two weeks in 'the hole'

So, er ... just in case anyone is wondering, Finland continued to do its marvellously spacious and tranquil thing all the way through to the end of my time there. In fact, it did so even more determinedly in the final two weeks, stepping up from Sparsely Populated Mode to Well-Nigh-Deserted Mode ... which is possibly my favourite mode of all.

My final obligation to my employer involved spending two weeks in "The Hole" (a literal translation of Valkeala, which was the closest town to the college where I worked). So down The Hole I went, and this is where the mode change happened.


RUSH HOUR                                                                         Nuutilla, FInland, 21.8.10 

I know I've said this before, but honestly, ESL teaching is an odd profession. I mean, some of the places where you can land a job teaching English are seriously crappy*, whereas others are ... well, strangely reminiscent of paradise. At both extremes of the spectrum, you end up spending quite a bit of time in locations where the average comfortable Westerner simply wouldn't ever find themselves. To me, this is still hugely appealing.

A case in point: imagine you wake up every morning at around 6:30am, and the first thing you do is throw open your curtains to reveal a panoramic view of a calm, picturesque lake, its shores lined with pine forests and dotted with red timber cottages. You finish planning your lessons (started the night before), then stumble up to the dining room where a buffet breakfast awaits your perusal, before adding some final tweaks to your lesson plans and plunging into five hours of teaching.

Come mid-afternoon, classes finish and your students are transferred into the care of their camp instructors, leaving you free to spend the rest of your day as you like. And so you jump on the bike and go cycling through farmland and forest. Or you take on a longer expedition to a town or village. Or you go for a row on the lake, play badminton with your colleagues, read in the afternoon sun, or row/walk to a beautiful 100-year-old wooden hydro-electric station (only in Finland could you have a "beautiful power station"), to enjoy ice cream with friends while watching a family of ducks choosing their route up river. Or, y'know, you just go to your room, mess around on the internet for a while, and sleep till dinner time.

Of course you have to plan everything you want to do in the classroom, and some days this can be very time-consuming. But more often than not, a large portion of your time is completely your own.

After a few days of this, one morning you hear a sound that gets your attention. It's the sound of a car engine, and it's getting louder. You think "Hmmm, strange. Who that could be?".

Then the following realisation hits you:  "Holy crap! I'm so far removed from civilisation here that an approaching car is a frikkin' event ... and yet, I'm actually holding down a job in this place!"

And at that point, you know you've been making some good choices in your life.

This, in the proverbial shell of a metaphorical nut, was my time in Valkeala. Even though I was missing The Belle intensely the whole time, and there were some issues with the camp instructors, and the students weren't nearly as cool there as they were in Anjalankoski, being in The Hole still contributed to making 2010 one of the best summers I've had.

At the end of it all, I rode back to the town of Inkeroinen, and returned my bicycle to the bike hire shop. This in itself was quite an intense experience – a 55km 'farewell ride' through some stunning countryside*. Not wanting to compromise my rugged manliness or anything, but I've really no idea when (or even if) I'll be back in Finland, and as I approached Inkeroinen's not-especially-charming town centre, there were some emotional moments. I have a lot of good memories that centre around this little corner of the world now.

So yeah ... on my fourth year there, I think I finally learned how to appreciate Finland properly. Amazing that it took me so long – for the last couple of years I've been the Meg Ryan character to Finland's Annoying Guy who Randomly Meets Meg and Inconveniences/Irritates Her. You know the plot outline even if you haven't suffered through the films: she sees all his faults and complains bitterly about him, then later realises that she's madly in love with the very same guy, a minimum of half an hour after every single audience member – even those with IQs bordering on the subnormal – have effortlessly reached the same conclusion**.

Silly Me(g)! 

Oops, sorry for the tangent. Let's skip to the finish of the Finnishness.

The following day, several expensive train rides and a fairly bad hostel experience later, I flew out of a completely different part of southern Finland. Ascending over the Turku archipelago, on my way to Gdansk in northern Poland, I had one last rush of "Oh my gods, this country is amazing".

The archipelago extends far out into the Baltic Sea and is made up of more than 2,000 islands. on some of them I could see little communities, joined to their neigbouring islands by bridges, but on quite a few of the smaller ones there was just a single visible house, alone among the waves and the wilderness. Still others remained completely uninhabited ... at least for now.

