Suzdal', and something about the Metro; so if you find yourself reading something about Russia, don't necessarily take that to mean that I have returned to the country.

***

As a parting task, I cleaned out my fridge. An almost complete list of contents included:

A half empty bag of salad greens that was leaking a balsamic vinegar-like fluid.

Another bag of vegetables, unopened, pressed up against the back of the fridge. One half of the bag was frozen, while the other half had become a homogeneous mass of organic matter.

A tub of margarine that was already there when I moved in.

A carton of milk, over which mold had begun to grow.

Mushrooms, I think. I can't recall the last time I bought mushrooms, but that's what they looked the most like.

And something else, which is as accurate as I could describe it.

I'm beginning to worry that if I write too many more posts like this, I'll have my status as a legally independent adult revoked.

Murmansk: Day One

[photos to come]

And so we step off the train.

Law enforcement is Russia is either unapologetically inconsistent, or bewilderingly complex; I haven't yet decided which label to apply. A good illustration of this complex inconsistency, which, I'll note, fits into the chronology of this story without coincidence, is the fact that we were met by a law-enforcing greeting party no later than immediately after stepping off the train. Five foreigners traveling into the Arctic Circle in January attracts attention, it would seem. The promptness of the greeting party -- indeed, the fact that they didn't come down to the platform to meet us but, rather, were already there -- illustrates the unusualness of what we were doing.

"Hey," said the conductor on the phone to the police in Murmansk. "There's a group of five foreigners on the train, heading your way."

"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 Murmansk. I have to see this."

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 Saint Petersburg to get there. (I'm unfairly speculating as to their thoughts, but they certainly gave us the impression that we were a novelty. I'm also being unfair regarding an average Russian's knowledge of geography: most people here do know of New Zealand. When I tell people where I'm from, a typical response is an expression, not of confusion, but one that couldn't be all that much different from the expression they would give if I had told them that I was from Narnia. That lasts a few seconds, before they say something equivalent to "Hang on. You left there to move to Moscow? What the hell is wrong with you?" And, as much as I like Moscow, I still can't provide a satisfactory answer.)

Every time a foreigner enters a new city in Russia, he must register himself, a little piece of bureaucracy that none of us were familiar with. We were lead to an office in the train station, and Redim, with his serviceable command of Russian, was voted most likely to deal with this well, and sent into the office with a pile of passports in hand. With nothing to do but wait, the rest of us busied ourselves with taking photos of falling snow and saying hello to passers-by in our best Russian.

Had things taken that long in any other country, I might have been inclined to think that something had gone wrong. But this is Russia, and pain-in-the-arse bureaucracy is to be expected, so the only thing I felt was cold.

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.

Murmansk buses adhere to all of the premises underlying the basic definition of a bus as I understand it to be. I'm sorry if you were expecting another example of my being made to feel like a foreigner in a far-away land, but it was a pretty ordinary bus.

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 Murmansk, following the lead of our host/guide.

The city is not exactly what I would have called Paris of the North. Granted, I have limited travel experience (I haven't even been to Paris) -- and my choice of wording plays up my level of experience -- but Murmansk was what I would have expected from the USSR's main northern port.

Aesthetically, I was struck by how different Murmansk was from central Moscow. Moscow, with almost 1000 years of dynamic history to shape it, is something of a chronological crucible; on a walk through the city one can encounter Orthodox churches of Tsarist Russia resplendent with onion domes and triple-crossed crucifixes, standing beside New York-style high-rise offices that look as though they were glass-blown rather than built; or narrow stairways and alleys -- of the kind you could never hope to find by simply reading a map -- leading around corners and through passages bereft of lighting or paint and humming with the sound of mechanical devices that seem to have been imported directly from a not-too-distant-future science fiction film -- into a snow-covered courtyard or another alley, painted in grey, white and pastels, surrounded by doors, most without any identifying labels. In short, Moscow is an amalgam of three worlds: a monarchy and a democracy framing a period of 74 years, during which time the country was both and neither.

Murmansk does not benefit from this historical tripartite. Founded in 1916, 4 short months (or perhaps, 4 short-day months) before the Russian Revolution, it missed out on the decedent architecture of pre-soviet Russia; yet, being a predominantly industrial town, never experienced the benefits of the transition away from communism, either. Because of this, there was little reason for the city to adapt itself to fit the dramatic change that Russia underwent 18 years ago.

With no major fledgling tourist industry or exponentiating commercial sector as imputes, Murmansk has remained quaintly Soviet in outward appearance. From the explicit -- such as painted stone reliefs reading CCCP or Lenin -- to the stylistic -- pastel boxes in lieu of architecture -- this is a time-capsule of a city. (My favourite landmark was a life-size +20% statue commemorating a Russian soldier who, when surrounded by Germans, let of a grenade in his hand, annihilating himself and his would be captors. Never would I have imagined seeing a statue commemorating a person who held a grenade for too long. A Darwin Award, yes, but never a statue.)

