eight-year-old dilemmas (part two)

So, where were we? Oh yes: the eight-year-olds were losing their fear of me and transforming into little human express trains. And I was about to tell you about Dilemma The Second.

Okay. Well, it first surfaced due to a mutual interest shared by two of my students, Anna and Sergey.

Anna is a bright kid, prone to getting bored and pouty when other pupils don't match her pace, but basically okay. Sergei is … well, a boy. I don’t much like boys, and never have – they nearly all seem to be suffering from some kind of learning disability, on top of which I frankly just find them annoying. But as boys go, Sergei is no worse than most. There are even times when his masculine delinquency gives way to something else; a sort of witless "hello there!" smile that's as dumb as rocks, yet almost charming in its complete lack of reserve. I still much prefer the girls, though. I guess it's just a variation of the dogs vs. cats argument, and (with apologies to dog owners who are reading this) I'm always gonna come down on the feline side of the fence.

Anyway, the “mutual interest” these two micro-pupils share in common is as follows: they simply adore kicking the crap out of each other. This isn’t a terribly desirable thing to have going on during any lesson, but a while ago there came a point when Anna's and Sergei's squabbles went from being merely disruptive to being cause for more serious concern.

Some time in late September, at the start of one of my lessons, the Anna-Sergei monster was whizzing around the classroom in full flight – chasing its own tail, darting between chairs, dodging tables and so on – when suddenly its Anna-half decided to try going through a chair rather than around it. She fell forward and ended up lying prone across two seats, with her head and feet dangling less than half a metre from the floor. As the capsized Anna lay there trying to work out how to fix the vertical hold, Sergei continued to beat her over the head with his pencil case (or possibly hers). It was pretty much your typical no-holds-barred, psychotic eight-year-old deathmatch.

Here’s the thing, though: on their way through the maze of classroom furniture, both halves of the monster had bumped themselves on just about every single desk, chair or other obstacle in their paths. In doing so, they’d fuelled one of my ongoing concerns about Muscovites – namely that they sometimes appear to have a very poor sense of direction &/or are genetically pre-disposed towards clumsiness. I won’t try to justify my claim now, though it’ll probably come up again in later entries. For now, you’ll just have to accept the premise that the townsfolk here have an extraordinary talent for bumping into things (most notably other people and their cars*).

But getting back to Anna and Sergei: she eventually made it to her feet, and I could see that their attempts to kill one another were about to resume at an even more intense level. My usual threats and admonitions were having no effect, and their in-built clumsiness had me convinced that within seconds I’d be reaching for my phrasebook to look up the Russian for “I need to phone an ambulance”. So what was I to do?

What I did was this: I walked behind Sergei, stuck my arms underneath his shoulders and forcibly lifted him through the air, all the way back to his desk.

It worked, too.

Now, perhaps my experience of how grown men are supposed to behave toward small children back in Paranoid Delusional Land** has made me a little too concerned about having physical contact with young students. Because, you see, I was expecting angry phone calls from parents after this incident. I thought Sergei would be so upset to have been man-handled by a teacher that the story would make it home to mama and papa, and I’d end up having to justify myself to the school director, possibly copping a written warning or even having my contract terminated if my school didn’t accept the “it was the only way I could think of to ensure their physical safety” defence. Mentally I'd begun packing my bags already, just in case. But nope. Nothing at all. Sergei didn’t seem remotely disturbed by what had happened. I'm sure he's forgotten it.

It was during the very next lesson that I realised something I never would have suspected: these children actually seem to crave proximity to the teacher. This fact dawned on me all-of-a-sudden while I was reading my eight-year-olds a story from the Teacher’s Book - or rather, while I was trying to. Perched on a chair at the front of the room, I was completely failing to get anyone’s attention, so out of grim determination I decided to go and sit at the desk of a student called Nastya and read my book directly to her. Anticipated result: I might get one student to actually listen, which would've been one more than I’d had up to that point. But when I did this, the psychological effect was stunning; before I knew it, there were four littl’uns crowding around me, sitting on tables and resting their hands on my shoulders. It was like Story Time with Uncle Anthony! I really expected one of them to push their way up onto my lap at any moment. Very surreal.

Cut forward about two weeks to a bar in the downtown district of Kitai Gorad. Here I sat drinking with a few teachers and students, recovering from the Sergiev Posad débacle (see my earlier entry). I found myself sitting next to a teacher who I knew had quite a bit of experience with 'young learners', so I told her my reservations about physical contact with students. She was astonished: “I’m touching my students virtually the whole time. It’s essential.” I then went on to tell her about the Story Time incident, at which she exhibited no surprise whatsoever.

The upshot of all this is that I now try to remain within striking distance of my Little People whenever I can, and they often decide to lean in close or just stick out a hand and grab me. (Example: you'll notice in the photo here that the ever-delightful Zusha has her hand in mine. That was her idea.) It still feels pretty weird at this point, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. And it has made quite a difference to the effectiveness of my lessons.

So there you go. Barely two months into my new career as a poor man’s Rhys Muldoon, and I’ve survived two dilemmas already. Undoubtedly they're just the first of many to come. I’m still a long way from comfortable in a classroom full of eight-year-olds popping out of their skins like corn kernels in a hot covered pan. But I’m also vaguely proud not to have crumbled entirely (yet). And I must admit, there have been moments when some of the little vultures have flipped the switch to Cute-as-Hell Mode and disarmed me completely.

Actually, to be truthful,there are one or two pupillini who melt my steely detachment like this on a fairly regular basis, notably the terrible twinlets Zusha and Ksusha. Two days ago, for example, sweet and silly Ksusha approached me during class and motioned for me to lean in close to her. Evidently she had a secret to share, which was delivered behind a cupped hand: “Entoni … today my birthday.”

Exactly why one of my mini-pupils would choose to reveal this to me I don't know, but frankly that would’ve been plenty of cuteness for one day. After class, though, Susha approached me again, this time with hands held behind her back. I’m thinking “Oh no, is she going to show me a birthday gift someone gave her? Will I need to feign being impressed by something truly awful?”. But instead, Susha made a short announcement: "Entoni, preee-zent". Then from behind her she whipped out an enormous box of chocolate wafers for me. I was very nearly speechless in two languages!

I actually sat the wafers on my desk, knowing I’d need them later in the day - not to eat, but to glance at whenever I felt like strangling members of my nightmarish Tues/Thur adult class. Or to put that another way: I used something symbolic of my eight-year-olds to get myself through an adult class. Bit of a turnaround, no?

Anyway, after she'd given me the wafers, Susha did proceed to show-and-tell, producing from her school bag a rather odd-looking doll. I asked if I could take a picture and she happily posed with her birthday gift. If you can stare at the resulting photo (left) for five seconds without feeling your heart soften at least a little bit - well, you're doing better than me.

Meanwhile, as the eight-year-old situation slowly improves, Moscow's wider adult population (or at least the white 'European' portion thereof) has been offering me ample practice in dealing with juvenile behaviour. I mean, in the two months I've been here, I’ve met some remarkably lovely and big-hearted people who've shown me that the famed 'slavic hospitality' I'd heard about is not mythical. For this fact, and to those people, I am hugely grateful. But then you have the other, less pleasant face of Moscow. It's this that I want to tell you about now.

A good way to see this face is to ride the Metro. You frequently find yourself resisting the urge to turn on other commuters and say stern, motherly things like “Do you really think that shoving will get you there any faster?” and “Oh for heaven’s sake, would you just grow up and consider someone else for a change?” Likewise in the classroom, there are at least one or two adult students who could easily go pout-for-pout with the worst of my teens and tinies. And attempting to converse with most people in 'service' industries here - like, say, the staff at the local supermarket - is like trying to make cats excited and enthusiastic about bath time.