I just don't think I could have been more impressed with this. I really don't. It was as if Finland was sending me a farewell message – something along the lines of:

"Don't dismiss your dreams, Anthony. Nothing is too far-fetched, 'cause after all, you live in a world where people can still have their own frikkin' islands! Got that?"

Yep. Message received.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about all this is that, despite everything I've described in the last two entries, plus a well-functioning socialist society, an educational system that's the envy of the rest of Europe, brilliant health care, decent life expectancy, financial comfort, low crime and more quiet lakeside beauty spots than you can poke a fishing rod at***, Finns are one of the most clinically depressed races of people on Earth. They have one of the highest incidences of both suicide and chronic alcoholism you'll find anywhere. So why?

Seems to me there's a whole treatise waiting to be written in answer to that question. It'd be about how people who routinely live in ideal circumstances struggle to find 'highs', because the good moments in their lives aren't that much better than what seems normal, while on the other side of this coin, those who live in crappy circumstances are often happier because any time something good happens to them (even small, everyday stuff), it stands out from the crappiness ... blah blah.

Or maybe none of that is true, and northern peoples are just more inclined to be melancholic.

As intrigued as I am by this question, though, I think I'll leave the treatise to other people (and there are plenty of them) who have spent a lot more time than I have trying to penetrate the mysteries of Finnish culture. Good luck, guys!

Anyway, to get back to the original point of this entry, which sort of got buried in the ramble: Turku-Gdansk was part of a longer journey leading back to Lviv, the Ukrainian city where I lived and worked until recently. I'm in the 'burbs of the city now, looking out of a 2nd story window into a street called Rubchaka, which has witnessed some fairly significant events in The Word Nerd's recent life.

At this point, the super-observant reader might be questioning my decision-making capacities. The question would go something like this: "So, Mr Nerd, you're telling me that you've just left behind a country which you've said is pretty darn fabulous, and returned to a city which you didn't write a single word about during the whole ten months you lived there ... and where you no longer have a job. So, er, what the Hell are you doing back in Lviv?"

It's a fair question, and I'm glad you asked it ;-)

I'll tell you next time ... but meanwhile, I've posted the above pic to help you guess (if you don't know already).

Bye!


(*Just wanted to acknowledge the extensive and obvious Photoshop work on this photo. My excuse is poor light ... the skies went all moody and dark while I was setting up for the shot, and I didn't feel like fiddling with my camera for ages to try and brighten up the shot.)

(**And yet they stay and watch the whole tedious thing unfold with mind-numbing inevitability ... leading to such questions as "Why?", "Why oh why?" and "For Douglas' sake, WHY do they do that?")


(***Estimates of the number of lakes in Finland range from 30,000 to 200,000. That's just a ridiculous number of lakes, don't you think? I mean, how do they manage to fit any actual land into the country?)

today was ...

1:  ... joy and contentment

There’s no doubt that the last four weeks have been an amazing time in my life. I mean, I haven’t done anything really spectacular (apart from lying on a bed of nails, which was very cool), but I have begun to recover two things that I’d lost.

The first is my liking for Finland. I really enjoyed it here when I first visited four-and-a-half years ago, but I kinda fell out of love with it during successive visits. This time around, though, I’ve found myself marching in the “I love Finland” parade once again, waving my little blue-and-white flag and my stuffed moomin* around like ... well, like a mad Finn, basically.

This place truly is a tonic for the soul.

The thing is, it’s exactly the same country I left a year ago, so I can only conclude that it’s my mindset which has changed. The vast open spaces, the dramatic skies, the clean air and the profound quiet all do their part to clear my mind and put me in a good mood – whereas last year I just found the whole place kinda boring.

As a nice little bonus, the strange hobbity language, with its wonderfully long compound words and crazy umlauty vowel sounds, is really grabbing me this time … perhaps because my contact with Estonian last year has rendered at least a few Finnish words understandable**.

Anyway, today I got a large dose of southern Finland at its green, idyllic best, and out there in the middle of nowhere with not a soul around, I found myself rather blissed out. There were moments when I felt infused with a zen-like calm, and others when I wanted to yell “Woo-hoooo!” across the empty fields. Both were fun )))

2: ... a bitter farewell

The other thing I’d partially lost during my nine months in Lviv was my passion for teaching English. Of course teaching has the same ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ as any profession, and for various reasons which I won’t bore you with, the nine months from October last year to June this year was probably the biggest downer I’ve had (only in the professional sense) since I started doing this weirdarse job.

