the heart of the experience ...

When I first opened Ranting Manor last year, I wrote on the home page that it would "record my experiences as a traveller and teacher of English". But I realised last week that, in actual fact, I've barely mentioned the teaching part at all.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost, I don't want to bore you! I mean, the occasional classroom anecdote is okay (I think), but I'm sure the vast majority of people reading this can live without a detailed breakdown of what it's like to teach English as a foreign language. And secondly, thinking back to when I was doing my training, I saw teaching partly as a vehicle. Which is to say that, while I thought it could potentially be a very suitable job for me, the #1 reason to be in a place like Moscow would not be to teach there but ... well, simply to be there.

That's why most of my rambling has centred on places I've visited and things I've seen while not explaining the present perfect, nit-picking phrasal verbs ("No, Tatiana, the opposite of 'put on your coat' isn't 'put off your coat' ... though it probably should be") or trying to help students distinguish between defining and non-defining relative clauses.

And now you're thinking "Oh ^deer^, he's about to launch into a whole bunch of wacky classroom tales." Well, sort of. What I want to do, now that my time in Moscow is just about over, is tell you what I think has been the heart of the experience for me.

It does, however, involve some teaching-related babble. Sorry 'bout that.

First, some context: the last few weeks have been mainly about saying "goodbye" to students I've met and taught here. Some of these farewells, it must be said, have been nothing short of sweet relief. I actually celebrated with a bottle of shampanskoye the day I was freed from the greasy clutches of my "Loser Class". This was a group of 10-13 year olds, most of whom had absolutely zero interest in studying English, but whose Novy Russkiy parents were pushing them to learn – presumably so that, in a few years' time, they can go to the English-speaking world and annoy native speakers in their own language. I could've strangled several members of this class, quite cheerfully and without the slightest damage to my conscience. The knowledge that I'll never have to see them again ... well, let's just say that knowledge can be a beautiful thing.

But then you had the other end of the spectrum: students whose company I've really enjoyed and who, in some cases, have proven rather difficult to leave.

Wednesday night's final lesson was a case in point. I had to farewell the last of my long-term adult classes, a very pleasant group of people who've been with me since I started in September. I really hadn't been looking forward to the day when I had to say goodbye to these guys, especially my favourite among them, an extraordinarily bright and conscientious young student called Masha Tretjakova.

Masha is one of those people who always manages to lift your mood, and her dedication to her studies is quite inspiring. But lessons must go on, so we opened our course books as per usual and explored prepositions of movement, until 9pm rolled around and it was time for goodbyes and best wishes. After the lesson, Masha decided to stay back and talk for a little longer. She gave me a gift, I gave her a gift, we chatted for a bit ... and then she started crying! I didn't really know what to do. But it was very gratifying to know I wasn't the only one who felt they'd gained a lot from teaching that class.

However, having said all that about the talented Ms. Tretjakova, I have to tell you that the real kicker for me happened three weeks ago. See, when I think about my personal Moscow highlights, there's one that stands out a mile; more than the amazing sights; more than the long-overdue break from Outer Anglo-world; more, in fact, than any aspect of the gradual Russian Revelation I've been caught up in for the last ten months.

When I tell you what (or rather who) I'm talking about, you have to promise not to laugh, okay? Right then, here it is: the best thing about Moscow – and if this seems unlikely, I can hardly believe it myself – the BEST thing has been meeting a group of 14-16 year olds who some of you will know from my emails as "Teens1". That was the name I gave them at the start of my contract, only because I had two teen classes on my timetable and I needed a simple way of distinguishing between them. It's pretty wildly inadequate and silly, but it stuck anyway.

Seeing Teens1 was the thing I most looked forward to every week as I plodded through other, less pleasant parts of my timetable, or as I coped with the various tribulations of life as a foreigner in Moscow. We did lock horns in a few early lessons, but with the inevitable teething problems sorted, teaching them became an absolute joy. More than once, they were my one and only reason to stay here when everything else was telling me to leave. And hey, look at that ... here I am, still sharing one of the world's great metropoli with ten-ish million people and an inestimable number of feral dogs. So obviously it was reason enough.

The irony here is that, at the start of my contract, I was warned at great length about the perils of teaching teenagers. "You give 'em the smallest chance or make the tiniest mistake, and they'll eat you alive", was one such warning I remember. Another was "Don't ever think that you can be their friend; they already have friends, and you're not one of them."

I've worked with some very capable teachers here and been given truckloads of solid professional advice. Fortunately, though, all of this "teens are incredibly scary" stuff turned out to be rubbish ... or at least a gross over-generalisation.

This was perhaps best demonstrated at New Year, which comes a week before Christmas in the Russian calendar. Whereas in Australia the big gift-exchange is done on Christmas Day, Russian people do it at New Year. I got a smattering of presents from students in various classes, but when it came time to see Teens1, fully half of them had gone out and bought me stuff. It was almost embarrassing (especially as I hadn't realised, and therefore had nothing to give in return), but also very cool. I got a couple of cards as well, including one from Sasha (more about her in a sec) which had a long passage of Russian text on the inside. Sasha had translated the text as follows: "That means, best regards from your crazy Russian friends and Happy New Year!"

I've never been a big one for greeting cards to be honest, but that card was an exception. I was tempted to photocopy it and stick it on the wall in our central school, near the senior teacher who had made a lot of the "teens will never be your friends" comments. But he disappeared to Siberia before I had the chance*.

I've actually got a little collection of cards from Teens1 now. My favourite came from Dasha, who was clearly the 'heart of the group' – the one who most often reminded me that learning is never a cold, impersonal experience if you enter into it whole-heartedly. Though she never meant to, Dasha could make me feel guilty for days afterwards whenever I delivered a mediocre lesson to Teens1 (and early on, there were quite a few of those!). But she could just as easily (and often did) send me off on a high when things went right in the classroom. Dasha continually surprised me by doing things like, for example, asking when my birthday was just a few weeks after we'd met, and then actually remembering five months later and making a gift for me.

That was textbook Dasha; it's difficult to imagine meeting a kinder, more thoughtful person.

Anyway, her card contained quite a lot of text, as is the way of things here. It read, in part: "This greeting card is for parents, but I chose it because I think that the teachers are the second parents. Thank you for everything, and I wish you good luck and the realisation of your dreams". Then later, translating the Russian greeting: "The best of all the presents ... here it is written that it is a parent's love. Teacher's love too, I think."

So once again, what was that about teenagers not wanting you to be their friend?

Of course, not everyone in the class was quite as expressive as this. Dasha was the youngest and, it seems, hadn't yet acquired the veneer of cool detachment that teens generally like to project into the world. So she tended to be a bit more forthright in her comments and reactions (though thankfully not to quite the same degree as some of my tiny studentini, who would do things like run up and hug me when I gave them their test results!).

So anyway, as I mentioned earlier, the joy of teaching this group is all in the past now. On May 31st we had our final scheduled 135-minute slot together. I'd been anticipating this for a while, of course, so I'd prepared a real "throw the course book out the window and let's have some fun" type of lesson, to try and make sure we ended on a high. I think it went quite well. But still, inevitably there came the "goodbye" moment.

