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.

Spring blogs: 5) Moscow

Anyone who decides to start their first trip to Russia outside of Moscow will be steadily bombarded with others' pre-chewed impressions of the capital. I was one of these people. I spent almost six months in Russia before I even considered a trip to Moscow. My Armenian friend told me that it was just a cash sucker: the place where newcomers could make their money, start to live well and then forget about paying for the development of their relatives back in more provincial locations. An other friend, a psychologist from Yekaterinburg, told me that Moscow was synonymous with 'dirt, traffic jams and pointless striving towards money and power'.

They didn't half mince their words.

But the more I heard about this 'dirt', this 'selfishness', this 'striving', the more I became convinced that these negative elements could not exist in a vacuum. In all places I have travelled, there have always been similar, although sometimes better hidden, quantities of human warmth. Under the factory clouds of Magnitogorsk I was given food, a bed and a philosophy on art. Along the Stalinist prospects of Minsk I found a middle-aged women who opened her home and plied me with sunflower seeds. In Riga I met a shy girl who made me vegetarian sandwiches, defended me from a religious drunkard and explained post-Soviet linguistic conflicts. In Cambridge I saw troubled academics dance in frantic circles with creative madness in their eyes. Even in the oppressive environment that is any man's home time I found unique sparks of humanity every day, even though I chose to leave. 

As a result, I became more and more interested in forming my own limited impression of Moscow, if only for a few days. I wanted to at least add my own subjectivity to the millions of subjectivities that form the capital of this huge land mass. In the end, this subjectivity was much different from what I had expected, but no less beautiful.

I arrived on a train from Kazan in the morning. The night before I had made the acquaintance of three women. They had almost immediately noticed that I was a foreigner: in the open 'platzkart' compartments of the train everyone can see you making your bunk. And if you're a poorly train-travelled foreigner with a natural predisposition towards awkwardness and a complete lack of hand-eye coordination, setting up your bed linen will provide great confusion and hilarity among your fellow travellers. At first they'll give you stares of doom, thinking you're an idiot. Then, once you say that you're a foreigner and ask for assistance, they will laugh kindly and proceed to help. This was the case when I failed to realize that I was in possession of a mattress and just assumed that the rolled up oddity at the end of my bunk was some form of bulky, slightly mutilated pillow. I put my bed sheet directly onto the leather bunk and was ready to climb into my uncomfortable nest before I was informed that no, in fact, I was doing everything terribly wrong. I apologized (even though there was no need for apology), resorted to the 'Oh I'm just so helplessly foreign' trick (rather than admitting I'm just a spatial idiot) and was showered in food, tea and curiosity: did I like Russia, what was I doing here, why do I speak Russian, is Ireland really that green, had I been to Moscow before etc.. The lights went out before midnight and our conversation faded into a muffled choir of 'spokoinoi nochi'. Once again my well-versed accounts of why I had chosen to move to Russia had been given yet another polishing: I've started to have automatic answers to these questions, like a GCSE oral exam, but I do try to be more spontaneous sometimes. It feels only human and honest to make my stories a little bit more personal for each individual. In the morning, I was handed more cucumber sandwiches and wished 'good luck' and 'success' by the cohort of friendly women whose names I never learnt and whom I will never see again.  

It was past rush hour when I arrived at the station. Nonetheless, I was still greeted with crowds of mildly-organized chaos: masses of people in huge coats and warm hats were streaming through metal detectors. Some put their valuables in the little designated boxes, undid their belts and unbuttoned their coats. Others seemed to just barge on through. I followed the rules and wasn't stopped. I picked up my mobile, books and loose coins, placed them roughly into the many huge pockets of my winter coat. and walked slowly away from the crowd into Moscow. I saw my first sky scrapers in the station square, admired them for half a minute, too tired for beauty, and then climbed down the steps to the metro. I travelled to my accommodation -- which bore the very Russian name of 'chillax hostel' -- locked my valuables in the safe and placed my books under the pillow.

The hostel was located in central Moscow, but on a quiet, calm street. The buildings around me were relatively tall, but felt empty. The windows had no souls peering out with curiosity and there were next to no cars on the street. I was shocked by the tranquillity of such a central place: wasn't Moscow dirt and crowds? Where on earth was the pointless striving for power and money I had been promised? Where were the greedy bankers rubbing their hands in glee as the poverty stricken workers eat lavash in  a traffic jam? Where were the unwashed crowds of  'uncultured gastarbeiter' (guest workers) Russian people loved to warn me of? Instead of waiting for the hyperbolic realization of others' stereotypes, I remembered one of the beautiful things I love about the huge metropolises that I have come across so far: as expensive and hectic as they can be at times, they give you the possibility to move from different worlds of cultures, lifestyle and wealth just by crossing street boundaries. I was in the centre of the mayhem and the centre was tranquil. Outside I knew that there were various rings of life: areas of chaos, areas of order, areas of ethnic diversity, areas of wealth, areas of poverty: rich men buying their wives necklaces, homeless druggies making crocodile in their squats, parents teaching their two year old children to feed ducks by the pond, grandmothers brewing borsht in their former communal apartments, spectacled students studying till late in the Stalinist towers of Moscow State University, teenagers falling in love on park benches and all the varieties of life that could lie between. The wonderful feeling of diversity and opportunity that strikes any smalltowner on the first day in a large city struck me. 

