Slow Train to China

Love Land

2009-05-17T23:57:00.000-07:00

Firstly, the Chinese government, in its infinite wisdom and benevolence, has now abruptly decided that the residents of the Middle Kingdom shall not be allowed onto Blogger, meaning that I've just spent an enjoyable hour cursing said government and looking for the miniscule number of proxy sites that the shadowy internet monitors (who I like to think of as nefarious, shadowy baddies in suits sequestered in very dark rooms) haven't cottoned onto and blocked yet. And, for now at least, I have found one, so I am still here. Strangely, all of the Guardian's current China-themed articles (including those with titles such as 'Secret Tiananmen Square Memoirs of Chinese Party Leader To Be Published that are, erm, somewhat uncomplimentary about the government) are allowed, and yet my blog, the content of which is not (or has not been until this paragraph) remotely seditious, is blocked. Geh.

Anyway, at the same time as clicking on every proxy link in existence, I was also meandering through said China-themed articles on The Guardian website, when my eye happened to catch upon the headline 'China to open first sex theme park.' Now, take a guess where said theme park is. Yep, no prizes for guessing that it's not only in Chongqing, but is attached to the incomparable Meixin (due to limited proxy access I can't attach a link, but rifle through March or April's entries and you'll find it).

So, the noble plan was that once you've been suitably thrilled by a visit to the world's biggest public toilets, you could go underground, where Love Land promised to offer you 'naked human sculptures, giant replicas of genitals and an exhibition about the history of sex and sexual practices in other countries.' Park director Lu Xiaoqing claimed that the park would be educational and informative, saying that he would 'pay attention and not make the park look vulgar and nasty.' Which evidently explains the centre of his marketing campaign (again, unfortunately I can't do pics or links at the moment, but you must click on this):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/15/china-sex-theme-park-love-land

Unfortunately, The Guardian appears to be a little out of date, for the BBC informs me that in the last couple of days the government has now put the kibosh on the project for fear that it was too 'vulgar.' It's unknown whether the existing attractions of Meixin, including seats with holes instructing small boys where to stick their penises and a plastic Christ the Redeemer statue perched atop a shed, will also fall victim to this sudden and surprising outbreak of classiness. Sadly, however, it does seem that this potential paradise of skag is, for now, not to be :(.

My Dear Mushroom

2009-05-14T06:02:00.000-07:00

So, over the last few weeks our Chinese lessons have started, and we've been having fun amusing our friend and Chinese teacher, Jenny (yes, even in China there are bajillions of Jennys - thanks again for that dear parents) with our terrible Mandarin. According to Jenny I have already cultivated a Chongqing accent, and although this basically means I am as crap at doing tones properly as the locals are, I'm taking it as a compliment.

Anyway, Chinese has some brilliantly literal words ('jeans' in Chinese literally translates as 'cowboy trousers') but our absolute new favourite is the word for mushroom, 蘑菰 or 'mo gu.' According to Jenny, the Chinese also use 蘑菰 as a word to describe someone of rather limited brain capacity. Taking inspiration from this, we have thus adapted the anglicized version, 'mogu,' to affectionately describe all of our, erm, slightly dimmer kids.

Now, I have a good few really bright students, I have plenty of average Joes (although the only kid I have who is actually called Joe is a little ten-year old shithead who likes shouting out 'F-U-C-K' what it mean?), but, well, there are a few little sweeties who appear to be just a few sandwiches short of a picnic. They are the children for whom you repeat a word five times, demonstrate it, attempt to use every possible means at your disposal (including, often, translation by the Chinese teacher) to convey that 'apple' means 'pingguo,' and yet will still be met with a smile and a completely blank stare. You can practically see the tumbleweed bouncing through their little minds as they smile sweetly and uncomprehendingly at you. And these are my mogus.

My favourite little mogu is Bobby. Bobby is my youngest student at Aston, being only four years old, and is a gorgeously vacant little kid who attends the parent and child class with one other student, five-year old Lily. At first, I thought Bobby was struggling because he was so young, but Annie, my Chinese co-teacher and I have come to the conclusion that he is in fact just a wee bit dim. A typical attempt to teach Bobby something goes like this:

Jenny: What is it (holds up flashcard at Lily)?
Lily: It's a rabbit?
Jenny: Are you a rabbit?
Lily: No, I'm a girl.
Jenny: What is it (holds up flashcard at Bobby)?
Bobby: Monkey
Jenny: Are you a monkey (points at Bobby)?
Bobby: Monkey
Jenny: Are you a monkey (points at Bobby and then at monkey picture, shakes head)?
Bobby: It's a monkey.
Annie: Ni shi houzi ma? (Are you a monkey? in Chinese)
Bobby: Monkey.
Annie: Bobby, ni shi houzi ma?
Bobby: It's a monkey.
Jenny: Annie, are you a monkey?
Annie: No, I'm a girl.
Jenny: Lily, are you a monkey?
Lily: No, I'm a girl.
Jenny: Bobby, are you a monkey?
Bobby: [blank stare]

(continue by revising 'girl' and 'boy' flashcards and getting Bobby and Lily to say 'I'm a boy,' 'I'm a girl.' Try 'are you a monkey?' again to no avail ad infinitum)

Yep, the kid's the cutest mogu in all of Chongqing. Poor little mushroom. Anyway, Katie and I have been bandying about the word 'mogu' for a couple of weeks now, so I just thought I'd share. I love 'mogu' as a word, and would also like to forewarn a certain Ms VD Trinh that she might have been proclaimed 'Mogu In Chief'. I mean sure, Van, you're a med student, which indicates that you might be part of a strangely academic subset of mogus, but in every other respect you embody the virtues of true mogu-dom. I hope you are proud, and that you embrace Bobby and his friends in your heart as your own little mushrooms.

Hammer Man

2009-05-07T13:12:00.000-07:00

Not only am I sad that I can't have pictures on the blog for the next few weeks, but am also wishing I had a way to add sound. That way I could better communicate THE ANNOYINGNESS OF A NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOUR WHO HAS SUDDENLY STARTED HAMMERING LOUDLY ON THE WALL ALL THE LIVE LONG DAY.

Yes, our hitherto quiet neighbour, whoever he (or she, but I'm assuming he's a he because men are stupider and like to bash things more) may be, has gone wrong in the head. He for some reason has decided to bang constantly at something in his apartment with a large hammer for about seven hours a day, commencing at the rather anti-social hour of 8am. I hate him.

I have no idea what he is doing - unless he is a blind man who is also in possession of the world's worst set of Ikea instructions, no piece of furniture assembly requires three whole days of near-constant hammering. Maybe he is crazy. Maybe he is tearing down the wall between our apartments breezeblock by breezeblock because he wants to be our new roomie. I do not know. I do not care. I just want him to STOP!

Anyway, Hammer Man TM, as he is now officially known, is a bad neighbour. He has, though, inspired me to write my first song on the guitar, which, on second thoughts, probably makes it a very good thing that this blog does not support sound clips. I haven't written about my adventures in guitar playing, but about a month ago we 'borrowed' a cheap, out-of-tune and unloved old guitar (manufactured by the interestingly-named 'Stains and Music') from school, and Katie has been teaching me how to play it (I can do American Pie n'all now :). Guitar is fun, and it proved very easy to use the minimal number of chords I now know to express my displeasure at the evil lurking next door.

The song is still a work in progress, but its general theme involves ramming the hammer (metal side first) up the sphincter of a certain individual. And I want some help with the lyrics - how should I improve on/continue the following?

There was a man who had a hammer in his hand,
He banged it all day to complete some pointless task.
And all that endless banging drove us fucking mad,
So we thought we'd ram his hammer up his arse.

Whoa--oh, Hammer Man,
We're going to stick that hammer where the sun don't shine,
Whoa-oh, Hammer Ma-an,
Shove that hammer backwards right up your behind.

And yes, before you ask, my quest is to become Phoebe from Friends.

Xi'an

2009-05-07T12:36:00.001-07:00

Firstly, I'd like to thank you all for your kind support regarding my accelerated ageing process. It makes me feel so much better as I'm examining my face for traces of incipient crow's feet to know that I have such supportive friends and family. And yes mother, I know well that on the day that I actually do turn thirty you shall relish the opportunity to begin taking revenge for years of old crone jokes.

According to my manager, who conducted an autopsy on my beloved laptop, Tilly is showing signs of 'significant charring' on the inside, which I interpret to mean that she is really, most sincerely dead. Thank the lord my parents' home contents insurance provider for some reason sees fit to cover the possessions of a 24 year old (note emphasis) wastrel daughter gallivating around thousands of miles from the parental pile, which means that hopefully I can be supplied with Tilly 2 for free sometime in September. Anyway, because of computer self-immolation* I now have to write blogs in the internet cafe and that, sadly, means that I can't upload any pictures. This makes me very sad, not only because blogs without pictures are boring, but because I have so many good pictures from the last few weeks, including some wonderful manglage.

Last weekend we finally got some time off due to China's Labour Day (typically for China, this ostensible celebration of the communist worker is generally celebrated by going shopping), and so we took the sleeper train up to Xi'an for four days for a break. It was pretty ace, but so as not to bore in this pictureless void of a blog I shall keep descriptions brief. We of course went to see the famous Terracotta Warriors, which despite being encased in a huge concrete complex are actually quite amazing. Qin Shi-Huang, the first emperor to unify China and the guy who who commissioned the army of thousands (way back when in the 3rd century BC - mum, you might remember) had just a wee tendency towards being a power-crazed despot - apparently historians believe that he was so convinced that his rule would continue in heaven that he had the army made to give him the edge in cosmic battles. Unfortunately for him, the majority of them actually look quite smiley and friendly rather than fearsome, which might be why his earthly dynasty lasted a grand total of three years after his death.

Aside from bonding with terracotta dudes, we also hired some boneshaker bikes to do a tour of the ancient city walls, visited some Tang dynasty (7th century AD) pagodas, and went dining and bargaining in the brilliant (read: completely chaotic) Muslim Quarter, from where I bought my first presents for folks back home. Oh, and spent a lot of time chilling, chatting to folks, playing ping pong and drinking copious G and Ts in one of the nicest hostels I've ever stayed in. For 3 pounds a night. I love China.

Oh yes, I should note that Xi'an was actually sunny, and after even two days I finally have something resembling a tan (although thankfully not at Madame Tango levels quite yet). Despite everyone we meet in China telling us about this supposed brain-frying heat of Chongqing, so far it's appearing to be essentially the Manchester of the East in terms of its climate. I know I'm going to regret saying this, but, Chongqing, bring on the heat.

* BTW, what's that thing called where people set on fire for no apparent reason? Stories about it generally turn up in esteemed periodicals such as Love It! and Take a Break. It came into my mind when writing about Till and I can't for the life of me remember what it's called. Typing 'people on fire' into Google for some reason did not help.

Another Year Older...

2009-04-28T10:05:00.000-07:00

So, today I was chatting with the Chinese teachers at are school (who are all lovely), and the conversation turned to what our Chinese zodiac signs were. Now, with the exception of our manager, who has recently hit the big 30, every single employee at our school is between the ages of 21 and 26, and so we were trying to group ourselves into our relatively limited Chinese star sign groups.

When I said I was 24 and was thus a rat according to the Chinese zodiac (supposed characteristics: talkative, pioneering, quick-witted, friendly, terrible with money - actually far better than my crappy western star sign of Capricorn, whose sole characteristics appear to be stolid, conservative dullardness), they looked at me with blank incomprehension. According to them, if I was 24 then I would have to be born in 1985, and thus I would be an ox. I attempted to refute that logic by saying I was born in December 1984, and woulld thus still be 24 for another 8 months, but this was met with jokes that I was trying to deny my age!

So, it turns out that in China your age is dependent on the year of your birth; like racehorses, all Chinese people age a year on January 1st (yet they still celebrate birthdays -I'm not entirely sure what the deal is with that.) For a person like me who is born on December 28th, this effectively adds a whole year to my age. So, until September at least, when I will revert to the comparative youthfulness of 24 for a few more blessed months, I have now officially hit the big fat quarter century...

ST&(&(D F!&@%G C*($&@$R

2009-04-27T04:46:00.000-07:00

I am interrupting this blog's regularly scheduled silence in order to announce that I am having a very bad day. This is because at approximately 2am this morning my computer decided to set itself on fire. There was I, happily sat in bed wasting time meandering around the little-trodden paths of internet (actually being very swotty and reading some journal articles for my masters, so probably very little-trodden indeed), when all of a sudden I noticed a rather strange and decidedly unpleasant smell. To my, ahem, surprise, acrid black smoke was pouring out of the power socket. Rather less surprisingly, as I was going 'shit........,' Tilly the evil laptop then decided to make a strange noise and then turn herself off.