As 7pm (the end of their lesson) approached, gifts and words were exchanged, and I told my beloved teens a few things I thought they deserved to hear –  like, for example, that they're "a tiny bit famous", which they are among the Moscow teaching fraternity. ("Oh, so you're teaching in Butovo? You must have that teen class. I hear they're an exceptional group.") They seemed a little blown away by that; there were some slightly awed looks exchanged around the room, which were rather wonderful to watch.

I wish we could've hung out for a while and talked, but I had to kick the students out right on seven because I had another class starting almost straight away. So when the time came I just said "Thank you so much everyone, and goodbye". The reaction was kind of amazing; I was clearly asking them to leave, and they knew it, but they just ... well, no-one moved, basically. We all just sat there frozen, going "Hmmm, what now?" It came eerily close to being that "Captain, My Captain" moment – the one you're trained to think will never happen in real life.

I've never had a job this good before.

Eventually the students filed out, and I asked Sasha and Dasha to hang back for a minute. We chatted for a little while, and I managed to let myself stop thinking and just enjoy their company ... and then suddenly they were gone, and I was in the midst of my next lesson. Trying really hard to focus attention on my adult beginners, and their reading about Henry from Cambridge who works in a post office and goes to the cinema on weekends.

And that was that. Or at least I thought so.

Two days later I mooched on down to Butovo School to meet my new short-term class of six-year-old psychopaths, feeling a little sorry for myself because that afternoon I would normally have had a lesson with Teens1. But when I got to the teacher's room Maria from Teens1 was there, waiting to speak to me. She told me that her and some of the other students had decided to organise a day out for us, and asked if I'd be available on Sunday.

Guess what my answer was. (Clue: if you're guessing "no", you haven't been paying very close attention.)

So off we trekked that Sunday into the centre of Moscow. The teens led me through Alexandrovskiy Sad – the garden of Tsar Alexander – explaining the historical &/or literary significance of every single thing we saw amongst its fountains and outdoor porticos. (I threw a coin into one of the fountains there, which apparently means I'm destined to return to Moscow some day). Then it was on to Red Square – my fourth time there, and it still gives me goose-bumps – followed by the glitzy Okhotny Ryad shopping centre and the main drag of Tverskaya Ulitsa. I'd seen most of this stuff before, but not with the expert commentary. The students really brought it all to life, making me feel something for places which had previously seemed like nothing more than random clusters of architecture.

One place I hadn't seen, mind you, was the inside of the McDonalds on Tverskaya. The teens had apparently planned to take me to a traditional Russian restaurant that day, but their plan fell through because none of them actually knew how to get there from Red Square. Plus, it was the hottest day of the year so far – pushing 30 degrees – and therefore possibly not the best weather for traditional Russian fare. After conferring for a while, they decided instead to take me where they go at the end of a fun day strolling around the city. So having begun beneath the elegant deco chandeliers of Chertanovskaya metro station, we ended our outing beneath the Golden Arches. Bit of a change of scene for me, I must say; the last two McDonalds restaurants I recall visiting were in Tokyo and Stockholm respectively, and in both cases I was purely there for the clean toilets. But I didn't mind at all. I realised that I was getting a genuine cultural experience here – a day in the life of my students. And I'm glad we didn't end up in some 'proper' restaurant where the students felt less comfortable, just because they thought I might prefer it.

To be honest, that was probably my best day in Moscow.

Since then I've seen a couple of the teens around the traps at Butovo. I saw Polina, for example, on the night she graduated from high school. (The classrooms where I taught English are rented from her school, so we were both in the same building at the same time for different reasons.) That was quite a bonus, to see one of my guys all dressed to the nines and rite-of-passagy. But a bit sad, too.

In some ways, my daily Moscow routine seemed a whole lot pointier when I had Teens1 to look forward to each week ("pointy" being the opposite of "pointless" if you base your knowledge of English on Buffy the Vampire Slayer – and I can't think of a good reason not to). Luckily, though, life here tends to have a fair amount of forward momentum; you continually get dragged along by what's happening in the present moment. That's sometimes a good thing (e.g. last Saturday when I went out to find a gym and ended up stumbling upon a beautiful 'nature corridor' I hadn't seen before) and sometimes not so good (e.g. my ongoing struggle to keep clean after the council turned off our hot water on June 2nd. We had to wait 19 days for the water to come back on.) But either way, the pace of life here tends to make 'dwelling on the past' an unaffordable luxury.

In terms of how I plan to follow up my Russian teaching experience ... well, I'll let you know when I know. In the meantime, if anyone's got a spare AUD$300 lying around, wire it to me tomorrow and I'll buy you a bottle of Kalashnikov vodka in the shape of an AK-47. It's cut-glass, it's life-sized, and it's one of the funnier / more disturbing things I've seen on sale in Russia. And believe me, everything is on sale here. Defenders of pure capitalism really ought to come and see how it mutates when let loose in the wild ... and maybe take a drive on Moscow's motorways, where Novy Russkiy trophy wives careen around in their beamers, holding driver's licences that their husbands bought for them when they bought the car. That's right; in the New Russia, there's no need to sit those bothersome driving tests if you've got the requisite purchasing power; you simply buy your way onto the road. It's a beautiful thing, don't you think?

Makes me wonder why I suddenly feel so sad about leaving ...



(Footnote, May 2010: in case you're interested, I'm still in touch with Sasha and Dasha, and they're all grown up now! Sasha is living in Vermont, USA, and Dasha is planning to marry her Beau some time in the future. Can't wait for the wedding )))


(*For people reading this in Kazakhstan: the person I'm referring to here is Daryl Koetzer. For others: I spoke to this guy two years later on the phone. He interviewed me for my job in Kazakhstan. Unfortunately, by the time I turned up in Almaty, he'd once again slipped away. But people like this have a habit of turning up again and again in the former Soviet world. I'm still hoping that I'll bump into Daryl one of these days. During the job interview he lied outrageously about life in Almaty, and so I have a lot to confront him about. But mostly, I want to show him the photos of me and a few of my favourite humans ... the ones he told me would "eat me alive". Clearly, the man has issues.)

hospital stories (part two)

Now, where was I? Oh yes: student's car, passenger side, biting the skin off my knuckles and gasping in pain / giggling in shock as we headed for the klinika. Ah, such golden memories!

Before I launch into my little hospital tale, though, I should probably do two things: first, I ought to caution you that I've been asked to include some injured-ankle photos, so be warned that puffy foot shots are approaching. And second, I think this will all make more sense if I give you some context relating to the health care system in this country. So to that end, here's a sampling of what ex-pats, travellers and others will tell you about Russian hospitals and Russian health care generally:

"If you're in need of a doctor you are in trouble. They [hospitals] are short on supplies. Their doctors are not as knowledgeable as Western doctors or as well trained ... You can purchase medicine on just about every street corner, Metro Station, etc., but some are not controlled by the Government and most are outdated or will simply make you sicker. Medicines that are no longer in use in the Western world are sent to Russia ... Medical insurance may be of not much use at the time you need it."
- Russian Women's Guide.