There are exceptions, of course, and the kindness of strangers has saved me on more than one occasion. Still, the unfriendly public persona of your average Muscovite is a notable fact of day-to-day life. Acquiring the patience and stamina to deal calmly with this kind of childish crap from adults is therefore a matter of daily necessity.

I imagine this will help me out enormously as a teacher, and possibly even as a human being. It also makes me think that perhaps – in Moscow at least – spending a few hours each week surrounded by a bunch of eight-year-olds isn't that much of a special dilemma after all ;-)






* Statistic: Moscow has approximately the same population as London, but six times the number of road accidents.

**My suggested new name for the territory previously known as Australia, after four years of the War on Terror, eight under Howard and decades in the vice-like grip of insurance company lawyers.

eight-year-old dilemmas (part one)

Hello. A slight change of pace this week: for the benefit of those who’ve been asking, here's where I finally stop gawping at landmarks, street vendors and wallpaper and start telling you a little about what I actually do here. If you’re the kind of person who can’t think of anything less interesting than the minute details of someone else’s job, I can empathise; feel free to skip this entry.

*ahem*

Ignoring all considerations of narrative good taste, let's start with a flashback. Picture Anthony sitting in an office tower in York Street Sydney, in a relaxed, civilised round-table atmosphere, studying for his CELTA certificate. It's the beginning of 2005, and twelve months of fairly intense introspection have led Anthony to decide that this year he will finally give his life a long overdue shake-up. He will stop procrastinating; he will start making some of the Big Changes he's been putting to one side; he will set events rolling as soon as possible, and try to give them a momentum of their own so that the brakes can't be applied later when the usual doubts begin to surface. All of which will hopefully drag life into its next ‘phase’, whatever that turns out to be.

Hence the teaching course, among other things.

A brief explanation for those of you who haven’t come across the acronym: CELTA is the piece of paper you need to convince prospective employers that you’re fit to teach English. Its full name is the Cambridge Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults.

I'd like you to take particular note of that last bit – the word after "to". It roughly translates as “people to whom one can probably try to teach some things without sustaining permanent damage to one's sanity”.

But returning to Flashbackland, there I sat in York Street, learning how to teach adults to speak English. Training with adults. Teaching adults. Giving my adult students lots of useful adult exercises, choc-full of useful adult vocab relating to useful adult subjects, to which they responded in a sane, adult manner whenever I formed a sentence beginning with a phrase like like “What I’d like you to do now is …”.

Now cut to six months later, as Anthony rides the Metro out to South Butovo (“the outer administrative limit of Moscow”, according to one website I visited recently), assumes the blackboard position, and sizes up his first class ...

... of eight-year-olds!

Anthony [to self]: “What the hell am I supposed to do with all these little people?”

Answer [from self]:     “No freaking idea.”

I did have one thing working for me, though. As luck would have it, this class had been together for a year and had already worked their way through a whole textbook together. So Anthony goes straight to Page One of Book Two, and reads the cues:

Anthony [to class]:      “Touch your nose.”

Blank stares.

Anthony:                       “Point to the door.”

Nothing. Students evidently pre-occupied with eight-year-old thoughts (most likely the equivalent of “What's this scary man with the beard doing here, and what the hell is he pointing at?”).

Anthony:                       “Stand on your chair.”

Seconds pass. A silence so absolute, my brain starts supplying the soundtrack: a whispering breeze blowing through a ghost town. Imaginary tumbleweeds begin rolling across the classroom.

Then finally, signs of movement: a student lifts her hand, seemingly in the direction of her nose. Is this a delayed response to the earlier “touch your nose” request? Could be. Or maybe she’s just planning to do some house-cleaning. I have to know. I turn to look at her. She stops, puts her hand down, resumes pouting. Silence envelops the room once more, like a metaphorical Red Sea onto a swarm of figurative Egyptian guys with chariots.

And so went most of my first lesson.

The second one was marginally better, but still awful. I really, really needed to seek some guidance from my ADOS (Assistant Director of Studies) about this, and quickly. I was getting absolutely nowhere with these little monsters.

To cut a long meeting short, the ADOS’ main piece of advice was this: "to 'activate' young learners, it's often necessary to introduce a more kinaesthetic component into your lesson plans". Translation: get them moving. “Hmmm”, I thought. “Good idea.”

It worked, too.

Four weeks and eight lessons later, the classroom atmosphere has changed beyond recognition. Having lost their fear of the Scary Bearded Man, and seemingly invigorated by the knowledge that learning doesn’t have to entail being tied to a straight-backed chair and drilled by scary bearded women, these kiddies appear to be having a rather wonderful time in my classes. Even better: while that’s going on, they’re also beginning to retain small quantities of information about the English language. They’re running around the room to find numbers I’ve ‘hidden’ in far corners; they’re running up to the board to draw the time onto clock faces or to write “fifteen balloons” next to my pictures (although they still pronounce it “fiveteen”, and I still can’t draw balloons that don’t resemble sperm). They’re running straight at me as I walk around dropping slips of paper with vocab written on them, making me feel like a Gulliver-sized referee in a football scrum full of midgets. They’re running, they’re running, they’re running … 

... they're running me ragged!

Still, at least I’ve more or less solved the first dilemma I faced with my eight-year-olds. I can safely say that they’re well and truly “activated” now ;-)

I’ll give you the lowdown on eight-year-old dilemma #2 (even thornier than the first) as soon as I can.

and a special welcome to our foreign guests ...

I often ask myself the following question: "Am I too much of a cynic?" I'm never really sure. Let me tell you about my Saturday, and see what you think.

First, some context: since the day of my arrival here, I'd been seeing the signs posted up around school campuses: "Excursion to Sergiev Posad – see with your own eyes the glorious remains of what is carefully preserved by the Russians".

Okay; curiosity duly piqued. I'd never heard of Sergiev Posad. What was it? Where was it? Why were "the Russians" so keen to preserve it?

Fortunately the information I needed was pretty easy to come by; the Sergiev Posad excursion was the talk of the teaching fraternity. "Are you going?"; "Have you booked your seat yet?"; "Better get in quick! It's filling up." Then – once I'd established what it was (a heritage town with a big fat monastery in the middle of it) and how to book (pay your 850 roubles, or AUD$40, at one of the central campuses) – I started hearing things like "Ooh, you're going? Great! Charge up your camera, Anthony. You'll be taking plenty of photos". And the ads, still hanging around on walls even after every seat on the tour coach was full, had been calling to me all week. "Those who come with us will be rewarded with relaxation in the Russian countryside", they said.

It sounded like exactly what I needed after a trying week of lesson planning, disciplining unruly teens and far too little sleep. So, having finished class a little after 9pm last night, I hurried home on the Metro, snacked on some fruit, emptied my camera's memory card, set my alarm for 5:30am and fell into bed, utterly exhausted but eagerly anticipating my first chance to explore an ancient Russian townscape.

The flyers had very helpfully offered an estimated journey time to reach this cultural jewel: "One-and-a-half hours from Moscow", they'd advertised. This was confirmed as our coach pulled out of the parking lot behind Kitai Gorad Metro station, only 20 minutes behind schedule.