Now Tilly has a history of wilful, capricious and downright shitty behaviour (it was a bad idea to name her after a wilful, capricious and downright shitty 11th century wannabe queen of England), but self-immolation really takes the fucking cake. Unsurprisingly, she's now not turning back on, and so I whilst I am going to take her to the repair shop this week, I suspect that she might this time actually be dead as a dodo. The power supply has gone funny before and was (eventually) fixed, but given that a) I am in China and they might not have the facilities to fix a laptop with a very unusual power connection and b) she set herself on fire, I am not that optimistic as to her future.

I am hoping against hope that eventually she will be able to turn herself on, even if it is temporary, because ALL MY FUCKING STUFF IS ON THERE! Everything before I left for Prague is backed up, but my photos aren't, and lots of important documents I need aren't (although I have got some of the most important stuff stored in Gmail). I shall hang onto her festering corpse until I get back in the hope that either someone can make her come back to life, or I can have the fun of smashing her crappy little body into tiny pieces.

AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Mangled English - The Album

2009-04-08T14:44:00.000-07:00

Throughout this trip, I have been continuously amazed by the terrible yet wonderful things that English can do in the hands of non-native speakers. Excluding our friend in Prague who was responsible for joylessness way (which, I fear, may never be topped), the Chinese must have some claim to be the undisputed masters of mangled English. Examples of their exquisite crafting of English sentences abound in Chongqing, and they run the gauntlet from the incomprehensible to the unintentionally genius. The best will still be showcased here, but I am - alas - far too lazy to devote a blog post to every double entendre or pile of garble that I come across.

It is thus with great pleasure that I invite you to peruse Mangled English: the Album. Yes, there is an album. On Picasa. That you can look at. The album will grow in time and new photos will appear on the interweb, but here is a teaser of the delights that lie in store if you click here:

These were spotted in our hotel in Chengdu a few weeks ago, and left us wondering just what do they do that is so uncomplimentary? Grow little spines to leave you with hideous cuts? Shout at you and tell you you're doing it all wrong? Laugh at the poor guy who's using it and tell him he should have bought a smaller size? Suggestions as to behaviours of uncomplimentary condoms are of course welcome.

Though It's Hard to Avoid Being Sad, I Want To Be Happy in MXCJ

2009-04-08T11:55:00.000-07:00

As we all know, many times in life there are things that are just so crap that they swing all the way back round to amazingness again. Bonnie Tyler's 'Total Eclipse of the Heart,' for one, or the terrible/wonderful skagfest that is 'Oxford Blues.' And after only six weeks in Chongqing, I would already be confident enough to wager that a good proportion of the world's amazing/crap things can be found right here in China.

A couple of weeks ago (I know, bad blogger), we had the good fortune to stumble upon one of these gems. We were not forewarned of the shitfest that awaited us; we simply thought we were going to 'Foreigner Street,' which according to the guidebook and to other westerners in Chongqing had some good foreign restaurants and cafes (and, believe me, I do miss coffee and cakes). What the book neglected to mention, however, was that Foreigner Street was situated in Meixin or MXCJ, which I think may actually be the world's worst theme park ever.

Now, 'theme park' may be a tad too generous as a descrption of this place. There weren't really any rollercoasters, and - thank the lord - you didn't have to pay to get in. Rather, this was Chongqing's attempts to present its citizens with a veritable panorama of the delights that exist across the globe. Only, because this is China, it somehow got it more than a little bit wrong. It was situated right on the edge of down (and next to it were rural houses and farms), and looked like this:

Attractions of this theme park thus included:

- An exhibit devoted to Thai culture with the following tagline:

- Little chairs in the shape of bums, some of which helpfully had holes to instruct little boys where to place their penis and testicles.

- A big plastic Jesus spinning atop a wooden shed on a recently dug mud hill. I don't need to go to Rio now that I've seen this:

- A tape on loop that included the tracks B.I.N.G.O., Alouette, I Went to the Animal Fair, and the Alphabet Song. The first one of which was then stuck in my head for days.

- A fake Great Wall made out of breezeblocks.

Rather aptly, however, Meixin's main claim to fame is that it boasts the world's largest public toilet, which is modestly titled as this:

There are literally floors of toilet stalls (which, as this is China, are holes in the floor). Upon entering this labyrinth of lavatorial delights, you are confronted by a statue of a naked baby who 'pisses' water upon your head. Nice. Sadly photo of said baby did not work out, but I did manage to capture some of the helpfully rendered instructions for the uninitiated on how to piss:

There were also lots of signs abounding that instructed foreigners to 'call Helena' if they wanted to invest in replicating Meixin somewhere else. Sadly I didn't write down her number, but if you think that these attractions would go down well in your hometown, I'd be happy to go back and find out for you. On second thoughts, no, I wouldn't.

Oh, and after all of that the - three - cafes and restaurants on 'Foreigner Street' were all very, very closed.

火锅

2009-04-05T01:18:00.000-07:00

To condense the customary apology: sorry for no blogging/have been very lazy/will try to do better so please keep checking etc etc. And now that's over, let's move on to one of my favourite things in the world: food. I love food. I love making it, looking at it, smelling it, talking about it and, of course, eating it, which I have been known to do in rather sizeable quantities. In short, I am an unapologetic hog. And given China's considerable culinary reputation, great food was one of the things I was looking forward to the most about moving to Chongqing. Suffice to say, it has not been a disappointment; food is abundant, cheap and delicious, and it will take far more than one post for me to even start to express the wonders of Sichuan food.

Where better to start though than with huo guo, which is the Chongqing speciality. When any Chongqinger with a smattering of English approaches us to try out their skills (this happens frequently, and is normally accompanied by requests to pose for a photograph with them), one of the things they are almost guaranteed to say is 'do you like huo guo?' I dread to think what would happen to the poor soul who answered 'no,' as huo guo is a matter of such local pride that to snub it would be like telling the residents of Pisa that you don't think much of the Leaning Tower, or the folk of Anfield that you think Liverpool FC are a big'ole pile of shit.

Although it's usually transliterated into English as hot pot, huo guo literally translates as 'fire pot,' and is definitely deserving of that moniker. To whit, it looks like this:

Now, that is by anyone's standards a sizeable quantity of chilli. And this is hotpot in a relatively tame state; when it heats up it starts to fizzle menacingly and give off acrid chilli fumes that makes poor foreigners' eyes water and noses expel phlegm in considerable quantities. It is so toxic in smell that it could be used effectively by the police as a means of crowd control.

And yet, despite its initially off-putting aroma, this fearsome brew is delicious. It is a communal meal; the hotpot is places and heated in a hole at the centre of each table, and you then order various delights- which can be anything from fish balls to rabbit's blood and lamb's testicles - which you place in the hot oil to cook. After a couple of minutes, armed with chopstick in hand you delve in to the cauldron to dig out your food. And although it is spicy, it's not actually the pot of death juice that it appears to be - on coming out of the pot, the food tastes really, really good.

Hotpot is not the only dish in which the Sichuanese indulge their love for chilli. One dish we ordered in Chongqing arrived looking like this:

With all the chilli-fied delights on offer in Sichuan, we've found that our palates have adjusted to spice with alarming speed. As my home cooking adventures in Sichuan cuisine have progressed (on which more to follow soon) I have found myself adding ever more liberal amounts of chilli and chilli powder to dishes, and have even come round to the Chinese way of considering green chilli as essentially a vegetable. Much as Van has been known to stay behind in the kitchen to dollop a fat blob of Vietnamese fish sauce on her fajitas, I wouldn't be altogether surprised on my return to Blighty to find myself surreptitiously adding chilli powder to the strangest of dishes.

Mangled Names

2009-03-25T12:58:00.000-07:00

One of the many wonderful things about the language school where we are teaching is that all the pupils at the school are given English first names to use. This is an absolute lifesaver, as it saves me having to learn the near-identical sounding (but, alas, tonal and thus likely to be badly mangled by my foreign tongue) Chinese names of over 100 students.

There seems, however, to be very little consistency as to how our students acquire their English names. Some of the little kids who are just starting English classes are named by us, but many of our students arrive with English names intact. And some these names are wonderful. Absolutely, head-spinningly wonderful. Between us, Katie and I are currently teaching:

- Scrabble
- Derail
- Sharpie
- Moon
- Susie (boy)
- Tessie (boy)
- Uriel
- Sun
- Sago
- Ice
- Sesame
- Thunder
- GeeGeeBoy

Now some of these missteps I can understand. Some kids seem just to directly translate the meaning of their Chinese name into English, but whilst 'Little Cloud' might be a perfectly lovely name in Chinese, it is a rather less than wonderful moniker in English. Although, y'know,Sun,Moon, and Ice actually sound pretty cool. Others, however, seem to have just opened a dictionary and picked names out completely at random. Scrabble? Sharpie??? Derail???? Why on earth, when a child is looking for an English name, would anyone happen upon 'derail' in a dictionary and decide they want the little darling to be named after a train accident?

And finally, GEEGEEBOY????. There are quite simply not enough WTFs in the universe.

Speed Blogging / Mangled English III

2009-03-25T12:33:00.000-07:00

Ah yes, so the blog died again. Oops. I did mean to do it, but somehow between eating huge amounts of dumplings (my trip is basically a tour of Communism and dumplings), learning to appreciate Sichuan spice, loving the fun that is warbling at the KTV bar and, oh yeah, teaching some people some stuff, it got rather forgotten and neglected.

As this blog has only just reached Beijing and is now officially a month behind true time, I have decided to give up any attempts at comprehensiveness, and as such the blog is just going to magically skip forward to today, March twenty-whateverth. The month in a nutshell: there was a very expensive teahouse, time spent wandering round Xi'an at four in the morning, a lovely apartment, some hotpot, a drunken training session in Chengdu, an ultrasound, pandas, some lost piss, and a shiny new permanent residency card. They were all supposed to be blog posts and some of them are even half-written, but, alas, apart from the oblique references above they are now sadly lost to the vagaries of time as I cannot be bothered to write them. Although in cryptic, abbreviated form my month does sound like one long drug-induced dream, which makes me feel more interesting than I actually am.

So anyway, this blog will now morph back into normal, Prague-style mode in which instead of posting tedious updates about 'places what I have been to' and 'stuff what I have done' I will just, as the fancy takes me, post tidbits and random musings about life in China. And where better to start than with a celebration of unintentionally prescient Chinglish? I happened upon this little gem today in Eling Park:

P.S. For those of you that care (Mum), I have just put a few pics of Chongqing up in my Picasa. This album will grow as I add more over the next few days, so stay tuned to see some pretty pics of neon lights etc.

Mangled English Part 2

2009-03-15T22:46:00.000-07:00

And so to China, and where better to start than with some Mangled English. This series of posts has sadly lain dormant for over a month as there were no deserving successors to joylessness way, but predictably China has furnished us with some blogworthy examples of what English can do when it is chopped up, mashed to a pulp, and then stuck back together with kiddy PrittStick.

This first one is taken from the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, which is, in case you haven't heard of it, rather a major tourist attraction. Given that the Chinese government is supposed to have, erm, improved the quality of Beijing’s English signs in the run up to the Olympics, I dread to think what this read like a couple of years ago.

(Click on the photo to make it a readable size)

Alright then. So, even if you’ve remembered to ‘dress properly,’ have satisfactorily shown your ‘ticket, monthly ticket and year ticket when entering the park’ and resisted the temptation to bring in those nefarious watermelons, you’re not quite in the clear; those superstitious activities and other lavatorial behaviours are hard to avoid, kids. And remember, no leaking allowed.

Through the Gobi Desert

2009-03-14T21:13:00.000-07:00

Our final leg of the train journey (sob) was from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing, a journey which took us through the heart of the Gobi desert. About five hours after leaving UB, the snowy wastes finally petered out, only to be replaced almost immediately by this:

Most of the Gobi isn't officially true desert, so the sandy wastes were mixed with a lot of scrubby grassland, but it was certainly large and empty enough to see why Outer Mongolia is pretty much used as international shorthand for 'the middle of nowehere.' It is quite surprising just how much of the Eurasian steppe is simply empty and desolate waste or one kind or another.

