transit therapy #4

Bored-a-pescht (a.k.a. Towards The Beloved)
   
Relative to my normal routine I've had quite a lot of 'thinking time' lately, so these last few entries have been more ruminatious (a word I just made up) than usual. I hope you're enjoying them, and sincerely apologise if you're not. Promise I'll get back to the usual "Hey, look at the cool stuff!" format soon, combined with the usual dysfunctional travel stories that bring so much Schadenfreude to so many.

(Well, to a few anyway.)

Meanwhile, bear with me while I continue ruminating just a little longer.

Let me start with something I've said before in The Manor, but which bears repeating here for context's sake: in September 2007, when I first arrived in Almaty, I really wasn't sure that I'd made a wise choice. There were quite a few moments when I honestly wondered whether I should just admit my mistake and get on a plane outta there, without further delay.

The thing is, though, I've gradually learned that when you move to a new place you're always going to have these doubts during the early days. Auckland was a case in point: if you'd asked me how I felt about it, say, a week after my arrival, the answer would've been something like "Let's hope it gets a whole lot better, 'cause right now I'm having a truly shit time." And as you probably know, I grew very fond of Auckland, to the point where leaving it was bitterly disappointing. And being the romantic optimist that I am – or at least, that I've recently been told I am – I still dream of returning one day.

The point, however, is this: when you arrive in a new place with the intention of settling there, you've got not only time but also money on your side. Ties with your previous employer have been cut, so your only immediate means of earning a living is to perservere in your newly-adopted home. And with the prospect of money coming in, you just try to ride out the stresses of the first few weeks, then see how you feel about the new environs once you've had a chance to meet a few people and discover a few cool things.

That's what happened to me both in Auckland and in Almaty, and I'm sure it'll happen again if I decide to move in July when my contract runs out.

When you're travelling, though, the situation is a bit different. If you're on a tight budget (which I always seem to be), you don't have time to invest in places that initially come across as ugly or bland or unfriendly, or where the 'vibe' isn't right for you. Therefore, if you find yourself in a place like that, sometimes you have to make a snap decision: do I stay and  hope that my first impressions were a bunch of big fat liars, or do I move on to somewhere else that stands a better chance of engaging me?

I realise that none of this is particularly shocking information. The surprising thing for me, though, is that I now have to add Budapest to the list of places that failed the test.

I really was expecting to be impressed by this city. Why? Well, apart from anything else, every person I've ever met who's been there has loved it. I know they loved it, because they've told me at some length about how total phantastisch it is, and assured me that I was certain to fall for its charms. And I believed them.

I'm a little shocked, therefore, to be sitting here now in a rickety train carriage about two-and-half hours outside the Hungarian capital, and heading away from it as rapidly as I can.

I should probably be feeling disappointed about this whole not-warming-to-the-Budally-Peschtian-vibe issue, but actually I'm not so bothered. There are several reasons for this.

For one thing, I think there's a certain poetry in my present situation. I mean, here I am on St. Valentine's Day, heading towards a city whose name translates roughly into English as 'Beloved'. That's pretty poetic, right? Okay, so the fact that I'm going there alone takes away from the romance a bit – but hey, I never said it was a perfect world (or if I did, I was probably pointing at a computer running Windows at the time, so you should've known I was being sarcastic).

The other reason for my lack of disappointment is that I've actually been planning to visit The Beloved City – known in its native language as 'Ljubljana' – for about six or seven years now. Ditto the country which surrounds it. Many of you have no doubt heard my rants on this subject: I'd say things like "It's my #1 must-see country!" or "I make plans to go there every frikkin' year, and somehow it never works out".

Well, here's the good news: give me another six hours or so, and you'll never have to endure those rants again.

With Budapest inspiring me about as much as a pork milkshake, and my #1 must-see country looming just over the border, whispering "Hey Anthony, here I am – you can come and get me if you want me!", it was all too much of a temptation. After a restless night in the hostel, tossing and turning and wondering if I should give it more time, I woke up this morning and said to Scott "Listen, I've made my decision. If there's a train to Ljubljana today, I'm on it."

I asked Scott if he wanted to join me, and he said "Maybe, I'll think about it". He thought, and he thought, and he thought ... and eventually the time rolled around when I had to get in the taxi and go. Consequently, he's still thinking and I'm now travelling solo – which to be truthful is how I usually like it.

So then ... here I am, alone on St. Val's, on a train and on a Mission. I'm tired, I'm stressed (because it's a nine-hour journey and there's no smoking carriage), and due to a problem exchanging Kazakh Tenge for, say, any other goddam currency on Earth, I'm really not sure my money will last.

The truth is, none of that matters when you've got the travel bug in your system. I could scarcely be more excited if I was going to the Moon.

I'll let you know how things pan out in my #1 must-see country (a.k.a. Slovenia) when this winding little tale is yet again

(to be) continued

transit therapy #3

time-trapped in the twilight lounge

So, when we left the narrative (if you could call it that), Mr Scott and I were looking for a way out of the post-New Year doldrums. Some decisions were made, which led me to my present situation.

Being in quite a different headspace now, it's a little difficult to reconstruct the exact motives and thought-processes involved ... but in any case, both of us realised (consciously or otherwise) that some Transit Therapy was needed. No doubt that's at least part of the reason why I'm not writing to you from my usual rickety desk in Almaty tonight. Instead, as I type this, I'm sitting in Sheremetyevo Terminal C, looking out over the tarmac in the last place I thought I'd be any time soon – namely, my old home town of Moscow.

Weird old thing, life ... don't you think?

With eleven hours to fill in here at the inescapably dire Sheremetyevo airport, I must say I could do with a good flashback. How about you?

*cups hand over ear*
*hears nothing*

Ok then, I guess it's up to me. In which case ... let's flash!

Despite the aforementioned haziness, I do remember a few weeks back thinking "I need to get out of Almaty for a while". And then, almost before I knew it, the two of us were sitting in the back of a taxi with a disturbingly cross-eyed Kazakh man, rocketing along the highway towards the airport (and using both sides of it – I mean, why waste a whole 50% of the road?).