As it turned out, today was the day when I got my first taste of how time runs differently in Russia. Two-and-a-half hours after we'd left Kitai Gorad, a coach full of bemused, slightly travel-sick teachers and students emerged into sunlight, having survived an epic monologue delivered by a bearded woman in a frightening tartan jacket, who evidently considered herself a "tour guide". Beardie had spent the entire journey lecturing on such scintillating topics as Moscow's wondrous motorways, and castigating the Russian students for their poor knowledge of history. (They didn't know the name of some guy after whom one of Moscow's main streets is named - can you imagine?) Her tone was somewhere between the propaganda broadcasts of Nineteen Eighty-Four and school assembly announcements, and her microphone was held somewhere between her front teeth and her molars.

After alighting from the bus, we milled around outside the monastery for ages while the guide arranged … well, actually, I'm not quite sure what she was arranging. Some kind of bureaucratic Russian business was taking place, the nature of which remains a mystery. Meanwhile, I was told that I wasn’t allowed to take photos in the monastery's grounds unless I bought a 100 rouble permit, and that if I chose not to buy the permit I would have to hand in my camera. Hmmm.

It was also around this point when it became clear that our 'free time' in the town of Sergiev Posad had evaporated, and the monastery was all we were going to see.

After standing around a little longer, I eventually thought “bugger this!” and strided into the complex (with my camera still in my bag), just to see if all the waiting around was going to be worthwhile. It looked pretty uninspiring, to be honest, and it was drenched in tacky gold-plated Jesuses making lazy peace signs, bleeding-heart Marys and the usual collection of saintly effigies, all depicted in flat 2D Orthodox Icon style. So I basically walked out, abandoned my tour group and went wandering around the town instead.

This part of the day, though far too brief, was pretty cool. There was a pleasant town square in Sergiev Posad with a reasonable market, along with some nice downtown ‘green space’. (At times you could almost have been forgiven for thinking you were in Europe.) I grabbed a horrible takeaway coffee and strolled through wooded parkland, looking at local people as they relaxed on park benches and watching students with sketch pads. I found an outdoor museum where children and teens were learning how to paint matryoshki* and casting traditional Russian pottery. It was a pleasant hour of small but worthwhile discoveries.

When the appointed time rolled around, I met up with the group and we resumed our itinerary. Next stop: lunch at a local restaurant where I waited almost 15 minutes for an attendant to show me to the toilet, before being served a bowl of lukewarm soup … with a dead fly floating in it! That was followed by some unidentifiable, fatty slab of meat, dripping with grease and suitably accompanied by mashed potato with a reservoir of greyish fluid in the centre.

Mmmmm, nummy treats …

Back onto the bus after that, to head for a place called Abramtsevo. This was billed as a Russian heritage village. “Ahhh, good”, I thought. “We do get to see some non-churchy heritage stuff after all.” Except that we didn’t quite get there. Well, at least not for a very long while.

Travelling via the main street of Sergiev Posad, we were treated to more of Beardie's sparkling insights, beginning with “on ze light you ken see MekDonalds”. We veered onto a highway, then veered off again to wind down a pleasant old road lined with dachas**. Quite picturesque in its way. Shame it wasn’t here that our bus decided to break down; instead, it was a couple of miles further along the road, on a blind curve, adjacent to a messy expanse of ugly ‘farmland’.

We stood on the blind curve for about forty-five minutes while the driver tinkered with engine parts and Beardie dithered over what to do next. She then suddenly made up her mind, explained her decision (but only in Russian) and flagged down a passing local bus. The Russians in the group ran at the bus and boarded it, but the English-speakers – having not been told the plan – were a little slower to work out what they were meant to be doing. By the time they’d realised what was happening, the bus had disappeared. In other words, we’d been left behind in the middle of nowhere!

Eventually another bus came along and most of us caught it (though there were still a few people stranded on the roadside when I left). Some of us had to pay a fare, some didn’t – I really don’t know what happened there. But in any case, the bus managed to get us the rest of the way to Abramtsevo without tipping over (though it was a near thing). And we arrived just in time to be told the cheery news, which was this: due to lateness, we wouldn’t be getting the English-speaking tour we’d paid for.

Abramtsevo itself was a collection of traditional huts and churchy-type buildings with an art studio in one corner. All in all the complex was quite large, and thanks to our breakdown we had a bit over 45 minutes (as opposed to the intended two hours) to see the whole lot. So after lining up at the gate and getting our group ticket, we all filed in and followed the guide. She headed for the art studio, which seemed a reasonable first choice. The queue outside was so long, though, that many of us realised we wouldn’t get to see any of the other buildings if we stayed there, so we wandered off.

In all the other buildings we went to, babushkas in drab blue uniforms guarded the entrance hallways. To see the insides of the huts or churches, they insisted, it would be necessary for us to show the ticket we’d purchased at the gate. But of course, we only had a group ticket, which was held tightly in the hand of our tour guide, and she was still dutifully standing in line back at the art studio (perhaps enjoying some kind of weird queueing nostalgia associated with having grown up in the USSR). Result: no entry for us. Strangely enough, though, Russian people seemed free to come and go at their leisure while we “foreign guests” – to quote the sign on the replacement coach that took us back to Moscow – were barred.

Our Abramtsevo visit was capped off nicely while I sat talking to another teacher called Carol, waiting for the group to rendezvous at the front gate. Carol and myself were approached by a very friendly Russian girl, who told us she'd learned to speak English while living in the UK. She was curious and courteous and outgoing, and would've been quite likeable were it not for the fact that she kept leaning closer and closer to Carol's right ear as she spoke to us. I'm still not sure whether it was the ear itself exerting this strange fascination on our new friend, or whether she was trying to work out how to steal an earring while its owner was wearing it.

Fun, huh?

The journey back to Moscow on the "foreign guests" bus was spiced up by two more hours of Rambling Beardy's fabulous commentary, which left all of us more than ready for a drink or two in Kitai Gorad. And the whole day left me wondering about the question I put to you at the start of this entry.

So what do you think? Am I being a big fat cynic here, or does that sound like a pretty sad parody of a tourist excursion?

Either way, I think I might stay local next weekend :)



*matryoshki: the famous Russian 'nesting dolls' (mentioned once before on these pages).
*dacha: rustic summer house / weekender.

mystery of the metro-babushkas

I guess it’s a hangover from the CCCP’s glory days. Or maybe just an outlet for some of the more creative minds at work within Russia’s vast bureaucratic übermachine. Whatever the reason, Moscow’s streets are awash with the human products of a multitude of job creation schemes. You see them everywhere: teams of workmen who sweep up the autumn leaves in between tower blocks; young militia lads ‘standing guard’ around the metro; security guards at fruit markets. The list goes on.

Easily my favourites, though, are the babushkas* who sit in little booths at the bottom of every large escalator inside the major metro stations.

My flatmate Reinhardt and I have theorised at some length about what it is these ladies actually do, what function they serve. Haven’t managed to puzzle out a definitive job description for them yet. Here's the current crop of theories:

EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

According to this hypothesis, every booth contains a large on/off switch, which the babushka must operate if, for example, a female commuter gets her stiletto heel stuck in a groove and is sucked underneath one of the escalators. (Enormous high heels are typically the workaday choice of the lady Muscovite.)

 
LIGHTING MALFUNCTION EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

In this scenario, the babushka keeps a close eye on the scores of vertical fluorescent tubes lining her escalator shaft, and informs maintenance people if a globe blows. (An adjunct to this theory is the idea that the babushka herself will throw her emergency switch to “off” every few days or so, go up the escalator and scrape any errant particles of grime from the fluorescent tubes with a pocket knife.)

