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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Irkutsk 40 million - Jenny 0

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....

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....

Concrete Rainbows and Beautiful Views

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

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.