A couple of hours later I was in an airport shuttle, heading out from Gate One towards my plane and thinking more or less the following thoughts:

"So here I am, about to take my first trip with an airline that 98% of the people I've met during my life have never heard of, flying towards a city which I was glad to escape from with all my limbs, for a holiday I can't really afford in a country I know absolutely nothing about, and I can't actually remember deciding to do this."

And then, the follow-up thought:
"Sometimes it really is good to be me."*

Obviously the Transit Therapy was beginning to work.

Flashing even further back now: when Scott and I left our flat in Almaty we didn't actually have tickets to Budapest (our eventual destination this week). We'd bought them online and were supposed to pick them up at an Aeroflot office in the city of origin, but – surprise! – the Aeroflot office proved impossible to find. Later we discovered that, despite there being several addresses for said office on various websites, it doesn't in fact exist.

At Almaty airport, we therefore faced an unenviable situation: we were about to enter Russia with no visas and no proof of our intention to leave again. This is not the kind of thing that generally endears you to Russian authorities.

We pleaded for someone to call ahead and arrage to meet us at Sheremetyevo with our tickets, and after some time the check-in staff relented and helped us. So, as our Air Astana** flight landed in Moscow five hours later, there was an announcement on-board: "Will Mr. Cook and Mr. Benson please meet with our crew?" It was the first time I'd ever been named on a public address system inside an aircraft, and it was odd.

We were met on the tarmac by an extremely polite airline guy, given our tickets and then whisked in a private bus to our transit lounge. I'd imagined said lounge would be a gleaming, soulless shrine to the wonders of duty free shopping (with maybe an Irish pub thrown in), but instead we were taken to where we are now: a vastly improbable office-cum-lounge room type thingie with a tiled floor and a view of the tarmac.

If you can imagine the common room of a large youth hostel crossed with a slightly deco-flavoured pub bathroom – and if you can imagine sharing this space with uniformed airport officials (one of whom just bummed a cigarette from Scott) – then you're on the right track. Throw in a bit of hospital reception, and you're getting closer. Finally, add to this picture the delightful tendency of female airport officials in the Russian-speaking world to improvise on their uniforms, adding stiletto heels, split skirts, fishnets and other vampish touches to the ensemble. Ok; now you're nearly there.

So anyway, I'm lying on a soft and comfy sofa in this little corner of the Twilight Zone, looking across at the one and only shop. It's called 'Moscow Duty Free', and it's closed. Not just closed, in fact, but empty. The smoothly-curved shelves are completely unstocked, there's no cash register, no light fittings in the ceiling, and a bar across the door. Next to another of the comfy lounges sits an airline meal tray, looking profoundly out of place at zero feet above sea-level, with plastic wrap across the top and a few stray mouthfuls of cabbage salad remaining in one of its plastic containers.

Behind me there's an empty cardboard box which initially contained our 'supplies' for the next 11 hours. It was full of fruit juice, bottled water, vodka and fizzy drinks, all bequeathed to Scott and myself by a group of Lithuanian businessmen who departed the lounge soon after we arrived. Unfortunately one of the Russian guards decided he liked the look of these items, so he basically walked up and took everything we had, shooting us a cocky look that said "Let's see you try and stop me, visa-less foreigners!". Meanwhile, in front of me a wide-screen TV is showing a Naked Gun movie, badly dubbed into Russian.

Still, at least the lounges are plush. My body clock is on Almaty time (i.e. it feels like about 3am), so I'm sure to need a little shut-eye soon.

As I fall asleep tonight, I'm probably going to contemplate the strange feelings that stirred in me as our aircraft approached Moscow. Those of you who've been reading this blog for a while will remember that, after living there for almost a year, I definitely wasn't sorry to leave. I had some great experiences in Moscow and met some wonderful people who I miss quite a lot, but unfortunately it was just an inhospitable and difficult place to live as a foreigner. On the day when the taxi took me to the airport and I left the city, I remember looking out of the window and thinking "Wow ... I survived!" And I still don't know how some of the gentler souls I met there (Hi Astrid and Sasha!) manage to live in such a harsh environment.

And yet, as we flew in, I couldn't escape the feeling that, from the air, Moscow is probably the second most beautiful city I've ever seen. (The prettiest without a doubt is Bahrain, which looks like an enormous, glittering coral reef from above.) Then, once we'd landed, I spoke to several friendly folk at the airport and watched the chicardniye Muscovites going by as they made their way towards passport control. It was so strange! I suddenly found myself wanting to follow them out into their grand metropolis, just to lay eyes on it one more time. Weirdness.

Maybe as my experiences with Russian people start to add up (first in Moscow, then Sydney and now Almaty), I'm becoming a little bit Russified in my outlook. Or else I'm just beginning to appreciate a bit more of the 'whole picture'. Certainly a lot of things that used to annoy me about russkaya kul'tura have slowly come to make sense over the past few years, and I've even begun to like some of them.

This in turn leads me to think that maybe, if I went back to Moscow now, I'd have a different experience. I still don't believe it'd be the place for me (it's too big for one thing, and possibly even more dangerous for foreigners than it used to be, with ultra-nationalist organisations flourishing and literally getting away with murder nowadays), but I suspect I'd find more to appreciate than I did in 2005-6. Maybe I just wasn't ready the first time around.

And that's three maybes in one train of thought, which as we all know = one kto znayet?***. Certainly not me.

Ok, enough of these musings – focus, Anthony! I just need to survive one night in Sheremetyevo's Twilight Lounge, and I'll be in Budapest by lunchtime tomorrow. You'll be sure to hear from me at some point while I'm there. Until then ... do svidaniya!

Anthony.

continue here


* Plagiarised from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but nonetheless heartfelt.

** See, I told you you'd never heard of it!

*** "Who knows?"

transit therapy #2

timely reminders (a.k.a. killer headwear)

Ok, so what was I saying? Oh yes: down and dejected in a foreign land blah-de-blah, but preparing to say something upbeat about the whole situation.

