Hammer Man

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.

Teddy McRubbish

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.

Advertising Genius

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.

Things That Freeze at -30 Degrees

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.)....

An Interesting Cultural Observation

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

A War on Trees

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).