When I came to Finland, I think there was a shiny little neuron of hope lurking somewhere in the back of my brain, boldly claiming that coming here might help me to recover some of the ‘fire’ that I’d lost.

And, amazingly, that’s exactly what happened.

Being in Finland (see above) was certainly part of the reason for this. Hanging out with my colleagues Andrea, Chelsea and Jonny helped as well, ‘cause the four of us had loads of fun and helped each other cope with the stresses and absurdities of summer camp. But the dominant influence was the busloads of Russian teenagers with whom I’ve basically lived for the last four weeks.

Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while are familiar with my rants about the most surprising/miraculous aspect of teaching English: namely the number of great and inspiring people you meet, especially amongst the younger folk. When you see how brilliantly some of your young students can shine – not just academically, but in plenty of other ways too – it’s hard to remain cynical and unaffected.

This year my summer job brought me two miracles in human form: sisters from Moscow, Liza and Sonja, who blew me away on more or less a daily basis. They were not only gifted students, but also great humans with impressive creative abilities. On top of that, their classmates (the “Yummy All-stars”) were also pretty damn cool, and every morning I woke up looking forward to seeing them and ‘working’ with them.

Maybe the greatest thing about all of this, btw, is that I felt the need to put rabbit ears around the word 'working' in that previous paragraph. I just read it back to myself, noticed the ears (which I'd typed without really thinking about it) and thought "Hey ... cool!" I mean, surely this is the kind of thing everyone hopes for in their professional life: a job which you scarcely think of as work at all, but more as something which you simply do because it's part of who you are.

"But wait", you may or may not be thinking. "Why is all this cheerful rambling under such a dark heading?"

Well, there's sort of a catch. See, the weird meta-reality of summer camp can only be sustained for a short period before it collapses on itself, like a probability wave when you open the box and the cat either a) leaps out and asks for food or b) lies still and decomposes. At the end of it all, there comes the point where everyone has to say “goodbye” (often through a flood of tears), get on a bus and go home. And that’s the last time you ever see 98% of them.

Today was the final day of camp at Anjalankoski. After breakfast all the students piled their bags into the luggage hold of their coach, and I spent my final hour with Liza and Sonja. It was every bit as sad and depressing as I’d anticipated.

The goodbyes never get easier (((

3: … a mad mission

Dull-but-necessary contextual stuff: after the month-long stint at Anjalankoski, I’d signed on with the same employer for another summer camp in a place called Valkeala***. The two places are about 55km distant from each other, with a reasonable-sized city called Kouvola lying in between.

My school had offered me a lift to Valkeala, which would take about 3/4 of an hour. But I decided that it would be more fun to make my own way there. (Plus I wanted the exercise – gonna see My Beloved in two weeks, and I want to look as good as possible when the day arrrives.)

The resulting plan: go to the bike shop in Anjalankoski, ask if I could take the bike I’d been renting from them on an ‘extended excursion’, then get the train to Kouvola and cycle the remaining 30kms to Valkeala.

I arranged all of that a couple of days ago, and it seemed like everything would be ok. However, Finland’s weather has been unusually wild lately, with heatwaves, storms, fires, and even tornadoes occasionally destroying forests and knocking out power lines for days at a time.

So … when I went into school today, I heard the dire forecasts: “There’s going to be a really big thunderstorm this afternoon. Stay indoors – it’s gonna be nasty out there.”

“Hmmm”, thinks Anthony. “To ride or not to ride?”

At 2:30pm, when the time came to make the final decision, the winds were gusting angrily and the skies were apocalyptically dark. I realised that the only sensible course of action would be to return my bike and accept the lift that my school had offered me.

Then I realised something else: that was never going to happen.

I cycled out of Kouvola an hour later, without a map. (I'd printed out a set of written instructions from Google, like “Take Valkealayannta for 3.4kms then left into the Kalevantie for 11.6kms.")

As I reached the outskirts of the city, heavy rain drops were darkening my shirt and bouncing off my head, while the wind pushed me around like a playground bully, and the skies rumbled with malicious intent. I braced myself for a difficult, possibly even terrifying ride – I mean, what was I going to do if the weather got really intense, and I was dodging lightning bolts in Nowheresville with not a soul around to help me?

Fortunately I didn't have to find out; after the first hour or so of riding through rain, the skies cleared and the usual sunny, perfect tranquility of Finland re-appeared. Yay!