It took only twenty minutes before one of these opportunities had landed, quite accidentally, into my lap. 

When talking in Russian to the receptionist, the door bell rang. A pink-faced, cute featured, green-eyed slightly stoned young man walked in and started to talk to the receptionist in a very informal manner, swaying relaxed back and forth against the counter. He wanted to know whether the two English girls who were staying at the hostel would like him to show them Moscow.

'What do you mean?'

'The English girls. I want to show them Moscow. Can you tell them I've come to show them come cool places?' (He opened up his laptop and proceeded to show us a pretty interesting website that showcases unusual corners of Moscow.) 

'Do you know these girls?'

'Yes'

'Do you speak English?'

'No. Learnt it in school...but I screwed it up and can't say much.  Well, about from 'hello' and stuff like that' (Nervous self-conscious giggle...)

'You know, those girls don't speak Russian...'

...but I did. 

And so it transpired that for the next five hours I would be the translator for Viktor, an antiques collector. 'urban alpinist' and avid cannabis user from Moscow;  two enthusiastic English party girls from the North and a slightly grumpy, but also surprisingly smiley Australian.  As far as the girls were concerned, Viktor had met them by chance in a McDonalds. Noticing they were drunk, he and his friends had just joined along in the party. The girls had already been shown half of Moscow by really enthusiastic Russians looking to practice their English and so were already used to friendly advances. They gladly invited the guys into their life, especially when they knew they could get a spliff and some relaxed times. Viktor told me he had seen them check-in nearby on facebook and so had decided to go meet them. Not many English girls partying in Moscow, I guess. They had managed to communicate pretty well in the intoxicated atmosphere of party and with one bilingual speaker, but now Viktor would be on his own and he asked me, a smiling and compliant stranger, to help him translate. In return he would show me some odd, abandoned corners of Moscow. 'Screw Red Square,' I thought, 'I might as well go help an antiques collector climb abandoned buildings.'

The abandoned building which we climbed.

'So, what's his job then?' one of the girls asked me as we walked down the street.

I asked Viktor the question and then stumbled over the translation.

'He...umm...manages climbing...well... um...the way he put it is that he manages urban alpinism, which I guess means he helps people to climb buildings.'

'Oh, that's cool!' they enthusiastically cried back.

I had to admit, it was pretty cool and I felt a positive buzz at bringing people together who otherwise would never have found a common tongue.  On the other hand, however, my first real experience of interpreting for several hours at a time was, apart from the aforementioned communicative buzz, strangely exhausting. I sort of ceased to be a person: I very rarely was asked questions about myself. I simply transferred information from one source to another. I learned much about Viktor and the girls' stories, but they would never really know mine. 

Viktor had moved from Irkutsk as a child to live with his grandmother in some sort of stagnating town in central Russia. He had finished school and somewhere between compulsory military service and the rest of his life, he ended up in Moscow: a place that gave him much more freedom to follow his artistic passions, but now, after a few years, it  felt more and more restrictive and was beginning to choke him. After the army he had spent a year 'not doing anything': not working, not studying, just thinking and smoking. Now he was back in work again, but felt ever more trapped by the confines of his city, his language and his country. He needed to 'learn English and get out'. And now, by coincidence of fate or facebook, two pretty representatives of his perceived world of opportunity had just waltzed into his life. 

Viktor decided to take us to the top of an abandoned multi-storey building in the centre. He promised us that on top of the building we would be greeted by a beautiful, panoramic view of Moscow. As we approached the site, the Australian was dubious. 

'Is this even legal?' he asked.

'Doesn't really matter if it's legal,' I said giddily, 'it's Russia. There'll be a way to do things.'

The puppies!