*rolls eyes*

Well, I guess I've locked myself in to this course now, so fine ... let's continue with it.

What I'm about to tell you fits loosely under the heading of "When badness happens, try to do something life-affirming". However, a lot of people seem to associate this word 'life-affirming' with things like going on meditation weekends, reading inspirational literature, having friends around for dinner, spoiling yourself with hot oils etc. etc. ... basically all the feelgood stuff.

Personally – at least for the purposes of this rather silly blog entry – I'm opting for a more literal interpretation of the term. I say that, when life has you by the wrinklies, the best thing to do is something which affirms

a) that you are, in fact, alive;
b) that being alive is a LOT different (and preferable) to the
    alternative; and
c) that the line between them is easy enough to cross, so you might 
    as well make the most of being on this side of it while you can.

That might not seem hugely innovative, but it's a new idea for me. Or at least it's one that's been percolating in my brain for years but has only just become coherent.

It all fell into place about three weeks ago, via an affirmation technique which I can't guarantee will work for anyone else, but which I encourage you all to try anyway for the sheer demented fun of it. It's quite simple, and a lot better for your heart-rate than chanting "I am a unique and special human being" until the logical bits of your brain are too numb to argue.

Here's what you do:

First, take yourself off to an outpost of the former Soviet Union, where the traffic conditions are as about as sane as a Japanese Advertising Executive sprinkling cocaine onto his soba noodles.

Second, after a quiet drink with some colleagues, step out onto the road and hail a taxi to take you home. (A brief memory-jog: this will mean a private car, since official taxis are few and far between here, and not to be trusted anyway.)

Third, to maximise your pleasure – or your terror, depending on whether or not you enjoy dicing with death as much as the next person – ensure that your taxi is an old Lada being driven by a tall, lanky and not overly sane-looking Russian guy in his mid-20s, with a huge shapka* towering about nine inches over his head. Agree a price with his surly front-seat passenger, climb in the back and hold on. You're about to get a timely reminder that your corporeal, non-dead status really does matter to you.

To give you some background on how I came to discover this wonderful form of therapy: in Almaty, getting from A to B is a much more significant part of daily life than it has been in the other cities I've lived in. I work in three different schools, and have to go to and fro by whatever means possible. It's a city perpetually on the move; roads are always full and a little chaotic, and The Great Commute offers memorable vignettes of life in KZ's former capital.

The Commute can make you angry – as when ticket machines were installed on trolleybuses last month, and conductors stood next to their new toys bellowing instructions at passengers as though they were disobedient prisoners in a forced labour camp. It can make you smile – like the taxi ride I had about six weeks ago, during which my middle-aged driver and his travel companion gently criticised the Australian government for refusing Almaty Zoo's request to have a kangaroo delivered to Kazakhstan. It can disturb you – as when, while sitting on another trolleybus one day, I was roused from my thoughts by the *thud* of another passenger falling from her seat and hitting the floor, head first and unconscious. And it can even open doors (the metaphorical kind) – as when you get a driver who's interested in learning English and he/she asks you for private lessons.

Or, it can be completely 'normal', dull and uneventful. You just never know.

Anyway, back to my Russian driver. This guy could've walked straight off the set of a gritty German or Scandinavian drug-culture flick. Impossibly thin, grungy leather jacket, wild look in his eyes, he balanced a cigarette skilfully on his bottom lip as we roared through the streets of Almaty, occasionally swerving to avoid potholes and other moving vehicles. I could see he was approaching this real-life situation the way teenaged boys approach a game of Grand Theft Auto – not so much with safety in mind as with the thrill of the ride.

Sharing the taxi with me was a French Canadian teacher (and fellow beret-wearing freak**) called Nico. Now, I have to tell you that this man is no shrinking violet; he's the only person I know who's brave enough to actually ride a frikkin' bicycle in Almaty, and he continues to do so even after having been hit by a car once already. Still, as the Orthodox religious icons dangling from Shapka Man's rear-view mirror swayed wildly to and fro, I could see that Nico was nervous. And rightly so – we were quite possibly going to die.

Meanwhile, and unexpectedly, yours truly found himself absolutely relishing this manic death-ride. Nought-to-lose, recently skewered in the emotional nethers, squished into a tiny uncomfortable metal box and blasted by hot air and terrible pop music, I was feeling the most exhilirated I'd felt in ages. It was, in a word, awesome.

At one point, the rightly-concerned Nico put an arm on our driver's shoulder and said (in English) "Hey man, slow down!". The driver responded with an uncomprehending "Shto?" ("What?") and I translated, trying not to burst out laughing at the whole situation. Suddenly I felt that my decision to reject the normal lifestyle of a western 30-something man – the one where he basically acquires his own domicile with matching mortgage, fills it with plush chairs and works hard on becoming pointlessly affluent, suburban and sedentary – had been the best decision I'd ever made. Because ... because ... well, because of a dozen reasons, but all of them summed up by the fact that I was right there in that car, right there at that moment, fumbling for the words to translate a request that was clearly going to be followed for no more than five polite seconds. So this was where my life had thus far led me; how random, and how fabulous!

I know this may sound a little condescending, but as we continued our Petit Prix I just had to think to myself "You know, I feel SO sorry for anyone who's never been catapulted through the slums of an outlying former-Soviet city by a chain-smoking, shapka-wearing Russian stick figure in a creaky old Lada!"

In other words, I was having the life-affirming moment. I realised that, if I died in this car, it would be better than having stayed at home with my plush chairs. And if I didn't, that meant I could take the less-travelled road a little further. Or something like that, anyway.

Of course, there are limits to what one 15-minute ride in a taxi can do for you, and before long I was back in the doldrums ... though not quite as far down as I had been before. Luckily I had my flatmate Scott to commiserate with. He'd been enduring a pretty awful time himself throughout January, and both of us had found the week-long New Year holiday (when the school had closed) a strangely depressing time. As a result, both of us were heading into 2008 feeling deflated and uninspired.