Two and a half hours later I arrived at the new college, somewhat exhausted but feeling great after the ride. The landscape out here is stunningly spacious and pretty, especially after you leave the main highways and get onto the almost-deserted country roads – and it was this that produced the ‘magic moments’ I mentioned earlier.

Of course, the Russian camp administrators at both ends of the journey thought I was insane. But that’s fine … I’m more or less used to being a ‘weird foreigner’, and most of what I do/say/think seems odd to the people around. It often used to happen in my own country, anyway ... at least here, I have an excuse for being weird ;-)

… a day of resolutions

Cycling through the wide open spaces of Finland gave me a lot of time to think today. At some point, I realised that a few things had been simmering slowly in the back of my head, and that they'd formed themselves into more or less clear thoughts during the journey.

(Isn't it great how journeys do that?)

Actually, a few of these things were more than just thoughts: they were resolutions. So, at the risk of sending everyone to sleep, I'm going to share three of these with you now. Please don't feel that I'm 'preaching' here – these resolutions are just for me. Having said that, I'd be interested to hear your opinion about them. Let me know if you think they're reasonable or not.

Ok, here we go ...

Resolution #1: never, ever grow up
(a.k.a. "be a teenager forever")

Working with young people teaches you this: being an 'adult' is ridiculous. When you're in summer camp, you watch and listen to young people all day long (and sometimes all night), you find ways of relating to them, you see them on their best and worst behaviour, and sometimes at their most creative. In a way, you almost get to be a kid for a little while, doing silly 'kid/teenaged things' like riding your bike into town for ice cream after school, trying out new table tennis moves or making a home movie with your friends. And guess what? It's a great life.

This is something that I never want to lose sight of as adult life tries to bury me (and everyone else) beneath a mountain of responsibilities. So ... here's what I reck'n:

Rather than letting the sensible adult world mould us into boring people, and leaving kidhood behind, we should be aiming to do the absolute minimum possible amount of adult stuff necessary to keep us from becoming homeless. And we should do it in the knowledge that a) it's mostly bullshit, and b) it's trying to kill us inside. Look at it as merely an unavoidable distraction from the real mission ... which, btw, is to be incredibly silly, run about laughing, eat ice cream, play racquet sports and do whatever stuff we happen to think is fun/cool.

That's all )))


Resolution #2: Never have a normal life

Sometimes when I hear others say things like "People think I'm crazy", it sounds like a pretentious boast. So I hesitate a little to make a similar claim about myself. However, it really seems to be true. And y'know, I've gradually reached the conclusion that this is a very, very good thing. 

The why of it goes like this: if people doubt your sanity, it's because you do or say things which lie outside the range of what they think a sane person might decide to do or say. By implication, the people who think this about you define themselves as sane and normal. Over the years I've noticed something about these 'normal' people: namely, that they don't appear to be having anywhere near as much fun as I am.

Logically, therefore, it follows that when people think you're crazy, the only sensible reaction is to feel sorry for those people. They're clearly not enjoying their lives to the fullest ... such a shame that they're too frikkin' scared, unimaginative or just plain dull to leap onto the crazy float with you and join the parade ;-)


Resolution #3: Be where the people aren't

My last resolution for the day was simply this: sometimes the only way to deal with the fact that you share your world with other people is to get as far away from them as you possibly can.

I find it extremely interesting that, on the one hand, solitary confinement causes many people who experience it to go insane, whereas just the solitude without the confinement is actually sanity-enhancing. (At least it is for me ... and I don't think I'm alone here.****)

Certainly I've found that's one of the best things about Finland: there's enough space here for everyone to be truly alone any time they want to. The open fields, empty roads, gently winding rivers etc. don't photograph as well as, say, craggy fjords and dramatic mountainscapes, but they have a real therapeutic effect ... as though you've just spring cleaned your brain and now you can finally relax in it.

Maybe the feeling of spaciousness is a function of the number of saunas here – altogether there are two million, for a population of five million people. Could be that most of the people you'd otherwise be sharing your environs with are underground and therefore out of sight.

(In Helsinki, a tour guide once pointed out to me that there's one sauna for every 2.5 people in Finland, which means that, in theory, every Finn could be having a sauna at the same time. She then explained that this is exactly the moment the Russians are waiting for ;-)


But whatever the reason, the availability of solitude is a marvellous thing, and today I resolved to look for opportunities to "be where the people aren't" on a regular basis. I mean, I think this is something I tend to do anyway, but from now on, it's no longer optional. It must happen ... 'cause it keeps me sane )))

And that was today. Hope you enjoyed it :-)

Bye!

