Crossing Borders

I recently made a post about my goals in Russia in both my private blog (for you lovelies who actually care about my personal development) and my new sparkling, only mildly shite LGBT+  in Russia blog. After about 2 weeks in Krasnodar, it is probably time that I updated you all on what has been going on in this Slavic paradise. I realize that it is easier to read in small chunks, so I will dedicate this post to the first 2 days. I will then write another post in the very immediate future about my strange flatmates who waged a Cold War against my shampoo, the large abundance of Armenians in my life and my new Georgian bezzie m8 4 lyfe who goes by the alias of Rumpelstiltskin. A little while after that, I will write a post about my brief interview with an LGBT rights activist from Sochi. In the meantime, I give you a 14 hour bus journey, a gold-toothed grandmother and a fisherman who likes to talk about fish (surprisingly enough).

ARRIVAL

The Beautiful Bus of Doom

I arrived in Russia at 5 am in the morning after a 14 hour bus ride from Sevastopol’, Ukraine. It seemed like a very logical decision at the time. After all, I had wanted to see Ukraine and there were no direct flights between Belgium and Krasnodar. It turned out, however, to be a thoroughly unpleasant experience. Having bought the very last ticket to Krasnodar, I was seated at the front of the bus beside a sleeping academic and a series of macho bus drivers, who swore in their best ‘russkii mat’ (Russian swear words), ate seeds all through the journey (Russians love to eat seeds!), smoked quite a bit and drove fairly recklessly. From previous experience, I wasn’t expecting any great road safety and I was willing to pass it off as one of those quaint Eastern European things. After all, I had already got used to taxi drivers saying ‘NE NADO’ (‘you don’t have to!’) every time I had tried to put my seatbelt on. Moreover, despite the fact that they drove in highly creative manners, I hadn’t died yet. The passing cars formed the main difficulty for my comfort: the bright headlights impeded sleep and instead hyptonized me into a surreal tired trance: my head slowly bobbed down and up and down again as I attempted sleep and my head gradually emptied itself of everything but a vague drone of thoughts: a radio in my mind, low volume, passing through all the un-tuned stations of the Ukrainian steppe.

My hypnosis was interrupted by a 2 hour wait at the border. We queued at the Ukrainian side for the border control, queued again for a suitcase inspection, got on a 15 minute ferry, queued for another suitcase inspection, queued at the Russian side again, and then finally drove on. My hearing isn’t the best, so when the Ukrainian border guard asked me to take off my glasses, my sleepy-delirious reply was a very abrupt Russian ‘SHTO?’ (= ‘what?’), from which she concluded that I must not understand her language. She therefore proceeded to call over her colleague, who repeated the instructions in Russian, which I promptly obeyed. Having then realized that I spoke their language, border guard no. 2 happily exclaimed ‘HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN’. They then, for no apparent reason, began to giggle and gossip in whispers for about 3 minutes whilst looking at my passport. They smiled, wished me 'udachi' ('good luck') and sent me on my way.

The bus arrived 2 hours earlier than I had expected (at 5am, not 7), so I decided not to go immediately to my hostel. I didn’t want to disturb their sleep and I thought it better to wait for a few hours until a civilized time. The train station had the huge luxury of wifi, something which on my travels I value like an ambitious infertile father values a gold-studded vial of sperm from an Ivy League Sports-competent sperm donor (Forgive me, I’m trying really hard to come up with original analogies). It turned out that this wifi  cut off every 15 minutes with the message ‘After 15 minutes of wifi, there will be a recuperation pause of 5 minutes’. That was a tad annoying, but better than nothing. In the end, I found myself deliriously laughing out loud in the station at the idea that my wifi was recuperating: I envisaged some sort of meme where the wifi is like ‘feck this, I’m going to sleep. OVER AND OUT’. I'm not sure whether it was actually funny or whether I was just hysterical...

THE FISHERMAN

After a while of sitting on the internet, I was approached by an old man, who, taking a strange interest in my bottle of sparkling water, proceeded to ask me lots of questions, as listed below:

1 ' Is that bottled water?'

'Da.'

'Is that sparkling bottled water?'

'Da.'

'You managed to get a whole litre?'

'Nuuuuu DA.'

‘Did you get it in the station?'

‘Da-da-da. Over there.’

‘Oh, that’s wonderful. Maybe I will buy some... How much did it cost?’

‘I can’t remember, I’m not very good at rubles.’

‘Oh, are you a foreigner?’

‘Yes, I’m from Ireland..’

‘Ah, Holland. I’ve heard it’s a beautiful country’.

‘No, Ireland.’

‘Ahh, okay. What language do they speak in your country? Dutch?’

‘No, we speak English. Although some people still speak Irish.’