A grey concrete block with broken windows and streaks of decay rose high above our heads. We started to walk towards a barrier to enter. A security guard from the next building came out, shouted at us asking what we were doing and after mumbling something about 'wanting to show tourists the building', Viktor walked off into a corner to talk to the guard one-on-one. Two minutes passed, a discussion was held. Maybe there was a bribe. In any case, the guard soon forgot his stricter tone and became a friendly, compliant type. He was very smiley, quite well-rounded, grey-haired and rosy cheeked. He reminded me of that friendly old uncle who makes jovial puns at Christmas and plays the role of the doughnut-eating cop in American films. He showed us a litter of cute Andrex puppies (i.e. little stray baby golden retrievers) who seemed to be living under a huge barrel in the courtyard and then gave us instructions on how to safely get to the top of the building. He knew where all the stairs where. Maybe he had done this before...  Viktor knew the way without any guidance. He liked to smoke and relax on the roof. He came here quite often.  

Inside we were met with huge grey stairs, elaborate graffiti murals, poetry we couldn't understand, fairly dangerous holes in the flooring and loose wiring. This was obviously a hang-out place for some pretty creative people: they had decided to let their graffiti and art decorate an abandoned mess of greyness.

The building interior.

The poem we tried to decipher. Including looking up the word 'eaves' in the dictionary. Apparently modern day man doesn't understand what that is anymore. I wasn't the only one. 

We reached the top of the building and saw a pretty good view. Nothing too special, though. There was still a bit of ice and snow on the roof and it had the potential to be mildly dangerous. Then we wondered were Viktor had gone, turned round and realized that there was another level to the roof: an old wooden step ladder and then a relatively steep ledge would take us to the very top. The girls happily took Viktor's word that 'it isn't really that scary, you just have to do it' and were soon up. I hesitated, formed a one minute conspiracy with the Australian, both agreeing that it wasn't for us, and then eventually caved in and climbed up, guided by Viktor's hand. The Australian guy came up about 5 minutes later after the same assistance from the same hand and lots of repetition from the girls about how it was worth while, and so much better up here, and you wouldn't even feel it, and you just had to do it. He did it. We sat on the very top of an abandoned multi-storey building, took in a considerably more beautiful view and listened to punk on Viktor's laptop, whilst he read us out his newest English vocabulary from a phrase book he had just bought. He was learning a dialogue between Mr Smith and a hotel receptionist. It was a beautiful start to Moscow.

One of the English girls (who looked really like Rita Ora) braved the ladder. The steep ledge above it was much more scary.

Later that day I decided to leave the girls and Viktor; tired from constantly interpreting, and walked Moscow alone. I was so pathetically bad at getting orientated that I walked for 40 minutes and still didn't find Red Square. At one point I even got on a bus that said 'Red Square' on it, but then realized I had absolutely no way of paying for my ticket, so just awkwardly stood beside the driver as he drove to the next stop, where I got off. It saved me 50 metres, I reckoned, and at least now I could follow the bus's path. But, naturally Sod's Law dictated that by following the bus I actually walked away from the square, not towards it.  When I realized my mistake I comforted myself with a ridiculously overpriced coffee and finished the night in some club with people I barely knew doing things that weren't that special. It was worth it for the 5am walk home, though fresh air and for my bragging smile towards the frustrated early birds of Moscow. But I still don't know why I had forced myself, once again, to go against my nature and attend an environment that wasn't appealing to my mood. I hope it's just the standard masochistic party complex a lot of young people seem to have. I'll probably grow out of it. I really hope so.

A man at the club found me mildly attractive and gave me his phone number. He was a Socialist Revolutionary who strongly disliked the current system and government, but more strongly hated the West. When he talked about the government of Putin, I sensed a huge amount of dissatisfaction, concrete examples including low pensions and lack of opportunities. When he talked about the 'patronizing Western imperialists', however, I saw a much more intense rage. I was a little bit scared he would hate me, just because I came from those parts. I often feel afraid when certain Russians strongly criticize the West, with unbridled anger in their eyes, not because I don't agree with some of what they're saying (yes, I'm also anti-war, yes, I'm also anti uncontrolled capitalism and yes, I'm against a lot of patronizing 'let's help out your poor little people' western style politics.), but because I fear that soon the lines between politics and people may completely disappear. Russians and Westerners need more contact with one another, to remind each other that each side is human, that each side has the same amount of good and bad people, and that the issues are political. Otherwise I fear that the dehumanization of the enemy will create misery and unpleasantness. I know a few Westerners who think Russians are barbarians, and quite a few Russians who think Europeans are part of a huge gay conspiracy to spread immigration (as if that's a virus) and to undermine Christianity and conservatism. Quite frankly, both sides petrify me, and so when people virulently attack either Russia or the West, I often become nervous, fearing that soon they won't just be attacking the politics, but actually the citizens on the other side.