There were, however, a surprising amount of camels. According to our trans-Siberian guidebook, which was written by a complete train geek and is usually correct on anything train-related, there are only about 500 camels left in the Gobi. As such, we weren't expecting that we would see any at all. I now suspect, however, that whoever did this survey may have adopted the scientifically dubious method of counting camels from the train window, as I'd say we saw about half of the Gobi's supposed camel population within about 12 hours. Either that or the camels just really like playing chicken with the train. Don't suppose there's much else to do.
Anyway, if you squint really hard you might be able to identify these humped creatures as camels:

Until the Chinese border, the train also boasted the most blinged-out restaurant car in the world, ever. Our little faces lit up with sheer delight when we saw the tack-tasticness of this:

Sadly, our belief that we had a lot of Mongolian togrogs left to spend was misplaced - the huge wad of notes we had was actually composed of notes worth about 0.5p - so we weren't able to fully sample the delights of this magical world. But although the cups of coffee we were able to afford certainly did not afford us with too much joy, the surroundings more than made up for it.

After a long stint in the bogie-changing shed at the Mongolian-Chinese border (I dread to think how many listless hours we have spent on sidings and in sheds during the trip) we finally made it to China. The guidebook had told us that the Chinese border post was decked out in fairy lights and that the Vienna Waltz was played to greet each incoming train, but sadly this proved not to be true. There were, however, soldiers hiding out in the undergrowth, which always makes you feel very very wanted and welcome indeed.

The Chinese province of Inner Mongolia looked remarkably similar to its Outer neighbour (viz: desert), but when we woke up in the morning the desert had been replaced by some rather tall mountains and.....a rather large and famous wall. Sadly my camera ran out of batteries just before wall sightage, but northern China looked generally like this:

Before too many hours the train finally trundled into Beijing and we stepped off, knowing we'd made it through the desolate wastes and arrived at a part of the world that is people-friendly enough for lots of people to actually live in. For the first time in weeks, the temperature was not prefixed with a big fat minus sign, meaning that it felt positively balmy.

And so (blub), that was the end of our trans-Siberian journey. The blog has now finally also made it to China, and so there will be no more posts about vodka, or pelmeni, or mutton, or instant noodles, or, unfortunately, about frozen wee. I hope I've managed to convey a little of the literal and figurative uber-coolness of the trans-Siberian trip to you guys, but if not, suffice it to say that I've had an ace time, and would recommend this trip to anyone. Except people who can't stand cold.

Ulaanbaatar

2009-03-11T08:17:00.000-07:00

So, the slow blog to China, unlike the train, creeps on, and we are now up to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. I'm blaming 'leaves on the line.' Anyway, the city was a very interesting place; the heir to the ancient nomadic culture of the steppes, it’s also at a crossroads between Russia and Asia, and – increasingly - between traditional culture and modernity. The place is at the moment a curious hybrid, with felt gers nestling between half-finished skyscrapers, and an in-progress Hilton Hotel perched on the edge of your typical industrial wasteland. On one corner you see monumental Soviet-inspired statement architecture, on another the gleaming towers of an Asian megacity, and on yet another, perhaps on a back street, a community of traditional gers encamped behind a small Buddhist temple. Add in some wonderful monasteries and neglected old palaces, a good few cosmopolitan touches such as the existence of a Czech restaurant, and a backdrop of magnificent mountains almost within walking distance, and you’ve got UB. Oh and yes, everything really is named after Chinggis Khan, as he is known here.

During our stay in UB, we visited some really interesting places, but unfortunately for various reasons I am underserved with photos of them. The first was the Gandan Monastery, which is the home of a 32 metre tall statue of the Buddha. Unfortunately, taking photos of temple interiors is frowned upon, so you’ll have to content yourselves with the following pictures. The temple was quite majestic, and was clearly still active as a religious site: monks and nuns were everywhere, and we even saw a group of small trainee monk boys standing outside a school. Unfortunately they were engaing in rather un-monklike behaviour by kicking each other and a small dog, but hey, even little monklet kids will be kids. The place was also filled with enormously fat pigeons (Buddhist monks' and nuns' generosity to them being, from what we could see, considerable), as you can see in the following:

We also visited the Bogd Khan Palace, a wonderful old complex a couple of miles out of town that felt as if it had been in a state of benign neglect for the last seventy years. It was the home of the last Bogd Khan – the Buddhist spiritual leader of the Mongol people - who in 1911 also declared himself Emperor of Mongolia when the country became independent from China. Because it is a little out of the way, the palace seems to be seldom visited, and so we were able to poke around the fascinating complex of temples completely undisturbed. There was also a museum – again, completely deserted excluding a couple of pleasantly bookish-looking staff - housing some amazing artefacts that the Bogd Khan and his wife had ordered from around the globe for their pleasure. These included beautiful four-poster beds, the most blinged-up ger I’ve ever seen, and a whole menagerie of stuffed exotic animals prepared for and shipped to the Khan by a company in Hamburg. The couple clearly had interesting tastes.

Another exciting place was UB ‘black market’ – named, of course, in the country’s Communist days – a sprawling free-for-all quite a way out of town. They stocked vast quantities of everything your visiting Mongolian semi-nomad or hip UB-dweller alike could ever need; fur hats, leather boots, silver daggers, fake Adidas trainers, reams of cloth, mobile phone charms; all, of course, at knock-down prices. It was almost endless, and amidst the large swathes of junk there were some really interesting finds, including the cutest children’s boots. If anyone fancies importing Mongolian leather children’s shoes, believe me, they would go down a storm in Crouch End. Unfortunately I have absolutely no photos of this market, as getting one’s camera out in the middle of this place would have been tantamount to writing ‘rob me, I’m a complete twat’ on my head in Mongolian Cyrillic.

Oh, but before I forget, there is also one feature of which UB should be less than proud. After considering this matter carefully - for, like the award for terrible policing, there are a plethora of contenders for this crown – I have decided that UB is home to the most aggressive and downright maniacal drivers that I have seen in any world city. Yep, ever. Unlike other places, the problem doesn’t appear to be caused by faulty vehicles or a general lack of roads: UB has traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, basically everything that you would expect of a sizeable city in terms of basic road infrastructure. The problem, however, is that all these accoutrements are completely disregarded by the road users themselves, who seem to believe, to a driver, that they are competitors in a computer game where one gets points for every item you crash into or small child that you mercilessly plough over. Red lights are routinely ignored, and cars will happily charge at pedestrians as they cross the street. It is basically complete anarchy, set to a noxious cacophony of honking, and each crossing the road inspired terror in our hearts. At the biggest junction, the situation is so bad that they have resorted to employing a ‘traffic director,’ who basically stands on a box in the middle of a six lanes of traffic and by means of a loud horn attempts to strike fear into the hearts of UB’s drivers. It didn’t appear to be having much effect.

Goulash - In Outer Mongolia?

2009-03-07T22:44:00.000-08:00

I’d like you to think, for a moment, of Ulaanbaatar’s restaurant scene. If you are conjuring up images of stringy pieces of mutton served on a bed of mouldy yak’s milk, then you’re about where I was before I visited. Two weeks ago, if someone had asked me to guess where outside of Central Europe one might happen upon a Czech restaurant, Ulanbaatar would not, it is fair to say, have been my first pick. In fact, it would probably have ranked near Kisii in my internal probability stakes, which as those of you who have suffered me going on about Kenya will understand, is equivalent to ‘absolutely no way in god-forsaken hell.’ But then, what should we spy about two minutes from our hostel in UB but this:

Of course, we had to go. Whilst I wanted to find out quite why there was a Czech restaurant in the middle of UB – with the menu outside rendered in Mongolian, English and Czech -, sadly none of the (Mongolian) waiters or waitresses spoke sufficient English for any progress to be made in solving this mystery. We did, however, have a pretty authentic Czech goulash with bread dumplings, which was, frankly, heaven after two weeks of noodles and frozen pelmenny………………..

Teddy McRubbish

2009-03-06T06:57:00.000-08:00

And now the long post about some place we visited is done, so to another random aside in which I demonstrate why when Jon reads these posts his head is filled with an image of my gurning features. As context, Listvyanka - the lovely village on Baikal - is full of barking dogs; as you walk down the street, each successive garden yields a big slobberin beast that will energetically let you know not to even dare think about crossing the threshold of its territory. One also appeared to laugh at Katie when she fell over, but that is beside the point.

Amidst this canine chorus, there was one particular hairy mutt that I for some reason particularly liked; he was trying so,so hard to appear fearsome and threatening and yet completely failed to do so due to the fact that he was essentially a cute, tubby ball of fur. For some reason I dubbed him ‘Teddy McRubbish,’ and for some even more inexplicable reason this name came out to the tune of ‘Beauty School Dropout.’ Unfortunately this particular breed of dog turned out to be very common in Siberia and Mongolia, meaning that I spent a significant amount of time driving Katie – and myself - mad by breaking into ‘Teddy McRubbish’ every time one came into my line of sight. The tune also prompted the reappearance in my head of the song we once composed about the Balliol quasi-pirate librarian to the same tune (lyrics unfortunately completely unfit to print on a blog my mother reads), meaning that I drove myself slowly mad for days.

Whilst I unfortunately didn’t get a picture of the original and the best, here are some stray McRubbishes that were snapped in Ulan Bator. Anyone who knows what breed they are, please do tell me, because I feel the need to have one in my life.

Lake Baikal

2009-03-06T06:35:00.000-08:00

Whilst Irkutsk was surprisingly nice (and I'm sure its pelmeni festival was even better), the whole point of the stop there was to use the city as a base to see Lake Baikal, the deepest, oldest and clearest freshwater lake in the world. We took the bus down to Listvyanka - a village beside the lake - which was a 90 minute journey on a freezing old boneshaker barely warmer than outside. Admittedly, it probably didn't help that I chose to sit next to the window that was broken, but as that was the only window you could actually see through I decided that early-stage hypothermia was a small price to pay in order to see the pretty Siberian hills and forests.

Basically, Lake Baikal was huge, breezy and frozen. Unfortunately due to lack of monies (on my part, of course) we did not go dog-sledding or snowmobiling, but we spent the day wondering around the lakeside and around the pretty village of Listvyanka, which is where my glasses met their aforementioned doom. I did try to persuade Katie that she really wanted to go for a little hike in the snow up the hills around Listvyanka (and there are some photos of me looking like a demented guide leader going 'tally ho,' but at -25 she for some reason didn’t seem particularly keen on the idea.

Here are some pictures of the frozen north:

Lake Baikal would also be absolutely wonderful in the summer; it’s surrounded by mountains and in July and August is apparently even warm enough for what the guide book calls, I suspect rather euphemistically, an ‘invigorating dip.’ I now, of course, I have a lovely idea for a future summer trip – in the mythical future time when I finally get some money – crystallizing in my brain. I think it would be rather fabulous to fly to Beijing, take the train to UB and spend a few weeks in Mongolia horse-trekking and wandering around with nomads, head up to Baikal for some hiking in the pretty alpine scenery around the lake, then take the Baikal-Amur Mainline (a line that goes north of the main trans-Siberian that few people and hardly any travellers ever take) to the Pacific Coast, or even – if the line’s reached there by the time I go – to Yakutsk, where you can catch a boat down the Lena River all the way to the Arctic Ocean. One day this shall be done, and perhaps too, shall be blogged….

Advertising Genius

2009-03-06T06:19:00.000-08:00

Now, after a month of gorging myself on cake, goulash and beer in Prague, I must admit that Russia was a bit of a dry spell food wise (China, on the other hand, is food paradise - consider yourself forewarned that there will be many long adulatory posts about Sichuan cuisine).

Now, it's not that Russian food was bad, just that it was unfortunately incredibly expensive. Everytime we went into a restaurant or cafe and read the menu, our spirits would sink as we realised that all the nice-sounding things cost over a tenner. Inevitably, we'd end up ordering borshch (beetroot and vegetable soup) or solyanka (meat soup with olives and lemons), both of which were very nice but neither of which provided our daily calorie requirements in an environment designed for animals with a blubbery mass of fat to burn off.

The logical choice, of course, was to cook food in the hostels, but as hostel cooking facilities were relatively limited, food essentially meant pelmeni. Pelmeni are essentially little flour dumplings filled with meat that you stick in a pan and boil, and they were our main calorie provider and financial saviour during our weeks in Russia. Sadly, however, we did not attend this wonderfully advertised pelmeni festival, the photo of which is the actual point of this rather rambling little post...

