Brontides

After what seems like an age, I’m finally settled in to life in Nizhnevartovsk. I’ve got myself installed in a flat, I’ve bought groceries, I’ve even (mostly) unpacked my suitcase. I know that I’m only here for three months but I’ll be damned if I don’t enjoy a sense of permanence while I have it.

At the end of the last episode, I was in Tyumen, freshly birched and awaiting transportation. All told, I had a pretty good time in Tyumen. The people there were good people, and I had a chance to teach a couple of individual students, which was at least a first step in getting a bit more confident at this teaching lark. One of the students was a 16 year old girl, and it was encouraging to note that Russian 16 year old girls are the same as 16 year old girls everywhere, i.e. capable of delivering an unholy mountain of scorn at very little provocation, and that this is an occupational hazard that I can cope with, albeit with an acceptable degree of flapping.

I finally left Tyumen behind me on Sunday 15th. I had been looking forward to it, but in the event, to call the journey a chore would be an understatement. Trouble started when trying to rustle up a taxi. For a start, actually finding a taxi was an uphill struggle. In Moscow and, to a lesser extent, Nizh, it is usual to find that 90% of the cars on the road are being driven by someone who is happy to be a “freelance” taxi driver – you negotiate a price and jump in. Not so much in Tyumen, where I stood with my arm up like a dork for over an hour waiting for a cab. It was so cold that I had to go back to my flat two or three times, each time tracking mud back onto the floor that I had laboriously cleaned, to restore circulation to my extremities. When I finally did manage to flag down a cab, I of course had no idea how to negotiate a price in Russian, so of course – to add insult to injury – I got reamed on the cost at the other end. At the time this was vexing, although I can now put it into perspective and realised that I was being charged about £6 for a 20 minute ride with luggage, which is hardly a reaming by London standards.

However, at least my adventures with taxis done, for now, I was met at the train station by one of the other teachers called Rob, who made sure I was well supplied and put me on the right carriage. At this point I was already headachy and slightly irritable, but I’m glad that someone came out to see me off; I know that Amanda would have done, but she was struck down with some virus that is currently sweeping the nation, so it was kind of Rob to make the effort.

On board the train, I quickly found my seat and stowed my luggage. The train itself was an interesting beast: a kind of rolling dormitory, spotlessly clean but somewhat cramped. Each carriage has 54 beds, spread over two bunks and arranged in clusters of six. The other passengers on board were very kind, choosing to treat my foreignness as an unfortunate disability that couldn’t be helped, and thus giving me every assistance, which I was grateful for despite essentially wanting to be left alone – the headache had by now developed into a mild migraine, which necessitated occasional bathroom trips to vomit – but once the train was on its way I was mercifully left to my own devices.

I didn’t sleep that night, as the combination of crowded dormitory, rocking train and retching headache is a bad one, but it gave me an opportunity to look out of the window and count my blessings. An opportunity to watch Siberia go by without having to experience the cold is certainly something to be thankful for, because Siberian landscape is an oddity. For a start, an awful lot of it resembles nothing more than sand dunes. The temperature doesn’t get high enough here for the snow to coagulate for another couple of months, so the snow on the ground is all sand-esque powder, and is shifted around by the wind in a similar manner. More than that, though, the flora – struggling with snow and permafrost in the same way that beach scrub has to cope with barren sand – is the same kind of skeletal gorse and shrub that you see on British beaches all year around. It was slightly surreal, as a part of me half expected to see surfers and kite-fliers at any moment.
The snow dunes alternate with patches of countryside – disused for the winter – which could have been lifted from rural anywhere: fields demarcated with hedgerows, copses of trees, mild hills – except, of course, still covered in snow. In many respects, that is the overwhelming aesthetic here.

Finally, there is the tundra that I imagined before I came here: forests of evergreen pine, larches with silver bark, and the brightest stars I have ever seen. This was the dramatic Siberia that I had partly hoped for, home to wolves and bears, an image which I was sure was anachronistic, although I was happy to be disproved.