 My conversation partner had a developed sense of nostalgia for the Soviet Union, which seemed a contradiction in terms. I told him that if he was a real revolutionary, he would have recognized that the last 50-60 years of the Soviet Union were just a barbarism and manipulation of the initial goals of communism and of the people who actually dreamed of a fair revolution  He agreed to some extent, but still said that at least his parents had felt safe and secure. He underplayed  Soviet political persecutions, reminding me that 'all states everywhere persecute and imprison their opponents'. We changed topic and he told me about his origins.  He came from Vladivostok and had arrived in Moscow to study and work.  In 2 years he hadn't been able to afford the train journey home to see his family. On the way here, he had fallen in lust or love with a 'straight boy on the train to Moscow. During the 6 day train ride they had developed a strong bond. They spoke a great deal and found out a lot about each other. He had decided that he would try his best to make the boy love him, and, in fact they did end up in bed together a few months later. But their relationship never passed that line. His story faded off.

We bade farewell. I thought I might invite him to dinner some night if I got bored. He had very clear, pleasant Russian articulation. 

The next days consisted of nothing more than me exploring the city by my own and with an English friend. I grew to love it and to love the freedom of just walking with no need for a goal. At this point my narrative of Moscow becomes a lot  less linear and fades into certain memories that I can't order particularly well and so will treat individually (as I often do in my blogs).

I remember...

1) Having a discussion in Spanish in my hostel kitchen with an illegal Cuban immigrant called Luis and a Colombian woman, who was having a mid-life crisis. Frustratingly, I could understand everything they said but found it very difficult to reply, not having practised Spanish for two years. I was forced to be a passive listener.

The Colombian woman's story was simpler. She had studied well and received one of the best educations in her country. She had a good, stable job in Bogota. She was a lawyer or something financial, I can't remember which. But she couldn't find meaning in her life at the moment. Her boyfriend made her feel stuck: beautiful, kind, warm and, as she repeatedly reminded us, making emphatic facial expressions as if she was orgasming right then and there 'so, so, so good in bed'. But still she wasn't happy. And so she had taken a one week holiday to Moscow without him to relax and 'figure things out'.

Luis' story was more complicated. He was working in Moscow as a salsa teacher, although ideally he would have preferred to act and sing instead. 'I'm a three-part act,' he told us in a warmly camp voice. He gave off an energy that somehow infected me with bizarre giggles. He was a good man. Maybe not on the same wave length as me.  Maybe on a far off Cuban salsa wavelength. But it was a well-meaning, positive, radiant wave-length all the same. He was making good money in Moscow and living in the hostel, because it was very practical: cheap, in the centre of town and he already had made friends with some other people who permanently lived there, including Spanish speakers. The only problem was that he was 'an illegal'. 

He began to tell us some shocking stories about his past.  He had left Cuba with an allowance to go to Russia for a month and decided to stay longer, putting himself in risk. He assured us that even in Russia (a place he didn't seem very fond of and whose citizens he depicted as quite cold and brutal),  life was better. Like a lot of emigrants, he wanted to provide for his parents and create a better future.

'Lots of Cubans do this. I know so many of them in  Moscow. Russia is the only country that lets us in. We're supposed to come only for a month. We buy return tickets, but we all stay for longer. We live as illegals. We don't have any rights, but even that is better than Cuba, than feeling you have no opportunities for the rest of your life....'

He told me of two of his transsexual Cuban friends who lived in a flat in Moscow and always entered and exited in disguise at odd hours in case the neighbours started asking two many questions.

He told me of a group of men who had temporarily kidnapped him, asked for a bribe and taken him to Ukraine, before he could escape.

He told me of rich Muscovites, who took him into their lavish world and showed him luxury.

The details of his stories have faded and I fear recounting them for lack of detail; but all I do remember a complete disbelief. A complete saddened disbelief that this person, who had suffered so much, who had the most elaborate, bizarre, surreal stories of misery that you normally encounter only in film...that this person was so positive and ready to share.

'It's what we Cubans are like,' he said with a warm, but nervous laugh, 'no matter what happens to us. No matter how much pain or suffering or horrible, indescribable things, we are always laughing and smiling, looking for parties and friends. We are very strong. Muy fuertes.' 

Unable to fathom words to reply (both through shock and linguistic restrictions), I tried to convey warmth through my eyes. Our conversation partner, the Colombian, was probably much better at this than me. Like many Latinos I know, she had the ability to naturally empathize with the speaker, to mirror his emotions  in her face and to convey huge sympathy and love to a man she barely knew. They seemed like brother and sister. Maybe it was the common language and shared cultural elements. Maybe it was because they were touching vulnerable topics. Maybe it was just my illusion.

'It's a shame. A disgrace that we Colombians turn back Cubans when they come to us. They're suffering,. and we speak the same language, are like brothers and turn them back. It's horrible' 

They were beautiful moments. 