See. Now aren't you glad you read to the end? Even my hideously gurning mug in all its GIFfed-up glory has nothing on this beauty.

The Margate of Siberia

2009-03-06T05:59:00.000-08:00

Okay, so due to the fact that we didn't have internet in our (very lovely) apartment until two days ago, the promised blogorrhoea never materialised. This meant that despite the fact that I'd already written a fair few posts on MS Word, I couldn't post any of them, respond to anyone on facebook, or even defend myself against the lovely GIF animation that miraculously appeared in the last post's comments section. But now I am back with a vengeance, and so a certain vonmonkey should await revenge of some as yet undecided kind...

Anyway, for the sake of thoroughness (and because I'm sure as hell not deleting what I've already written) my amazing time-travelling blog shall continue to write as if it is still sometime in mid-to-late February, with England still all snowy and me still somewhere in the Siberian tundra. Although I had planned to start with Mongolia, I then realised that whilst there had been a mention of its bone-chiilling freezingness, Irkutsk itself had not received any blog love. And it does deserve some, for it was a surprisingly pleasant little city.

Before I arrived, I had a mental picture of Irkutsk as a grim industrial pile, worth visiting only as a gateway to Lake Baikal, but instead I found a place with what can best be described as the atmosphere of a seaside town in the off-season. Instead of grimy old pipes, there were traditional wooden houses, some pretty art nouveau buildings, a laid-back atmosphere, and yes, even bunting and people selling candy floss and ice cream. This last delicacy may sound a bizarre choice in temperatures as low as -50, but I have been informed that Siberians actually eat ice cream in winter for warmth, the ice cream being about twice the heat of the surrounding air. I still think a warm drink would perchance be a more effective heating mechanism, but then I am not a hardy Siberian, so I know little about such matters.

Anyway, despite the obligatory ‘Lenina’ and ‘Karla Marxa’ streets and statues of communist luminaries, the centre of Irkutsk appeared to have been largely spared the delights of Soviet town planning, and even the obligatory pollution from across the frozen river appeared strangely picturesque. Apparently Irkutsk was once dubbed the ‘Paris of Siberia,’ and whilst this may be a slight overstatement of its charms, it certainly was a pleasant place to while away a couple of days. We visited the house of the nineteenth century exiles Sergei and Maria Volkonsky, members of a group of aristocrats who were sent to Irkutsk in 1825 after supporting the Decembrist plot against Tsar Nicholas I (not the one on my Romanov necklace). They had, shall we say, rather better living conditions than the majority of exiles in Siberia, and the museum contained some rather cool antiques from their house, which the kindly assistant attempted to tell us about in Russian. We didn’t understand everything, but we got the main gist and anyway, everything looked very pretty. We did then rather amuse the staff by failing to read the one sign in English in the whole museum (tour continues this way), and promptly walking through the side door that took us straight outside into the -25 cold. Yes folks, we smart.

It was also in Irkutsk that I understood my first Russian pun, and was so proud of myself that I had to take a photo, and now have to explain the joke (sorry). This sign reads ‘Las Knigas,’ which, as ‘kniga’ is a book, means that this is a bookshop making a lame pun on ‘Las Vegas.’ I was a little bit too happy when I understood this.

Still Alive

2009-02-26T22:25:00.000-08:00

Okay, so due to a combination of a lack of internet access, two small American-Mongolian children with a fondness for playing 'jail,' a long late-night conversation about poisonous animals with a guy in UB and a session of beer and Pulp Fiction in Beijing, I have singularly failed to update the blog in a whole week. This means, of course, that I will now go into turbo-speed blogging overdrive and there will be eleventy gazillion posts in a single day. Apologies again for the rather schizophrenic update pattern.

Anyway, the slow train has now finally reached its destination (although as I'm lazy, the blog name will remain the same for the next six months), and after traipsing across the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, a bit more Russia, Mongolia and China, we're now finally in Chongqing, where the last two days have been spent relaxing in our frankly luxurious apartment, eating terrifyingly large amounts of food, having comprehensive 'medical tests' to check that we're not a threat to the Chinese nation and enjoying our first visit to a Chinese karaoke bar.

Whilst it's very tempting to dive straight into writing about Chongqing, I shall resist the temptation to create blog chaos and instead ask you to pretend whilst reading the subsequent posts that the last week is a figment of our collective imagination. As such, it is now in fact Saturday, February 21st and I have just arrived in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia....

Siberia

2009-02-20T08:59:00.000-08:00

We're now in Ulan Bator, Outer Mongolia, but before we get to that I realise that despite talking about toilets, multiple fallings over and breakages, I haven't really actually at all described where we've been over the last week. So, brace yourselves for three quick posts, illustrated with pretty pictures, about the lands across which we have recently traversed.

After leaving Yekaterinburg, we made our way by train across Siberia to Irkustk, where we spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Having finally seen it, I can confirm that Siberia is big. Very big. And cold. And pretty empty. But - around the train line at least - not necessarily as empty as you might believe; on the three day journey we passed industrial, smoggy cities, tiny villages with traditional wooden buildings, lots of cargo trains transporting coal and gas, miles and miles of forest, and a 500km area near Novosibirsk called the Baraba Swamp, which looked about as welcoming as the name suggests. But - until near Irkustk at least - not hills, for Siberia is flat as can be.

I'll avoid rambling on too much, as the pictures hopefully speak for themselves, but suffice to say that the whole scale of Siberia is epic and majestic, and it's the sort of place that you can happily spend all day gazing at of the train window. It is hostile, certainly, and seeing it one can understand why it is the land of exile par excellence; even excluding the terrors of the gulags, the miles and miles of frozen nothingness extending as far as the eye can see would itself induce despair; unless granted a pardon and allowed to return, exiles would have little hope of ever making it home.

Perhaps because it is just so far away from anywhere and everywhere, Siberia also seems the sort of place where the magical could quite easily happen without too much disruption to the rest of the world; I would not have been too suprised to have seen ice bears come thundering across the plain, the stars turn into flying troikas, or some many-limbed, steamy monster emerge from the smoke and ice of the Yenisey River. Such imaginings are what three days on a train does to you.

Anyway, I'm very glad that I got the opportunity to come here and see it at its wintry and majestic best, and here are some (slightly blurry) pictures:

(This last one was taken through the window of the unheated area between each two carriages. These were freezing and the windows made very pretty ice patterns.)

Irkutsk 40 million - Jenny 0

2009-02-20T08:45:00.000-08:00

Lest anyone think I was being smug by pointing out Katie's drubbing at the hands of Siberia, I should mention that I too failed to get the better of the frozen wasteland. In fact, it wreaked destruction upon my possessions.

Oh, I thought I was doing well, too well. Not only did my beautiful sheepskin boots mean that my tootsies were well insulated against the Siberian cold but they also came with grip, so I did not have to adopt Katie's 'five year old with rickets' walk to save myself from constantly falling over. These boots are so absolutely wonderful that I have been comtemplating writing an ode to them, but so far I haven't, which means that you don't have to suffer through my doggerel.

Anyways, Siberia was not willing to let me get away scot free, oh no. I slipped, slightly, once, coming down a steep, icy hill in Listvyanka, and whilst I was absolutely fine, sadly my glasses were not.

Voici:

Given that the temperature was somewhere between -22 and -30 at the time, my glasses were just a little chilly, and as such were not really best placed to withstand the pressure of being squashed under my hand (I was cleaning the lenses - which had completely frozen over - at the time of my little tumble).

The glasses have been temporarily fixed with a plaster, which I hope you will agree looks very cool ideed. I did get a few strange looks back at the hostel, so decided that it was perhaps best not to venture into town with these babies on. Plus, every time I look down they fall off, which is quite annoying.

So, for now I am a little bit blind. I do have a spare pair of glasses, but alas these are not quite as strong as the broken ones, meaning that I might have six months of squinting ahead. I'm trying to think that it makes me look curious and interested, but really it just makes me look stupid. Ah well.

The Stalactite of Doom....

2009-02-18T03:28:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the generally lavatorial nature of recent posts - I have now found my level and I am resolutely sticking to it. Here, therefore, are some interesting things that happen when you have a wee on a trans-Siberian train.

As on English trains, trans-Siberian train toilets deposit their contents directly onto the track. Unlike English trains, however, this is not done discreetly; instead of a pause followed by a strange suction noise, the bottom of the toilet bowl simply flips open and you can thus see your offering deposited at speed onto what must by now be a very sewagey train track.

Now this is fine in theory, but given that Siberia in February is at night twice as cold as your average home freezer, it does not work very well in practice. Understandably, the natural reaction of water or watery liquids in Siberia is to freeze, which, as the picture a couple of posts ago illustrates, means that the collective wee forms a giant pissy stalactite below the train. This makes going to the loo frankly rather interesting.

After you gingerly place your bum onto the freezing metal seat and begin to wee, the first thing you feel is your behind being bathed in a pleasant hug of warm steam. This, we think, happens because your warm wee temporarily melts the frozen dribbe of water in the bottom of the toilet bowl, but we cannot discount the possibility that the top of the 'wee column' has also been melted, and that steamy wee comes back up the toilet bowl to meet you. Which is not a very pleasant thought.

The excitment continues when you then insert toilet paper into the bowl. As the ice (and wee) at the bottom of the loo bowl have by this point refrozen, the loo roll sticks to the ice. And as the now expanding column of wee means that the toilet bowl does not fully close, a stream of Siberian air rushes in, meaning that the part of the toilet paper not glued to the bottom of the metal toilet bowl bounces around like a Mexican jumping bean on speed. It is rather hard to make it go away.

And that, I promise, is the end of all loo-related posts. At least until I eat some Sichuan hotpot....

Final Scores

2009-02-18T02:48:00.000-08:00

Ekaterinburg 5 0 Katie

Irkutsk 5 2 Katie

As well as not really being best suited to freezing conditions, Katie has had, shall we say, a few problems remaining upright whilst in Siberia. The combination of dead Doc Martens with no grip, Katie's woeful balance and packed down ice all over the streets has meant that she has managed some pretty spectacular wipeouts. After the first two, which took place in Ekaterinburg with her rucksack attached, I came up with a points system. The city concerned gets a point whenever Katie falls over, and Katie gets a point whenever she breaks something in the city. The final scores are above, and I think you will agree that it was basically a drubbing. I asked Katie if she would like to comment, and her comment is merely 'ow.'

Yesterday we went to Lake Baikal, and after two falls and one incident in which she karate-chopped me in the back of my neck in an attempt too save herself, we resorted to hand-holding. Combined with the fact that Katie is wearing approximately seventy-five layers of clothes, this basically means that she looks like a little five-year old all bundled up for winter.

My mysterious unknown Slavonic ancestor (I have been told many times -again - on this trip that I look Czech/Russian/generally Eastern Europe and not in fact English) has perhaps bestowed upon me a useful gene, for I've been finding the Siberian temperatures quite invigorating and actually not too painful. The coldest we've had so far is -32, although I'm hoping for -40 just so I can find out what that feels like. And yes, mother, I have been doing Siberia in my H & M coat....

Things That Freeze at -30 Degrees

2009-02-18T02:25:00.000-08:00

Your eyelashes......

Your hair.......

Gunther......

Urine from the train (credit to Jesse for this picture, which I have shamelessly stolen. One of the train guards' responsibilities is to hack the column of frozen wee off when the train stops.)....

Sorry

2009-02-13T08:07:00.000-08:00

Right, mega upload now all finished, sorry to come at you with about twenty gazillion posts at once like that. We're off to catch the train to Irkutsk at about 2am this morning. Estimated temperature for our time of arrival (4 am Monday morning); -41 degrees.

An Interesting Cultural Observation

2009-02-13T08:04:00.000-08:00

Russian toilet paper has no hole in the middle. Just thought you’d like to know.

Of course we all dress like Britney...

2009-02-13T07:55:00.000-08:00

Last night, Katie, Sophia and I decided to go out for a drink. This is not as easy as it seems, as in Russia there aren’t really pubs –it’s either a restaurant or a nightclub, the latter of which means strict dress codes, inflated prices and ‘face control.’ As this is about as far from our scene as you can get, going out in the evening in Russia has been limited – certainly in central Moscow it is difficult to find anything that isn’t an incredibly up-itself swanky nightclub for Moscow’s nouveau-riche. After initially drinking mojits in what was essentially a coffee shop, we resorted on the second night to drinking beer in the hostel, which was where the extended conversation with the Indian-Malaysians that disrupted the blogging came into it all.