"Russian hospitals often reuse needles, and screening of blood supplies is inadequate. Americans resident in the Urals and Western Siberia regions may wish to maintain a private blood supply, stock extra needles, or, in the case of emergency, insist on intravenous fluids over whole blood transfusions until they can reach the West".
- U.S. Consulate General, Yekaterinburg.

Open heart surgery is routinely performed without heart bypass machines; there is so little blood that non-emergency operations are constantly postponed and, even so, doctors and nurses often have to give their own blood to patients; and painkillers are in such short supply that Russian hospitals echo with the sound of screaming patients."
- Hugh Gusterson, Unitarian Universalist Church, Livermore USA

"Russian doctors don't waste a lot of time and money on preliminary tests - they go straight to the autopsy."
- Yakov Smirnoff, Russian ex-pat comedian.

I could go on (and on), but I'm sure you've got the general idea. Mm-hmm ... not nice.

Some other themes that commonly surface in patients' accounts include being refused treatment because they've committed the mortal sin of being a foreigner, developing rashes from hospital bed sheets (usually followed by the nurses telling the patient they should've brought their own sheets if they didn't want a rash), endless waits for emergency procedures (of course) and rampant staph infection.

So ... having been a good little traveller and read up about all this stuff before coming to Russia, I'm sure you can appreciate why I was feeling just a tad nervous as Giorgy, Denis and I drove up to the klinika on the night of my little 'accident'.

Anf how was my experience at the pointy end of the Russian health care system? Well, to be honest, it wasn't nearly as horrifying as it could've been. That was 99% due to the fact that my local school organiser Giorgy (who's high on the list of My Favourite Muscovites) and my student Denis (the guy who had offered me the lift home) came with me to the klinika. Believe me, that's the best possible thing that could've happened. Apart from having not fallen over in the first place, obviously.

A few months ago my friend Astrid (also an M.F.M.) took a spill while she was walking in town by herself. With no friends around to help her, Astrid lay on the ground screaming for about five minutes (on a main pedestrian thoroughfare) before anyone stopped to lend a hand. So if I'd sprained my ankle this badly while I was just schlepping around Moscow – as opposed to right outside my school – well, there's no other way to say it: I would've been utterly screwed. I couldn't walk. I had no idea where a hospital was. And I got the impression that the one we went to wasn't actually the closest, but was selected by Giorgy and Denis because it was the best one open. I heard Giorgy say "Och'n kharoshaya klinika" (very good clinic) at some point in their conversation. Which means that, by virtue of their local knowledge, I probably avoided having a far ickier experience than the one I had. So I'm thinking that, as small mercies go, that was quite a McHuge one!

Anyway ... when we arrived it was immediately obvious why ex-pats are so scared of Russian hospitals. It wasn't that it was horrifyingly primitive or anything – just kinda dysfunctional and very unsympathetic to non-Russian folk. But again, I was okay because I had two native speakers there to help me.

Here's how it went: to start with, casualty seemed to be closed, so we had to go around to some dodgy back entrance of the hospital. There some guy gave us a wheelchair, but only at the top of the staircase. And Giorgy had to go inside to explain why we needed it. Koroche: there's no way I could've entered the place if I'd been there by myself.

So then I got wheeled in – looking like a person who was plainly in some serious agony, I'd imagine – and the doctor was called. He arrived ... eventually. And amusingly enough, his first question was not about my ankle at all, but about my documents. And his second question. And his third. And his fourth ... and so on and so on, while I sat there wincing in pain and Guardian Angel Giorgy handled the interrogation.

Then the doctor told Giorgy there are only one or two hospitals in Moscow that treat foreigners, and that we'd have to go there. (I understood this only afterwards, in translation.) Giorgy's reaction was along the lines of "What the *bleep* are you telling me, you moron? This person is seriously injured!"

The next thing that happened – and here again, I was too absorbed in the whole "oh my gods, this is killing me!" experience to notice at the time, so I had to be filled in afterwards on this – was that money changed hands. Yes, you read that correctly: Giorgy had to bribe a frikkin' doctor to treat something which, at the time, looked like a possible fracture.

I must admit it was amazingly effective, though. I mean, once the bribe was paid, suddenly everything changed. We went from implacably slow Russian bureacracy speed (marginally slower than forest re-growth) to fast forward. It was straight up to X-ray, straight onto the machine, immediate diagnosis, immediate prescription, and home via the chemist's. Once again, if I'd been on my own I wouldn't have realised that the doctor was merely waiting for me to apply a lubricating smear of roubles to the situation before proceeding. I have a knack of missing these things; there have been plenty of occasions when I've struggled to get something done, only to see a Russian person accomplish the same thing easily by knowing exactly when to start passing notes under the table.

Um, and then what? Oh yeah. On the way home I spoke on the phone with Giorgy's daughter Yulia, who speaks some English. She told me about a lot of the details I'd missed at the hospital, and translated the diagnosis. Then student Denis brought me into my building and up the stairs, and I sat on my bed going "ow" and waiting for the pain killers to kick in. Once they did, I must say I felt rather chirpy! It seems that, like the Germans (who sell some truly awesome over-the-counter pain killers), Russians evidently don't mess around with those sort-of-vaguely-effective-but-all-very-tightly-controlled-by-industry-regulators-and-therefore-not-really-helpful drugs you get in Australia. (Sorry, Jonathan.) I guess they can't afford to, drinking as much beer as they do in a country full of treacherous, icy footpaths. But whatever the reason, popping a few of the little green pills certainly made me feel a whole lot less like amputating my leg just to be rid of the damn thing :-)

I had a week-and-a-half off work, during which time spring decided to pounce, quickly melting all the patches of ice that had been lying around waiting for people like me to slip on them. Which means that if I'd gone one more week without losing my balance, I would've been fine. Grrrr! Still, it was good to miss some of the thaw, and kinda fun to emerge after ten days as though from a chrysalis, stepping out into a completely changed environment.

I have to say that, while this whole ankle business was rather unpleasant, it's been such an essential chapter in my Big Scary Russian Experience that a part of me is oddly pleased that it happened. (Or at least I will be pleased once I'm sure there's no permanent injury.) I mean, apart from getting my first ever ride in a wheelchair, I've now seen the inside of a Russian hopital – an environment spoken of with fear and trepidation by most ex-pats, as I mentioned earlier. So in a sense, being able to eyeball the klinika while remaining relatively safe (due to the presence of my two Guardians) was like sneaking a vicarious peek into a dark corner of Russian life seldom seen by 'Westerners'. Quite a privilege, in a weird sort of way.

