IRISH MAN LOCKED IN A SAUSAGE FACTORY

Sorry for the title. This blog is just about my recent trip to Berlin. I didn't even eat any sausages, which, given the Germans' fine vegetarian sausage-making skills, was probably the wurst decision of my life (PUN!). But I needed to lure you in and I know all my readers yearn for phallic objects on a regular basis.

My trip to Berlin began with a consultation with the world’s most enlightened and progressive soul.  A kernel of knowledge. A whirlwind of wisdom.  An ethereal star in the cusp of the cosmos. His name was Shaikh Jalal, the Highest of All Spirits in the Midlands, and he spoke to me from the magazines of the Birmingham to Stansted train. Unfortunately, it was such a transient experience that I won’t be able to convey it in words to mongrel mortals like you, dear blog readers,  so therefore I shall merely post the photo and ask you to respect my deep religious convictions.

In the meantime, I have divided this post into several sections:

1. Last minute Berlin
2. The Dacha
3. Knives and casual psychopathy
4. Shake your ass!
5. SWEATY AIRPORT DRAMA

Feel free to read those which sound most sexy and appealing to your individual tastes.

Warmth, warmth

D

xx

Last minute Berlin

I came to Berlin to provide some distraction for a friend of mine in a difficult situation.  A kind-souled thirty-something Russian woman with a tendency towards depression and beautiful madness decided that inviting a little Irish boy to the city for a few days would be a good way to improve her mood. The conversation went like this:

‘I’m depressed again.’

‘Do you have money?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fly me over and let’s talk about it.’

A week later I was in Berlin. My friend greeted me with miniature bottles of wine and my very own welcome sign. Before I had even left the airport premises I understood something important about the city. Visually, everyone seemed to fall into four categories: gay, hipster, hippie, punk or a combination of the above. Of course, these categories are silly and superficial, but they help capture the atmosphere of the city centre: young people in various ‘subcultural’ styles with a semi-ironic friendliness. Not wide smiley friendliness and that Hollywood ‘I’m so happy to see you’ face, but a sort of pleasant ‘do whatever the fuck you want’ indifference. People smoked in the bars, drank on the streets, made music on all the corners and graffitied all the homes. I was never referred to as ‘Sie’ (the formal German word for ‘you’) for the duration of the four day stay. I was totally du'd.

My mood generally varied between feeling free and fabulous to wondering whether I was an imposter who would never be as hopelessly creative as the surrounding strangers. I didn't busk, I didn't have tattoos and my shoes were not a self-ironizing statement on post-colonialism in the Nile Delta. Luckily, the voice of reason and the fact that beers cost only one euro helped my self-confidence prevail. I was dressed in tweed and my glasses were nerdy, but in a world where everyone looks a bit hipster, being geeky was sort of...alternative. A middle-aged gent in a clothes shop even winked at me repeatedly like an epileptic on crack and told me I looked ‘suave’. I was flattered.

‘Dacha’

My friend --  let’s call her Betty -- immediately took me to a restaurant opposite her home. Its name is ‘dacha’. For my English-speaking readers I should explain this concept. A ‘dacha’ is a country house. It is the summer destination of almost all Russian families, who spend their winters locked up in their apartments in the frozen city and their summers frolicking in mother nature's breasts. The dacha is a source of fresh air, once-a-year contacts and plentiful harvests. An elderly Russian woman cannot claim to be a true babushka unless she has spent 3 months a year on her knees growing potatoes, making ‘kompot’ (a type of fruit juice) and blending jam for the winter. In the Soviet Union people were taught that hard labour is both a useful and cleansing experience and no one enjoys a bit of harvesting more than the pensioned classes.

This ‘dacha’, however, was no country house, but rather a cute restaurant where members of the Post-Soviet space and Russophiles gather to eat home cooking, drown themselves in dill* and drink vodka by the gram.

We ordered 100 grams of vodka and some dumplings (‘pel’meny’) and began to discuss the soul, the body and the mind. By the end of the night we had laid God and the Universe to rest. Everything made sense. Betty fell asleep drunk whilst hugging her cat. I stayed up late watching drag queens on youtube and feeling blessed.

*The Great Russian herb/weed which is applied to every meal because of its mythological healing properties. See: https://www.facebook.com/groups/186326061392049/?fref=ts

Knives and casual psychopathy

This is a picture of a knife cutting bread.
You're welcome.

‘Don’t you dare cut your own bread! You’ll kill yourself!’.

Betty banned me from cutting bread. She was afraid I might die. This is nothing new. I have spent a lot of my life dealing with terrible hand-eye coordination and to a certain extent I have developed ‘learned helplessness’. This is a process whereby a child learns that instead of performing certain fairly mundane tasks, he can receive help from sympathetic adults. I don’t have the best natural hand-eye coordination to begin with, but my problems were worsened by two defence mechanisms:

1. If you can’t do it, then pretend you never wanted to do it in the first place.
2. If you can’t do it, let others do it.

I never learned to tie my shoelaces. I was tired of being laughed at for my frustrated attempts. For eighteen years I pretended that I just prefered laceless shoes. During my adult life I gradually learnt the movements (thank you internet!), but along the way cute boys and sympathetic strangers stepped in to do it for me.  I was so embarrassed, I would pretend I was drunk or distracted. Somehow claiming I had alcoholic tendencies seemed less embarrassing than the truth. The same applied to many other vital practical skills: cooking, cycling, tying ties and participating in any form of coordinated movement.

Betty initially just wanted to get me the fuck away from bread. She observed my perilous cutting technique and immediately stepped in. After all, my health was at risk. Later on, during a conversation about these issues, she changed her mind and slowly taught me how to position my hands, which direction to cut and how to butter the bread. I wish I had had the courage to demand this kind of patience from people when I was younger. But then again, delayed learning leads to waves of delayed pride. Life is somehow amazingly beautiful when at 22 years of age you walk out onto the streets of Berlin with your head held high at the thought that -- finally- you have become a bread-chopping ninja. Tis the little things...