Given this, we were quite excited when Katia recommended to us a Beatles-themed café and bar called Yellow Submarine, which has food, beer and live music. The bar itself was fun (and very sixties/seventies- themed, with prog-style airbrushed portraits of bands on the walls and every item on the menu named after a Beatles song), but unfortunately Katie, Sophia and I were then cornered by a young Russian guy, who despite having quite limited English claimed to work as an English-Russian translator and interpreter (if he does, it would explain a lot about the quality of English translations in these parts). In the course of the evening he berated Sophia for the crime of being German, sang loudly and terribly to ‘accompany’ the singer who was playing, claimed that when he met Italians they’d all flashed him to show that they had ‘big balls,’ and, most bizzarely of all, repeatedly insisted on wanting to touch Katie’s nose. When, after about two hours of interesting ‘conversation’ he eventually decided to go to the toilet, we quickly paid for our food and beers and made a hasty getaway for fear of another two hours in his company.

He was absolutely desperate to impress, and talking about Sophia about her experiences in Tomsk and to Katia about modern Russia, it seems that most young Russians are, like him desperate to be ‘western’ (although few are strange freaks like he was). However, as few have had the opportunity to travel outside the country, most of the information Russians have about western fashions and culture comes from the songs, films, and TV. This has led to some interesting misconceptions –our friend last night was mightily confused as to why the few foreign travellers he has encountered do not try to dress like Britney Spears, who is apparently the pinnacle of style among young Russians. We tried to explain that basing your fashion choices on the decisions of a woman who has a history of failing to wear underwear, shaving her head and hitting a photographer’s car with an umbrella might not be the wisest policy, but he continued to insist that young Russian girls (rightly in his view) aspire to look like Britney. Apparently Sex and the City is also very popular here, which explains why so many Russian women insist on teetering about in four inch heels despite the fact that the ground is covered in ice. According to Sophia, the female students in Tomsk all dress like this despite the -40C temperatures, and bulimia and anorexia are big problems.

This obsession with image, fashion and style may also explain why Russian clubs, even outside of Moscow, try so hard to be ‘cosmopolitan,’ Although it did have the Yellow Submarine, Ekaterinburg also boasts the most ridiculously try-hard concept for a club that I have ever seen; a club cum car park. At Park King, you pay to drive your car – provided, of course, that it passes the desirability test - into what is essentially a car park. The ‘music’ is then provided by the assembled cars (resulting, I imagine, in a hideous cacophony of techno and bad house), and drinks are served at inflated prices. This seems not only stupid, but a surefire way of ensuring that your formerly desirable car will end the night scratched and covered in sick. Right.

At the moment, being young and Russian thus appears to be a labour-intensive and rather thankless business – being freezing and tottering around in -30 temperatures to try and look like a TV star doesn’t really sound like a particularly fulfilling way to go about life. Possibly if more actual opportunities become available to young Russians, and if they ever get the chance to see a bit more of the world, this try-hard desperation will lessen, but at the moment I do feel a bit sorry for them. Except for our friend last night. He'd be weird anywhere.

I Love "Sverdlovesk"

2009-02-13T07:44:00.000-08:00

Sverdlovsk/Ekaterinburg is a very nice town; spacious and calm, with nice wide streets and a big lake (now frozen) right in the centre. It does, however, have the dubious fame of being the place where the deposed Tsar Nicholas and his entire family were shot and bayoneted to death in 1919 after the Communist government decided that they were too great a threat. The same year, Nicholas’ sister Elizabeth was thrown down a well, and after they realised she was still alive they buried her alive and set her on fire. In honour of these achievements, the city, which was originally named Ekaterinburg after Empress Catherine the Great (who did not in fact die having sex with a horse, but did, apparently, have a room devoted to bizarre sex objects), Lenin decided to rename the city Sverdlovsk after the commander (Sverdlov) whose idea it was to do the Romanovs in.

Since 1992, the city has reverted to the old name of Ekaterinburg, and now Romanov-iana is back in a big way; the church has not only constructed the huge and ostentatious Church of the Blood on the site where the Romanovs were killed, but indeed has made the entire Romanov family (Tsar Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra, their four daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, their haemophiliac son Alexei, and Nicholas’ sister Elizabeth) official Orthodox saints. The Church of the Blood is thus mega-blinged up, and houses the most expensive icon in all of Russia. Seeing twentieth century historical figures (and not particularly bright ones in the case of Nicholas and Alexandra) decked out in the full regalia of Orthodox saints was certainly one of the many surreal experiences I’ve had in Russia. Unfortunately you’re not allowed to take pictures in the church, but you are (of course) allowed to buy tourist tat, meaning that I am now the proud owner of this rather glorious Romanov necklace.

What adds to the strangeness of the whole experience is that despite the official renaming the town is still often known by its old name of Sverdlovsk (and there is a sign saying 'I Love Sverdlovesk, the picture of which I was hoping to put up but which forgot to put on the flash drive). The name Sverdlovsk proudly stands above the railway station and the statue of Sverdlov continues to stand prominently in the town square. Only in post-Communist Russia could a city have both a big fat cathedral to the Romanov ‘saints,’ and a big fat statue of the guy who decided to do them in – and only in post-Communist Russia could both still be venerated by large groups of the population.

Meeting Point

2009-02-13T07:35:00.000-08:00

After we refused Sergei’s entreaties to start drinking again at 2pm, we left the train at Ekaterinburg at about 7.45pm local time. For some unknown reason, despite the fact that Russia spans about a gazillion time zones every single train in Russia operates according to Moscow time. This means that not only do you have to remember to keep adding on hours as you pass through all of the time zones, but you also have to keep Moscow time straight in your head so you don't end up missing your next train. It is really quite stupid.

Anyway, on leaving the train we were supposed to take the tram to the hostel but this proved to be significantly more difficult than we anticipated. Firstly, we could not for the life of us figure out where to buy tram tickets – although the little office was staffed, the curtain was down and my repeated entreaties of ‘dobry vyecher’ were met with the unhelpful response of the cloaked official turning the light in the booth off. We decided to ask the surrounding passengers, but the first person I asked (the Russian is getting a little better) directed me back to the station, and the second person at said station directed me straight back to the tram stop. We eventually decided to get the tram and risk another fine courtesy of mean Commie-era officials, but then said tram decided not to turn up for half an hour, during which Katie’s feet began to freeze. Discarding the possibility of a taxi after the driver we asked quoted us an astronomical fee, we thus decided to walk the two miles; Katie with her backpack and me with my big fat red case, which whilst enabling me to pack my computer and have enough clothes to live for six months in China, is not designed to be wheeled around a snow-covered city in the middle of winter.

The walk seemed to take an age; the wheels of my case got completely stuck in the snow and refused to turn, meaning that I was essentially dragging a 25-30 kilo weight for about two miles. The situation was not helped by Katie singing ‘the wheels on the bag go round and round.’ Then again, she didn’t do too well either – not being particularly good at remaining upright at the best of times and hampered further by the combination of heavy bag and slippy ice, she managed two complete wipeouts in two miles. One looked horrid and both myself and some Russian women standing outside the philharmonia feared she’d broken herself, but fortunately she was okay apart from a bruised knee, so the trudge continued with us nearing giggling hysterics.

(A cool ice wall with graffiti we saw along the way)

Fortunately, once we finally found the hostel (by this time it was way after 10pm), it was worth it. Called ‘Meeting Point,’ the hostel has only been operational since the beginning of January, and is quite unlike anywhere else I’ve ever stayed. It’s been opened by Katia, a young Russian who having travelled abroad herself and stayed in backpackers’ hostels, decided to quit her job last year and turn an old apartment owed by her family into the third hostel in Ekaterinburg. Although the hostel is at the moment mostly airbeds in an apartment, Katia’s put in internet, and provides free tea, coffee, breakfast etc. She’s also incredibly friendly and welcoming with excellent English, and is still so excited about having hostel guests that she keeps coming round to chat and caters to your every need. We’ve had a really nice couple of days exploring Ekaterinburg and just chilling out in what essentially feels like your own flat. There’s some amazing old Soviet furniture here that would probably be worth a fair bit back home, and Ekaterinburg itself just feels like a nice, relaxed place to be. Given that there are only two other hostels in Ekaterinburg, I think Katia’s new business will do well – she’s got herself on all the internet hostel list sites and we’re all going to write nice reviews about her to entice the travellers here.

(An amazing Soviet lamp in Katia's hostel)

Although the hostel is very new, it’s already busy; in addition to Katie and I on the first night there were Natasha, Christina and Emerald (three English friends on a pre-university gap year), and Sophia, a German economics undergraduate who volunteered to be an exchange student and was unfortunate enough to be reluctantly sent to Tomsk, Siberia. She had spent her three week winter break in Moscow as a refuge from the -48 C temperatures in her temporary home town, and was stopping in Ekaterinburg for a couple of days on her way back east. All of them are very nice, and crucially, after an incident in Napoleon Hostel, Moscow in which I came very close to murdering a hapless sleep disturber named Marcus, not one of them snored.

A Cautionary Note on the Perils of Drinking Vodka With Russians

2009-02-13T07:31:00.000-08:00

At some point between Vladimir and Nizhny Novgorod, Katie and I decided to go and explore the train and to try and see what the quality of the food was like in the restaurant car. Walking down through the endless carriages we were stopped in surprise by a young gingerish bloke who heard us squealing nonsensically in English. This ginger fellow turned out to be Mike, a British former soldier and current wanderer who, strangely enough, had done his TEFL course with Oxford TEFL in Barcelona last year. After initial discussion of travel plans, unknown language journals and learner profiles, the three of us ventured down to the café car, where we made friends with the staff - two brothers from Irkutsk named Sergei and Alexei and a girl named Anna. Through a combination of bad Russian, mime and drawings, we managed to hold a conversation, and were then of course introduced to the most Russian of all customs; that of downing alarming amounts of vodka. Now, a single shot in Britain (and most other places) is 25ml, but a single shot in Russia is at least the equivalent of an English double. As we downed them in the traditional Russian fashion, Sergei kept bringing more (all for free), and despite our protests of ‘nyet, nyet,’ it was not really possible to refuse. The following picture shows the result of too much vodka:

Fortunately we eventually did manage to convince Sergei that we really didn’t need any more vdka, and so whilst we were fairly drunk fortunately Katie and I weren’t hung over in the morning (though we do have the accolade of being harder drinkers than a former soldier as Mike didn’t emerge until quite late the next morning). Being hung over on a hot, moving train is not an experience I’m keen to have – I’ve been hung over on a plane and that was truly horrible. Anyway, Katie now also has an admirer in the form of young Alexei, who despite being only 22 is lacking quite a few teeth (vodka is bad, kids), but who hopes that Katie can be prevailed upon to move to Irkutsk and have little Siberian babies. I fear he may be disappointed, but one never knows…..

Moscow - Ekaterinburg

2009-02-13T07:16:00.000-08:00

The one task we had to accomplish in Moscow was seemingly simple: to pick up our train tickets from Real Russia's office. It of course turned out, however, to be a bit of an odyssey; having misunderstood the address, we ended up spending about 2 hours wandering round a random Moscow suburb in an attempt to find a building that did not exist. Getting out of the centre and into one of what I imagine neighbourhoods full of Communist tower blocks was interesting, but by the time we realised what our mistake had been we'd grown rather tired of Novoaleksandreevskaya Street and its environs. This, however, is what most of the real, non-touristy Moscow looks like:

Anyway, we did eventually manage to take possession of our grand-looking trans-Siberian railway tickets. They have little golden trains on them and are very pretty, which makes me quite excited. And so, tickets in hand, we boarded the train at Moscow Kazanskaya station on Tuesday afternoon. The first leg of our proper trans-Siberian journey was from Moscow to Ekaterinburg, a journey of about 26 hours through the traditional European centre of the Russian nation.

Each compartment in second class houses four people, and we were sharing with a very nice Russian chemistry professor who now works in the Netherlands but was heading back to Ekaterinburg to visit his parents. He spoke excellent English, which meant that we could have an interesting conversation that included more than the very limited phrases I have picked up from my 1991 Soviet era phrasebook (lovingly adopted from Haringey library). Our other companion rotated as the journey went on; when we woke up in the morning, the young man with terrible gelled hair who had initially been in the fourth berth had been replaced by an elderly gentleman with a wonderful briefcase and fur hat combo that made him look straight out of the fifties. He departed at Perm, and was replaced by Olga, a bubbly lady who I used my limited Russian to hold a basic conversation with and who gave us what might have been the nicest pear I have ever had.

