A dull thud in the distance
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A funny thing happened on the way to the Slavtak

April 27th, 2009 | Posted by Aosher in Politics | Travel - (0 Comments)

I was walking down the street yesterday, about to meet some colleagues for an evening of card games and roast chicken. At the time I was on the phone to Jon, when without warning a massive guy came up behind me and but both his hands heavily on my shoulders. This was rather surprising, but then he called out to a car, that swooped out of the nearest turning and pulled up in front of us. Before I could really react, he had pushed down on me, hard, forcing me into the car, and had closed the door behind me.

Jon tells me that I sounded surprisingly calm while this was going on, but the guy driving the car started shouting almost immediately. “POLITZIA, POLITZIA,” he shouted, while I looked back in wide-eyed terror. They drove me to a nearby alley and continued shouting. “PASSPORT. PASSPORT!” Stupidly, I had left all of my documentation at home, but had no really effective way of communicating this other than shrugging and looking bewildered. They carried on shouting for a while and I carried on looking confused, but I quickly realised that we were at an impasse.

They were apparently unwilling to do anything to me other than shout, thankfully, so I called the manager of the school and asked him to translate for me, in order to help move things along. He had a word with the cops and explained to them that I didn’t have my passport with me, but almost as soon as he’d hung up they started shouting again – “POLITZIA! PASSPORT!” This didn’t seem like a promising sign.

After a while, the record changed. The larger of the two turned, looked me in the eye, grinned, and – pointing to himself – started repeating, “Mafia. Dollars! Mafia!” At this point I actually relaxed a little. Up until this point I hadn’t been sure what was going on, but a shakedown is much more of a known quantity – it was surreally hilarious, but in general, you know what to do when a massive crooked cop is asking you for money. He clearly wasn’t actually Mafia; I’d been walking around with a laptop, a camera, an iPod and my credit cards, and if this guy had really been mafia he wouldn’t have bothered with a shakedown for twenty bucks. So I continued to act dumb (I’m a natural) until he got bored, which happened surprisingly quickly. After about 5 minutes, he visibly deflated, said “Bye bye”, and stared morosely out of the window. “Spasiba!” I said before climbing out of the car and hauling ass.

My boss was livid about the incident. Apparently, despite being a bit of a Russian cliché, crooked police shakedowns are rare in Nizhnevartovsk, and he promised to give the local PD hell (I’m sure that he pays enough in protection money to be able to expect that his teachers are unmolested). Me, I was… one-fifth terrified, two fifths confused and two fifths entertained. As soon as I realised that I wasn’t in any real danger, the whole thing became a bit of a pantomime. There is an extent to which I brought it on myself – by walking around without a coat I stuck out as a foreigner like a sore thumb (I also attracted a fair bit of gopnik attention – ‘gopnik’ being the local variety of chav, redneck, bogun, whatever). But it makes for a good anecdote and we had a few laughs about it over the roasted chicken, so it could have gone down much worse.

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What happens when you don’t pay attention

March 10th, 2009 | Posted by Aosher in Travel - (0 Comments)

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.

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Food and trade

March 10th, 2009 | Posted by Aosher in General | History | Politics | Thorough Wonkiness - (0 Comments)

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?

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First to Fourth September, 2005 (Paris, France)

September 4th, 2005 | Posted by Aosher in Travel - (0 Comments)

Some commentary:

1. I was younger and, apparently, crasser. Not much crasser, though.
2. I still don’t like Paris, but I would be less scathing about it in retrospect. It lacks a certain ambience that I look for in cities; a sense that it would continue to exist even if all the tourists went away. I’ve described it as a museum of a city and I stand by that.
3. I have lost my fear of mass transit.

I am not a well boy.

Its the end if my first calendar week abroad. I’m writing this from what is probably my favorite spot in Paris so far. It’s a little ledge on the river that runs around the Ile de Saint-Louis, and the reason why I like it is because the sun virtually never hits it. The sun and I are not friends at the moment; it wants to be some thirty-degree-centegrade sillyness and I want it to be raining.

Unfortunately, I also seem to have every disease ever invented ever; a cold that I brought with me, a fever (complete with delerious nightmares) and diarrhea c/o Mr Sun and a nasty stomach bug thanks to Paris’ dirty tap water.

Paris is very old-fashioned compared to London. From a distance, I didn’t realise that it’s roughly one-third of the size of London, and that even France as a whole – despite occupying twice the landmass – has a smaller nose-count overall than the island I call home. This does give Paris a kind of personality which I suppose London lacks, particularly to an outsider, but does make the city feel rather hollow. While it is certainly both beautiful and eccentric, it’s clear that it is, for example, ill-equipped for commerce; the driving system is a glorious chaotic mess and there doesn’t appear to be a sizeable commercial district at all. Which shouldn’t bother me, as a tourist, but for some reason it does.