I rolled into Nizh at 11am the following morning, feeling surprisingly fresh. I was met at the station by Jon, who trained with me for a while in Tyumen and who is one of the nicest people I have ever met, and Tom, who will be my new boss and who seems like a really kind and pleasant guy. They showed me to my new flat and left me there to gather my thoughts for a few hours.

Since then, I have started at the school, taught my first few classes and found my local supermarket. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to write some about all of those things a little later on.

My first weekend in Russia was fun.

Because many of our students are working adults, a lot of our work is conducted outside of office hours – i.e. evenings and Saturdays, although the school is thankfully closed on Sundays. This weekend was a public holiday, however: International Women’s Day, which, despite the moniker, is largely only celebrated in the ex-Soviet Union. Originally instituted by the UN in New York, it was envisaged as a holiday celebrating women in the workforce; the Soviets picked it up as part of its adoption of organised labour, and it gradually fell out of fashion in America and the West for much the same reason. Its celebration in Russia has mostly lost this context, and now serves as an all-purpose celebration of women, although this is largely theoretical in Russia’s hyper-masculinised society.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that we shut up shop early on Saturday and resolve to head for the local banya. A banya is the Russian equivalent of a sauna – a log cabin in the woods, about a mile outside of the city, on the edge of a (very frozen) lake. You get about five hours in the hut – the ten of us arrived at around 8 and left just after midnight – a functioning barbeque, to which we bought our own meat and expertise, and a handy hole in the ice of the lake, to which we will be returning. Oh yes.

We started out by cooking the food we’d bought – chicken, beef and pork chunks were skewered with vegetables, and Rob, Dan, Amanda and myself took it in turns to watch the meat and occasionally prod at it to see if it was done. In the meanwhile, those who weren’t involved in the cooking watched the greatest hits of the Eurovision Song Contest in the hut and drank very expensive vodka. We cannot be accused of not having conformed to local culture.

Food dispensed with, we explored our facilities. The banya had three rooms. The first was a normal room, in which we played cards, ate food, and messed around with the provided satanic backgammon board (don’t ask). The second is a kind of hot lobby; although there was no fire in there, the heat and steam from the banya itself kept it at sauna temperature. It was a good place to cool down after the banya itself and a good place to acclimatise when going in the other direction. Finally, the banya itself was a small-ish room with tiered levels of slat seating. One wall was taken up by a furnace which belched heat and humidity. The temperature in the room was, at a guess, around 45C, but the humidity was intense. I don’t cope well with saunas so it was an effort of will for me to stay in there, but I enjoyed it once I’d found my feet.

In addition to the above, we also had the services of a banshick, a man who comes into the sauna, pours various liquids onto you (beer, cold water, honey, you name it) then slaps you with a laurel branch while you lie face down on the slats. This is actually an extremely pleasant experience and a quite unique way to have a massage, although you’ll still find bits of laurel between your toes weeks later.

After around twenty minutes of this, you have generally had enough. The tradition is to then run down to the lake, which has had a 2m x 1m hole cut into it with an axe (the ice, for context, was about a foot thick), and plunge yourself in. The hole itself was a good hundred yards from the banya, a mad dash over slippery ice down an unlit path through the trees, at the end of which: some ice, and a hole. The water was sub-zero; if you left it alone for more than ten minutes or so it would start to re-freeze. After plunging yourself into the frozen water, you then scramble madly back up the hill, back into the hot then bolt for the safe heat and humidity of the banya, all the while shivering uncontrollably and scraping ice out of your hair. I took one look and thought: Nah. Fuck that.

Of course, that resolve didn’t last long.

And the bizarre thing is: it was brilliant. The heat from the banya stayed with me for the entire plunge, and by the time I got back into the sauna I was still wondering when the pain was going to start. Not only was there no real pain; the rush of endorphins was immense. I ended up going twice; Jon went three times and ended up staggering around with a spinning head. Totally worth doing, though, and great fun as a group outing.

Sunday was quiet – I took the opportunity to see a bit more of Tyumen, which was somewhat underwhelming. Monday started with brunch at Amanda’s, along with Rob, from the school, and two friends of Amanda’s from around town – which rapidly turned into lunch, then afternoon tea, before I made my excuses and ducked out at around 5. All in all a good weekend. In the next few days, I’ll teach my first class and get ready to relocate to Nizh, so I guess you have some or all of that to look forward to in the next gripping installment.