During the course of my stay, Betty also introduced me to another psychological ‘trick’. In Russian the slang term ‘психовать’** (Psikhovat’) describes a state of temporary insanity wherein an individual acts like a bit of a hysterical crazy person. Betty believes that it is important for highly emotional or creative people to take half an hour a day to be insane. That way we can let our energy out gradually and in a stable manner rather than festering until we explode and spend four days eating pie on the floor and hating ourselves. As a result, for half an hour each day Betty and I took time to do ‘insane’ things: cry hysterically in the corner, have existential monologues with the cat, lick household objects, write mad poems, swear at the universe, dance in ridiculous and exotic patterns and generally feel free. After 30 minutes the insanity egg timer would go off and we would continue our serious affairs. I put on my tweed jacket and my indifferent Russian bitch-face and went off to admire local graffiti and meet natives through tinder and couchsurfing; Betty continued her work as a translator, read literature and drank gin.

**(I needn’t explain the link between the word ‘psycho’ and ‘psikhovat’, making this, unfortunately, a very unkind and stigmatic word for the mentally ill, but one which Betty, having suffering from mental illness, has re-appropriated for herself. I would compare this to the members of the LGBT+ community who reclaimed ‘queer’ to mean something inclusive rather than discriminatory, but I’m not sure whether it was a conscious decision on her part or just another example of her fabulous sense of irony.)
***We psikhovatted separately and at different times of the day. One must coordinate one's madness.

Shake your ass!

One of the most memorable Berlin encounters occurred in the middle of the night in a corner bar.  I woke up at 11.57 pm with a disorientated feeling that I had left something undone or forgotten something important.  

Betty was lurking drunk in the darkness.

‘Daniel, I’ve just been to a bar with a strange American man. Come with me immediately!”

We soon became the long lost table buddies of a group of eclectic strangers. Behind the bar stood a French man who had lived in Kiev for many fears  and was now rhymically pouring free drinks past closing time and singing along to the Russian bard, Vladimir Vysotsky. Betty almost fell from her chair in delight: unidentified Frenchie was sexy, stubbly, edgy and sweet. He could even throw together a few fairly coherent Russian sentences. In the mood lighting and under the increasing influence of wine, it seemed that they were the perfect couple.  I hope one day they reproduce and make copious amounts of culturally savvy multinational babies. But we shall see.

Drunk Ginsberg man told me that if I did nothing else in my life I should listen to this Cape Verdean woman. I did. She made me cry with beauty. 

Our other drunken soul mates were an impossibly lively blues singer from New York,  a drunken Ginsbergian type who looked like he would say deeply profound things if he wasn’t completely off his tits, an Irish man who had previously studied English literature in Oxford and a German girl who did nothing but stare enamoured into the former’s milky, milky eyes. Having vowed to always be honest to strangers (the ‘if you don’t like me, kindly piss off’ philosophy), when asked why I intermitted from Cambridge I replied that I was depressed and everything felt empty. This led to a very odd conversation wherein the intoxicated blues singer repeatedly told me that he can’t imagine that such a thing like depression exists and that yes, he has had sad moments, but he has developed the perfect defence mechanism:

‘Every time I feel sad,  I just shake my mother-fucking-ass.’

I didn’t try to explain the biological foundation of depression, but instead chose to just smile along as he sang many a song about ass shaking. Sometimes it’s just not worth it. And who am I to judge such an approach to life? I wish I could get horribly sad, write beautiful heart-wrenching poetry from the depths of the soul and then, when I felt tired, just gently frisk my derriere in order to return to a life-loving mood. Alas, things aren’t that easy.

We soon parted in mild frustration. I was annoyed that I had missed my chance to have a meaningful table conversation with my co-patriot (the noise and the enamoured girl were unsurmountable obstacles), Betty was drunk and tired of ass-shaking man. There is a limit to booty vibration.

SWEATY AIRPORT DRAMA

Unfortunately, I must leave many pieces of my experience in Berlin untouched. I could tell you more about the nice Russian man who made me laugh for hours, or the multi-lingual Spanish actor who loved Slavic culture so much that sometimes he pretended that he was the orphan of a gypsy woman from Dnepropetrovsk, or the Icelandic trucker, or the Slovak who lived on the street where ‘das Leben der Anderen’ was filmed, made me cocktails and told me about the parallel universe theory. But unfortunately, those things may have to await a future blog. I’m tired and even my fingernails smell of coffee.

Therefore I shall end my Berlin narrative with a brief image of my airport stress.

Imagine the following:

2 hours of sleep.

Rush hour in June.

Lack of cash.

Losing your boarding pass in your back pocket.

Disapproving stares from pensioners as you frantically search through your luggage on public transport.

Running to the front of the queue and apologising profusely to German strangers.

Dropping your passport 6-8 times.

Sweating like a nun in a sex shop.

Falling asleep in an upright position.  

It wasn’t pretty, but I made it home.

And I will always be grateful to the nice Russian Betty who took me into her life for four nights, showed me some beautiful corners of Berlin and taught be to ‘act insane’ for half an hour a day. I expect this shall be a useful skill.

News from Vladi-bloody-vostok

Владивосток

An attempt at photographing my first sunset of the Pacific Ocean.
Although, it turned out to be just a bay, not the ocean.
Minor fail.

It’s 4 am in a kitchen in Vladivostok: the Asian end of the Russian ‘Eurasian’ dream. I haven’t eaten any fruit in days, my body clock is dangling between mildly and moderately screwed and all I have is coffee, cheap pasta and the burdensome company of itinerant workers who, unfortunately, are really starting to get on my tits. In Russia most hostels aren’t what we expect in England: a space for young travellers to gather, consume alcohol and exchange ideas. You’re unlikely to see any drunk Australian demi-poets talking about the meaning in a Finnish girl’s eyes. You won’t see that one American girl who thinks that Florence ‘totally changed her life’. There will be no Columbians eating pie, no French people staring at you with disdain from a chaise-longue, no Germans with maps and no Brazilians singing about saudades. You will, however, probably end up in the natural habitat of a certain breed of Russian man: the good old Muzhik. The kind of man who will invite you to drink beer from a plastic bottle, who will end every sentence in an expletive, who will loudly talk to his wife on skype in the middle of the night and who will confuse Ireland with Iceland, Finland, Holland and any other country ending in ‘land’. 

Over my Russian voyages in the last years I have developed a way to cope with such men, the grand frequenters of hostels and trains from Kiev to Moscow and Novosibirsk to Riga:

1)    Accept one beer. Then pretend to be tired and use the force of the alcohol to induce sleep as you rock yourself into the foetal position.