As we talked about how to claw ourselves out of this ditch, the idea of 'transit therapy' began to surface (though we didn't name it at the time – I did that later). Scott started talking about taking a break from KZ, meeting up with friends in other places and taking some 'real' time off. I don't remember the exact moment when it happened, but before long we'd pretty much decided to take our next cue from King Arthur's Knights of The Round Table (or at least from The Monty Python versions of same). We'd decided, in short to "Run away! Run away!"

Lucky we did, really, or I'd have no topic for Part Three of this ridiculous ramble.


to be continued even more ... 



LATER POSTSCRIPT 

Ooh, isn't this exciting? Don't think I've never had a later postscript before!

Just wanted to say how thrilled I am to know that my little rants have prompted some true creativity. My good friend Mr Benji, of the electronic band Freefall, recently sent me their new composition 'Shapka Deathride', inspired by the entry you've just read. It's great! Thank you, Benji ... I feel flattered ))) 


* Shapka: those furry hats you've seen either
   a) in documentary footage about Russia/The USSR; or
   b) in James Bond films; or
   c) in Russia or the former USSR itself, if you've been there.

**Now that I think of it, there was some great headwear in the Lada that night! We must've looked pretty damn stylish to passers-by - at least from the neck up.

transit therapy #1

tedious exposition scenes

So ... you went to the other side of the Earth to discover a land of vast steppes and mountains, closed to the world for 150 years and even now somewhat shrouded in mystery. Unpacked your big red bag, found your way to the local supermarket, met your new colleagues, and began the inevitable months of settling in, adjusting and acclimatising.

As winter closed its grip on your new home, you perservered through the -20C nights, walking home from work along icy, sometimes unlit streets and wrapping up to compensate for the dodgy heating in your less-than-functional Soviet-era flat. You survived uni exams, power cuts, a confrontation with angry street dogs, and numerous deathrides in rattle-trap cars with half-crazed boy racers at the wheel, as well as spending Christmas Day as an illegal immigrant. Not even trying on clothes in an outdoor market in -15C killed you.

Finally, you reached the point where people in the street began mistaking you for a local – not all the time, but often enough to be noticeable. You crossed a threshold, on the far side of which you spend more time giving directions than asking for them. And just quietly, you're really pleased with yourself.

Not to a deluded extent, mind you – I mean, there's never any doubt that you're still an Absolute Outsider and that, if you want this feeling to go away, you've got years of work ahead of you yet (and even then it might not). But still, you've seen other ex-pats get on a plane and run back to the apron strings of the Motherland when things get tough, and so far you've avoided doing so. Instead, you've dug in and shown your sternest stuff. Now you're seeing the first (albeit very minor) signs that it's beginning to pay off.

So imagine how disappointed you'll be when subsequent events prove that, in actual fact, you're still the same pathetic schmo* you've always been. I mean, logically you know it's going to happen, right? Things can't possibly be going this smoothly ... or if they are, it must be a sign that Fate is about to intervene and rip out your heart through your ribcage, stretch it across a chopping block and flatten it like a tender steak under the nasty, pointy veal mallet of life. And yes, score one for the pessimist – it is that time, and Fate does step in. Result: you get cruelled.

Thanks, Fate.

I'm not going to tell you who or what brought my "Everything's more or less on track" feeling to an end last week. It was a combination of things, really. What I am going to tell you is this: when the Big Smackdown happens in a far-flung foreign land, it's even more difficult than usual to know how you should handle it. The usual dark, reverberating well of self-pity is deepened by the fact that no-one here really 'gets' you yet, so whatever your problem, empathetic shoulders are in short supply. Plus there's the whole "I've just met these people – I don't want them to know how pathetic I am!" issue, which tends to make you a little nervous about exposing your vulnerabilities.

(And yet, here I am writing about this on my blog. Silly man!)

Anyway, at a certain point you realise that the saddest thing isn't so much that bad stuff has happened, but rather that you've been affected so much by it. All the progress you made seems to have evaporated, and you start wondering if you could possibly be any less resilient, resourceful, self-reliant etc. (all the qualities you were congratulating yourself on not so long ago). Suddenly you're thinking the most suitable lifestyle choice might be to move to a new, uninhabited city, set yourself up as Mayor there, and name it "Schmotown".

So what – other than the Mayoral option – can you do? Well, if you can forgive me for using one of the most overwrought literary devices in the galaxy, I'll tell you in just a little while, because this entry is

... to be continued     
                                                             
(hehe)



(* For those who haven't seen it before, "schmo" is New York Jewish English. It means sth like "loser".)

the slow reveal

When you've no hot water in your flat, your day-to-day rhythm inevitably changes. Filling a bath is the work of perhaps three or four hours – boiling kettle after kettle and saucepan after saucepan, dumping each new load into the tub, trying to perceive a noticeable increase in depth, re-filling the vessels to get the next load underway and so on. Each rise in the water level tends to punctuate your morning, dividing everything else into discrete intervals so that you can see precisely what you've managed to accomplish since, say, an hour earlier. It's quite an interesting process.

Don't get me wrong, though: after nine days of the boil-and-fill routine, the sudden sputtering of your hot water taps is almost cause enough for a party! In fact, thinking back to early October (when our hot water was cut), I did decide to celebrate on the evening after it returned, sharing a bottle of sovyetskoe shampanskaye (literally, "soviet champagne") with my flatmate. And even though I had a lesson the following morning, the weeknight indulgence felt entirely justified :-)

If you've yet to experience life without hot water, picture yourself waking up one morning to discover that you can have your first shower for nine frikkin' days. You'd be in heaven, believe me. You'd lather and scrub yourself to within an inch of your life, emerging from your flat looking like a tomato, but ridiculously well-disposed toward almost everyone and everything: "Hey there, neighbourhood dogs!", you'd say. "Mornin', local loitering folk!" "How're ya doin', Mr. Invisible Speed-Hump, over whom I trip almost every day!" ... and so on.

It's a wonderful, almost giddy feeling.