SLEEPER AGENTS

I personally like the idea that the babushkas are actually there to make sure no tourist takes any happy snaps of things they shouldn’t be photographing, and will inform the militia of any transgressions to the unwritten (and apparently arbitrary) rules about this.

To explain my choice of the word "arbitrary" here: on quite a few occasions I’ve asked the women in booths mozhna sfatagrafeeravat v stantsye? (“May I take photographs in the station?”, or at least something not too far removed from that.) The first time I did this, the response seemed to be along the lines of “Don’t be silly, of course you can!” Since then I've twice had a "yes", while the rest of the time the answer has been a stern and disapproving “no” (which makes the photo on this page a tiny bit illegal - depending on which babushka you talk to, of course).

Hmmm.
 

WASTE CONTROL

This theory goes that, once in a while, the babushka will reluctantly leave her booth and sweep metro tickets into a little pile, which southern gentlemen in iridescent orange workmen’s vests will later come along and remove.

The waste control hypothesis is weakened somewhat by the fact that, while walking through Bibliotheka Imeny Lenina station one night, I watched a swarm of middle-aged women (not booth babushkas, but the beneficiaries of some other job creation scheme) busily cleaning. They were leaning over the wood-panelled areas between escalators and dragging huge cloths along the surfaces, wiping off a day’s worth of dust and skin oils. So I’m thinking that either they would handle stray tickets as well, or there’d be someone else doing that. (I’d love to know if all of these jobs have titles and, if so, what they are.)

Still, I wouldn't discount the waste control theory altogether. Russian authorities appear to like the word "control" every bit as much as their German counterparts, so any role which has that word in the job title could seem worthwhile inventing.

If anyone can help me get to the bottom of this mystery, I’d very much appreciate it. Hold off for a couple of weeks, though; Reinhardt and I are having fun speculating!



* Brief linguistic aside: I’ve noticed that a lot of people understand the word babushka to mean “baby”, while others think it refers to those dolls that fit inside one another. Just to be sure we achieve mutual understanding in this rather silly blog entry, let me clear that up: babushka means “grandmother”. (The nesting dolls are matryoshka.)

seeking out the little things

“It’s the little things that make a difference.”

How many times have you heard that clichéd little phrase?

I’m asking rhetorically of course. Please don’t send me an email that goes “Hi Anthony, hope you’re keeping well. In response to your question regarding the ‘little things’ cliché: at last count it was 327”.

Actually, no ... on second thoughts do send me that email. It’d be marvellous to know there’s someone out there who makes more notes on their own life and keeps more lists than I do.

Anyway, I’m quoting the cliché because "little things" is a theme that has so far run through my experience of life as a foreigner, like the stripe through certain kinds of toothpaste when that suddenly became fashionable in the 90s for no apparent reason. I’ll give you an example:

You all heard about how, after the Cold War ended, the bread queues in Russia disappeared and the shops began stocking up for a new era of delirious consumption, right? Well, it seems to be true. The scale of retail here is quite staggering; there don’t appear to be as many mega-malls as there are in Australia (and what a pity), but instead there are mega-markets, backed up by clusters of little shops and stalls that radiate out from every metro station. And they’re huge. The size of my local market in Prazhskaya, for example, is measurable in PadMarks*, a unit of retail space equivalent to the area occupied by Paddy’s Market in Sydney (much as a ‘SydHarb’** is equivalent to the volume of water in Sydney Harbour). One circuit of Prazhskaya market provides almost half of your daily exercise requirements.

In these markets you regularly come across things that make you go “hmmm”, and the little shops that line each aisle are packed to the ceilings with stuff. Some of them specialise to a remarkable degree – like the yoghurt stall at Prazhskaya, which stocks a dizzying variety of cultured milk products – while others seem to sell just about anything they can lay their hands on, from designer passport wallets to little packages of kalimar (a local snack that bears roughly the same relationship to squid as beef jerky does to cows, except that it’s kinda stringy). So it’s fair to say you can get just about anything in Moscow.

However, there do seem to be some fairly basic items that have slipped between the cracks in this retail renaissance.

The Lonely Planet recommended that I bring a bottle opener with me to Russia. My reaction when reading this: “Er, sorry guys, but why would I need a bottle opener in a country that reportedly has an enormous problem with alcoholism?” But I brought one anyway. Haven’t used it ... they're everywhere.

However, the other thing they recommended I bring was a universal sink plug. Here again, my reaction would probably be pictured in cartoon form as a speech bubble with just a question mark inside it. In this case I didn’t follow Lonely Planet’s advice and, sure as eggs (which are apparently pretty sure), when I moved in to my flat I found the kitchen sink was lacking one fairly important feature.

"No problem", I thought. "I’ll just go and buy a sink plug."

A week later, I was becoming quite accustomed to keeping one eye on whatever else was happening around me while the other eye scanned for sink plugs. They were nowhere. I learned the Russian word – rakaveena shtyepsil – and tried it out on a few market stall owners, who stared at me blankly or directed me to other stalls that sold hardcore kitchen plumbing equipment. No shtyepsil. Nyeto*.

Then finally the day came when, between piles of biros and napkins and key chains and steel wool, I saw one on display at a market stall. The price struck me as somewhat outrageous, but it really didn’t matter. I had a sink plug. It was a good day!

The obvious down side here is that if you need something urgently, as often as not it’s going to be the one thing you can’t find among the welter of household minutiae – a fact which I've definitely recorded in the “grrr” column. But there’s a corresponding up side, which is this: when you do find whatever it is you’ve been looking for, you feel a wild sense of accomplishment. You want to go out into the street and wave around your sink plug (or your blue tac, your ground cinnamon, your stiff white cardboard, etc. etc.) and just tell anyone who passes by how incredibly pleased you are. It’s a silly feeling, but a good one. It really does bring you back to an appreciation of the little things.

And yet, while that’s happening, there’s an opposite effect at work too. You can become quite enjoyably pre-occupied with the small items you’re searching for, but at the same time you actually have to get by without them for as long as your search continues. That gives you time to recognise that they are just little things. It tends to clarify the distinction between what you’d rather like to have and what you actually need in order to live, or to ‘be the person you are’. I know that doesn’t seem especially profound – probably because it isn’t. But then again, haven’t you ever marvelled at how many of the people you know have immense difficulty making that distinction? I have.

I’ve talked to a few other teachers about this hunt for little things, and they’ve had their extensive searches too, along with their moments of triumph. Interestingly, they all reflect that it’s something they hadn’t often experienced in their own countries, where things are sane and sensible and you can easily acquire any basic item you want. And perhaps that might even be one tiny part of the reason why a Moscow-born I.T. specialist who I met at the market last Saturday, and who had been working in Atlanta Georgia for the last ten years, finally concluded that “The U.S. is a bit boring” and returned to Moscow. He remarked that, in the West, “every day is the same”, whereas “here you don’t know what can happen one day to the next”.

True. You might wake up one morning, wander down to the market and come home with your very own sink plug. Who knows?



* One PadMark = approximately 1.5 standard metric bargain bonanzas.

** Unlikely as it may seem, this is a real unit of measurement.


*** Nyeto = "We don't have any".

culture and customs (the word nerd takes a hammering)

Okay, so now it’s official: my first week in Moscow has, on balance, sucked rather mightily. There have been some great moments (as reported in these pages), and I've been trying hard to concentrate on those, but it’s been something of an uphill climb. Viewed in hindsight, this week has just hurled one painful &/or irritating experience after another straight at me.