2)    Let them stroke your pride as they tell you how wonderful your Russian is. Nod slowly and use your most masculine, indifferent voice to reply ‘ну да’ (well, yes) and ‘понятно’ (I understand).

3)    Do not mention your gayness. It will only confuse them. They probably won’t hurt you if you are in a train or a hostel, but they might spin you some story about how homosexuality is illegal in Russia (it’s actually perfectly legal^[1]) or start miming female breasts, cackling and asking why you don’t like them. Instead you may claim that your penchant for academia means you have no time for study. This works for me because I have glasses and carry books around, but it can lead to conversations about how breasts and vaginas are necessary for life, no matter how many poems you read (see miming mentioned above). Alternatively, you can invent a fictional girlfriend. Mine is an accountant called Yulia Petrovna. She enjoys table tennis and good wine.  Make sure not to show them a picture of Yulia, though. Because then they might mime her breasts again.

4)    Do not accept their poor-quality meat. It will give you cancer. Unless, like me, you’re poor, hungry and an inconsistent vegetarian. In which case, eat cancer. It goes well with black bread, sugary tea and garlic sauce from a tube.

5)    At a certain point in the scale of sobriety to the vodka nirvana, you may just have to sit back and listen to them quote Russian poetry. That man might work as a lorry driver and know more about fishing for sturgeon than the finer details of art, but he will recite more delicate poems off by heart than you will ever learn. #sovieteducation

I'm at the bit that says 'владивосток'. I can smell North Korea from here.

Nonetheless, despite these provisional tips, you may not be successful in retaining your calm. If so, remember that all of this will be funny in retrospect. On a cold night in January 2014 I didn’t enjoy my taxi driver’s advice about women and vodka, but now it is one of my most memorable quotes. Seeing that I was struggling to breathe under an unstoppable cough, the nice driver turned to me and told me that the best solution was to ‘grab a bottle of vodka, shove a red chilli pepper in the bottom, leave it overnight and go to sleep. Then tomorrow, get up, drink the bottle and fuck your girlfriend. You’ll be cured.’ Now every time I get ill, I know exactly what to do.

But I digress. Let’s answer the questions you have been asking me, dear readers!

1. Richard, Texas: What are you doing in Vladivostok?

Mainly I am failing to understand the concept of time. I’ve never been jetlagged before, so this is very new. Nonetheless, I am finding it quite entertaining. There is something about having an unpredictable sleeping pattern which enhances the sense of adventure: I only make plans for the next few hours rather than for the next few days, because I have absolutely no concept of when I will sleep, at what time I will get up and what shall awake me. I could awake to an empty city in rain, a scorching midday bustle, a Japanese tourist frantically packing his suitcase, a hysterically chuckling Uzbek or another Russian man shouting down the telephone to his mother (conveniently forgetting to end every sentence in ‘whore’ (блядь) like he normally does).

Otherwise, I am spending almost all of my time alone and in joy. I have dreamt about coming here for a long time. At the risk of sounding sentimental, since I started learning Russian about three and a half years ago, Vladivostok has always seemed like the culmination of my goals: the proof that mastery of this difficult language will literally take you to the end of the earth. I call almost smell North Korea from my window sill. *cue Dawson creek theme music, add extra violins, mood lighting and a dwarf grating cheese*. 

I saved a lot of money to get here; I studied vocabulary and grammar for eight hours a day back in the beginning; I got used to eating things that look like human waste (‘GRECHKA? WHAT EVEN ARE YOU?’), and I made a huge effort of mind and soul. As a result, simple things have been leaving me in hysterical tears of joy. A swing at sunrise? Tears. A bridge over the hills? Tears. Looking at that huge map of the USSR on the wall? Tears. Discovering that in this part of the world they sell hot coffee in cans? HYSTERICAL TEARS.

Although, to be fair, the idea of having coffee named ‘LET’S BE mild’ probably would have reduced me to tears even in England. It sounds like a Christian advertising campaign for sex in the missionary position.

The hot coffee in a can which brought my jetlagged self to hysterical laughter beside a Russian Orthodox church..

2. Imaginary question asker #1: How did you get here?

On an 8 hour plane journey from Moscow. I could have gone by train, but having experienced countless overnight ‘Platzkart’ journeys in Russia over the last year, the appeal of the Trans-Siberian Railway has diminished somewhat. The idea of being on a train full of muzhiki for a week with no proper hygiene facilities and a diet consisting of ready-made pasta, rubbery ham and noodles, makes me want to inject myself with ebola instead. I’ll wait a few years, find a husband who speaks no Russian and then take him on the Trans-Siberian with me. Then at least it will be entertaining. I enjoy laughing at other people’s misfortunes.

It was also the perfect excuse to listen to this terrible Russian pop song that I discovered when I first began learning Russian. The lyrics of which run:

‘Мне очень жаль, моя любовь. Я улечу Москва- Владивосток”.

‘I’m very sorry, my love. But I am flying from Moscow to Vladivostok.’

Initially, however, I had misheard the lyrics as:

“Мне очень жарко, моя любовь. Я улечу Москва- Владивосток.”

‘I’m very warm, my love. I am flying from Moscow to Vladivostok’.

I interpreted this as a pretty extreme alternative to installing air-conditioning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVGsWLGqJ4A

3. Imaginary question asker #2: What do you plan to do for the rest of the time?

I plan to barbecue on the Pacific Ocean, eat borscht, take a train to Khabarovsk and search the Jewish Autonomous Oblast’ for the last remaining Jew.

4.  Lenneke, Amsterdam: Are people more Asian or European?

Whether Russians are more European or Asian is a good question for a lifetime of investigation and pondering. Consult Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy advisors and Masha at the cake shop for the definitive answer. I’ll tackle another question instead.

So far, it seems there is no significant difference between the Russians in Vladivostok and the Russians in some small town near Moscow or Saint Petersburg. Perhaps I will be proven wrong with time, but my first impression at the airport was that I had arrived in just another normal Russian city: the same fresh May rain, the same Soviet architecture, the same shops, the same people, the same accent, the same programmes on the television, the same news of Ukraine and NATO. There are a few more Asians than in the rest of Russia (despite massive deportations during Soviet times^[2]), more people learning Chinese or going to Japan to buy cars, but this place is more amazing in its ability to be similar rather than its difference. We are 9000 km and week-long train journey from Moscow and yet most Russians here still think and act the same.