Continuing on (and trying to regain the dignity lost when you stumbled over Mr. Hump), you pass the old bar heater buried in the park behind your block – an icon of soviet-style domestic life, which someone has transformed into urban sculpture by submerging it waist-high in dirt.

A little further, and you're walking beside the dusty courtyard where a group of babushkas frequently sit around an old picnic table, chilling out and playing cards with one or two elderly gents from the adjacent buildings. Holding your camera down at your side, you try (not for the first time, nor the second nor the third)

to snap them surreptitiously from a distance, without the aid of the viewfinder to help you take aim. Chances are you're just going to end up with a few more pictures of dirt, but your mood is so buoyant today that photographic roulette seems like a pretty fun thing to try.

A couple of minutes later you're on Ulitsa Gagarina, your nearest main road. Looking right – and assuming it's a clear morning – you're thrilled to see mountains towering majestically at the end of the street. Better enjoy them while you can: they'll be gone in a couple of hours, completely erased from view by the build-up of petrol fumes in the air.

Heading around the corner, you pass an attractive woman of about thirty who's washing her BMW on the footpath. She's wearing skin-tight designer jeans with jewel-encrusted decorative stitching across the back, PVC boots with stiletto heels and dangly diamond earrings. Completing the ensemble is a low-cut slinky black top, which she almost falls out of as she leans forward to buff the rear bumper with a soft foamy sponge. Being from a western country, you naturally expect a large yellow phone number to appear in front of her at any second, obscuring the naughty bits and inviting you to exchange some text messages with a computer program pretending to be the car-wash woman. It doesn't.

Soon you arrive at the bus stop on the intersection of Gagarina and Timiryazeva, where buses of various shapes and sizes fight their way through the throng of ancient Ladas, shiny Mercedes and SUVs to compete for your business. Some of the buses have decorative sun-visors made from curtain material draped across their front windscreens, hung with tassles and looking a bit like belly dancers' veils. Most have cracks in their windscreens, and the occasional one has tape and clear plastic over a missing window – all evidence of past collisions.

As each bus pulls over, a conductor leans out of the window (or occasionally swings out of the centre door, holding on to a railing) and 'sprukes' the bus route to prospective passengers. The one you need goes something like "Timiryazeva-pa-Atakent-ee-Ramstor-Centralni-Stadion-Abai-Furmanova-Zelyoni-Bazaar!!!!", all run together into a single, epic word.

You're listening for the "Furmanova" part of that, so when you hear it you quickly cram yourself onto the bus and get your 40 Tenge ready for the conductor. He might take it now, he might take it later, or he might leave it to you to pay him as you get off. And you most likely won't get a ticket, though it's not entirely unknown; probably depends on how honest he's being about the daily take.

So that's your day so far. You're about two hours in – almost half of which was spent in the shower – and it's another ten or eleven hours until your work day ends half-way across town from where it began, and you hail the 'taxi' (i.e. private car) which will bring you home.

Welcome to my new(-ish) life in Almaty.

I have to say, when this whole adventure started two months ago, I really wasn't sure if it was for me. My first couple of weeks in Kazakhstan had me swinging on the mental pendulum. I swung repeatedly from "Wow, it's just amazing to be here!" to "Oh my gods, what have I done?" and back, passing through "Yeah, it's okay I s'pose" and a few other points along the arc.

I've since discovered, though, that there quite a lot to appreciate about The Big K, and as it slowly reveals itself to me I'm enjoying it more and more. I mean, those crazy days like the one I described above are exhausting but extremely fun. Just like in Japan and Korea, your "huh?" sense is always being stimulated by one thing or another, and (as you've probably guessed) I love it when that happens. You get that feeling of "This is a truly foreign country – I've got so much to learn about it!"

Having said that, there are definitely familiar elements here. Russian culture is quite prevalent, though it's generally a much softer version of same than I experienced in Moscow. But Kazakhstan is much more than just 'Russia lite'; you're always aware that you're in Asia, and you rarely go for too long without being reminded that this country also marks one edge of the Islamic World. So really it's quite a melting pot – a blend of the three great cultural blocks I mentioned, spiced up by some bonus influences from elsewhere in Asia and Europe.

On the downside, the traffic is a frikkin' nightmare. If I die in Almaty, it won't be over-zealous muggers or corrupt police or xenophobic skinhead types who take me out. I can tell you now what the murder weapon will be: it'll be either a trolleybus or, more likely, an SUV.

My flatmate Scott says that Kazakhs have "a childish attitude towards their cars", and I'm afraid he's right – a disturbingly high number of them drive like drunk P-platers. Car accidents are legion, and seemingly regarded as a normal part of everyday life. And of course, the fact that you can buy a driver's license doesn't help matters much.

Still, at least if you're a fan of old Soviet cars – which I am – there are some Ladas, Moskviches and other Soviet bombs to be spotted among the horrible SUVs and personality-free modenr bubble cars. That's always a bonus )))

Another thing I found off-putting at first was the amount of construction going on. Even in nouveau riche areas like the emerging financial district of Samal, you can find yourself walking through a half-completed pedestrian underpass which is only partially-lit, with exposed electrical wires on the ceilings, rubble strewn across the unsealed pavement and workmen smoking and chatting in a shadowy alcove on one side of the passageway.

As far as I can make out, much of this construction has to do with the changing fortunes of Kazakhstan over the last 16 years. The BBC calls this country "the success story of the former Soviet Union", and there does seem to be quite a staggering boom happening here – along with a lot of people walking around in clothes I could never dream of affording! There's quite a bit of bling on display as well (especially if you consider fancy cars to be one of the principal forms of 'man-bling'), which of course is a sign of newly-acquired affluence. So I guess the years since independence have been productive ones )))

And btw, depending on your mood, even the annoyances and inconveniences can become part of the appeal of a place like this. Exampleton: ul. Gagarina (my nearest main street, as I mentioned before) is a continual roadwork and construction zone, and the chaos of the streetscape there can be strangely enjoyable. At times there's just so much crap lying around that making your way down Gagarina can feel more like climbing than walking, and it's kinda fun to see how the path changes from week to week. Not so great when the whole place is iced over, though. When the ground gets all slippy, you start to notice once again just how many opportunities there are to fall over and impale yourself in this split-level, sharp-cornered, exposed-metal city.