Just before I go on with this rant, a word to those of you who were/are worried about me coming here: I’m definitely not drawing any grand conclusions from the above about whether Russia was ‘the right choice’ or a ‘mistake’. Obviously I need to give it some time; I’ve never lived outside of Australia before and I deliberately chose a challenging destination, so I expected some less-than-fun times, especially at the outset. I’m not too worried yet, and nor should you be.

I should also tell you that, when I first arrived in my new neighbourhood of Prazhskaya, my off-the-bat reaction was absolute horror, but within just a week it has started to reveal a softer, more colourful side which I’m rather enjoying. I could even see it being a place I’ll grow quite fond of. 

However, as nice and fluffy as all of that is, none of it detracts from the general suckiness of the week just gone. What clinched it, finally, was the baggage issue.

Let me explain:

I sent two bags ahead of me when I left Sydney, because my stuff was well over the weight limit and QANTAS wanted to charge me a fortune to stow extra luggage on the aircraft. QANTAS and Lufthansa teamed up to get my bags from Kingsford-Smith airport (Sydney) to Sheremetyevo (Moscow), at a cost of about AUD$450 – more than I had expected to pay, but not too unreasonable, I suppose, to have 30 kilograms of miscellany transferred from one side of Earth to the other. And it took me about 20 minutes to arrange this.

The thing is, planning the first 12,000 kilometres of my bags’ travel itinerary turned out to be the easy part. The insanity began when I started to enquire about how to move them the extra 50 kilometres or so between Sheremetyevo airport and my flat in Prazhskaya.

The bags were being transported – or so I believed – to Lufthansa’s customer service counter. Which is why I called their number continually throughout Monday. No answer. My flatmate, Reinhardt, told me not to be concerned about this. “That’s pretty standard for Russia”, he said. But I called again on each subsequent weekday, just in case – by some minor miracle – they decided to answer their ‘customer service line’.

Meanwhile, the school told me that my bags had arrived at Sheremetyevo on Tuesday. On several occasions they offered to help sort out the transportation of said bags to my flat, and I accepted their offer(s). The story changed a little each time, though: first it was me and a staff member who would go to the airport on Wednesday (which didn’t happen); then the staff member would go alone and retrieve the baggage for me on Thursday (which didn’t happen); then a staff member would go on Friday with a driver (whom I would have to pay for), and so on.

Once again, when none of this came to pass, Reinhardt was philosophical. “It’s not a surprise; this is a Russian organisation.”

Finally on Saturday afternoon I decided to go to the airport myself. Two-and-a-half hours later I had successfully traversed nearly the whole of metropolitan Moscow, and I had Sheremetyevo Terminal Two in visual range. The terminal, though, proved to be just the first in a sequence of locations within the airport ‘district’ to which I was re-directed. So it was that, after a further three bus trips, a 20-minute walk along a deserted highway and an accidental visit to an airport vehicle maintenance facility (where a vicious-looking hound signalled its intention to kill me if I tried to enter), I finally found the international cargo centre.

A note here: the building I’d found was not operated by Lufthansa. This was, pure and simple, a customs facility.

So what then? Well, the next step was to make somebody at the information counter acknowledge the presence of a sentient being in their midst. That accomplished (with some difficulty), I was ready to start grinding my cranial bone against the brick wall of Russian bureaucracy.

Here’s how it began: I met a customs agent. I showed her I.D. I had papers stamped. I signed forms. I accumulated duplicates of these forms, along with copies of my own documents now bearing florets of red and blue ink. I attempted (at the agent’s request) to recall every single item in my bags and estimate its monetary value in $USD, then translate this information into Russian.

At the conclusion of this 90-minute session, I was advised: “You will not get your bags today, because it is late. Come back tomorrow.” And so I crossed the city again, arriving home exhausted a little after 11pm, with half of my first weekend in Moscow now in the past.

Sunday morning – an early start. Out the door at 8:30am and back to Sheremetyevo international cargo. There to meet with another customs agent, who checked my I.D. and stamped my papers and made notes and took copies and asked me to sign things. I didn’t mind; I was becoming acclimatised to this now. Then he says “you must go to the kasa (cashier)”. So off I went, with my growing pile of documents. With great deliberation, and wearing her standard issue “I’m so over this; I could list off the top of my head at least 50 more important things I’d rather be doing” Moscow Face, the woman at the kasa slowly, thoughtfully pressed buttons for about 10 minutes. (Think about that for a second: when was the last time you spent ten whole minutes waiting for a cashier to ring up your purchase?) She then handed me a piece of paper with a price written on it: 5,064 roubles. At today’s exchange rate, that’s AUD$232. I looked up the word for “expensive” in my Russian phrasebook and read it out.

What happened next was the very last thing I had expected: the kasa woman actually smiled at me.

It was an evil smile, though. I’m sure of it.

Her smile said “Yes, you would think that, wouldn’t you? You haven’t been here for long. Don’t worry; you’ll come to expect this kind of treatment. Bwwwwwuuuhhh-HAHAHAHAhahahahaaaaa!!!!!”

Choking back the odd stray tear of despair and disbelief, I paid my 5,064 roubles (which had to come out of my day-to-day living money, because Russian customs doesn’t accept Visa card payments), and was shuffled back to the so-called information counter. Another 20 minutes of stamping, signing etc. Then another kasa where I was charged – get this – a daily storage fee for my luggage! At this time I was also informed that the cashier would be charging me 30 roubles for making the transaction (i.e. for printing out a receipt and taking my money). But she was feeling generous – toward herself, at least – and charged me 60.

Then it was on to the systems department, which was located adjacent to the actual cargo warehouse, for more stamping and signing and – almost unbelievably – an actual physical sighting of my bags. (Fortunately, there was a big iron gate protecting them from their owner.) That was followed by another round at a separate counter whose function I still couldn’t even guess at, but which required me to go back to the information desk again and use their photocopier to make a copy of some documents I’d received earlier. Information sent me back to the mystery counter, who stamped and frowned and sent me back to customs, who stamped and copied and sent me back to systems, who stamped and laser-printed and sent me to another part of customs, who stamped whatever it was systems gave me and sent me to the warehouse, where the big iron gate was opened and – after almost three hours – it seemed as though I may actually be allowed to take my bags.

I estimate that, by this time, there were about 200 people left in the Russian Federation who had not yet checked my passport. Give or take a few.

Once inside the warehouse, a very congenial armed guard – tickled pink, it seemed, to see an Australian person in his workplace – tried out his English at me, gave up, ventured the word “Deutsch” as a question, then proceeded to talk and joke with me in bad phrasebook German. I attempted to respond in my even worse Russian, as I tried to clarify whether or not this was really happening – that is, whether I could now actually leave with my bags. I picked them up. He made noises. I wasn’t sure what he was signalling – was this okay, or not? So I started walking. More indecipherable noises. I thought “Well, I’ll just have to keep going and see if he stops me”.

Phew. He didn’t.

A moment later, I was through the door, my eyes adjusting to the sunshine.

Finally, to cap off what had been an unrelentingly surreal experience, the last thing I heard at Sheremetyevo customs was the voice of the guard, who called out after me in a cheery, fun-to-have-made-your-acquaintance tone, “Auf Wiedersehen!”

“Da Svidaniya!”, I called back.

And so once more across town I went, towing two huge bags behind me – one with its wheels behaving like those of an Australian shopping trolley. Being shouldered out of the way and cut off by endless rude Muscovites. Being muttered at by station attendants, and eyed avariciously by militia men. Taking the train in the wrong direction at the second of three stations where I had to change lines. Generally having a phenomenally awful time.