2) I remember...

a large group of Spanish speakers discussing gay rights in Russia suddenly becoming very silent when they realized that I was staring intently at them with great interest. Too embarrassed to reveal I could understand everything they said, but couldn't form the words to make any meaningful comments, I just kept up the facade of a very nosey Russian and watched as they hushed their conversation and said 'he might understand some words. It's dangerous to talk about this in front of Russians.'

If only they had known...

3) I remember...

meeting a man for breakfast and being awe-struck by his ability to pay for a life of luxury. He was the first rich man I met on my travels, and he didn't even think he was rich. I guess our standards differed. For me, being able to buy coffee at 220 rubles a piece alongside breakfast in an expensive restaurant; to make the taxi wait 20 minutes every morning whilst he slowly got ready and to live in a pretty good apartment in central Moscow is a fairly good token of wealth. He seemed oblivious. We continued to drink our expensive coffees on his bill and waste taxi drivers' time at his expense.

He was a good man. We spooned in the end. No sex, just spooning. I can't remember which spoon I was though. I do remember feeling very warm and fuzzy at the first real, genuine, sincere human warmth, skin against skin, I had felt in a long time. 

What a lovely stereotypical Russian couple walking
through Moscow:
a man in a fur hat and a beautiful woman in heels

4) I remember...
wanting to invite the socialist revolutionary for dinner before I left, but confusing his number with Viktor's. We had a long phone conversation without me even realizing that I had got the wrong voice. I was very shocked when Viktor showed up, asking why I had been so keen to see him. We ended up having a very platonic dinner together as he asked me about what the best way was to learn English and whether he would be able to leave Russia. He was so thankful for letting him communicate with the girls that he gave me a collection of about 5 political journals from the period before and just after fall of the Soviet Union. Glasnost and Perestroika were real, vivid terms. I took them proudly. A very good reward.

5) I remember...

almost falling over about 4 times on the way to the airport. I had lots of bags and was hurrying along the newly formed ice. I was like the crazy grandmother who buys 16 plastic bags full of cat food for her home and then teeters along, perilously, over road surface. It was a strange moment in my life.

And so I formed my subjectivity of Moscow. A few memories, a few beautiful moments, a lot of time alone and vague impressions of the street contours and scale of the city. 

It remained a subjectivity. Something thoroughly incomplete. Something that gave no answers and didn't even seem to welcome questions. It just was.

But at least it placed one persistent urge in my belly: a desire to return, again and again and again. To collect these subjectivities, to place them in little rows of misunderstandings and meanings and half-truths and perceptions. I won't ever understand Moscow, but I'm not even going to try. I'll just keep spinning webs of memories and odd little moments of time. I will collect them for as long as I can, returning as many times as I can. A seed has been planted.

The view from the first part of the abandoned building. Doesn't really show the best of Moscow, does it?

SPRING BLOGS (6): SOCHI

[Message to readers: I have many plans for blogs about my travels in the last month. Many are in progression, but I can't keep them in order chronologically for the time being. As a result, let's skip from 1 to 6, and reinstate the ordering at a later date. I wouldn't want to keep you waiting.]

Sochi Train Station

I spent three days in Sochi, but it is probably one evening that I will remember until my dying delirium. All the elements of madness came flowing together -- by the sea, in the night, beside the palm trees -- and spelt out a kiss on our foreheads: the Chechens, the alcohol, the beautifully-odd hiphop boy, the 'little salad' girl and the empty station at dawn.

 It was February and I had decided to come to Sochi in the interval between the end of Olympics and the beginning of the Paralympics: all the hotels and hostels had free spaces, the foreigners had more or less left, and I could find a place to stay. I had been invited to Sochi by my friend, Pasha, a psychologist-in-training from Belarus (I made reference to him in my post about Belarus in March 2013), who was working in the culinary department of one of the many new hotels built in Krasnaya Polyana, the ski resort outside Sochi.

I took a night train and arrived at 5am. I walked out of the station with no fixed direction and only one goal in mind: to get rid of as much fruit as possible as quickly as possible. Before the train ride I had coincidentally bought a huge stock of fruit for the next week (apples, bananas and pears galore) and then, running late, had been unable to bring said fruit home before leaving for Sochi. Now I wouldn't be able to fix my mistake: the fruit was doomed. I knew that before getting on the special service trains (named 'lastochki' or 'swallows')  to Krasnaya Polyana or the Olympic Park, I would have to go through security checks equivalent to those at airports. This, of course, would involve throwing out all my food and any liquids. Bananas, Pasha had said, were considered dangerous items. He didn't really know why, but they hadn't let his yellow fruit pass, and that was that. We can safely say that no bananas have ever graced the swallow trains of Sochi. Maybe that's a good thing. Bananas, as comics around the world regularly remind us, are famously slippery and would have been a huge impeding peril to our Olympic athletes. There would have been countless news reports about banana-injured hobbling figure skaters crying in despair at the gates of the Olympic Park. This would have been unacceptable.