Also, there were just so many humorous &/or surreal moments along the way, I really wish I could've filmed it all somehow. Like for example, you know I'm flatting with an English lad called Craig now? Okay, maybe you didn't. He's basically an okay guy (and he was very helpful in the days immediately following my injury), but he does eat like an English bachelor – meaning that overcooked, deep-fried chips and oven-blasted cuts of crumbed flesh have been the norm since my fellow-foodie Reinhard vacated Moscow and Craig moved in. So when Denis and I got to the flat, Craig had just cooked dinner and the usual charred-corpse-and-burned-oil smell was hanging in the air. Denis is an elementary student with not many verbs at his disposal, so when he tried to say "I think your flatmate's dinner might be burning" it came out as "maybe ... hmmm ... maybe your food, he's dead."

I thought "Oh stop it, Denis; I'm trying to balance on one leg here!"

Six days after I went for my unscheduled slide in the car park, I got a visit from the school doctor (who was billed as a fluent English speaker - yeah, right!). She was lucky she didn't come earlier since, as it happened, that was the first day I'd been able to have a shower. That's right: five days, no bathing. We've got one of those showers that's inside a bathtub, see, and there was simply no way I could get into the tub. Thus I was probably not the most pleasant person to be around during that period.

Anyway, the doctor came on day six, just after I'd torn myself away from the bathroom, where I'd spent a very long time standing under the shower going "Oooohhh, yeeahhh!". She poked and prodded and supplemented my growing stock of prescription goodies ... and then, with a conspiratorial smile, she produced from her bag something that she obviously considered to be slightly miraculous. "This", she said, "it is special Russian medicine", and flashed a tiny jar of something called "yod" at me.

Next she pulled out a swab of cotton, opened the yod and began applying it to the area around my ankle. It didn't take me long to realise that the stuff I was being swabbed with was in fact iodine, so I asked the doctor "Was this really invented in Russia?" She nodded with the same air of wistful pride that you see in the eyes and postures of Russian people when they talk about Yuri Gagarin or Mikhail Lomonosov.*

I've seen this kind of thing before – Russians believing they invented things that are clearly not Russian in origin. I don't quite know where it comes from, but it strikes me as something you might also come across in certain parts of North America. My guess is that it derives from a combination of ignorance about what goes on outside one's own borders, and that silly überpatriotism that leads a person to believe anything truly great must have been invented by somebody from their own country.

This is just one of many similarities I've noticed between the Russians I've met (or at least quite a few of them –  certainly not all) and the Americans (ditto). But let's not even go down that path. Suffice to say I've learned that it's pointless, for example, to confront an overly self-assured white Muscovite with all the evidence pointing to the invention of Mayonnaise by the French. You can bleat on about Duke Richelieu's capture of Port Mayon in Minorca, and the great victory feast subsequently prepared by his chef (featuring a new kind of egg-based white sauce, created specially for the occasion). You can draw attention to the obviously French character of the word "mayonnaise" – variously thought to relate to the Old French word moyeu, meaning "egg yolk", or to the verb manier, to stir. You can, in fact, do what you like; it won't make a single bit of difference. Russians are frighteningly obsessed with mayonnaise, so your self-assured Muscovite will just re-iterate the obvious: that anything so delicious simply must be Russkaya kukhnya. Same kind of deal with iodine, presumably.

Oh yeah, and the internet? Well, that was invented by Al Gore of course. But he probably stole the idea from a Russian ;-)

So anyway, yesterday was a month to the day since this particular chapter of my Russian Adventure began. Spring is going full-tilt now, taking temperatures up as high as 15 degrees. The snow is a distant memory, and greenery is re-establishing itself. Which, I might add, is not entirely peachy. It may seem like an odd thing to say, but looking back on the Russian winter is a little bit sad and anti-climactic. For one thing, it feels as though one of my main reasons for coming here is well and truly in the past. But also, when the snow melted away it revealed what lay underneath: mountains of discarded chip packets, chocolate wrappers and beer cans, tossed into parks and roadside fields by a people who like to claim a special relationship with nature. Presumably this is how some of them express their love for Mother Earth – by sharing with her their favourite kinds of junk food and alcohol.

Winter's recession hasn't stopped the corpses from piling up, either. I saw my fourth dead guy last night. At least, he looked dead. You can never quite be sure, and you don't really want to go up and ask. "Er, excuse me sir ...".

I obviously didn't expect Moscow to be an easy place to live. What I had hoped for was maybe some kind of atmosphere here, or a cultural experience that would make the unpleasant side of the city worthwhile. I've found this in the classroom on occasion, but outside of that I've been a little disappointed, to be honest.

In the Western media you always hear that Russia is a harsh place because of its poverty and inhospitable climate, or that the 'hangover of communism' is to blame for its problems. Well, here's my experience: those things may be true to an extent (though the last one is vastly overstated), but they're not the explanatory be-all-and-end-all. I mean, for poverty and destructive politics Moscow is no worse off than Washington, and as far as climate goes ... well, hey, I come from Australia, so what can I say? Hard to beat an Australian summer for sheer meteorological awfulness.

Here's what saddens me, though: at times, it seems to the outsider that a lot of Moscow's unpleasant side comes from the much-glorified Russkie lyudi themselves. Not all of them, obviously, but enough to make daily life more of a trial than it needs to be. So, while Moscow definitely has a 'specialness', a uniqueness and a specific kind of mystery you won't find anywhere else, it isn't enough to offset the difficulties of settling here as a foreigner. Unless you're into nightclubs, that is – there are plenty of those, and they're reputed to be pretty wild. I didn't come for the clubs, though. Nor did I come to hang out with other ex-pats in ex-pat bars. So maybe I came for the wrong reasons. Or maybe not.

All things considered, I've learned a lot from being here and it's an experience I wouldn't 'give back' for anything (if the laws of physics allowed you to do that sort of thing). But frankly, spring's arrival has signalled that my time in this vast metropolis is nearly over, and I'm quite comfortable with that.

Got one or two more Moscow stories to tell first, though. I hope you'll be back to read those when they surface. Bye!

* A pioneering Russian scientist, credited with discovering a lot of things that were later credited to Western minds. (Then again, with the Russian predilection for claiming foreign inventions as their own, who can tell?) Also an author and seemingly a bit of a national hero.

stories from the city, stories from the ... er, hospital

(part one)

And so here I am, back in Moscow. Okay, so it hasn't turned out to be my favourite city in the world, but it is a huge city, full of sights and sounds and parks and museums and galleries and libraries and so on. And on that last point, we all know that huge cities don't just have libraries; they are libraries. Someone famous undoubtedly once pointed out that every city is a living collection of stories – the stories of the people who live there now, of those who have in the past, and of events within its perimeters. In that respect, Moscow is truly a great city; it seems to breed stories as efficiently as sewers do rats.

Within days of being back, Moscow's unfolding narrative had started pressing on my cranial walls once more. It started on the day that Maya left. As it happened, I ran into a fellow teacher at the airport that day – a Scottish woman called Sarah – who told me about something quite incredible she'd seen just a few hours earlier. Approaching the bottom of an 'up' escalator in a Metro station, Sarah had noticed an opened but nearly-full beer bottle sitting on the ground near the end of the 'down' escalator. Then, before she knew it, a middle-aged woman dressed head-to-toe in a priceless fur coat and matching hat had swept off the escalator, leaned down, picked up the beer bottle, drunk its contents in a single motion, replaced it on the ground and kept walking.