Some art from the conference of Far East Tourism which I attended by accident. 

4. General cry of facebook friends: what have you done so far?

Apart from crying hysterically at inanimate objects, I have:

a.    Visited an egalitarian Vladivostok sex shop.

b.    Been to a conference about tourism in the Far East, where I watched Malaysian dancing, wondered at Asian calligraphy and listened to a woman very persuasively arguing that I should learn Chinese immediately.

c.    Attended an underground bar, where they only open the door to familiar faces and play alternative films all day long. The woman behind the counter said she thought I sounded like I came from Moscow and my heart melted with pride.

d.    Fallen asleep under the sun on a pebble beach.

e.    Danced beside the Pacific Ocean (see bad pop above). 

f.     Prepared a visiting French couple for their train trip to Moscow with the following advice: ‘It’s going to be terrible, no one on the train will speak English, you will probably get lost constantly, you may be forced to eat more sunflower seeds than is humane and proper, and you will be very, very sweaty because some Russian babushka will be scared that if you open the window the draught will kill you all. But you will love the experience and remember it until you die.’

The egalitarian sex shop in central Vladivostok.

5. Inner voice of self-critique: When can we get a proper blog that isn’t just a silly question and answer section?

Over the last year I have developed an irrational anxiety disorder related towards writing, meaning that my blog had to stop very promptly. So even this very basic article is an important step in the road towards my goal of not fearing the things I love. If you want an explanation of my psychological complexes, please send me a personal message. I can write you a small novel of fuck ups with details of all the bends in the mental road. You’ll probably feel much better about yourself afterwards.

Since my last post, I have visited nudist beaches in Ukraine, fallen in love in Amsterdam, been shot at by rubber bullets, travelled to the grand smoke of Magnitogorsk and driven through Italy in the back of strangers’ cars. None of these experiences have found their voice yet, but I hope that this little introduction to writing will allow me to slowly piece together these experiences. In the meantime, this is only a taster. You may feel free to lick your screens.

Love love,

D.

P.S. Blogs about my recent trips to Moscow, Saint Petersburg and France may follow soon. The exact date?  Ask the wind.

---

^[1] Although talking to someone under 18 about the existence of homosexuality or other ‘non-traditional sexual relations’ in a positive light is considered ‘propaganda’ and therefore a crime.

^[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Koreans_in_the_Soviet_Union

Waiting for Spring: 4) Kazan

Why? When? 

The relatively new 'Temple of all Regions' outside Kazan

A myth was formed around Kazan from the first time I heard the name. It was depicted to me as a hub of beautiful architecture, educated citizens and an interesting mix of 'Mongol' and Russian culture, where a mosque and a kremlin could peacefully exist together as the symbol of the city. It was promised to be the 'third capital' of Russia and the centre of one of the country's most important economic regions: Tatarstan. When inquiring about the city, I received no negative comments: an acquaintance who had grown up there told me that it was one of the most sophisticated parts of Russia; countless people from Krasnodar to Minsk told me that they dreamed of going there...

I planned to travel from Yekaterinburg to Moscow by train, and Kazan was the ideal resting point in between: I wouldn't have to spend a whole day travelling. Yet I hesitated to visit the city: too many positive comments made me feel intimidated. What if it wasn't actually that beautiful? What if I couldn't enjoy it because I was supposed to? What if it just didn't feel right for me?

To be quite honest, I was wary of Kazan for the same reasons I am sometimes wary of France. Everybody loves France. Everybody learns French.  Everybody speaks well of French cuisine. Everybody thinks their language is beautiful, everybody adores French philosophy and everybody seems to dream of romantic holidays glugging wine on the Seine. As a result, in my perception France immediately loses a certain quantity of beauty: it becomes a standard given beauty, rather than the unexpected, the new and the adventurous beauty I prefer. When I spend time in France, I actually quite like it, but when I think about France, I get a bizarre feeling of dread and ennui. I have always respected its citizens as I would any human being, I learned its language as enthusiastically as I could muster in my school days (even winning in a French language debating competition), listened to its music, travelled to the country... But something didn't quite click: It's a beautiful place, but it's not my beautiful place. It doesn't quite make me feel at ease. It doesn't thrill me or speak to me like other places can. This isn't a rational standpoint; it is more romantic and instinctive. My psychology rests more peacefully in other climes...

My instinct told me that the time wasn't right to visit Kazan. At first, I tried to go against this foreboding, irrational feeling: I made plans to get up early in the morning and buy the train ticket well in advance at the station, so that I would definitely leave that evening. Instead I slept sixteen hours and woke up nauseous and unsettled. The next day, instead of attempting to buy the train ticket again, I ended up going back to Magnitogorsk  -- for the second time – because my story of that place felt incomplete and still compelled me, whereas there was something premature and unpleasant about my plans for Kazan.

A digression on train stations

I should, at this point, make a little detour and explain why it is often very important to go to the train station in advance:  depending on circumstances, buying a ticket at a Russian station can take between ten minutes and an hour. If you stand in the queue for the ticket desk, you have to make sure that said queue won't just randomly stop working in a few minutes time. All the ticket desks have their schedule written on a sheet of paper stuck to the corner of the glass screen. A first time train traveller is unlikely to notice this schedule, but nonetheless you must always check it before you even start queuing, otherwise you might queue twenty minutes, with frustratingly slow crowds of people in front of you, and then finally, when it's your turn, realize that the desk is closing in thirty seconds ('Sorry, young man, this desk always closes at 20:36!'). The staff will refuse to serve you. The poor guys just want to go home.

If you do manage to get to a ticket desk that is open, your status as a foreigner can still create confusion as the ticket seller looks through your passport trying to find the details needed for the system. Moreover, if you are hesitant at speaking Russian and don't say your request immediately, the person behind you will probably just brush past and take your spot. Everybody hates a time waster. In the best case, a kind-faced, bemused stranger will look at you like an alien and exclaim: 'What are you so shy for?' ("Че стесняетесь?")