So. Now the results are in, let’s review:

Final arrival back at Prazhskaya: 4:30pm. Total hours spent retrieving my baggage: 15. Total cost: AUD$738. Reaction to the fact that, on this same day, there was a huge festival in the town celebrating Moscow’s 850th birthday? Erm, somehow, I didn’t feel overly keen to attend.

And there ended my first weekend in Moscow.

I hope you’ve at least drawn a laugh or two from this whole sorry tale. Any good that comes of it will be ... well, will at least be something. Please let my rant be a caution to you if you’re thinking about freighting some excess baggage on an upcoming o/s trip or move. My advice: pay the hideous airline fee up-front, and stick with your bags!

autumnal shades (a single day in moscow)

So far, Moscow is turning out to be the kind of the place where, if I were to plot my states of mind over the course of any given day, the [x;y] graph would most likely resemble a weather forecast for New Zealand*. It’s possible to experience a pretty full spectrum of emotional states here between one sleep and the next.

Take today, the first day of the reputedly fleeting Russian autumn. Here’s a timeline for you:


10am: relief and contentment

Leaving my flat, I wander down to the local supermarket to pick up some milk, taking a shortcut I haven’t used before. Without warning, I find myself on a short but rather pretty section of wooded path, where overhanging trees completely obscure the socialist tower blocks. “At last”, I think, “some beauty in Prazhskaya.”


1pm: spring in the step

I take a break between lectures at the school’s central office on Borovitskaya (about 1km from Red Square). Standing in the street smoking a cigarette, I can see the sun glinting off the elegant domed roof of a government building across the road. Behind that are cheerful blue skies and motionless fluffy clouds, almost hyperreal in their vividness and calm stillness. Suddenly I’m feeling rather chirpy - even verging on ‘blissed out’. This place can be rather grand.


4:30pm: fits of fury

A plan to meet some colleagues for coffee on Tverskaya Ulitsa (Moscow’s main street) goes disastrously wrong when I find I literally cannot cross one of the roads lying between me and the meeting place. I decide to go ‘around the block’. A comedy of errors ensues – except that, by the end of it, I’m so not laughing!

When you’re lost in Moscow (except on the Metro), everything seems to stack up against you. The streets twist and turn in disorienting ways; not a single motorist will cut you a break by acknowledging the existence of pedestrian crossings; the city maps are pathetically bad (Where’s a “YOU ARE HERE” arrow when you need one?); most of the non-famous buildings kinda resemble each other to the untrained eye; and the people power-walk straight at you (much as they do in Sydney, only more so) .

By the time I reach Tverskaya Ulitsa – 40 minutes late, but in perfect time to see the other teachers exit the café where we were supposed to meet – I’m ready to let fly with a furious “Screw-this-whole-damn-city-and-everybody-in-it!” outburst. Which I do.


7pm: anxious moments

Myself and four other teachers are in Kuznetskiy Most, two metro stops northeast of the centre. We walk onto a rather stately open square, and myself and Louis (a very pleasant and bouncy Spanish/Mexican/Californian colleague) decide it’s time to whip out the digital cameras for some happy snaps. It’s the first time I’ve been brave enough to use my camera in the city, and what happens within ten seconds of producing it from my shoulder bag? A militia man materialises, looking decidedly pissed off, and barks “No foto!” while almost running at us. I’m thinking “Oh no, he’s going to impound my camera, and me with it”. Fortunately not.

Apparently (we worked out later), one of the more anonymous buildings on the square used to be KGB headquarters. It isn’t anything sensitive now, mind you – but it used to be. Which is evidently enough to make this a no-happy-snap zone.

To put this into its proper context: right now all of us new teachers live in fear of the militia. They’re fond of stopping anyone who looks &/or sounds like a foreigner and doing an on-the-spot document check. At the time of writing our school has our passports, because our visas have to be registered, which they’ve offered to do for us. (Apparently the process is interminable and difficult.) So each of us is armed only with a spravka – a kind of affidavit letter – and with some increasingly ragged-looking photocopies of our passports and visas.

The worst part of this, though: the documents we're carrying around with us show our visas as unregistered. That makes us quite vulnerable. Militia checks can end in a number of ways: most likely we’ll either be let off or asked to pay a fine, but a highly unpleasant experience in a Russian police station is not out of the question. So our militia man confrontation definitely qualifies as an anxious moment.


10pm: quiet awe

From Kuznetskiy Most, myself and the other four teachers decide to wander towards town, on the lookout for somewhere to stop for a coffee along the way. We end up in a sort of beer tent adjacent to one wall of the Kremlin. After sitting for a couple of hours, talking about what brought us to Moscow and so forth, we decide to head for our respective homes.

The area around this part of the Kremlin is also the entrance to Red Square (probably not the only one – I’m not sure). It’s floodlight at night, mostly in brilliant white tones. As we cross through this area, I find myself thoroughly in awe of my surroundings. We all do. Conversation slows as we take it all in. Then one of the other teachers (a fairly well-travelled American called James) tells me about an imaginary phone conversation that's been playing on a loop in his head:

Friend: “So, wha’d ya get up to last night?”

James: “Oh, you know … wandered around outside Red Square, mostly.”

The look on James’ face and his tone of voice makes the significance of this clear: he can’t quite believe he's in the position, at least theoretically, to have that conversation. I think we're all feeling a bit the same. I comment to another teacher that “I didn’t expect to be quite so overwhelmed by this place”, and she replies: “Oh? I did!” This from someone whose most recent teaching assignment was an 18-month stint working for the Peace Corps in a village in Turkmenistan.

So you get the idea, I think. The brush with Moscow's Big Red Things affected us all quite powerfully. It was awesome.


11:30pm: lost again ... but almost loving it

The final mental challenge for the day: find the right metro line and get home. This can be quite tricky, even if you’re at the right station. See, on the Moscow metro, if you have a large station with, say, four lines running through it, the station will usually have four names. The one I find myself in tonight is variously called Bibliotheka Imeny Lenina, Arbatskaya, Borovitskaya and something else I can’t recall.

The reason for these multiple names is that platforms don’t line up parallel as they would in other cities. They all point in different directions and are often spread widely apart. Some stations-within-stations are connected by long perekhodi (underground walkways), while others remain completely separate, accessed via different streets. Your job is to work out which is which, and then navigate the vast subterranean complex to the right platform.

As often as not, you find yourself traipsing through hundreds of metres of perekhodi, speeding up and down on escalators that reach cruise speed at around Mach 2.5, and generally covering a lot of territory without ever really being sure you’re heading in the right direction. In the process, though, you come upon what must be some of the most incredible architecture ever created for the purpose of city transit.

The walls of most metro stations are constructed from gleaming grey-and-white marble. All are airy and grand (especially those in the centre of town), with arched hallways – architecturally, they’re the exact opposite of the claustrophobic sausage tubes that wind beneath large Western cities. Many stations contain notable works of sculpture, depicting themes that range from past wars and famous Russian historical figures to the idealised lifestyle of the hallowed peasant family. Others have artworks and silhouetted cityscapes painted directly onto the walls.

The illumination in these places is also a feature; I’ve been in at least one station hall that was lit by chandeliers! Often you get some kind of ‘concept lighting’, like the flame-shaped lanterns set into the walls of Belaruskaya, spreading a subdued glow throughout its cavernous red-marble halls.