In the mid fifteenth century, the Venetians were the undisputed masters of the Mediterranean. Following the sacking of Genoa, they had no meaningful rivals when it came to the sea’s lucrative trade routes, and the Ottoman overthrow of Byzantium and the destruction of Armenia meant that overland trade with Asia Minor was all but impossible. Operating mainly through Beirut and Alexandria, Venetian ships more or less single-handedly represented Europe’s market to the old world.

In these two ports, everything was traded – the goods brought overland from India and China along the Silk Road – Persian gums, precious stones – copper and incense from the south of the Arabian peninsula, ivory, pearls, fruit and cloth from north Africa. But one commodity stood above the rest, commanding prices put all of the others to shame, and that was spice – more specifically, pepper.

What the spice trade meant to Europe can be read upon the pages of any medieval account or cookery book. In spite of the perverse vagaries of the Mameluke Sultans – whose greed could send prices soaring on a whim, and whose uncertain tempers and squalls of fury could inflict upon a patrician Venetian a flogging, as if he were a slave – to the Republic, the rewards were well worth the costs. German, French and English consumers would pay whatever prices were demanded for as much spice as Venice could supply.

But, in 1487, Batholomew Diaz became the first European to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, and before the end of the century Vasco de Gama proved the viability of a sea route to Calicut. This was apocalyptic for the Venetians; a pilgrim’s journal of the time notes that “all the city of Venice was greatly impressed and alarmed, and the wisest men held that this was the worst news that could ever come to the city.” Sure enough, by 1502, the Venetians found that there was no spice to be found in Alexandria. The Portuguese had stolen the trade, although the English would later steal it from them in turn, and Venice’s star was on the wane.

I find this interesting for several reasons. Firstly, I think that cooking – the desire to source new, exciting ingredients and have them delivered fresh – is underrated as a motivator when it comes to understanding geopolitics. It only recently that, for the first time in human history, the most commonly internationally traded resource had not been a foodstuff; coffee, the erstwhile leader, still accounts for phenomenal quantities of shipping every year. To those who say that the current banking crisis somehow proves the inviability of capitalism as model, that this is the end of the supremacy of the market, I can only say: human behaviour is economic behaviour. As long as people need to eat, international trade will be at the forefront of or politics, our society, and our world. A few fewer banks and a few fewer bankers won’t change that; there still will be banks and traders and investors, because at the end of the day, people will always need pepper, and that’s the bedrock upon which international trade is built, not mortgages. The mortgage trade may seem like a lot when your fate is directly linked to interest rates, but it’s peanuts compared to how the peanut sellers roll.

Secondly, it illustrates what a harsh mistress that very market is. Both Venice and Portugal had their dreams of glory dashed on the spice trade; then, as now, the Middle East proved to be an unreliable trading ground. In the context of this history, it makes sense for America to pursue their ethanol dream. What doesn’t make sense, however, is why the rest of the world is allowing them to do so. If the Brazilians have developed, in sugar cane ethanol, a fuel that is four times more efficient than America’s corn ethanol at the same cost, a fuel which many believe has the potential to be as efficient as gasoline, and a fuel which impacts global food supplies in no way at all, then why isn’t China, or Russia, or the EU, investing in it?

Airports. One feature of the modern world that is genuinely hard to love; from the gross inefficiency of your Heathrows and CDGs, to those sterile, sprawling monstrosities in Schiphol and Frankfurt, to the nauseating glitz of Dubai’s shopping mall city, no-one has yet managed to successfully design a place where thousands of travellers can cool their heels in relative comfort and peace. It’s a tall order, admittedly, but you’d be hard pressed to find an airport than makes a bigger mess of it than Sheremetyevo, the ex-Communist monster that “serves” Greater Europe’s second largest city. I spent roughly four hours in Moscow enduring fever-inducing cold, belittlement, mild extortion in the form of excess baggage payments (a 3kg excess in Heathrow miraculously blossomed into 7kg once on Russian scales), cigarette smoke, and the worst music I have ever heard in my life. If Russia is as awash with money as they say, then it can surely afford something better than this.