Anthony.


P.S. Thanks to Yuliya and to Anna Ternheim for inspiring the title (and hence the whole format) of this little ramble.


* A cartoon character that's one of the symbols of Finland. He looks kinda like a little hippo. In two of the photos here you can almost see moomin on my t-shirt, which my students bought for me.

** The two languages, Finnish and Estonian, are ‘cousins’, with lots of similarities in lexis, grammar etc.

*** Valkeala: a great-sounding name, no? At least I thought so. Sadly it kinda loses something in translation: roughly translated, it means "the hole".

**** Sorry for the terrible pun. You can slap me for it the next time you see me.

stranded (a bit)

a european odyssey in several parts

Let's see ... yep, I think there's time for one more flashback before I finally tell you why I'm in Krakow tonight. And you know I can never resist those ... so, are you ready for this?

Ok, let's go.

*flash*


4: THE END OF 'NEAR MISSES'

Hi! Welcome to the recent past )))

It's like this: a few days ago I left Lviv and travelled overland to Bratislava in Slovakia, to see two of my oldest and dearest friends, Span and Jits (and to meet their children Inka and Sidney for the first time).

Although Slovakia and Ukraine are neighbours, working out my route and acquiring the necessary tickets was no mean feat – Ukraine is, after all, a former Soviet country, so naturally the job of public transport providers here is to make life as difficult as possible for prospective travellers.

On this particular occasion, the award for Most Effective Hindrance to the Travel Plans of Foreigners went to the "international" booking office in Lviv. When I dropped the word "Bratislava" to the lady-at-the-window there, she gave me a completely mystified look, as though I'd just walked into a shoe shop and asked "Do you happen to know if they have Rochefort cheese on Mars, and if so, could you tell me the approximate price per kilo?" I'm absolutely convinced that the irony of having the word "international" stuck above your window, and yet being unable to help me get to the capital city of a directly adjacent country, would be entirely lost on this woman and all her colleagues.

Anyway, in the end she sold me a ticket to Krakow, leaving at a minute to midnight. I travelled in a bunk so high up in the carriage, and so cramped, that I could sit with my legs bent and touch the ceiling with my knees ... which felt kinda fun and adventurous (though not overly comfortable!). Then, as morning broke in eastern Poland, I bought my onward tickets at Krakow Glowny station. With some time to wait, I wandered into the city and walked around, seeing it for the first time with greenery and without snow. Then I continued south-westwards, crossing three borders in all, making four train journeys, and kind of enjoying the road-trippish nature of it all.

Seeing Span and Jits again was, I have to say, a real highlight of my year so far. The last time we were face-to-face was 2005 in Sydney, and since then we've come very close to meeting on several occasions, but never quite made it happen. Span works for the UN, so he can randomly turn up in almost any part of the world ... as in early 2009, when he wrote to me and said "I'll be in Turkmenistan next month. Can you make it across to Ashgabat** to hang out for a couple of days?"

I naturally thought "Yep, fantastic!". It's only two countries over from Kazakhstan (where I was living at the time), and it seemed like a golden opportunity. So I tried to get an express Turkmeni visa from the consulate in Almaty.

Of course, you can see what'scoming here. I arrived at the consulate to find it closed, so I returned during their opening hours (displayed on a sign outside the door), was re-directed to another office, tried again, was redirected again, went to an agency, was told the lead-time for a visa was almost infinite and the flights were irregular ... and so on.

I recently read in an ESL coursebook that beating your head against a wall burns about 150 calories an hour. So, when the Turkmeni bureacracy defeated me and I was forced to give up on our Ashgabat rendezvous, I felt frustrated and disappointed – especially as it wasn't the first time Span and I had planned to meet in the 'Stans. (There had been a vague plan to meet in Tashkent the previous year.) But hey ... at least now I know that I was getting some decent exercise ;-)

Anyway, as I was saying: after the repeated 'near misses', to finally be in the same city as two of my favourite humans was fantastic. We did the usual touristy 'walk through the Old Town' thing, we hung out and philosophised about life, the universe and everything, we told travel stories, we drank good coffee and good wine, we played scrabble, we learned to make blinchiki***, we strolled along the banks of the Danube ... we more or less did all the usual things you do when catching up with friends after a long period of geographical separation. And all were good.