 I shoved as much fruit as possible down my nutritional trajectories and with great regret threw the rest, with a clang, into a metallic bin.  The swallow was waiting.

 Pasha and I met just after dawn in Krasnaya Polyana -- the mountains rose before us, half-covered in mist.  I was exhausted and erratic in my words. Memories are blurred: my art-inclined mind finds it hard to keep things accurate, scientific and ordered in any circumstance, let alone in such a state of deprivation. Nonetheless, before I move on to describing the evening of madness, I will recount some memories of my brief encounter with an old friend.

This is a bit like what Russia looks like. (No relation to the blog. It's just cool.)

 
I remember...
climbing up to the hotel village on the furnicular railway. Before us stretched out a range of raw mountains -- sharp, snow-covered peaks and forests, which soon became completely blurred by the rain and dampness, so that almost nothing was visible. As we rose, Pasha handed me a set of post-cards showing the Belarusian city of Mogilev before the War. I took them gladly and fumbled through them, bemused at my attempts to pronounce the Belarusian language on the postcards' descriptions, and  whilst commenting on them (in Russian) tried to avoid showing any traces of a foreign accent. Admittedly, this mainly consisted of me being completely silent and limiting my signs of approval to nods and the words 'vot eto da, krasivo' ('Oh, that's pretty, indeed'), but nonetheless, I felt proud. Pasha had told me it was important that our fellow furnicular passengers shouldn't find out that I was a tourist: we hadn't paid the ironically steep visitor fees to go up, because, given that all the tourists had gone home, they just assumed everybody was a worker in the hotel village and didn't check our passports.

I remember...
drinking coffee in Sochi and becoming ever more delirious with tiredness as Pasha told me about his views on Gandhi, Buddhism and Hesse. I resolved once again to make an effort to actually read more about Gandhi, Buddhism and/or Hesse. I like these topics. He reminded me that it was important to aim towards honesty and to follow your own path. For the 70th time, I vowed to write a novel based on these principles. We will see when and how my promises to myself are fulfilled or whether I just keep reading the blurbs on the back of oriental books until my dying day.

I remember...
sleeping like a homeless man on the hard back seats of the bus from Krasnaya Polyana to Sochi. My head rested on my bag and Pasha took pictures. People stared at me. 'They probably thought you were a migrant worker. Worked hard all day, built the Olympics with his bare hands, collapsed on his bag, fell into unconsciousness.' 

I remember...
saying goodbye to Pasha as I finally made it dead-eyed and drained to the hostel, ready only for sleep. We promised to meet again, but it didn't happen. He started working, I slept for almost a whole day...

The next memories involve walking alone under the palm trees, getting lost many times, meeting a man who bought me a greasy sandwich, and rushing to the Lastochka. It was 9pm and I was going to Adler (considered a district of Sochi, but really quite far away) to meet someone who claimed to be an artist.

He looked pretty and hopefully hipster on his internet profile. He even seemed to have a bright blue tattoo of a kitten on his arm, he wore bright clothes and he knew how to skate. I thought I'd try to get to know him as I had nothing else to do. His name was V.

We went to a bar that was normally reputed for being 'cool' (his words), but today, unfortunately (once again his words), the locals were out. They were a cataclysmic force, shedding their inhibitions like the old snake scales of the passed Olympics. There were women shouting, and men roaring, and people with sweat all over their anatomies, and people laughing, and really sassy waiters and waitresses who told it like it was and made the kind of quick-witted comments you'd expect in some sort of stereotypical film about independent Afro-American mothers in New York. It was pretty funny. And surreal.

V. sat very close to me on the bar seat, right at my side. I was surprised. He was very 'masculine'-acting and I had expected him to keep a huge distance for the sake of a more safe public persona. But no, it was close, and quite quaint. He told me about his mother: she gets high a lot. He told me about his father: he's a businessman and the reason why V. has lived in many random corners of Russia. Now he lived in St. Petersburg and was working temporarily in Adler.

'When did your parents divorce?' I asked.
'They didn't. They still live together.'
'But you said your dad is very career-minded and hard-working, and your mother just gets high on lots of different drugs a lot.'
'Yeah, he likes her.'

With my prejudice about the feasibility of a relationship between a drug user and a business man exposed, I swiftly changed topic. Actually, no, I didn't. I kept talking about his mother for a long time and then about the effects of magic mushrooms.