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 Murmansk. It is not a tourist town -- that much is clear. It seems to me that any charm possessed by the city must therefore lurk deeper; beneath the surface, as it were, beneath the facade of a city so unvisited by tourists that there has never been the overwhelming need to appeal, beneath any lack of ostentation, beneath the city's unpolished shoes, scruffy, product-free hair and priortively functional wardrobe -- beneath all of this, there must be something that brought us here.

As I have already mentioned, Murmansk benefited from neither the pre- not post-Soviet worlds. But perhaps benefit is a poorly chosen word. I dare-say that Murmansk is a stylistic time-capsule: a display of what Russia once was. Statues commemorating The Great Patriotic War among buildings built in International Modern Style Architecture (featureless concrete cubes), babushkas selling fish from tables set up on street corners, intermittent examples of Soviet Realism art, buildings adorned with images of Lenin, and the Hammer-and-Sickle; and all in a city that could justify its existence, even in the new world of market capitalism. Murmansk is a city that never had any need to cease looking Soviet, and this didn't. It is a town that captured the interest of this someone who is too young to appreciate first hand the immense significance of the USSR upon the 20th centaury.

Later on that day we reached the reason for Murmansk. One might assume that the north coast of Russia would be an ill-advised place to found a port. No. In fact, if I were ever to found a port inside the Arctic Circle, this would be one of my first choices of location. The famous Gulf Stream, which brings warm water east across the Atlantic, arrives at the west coast of Ireland with indefatigable zeal. In doing so it cleaves -- the majority of the warm water travels south, toward and beyond Spain, the rest north, journeying past Scotland, Norway and Finland, to warm the waters of Murmansk and the White Sea. In over 30 years of living in Murmansk, Vadim had seen this Artic bay frozen over a total of twice.

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 Moscow. And, if you would you believe it, Mike knew one of them. We came as far from the equator as civilisation goes, and Mike still managed to bump into someone. I was impressed.

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. . .

Place-Holding

You may have noticed that I haven't updated my blog in almost a month. If you hadn't noticed, then allow me to be the first to point this out to you.

If I had updated during that time, then you could assume that I would have post something that could be described as either:

A brief anecdote in which I describe a failure to carry out a basic task or rudimentary social interaction, due to my lack of linguistic or cultural knowledge.

or:

A rant about an observation or fact of trivial importance, discussed with more neuroticism than evidence.

or:

An example of intellectually semi-permeable self-gratification, posited as a benevolent act of open edification.

More of the same to come.

How to Launder Clothes

A certain time ago I bought laundry powder. A straight forward enough task, one would be inclined to assume.

My having already used this new powder a couple of times, Enrique, my flatmate, approached me in the kitchen one evening as I was cooking. (In my world, cooking is anything that makes food taste better, and is therefore something more commonly understood as following the instructions on the back of the packet.)

"Um, is this your laundry powder?" He had the box in his hand.

"Yeah," I said. "You can use it if you want."

"No, no," he said. "It's um," he sounded apologetic. "The wrong sort of soap."

"I'm not with you." I mean, soap is soap, let's not be pedantic.

"Well," he said, pointing to a tiny, stylised illustration on the back of the box. "It isn't for washing-machines, it's only for washing clothes by hand."

"They make soap for hand-washing clothes?" This, to me, seemed equivalent to a revelation that my toothpaste was intended for molars only.

"Yeah. But I wouldn't worry about it. I mean, it still works, right?"

I sniffed my shirt. "Seems to." I said.

And so I went on using the wrong laundry powder, until it was time to replace it.

Upon my most recent visit to the supermarket, I was careful to purchase a box of soap powder that had a picture of a front-loading washing machine on it, looking the apotheosis of clean.

"Oliver, is that your laundry powder on top of the machine?"

". . . Yes?"

"Yeah. . . that's not actually soap."

"What do you mean 'it's not soap'?"

"Well, it is soap, but not for your clothes. It's for cleaning the inside of the machine. I don't know what you call it in English."

"I don't know what you call it in English. They actually make stuff to do that?"

"Yeah, they do. You're supposed to add a little bit in with your normal powder each time you use the machine."

I have much to learn about the subtleties of soap.

On the bright side: having used an entire box of The Wrong Type of Soap, it's probably for the best that I brought something with which to clean the inside of the machine.

80 Proof Wasabi Juice

Wherever possible, I try to interpret things as follows:

There are no such things as mistakes, only new experiences, and things that we will know better about next time.

However:

Horse raddish vodka.

It is what it says on the bottle.