The alternative is, of course, the ticket machines. These, however, are very frustrating and may lead to finger bleeding and grievous bodily harm. They look like innocent little touch screens. You would expect to just lightly press the buttons with your soft, delicate fingers and then frolic off joyously clutching your choo-choo ticket. But no. This is Russia. The machines require you to suffer to earn your ticket. You're expected to press the buttons not with your fingers, but with your nails. And if you don't have any real nails to talk of, then tough, it's going to be a hard, painful procedure. I normally feel like crying half way through. There is something distinctly unpleasant about the sensation of repeatedly pressing my short, ineffective nails against the hard screen. The only thing that keeps me going is the unpredictability of the queues. The machines may inflict physical discomfort, but they are at least predictable, and normally always unoccupied. The queues, on the other hand, are like the great shifting sands of the Sahara: theirs changes in form and size are both majestic and unexpected, presumably corresponding with the patterns of the wind. 

Let us for a minute imagine a pretty standard ticket desk situation. Put your mind and soul into the body of the feeble ticket tourist, breathe deeply, activate your senses, feel your chi and give yourself up to the following scene: You walk through the security gate, pick up your heavy black rucksack from the scanner, turn your head in search of the needed desk and navigate your glance through crowds of standing people, kiosks selling magazines and children sitting on suitcases. Eventually, you spot a far off desk and take joy in the fact that there's only one kind-featured older figure getting served. You instinctively go to this queue, skipping in your luck. They'll be quicker than that other quite substantial line to your right, you think, and proceed to wait.

Nope.

That's a bad assumption.

Sorry, but you have been fooled.

The humble citizen’s procedure will inevitably take a total of fourteen minutes as they:

1) ask for a refund of an old ticket

2) inquire about luggage policies and whether they need to buy insurance 

3) wonder whether there is an adequate on-board buffet

4) ask for seats in carriage 4, away from the toilets, in the lower bunk, with bedding provided, for the train between Moscow and Irkutsk on the 14th April at 16.05pm, which, frustratingly, is about 4 months in advance, when you just need your ticket, here, now, for the next available train which is leaving at... well, pretty much immediately really.

Moreover, you may get to the end of the queue only to realize that you don't have enough cash at hand (prices on the internet sometimes don't correspond to prices at the station). You can't pay the ticket seller by card. The only place you can pay by card is at the ticket machine and you gave up on that deliberately, because your fingers were bleeding. Oh, and you thought maybe you could ask the ticket seller for advice. But that is also a dangerous game. Sometimes they are genuinely lovely and very helpful, giving you a long list of options. Sometimes they look so fed up with their job that your question about the best seat for your journey provokes a reaction as if you have just said the stupidest thing in the world. You have literally just asked them whether the moon is really that big, whether Yeltsin is still president and whether Petrozavodsk is the capital of Russia. Either that or you've spilt wine over their cream carpet, accidentally neutered their poodle and shat on their doorstep.

Occasionally there are queues of twenty or thirty people that move swiftly, with German-style efficiency. But these queues are like a mirage in the desert. They only ever seem to happen to the people in the queue beside you. Trust me, you will never actually be in one of these queues. They are merely created by ultra-nationalist terrorists to piss off foreigners. They are a huge conspiracy. Do not believe your eyes. They are deceiving you. Just bludgeon your fingers on the machines instead. Much more efficient. Oh, and you'll have cool 'war scars' to show the grandchildren.

....

Actually, maybe it's not that horrific. But still: be prepared.

Fifteen empty beds

 

Sludge

More sludge

I went to Kazan in the end. At my own pace, when I sensed that I had become comfortable with the situation, that it didn't matter whether I would like it or not, and when I felt that I was ready to make that step: leaving the Urals would be taking me towards Moscow and St. Petersburg and would tacitly confirm that my pre-Spring journey through Russia wasn't permanent: that I had to go back to Krasnodar at some point and that these adventures would have an end.

I arrived in Kazan to coincide with a sudden warm-up in the weather. While it was still in the minus teens and twenties in Yekaterinburg, here the snow was melting. The city was covered in a mess of dirty sludge and icicles were precariously falling from the roofs. The street surfaces were ugly and brown and given that the avenues and roads were quite wide, this browness stung the eye. The elegantly designed building facades looked pale under a permanently dull sky. It was obvious that the ill-intentioned weather had reached a peak in its conniving plans to spoil the city's beauty. 

To make things worse, I had given my friend S. back his supernaturally efficient snow boots and was now wearing a pair of old, shabby winter shoes with loose soles I had bought for a trip to the Alps when I was seventeen. They were not watertight enough for the piles of snow and the sludge splashes that passing cars inflicted. Precarious icicles if you walk too close to the buildings, flying sludge puddles if you walk too close to the road, and wet feet in any circumstance. It wasn't a particularly good start to my visit.

The cheapest hostel I could find was also not exactly the epitome of travelling spirit. A good hostel is a place where adventurous travellers slum it together: casting off the luxuries of the world to appreciate the small things in life, to teach each other about music and varying philosophies and their different countries of origin and destination. They are places where you can feel free to be yourself, because everyone gives off a quiet aura of acceptance: they allow the different to be different. Pressures evaporate and you feel at home in a foreign country. I appreciate that these kinds of untainted, idealistic hostels are pretty rare, but I hoped that I would at least meet one or two impassioned travellers over a cup of coffee and talk about what inspired us to come to the middle of Russia at the end of winter.... That, in the end, turned out to be the problem. No-one actually comes to the middle of Russia in the winter! At least not very many travellers. I think I saw one Uzbek family in the other room, but my 16-bed dorm was just that: a 16-bed dorm. Tumbleweed. I was the only guest.

I locked my possessions in my room and wondered what I should do. I decided I would immediately try to make friends in the city. I would test how charming and educated they could actually be. I didn't have the patience for finding someone on couchsurfing. I needed something more immediate. After all, I am not a visual person. The tactile and aural sides of my personality and memory are much more developed. Whereas a beautiful voice, the warmth of my bed or the strokes of a massage can lead me into a semi-orgasmic trance, I rarely get a huge wave of euphoria from seeing a beautiful building. There has to be a context behind the building to make me really appreciate its beauty: whether it be the harmonious voice of a good-hearted person explaining to me the characteristics of the beauty and why it is relevant to their life, or a musical soundtrack played on to the beauty, or a feeling of overwhelming, heightened romanticism caused by such temporary afflictions as literature or falling in love. I decided I needed to meet someone to show me the architecture, to draw emphasis on the little moments of genius in the city's structure and to draw my eyes away from the gaping sludge.

