If you have seen the film Inception, you’ll know that as soon as a character in the film begins to realise that a dream is a dream, and not reality, the surrounding landscape begins to crumble around the edges.
I arrived in Moscow at 6.35am the other day. While I had been away, there was freak winter rain, which froze a thick layer of smooth, shining, transparent ice onto everything. Many trees had collapsed under the weight, and branches and twigs, branchlets and berries all twinkled and glimmered and tinkled and shimmered under their newfound bling in the early morning sun and wind. The city was as quiet as you might expect a city to be at the crack o’dawn during the biggest public holidays of the year, and I felt like, after just a couple of weeks away, I had returned to witness the eery aftermath of a silent apocalypse.
We had a couple of gorgeous sunny days of indescribable beauty.
The sky has greyed and the temperature has risen since, and the ice on the twigs, telephone lines, lamp posts, has started to crumble round the edges, while lumps of snow and ice and icicles come crashing down from the rooftops, as if these four and a bit months really have all been a bizarre Inception-style dream, which is coming now to an increasingly conscious collapse.
Indeed, it’s difficult to know what has happened and what hasn’t when I’m the only more or less reliable and accessible witness to events. But, in any case, we find ourselves in a new year, still trying to catch up with the last, and, memory or fantasy, for this blog it doesn't really matter. Onwards!
A Festive Foray into the Frozen North!
she got a cold nose.
Two of us from Cambridge weren’t returning to the Yu Kay for Nyu Yeer or Christmas. So we went to Petrozavodsk!
Here are some frosty stats
Air temperature on arrival: minus twuhenty nine degrees centimagrade
….that’s about all the stats I can think of for the minute. But I think that’s about enough. Luckily Russian apartment blocks are built like polar bears – 1) the heating system runs off seals (not really) and 2) they have a low (or is it high?) surface to volume ratio... basically the kind of surface to volume ratio that means that they have not much surface area given the volume so when you crank up the heating to full speed ahead it’s toasty warm on the inside and you can admire the view in a t-shirt.
We got recipes for gravy and stuffing from my Mumma and I had a bottle of whisky and Jo made a great xmas cake so the short days and long nights flew by.
We did get out and about though. The temperature made the place look really amazing. All exposed hairs freeze, condensation from factory chimneys immediately starts going down, icy breath in general from people and cars and houses comes billowing out in little cloudlets, and all this moisture in the air freezes to more or less every surface of everything. It was very cool. We were lucky because it wasn’t windy, so the snow remained thick on the branches, electricity lines, rooftops, etc looking beautiful, and the short days were light and bright.
Except on the final day which was windy and grey when we decided to go for a walk around town because it was only -17, and froze on the lake:
us at the lake looking frozen.
We were staying with old friends of mine and it was great family time, just as xmas should be.
Cultural activities included balalaika concert, cross country skiing, children’s karate championship*, cinema, private concert from a quality Russian rapper, fetching water from an underground spring, and eating elk soup.
*I was a specator.
Our hero’s frigid escapades continue as he ventures first to St Petersburg, and then on to deepest darkest Komarovo, clad in almost nothing but felt boots, a Christmas hat, and a canvas satchel…
I arrived home to St Petersburg to some other old friends, again early in the morning after another night train. I couldn’t work out the water heater and had a cold shower then had some tea and set out to meet a couple of academics from Cambridge. It just so happened that the snow and ice was being cleared off their roof just when I arrived, above their entrance, and the yardman just told me “run!” I guess dicing with death is just what I do. We had caviar for breakfast, got some money from cash machines, bought sim cards, and were photographed in front of the Winter Palace for the Cambridge Middle Eastern Studies website.
In Russia, New Year’s Eve is the main festival of the year. It is more of a family celebration, like Christmas is for us. Then they have Orthodox Christmas on the 7th of Jan (although on the whole not everyone is bothered about this, just people who are Orthodox), and the holidays go on until about 10th or 11th. Our Christmas is just a thing they have heard of but don’t go in for really. They have Christmas trees and Christmas music as we know it but here it’s all for New Year. It was fun seeing people taking trees home with them in the metro, and hearing jingle bells (that song that monkeys call jungle bells) playing on the accordians in the underpasses.
On the 30th two of us went out to the dacha (country house) to get the stove going and have it all warm for the 31st. Their dacha is a creaky old wooden house, with coal heating in the kitchen, in the middle of the woods by the Gulf of Finland. The snow was very deep.
We spent our time there eating, sleeping, and playing hockey on the pond down the hill through the woods. Also watching Monty Python, which was all the more hilarious and bizarre for being at the dacha in Komarovo. There was a constant flow of guests both from the city and from nearby, of all ages. At 1am on 1st January after a big New Year's meal we all went down to the crossroads and met other families and friends. Everyone brought their own fireworks. The occasional taxi would try to get through over the snowy and icy road, and groups of people were coming and going and passing through, but thankfully that didn’t hinder drunk men, children and dogs from setting off their flaming rockets towards overhead electricity lines and trees from different points within the crowd and at different angles. Our set of fireworks included bangers, rockets, and the kind of bright green and red flares you see on war films when people need to be rescued at sea in low visibility from seven kilometres away.
hockey on the pond.
Sunny day at the beach: The Gulf of Finland, about 1pm.
The highlight of my return to St Petersburg was the arrival of the other lodger from the far eastern islands off Siberia and Japan. We ate home-caught, home-prepared caviar and dried fish, washed it down with pepper vodka, listened to his quality collection of vinyl, and sat up til 6 while he told us of snow, bears and something along the lines of the true meaning of life.
Back in Moscow
Things in Moscow are more or less as I left them. My first conversation with my neighbour was Happy New Year followed by discussion about how he has replaced the loo seat, and the relative advantages and disadvantages of this change. There was a fat rat waiting for me in the kitchen rubbish chute to welcome me back. The smells are all the same. The cockroaches came to say привет. In short, everything is as it should be. There are some changes, for better and for worse: I have a new bed which is just long enough and a massive improvement from the one I had since August, which was made of three square mattresses next to each other which all together reached not quite as far as my ankles. Meanwhile, however, the voice has changed in the metro, which is a bit weird. But in any case I’m now into the final stretch of my Russia stint for the year, so who cares. And while I’m not at all desperate to leave, I’m looking ahead to getting back to the motherland, and then on to Iran, inshallah. In preparation for the Islamic Republic I’m trying to get used to eating meals cross-legged on the floor, and I've been enjoying listening to Nina Simone’s “Gimme a pigfoot (and a bottle of beer)”…
That's all for now. Lots of love, and best wishes for a Happy New Year.
No comments:
Post a Comment