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