And so, you might ask: what's her story?

On the way back from the airport to Rechnoy Vakzal (the station at the top of the Metro line), I found myself asking a similar question about a dirt-encrusted gentleman of Asian/Siberian appearance who sat next to me on the bus. Having boarded a few moments after me and paid his fare, he lurched about for a minute or so and then fell fast asleep on my shoulder. Which is normal enough I s'pose – it's happened to me on Sydney trains, and it isn't uncommon on the Metro. But when we arrived 30 minutes later at Rechnoy, this guy was still fast asleep ... and I couldn't wake him! He was out cold. I literally had to lift him from my shoulder and lay him down on the back seat before I could get out of the bus. He was breathing, but something definitely wasn't right there.

Then, when I finally got home that day, I was talking to my flatmate Craig about what I'd missed while I'd been away from Moscow. It was mostly the kind of news you'd expect – things that had happened at school, reports of more extreme weather and so on. But he also pointed me to another thread in The Moscow Tales which had me kind of amazed.

To summarise: one of the Top 30 "domestic lenders" in Russia is an Austrian-owned organisation called Impexbank. They have a vault on a city street called Ulitsa Berzarina – something like a huge storehouse to which couriers deliver hundreds of millions of roubles each day for counting, packing and delivery to bank branches.

Naturally, Impexbank performs regular 'sweeps' of the area around its vault. They do this using hi-tech, seismically sensitive equipment, similar to that which the U.S. military claim to have used when they were putting everything they had (or not) into smoking Osama out of his cosy little Afghani cave complex a few years back. During one of these seismic sweeps in February, bank officials discovered a hollow chamber in the ground beneath the vault.

Like many areas of town, the streets around Ulitsa Berzarina are full of free-standing lock-up garages. And as it turned out, the chamber found by Impexbank security was the final segment of a 50-metre tunnel that originated inside one of these garages, wound its way beneath the main road, and ended up directly under the bank's premises.

The tunnel was no mere rabbit-hole, either; it was lined by wooden planks, and electricity had been installed inside. Whoever was in charge of building it had put in a supreme effort to make this a workable subterranean passageway. The bank watched it for three days to try and discover the identity of the criminal mastermind(s) behind this ambitious project, but no-one turned up. Which leaves quite a lot unanswered, really – like, for example, having got this far, how did the diggers plan to get through the cement foundation of the building? And having accomplished that, what was their plan then? The completed tunnel would've brought them up in a changing room for security guards; did they know this? Were they planning to hide in the changing room lockers, leap out and surprise the guards in their underwear? On this and other issues, facts remain unavailable.

Possibly the best part of all, though: once the tunnel's builders have been identified by police, lawyers will have quite a struggle trying to find something in the Russian Criminal Code to charge them with. Tunnel-building isn't defined anywhere in the code as an illegal activity, and since the builders never actually connected their underground passage to the bank, charging them with an attempted bank robbery will be difficult. A 'crime expert' from Moscow University pointed out to the local press last week that anyone caught constructing such a passageway could easily say they were simply interested in tunnel-building for its own sake. They could feign ignorance about the bank vault, and this might be difficult to disprove in court. Funnily enough, the vault isn't terribly well-signposted; there are no neon signs saying "Impexbank City Vault: Millions of Roubles Delivered Daily" or anything like that. So maybe the accused will argue that it was all a coincidence. Unless the police investigation turns up a map with a big circle drawn on it, an arrow pointing to the circle and the words "BANK VAULT" next to said arrow, this 'crime expert' thinks our diggers might conceivably walk away uncharged. I'm finding it hard not to love that :-)

You might've noticed, though, that all of these stories are quite fragmentary – no tying together of threads, no satisfying denouements and happily/crappily-ever-afters. And this is the inevitable drawback, I s'pose, of participating in the unfolding tale of a great city. You rarely find out how the other sub-plots end, and you're left with a bunch of unrelated hairy scary tales that remain incomplete.

But since I don't like to disappoint, here's a tale whose ending you will find out about – and it's one of my own.

Last Wednesday as I was coming out of class, some of my students were standing around outside the school chatting. One of them – a very amiable guy called Denis – was heading into Moscow for some benzin, so he offered to give me a lift as far as Metro Prazhskaya. After doing my usual "guy from a country where they drive on the wrong side of the road" trick (where I head for the driver's side of the car instead of the passengers' side), I turned and went around the car, explaining to my giggling students why I'd made the error.

Any fellow English teachers reading this will know that talking to elementary students outside of the classroom can be an engrossing experience. As you spend more time with them, you become very aware of how native speakers incorporate sophisticated language into even the simplest conversations. You start to notice yourself doing it, and so you invent ways to 'grade' your language by avoiding, for example, tenses you know your students haven't studied yet, or conditionals (try not saying "if" or "when" or "unless" for half an hour), or the weird phrasal verbs that litter the English language and have to be learned one at a time.

This is quite an interesting mental exercise, and you do get better at it, but it takes a lot of brain power to maintain that awareness of every word and every grammatical structure you use in casual conversation.

So anyway, on this occasion I was so wrapped up in explaining my silly "wrong side of the car" mistake that I completely forgot about the treacherous conditions of that day. Which was a deeply stupid thing to forget, as it turned out. See, the upshot was this: there had been some rain, but it hadn't melted all the ice ... just made it extremely slippery. So, as I was heading towards the passenger door, rambling about how Australians drive on the left side of the road, I fell down flat on a patch of rain-slicked ice in the school car park.

Now, if the embarrassment of this situation was the only problem, it'd be okay. I mean, I've been spotted plenty of times being clumsy in public, so I'm more or less used to dealing with that. But no such luck this time; as I was falling, I felt my ankle twist violently one way and then snap back in the opposite direction. My immediate response was to get off the ice, pick myself up and try walking, just to assess the damage. And that's when I realised that I couldn't use my left leg at all. I think it was actually during the split second I spent falling forward into the arms of my student Sergei that it first started to dawn on me how serious this was.

The students phoned my local school organiser Giorgy, who was fortunately still upstairs in his office. Giorgy came outside, cast an eye over the situation and conferred briefly with my students. He then got into the back seat of Denis' car. As Denis turned the key in his ignition, I heard the word klinika pass between him and Giorgy in conversation. Unfortunately that left me in very little doubt as to what would happen next. I was clearly about to get my first look at the inside a Russian hospital.

... to be continued ...

"a land of eeks and baars"

Well, here we are in Tallinn, birthplace of the composer Arvo Pärt, home of the DM Baar and site of the so-called Singing Revolution.

I want to tell you about that last thing, because it's really quite impressive. A couple of kms outside Tallinn's city centre, there's an enormous arena that hosts the Estonian Song Festivals every five years. This might sound like a giant snore – thousands of people jigging about to folk tunes and so forth – and indeed it may well be. But here's the first remarkable thing: the arena holds 150,000 people, and the actual stage holds 33,000. So these Song Festivals really do celebrate the 'music of the people' since, with only about one million ethnic Estonians in the country (along with about half a million Russians), you can fit a decent % of the entire Estonian population onto the stage, and a fair chunk of it into the arena.