V: 'I had a friend who took mushrooms, had a bad trip, and now he's lost his mind. He's sitting in the mental hospital and doesn't know who he is. Or who anyone is.'
'Do you take them?'
V: 'Oh, only a few times every few months.'
'Aren't you afraid you'll also lose your mind?'
'Nope. I don't imagine that happening in the future, so that probably won't happen. I don't think about it.''
'So your friend didn't lose his mind because of the drugs?'
'Nah, it was definitely the mushrooms that drove him insane. It happened just after that time. But no, I don't see that happening in my life.' 

It won't affect me, because I just don't see that happening in my life. 

Ok, I thought, I'm going to run headfirst into a freight train, because I just don't really see myself dying. It just doesn't feel like my destiny.
Then I'm going to eat 40 kg of pineapples in one sitting, because I don't really see myself getting hives. Hives are not in my fate.
Then I'm going to not eat fruit for 6 years and travel the seven seas on a salty diet, because cholesterol and scurvy are really not for me. I just don't see myself as a scurvy kind of guy.

But I moved on. I like to interview lots of interesting people and he was a friendly, pretty boy. I didn't let myself judge. He'll probably survive the mushrooms.

One of the sweaty-faced local people came up to us. He made us toast to his beer several times. Then, stumbling, he asked a question:
'You're gays, right?'
He stared at us.
We didn't answer.
'Defo queer.' 

'I'm bisexual,' V. popped up.

'I respect you.' (A surprising answer. All the memories of the gay-friendly taxi driver came rushing back...)

'You're a couple, right?'
'No we've only just met.'
'Oh, well, your boyfriend is the passive one.'
V. laughed. I felt like I'd like to slip through the floorboards and vanish through the night.
'We've only just met.'
'Come to our party. We won't ask you questions.. about your orientation. We'll just have a fun time. Come, definitely come..'

We didn't go to his party. But we concluded that he definitely hiding some latent homoerotic demons.

Then the alcohol took its blur, our feet created movement and the beach came upon us -- strangely, somehow -- by way of a supermarket.

Along the way to the beach, V. told me about his plans to leave Russia as soon as possible and travel Brazil. I felt a small pang of jealousy, but mainly wonder. After Russia, Brazil will be my next goal and even thinking about other people achieving their adventures through that huge land mass of vibrant cultures makes me tingle.

But I will have to wait for Brazil.

He told me he was a spontaneous man.
'One time I got drunk in Russia and woke up in Barcelona. I didn't have anywhere to stay, so I had to use the internet. I used hornet (a gay social networking app) and I found a man who let me live in his apartment. He was amazingly friendly. We had a great time. He gave me his keys. But then I came home 6 hours late. I thought he had his own copy... But no. He had waited for 6 hours. He didn't like that and he threw me out. Then I found another guy to stay with. But we ended up fighting too. I didn't want sex with him.'

We took a beer in a black bag and sat on the beach, talking. It was grand and beautiful and the colours of the sea, somehow even in nighttime, seemed rich. I was happy to have made a new acquaintance.

But then the Chechens came. One tall, serious man in a taqiyah skullcap, another looking loose and overly friendly. Slyly, they asked for a light. V. gave them one. Or maybe they offered a light. Or maybe they offered a cigarette. I don't know. It was sly, in any case. It later turned out that they were cruising the streets of Adler late on a Friday night, when the locals were drunk and vulnerable, so that they could get them all involved in discussions about their faith. For two hours, they tried to convince V. and me to accept Islam. They kept talking, giving no real natural break to move away. At one point, I changed the topic to at least ask about their lives: what they thought of Chechnya, what they thought of politics, why they had come to Adler. But it always came back to their God and why we should accept his faith.

They told me that I would never know real happiness and calm until I became a muslim.
They told me to look at the night sky, honestly beg to the heavens for truth and that this would reveal -- without doubt -- that Islam was the truth. There would be a sign -- if I 'kept an open heart'.
They told me that they were ready to die for their faith. 'In a second, if I thought it were necessary'.
They told me that they would do anything for a fellow Muslim, that they would give up their lives: that it was an unbreakable community of sacrifice and brotherhood. 'It doesn't matter if he is from Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Nigeria. All that matters is that he loves Islam, and for that we will help him in any circumstance, in any way.'

I asked: 'And what if I'm in a bad situation? Will you do all that you can to help me?'  
'Of course..'
'And the second time? Or the third time?'
'You'll have to accept Islam at some point.'

I couldn't understand why V. was more interested in politely listening to the words of the smiling Chechen prophets than walking away and accompanying me to the bus stop as he had promised. I concluded that maybe, after all, as madly creative and spontaneous as he may have seemed: an interesting style, stories of Barcelona, love for some little-known hip hop trend that was governed by an international cohort of 'mamas' (or something along those lines). Despite these things, maybe he didn't have the wildness that I love in creative persons: the willingness to follow their own world and their own path. Maybe he was just a junkie discussing the prophets and Jesus.