Also, three-year-old Inka was a real charmer, and as a parting gift she gave me an original artwork that's sure to be worth millions one day. (As an innovative contemporary artist, her preferred medium is corn chips coloured with food dye.) It's on my fridge now.

So the weekend was definitely one for the 'plus' column )))


5: ONCE MORE WITH PRZEZ

My journey back to Lviv was basically the same route in reverse, and I almost made it without incident. Getting on the right train in Katowice (Poland) was always going to be the difficult part – the station management there seem to consider it acceptable practice to omit some trains completely from their published timetable, and to leave platform departure signs blank or display random names on them. I guess they feel a duty to imbue the humdrum business of intercity travel with an air of mystery and a surprise element. To which one can only say "Thanks, guys ... Maladyets!***".

When I got to the platform which I thought was the right one, the signs there simply read "Przez". Now, I've no idea where Przez is, and I feel fairly confident that if you surveyed 200 random people on the streets of any world city, none of them would have a clue either. In fact, for all I know it might not be a city at all – it could be Polish for "sign out of order", or "apologies for the delay", or "Hey guys, guess what? Poland just qualified for the next World Cup! No more trains tonight ... we're gonna party like it's 1999!".

Ok, so it probably isn't the last one. But you never know ...

Eventually a train did turn up on my platform, and I saw the reassuringly familiar word "Lvov" (Russian for "Lviv") on the front of it. I cheerfully boarded the sleeper carriage – or at least, I tried to. The carriage attendant told me that my ticket was for platzkarte (a compartment full of seats; no sleeping berths), and directed me to the back of the train. I'd specifically asked for a spal'niy wagon (sleeping cabin), and the woman behind the counter had repeated the phrase as she handed me my ticket. But ok, whatever. At least I wouldn't be spending a night with the good folk of Przez ... and that was probably something to be thankful for!

6: BACK IN REVERSE GEAR

Next came a lucky break – or so it seemed. A few hours after I'd boarded the train in Katowice, it pulled into Krakow Glowny station, and all the other passengers in my seating compartment got out. This meant that I'd be able to push all the arm rests out of the way, and sleep lying across four seats.

"Brilliant!", thought the Word Nerd.  

As I was getting comfortable on my luxurious four-seater bed, the train pulled out of the platform ever-so-gradually, and for a few seconds the sensation of movement felt very satisfying. Then my deja vu sense began tingling. We were going back toward Katowice – i.e. back to where we'd come from!

"Hmmm", I thought. "That's a little weird ... but ok, not entirely unprecedented". 

We continued Katowice-wards for about five minutes, and then started going forwards again, at which point I guessed correctly that the train was going to pull into a different platform. Back at Krakow Glowny, I jumped off – a little surprised that there were no other passengers on the platform – but then had to leap back on a few seconds later, because the train had started moving backwards yet again.

The next humans I saw were railway maintenance workers and cleaners, standing beside the track and waiting for my train to arrive in a siding. By this time, I'd walked up and down my carriage and noticed that it was completely empty. I'd also noticed that the door to the next carriage was padlocked. Don't know if you've ever seen a padlock on the door of a train while you were inside it, but I can assure you that it's a sight which inspires neither calm nor confidence!

Anyway ... when the crowd of maintenance staff saw me through an open carriage window, I heard a few of them gasp. The train stopped and a guy in a bright orange vest got on, carrying a two-way radio. We attempted to communicate in a mish-mash of languages (a word of Polish here, a Russian or Ukrainian phrase there, the odd bit of English thrown in), and after this difficult exchange I understood that the back end of my train had been detached at Krakow Glowny. The first three carriages had gone on to Lviv – meaning that the spal'niy wagon which I'd attempted to board in Katowice was in fact the right one! Either I'd been sold the wrong ticket, or the carriage attendant had made a mistake when I tried to board.

Either way, my ride home tonight was well and truly gone.

The situation was undeniably bad, 'cause my Belle was waiting for me to return and I had no way of telling her what had happened. It was saved from complete and unmitigated awfulness, though, by one thing: namely, the incredibly sympathetic and eager-to-help maintenance staff of Polish National Railways.