The main reason I mention this, though, is that these Song Festivals have occasionally witnessed (or even made) history. In 1990 the usual massive crowds doubled in size, and somehow the Tallinn Song Bowl was forced to accommodate 300,000 singing Estonians. They were there to "sing themselves free", to use a popular local turn of phrase. That year, the festival became a giant protest vote calling for independence from the Soviet Union.

Of course, this all happened during the period when the USSR was beginning to crack open like a gigantic geopolitical walnut in the nutcracker of history. [Bwwahahahahaa, feel my awesome metaphor-making power and quake, tiny humans!] Its façade of functionality was getting thinner by the day. Historically, Estonia had endured several periods of occupation by Russia, of which the most recent was half a century of harsh and incompetent Soviet rule. It'd been a very dark period in Estonian history, characterised by aggressive cultural suppression, deportations, gulags and so on.

The people were fed up with being pushed around by their occupiers and, as the eighties drew to a close, they saw their chance to act. So what did they do? They opened their mouths and began to sing. They sang, quite literally, for a couple of years. And the Song Festival in 1990 was the culmination of this, their Singing Revolution.

Reads as though I'm making it all up, doesn't it? But guess what: the story gets even more fanciful from here. See, the really unlikely thing is that the Singing Revolution actually worked. It happened soon after the 'Baltic Chain' event in 1989, when two million people joined hands across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. That had been the largest protest ever in Eastern Europe, and had drawn the eyes of the world media to the region. So when Soviet tanks began rolling around Estonia, trying to attack television and radio stations that were broadcasting pro-independence views (and jaunty folk songs), they were forced to pay attention to the human shields blocking their path. Why? Because all-of-a-sudden the BBC, CNN and their ilk were eyeing off the Red Army something awful. Bastards must've hated that!

Anyway, the Soviets failed to quell the folk-singing rabble. There was a referendum, in which almost 80% of the population voted "yes" to secession. (That may not seem overwhelmingly high, but bear in mind that 1/3 of people in Estonia are ethnically Russian.) Then there was a prefunctory little border skirmish, after which Estonia's independence was recognised.

So on our first full day in Tallinn, we went and saw the Song Bowl. It was pretty damn impressive, I must say. However, that was just a brief stop on a morning tour; most of the day we spent gawping at Vana Tallinna (the Old Town), sampling the local cuisine and trying to psyche ourselves up to hire a car in a foreign country.

Before I tell you about our adventure in the Estonian countryside, let me salivate about Vana Tallinna for a bit. I can't think of a better way to introduce the subject than to say that the entire city is UNESCO World Heritage listed. That's how cool it is. A stroll along its twisting alleyways and across its medieval squares is enough to make you appreciate why the UN would make the effort to protect this place. There really is no denying that Vana Tallinna rocks. Hard.

Outside in the new town, modern life goes on as normal, but there are few signs of it here; its World Heritage status has protected Vana Tallinna (mostly) from the grabbing hands* of property developers. All of which would make this more or less the perfect location for a 6-12 month sojourn, just to rinse the bustle of metropolis out of your skull for a while.

I've taken a ton of photos while we've been staying here, as one does. A few of them have been creeping up your screen while you've been reading this. 

To briefly explain these shots: Raekoja Plats is the Town Square, where the usual bizarre assortment of stuff has taken place over the generations – including the be-heading of a priest in the 17th Century, after he axed a waitress to death in a café on the square's perimeter because she served him an omelette that was "as hard as a shoe". Pikk Jalg is a street that runs part way around the edge of Vana Tallinna; its name means "long leg" or "long boot". Vana Turg is another of the many side streets running off the main square, lined with shops that have elaborate displays on their awnings.

The streets of Vana Tallinna radiate out from Raekoja Plats towards another pretty marvellous piece of UNESCO-listed architectural goo: namely, one of Europe's best preserved town walls. Actually, for historical and geographical reasons there are two walls here. See, in most periods of its development Tallinn has been divided into 'upper' and 'lower' sections. The city's occupiers – of which there have been many, thanks to Tallinn's seaside location on major East-West trade routes – have usually lived in the upper town, while local merchants and so forth lived down below. And of course, if you're an occupying power in a foreign land, you want your own set of fortifications to protect you not just from raiders but also from the townsfolk themselves. Result: it's wall-to-wall walls here! You rarely go too far without bumping into one (sometimes literally if you're as unco as me).

Because Tallinn has passed through so many hands, an almost ridiculous number of towers have been built into its walls at various times. There are 34 currently standing, many with odd-sounding names like Neitistorn (Virgin's Tower – once a prison for prostitutes), Paks Margareeta (Fat Margaret) and Kiek in de Kök ("peep into the kitchen"). The last of those was named because it's so damn tall and located at one of the wall's highest points. When Tallinn was part of the Hanseatic League, watchmen could stand on the tower and see "into the kitchens" of lower Tallinn – meaning it was the best point from which to observe any revolutionary ferment that might be brewing among the plebs.

Much later, the KGB had their own ideas about the best vantage points in Tallinn. They set up their local HQ at Pikk 71 (not far from the wall) and joked witlessly that it was the tallest building in the world because, from the cells in its basement, you could see Siberia. To which, of course, the correct response is "Oh you funny, funny Cold Warriors, you".

Right next to the wall, on a street called Nunne, a small sign marks the entrance to a modest little theme bar. As theme bars go, this is probably as close as I'll ever come to finding the 'perfect' one for me. See, the whole interior of this place is devoted to the English band Depeche Mode, who provided Anthony with a fair chunk of the soundtrack to his life during the second half of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. They play only Depeche Mode on the sound system here, serve DM-themed cocktails, and their walls are plastered with memorabilia and photos of the band's frequent visits to their establishment.

This, in fact, is none other than the 'DM Baar', a near-obsessive shrine to one of my all-time favourite bands. I was a little surprised to learn that DM are actually more popular in the Baltics than they are in any other part of the world, in terms of chart positions and albums sold per capita. When you consider that this is the band who continually breaks records for "largest ever crowds at a gig headlined by an independent band", that's quite remarkable.

Anyway, I probably don't have to tell you that, having been informed of this place's existence, there was no way I could visit Tallinn without popping in for a drink. And I'm very glad I did. It was kinda silly, but nonetheless an important thing to do. (And thanks to Michelle for giving me the heads-up, btw – I would've been crushed if I'd only heard about it afterwards.)

And so, yet again I've rambled on for way longer than I meant to. And I didn't even get to the part where Maya and I headed out into the picturesque Baltic wilderness, went for a stroll on the frozen ocean, and sang our "Estonia" song at some trees.

("Estonia, Estonia

A few short days I've known ya

Estonia, Estonia,

Oh how I'd like to oooooooownnnnn ... yaaaa!!!!)

Hmmm ... okay, maybe that'll have to wait for a separate entry. I'm sure you're all feeling well and truly Tallinnated by now :-)

Right then. Bye!