Tyumen airport was an exercise in contrast. Which isn’t to say that it was good, because it wasn’t; more that it was… austere. It was really more of a train station than an airport. Upon touching down at 6am, we trudged across the snowy tarmac to be disgorged into a car park via a gate held closed by a rusty padlock. That was it; no arrivals building to speak of at all. A little while later, an ante-chamber was unlocked, in which I found my baggage. No further officialdom seemed to be forthcoming, so I went on my way – slightly bemused by the experience, nonetheless.

Happily, I was met from the airport by Amanda, a pleasant American lady who is also the director of studies of CET in Tyumen. Her assistance on that first morning was fairly vital, as my own capacity at the time was somewhat sub-par. I later found out that this was a case of the blind leading the blind: Amanda had herself arrived in Tyumen after a 15-hour trek from the States only a day or so previously, and spent much of the following day in deep, deep sleep. But that notwithstanding, she still managed to take me to my apartment, thrust a handful of cash and groceries into my hand, and force me to make my bed before collapsing into it. For this I am grateful.

I forced myself out of bed at around noon, having slept for about 4 hours – enough to take the edge off, but not enough to ensure that I would be body-clock-distortingly alert at 2am the following morning. This was the first point at which I properly stopped to check out my surroundings. My flat – fine, clean, tastefully decorated and spacious, with as much kitchen as I could possibly wish for. Located on the tenth floor of a Soviet concrete block, it provides some scenic views of a pair of radio masts, which are actually quite pretty when lit up for night.

Meeting Amanda and another new colleague, Rob, for a pizza lunch provided an opportunity to see Tyumen itself in daylight. On first impressions, it’s like a Saudi city but snowier – lots of wide, straight roads in a grid system, lots of concrete blocks, and lots of cars. A slightly fairer eye will realise that this is fatuous; for one thing, Tyumen has bars, and restaurants, and pavements, and people bustling about the place – not many, but enough to prevent a sense of desertedness. The concrete blocks are interspersed with some charmingly ramshackle old wooden buildings, most of which have electricity but none of which have plumbing. And if you’re persistent, you can find some items of real interest – a small central park with a fair, for example, complete with ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds, and a collection of very beautiful ice sculptures, or some of the oldest churches and cathedrals in Russia.

Pizza was a slightly lazy affair, if only because Amanda and I were persevering under the effects of travel tiredness. Once fed, however, I was taken to the school to meet the other staff and get a sense of the premises. The school in Tyumen isn’t big – 6 permanent teachers, plus myself and Jon, both pending for Nizhnevartovsk – but it is friendly, and the welcome I received there was very warm. At the end of the day, Jon – who is literally the friendliest, most cheerful man I have ever met – took me out to dinner at a diner in town. Along with Dan, another recent arrival, we cheerfully ordered Deluxe Moccasin with no idea what that entailed (in the event, a fish fillet fried in batter with a potato fritter) and a nice big slice of cake to follow. I got home in time for an early night, but sat up bolt upright at about 1.15am, realising that I had left my satchel at the restaurant. After ten minutes of internal wrestling, I sighed, booted up and headed back out into the cold. After half an hour of trudging, was extremely fortunate to discover that: a) stories of the probability of getting stabbed in Russian cities at 2am are overblown, at least in Tyumen; b) the restaurant is not in the UK, and thus stays open until a sensible hour – in this case, 2am; and c) apparently no-one else had been in the restaurant since I left, as mu bag was undisturbed where I left it. All of this is extremely fortunate, as losing that bag – and its contents – would have been catastrophic.

Yesterday was mostly spent at the school, although I did brave my first visit to a Russian supermarket (which was, uh, remarkably similar to supermarkets anywhere else in the world. Who would’ve thunk). Plans are being drawn up for a weekend trip to the hot springs, and hopefully I’ll have my ticket sorted out for my train ride to Nizhnevartovsk by early next week. I shall no doubt keep you all informed in the next thrilling installment.