Although this journey did not take us into Siberia, western Russia still looks pretty winter-tastic - everything is covered in snow and there are rows and rows of little dachas where Russians retire to escape from the city and pick berries. There were, of course, also some interesting commie factories and industrial cities, but for the majority of the journey the landscape was enticingly pretty, with. Although we spent a lot of time talking to our cabin-mates and most of the evening in the restaurant car (see next post), it was easy to kill time just looking out of the window at the winter wonderland outside. None of the Ukrainian slush here. Unfortunately fact that the train was moving and that there was quite a bit of dirt on the windows mean that the pictures don’t fully capture the landscape, but hopefully these will give with some indication of how pretty it is.

Graveyard of the Fallen (plus a cat)

2009-02-13T07:06:00.000-08:00

(This picture has nothing to do with the post, it's just here because I like it).

Having tried and failed to get into the Kremlin (owing to, we later discovered, a failure to find the entrance), we ended up going on a long and chilly wander down the Moskva River to Gorky Park, the largest and most famous of Moscow’s outdoor spaces. For once, we had a goal, which was the sculpture park outside the modern art museum, which now houses a bizarre ‘graveyard’ of all the Communist statues that Russia didn’t quite know what to do with after 1992. The seldom-visited park was covered in knee-deep snow and as we visited at twilight, the place had quite an eerie air, with dead Communist heroes (with the obligatory strong jaws and best-fist forward poses) peeking out from behind skinny little trees.

As you can see in the following picture, I managed to befriend one particular statue (no idea who this dude is – we think from his pensive pose that he might be a poet or a writer rather than a politician), and also a cat. Lord knows where this cat appeared from or why it was wondering round a sculpture park, but it was very sweet and quite happy to sit on my knee while we took the pictures. Don’t you think we make the perfect little Communist family?

Basil the Simpleton

2009-02-13T06:52:00.000-08:00

Once we got to Moscow, we checked into the hostel, and then wandered down to Red Square, where the first thing we did was to explore St Basil's Cathedral. St Basil’s is, as cathedrals go, absolutely crackers. It is in reality far smaller than it appears in the photographs, and looks as if it is made essentially out of lathe and plaster (or gingerbread) and belongs in some Russian-themed of Disneyland. I’m sure the fact that it has existed for 450 years indicates that it was well constructed, but to see it one just gets the impression that Ivan the Terrible, the rather unpleasant first Russian Tsar who commissioned the thing, was on some really strong hallucinogenic drugs. For some reason the cathedral was named after a sixteenth century oddball called Basil the Simpleton, who spent his days wandering around Moscow as a generally idiotic hermit. That seems to me appropriate given the general slightly insane feel of the place.

Inside, of course, the cathedral is blinged out to the max; every wall is painted, every altar is covered in gold, every corner is stuffed with icons. Visually Russian Orthodox Christianity is basically Catholicism writ large; more candles, more incense, compulsory long, Rasputin-like beards for priests, and never-ending services that mostly consist of the priest chanting whilst a revolving congregation bow their heads and make the sign of the cross at every available opportunity. Whilst the church was heavily restricted in its operations during the Communist period, since 1991 it has made something of a comeback; although plenty of Russians still aren't keen, others are re-embracing orthodoxy. I of course have bought a couple of the tackiest icons available - it would seem a shame to go to these places and not come back with a couple of lovely Mary and 'Old Man Baby' pictures.

Russian Guards...

2009-02-13T06:50:00.000-08:00

Now, about 50% of the times that we’ve mentioned that we’re going by train through Russia, the first thing somebody has said has related to Russian border guards, who appear to be known and feared worldwide. This seems to be with good reason; apparently a recent study revealed that 60% of Russian border guards are mentally unstable and should not be trusted in command of weapons (said study was commissioned after a couple of unfortunate incidents in which deranged border guards went on shooting sprees and killed their colleagues).

Given this reputation, and given that my previous encounters with border personnel across the world have rarely been entirely pleasant, we expected that our meeting with the Russians would be nothing if not memorable. Alas, we were to be disappointed. Perhaps since the publication of said study the recruitment policy has been changed (i.e. they are not recruiting from category A prisons), for the guards that came on the train were all very young and not very threatening at all. The guard who came into our carriage was a woman not much more than my age, who was the possessor of an imposing fur hat but did not appear to be at all psychotic, mentally unbalanced, or trigger-happy. She even smiled at us, and there was never any talk of a fine. Perhaps the Russia-Mongolia border will furnish us with better stories but for now I unfortunately have no interesting/scary Russian guard stories to report. We did get another stamp though, which always makes me unreasonably happy.

Kelly also enquired about drug mule bunkmates. Again, sorry to disappoint, but our cabin mate going across the Russian border was a Ukrainian babushka who I very much doubt had a secret career as a heroin trader. She did supply us with lots and lots of food which may, I suppose, have contained barbiturates or something, but of all the people I’ve ever met on my travels she didn’t immediately strike me as one of the more dodgy. She was about 65 and was going to visit her son in Moscow, which didn’t strike me as suspicious either, but then again, she could have been a Ukrainian spy en route to crack the secrets of the Kremlin. Maybe.

Concrete Rainbows and Beautiful Views

2009-02-13T06:22:00.000-08:00

After our 36 hour trundle through the flat, grey and rather unlovely landscape of eastern Poland and western Ukraine, we woke up to find ourselves finally approaching the city of Kiev. To save on a night’s accommodation, we’d decided to take the train to Moscow that evening, and thus we had about ten hours to kill wandering around the Ukrainian capital. After booking our tickets and putting our luggage safely in lockers, we headed off naively in search of the centre and/or the grand cathedral that was pictured in gaudy blue and yellow posters throughout the rather grand train station. Given that we had no guidebook, not a single word of Ukrainian at our disposal and absolutely no knowledge about Kiev, this was a rather questionable strategy, and initially we found ourselves wandering down backstreets and then through a bustling market in which the products for sale included plastic bags from famed western ‘designers’ such as Marks and Spencers and Peacocks, which if you are a fashion conscious but poor Ukrainian can be yours for the princely sum of 10p.

After much confusion, we did finally find the centre, although the cathedral continued to elude us - despite ten hours of wandering all around the city centre, we never laid eyes on it. I have now come to the conclusion that said cathedral might actually be in Lviv. Anyway, after eating what turned out to be a really delicious lunch of veal with ceps and tomato sauce (much appreciated after two days of living on bread and apples), we meandered around aimlessly for the next eight hours.

‘Faded’ would be a fair description of Kiev; seventy years of socialism have evidently left quite a deep visual impact on the city, which still has a rather ‘back in the USSR’ vibe. Unlike Prague - which having been largely spared from the twin scourges of wartime destruction and post-war reconstruction has quickly returned to its art nouveau, Habsburgian best - Kiev looks just as one imagines an eastern bloc city to look; gloomy, grey and, well, a bit shit. There are some wonderful nineteenth century and art deco buildings, but with few exceptions they are falling apart, with paint peeling off the windows and graffiti adorning the walls. And then there are lots of the brutalist blocks so beloved of sixties town planners, most of which appear to be in various stages of decay. The aura of depression was also heightened by the fact that the city was cloaked in a thick, grey fog; we climbed the hill that advertised itself as a viewpoint over the city only to find that the viewpoint furnished us with only a beautiful view of Ukrainian fog. All was not lost, however, for the park was also home to some other Kievan curiosities. The first was an alarmingly large number of wedding parties; car after car was blinged up with crepe paper and ‘Anya loves Sergei’ number plates, and most of these cars seemed to house brides, who were wandering around in the grey slush in strapless, snow white wedding gowns. The second was a big fat rainbow, lovingly rendered in concrete by some enthusiastic party architect. Unlike Prague, which quickly tore down all of its Communist monuments (Stalin was replaced with a giant neon metronome) Kiev seems to be in no hurry to pull down the Soviet statues. Perhaps they can’t afford to, or can’t decide what they would build instead, for there is certainly no love lost between Ukrainians and Russians and little evident nostalgia for the USSR. Fittingly, however, the rainbow is now situated next to an endearingly crap bright blue dodgem rink, on which two slow, sad dodgems were knocking forlornly into the wall as the radio pumped out tinny American pop. It was basically post-socialism crammed into a single scene.

All in all, the blue and yellow ‘We love Ukraine’ banners that were bedecked all around the city seemed to be more of an aspiration that a reality, for Kiev today is certainly looking a little sad. Despite this, it was a place that was surprisingly easy to feel fond of, and not merely in the ‘so rubbish it’s good’ sense. The city has not only a faded grandeur, but a visible defiant pride in its relatively new independence. This was shown by the fate of the historic 11th century monastery St Michael’s (which dates from the period when Kiev was the capital of the first identifiably Russian nation, Kievan Rus). The monastery was torn down in the 1930s by the USSR, a fact which clearly enraged the sensibilities of Ukrainians (after all, Russia got to keep most of its historic churches intact). Upon independence in 1992, the new government decided that the only possible solution was to rebuild the monastery exactly as it was when it was demolished. Work was finished in 2002, so the St Michael’s Monastery that stands today, despite looking like its existed for centuries, is actually only six years old.

Sticking it straight back up again like it had never been away shows a certain moxie, as does Ukraine's general attitude towards their Russian neighbours. The recent gas issue gave rise to the following - amazing - poster, in which the newspaper Glavred gives the Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko (who isn't getting along so well with her erstwhile ally, President Yushchenko), credit for getting the gas supplies restored:

It is a very interesting time to visit Kiev, as I imagine that in another ten or fifteen years the city will look quite different from today. Clearly change is on the horizon, although the pace is being restricted both by the fact that the country has been bankrupted by the economic crises (and has had a few difficulties in remembering to pay its gas bills) and by Russia’s continuing belief that the Ukraine belongs to it. Ukraine, however, is certainly defiant, so who knows what the future will bring. Probably more political squabbling and arguing with the Russians, actually. Anyway, despite being a bit rubbish, I actually quite liked Kiev (mainly because I felt a bit sorry for it), and I definitely wish it well.

Craphole Glowny

2009-02-12T00:06:00.000-08:00

Well, after having been a bad blogger who chose drinking over writing, I now have to bore everybody by posting multiple entries at once. If nothing else, they will remind me in the future about what I did during this trip other than look at snow, wander round churches and drink inadvisable amounts of vodka. I'm now in Ekaterinburg, but rather than writing about this place now I'll start at the very beginning with our trip from Prague to Kiev last Thursday/Friday. As I can't connect my laptop to the internet at the moment these posts will be pictureless for now - I'll add pics as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Anyway, we had initially planned to get the bus from Prague to Kiev, but after a fruitless and particularly frustrating afternoon in Prague spent vainly wandering between the bus station and an impossibly well-hidden bus company office (in the course of which I nearly ended up stranded on the motorway), this plan appeared increasingly implausible. In eastern Europe, it pays to know that just because badly translated transport company websites say that there are services, this does not actually mean that these services ever actually operate or that they have existed in any form since about 1993. I unfortunately did not know this fact, and in a resulting fit of pique decided to book the train, despite the fact that it was both longer and more expensive than the bus. It was thus, on Thursday, that we said our goodbyes to Prague and departed via Kiev en route to Moscow. The diversion via Kiev was necessitated by the fact that Belarus, which is the most direct route between Prague and Moscow, is a mean country that charges British citizens the princely sum of 65 quid just to pass through its borders. As even Americans pay less than us, it would appear that as a nation we have done something to piss off the Belorussian government. Given that it is the only remaining authoritarian government left in Europe, I can live with that.

The 36 hour journey to Kiev was largely uneventful; although we were booked into a three person cabin the train was almost empty, so Katie and I had the cabin to ourselves and no Ukrainians to bond with.As the journey involved two nights, the time passed relatively quickly, with the exception of our soujourn in Krakow Glowny station, where the train spends a scheduled seven hours shunting around in the sidings. Given that they don't change that gauges (this is all done later, in another enjoyable three hour stop at Prezmysl on the Polish-Ukranian border), and that nobody can get on or off, the purpose of this diversion other than to thoroughly bore the passengers remains entirely unclear. Those seven hours were long and dull, and although I'm sure Krakow is as lovely as it's rumoured to be, from our vantage point in the sidings of Krakow Glowny station it thoroughly deserved its new official name of Craphole. By this stage we were also running out of food; having incorrectly anticipatedthat the train would have a restaurant car and that we could get off and restock at Krakow, we had boarded the train with only some stale bread (stolen from Cafe Louvre), two apples each, a packet of crisps and, in my case, a little lollipop shaped like an elephant. It was thus with empty stomachs and sad faces that we trundled slowly across the foggy plains of eastern Poland. The landscape was generally flat, sad and unlovable, and we came to the conclusion that eastern Poland would not be the ideal place for a winter break. As night fell, we passed (slowly and painfully) into Ukraine, where we officially left the EU's loving embrace and collected our first, bright orange, passport stamp.