As far as I can determine – although my flatmate disagrees – these metro stations are Cold War vintage. They were built to double as air raid shelters if the need arose (hence the long, metal-plated escalator shafts like the one pictured). What proportion of Moscow’s population could be accommodated in an emergency I’ve no idea, but wandering along the platforms and through the perekhodi you get the feeling it wouldn’t be an insignificant number. It makes being lost kind of entertaining.

So that was my day in Moscow. Yep, just one. And I left out the work-related parts, which offer a whole separate emotional fun park ride at this point. (It’s part roller coaster, part dodgems.)

Did I mention that today was the day I found out that my first class will be full of eight-year-olds?

Mm-hmm. Let’s not even get started on that.



(* New Zealanders have an expression which they use to describe the weather in their country: "Four Seasons in One Day".)

welcome(-ish)

“Tak-see!”

“Nyet. Spaseeba, nyet.”*

“You von’t tak-see?”

“Nyet. I have a ride.”

“You khev a ride? Hvear is zis ‘ride’? Khee is not kheer.”

“He’ll be here.”

“Okay. Mebbi later, if your ‘ride’ not kheer, you vill von't tak-see.”

“Okay.”

Moving right al –

“Tak-see! You von’t tak-see, no?"

“Nyet. Spaseeba, nyet. I have a ride."

“No, you khev NO ride. I geev you good price" …

And so on, ad infinitum.

Welcome to the Russian Federation, otherwise known as the Commonwealth of Independent Taxi Drivers.

You may (or may not) be interested to know that none of the half a dozen shady-looking characters who approached me upon my arrival at Sheremetyevo airport wore a uniform or, in all probability, drove an actual taxi. They were all dressed in jeans and polo shirts, their shirts just a little too small so as to emphasise their burliness.

The explanation for this is that, according to reputable sources, every car in Moscow is a taxi. So: got nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon and in need of some spare cash? Muscovite custom says you should put on your smallest polo shirt, head out to the arrivals lounge at Sheremetyevo and harangue silly foreigners into letting you give them a lift somewhere – at a pre-arranged price.

Of course, as a visitor to Russia, you don’t get to experience this part of the local culture without first having to queue for an arbitrarily long period. Your passage through Russian passport control is best measured in geological terms; comparisons to, say, the total number of eons contained within in the Precambrian era are more useful than the expressions of time we use in everyday conversation.

Fortunately, my lift did eventually turn up, assuring me that it was only ten minutes from Sheremetyevo to the centre of town. A harrowing one-hour drive then ensued, as we passed through the tsyentr (city centre) and kept right on going. Across endless freeways; past endless huge, rectangular apartment towers; around endless industrial estates and building sites. Across, in short, what seemed like an insane amount of distance, until finally we reached my new residence. Where the hell had they put me? Were we technically even still in Moscow? Would I have to commute by air?

All these questions flashed through my head, but I was too timid to ask them. It had been a long day, beginning with a 6am start in Tokyo and encompassing a nine-hour flight. I hadn’t the energy left to remonstrate or the presence of mind to absorb much new information. And I had, at least, arrived.



Now, if we could just work out how to get in to the damn flat …



(*"No, thank you, no.")

Almost Zenned

Hello. The climate on this little group of islands is truly intense. It's ridiculously hot and humid right now; replacing lost fluids is more or less a continual process. And I've been badly sunburned, especially today. Meanwhile, the newspapers are warning that a typhoon is headed for Kanto (the eastern part of Honshu island, which includes Tokyo). So at any moment, things could go from "Pass me your parasol, I'm beginning to resemble a sun-dried tomato" to "All flights to Moscow cancelled due to extreme weather". Scary.

But to progress to the actual point of this ramble: I've mentioned to a few people that I'd read about a town south of Tokyo called Kamakura, which is reputedly the birthplace of Zen Buddhism. The travel guides said you could go there for a day and take instruction from Zen Masters. Well, I got up at 5am today (presuming, for some reason, that monks would rise early) and I went.

Let’s see ... how can I best convey the results of this to you, gentle reader? Hmmm. I guess what it boils down to is this: I got less Zen instruction than, oh say, any at all!

That’s right. The travel guides failed to mention a few things (surprise!). Like the fact that Engaku-ji Temple (one of two places where it's theoretically possible to do what the guides claim) commences its sessions at 5:30pm, and they continue until 10:30am the next day. That isn't a succession of times, by the way ... it’s a single 17-hour session. And it’s in Japanese only. The Lonely Planet didn't mention that part, either.

Needless to say, after such a build-up I'm a little disappointed about the lack of enlightenment.

That said, I had a brilliant day, nirvana-related issues notwithstanding. For a start, Kamakura proved to be quite a charming town, with numerous poky little streets to explore and some eye-opening sights (although not all of these were good – the pet shop I visited where a macaw was tethered to the counter was a worry). The township is wedged in between a low mountain range and the shore of the Pacific Ocean. I’d never seen a Japanese surfing beach before, so I figured “Why not?” and, after schlepping round the town for a little while, I wandered down to the sandy shores. As a bonus, it was kind of intriguing to see the ‘other side of the ocean’, so to speak.
[Warning: duration of novelty value <15 seconds.]

But much better than this was the fact that, by a series of dumb coincidences, I did get to meet someone who seems to qualify as a celebrity in the world of Zen – possibly even the celebrity. More specifically, by getting lost and accidentally ending up in his backyard, I briefly met the abbot (for want of a better word) of Engaku-ji. This is a big deal as I understand it. From what I could gather, he's more or less the Steven Hawking of Zen monks.

I then scored a private behind-the-scenes tour of Engaku-ji, conducted impromptu by an Austrian guy called Mannfred who's the Zen guru's brother-in-law. I met Mannfred at the house he’d been staying in, and he gave me a tour of that as well. Said house formerly belonged to a famous Nihonga painter who was declared a 'living national treasure' by the Emperor while he was alive. There are plans to turn it into a museum (it's more or less Japan's equivalent of Shakespeare's birthplace or the Goethehaus in Weimar, Mannfred said), but I'm the first member of the public to have seen it. It was absolutely incredible – a sublime little corner of Old World Japan, untouched by modern hands (except those of a few plumbers ... which can only be a good thing!)

In the main temple complex, I bowed to the buddha, threw money into his Holy Trough and asked him to grant me a wish before being shown around various meditation rooms and other places of interest. At the abbott’s insistence, Mannfred then dragged me up an extremely long and winding staircase set into the side of a small cliff, to look at … wait for it … a bell.

Yep, a bell. Big metal thing that rings. Not ordinarily the kind of thing I’d fly for nine hours to see.

Fortunately, this particular big metal thing shared its elevated corner of the Engaku-ji complex with a great view and a beautiful Shinto shrine, where I clapped my hands to summon the kami (divine nature/ancestral spirits) and was once again allowed to make a wish.

I’m not too clear on why it is that the buddha charges for wish-granting while the kami offer their services for free, but I do like the fact that both are here. I noticed the harmonious relationship between Buddhism and Shinto the first time I visited Japan, and it impressed me then as it does now. (Let’s see ... I wonder are there are any other ‘multi-faith’ regions of the world where the people could draw a lesson from this kind of mature co-habitation. Hmmmm …)

Anyway, Mannfred took me to an adjacent gift shop where teenagers sat eating shaved ice with green tea syrup, and where I discovered there are numerous ways to improve your chances of finding favour with the kami. I particularly liked oma-mori, rather attractive little belt-hanging things that increase your fortune in different areas of life, depending on which kind you wear. You can go for the usual stuff like career advancement, finding love etc., but there are also some charmingly offbeat oma-mori as well ... like the one which asks the kami to keep you safe in heavy traffic.