 

* Maya dubbed Estonia "a land of eeks and baars" on our first day here, and the phrase lodged in my brain immediately. The "EEK" is the local currency, the Eesti Krone or Estonian Crown. And the "baar"? No, not a misspelling; they really spell it with an extra "a" here. Almost as you would in your head at the end of a relentlessly awful day: "Mmmm, baaaaaar ...". Hehe.

rolling northwest

Since I started keeping a travel journal of sorts, I've sometimes imagined how cool it would be if I could 'phone in' each entry from some new and exciting location. Unfortunately, that just isn't possible. I mean, I'm not actually travelling at all now, so much as just living somewhere else. So in truth, 95% of everything I've published on Ranting Manor has been phoned in from ... well, from the bedroom of my flat.

I'm feeling rather pleased with myself right now though, 'cause tonight's entry is a bit different.

As I type, I'm rolling north-westward in a first class sleeper cabin on service number 54 from Moscow to St. Petersburg. It's about 4am (I think), it's pitch black outside and I've got the feeling that I'm making my way through a vast, icy expanse of almost-nothingness. I love that feeling! In the 'ideal lifestyle' I sometimes imagine for myself, it's something I get to feel at least once in every calendar month.

Some words about my present environs: I was kinda nervous about long-distance rail travel in Russia, especially in regard to safety. Turns out that I needn't have worried. We're hermetically sealed into this cabin by electronic security; the only way to open the door is to wave a pass card in front of it until a piercing little beep announces that the heavy invisible latch has been released.

Inside, you get the feeling that you're in the lap of luxury; the décor is all plush crimson with gold trim, there's endless gadgetry embedded into the walls (including a power point and phone jack for me to plug my laptop into) and a little dinner is provided to boarding passengers, complete with fancy chocolates and jars of red caviar. Waiters come around and helpfully offer to top you up with cognac, shampanskoye and other intoxicating goodies from the extensive drinks menu as your journey gets underway.

However, out in the vestibule area, where the myesta dlya kooreniya ("place for smoking") is situated, it's a different story. The ridiculously efficient heating system that's slowly broiling us alive in our cabin doesn't operate in the lonely vestibule, and it's below freezing out there. You can see your breath plainly, and a thick crust of ice makes the windows almost entirely opaque. (That's ice on the inside, by the way.) Plus, there's a draught at floor level that's cold enough to make you think about frostbite.

All in all, I think this would have to be one of the funnest rail journeys of my life so far.

On the chilling side of things, a short while ago I was standing out in the hallway, just squinting into the pitch-black and moonless night (as you do), and we passed through a village where I saw a building on fire in the main street. It looked like someone's dacha. Most dachas are made of wood, and I'm thinking they'd be at greatest risk of catching fire whilst inhabited, since gas lamps, cigarette ends, open fires and so on are all ideal means of ignition. So whoever owns the dacha was probably staying there when it went up.

Everything I've read and been told about these country homes suggests that they're a kind of 'spiritual centre' of Russian life. So I'm finding it difficult to imagine just how heart-wrenching it would be, waking up in the middle of the night to find your beloved dacha burning down around you, then having to gather up your stuff and make a run for it into the frozen laneway. Out here, I seriously doubt there'd be any prospect of a fire brigade turning up to help you salvage some of your pride and joy. There'd be nothing you could do but stand back and watch the flames destroying your dream, then try to find some other means of sheltering yourself from the bitter (-15C) cold.

But moving on from that rather depressing little tangent: I've managed to get four weeks off work, so now it's adventure time. And I'm joined in this adventure by Maya, who flew all the way here from Sydney last week to visit me, and to get acquainted with some Russian and Northern European beauty spots. Pretty cool, don't you think?


Obviously the first place to explore was Moscow, and since my guest turned up a week ago, it's been doing its usual oscillate-wildly-between-extremes trick. One minute you're feeling awed by the stunning Metro, or losing yourself in the beauty of winter's fine detail, or immersing in the outdoor market experience, or gawping at the famous landmarks and so forth. The next you're being barked at by apoplectic cashiers because you don't have a ten kopeck (0.5 cent) coin on you, or feeling the day slip through your fingers courtesy of Moscow's absurd unnavigability, or seeing a corpse being guarded by militsia in the foyer of a railway station, while outside other Muscovites try their hardest to join him in the next world by flinging themselves face first at the pavement.

Or else, you know, you're just hating the food and the coffee.

The highlight was probably seeing the interior of St. Basil's. It was very different to how I'd imagined it, and quite strikingly beautiful. It departs from the 'normal' layout and design of a church in some pretty significant ways - for example, there's no central hall, just nine small chapels on different levels. They're all connected by winding hallways and staircases, which makes you feel as though you could be exploring a medieval merchant's house rather than a cathedral. Also, the walls are covered with brightly-coloured, mostly non-figurative designs, which lends the whole place a vaguely mosque-like feel. The accoutrements (lanterns and so on) are surprisingly tasteful, too, compared to the clutter of iconography that plasters every surface in most Orthodox churches. I'm really glad I went in and had a look; had Maya not been visiting, I probably wouldn't have bothered.

But anyway, tonight was "farewell" to Moscow, at least for a couple of weeks. Obviously I'll fill you in on how our holiday turns out; expect a bunch of rants in the not-too-distant. For the time being, though, guess I'll just keep on rollin'. Exactly like Johnny Cash. Except that Johnny wasn't actually on the train; he was stuck in Fulsome Prison, feelin' blue as he listened to those big steel wheels roll past his tiny world, remindin' him of how time drags when you're in the Big House. Hmmm ... guess I'll try not to be like Johnny Cash, then.

I need some sleep. Can you tell?

breadlosers (notes on dough and dining in three oversized countries)

Hi! Thanks for visiting The Manor, and apologies for the long gap between entries. I hope everyone is well, and that (if you're reading this in Sydney, Newcastle or Armidale) you're surviving the evil and repulsive New South Welsh heatwave I keep hearing about. I'd send you some comfort snow if I could, but somehow it strikes me as one of the less postable parts of Nature's Bounty.

Anyway, last week I had to teach the word "breadwinner" to one of my classes. It's a fairly idiomatic term of course, and I thought it might be one that students would have some trouble wrapping their heads around. But they picked up the meaning remarkably quickly. This set off a whole chain of thoughts in my head about food in general and bread in particular, which is what I want to type to you about.

Let me kick off with some ancient history. I realise this is quite a tangent (even by my standards), but if you stick with I promise we'll eventually arrive at the point. At least I hope so.

Here we go:

Before Nat and I visited Germany in 2000, we were warned by various people about German food. “It’s bland and it’s stodgy and it’s horrendously fatty and badly cooked”, was the general consensus. Fortunately for us, this turned out to be completely untrue. Some of the best meals I’ve eaten have been served to me in moderately-priced restaurants in Germany. If you don’t believe me … well, go there and find out. 