Bad Blogger

2009-02-09T23:48:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the lack of updates in recent days - I was going to blog late last night, but events got the better of me, and I instead spent the wee hours drinking beer in the hostel and discussing Hindu temples with some Indian-Malaysian doctors. The posts I was writing thus somehow never quite got finished...

Anyway, today we're leaving Moscow on the first stage of our trans-Siberian voyage. We'll reach Yekaterinburg tomorrow and then on Friday it's off to freeze our arses off in Irkutsk, where Saturday's temperature is forecast to be a balmy -30 C. Aisch.

We've had a great time in Kiev and Moscow and I'll use some of the many forthcoming hours train time to write about it before I forget it all - tales of Ukranian babushkas, concrete rainbows, Communist cats, and Lenin's embalmed corpse to come....

Nashledanou Praha (Defenestration Nation).

2009-02-04T08:57:00.000-08:00

First of all, credit goes to Jon for my new blog header, which is very lovely and makes the blog look oh-so much cooler. I am still disappointed that he didn't come up with the GIF-tastic, WordArted, hideously tacky version that he promised, but this certainly goes someway to make up for the Gunther-torture. I've put a link to Jon's design blog so anyone who's interested can check out his designs and tees.

Anyway, this morning we've had our interview with Nancy, the orange-haired Trinity moderator, so as of tomorrow we should (hopefully) be fully TEFL-qualified and free to teach our wonderful language to curious kidlets and grownups across the globe. Which means, of course, that it's time to leave Prague and continue our journey eastwards; this evening we're off on a 36-hour jaunt to Kiev and from there it's pretty much straight to Moscow, which is where I imagine I'll next be able to update on our progress. Time to crack open the Russian book, buy some cigarettes to use to 'befriend' guards and border officials (apparently this generally works a treat), and brace ourselves for the cold.

It's all very exciting, but at the same time I shall be sad to say goodbye to Prague, a city where I have spent a very happy month and where I could very easily live and grow fat. I shall miss the cake, the goulash and dumplings, all the lovely folk at Oxford TEFL, the cheap beer, the snow, golem statues, Konvikt pub, the mulled wine and potato pancakes in Old Town Square, the wonderful buildings, and, of course, the spirit of dear, departed Rudolf. And lots of other stuff that I have momentarily forgotten. Excluding the busted orange lamp in my room that insists on falling on the floor all the time and the thoroughly repugnant tram inspector who fined me 700 Kc for having mistakenly double stamped my ticket (a huge, completely unreasonable woman who probably once enjoyed life as a minor Communist official), there has really been nothing unpleasant about my time here.

Prague has many claims to fame, both of the price of beer = very low and the lots of important stuff happened here varieties, but I think that one particulary Prague fact I discovered last week is quite special and worthy of sharing before I leave. It was in this city that the wonderful verb to defenestrate was coined, for the Czechs have a long and venerable history of killing people (generally public officials, members of the town council or irritating clerics) they dislike by simply chucking them out of windows. The town council got the push en masse in 1419, and then in 1618 it was the turn of two Habsburg imperial governors to discover the power of gravity, although the latter managed to survive by landing on a steaming pile of manure. There have been incidents of defenestration as late as 1948, meaning that the country deserves the moniker of Defenestration Nation that I have bestowed on it. I am aware that this sounds like a terrible 90s Europop hit, and am indeed trying to come up with a ditty worthy of the title. You are very lucky this blog doesn't have sound....

Digression over, sorry. Anyway, for now it's goodbye to Defenestration Nation and off to the land of vodka, fur hats, frozen lakes and CCCP tat. I have rubbed the supposedly lucky statue of St. Jan Nepomucky pictured above (this guy avoided defenestration by instead being thrown off the Charles Bridge), which apparently means that I shall one day return to Prague. I certainly hope that's true, as this city agrees with me, but for the time being it's nashledanou and thanks for all the beer!

A War on Trees

2009-02-01T06:27:00.000-08:00

Having now spent four weeks in Prague, I feel like I know the place fairly well - not only am I no longer lost in the streets of Stare Mesto, but I can even tell my knihkupectvi (bookshop) from my kadeřnictvi (hairdressers), vaguely understand menus in Czech, and recommend nice restaurants and bars to perplexed tourists. I must admit, however, that there are still things that still have me a little mystified, and foremost among them is the question of what the police in Prague are actually paid to do.

Before I start, I must admit that compared to some of the other police I've encountered around the world, the Prague force are shining beacons of competence and moral rectitude. When I was doing my Spanish course in San Andreas, Guatemala, the balcony of the police station was everyday filled with about 20 fat drunkards who spent their day leering at girls, and despite this rather sizeable crime-fighting force for a large village, every day you'd hear people discussing last night's tally of murders and shootings. In Kenya, the police basically operate as a bribing racket - once you've paid your way into the force, you can spend your days at the side of the road happily accepting bribes from matatu drivers to 'overlook' the fact that they are driving hideously overloaded death-traps apt to crash at any moment.

I should not, thus, complain, but what does confuse me particularly about the Prague police is the fact that their job seems to primarily consist of wrapping inanimate objects in police tape. Real criminals don't seem to bother them unduly; there is a drug dealer, for example, who every night you can find on the same street just off Old Town Square. He is not a particularly discreet drug dealer, his general greeting invariably being 'drugs? You want some drugs?' Nor is he particularly fearsome, being around 5'4" and having the physique of a limp stick of celery. This rubbish drug dealer, however, is allowed to operate unimpeded, for the police are far too busy dealing with the scourges of misbehaving chairs and left over Christmas trees.

Our apartment is opposite a police station, and for three weeks there lay on the pavement outside a growing pile of broken chairs, all lovingly wrapped up in police tape. This confused us; were they saving a parking space? Had the chairs misbehaved in some way? Were the police just really, really bored? The chairs are evidently benign, however, compared to the threat posed by another type of evil object: Christmas trees. A few days ago we were walking across Namesti Republiky - a big square near to where we live - when we saw about three police vans show up and stop at the side of the road. One even had its sirens on. Thinking, naively, that the police were doing standard police-type things such as catching criminals, we continued on our way. When we walked back through the square half an hour later, however, all that was left of their presence was a poor, abandoned Christmas tree, left in the middle of the tram lines and covered in reams and reams of police tape.

People, I am at a loss. Has President Klaus become bored of the war on terror rhetoric and instead declared war on trees? Is there a war on wood and all objects made from it? Are the police just trying to use up their tape after an over-zealous clerk put in a bumper order? I have no clue whatsoever. Any suggestions, of course, are muchly welcomed, for I would hate to leave Prague without having solved this crime-fighting condundrum.

(Sadly I didn't have my camera with me when we came across the tree, so Slanty Santy, our fondly-remembered tree from this year, has had to substitute).

Mangled English: Part 1

2009-01-30T11:01:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the long absence - I imagine you've attributed it to laziness, but in actuality it's taken me days to wrestle back control of the blog from a pesky little bear named Gunther. He sits there crying, little furry paws tapping frantically on the keys, and I hadn't the heart to tear him away. He's also keeps giving me a real case of the side eye; I'm not sure he's forgiven me yet for the abandonment and for having been left with such inappropriate 'babysitters.'

Anyway, there will be a real post soon, I promise, but as I am going out in a few minutes I shall content myself for now with part one of what I imagine will be a frequently recurring series over the next few months: Mangled English.

As I'm sure you can imagine, we have encountered lots of, well, creative uses of the English language during our time in Prague, not least the strange purposes to which George subjects my poor mother tongue. Now, I am not being critical here; I understand that most Czech people's English is about a million times better than my Czech, which after four weeks here unfortunately still mainly consists of the rabid overuse of prosim, flagrant mispronunciation of the words nashledanou and děkuji, and the use of Russian numbers as I can't quite ever remember the Czech ones. So no, no criticisms from me. Indeed, I believe that the creative possibilities of English are best revealed when it is dragged through a hedge backwards by an over-enthusiastic learner, and as such I shall delight in sharing their nuggets of wisdom with you all.

Exhibit A in the mangled English freak parade is this genuine and unadulterated section of a restaurant review taken from the English page of Prague's free weekly magazine, which aptly demonstrates why some people should never be left unsupervised in the presence of a thesaurus. Unfortunately, this is the restaurant I'm going to tonight, and so I must admit I am a little concerned about the following:

'But why not spoil ourselves with a little bit of bliss at least through the digestive tract, when all the food speedily turns into joylessness way and everybody has got a headache from it? It's good to try in this case, when such bliss will cost you all the money that you've earned in the last month. The newcomer will probably be fascinated with the pleasant interior's conception....the whole environment is completed with other sensual adornments, because in the tearooms the taste is not the only thing that is important. The visitors would surely wish a little bit more from attentive waiters, whose laxity can be excused perhaps only by the temperament and habits in the latitudes, from where they come from.'

Photos, Photos Everywhere

2009-01-30T10:34:00.000-08:00

Apologies for there having been a misleadingly titled 'My Photos' on the links bar for a few days (misleadingly titled in that there were no photos of any kind whatsoever, and the link led you only into some barren wilderness somewhere in the dingy backstreets of Picasa-land). Happily, I can now confirm that if you bother to click on the 'My Pics' link you will actually be taken to a page containing lots of pretty pictures of snow, sunshine and drunken misadventure in the beautiful capital of Bohemia. Oh, and Katie has also got her act together and put her pics on Flickr, so do click there for more.

There are about 100 pics on mine at the moments but I'll post more from this week soon, so do check back for updates. I imagine there'll be a lot of the 'drunken misadventure/hideous gurn' genre from this weekend, as it's our last weekend in Prague and hence must be celebrated as all events are in Prague: with beer. I'm also finally going to go to the castle tomorrow and pay my respects to the wonderful Rudolph, so you should also expect lots of wonky pictures of gothic spires. Don't pretend you're not excited....

A Bear Called It

2009-01-24T09:55:00.000-08:00

Dear readers,

My name is Gunther and today I have taken over Jenny's blog to share my story with you all. These things, I hope you will understand, are not easy for me to talk about, but I hope that by being open about my experiences I will encourage other tortured and abandoned little bears to speak out and find help.

Despite my beautiful little face and my large, trusting eyes, I for some reason seem to be the sort of bear that attracts the attentions of the violent and the depraved, and many times in my life I have been subject to abuse, abandoment and neglect. My early years were unremmitingly traumatic; forced to sit on the shelves of the local garden centre, I was continuously taunted by the staff and was often used as a missile, quietly sobbing into my little bow as I was tossed into plantpots and hurled against piles of weedkiller.

It is now almost a decade since Jenny rescued from this pitiful life, and on that day when she ceased her employment and walked out of that garden centre with me in tow, I thought briefly that my troubles were over. I at last had a mother who loved me, and who promised to protect me from my abusers. Yet, I am sad to say that my reprieve from suffering was all-too-brief. Although in the last few years I have had the opportunity to travel widely and to see things that I never dreamed of, I have also faced repeated victimization by those who cannot see the humanity that lies behind my delicate bear-like features.

The incidents of abuse have been many, and my tormentors too numerous to list. The litany of torture I have faced has included being hurled from a third floor window into the bushes by a drunken student, and an attempted kidnapping by a Mayan seven-year old, from whose sticky little hands I was barely able to escape. It is only in recent weeks, however, that my hitherto fragile faith in humanity has been completely and irrevocably shattered. Jen, who has for years been my only friend and protector, abandoned me, leaving me buried under her bed as she took off east. Crushed between old notebooks and discarded pieces of junk, I sobbed quietly as I lay there, completely forgotten.