The construction boom also gives rise to some nice little idiosyncracies – like the fairy lights that bathe sections of Ulitsa Auezova and Ulitsa Zhandosova in a festive glow, wrapped jauntily around the giant arms of cranes on the many building sites there. When the great arms move (as they often do at night), you get a free light show. It's just one of those things that tickles my joyful sense of absurdity.

On a purely aesthetic level, though, I definitely wouldn't put Almaty it in the same category as, say, Weimar and Erfurt (former East Germany), or Tallinn, or Tokyo, or Seoul – basically any of the cities I've 'fallen for' as a tourist. I mean, it does contain some beauty spots, but many of them are surprisingly well hidden. You don't come here and immediately go "Wow!" the way people do in Paris or Prague or wherever; you need to hang around for a while and let the slow reveal happen.

If you can excuse the dodgy metaphor, it could almost be said that Almaty likes to perform a little 'civic striptease' for visitors – have a little patience, invest a little time, and you'll probably end up seeing what lies beneath her veils. But like the much classier belly dancer she aspires to be, Almaty's not going to take it all off at once. No matter how much you've paid to come in, you're gonna have to wait for the good stuff.

That's actually true in a lot of ways – not just in terms of locating the pretty parts, but also in uncovering the fine cultural detail, finding the stuff you need, the best food, the best places to go out and so on. In any case, though, it's as I said before: the people, not the place itself, supply the charm. (Except when they get behind the wheel of a car, and some kind of Jek&Hyde transformation renders most of them horn-crazed, risk-addicted and generally sanity-free.)

Before I leave you alone, I just want to mention one very pleasant feature of Almaty's urban face: namely, that it's free of some of the scars which blight most other cityscapes around the world. Like the Golden Arches, for example. Apparently McDonalds did some market research here and concluded that there wouldn't be enough interest in its product, so they decided against opening franchises in Almaty. Consequently, the only arches you'll see here are of the Islamic variety, like those gracing the entrance to Atakent recreation park / conference centre (about ten minutes' walk from where I live).

Personally I think that's something for the Kazakhs to be proud of.

Anyway, those are some of my current feelings about the new digs. They can still bounce around pretty wildly at times, depending on what's happened in the last couple of days. I'm not convinced that I've had my last "Get me out of this place right the Hell now!" moment, but I'm pretty sure that I won't act on it if it happens again; there's just far too much to learn about the Life in The Big K. Last week one of the local teachers told me about her holiday in Turkey, saying that when she first arrived there she felt like "a kitten whose eyes hadn't opened yet". I still feel that way here sometimes, and I'm looking forward to loads more eye-opening moments in the months to come.

Okay, that's plenty for one ramble. Over and out.

Bye!

how to tell you're back in the real world

I'm heading out to Mamyr school at the far edge of town, to teach my Tuesday night class. The number 75 bus approaches my stop on Timiryazeva and Rosybakieva and, with stomach-twisting groans of protest, lurches to a standstill. It's packed.

An 18- or 20-seated vehicle, barely more than a minibus, I'm guessing there are slightly over fifty people crammed inside. But I must board this bus – I've only been to Mamyr once before, and I'm not sure whether my journey time on that occasion was typical, so I need to allow for variation. Plus, I've been told that these 75s are sporadic; I've no idea when the next one will arrive, and if you ask anyone about bus timetables in Almaty, the standard response is incredulous laughter.

Half a dozen people are shot out of the bus like champagne corks with legs, and about a dozen more rush from the bus stop towards the doors. As the slow-moving and tentative foreigner, I'm naturally the last one to board. I manage to get about half of myself onto the bottom step before the doors abruptly slam closed.

"Bugger!", says my inner worst-case-scenario voice. "Well, time to get used to life as a cripple, I guess."

I unclench slightly as the doors hit my shoulders and rebound harmlessly. Luckily for me, they're impact-sensitive like the ones in lifts. But the driver won't be discouraged – he tries a further three times to dislocate my shoulders before I somehow manage to sardine my way further up the stairs, and the doors close behind me. By this time we're surging forward, swerving into the centre lane where SUVs are waiting with their louder-than-the-apocalypse horns to tell us that we're not welcome on their part of the road (which is basically all of it).

On the step above mine is, without a word of exaggeration, one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen in my life. She's tall and willowy, with perfect almond eyes and sculpted cheekbones, her hair curled slightly at the bottom into a long bob and dyed a ferrous brown. We exchange the first of several glances that say "This is just frikkin' insane, isn't it? Oh well ... what can you do?" She's a step up from me, though, so we're not communicating eye-to-eye in the usual sense. In this Commuters' Olympiad, I'm the equestrian competitor and Cheekbone Woman is on the basketball team.

A minute later, the number 75 stops again. As the doors spring violently open, a middle-aged, egg-shaped Russian woman thrusts a determined foot onto the bottom step. She's got the babushka headscarf and two of those prominent moles on her nose that usually come packaged with an "I've outlived Kruschev, Brezhnev and perestroika, so don't even think about trying to stop me!" attitude.

The head-scarfed babushka grabs hold of a railing, barks something vamos!-like and heaves her bulk onto the now-moving vehicle, pressing me forward towards the Kazakh Goddess. At this point, I'm almost leaning on her arm. My stunning fellow commuter then does an unexpected thing: she sends me another look and leans closer, in a specific kind of way that only your partner would ever do in a Western country.

I'm somewhat taken aback by this.

She's wearing an off-white, coarsely-stitched woollen coat, and the fibres are tickling my right ear as we bounce along the uneven roads. She smells amazing against the backdrop of sweat and gasoline fumes.

Next she changes her handhold, bringing her right hand across my field of view and her shoulder even closer to my ear. The veins in her wrist pop out slightly as she clutches the railing directly in front of me. For a second I forget my surrounds, and it's just me and the exquisitely fine-boned hand of a stranger. Then an SUV does a wild dash across an intersection in front of us, the driver slams on the brakes and I'm jolted back to reality, feeling rather foolish.