Here's the thing, though: in mid-2005, when I started telling people I was moving to Russia, it sparked a rash of similar warnings about the food here. (Hmmm ... "sparked a rash"? Let's hope that's a mixed metaphor. If it isn't ... eeuww!) But I still recalled having my ear bent about the awfulness of German food a few years earlier, so I kind of ignored these warnings. Result: I’m pleased to say that I arrived in Russia with almost no culinary pre-conceptions. Yay me.

So, all-of-a-sudden here we are in January, which means I’ve been in Moscow for just over four months now. And guess what? Ninety percent of the Russian food I’ve encountered comes direct to your plate from the steaming kitchens of Stodge City.

I have to be fair and point out that there are some gastronomic delights to be had in Moscow. One obvious example is the great variety of things Russians do with beetroot. Borshch – provided it’s well-made and not too oily – is definitely not a bad thing to put in your mouth. For those who aren’t familiar with this stuff, it's basically beetroot soup, but describing it this way tends to undersell it. I've said some truly memorable bowls of borshch (along with some not-so-memorable ones). There are a ton of variations and possible ingredients, but the defining characteristic is its rich, reddish-purple broth. Yum.

However, with all of that said, stand-out dishes like borshch are exceptions to the rule here. Overall, the Russian culinary landscape is ... well, if I were to compare it to any of the actual landscapes I know, I'd have to choose tundra: nearly everything is frozen, and there's an awful lot of oil out there!

Hmmmm, so what was I going to mention next? Oh yeah, that's right. When I started writing this entry I had it in my mind that there were two things I wanted to say about food. The whole "Russian cuisine – not my favourite!" idea was thing#1. So thing#2 is next up, quite obviously. Only, I'm not sure I know how to brooch this subject without causing offence ...

Hang on a second.

*ahem*

See, it's like this: I feel the time has come to have a word to you Australians about bread.

[Cue to another tangent.]

Once again thinking back a few years, I remember one evening when my good friend Matt told me about a conversation he’d had with a woman from Berlin who’d moved to Australia some time beforehand. (This is Matt o’ the clan Hilzinger, btw, not o’ the clan Spannagle.) He asked her if there was anything she’d been glad to leave behind in Old Europe when she moved, and also if there was anything she really missed.

In response to the first part, she told Matt how relieved she was to be living in a country where you didn’t need to constantly add and remove layers of clothing in winter to maintain your body temperature. It's the same here in The Big M ... before venturing outside, you pile on seven or eight layers to insulate you from the bitter cold, then peel them off as quickly as possible when you get inside a well-insulated building, and re-apply them whenever you want to do so much as pop downstairs for a sandwich. All of which can have a negative effect on your routine. I sometimes find that, if I've got just a vague plan to go out-of-doors but no compelling reason, the layering-up process seems like too much of a hassle and I decide to stay in. So I can sort of empathise with the relief this German lass must have felt when she realised her days of layering up were over.

When she was asked about what she missed, Matt’s Berliner friend answered him with a single word: “Bread”.

Now, I definitely don’t consider myself to be any kind of Connoisseur of The Loaves. However, having travelled 'round a bit and lived in Moscow for a few months now, I do feel qualified to guess why Matt’s friend would single out bread above anything else.

First of all, German bread lives up to its reputation. It’s remarkably good. I wouldn't say that's quite so much the case here; I mean, "outstanding" is not a word I'd use to describe Russian bread, and quite a bit of it suffers from being loaded up with smetana (a strangely unsour version of sour cream). But it isn't bad, either. Overall I'd give Moscow bread a high pass mark, possibly leaning towards a credit. And most of it is real, actual bread. The Georgian loaves you can get here (if you'll excuse yet another digression) are particularly worthwhile, and anyone who comes to Russia shouldn't leave without trying them. They're similar to Turkish bread, but just a bit fluffier. Very tasty and great for soups.

I guess I should start edging a tiny bit closer to the point, though. It's basically, this: in my opinion, the comment made by Matt's German friend illustrates that bread deserves some deeper consideration in certain parts of the world. So let me give you my tip. The key to understanding bread, I reck'n, is to take a Kabbalistic approach.

The Kabbalists, see, were mystics on the fringes of Judaism. Along with a whole tableau of other wacky things, they were fond of saying that humankind is unable to look directly at the face of God. Meaning that you can’t go “So, who is this God person, anyway?” and expect to figure it out by concentrating really hard until the answer drops into your lap, wrapped in a nice neat parcel of linear logic. Mr. Y.H.V.H. (the name that appears on his visa card) is just too large, reckoned the Kabbalists, and too … well, you know, ineffable, intangible, incorporeal and a big list of other "in-" words that people are fond of using when they describe their deities.

So the Kabbalistic view was that you really needed to take an indirect route, narrowing your conception of what God is by understanding what he isn’t. I’d argue that much the same principle applies to bread. So, for example:

1. If it has no grain in it whatsoever, and looks like it never did, then it’s not bread.

2. If it isn’t a species of flat bread (naan, pita, lavash etc.) but you can take a pre-cut slice of it and slide it under a door, then it’s not bread.

3. If shearing it into pieces small enough to swallow requires only marginally more effort from your teeth and jaws than accomplishing the same task with strawberry yoghurt, then it’s not bread.

4. And lastly, if it has no discernable taste of its own, then it’s not frikkin' bread, okay?!.

By now, the Kabbalistic methodology should be paying off; that is, your contemplation of The Unbread should be helping you to form some idea of bread’s true nature and essence. I’m sorry to bore those of you who are reading this in parts of the world where bread is commonly available, but if you’re reading in Australia I hope you’re paying close attention. Why? Well, because I feel that – although there’s certainly some actual bread kicking around in that country – unless you live in Leichhardt or somewhere similarly euro-centric, the real stuff tends to be overwhelmingly obscured by a welter of lilywhite duck food that isn’t bread at all. Much of it isn’t anything, really ... just slices of protective material engineered to save you from getting honey or beetroot juice all over your hands. For a nation that prides itself on being relatively cosmopolitan, service-oriented and tourist-friendly, this just isn’t good enough.

Okay, so let’s review:


a) bread

b) bread

c) bread

d) precisely-apportioned prisms of white, fluffy nothingness; a kind of soft, flavourless void where the bread should be.

Exactly what you’re meant to do with this information (assuming you don't violently disagree) I’ve no clue at all. But that's okay: just think about Friedrich Engels. I’m quite sure he had very little idea of what people would do with his observations about the flow of capital when he first sat down with his friend Karl and started nutting out the Communist Manifesto. But others did eventually come along and put his ideas to use (though arguably not very well), and now I walk past his statue every week outside the Kropotkinskaya Metro station. I have to say that Fred looks pretty pleased to be there, too, surrounded as he is by street vendors selling all manner of aromatic loaves and rolls. Therefore, following his example, perhaps it isn’t too idealistic to imagine a fairer, breadier future for a society in which nearly all bread currently flows away from the proletariat.

So please, Australian readers, will you try to do something about the bread situation for me? ‘Cause the next time I have to endure re-runs of Australia’s Funniest Home Videos in the baggage hall at Kingsford-Smith airport, I want to know there’s a decent crusty roll waiting for me afterwards. And I don’t think I’m alone :-)