Luckily, being homosexual can prove a great advantage to travellers. Firstly, LGBT+ communities in countries with higher levels of oppression can be very welcoming of outsiders and form supportive communities to survive. Not always – you should always be very cautious – but often. Secondly, in the 'gay world' the use of smartphone apps for meeting people is much more widespread. Obviously, we all know of the infamous/useful/bug-ridden (delete as appropriate) app 'grindr', which literally tells you how far away the closest men with homosexual inclinations are. Whereas grindr has gained a reputation as being mainly for people looking for immediate sex (and other people use okcupid and all those lovey dovey sites), in Russia there is another app which is much more widespread and a lot less sex-driven. Its name is Hornet. It beats Grindr in several key ways:

1) It shows more than one picture of your future date/conversation partner/tennis buddy

2) It allows you to save favourites

3) It allows you to 'investigate' who is in a certain city by dropping a pin on the virtual map. Meaning if you get bored one evening, you can just spend hours travelling the world with that urging question in your mind of: 'What do the online gays in Tokio/Rio De Janeiro/ Istanbul/ Ulan Batоr look like?'

4) It allows you to easily scroll between users

5) In Russia nobody uses Grindr and most users of Hornet don't even know what it is

6) You may occasionally get sent a foreskin-frothy penis picture by an older gentleman, offering you to be his sex slave, but in general it has quite a lot of open-minded people who are just looking for conversation partners, friends or boyfriends. After all, in Russia there are very few open places for meeting partners for LGBT+ people. The internet is key.

Within an hour I had arranged to meet Gleb, a twenty-something year old guy from the suburbs, who was in a stable relationship and simply intrigued at the idea of meeting a foreigner. Oh, and hopefully at the idea of meeting me too. I try to sound interesting on the internet for things other than my foreigness, as being exotic is a pretty shallow trait. I normally don't write that I'm not from Russia until half way through the conversation as I don't want to make friends for being the novelty westener. I don't particularly identify with a western, Irish or British persona: I understand that my upbringing and education have had a huge effect on me, placing me in a certain mentality and scale of cultural and psychological values that I will probably never transcend, but I try to base my development in life on broader, more general human values. I don't want to be a nationality. I don't want to be a country. I don't want to be an accent. I want to be a good, intelligent, valued person. I have a strong dislike for 'patriotism' across the world. It seems stupid to love your state. 

I prefer a more pragmatic approach to any government. Never get complacent as love for your country can easily turn into a superiority complex: thinking that you are better than other 'races' or nations or blindly praising the state. It's important to love who you are (and that often involves learning to love, or at least accept, your roots and the place you were born), but it is also important to love the world as a whole. But that's another topic and I won't digress. You, on the other hand, can feel free to go ahead and write a dissertation on whether you agree with Samuel Johnson's statement that 'patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'. Come on. You know you want to. I accept applications via pigeon mail or carried on the backs of butterflies.

Black to Gleb, whose name rhymes with 'Khleb' (bread).

'What's your name?' I asked when we met.

'...' he replied, mumbling a name that I thought sounded beautiful, but somehow also managed to instantaneously forget, 'but everyone calls me Gleb.'

I later asked him why he went by a different name. He told me he just preferred his new name. It was more him. I told him, flippantly, when we were already on good terms, that his name rhymed with the word for 'bread'. 'Yep', he agreed proudly with a wide smile, 'it does'.  He loved his new name. I hated it. Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, I repeated to myself on the way home, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb, Gleb. Sounds like a frog quickly spouting foam. I didn't tell him I didn't like his name. I think he sensed it, but didn't care. He was calm within himself. He had a happy, kind, very relaxed aura. I could understand why he said 'many people don't like to talk to me': his calmness could perhaps be interpreted as a little bit smug by those with lower self-esteem, and he asked very deep, personal questions even though he barely knew me, which to some may seem intrusive. I, on the other hand, loved it. I appreciated the fact that through this means our conversation was able to transcend the everyday small talk and niceties that can numb the mind and dull the wit. We immediately reached a deeper level of communication, even if it did sometimes scrape the skin and roughen the bone to think of answers to difficult questions. To a certain extent, it reminded me of myself. I always like to ask people strange questions. Mostly I simply ask what comes into my mind. I think it's the best way to get to know someone on an honest level. Sometimes I feel an urge to ask people about their relationships with their parents or family or partners; or about what kind of beliefs or assumptions make up the philosophy that keeps them alive rather than jumping of a bridge; or sometimes I ask whether they like the colour of the grass or whether they wear odd socks or whether Shirley Bassey has had an effect on their perception of the world. This approach can make you great friends very quickly. It can also make people think you're a data-mining psychopath. You win some, you lose some.

I must mention that I met Gleb beside a dragon. I thought I really ought to find out why there was a dragon standing outside the metro station, but I decided it was best not to. That way I could call him Fred the friendly dragon and wonder about his function for the rest of my visit. Sometimes seeking answers and playing with hypotheses is more fun than the answer itself. Fred was the first thing whose beauty I appreciated in the city.

Gleb was effective in adding some context to the place, in lifting my mood and in letting me appreciate that I was in a beautiful environment, although he kept repeating 'why have you decided to travel Russia in Winter?' and telling me that I really ought to come back in Summer. 'Definitely no earlier than May! Even April could be risky.. The snow can be very persistent..'

At this point, my eyes probably glazed over and I probably went into one of my phases where I start being mildly poetic. I explained to Gleb that it didn't matter that it was winter. I needed wide open spaces. I needed trains travelling over huge expanses. I needed fir tries zooming past my eyes. I needed inspiration for poetry and life and little doses of madness and creativity along my path. I needed huge adventures and little pleasures. I needed the beauty of being alone in places I didn't know. I needed the security of little anonymous cafes where you can warm your hands with a mug of tea and imagine that you must seem mysterious with your little notebook, your biro and your continuous smile at the wonders of the morning. I needed freedom, or the illusion of it. I needed to meet boys and feed my heart on the hope that I would fall in love with one of them. I needed to finally grasp Russia within my hands and feel that it was whole and pulsating and vibrant and H.U.G.E., and not just one part of one small region, where I had lived for four months. I needed a psychological escape. I needed to move from place to place, to spend time alone, to figure out which elements in my mind were external and which were my own. I needed Kazan in the winter with the sludge and the non-waterproof boots and the cars honking outside McDonalds in the rush-hour gloom. I needed these things to feel alive.