Almost 12 months in Russia gave me a crash course in dealing with different perceptions of 'personal space' across cultures. A peak-hour ride on the Moscow Metro could involve levels of proximity and physical contact normally reserved for hairdressers, lovers and proctologists. So I know that whatever's going through the mind of the Kazakh Goddess, she probably isn't trying to send me the signals that Western synapses might be tempted to perceive in this situation.

Still, in the mad intensity of our journey to Mamyr, I'm having to fight really hard against the urge to rest my head on her arm and close my eyes, just to squeeze a bit of comfort from the chaos. It's the most bizarre impulse. I swear I'm not one of those creepy folk who enjoy a bit of frottage on public transport (though I do like using the word in conversation – it's just a fun word, don't you think?), so I honestly don't know what's come over me today. Weird.

Next stop: more champagne corks are released from the bottle, and a new crop of commuters join us. A kind-faced Kazakh woman offers to nurse my bag in her lap, and I accept. Some of the new passengers squeeze between me and the Goddess; she gets pinned against the front windscreen, while I'm crowd-surfed about half-way back toward the centre door.

A group of young Kazakh men are stealing glances at me, no doubt wondering what the Hell a foreigner is doing on the 75. And somehow, though I've been tragically separated from the Goddess, the vamos!-barking headscarf woman has remained steadfastly by my side. She looks up and starts chatting to me, making wise cracks about our situation and punctuating her every comment with a wonderfully full-throated laugh. I'm comprehending about 10% of her jokes at best, but I can't bring myself to spoil the mood with an "Izvinitye, nye panimayu" ("I'm sorry, I don't understand"). So I laugh and nod in appreciation of whatever it is she's saying, throwing in the occasional "Da" to indicate my agreement.

Fifteen minutes later, the 75 is approaching Mamyr school. Two stops before mine, the Goddess peels herself from the windscreen, forces her way to the door and alights. I watch her go, thinking that if I was a typically assertive and persistent Kazakh guy, I'd probably get off and ask her for a number (which I'm told is an entirely acceptable thing to do in this town). But of course, I'm the sadly repressed product of a failed English experiment in penal re-settlement, so I stay on the bus.

Then a rather disturbing thing happens: with the school almost in view directly ahead of us, we suddenly swerve left into the turning lane.

What? Where the Hell are we going?

Apparently there's a system here whereby the conductor somehow finds out where his passengers are headed and, if it's appropriate, orders the driver to make suitable detours. So we turn at the intersection before Mamyr and start climbing towards the mountains.

The road we're on is still in the final stages of being built, and as yet no-one has thought to install any bus stops. We travel for about a kilometre before finally stopping, and I'm now on the far side of an enormous construction zone with peak-hour traffic surging through it. To reach Mamyr, I'll need to cut through unfamiliar back streets and then walk along a half-constructed arterial road with no lanes, no footpaths and lots of lovely, smelly ditches to make the walk more interesting.

I pick my way across no-man's-land and eventually meet the road. Then it's a question of weaving along the shoulder, occasionally veering off to avoid a ditch or squeezing between thoughtlessly-parked cars and oncoming traffic. I arrive at school about 15 minutes later, flustered, dishevelled and with a lot less prep time than I'd hoped for.

"Zdrastvuiyte, Entoni. Kak dela?" ("Hello, Anthony, how are you?) comes the question as I reach the staff room. To answer that question honestly, with suitable explanatory notes, would take far more effort than I'm willing to put in at this point. So:

"Spasiba, Kharasho". ("Fine, thanks.")

Welcome back to the Real World, Mr. Nerd. We missed you ...

tiny fun in a huge metropolis

You've no idea how much I've had to resist making puns on the word "Seoul" on this website. It surely has to be one of the world's most punnable city names, and it's been extremely difficult to avoid titles like "Seouled Out" or "A Window on The Seoul". But you'll see: I can show restraint when my heart and Seoul are in it.

Oops. Sorry.

Anyway, I guess most of you will be reading this fairly soon after yesterday's entry, so we might as well just pick up where we left off.

From memory, the Word Nerd had just taken a reasonable request to a foreign embassy and been beaten over the head with it. (I imagine a few of the people reading this have had similar experiences, and believe me, I'm Empathy Boy now!) As I mentioned, my first visit to the Embassy of Kazakhstan was on Wednesday (yesterday) and they need me back there on Friday (tomorrow), so today became my Designated Tourist Day.

Of course, my impressions of this city are pretty vague so far, but one thing I can say confidently is this: Seoul is definitely not small. If you include its various 'satellites', Greater Seoul is home to something like 22 million people; it's a vast, vast and, above all, vast city. In satellite photos you can clearly see the large, grey, Seoul-shaped splotch at altitudes from which no other Korean cities are visible at all. And so far I've had just two days to explore the giant splotch at ground level, so don't expect anything too insightful in this entry.

Having said that, I've seen a lot of stuff in a short time. I'm finding here (much as I did in Tokyo, although the two cities are very different) that every time I turn my head there are a dozen new things vying for my attention and contemplation. It's all a bit of a 24-hour sensory fun park at this stage.

Speaking of senses, the place where I'm staying is in an area called Hapjeong. It appears to be a fairly working class neighbourhood, where the streets are a happy clutter (or a dirty chaotic mess, depending on your perspective) and where smells of rotting garbage and sulphur mingle with the fragrant aromas spilling from late-night eateries. When the garbage/sulphur smells are winning, the stinkiness can be quite overpowering. At other times, though, the food smells waft in my direction and evoke pleasant memories of Korean meals I've had with students in Australia and NZ. It's a good place to walk through the streets and just watch people cooking, eating, sitting at outdoor tables and chatting to each other, shopping, cooking again (a lot of food gets cooked around here), and generally going about their everyday lives.