Also, for an allegedly first-world country it can be quite backward. I mean, honestly Paris – I at least expected clean tap water.

It’s also expensive. Budget-bustingly so, in fact. I’ll just have to try and make it up once I hit the Low Countries.

So. I spent the first couple of days in Monmartre, which was nice – that hostel I stayed at was literally in the shadow of the Basilica de Sacre-Coeur, and the view out of my window was amazing. Thurday evening was sensible – bearings then food then bed. Simple.

On Friday, however, I seem to have decided to be silly. In my wisdom, despite having had no sleep and being unable to retain solids, I decided to walk to length of the city twice. From my base in Monmartre, I headed towards the Moulin Rouge in Pigalle, and was amazed – minge in the windows! I then headed south towards Opera, which is the absolutely jaw-droppingly stunning French national Opera house, then onto – and around – Le Louve, which was probably also spectacular but I was flagging a little by this point. For some reason, I then decided that it would be a good idea to walk to Bastile – it wasn’t, as obviously there’s nothing there but a big roundabout, although the walk alongside the Seinne was nice – after which I was more or less obligated to slog along the Rue Magenta towards Gare du Nord and Monmartre.

I could, of course, have spared myself all that at any time by simply jumping onto the Metro. UNFORTUNATELY I have a mild (yet bizarre) fear of unfamiliar public transport systems – it took me the better part of a week to get onto Tokyo’s metro, and here as there I found that the more tired I am the less inclined I am to face my peculiar issues.

Thus, Saturday was pretty horrible. I’d barely slept, I couldn’t eat and my body was still giving me hell for Friday’s stupidity. I moved hostels to one near Pont Marie, although with the larger pack on my back I bit the bullet and lost my Metro cherry while my brain was still functioning. My new hostel is pretty grim – swelteringly hot, badly built and no air conditioning, or even fans, which only goes to reinforce my opinion that Paris is a 15th Century city pretending to be a 17th Century city. I tried to get some compensatiory sleep, but couldn’t because of the heat; tried to eat but threw up; was generally useless. I ended up not doing much apart from feeling sorry for myself, which is something I’m quite good at.

Today has been better. I got some sleep this morning, and even ate a bit for breakfast and kept it down. The wind in my sails, I headed toward the Eiffel Tower to see if it was worth the fuss, and, yeah, it’s big and it’s go views and stuff. I almost carried on for the Pantheon, but I was feeling a bit rough after Eiffel’s stairs (1665, fact fans!), so I took Friday’s lesson to heart and mooched back to the hostel. So here I am, writing this with a baguette, so camembert and cherry tomatoes and orange juice, in what is, now, no longer my favourite spot in Paris – as a French man has just reached into my bag, pulled out my swiss army knife and mimed stabbing me. I think I’m going to move on now – tonight I’ll probably head towards the Arc de Triomphe, which I hear is also well-endowed in the views department.

If I seem slightly negative about Paris, then that’s because thus far I’m genuinely underwhelmed. Perhaps it’s the fugue state talking, and perhaps I’ll be more receptive when I shake my various maladies, but it seems like a very superficial city – more like an installation or sculpture than a real, living city. Which isn’t to say it isn’t beautiful – which it is – or that it is somehow lacking in life or energy – which it certainly isn’t. More to say that, between the stunningly pretty girls, the glorious Gothic architecture and the bohemian chic lies only filler, and not a real city at all.

That said, the one thing that has impressed is the Metro. Not only is it cleaner, fatser, quieter and cheaper than the tube, it has also provided the definitive Moment of the Trip So Far. London Underground, as many of you will be aware, has designated, Carling-sponsored busking spots for hairy men to sit in and play bad pop-rock, accousticly, so that we can all ignore them. At first I thought they were a kind of containment, stopping these people from roaming the streets, but no – apparently they’re still allowed to do that. I tend to just ignore them.

I digress. The Moment occured when I rounded a corner in Concorde station and encountered nothing less that a twelve-piece brass and accordian band, who were actually (and surprisingly) really good. They even got some change out of me, which is a rarety; I would have bought the CD but frankly I didn’t want to lug it around Europe only to discover it it was actually pap when I got home. So I guess I passed on that; nevertheless, it was the first time Paris had actually delighted me.

Right, I have to go now. Sorry this was so long, they’ll probably get shorter as I get bored-er of keeping a journal, but for now the novely’s fresh, so enjoy it while it lasts. Much love to all.

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