I love stability and warmth and relationships of lasting, tested value. But I am also changeable and impatient. I need adventure to feel I am making something meaningful from life. I need the ability to fly last minute to Siberia or Arkhangelsk. I need this wildness. I can't live without higher emotions, more colourful colours, deeper impressions, feelings that pass the skin, glances which actually penetrate and touches which actually burn. I need insulation from the numbness of a day which is the same as that which has passed and that which is coming. I can handle -- and even love -- stability for periods of several months. I love cats, I love books, I love sitting cross-legged on floors learning languages, I love vibrantly dancing to motown in my teenage bedroom at 4 am and I love warm, homely snuggles with my pillow factory -- but I can only go through these stable stages in my life if I can dream of the rawness of travelling, knowing that it's not just a dream, but a reality that will come to life in a matter of a few small months, or a few days of patience, or a few hours. When I arrived back to Krasnodar after Christmas, I couldn't see an opportunity to leave for another few months. I saw ice falling from the trees. I saw people shouting at each other and the elements, and I felt mundanity suffocating me, not allowing for change. That's why I decided to fly thousands of miles away at the last minute. That's why I decided to travel Russia in the middle of the Winter, hoping for a quick spring. That's why I didn't have a clue where I was going or what I was doing, but still loved it.

I couldn't put this to Gleb in so many words, but I think he understood it and accepted it. His question of 'why in Winter?' was probably more related to his love for Kazan, rather than anything else. 'You should come back in summer, the city is ten, twenty times prettier...'

He was proud that I found things beautiful.

During our walk we talked about his relationship. He loved his boyfriend. In fact, even though he was currently unemployed, he told me that he could only ever meet in the evenings. They were reserved exclusively for his boyfriend, who he described as intelligent ('much more intelligent than me'), ambitious and educated. He said that he didn't want to hold him back, that he would always give him freedom to leave and move to another city or country and to make progress in work or education. He also said that one day he hoped he would have a wife and biological children. His boyfriend, on the other hand, dreamed of sharing his life's path with him for the long run.

'Why?' I asked. 'Couldn't you avoid getting a wife and build the same sort of relationship with him? Then at least you would be creating a family with someone you loved, and the family would be based on love?'

'I can love a woman.'

I realised I had made an assumption about his sexuality and romantic interests. I asked whether he experienced significant physical attraction to a woman.

The answer was somewhere along the lines of 'not really'. I was sceptical about his plans, but he began to speak about the importance of finding a person, not a gender. He said that even though he is attracted to males, it doesn't mean that there won't be a female that he would fall in love with. He didn't have to be a sexuality, he could just love, and he was adamant that one day he could love a woman.

I could have made more assumptions. I could have assumed that he was gay and didn't believe that his goals of a long-term relationship and a family were viable in Russia, therefore he was imagining love for a woman. But I decided that these were assumptions and they didn't have much value anyway: I was sure he had been told the same thing many times and he still held to his dream. It might work out. It might not work out. He might change beyond recognition in the future, he might stay the same. The boyfriend might leave, they might celebrate their 40^th wedding anniversary sipping lime sodas in Barbados. But he was calm, and I was calm. We could accept each other as we were. I couldn't help but believe him. The topic passed.

Somewhere on the path to the phone shop, where I bought myself a new charger with the words 'give me the cheapest thing you've got for this kind of hole' (pointing to the charger socket. I didn't know what to call it...), we touched on the topic of open relationships. His talk about the importance of giving his partner freedom had made me want to test the boundaries of this openness. He was quite against the idea of sex or romance with more than one partner.

Partly to play devil's advocate and partly to defend the relationships of many healthy couples I know, I took up the opposite argument. I maintained that humans have various needs for love: romantic desire, sexual desire, and the desire for stability, warmth and partnership. It's very hard to satisfy these three needs at once, or for the whole period of your relationship. You might be romantically in love with someone and sexually attracted to them, but they can't give you the feeling of partnership and a shared path through life that you would have with your wife of twenty years. Or you may not be sexually attracted to your partner anymore and therefore want occasional sex with someone else, despite being quite glad to buy groceries and pick wallpaper with your spouse and share the same bed. Or maybe it's feasible to love different people at once in different ways. Arguably, this lack of understanding of different types of love is why so many people have affairs. It doesn't make them monsters to want to satisfy their needs with more than one person. In terms of cheating, it's terrible to lie to your partner, as relationships work best when based on pure, open communication, where partners don't have to fear hurting each other with the truth. In that sense, it is a grave sin to 'cheat' on your partner, but if both parties consent to having an open relationship, that is a completely different matter.

'Of course,' I continued passionately against his slightly bemused glance, 'living in a society where strict monogamy is the norm, these people get branded as 'whores' or 'cheats' or 'people who just don't love their partner enough' or 'people who can't handle compromise'. But why does it have to be this way? Why can't people overcome jealousy (it's a bit of a pointless emotion anyway) and let their partner be free? Why must everyone follow the same pattern for relationships? Often: a brief period of romantic love and sex, followed by long periods of sexless romantic partnership and strict monogamy, maybe with the occasional romantic or sexy interval whilst on holidays. Aren't we all different? Don't we not all have our own path? Where is the moral abyss in having relationships that differ from the norm? Both parties are consenting, both parties are making decisions together and both parties are striving to accept each other as they are: as human beings with certain biological, emotional and intellectual needs.'

Okay. I'm sure I've just misquoted myself. I'm not that articulate. But you get the jist. I was rabidly rambling arguments and hoping he would understand.

He told me that he could sort of understand what I was talking about, but that it's important to make sure that your partner just doesn't love you enough.

I could have continued. But he was so calm. We walked on and the winter wind blew our thoughts in different directions.

We parted and agreed to meet again soon.

 

THE ETHEREAL TEA

 

Ranuel walking through the snow

Our next meeting was no less remarkable: it was a scene of dutiless relaxation, comfort in armchairs, and calmness in the endlessness of an afternoon.