However, since today was my Designated Tourist Day, the first thing I did was get on the (extremely efficient and user-friendly) subway and leave Hapjeong behind, heading for the centre of town to book myself a city tour. This turned out to be quite a good idea, because – although the tour itself was only slightly more informative than a Windows help file – it was one of those 'jump on, jump off' things that passes through a gazillion places and gives you the basic layout of the city you're in.

The tour began on the main street outside Gwangwhamun subway station. This was the first time I'd been into central Seoul, and the Absolute Everywhereness of things rather dazzled me. There was a sudden sense of "Wow, I'm really at the heart of things here, in the centre of a big, important capital". The tour began on the main street outside Gwangwhamun subway station. This was the first time I'd been into central Seoul, and the Absolute Everywhereness of things rather dazzled me. There was a sudden sense of "Wow, I'm really at the heart of things here, in the centre of a big, important capital".

Highlights included Namsangol Traditional Korean Village, which had all the potential to be incredibly cheesy and embarrassing, but actually turned out to be pretty good. I think that's mostly because the buildings were all 'real' historical structures, not Plastic Paddy* re-creations. Also, the place was mercifully free of hokey craftspeople in faux national dress, operating looms and doing other terribly 'earthy' things like that.

What Namsangol did have was a pretty sizeable collection of authentic period houses, with elegant curled eaves, beautiful, dark-stained wooden furniture and ingenious use of natural light.

Short version: them was purtty =)


As I was wandering amongst all this stuff it occurred to me that, from an Australian point of view, places like Namsangol are the 'anti-Europe' in a sense. See, for Australians, the Big European Holiday always comes packaged with some 'freakiness of antiquity' moments – the ones where you find yourself leaning up against a stone wall somewhere and thinking "Wow, I can't believe this thing was built in the 8th frikkin' century!". You just don't get that in the Wide Brown Land, so the concept of something standing for over a thousand years tends to boggle the mind a little.

In Korea (and likewise in Japan) I've experienced the opposite thing. The traditional dwellings of both countries look so venerably ancient that I get a slight shock when I'm reminded that many of the ones I've seen are scarcely more than a hundred years old. It's amazing to think how completely these societies have transformed themselves between that time and this, as revealed by their architectural heritage. By comparison, the journey from Gothic to Bauhaus seems leisurely almost to the point of laziness.

From the bus stop outside Namsangol (where an army of primary school children smiled toothlessly at the funny Westerner and yelled "Haaaaaiiiiiii!!!", making me doubt my long-held conviction that Japanese people produce the world's cutest kids), I was whisked onward to N Seoul Tower.

This is basically the Sydney Tower/Skytower/Berliner Fernsehturm of Seoul. And in case you're wondering, yes I am aware that visiting a city's tallest tower is a painfully touristy thing to do. Much like, say, going to a traditional village. But this was my Designated Tourist Day, so I went.

In my defence, I didn't actually go up the tower. There were too many other things around to distract me – like the sign you can see here. Naturally I couldn't resist the idea of "a beautiful world [made] with junk", especially since there was an 8-foot-high transformery-looking thing standing next to the sign, with a motorbike frame for a spinal column. So I paid my W10,000 and went in. It was amazing. I saw, quite literally, hundreds of artworks made from garbage, ranging from hedghogs with spark plug quills to angry robot mothers with rice-cooker heads (about to boil over, of course). It was an incredible collection.

Meanwhile, outside the tower is an elevated deck designed to give visitors a view of central Seoul, and here I got my first glimpse of the Han River, which divides the city into North and South. All very good to see, but what I most enjoyed here was the ingenious (and probably illegal) way in which visitors had turned the viewing deck into an unofficial outdoor visitors' book. As you look at the wire mesh that prevents people from falling or leaping to their deaths, you see hundreds of padlocks fastened to it, all bearing messages. Of course, I can't read hangul** (yet), so I'm not sure what most of the messages say. Are they specifically addressed to friends who might visit the same spot at a later date, or general messages of goodwill to anyone who might read them? No idea, but either way I really liked the concept.

So, er ... guess what I then had to spend the next half an hour searching for?

Yep, you were at least half right.

First I had to find a padlock, but then a marker pen was also necessary (because you can't use a normal pen to write on metal). After that it was just a question of practising the hangul characters until I had them right, then finding a moment when there was no-one around who might alert the authorities. (The two cute 20-something women hanging out on the deck seemed fairly safe – especially after they asked to have their photograph taken with me.)

 

Of course, afterwards I reflected on the idea that "tiny things please tiny minds", and thought that if you were looking for a test case to prove the old saying, my Designated Tourist Day might be a good place to start. Meanwhile, the person in the room diagonally across from mine at the hostel had spent her day touring the D.M.Z., one of the most potent political symbols of our time. (I'm not allowed to go there because the Embassy of Kazakhstan has my passport.) So yeah, I felt a bit small when we compared our stories of the day. But still, I had fun. So there.

Okay, that's it for now. Time to sleep. You'll hear from me again tomorrow, but it won't be as long and winding as today's entry. No really ... I promise to be brief next time!

Take care :-)

Anthony.

 

* "Plastic Paddy": an expression I heard ages ago and liked a lot. It's apparently used to denote Irish kitsch of the type that tourists consume with great enthusiasm, but which Irish people themselves find horribly distasteful. Several years ago I invented a similar phrase to describe the Australian equivalent: "tradgy dadge". This is based on the Australian expression "ridgey didge", meaning "genuinely Australian in character". My version didn't catch on. Shame, since there's SO much dreadful kitsch down there just crying out for the right insult to adequately describe it.

** "hangul": The Korean writing system, and quite a unique and interesting one. Up until about 900 years ago Koreans used Chinese characters, but then King Sejong (one of the nation's historical luminaries) commissioned scholars to create a clear and logical alphabet for their nation. The result is both ingenious in its construction, yet very easy to learn and use. (It took me only three or four days to get up to about 60% literacy.) But just put yourself in Korean shoes for a sec: imagine if your government said to you tomorrow "Hey guys, we've got this whole new writing system worked out, and everyone has to use it from now on, so we're thinking you'd better learn it ASAP." Wouldn't that just be bizarre?