Also thanks to my Austrian guide, I got to witness something I’d never even heard about before: Zen archery. I’m told that relatively few Westerners have had the chance to see it, so this was evidently quite a privilege. It required some negotiation between my guide and the master archer, but after a minute or two of rapid talk and hand-gesturing, I was in.

The archers stood inside a wooden temple house that opened out at one end like a barn. They fired across a range that was ringed with dense greenery – though the “firing” part didn’t seem to be a big feature of what was going on. The impression I got was that, in Zen archery, you had more or less the principles of Tai Chi applied to bowmanship. The real point was not to score a hit on the target, but (as Mannfred explained) to meditate deeply on the long and rigorously precise series of movements that prepared the bow and its holder for a strike.

I watched a girl of about 12 or 13 years go through the archer’s motions a few times. The tiny movements of her head, the slow extension and folding of her limbs, were fluid and balletic. She knelt, bowed, stood, sighted the target and so on, while keeping her rather sizeable apparatus from touching the ground by manipulating it at different angles around her body. As she performed this meditative dance, the bow-string began to tighten very, very slowly. And throughout this, her facial expression suggested such a degree of single-minded concentration that I thought “Wow, if that look was directed at me right now, I’d probably run.” It was all rather majestic.

Anyway, once I’d done the rounds of Engaku-ji, I farewelled Mannfred and moved on to Kensho-ji temple complex. This place, I have to say, is possibly the most evocative and beautiful 'spiritual' location I've ever visited.

Zen instruction was meant to be available here too, but again it was only in Japanese and not until the evening, when I had to be back in Tokyo. But it didn’t matter, really; just walking around Kensho-ji and seeing the temples and their surrounds made the trip out to Kamakura worthwhile. There was definitely a satisfying air of harmony and a numinous spiritual quality to this space; I so wanted to get down on the tatami mats, enjoy the silence, and just drink in as much of the energy here as I could. It was amazing.

Conclusion: I think I may have a further date with Zen Buddhism in the future. I’ll see if I can work on some mono-dextrous applause techniques in the meantime :-)

day one: boy meets world, ponders happiness, gets rained on

Okay, so here’s the thing:

As most people who read this will already know, I’ve decided it’d be fun to capture certain aspects of my upcoming travels in words, pictures and (hopefully) sounds.

The odyssey kicks off in Japan, where I’m stopping over for just four (i.e. way too few) days in transit to Russia. As I write this, I’m sitting in a Ryokan – semi-traditional guest house/hotel type thingie – on the outskirts of Tokyo, on a chair with no legs in front of a desk that’s about 15” high, just breathing in the straw odour of the tatami floor and enjoying the way the light falls through the rice paper windows. (Actually, I imagine it’s probably mock rice paper, but I’m too much of an ignorant western tourist to know for sure, and it’s pretty cool either way.) As if to intensify the general rockingness of this place, here I am in a city of 20 million people – or some insane number like that – all of 100 metres from the nearest railway station and ten metres from a busy suburban shopping street, and yet all I can hear are raindrops, crickets and the rustle of palm-fronds.

I just read back that last paragraph. Reads as though I’m embellishing a little towards the end, doesn’t it? Well … I’m not. No, really; it’s crickets-ahoy here as Tokyo wades through the tail end of the monsoon.

Hmmm. There’s a sentence I’ll never write again.

Anyway, the title of this message is sort of a joke. I don’t plan to annoy people by ‘diarising’ every single damn thing that happens &/or every day that passes. But that said, I knew there’d be an entry today, and there’ll probably be one tomorrow and one the day after that. Yeah, sure, that’s how it always goes with journals and the like: out of the blocks at a frantic pace, slowing to an eventual standstill. But in this case there’s a specific reason for the initial outpouring, which is this: within an hour or two of arriving in Tokyo, I’d concluded beyond all doubt that this city is an utter marvel.

More about this soon, no doubt. Meanwhile, let’s cut to a flashback:

About five days before I left Sydney, I vacated my house in Camperdown to move in briefly with Maya* before heading out into The World (as I like to call the bits that aren’t Australia). I was fairly stressed by the preparations and in need of some ‘downtime’, which was how I found myself lying face-up in Camperdown Park, just smoking (choose your preferred meaning of the verb) and looking at clouds, listening to a bee, thinking nothing in particular. I don’t know how long I’d been there when an Airbus suddenly appeared on the horizon, roared overhead and interrupted my reverie – as I s’pose a multi-thousand tonne jetliner will tend to do. But it brought on one of those moments when you realise some aspect of your future that you’ve been talking about in an abstract, hypothetical way for a while is actually about to happen. It was my “hang on a second, this is all starting to get a bit real” moment.

I had a few more of those in the ensuing days, and they were scary. But in some cases, they were scary because they were good. Like this one: the day after the Airbus incident, I went with Maya to see the Hitchhiker movie at Govinda’s cinema/restaurant in King’s Cross. What an experience! I love that movie. Maya and I had seen it once before, and both of us had had our brains suitably pummelled by it, as by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. (Sorry for the gratuitous Douglas Adams reference there, but it was more or less inevitable.) Having the chance to see it again before I left was thoroughly marvellous, but also sad. It was another item crossed off the mental list of things to do in the lead-up to my (possibly permanent) departure, and it brought all kinds of emotions with it.

I’m not sure I have any great point here, but in case there is one let me tentatively label it Quasi-insightful Observation #1.

Q.I.O.#1 basically states that emotions are usually not parcelled up into discrete packages; you don’t often get to open the Scented Envelope of Happiness and sniff it euphorically until the perfume runs out and it’s suddenly your turn to have your head iserted into the Excrement-lined Bag of Blinding Fear for an hour. More often, you get the warm brown bag and the scented envelope together. They’re tied to one another; almost inextricably, it sometimes appears.

Suddenly I feel as though the above observation should lead to a moral of some kind, like “So, folks, don’t be holding out for that moment when the Pure Scent of Happiness comes along and fills your sinuses, without even the tiniest hint of reeky fear lingering in the background. Seize the Happiness, whatever else it’s wrapped in”. Or something equally trite and silly. I don’t know – is that a fair point, do you think? I’m not sure. Maybe the things I’ve related to you here add up to nothing more than a bunch of stuff that happened. Besides which, I know there are such things as moments of undiluted happiness that drown out all the emotional background noise. They’re not even all that rare, in fact, if you have great friends and you know what you like. Which I do, and which I do.

So I really don’t know. But I think I am saying that the happy/sad, comforting/scary, frustrating/funny moments have been up there with some of my most memorable recently. That should prepare me for Russia. And for a lot of things, actually. I hope so.

Blah. I promise that most of this blog will bear absolutely no stylistic resemblance to the aimless rambling you’ve just been reading (assuming you’ve made it this far). Maybe all the tatami and green tea herbs are just making me feel too Zen for my own good.

Hopefully I’ll find out the answer this weekend. I’m visiting Kamakura, the reputed birthplace of Zen Buddhism, on Saturday. I’ll let you know how it goes.

One hand gesturing obscenely,
Anthony.



(* So, er, who's this "Maya" person? Short answer: until a couple of days ago, my partner. Now ... my 'ex'. More about this in a later entry.)

(And about the dolphins: they're on the wallpaper in my bathroom - yet another reminder of how Douglas will always follow me wherever I go! Fellow 'Hitch Hiker' fans will be pleased to know that I'm teaching them how to sing 'So Long And Thanks For All The Fish'. They're getting quite good ... )