Gleb invited me and a friend of his, Ranuel, to a cafe for tea. I immediately took a liking to the boy. He was a kind, dark-haired Tatar with delicate features, high cheek bones and remarkable slightly cornered, chestnut eyes. His walk was wonderfully endearing: his head was permanently tilted downwards to snuggle into his coat for warmth, his shoulders were gently arched, and his boots made little crunching sounds with his movements. As the conversation carried back and forth from me to Gleb, he would occasionally swing round swiftly (without moving his head) like a slightly robotic penguin. It was snowing again, and we walked to the cafe without haste. The weather had reluctantly relinquished its conspiracy to ruin the city's visual magnificence. It was growing beautiful again.

The cafe was probably designed for richer clients: the staff were dressed up neatly in suits and bow-ties and greeted us with unusually effort-filled politeness. There was a grand piano and exotic birds in a cage to our right; the toilets had ornamental furnishings and illusions of gold, and the cups and plates were delicately patterned with strings of blue and shining, quality white. Nonetheless, we were prepared to sacrifice some student kopecks for a warm afternoon inside and a feeling of endlessness. We sat in a corner. Opposite me was a whole wall of glass, meaning that when I looked towards Gleb and Ranuel, I saw not only their faces, but also the scene of snow behind them. In turn, behind my back there was a television screen, broadcasting the Winter Olympics on mute, meaning that that when they looked at my face, they saw not only me, but also elegant patterns of figure skaters or the buoyant jumps of international skiers. We need never fear a lull in conversation. Any periods of silence were easy, unpressured, natural.  Our speech was slow, but precise. Our words and breath were light, untroubled, instantaneous..Whole pots of various teas seemed to just appear unnoticed, cakes formed magically on the table. I was so uninvolved in the physical side of things, that I could only concentrate on a small collection of thoughts and visions: my sheer happiness at being in the company of likeminded people in the middle of the adventure in the middle of the Russia in the middle of the winter that I had dreamt of for so many years of learning verbs and studying culture in my bedroom; the little flirtatious half-timid, half-knowing smiles Ranuel offered up to me; the bemused, but welcoming glance of Gleb; and the dynamics of passing snow-burdened silhouettes through the glass. 

Gleb told me that my gestures and form of speech were somewhat similar to that of a Russian director, Renata Litvinova, and Ranuel enthusiastically agreed. I had never watched any of her films, but I was overwhelmed by the compliment. I had seen a short extract of her in an interview for a programme called 'Shkola Zloslovija' ('School of Scandal') and been entranced. She was elegant, soft-mannered, a little bit wisely, but welcomingly distant and lost in thought at all time. Perpetually beautiful. Ethereal.

They might has well have called me Jesus.

Renata Litvinova looking mysterious in a music video for  a Zemfira song. She is rumoured to have a relationship with the singer, who is the short-haired, tellingly singing girl in black. Click on this picture and open the video clip..

 

Ranuel smiled directly at me, mischievously, and told me I was cute. A pretty childish word 'cute', but it fulfilled its function: my stomach grew wheezy-pleasant with a feeling of thirteen year old bliss.

A few hours passed, but I still didn't know how to spell or even fully comprehend his name (which he had repeated a few times alongside his surname) as I had never heard it before. He wrote it down from me in my notebook in tall, cursive letters. Underneath, I immediately wrote, in my comparatively brutal script, the word 'Skovznjak' or 'draught'. Earlier I had mistaken his surname for this word describing a flowing gasp of unpleasant wind. Something which Russians instinctively fear as the bringer of illness and death, permanently rushing to close windows, even when it gets to ridiculous levels of stuffiness. A quirky surname, I thought, for a quirky boy. Alas. No. I just misheard.

At the risk of sounding a hopeless poet, I must admit that for an afternoon, I was in love with those boys. One was shy yet sly, the other bemused and kind. They formed the whole world. The centre of beauty, the centre of calmness, a foundation for a belief in the romantic side of life.

Eventually the afternoon passed. Darkness fell unnoticed and we left.

We walked Gleb to his bus stop. The boys rushed ahead of me, sliding down the ice to move faster and add some fun to a winter evening. I walked on behind them, stumbling slightly, as if I was their older grandmother, who admired their youth and mobility, but was scared of breaking that old hip again.

We said goodbye to Gleb, and Ranuel walked me most of the way home up to the pyramid building. (Yes, after the fall of the Soviet Union someone thought it was a good idea to build a massive, tacky pyramid. Kazan clearly needed some Egyptian flare.)

What an attractive, genuine Egyptian pyramid! How on earth did it get to the middle of Russia?

On the way he told me that I was the first foreigner I had ever met, that he was glad to have come across me so unexpectedly and that he hoped I could come back in the summer. We exchanged vkontakte details (Russian's leading social media website, where, conveniently, you can listen to any music or watch any Russian-dubbed videos for free. Trust the good old Russkies to not care about copyright and therefore give endless joy to the teenagers of Eurasia.) I knew it would be several months before we saw each other, and that we would probably barely write in the meantime, but it didn't matter. I was happy that I had appreciated the beauty of the afternoon, and that was all that mattered.

 

The Rest

I have a few other memories of what happened before I left Kazan. I remember that Gleb and I walked around the city once more on my last day, on a fruitless search for an internet cafe, which had existed online, but not in reality. I got wet again.

 I also spent an evening with a man who ate a lot of dumplings and debated heavy metal with a historian. Moreover, I remember that the police interrogated me for a few minutes in a metro station because they were checking 'non-Russian individuals' (Проверка нерусских лиц i.e. using the word that means 'ethnically Russian', rather than 'Russian citizen'. Quite shocking given that city is a mix of both Russians and Tatars.) But these memories don't seem as imbued with meaning.  They are subsidiary tales.

In retrospect, I don't ruminate on these events, but attach significance to my wanderings instead. On the eve of my departure a thick mist fell over the city. During this trip to Kazan I was never going to be graced with bright sunlight and green fields, but I was given the present of a beautiful shroud of mystery circulating around every building and every passer-by. There is nothing more wonderful than stumbling across an elegant streetlamp, hidden by the mist, and behind it the rising glory of a modern mosque.

 Ночь, улица, фонарь, мечеть...

 

I think I liked Kazan more than France in the end.