‘I heard you have great ice skating in Holland.’

‘I wouldn’t know. We don’t actually have much ice in Ireland’.

‘Ahh, you’re from IRELAND. Ahh, now I know, Ireland and Scotland and Holland, you’re all together.’

‘No, no, Ireland is a separate island, and Scotland is on the same island as England. Holland – or the Netherlands – is on the European mainland.’

…

‘Tell me, what kind of fish do you eat in Ireland?’

                ‘Sorry, I wouldn’t know, I don’t eat fish.’

                ‘Do you have pike?’

                ‘Probably.’

                ‘Do you have cod?’

                ‘Probably.’

                ‘Do you have salmon?’

                ‘I think we do.’

                (And so on with a long list of fish, some of which I didn’t understand, but nonetheless assumed that they probably could be found in Ireland. He seemed to take more pleasure in finding out that we had a certain type of fish than in me answering that I didn’t know, so after a while I just started answering that, yes, indeed, we did have that fish. We have lots of fish. Salt water AND fresh water fish! Big fish and small fish! Little fish and large fish! Long fish and short fish! ALL THE FISH! AN UNIMAGINABLE ABUNDANCE OF FISH!)

He then asked me a few other stereotypical questions (which I encounter almost every day) to which I replied with a few stereotypical stock answers:

1     ‘Are Russian women pretty?’

‘Oh, yes. They’re very pretty. Irish women and English women are ugly in comparison.’ (I knew he would love this answer, so I decided to humour him. To be honest, Russian women are often prettier, but not always. In any case, I have lots of better things to do than carry out an intensive quantitative scientific study on the subjective beauty of Russian girls, so I just give the general answer.)

2      ‘Do you have good beer there?’

‘Yup. Excellent beer. We love pubs.’

3     ‘Do you do Irish dances?’

‘Ah-hum. Every day I wake up and immediately do a brisk jig whilst simultaneously harvesting the potato crop with my withered countryman hands.’ (Okay, I didn’t actually say this, but I thought it.)

He told me he had just come back from visiting relatives in Ukraine and was waiting for the first tram to go home. This seemed pretty reasonable (taxis are extremely expensive in comparison with the £0.30 tram rides) and we struck up quite an interesting conversation about his life as a fisherman (now all the extensive fish questions made more sense), his wife and his life in the Soviet Union. I was too deliriously tired to remember any of it, but it seemed fairly interesting at the time. I do however recall that he said that he had never been abroad, even though he had just returned from Ukraine. ‘Isn’t Ukraine a different country these days?’ I asked timidly, knowing the answer. ‘Bah, Ukraine isn’t abroad. It’s all politics’. And on that note, he left.

THE HOSTEL

When they said 'hostel', my first thought wasn't a multi-storey apartment complex, but there you go...

At about 8 am, I bade farewell to the station and got into a taxi to the address of my ‘hostel’. The hostel, however, turned out to be far from what I had expected. First of all, it wasn’t in an obvious location but in a huge apartment complex without a sign. It turned out that rather than booking into a hostel, I had actually booked into a strange Russian phenomenon known as a ‘private hotel’ i.e. a flat with a few spare rooms, where a lonely gold-toothed grandmother rents out beds to migrant workers or part-time students. The first obstacle when arriving at the address and being promptly abandoned by the taxi driver (‘You’ll find it, don’t worry!'), was managing to phone the owner. My telephone didn’t want to work in Russia, so I had to ask a passer-by to call. Luckily, he swiftly obliged (‘There’s a foreigner on the street. He wants to go to your hotel. Come get him!”).  The owner quickly came out, bleary eyed and slightly dishevelled, and welcomed me to my empty 6 bed dorm. I dropped my 30kg suitcase on the floor and slept for a whole day, only waking up for an hour at 8pm to go to the supermarket and buy a Russian simcard (for which, by the way, you need to enter your address, passport details and other information. A strange concept for a Westerner, but apparently they need my personal details for protection against crime.).

The next day I met up with my only friend in Krasnodar ( a friendly Adygean (yes, I didn’t know that was a nationality either) called Tim, who promised to find me an apartment and turned out to be a huge help in my first emotionally-troubled Russian days, for which I am very grateful); registered my passport with a friendly Ivan Ivanovich; talked to my wheezy voiced head of department (he was also friendly, but his voice sounded like the imitation of that Soviet bad guy in an American film who smokes 120 cigarettes a day and has a hook for a hand); and, when the sun had started to set, I fell in love with a little park where I wondered at how the sky could be so beautiful, full of orange and red and pink, and how I could have transformed into this strange traveller who has reached this place – this Russia, this East, this sunset – and decided to stay. I am still wondering and still discovering.  

As always, 

with love,

D.