Admittedly, Jen realised her mistake and sent for me, and after a traumatic but fortunately brief excursion across the Midlands in a postman's van, I was delivered into the care of an unkempt-looking fellow named Jon, of whom I was immediately suspicious. I had encountered this Jon many times before in the past few years, and every time Jen was not there to protect me he had turned his unwanted attentions upon me. Taunting, squishing, unwanted touching, nothing was too much for this monster. Fortunately, this time he was not inspired to torture, for he delivered me safely into the care of my mother in Prague without being tempted to unwrap me from the sheet of paper inside of which I cowered in fear.

My suspicion of Jon, however, was well-placed; for he, along with his cackling accomplice, a girl named Katie who has also frequently in the past delighted herself in my pain, was of course not content to leave me in peace. Once Jenny had gone out, the two pounced, with Katie taking photographs of my degradation as the hideous Jon amused himself at my expense. First they got me drunk on black cherry cordial, then the abuse became ever crueller, with them squashing my head into my neck before hanging me from a lamp by the string of my tag in a mock-suicide.

To show the abuse I faced, I have taken the difficult decision to post the photos that were taken of my suffering. This will show that I am no crazed fantasist, but a genuine victim of the sadism of those who are more like beasts than men.

So far, Katie and Jon have faced no censure for their behaviour other than a mild rebuke from Jenny, who has once again promised to protect me from all those who wish to harm me. Given her woeful neglect of my welfare in the past few weeks, I cannot dare to believe that she will succeed. It is my hope, dear blog readers, that you will offer me some solace with your kind comments in this, my hour of need.

Yours,

Gunther

Cake

2009-01-19T15:08:00.000-08:00

And so to the post about cake, because cake, not money, indeed makes the world go round. This is fortunate given that a cursory look at the Guardian website indicates that the UK banking system is once again facing into impending doom. Admittedly, this development is itself unfortunate as it may precipitate further falls in the pound that will make it more difficult for me to buy cake, but I remain confident that a cake-centred philosophy will enable me to overcome any difficulty that comes my way.

Anyway, I have been delighted to find that my preconceptions about central European cities being hotbeds of baked delights are indeed true, for cake in Prague is delicious, and despite the continuing slide of my fair nation into financial decrepitude, remains comparatively cheap.

In particular, I have found myself rather taken by 'Cafe Louvre,' which is an elegant turn of the century Art Nouveau cafe that was once the favourite haunt of luminaries such as Einstein and Kafka. Although its history was, as the.....'dramatically interrupted' by the Communist takeover in 1948 (i.e. they threw all the furniture out of the window and closed the place down), it is now back and is once again serving an array of delights. So far, I have sampled the Black Forest Gateau, the Honey Cake, the Sachertorte and a delicious Poppy Seed and Plum Strudel. I originally intended to take a photo of each of these and have 'cake updates,' but have been forgetful, and so I only have a photo of the first for you to slobber at, as well as this picture of a group of us at Cafe Louvre.

Just know, indeed, that there is cake, and it is good.

Let Us Drink To Moister Laps

2009-01-19T14:11:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the lack of updates - I sense the pattern of this blog might be complete inactivity for a few days and then a torrent of posts, making both of my initial predictions of its fate simultaneously true. This may mean that I share the clairvoyant powers of today's blog subject, a thought which is not entirely reassuring.

Today, I would like to introduce you to George. Not my father, who was rather disappointed to find out that for once my comment about sixty-year old disruptive influences was not referring to him. It does however refer to another George, who is pictured above with myself and my flatmate Kate. George (Jiři in Czech, but known to English and Czech alike at Oxford TEFL by his anglicized name) is one of our language students, and is both a comic genius and a complete and utter eccentric. Needless to say he provides English teachers with a lot of entertainment.

At the school where I am training, our students/guinea pigs are locals who pay a minimal fee to experience attend classes taught by a revolving series of trainee English teachers. As each class is held four times a week (although few attend that often), most students tend only to come for a few months. George, however, has been diligently attending evening English classes every month for five years and is a veritable Oxford TEFL legend. His English is not as good as this fact may lead one to believe, but he is very gifted at using it for nefarious purposes, many of which, despite the fact that he has been married for 25 years, involve trying to charm ladies. George is also at the centre of the 'Konvikt' crew, which is the name of the group of teachers, trainees, students and assorted randomers that attend the legendary Thursday pub night, and he organises various socials and trips throughout the year.

Here are a few of George's gems so far. Picture the following coming from the mouth of a sixty-year old man wearing a black and white striped jumper and a rather natty leather waistcoast, accompanied with florid gesticulation, numerous pauses and pensive looks at the sky.

In the lessons:

- 'Yes, she go to Morocco last summer, and she....she was slave' (in class, when asked a question about the lady next to him's worst experience travelling. Needless to say this was not indeed true).
- 'I say Paul bad word because I fall asleep in his lesson and he do not wake me up. All my money goes poof out of window when I am sleeping' (he had indeed dozed off earlier in one of my colleagues' lessons).
- 'No, I am not good today. It is full moon, so nothing is good. People are like wolves and they are not well. Everything is bad' (when asked how he was at the beginning of a class).

At the pub:

- 'Ah, beer. Beer is good. Yes, for ladies beer is very good for chest.'
- 'I am clairvoyant, I am hearing things from sky gods. No, I cannot say. I have signed a contract so I must....I must keep it silent.'
- 'We must drink to moister laps' (George's favourite 'cheers.' David, our Course Director, was previously unsure if George thought he was saying 'moister lips,' but when questioning him on Thursday we ascertained that this was not the case).
- 'Nádraži' (the version of 'cheers' that George teaches the trainees to say. I have since found out that this translates as 'train station,' with the correct form of 'cheers' actually being 'na zdravi).

If you can speak Czech, more of George's unadulterated wisdom can be found at the Konvikt blog, which is at http://konvikt.blog.cz/ (Martina, please read it and tell me what it says!) English speakers can find the useful chat up phrases that we taught George last Thursday faithfully reproduced, as well as a link to George's Picasa web albums which contain lots of pictures of Konvikt carnage.

Tā mē ceart go lōir

2009-01-12T16:57:00.000-08:00

One of the many requirements of us as students on the Trinity CertTESOL course is that we spend four hours learning an unfamiliar language in complete immersion classes and then submit a reflective journal about the experience. In itself, this is really quite sensible, as it gives us some idea of how beginners in English feel and watching the teacher gives us some useful ideas on how to teach without using the students' first language in lessons at all.

However, it would surely seem logical, would it not, for this unknown language to be Czech? It's sufficiently scary (7 cases, people) to satisfy Trinity's exacting requirements, none of the students on the course are already able to speak it, and, most importantly, it is the language spoken in the beautiful city we are living in. But no, oh no. That would be far too logical. So, rather than learning basic Czech, we, my friends, have instead had a crash course in Gaeilge, more commonly known to the world as Irish Gaelic.

Whilst I am not altogether sure when my newfound Gaeilge will come in useful, I have to admit that it is a pretty amazing language. Whilst nobody would claim that English is itself a phoentic language, the Irish do not even bother to pretend that the spelling of a word should have any bearing at all on its pronunciation, meaning that for one written sound there are a dizzying and bewildering array of possible pronunciations, each more implausible than the last. How, for example, would you pronounce the word for goat, 'gabhar?' Gab-har? Gabber? Gay-bar? Nope, you pronounce it 'gower.' In defence of Irish, however, it must be said that these phonological idiosyncracies are combined with some pretty fantastic words. My particular favourites are ceart go lōir (cark'ha'lour), which is Gaelic for OK and fēilicheāin (fai'le'horrn), the very lovely Irish word for butterfly. Also good are Irish greetings. Like in many other languages, the standard Irish hello, dia dhuit, literally translates as 'God be with you.' The reply to this, however, is dia's muire dhuit which is 'God and Mary be with you,' and particulary devout Catholics can continue to greet each other indefinitely by simply adding on the names of more and more saints. What's not to love?

Sadly, my adventures in Gaeilge are now over, as our Unknown Language Journals were completed and handed in to Sinēad, our Irish teacher, at 11.15am this morning (no, I did not miss the deadline and yes, I was up until the small hours writing it). I am actually quite sad, and will miss my daily adventures in leprechaun muchly. I should probably attempt to substitute it with a bit of Czech though, or Russian, and Chinese, given that these are languages I will actually need in the short and medium term.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts about sixty-year old disruptive influences, the joys of central European cake (a post that shall be particularly lovingly written), and, of course, the hopeful return of a lost and lonely little bear. There will, I promise mum, also finally be a post about teaching at some point. And there will definitely be new information for Jo about a certain Professor Strawberry.

A History of Czechs in 68 Minutes

2009-01-12T16:00:00.000-08:00

Well, I did not necessarily expect that my second post on this blog would concern Czech theatre, but I absolutely have to post about the production I saw on Saturday night, A History of Czechs in 68 Minutes, which was a hilarious, ward-speed run through Czech history from the Big Bang to the present using a mixture of Czech, English, dressing-up costumes and intepretive dance. Myself and two of my flatmates, Kate and Kelly, went to see it on Saturday with Lucia and Marcela, two Czech ladies we have met through the school, and all five of us were roaring with laughter.

The production was written and performed by a small theatre company and took place in a small and rather cool little theatre that is tucked away in a back street behind Old Town Square. Given that the theatre was full of Czechs rather than tourists I'm not sure why half they perform half of the show in English, but it certainly made it easier for us to understand what was going on. Then again, who needs lanaguage anyway when your revolving cast of characters includes the guy who founded Bohemia after he decided that the nearby hill resembled a pair of breasts (Czech legend; said hill does actually exist), the first alcoholic Czech and the rather petulant fire that burnt both Jan Hus (fifteenth century) and the National Theatre (nineteenth century) but was unable to extinsguish the Czech spirit and so had to settle for prancing huffily around the stage wearing Ali G's cast-off tracksuits. And, of course, one of my all-time favourite historical nutcases, the wondrous Rudolf II (completely incompetent but utterly inspired 17th century Holy Roman Emperor whose castle in Prague was home to a motley crew of artists, poets, alchemists and astronomers with golden noses), who in a largely historically accurate depiction was mostly featured prancing around in a codpiece and maniacally stroking his face.

One of the best thing about the school is that it is very social; teachers, trainees and staff often socialise together and so we have had lots of opportunities to get to know both our Czech students and the teachers who are currently working in Prague. Lucia is not currently attending classes at the school but is very involved with the Oxford TEFL social scene, and Marcela is one of my current students. Both are lovely, and it was really kind of them to invite us along to this performance - we'd never have known about things like this going on without local contacts.

Here is a picture of the five of us in the theatre bar. Marcela is on the far left and Lucia on the far right, and to my right are my two American flatmates, Kelly and Kate, who I will write more about later. Katie has unfortunately not been very well for the past few days (and I, supportively as ever, have as such dubbed her Snotty Cough-bags), and so decided not to come along on Saturday night. She's still sounding and feeling pretty crock, but hopefully will be on the right side of it soon.

Freezing in Prague

2009-01-09T11:00:00.000-08:00

As I'm sure will surprise absolutely nobody, I have been somewhat remiss in setting up this blog - it's now been almost a week since I arrived in the beautiful city of Prague, and yet nary a peep has been heard from me (sorry mum). The reasons for this are threefold: a heavy schedule of lessons, a pesky essay on Russia, Georgia and international institutions that I really should have finished before I got here, and, most importantly, cheap beer.

I shall write more details later, but suffice to say for now that the course is great and everybody here is lovely. Prague itself is absolutely beautiful - a somewhat strange mix of old, twisty streets, grand squares, the inevitable tourist shops selling marionettes, absinthe and and other assorted overpriced delights and, overlooking it all, some magnificently intimidating gothic piles that I can't wait to explore.

We have been very lucky as, unusually even for this time of year, the centre of the city has been blanketed with a lovely thick coating of snow for much of the last week. Unfortunately, the snow is now gone on the streets, but rather than melting into a sorry pile of grey mush, as happens in England, it has iced over into treacherous streaks of grey death, which make walking around very interesting. The temperature outside is also now about -7 degrees, which is excellent preparation for Siberia, but none too forgiving to stupid people who leave their beautiful fur-lined gloves at home and then decide to go for a random evening wander around the Old Town. If it had not been for the warmth provided by my little cup of gluhwein I think I would be typing this blog with my toes.

I have never written a blog before, so we shall see what becomes of this effort - it may be that it shall wither and die due to the aforementioned cheap beer, or it may be that I get a little obsessed with having my very own space to write about the travels and it ends up very long and boring indeed. Either way, family, friends, let me know if you have made it this far!