I got offended and walked away.

On the way, a girl, who looked about 16, but was wearing spindly grandmother make-up, beckoned to me to sit on a bench and drink her beer. She was talking on a hands-free telephonic device to some sort of bemused man, who was listening intently to her words and responding with warm-hearted laughter. Her voice was a subsonic purr. A bizarre, seductive, tainted, subsonic purr. It sounded like her vocal cords had been put in a foot-spa for several days, gently rubbed in the ashes of cigarettes and then repositioned in her throat. And, for some reason, she kept saying the word 'Salatik'.

For those of you who don't speak Russian, Salat means 'salad'. Yes, the leafy stuff. And by adding the suffix -ik to the word 'salad', she was imbuing the word with a degree of affection, or reducing it to a level of cuteness. It's hard to translate as we don't have direct equivalents in English. But something along the lines of 'my dear, witty-bitty darling salad man'. Okay, maybe that was hyperbolic. Nonetheless, the main point is the following: her term of affection for the man on the other end of the telephone was 'SALAD'. I felt like I had arrived in a bizarre parallel universe where it is normal to see leafy, starch-filled dietary components, renowned for their wrinkly greenness and low-calorie content, as cute (Maybe she really likes salad finger s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3iOROuTuMA )

 Her conversation went like this:

"Salad, my darling! A young man has just approached us!...I'm going to give him some beer, salad! Oy, I miss you so, dear Salad! Ukh, Ukh, you're my little salad man!

Nooo, Salad, he's a good man! It was me who invite him to sit with us on the bench, Salad! .. Oh, you're my cute little salad!

Drink up your beer, young man!

Oh, my dear Salad, you're just too good!"

I drank some beer, began to fear it may be mixed with hallucinogenics and bade farewell to little salad woman.

I had nowhere to go, very little idea of where I actually was and absolutely no battery on my phone. Luckily, however, I was wearing a huge coat and in its vacuous pockets I had shoved both a book and my charger. I  walked some vaguely familiar streets until I found a 24-hour Japanese cafe, asked the waitress for a seat by the plugs and for 2 hours charged my phone and sat on the internet, recounting the tales of the Chechens and the Salad woman to some British friends who, due to the time difference, had not yet gone to bed.

At 5 am I decided that the first public transport should be running. It was just after the Olympics, after all. I was expecting the infrastructure to cater towards the needs of early Sunday morning drunkards. My map on my phone was too touch-sensitive: if I pressed to zoom in, it would zoom in to show me miniscule details of unnecessary building components. If I gently tried to zoom out, I ended up studying Russia's southern borders. As a result, I just walked in the hope of finding something. A bus stop came across my way. The next service to Sochi was in 45 minutes. It seemed a hopeless wait. I decided to take the approaching bus to the station instead -- there were bound to be regular trains (swallows, remember?). I arrived at the impressively built building (a new Olympic project) which was strongly illuminated, brightening the night, despite being largely deserted. It turned out the next train was in 2 hours. I would have to wait. In my exhausted state, I couldn't even find the waiting room. I sat on a radiator, closed my eyes and gently hated life for approximately 120 minutes.

I got on the train to Sochi, fell asleep and was awoken by a police man on arrival. I was rather startled from my brutal awakening and scared he would arrest me for no reason ( perhaps not a very logical early morning thought). Instead, he just woke me up.

On arrival to the hostel, I was ready to sleep for 4 hours before getting a train to leave Sochi. Instead, opening the door to my room, I was faced with the last event in the chain of surreal circumstances: on my bed there was something I had not expected. A man. A fairly naked man. Sleeping on my bed. Underneath my stuff. Calmly recovering in the world of dreams.  Probably drunk. Definitely very much asleep.

I tried to call the hostel staff to try to get somewhere else to stay, but I didn't have money on my phone. The Gods were conspiring in bizarre ways to deprive me of sleep. After 10 minutes the cleaner turned up. I explained the situation.

'That's awful. A disgrace.' she smiled, as if she were my mother comforting me on the loss of a relative.

She was friendly and warm in her outrage. I felt reassured.

'Why don't you take your stuff of the bed? I'll give you a private room for a few hours.'

I took my things from on top of a sleeping man, moved to the private room and fell asleep, finally, in the mix of fluffy pillows and thick blankets that are provided for those guests who pay more. The sun had already risen behind the curtains. I was confused, bemused and content.

Later that day instead of leaving Sochi, I ended up at the house of a cutely-bearded Armenian boy who drew comics for a living. He listened to my story, made me tea and gave me a massage to relax, until I fell asleep, once again in a colony of pillows. He seemed to take less drugs than the first man and took care of me for a day. It was a good end to my Sochi adventure. Many interesting boys, a salad girl and some Chechens.