After explaining things to me as well as he could, Mr Orange Coat got on his radio and said something that included the words do L'vova ("to Lviv") to gods-know-who. Then he motioned me off the train, and I climbed down onto the stones with my suitcase. He ushered me along the track, shining his flashlight at pieces of wire and other stuff that I should try to avoid, and took me to a huge man standing in front of another train. This guy just said "Wait" in Polish (luckily the same word as in Ukrainian), and there was some more two-way radio action.

I stood for about two minutes, then heard (or maybe felt) a deep approaching rumble. A few seconds later a diesel locomotive appeared, and stopped about three feet away from us. The huge guy lifted my suitcase into the cabin and gestured for me to follow it. There were two drivers on board who, with smiles but without a single word, gave me and my suitcase a private lift back to Krakow in their enormous machine. I watched them drive the train, and smiled to myself at the fluffy toys and other stuff sitting on the dashboard.

How's that for customer service?!

And so, here's where I find myself: a nearby clock is showing a little after 2am, I've moved off the market square to get out of the pouring rain (which started about 20 minutes ago) and I'm sitting at an outdoor table beside a closed café, writing on damp paper and hoping that none of the frequent police patrols will decide to hassle me as they pass. I've got about 30 more minutes to wait before I head back to the station to board my 3:20am train to the Ukrainian border where, after the usual customs palaver, I'll hopefully be able to hop back to Lviv by bus.

My pockets contain approximately enough Polish Zloty to buy half a cappuccino (if there was an open place to buy one), some fabulously useless Euro coins (they're accepted by the internet kiosk on the railway station concourse, but when I walked through there earlier, a homeless guy had unplugged the kiosk so that he could use the socket to charge his mobile), and a wad of Ukrainian Hryvnia which is unexchangeable anywhere outside of Europe's largest country****. Oh, and I have a banana and about four or five butterscotch candies.

Gosh, how I love this traveller's life!

Anyway, now you know more or less the full history of my slightly odd relationship with Krakow. With any luck, I'll get the chance to come back here once more before I leave Eastern Europe, and enjoy it properly in non-freezing temperatures and without transport hassles. We'll see.

Hope you enjoyed my extended ramble about nothing in particular. I promise the next entry will contain something more than a bunch of tangents and train rides!

Bye )))


* Ashgabat is Turkmenistan's capital, and a place I'd absolutely love to visit – especially after realising last year that I'd unknowingly turned into one of those people for whom "the Stans" exert a strange fascination. The city is a modern Islamic metropolis with touches of the typically Central Asian 'God King' mentality in its architecture ... like the enormous Neutrality Arch, topped with a 12m-high gold-plated statue of President Niyazov which rotates to always face the sun. This kind of 'president worship' never fails to interest me ... it's like stepping back into a land of Khans and Emirs. So there you go.

** Blinchiki = Russian-style pancakes. 

**** "Well done".

**** Europe's largest country is Ukraine, btw ... unless you're talking to a French person, in which case it's France. Or so I've heard, at any rate.

stranded (a bit)

a european odyssey in several parts

2: FREE-WHEELER
    (a.k.a. "All I want is a few hours' sleep, gods-dammit!")

You'd be amazed at what you can do to a train while people are on it. Or maybe you wouldn't ... depends on where you've travelled by train, I guess.

In any case, I was amazed at what happened on the border between Ukraine and Poland in December.

As you may or may not recall, I'd had no sleep the night before, so as the sun came up I tried to settle in for a restful journey to Krakow. It was difficult, though, 'cause I knew there'd be a border check and I didn't know what time we were meant to arrive at the magic line-in-the-sand.

About 90 minutes later, while I was staring vacantly into space, a tall red-headed woman with intense blue eyes came into my compartment. I remember being struck by the fact that the colour of her eyes matched her shapka* perfectly. Then it registered that the tall furry hat was part of the Ukrainian Border Patrol uniform, and that I was going to be asked for my passport. I quickly grabbed it from my bag and handed it over, and she took it politely and respectfully, asked me a few searching questions, and handed it back. Ok ... so far, so good.

However, when the process was repeated on the Polish side of the border, things started to get a little weird. (It's always a small increment of weirdness first, followed by larger and larger increments ... don't you find?) This time, when I tell you they took my passport, I don't just mean that they grabbed it, inspected it and added a big red stamp. The border patrol guy actually walked away with the passport in his hand, and a few minutes later I saw him getting off  the train and disappearing into a station office. I was suddenly ID-free, at the exact point in space where Europe officially begins and ... well, not officially Europe ends.

Almost half an hour elapsed before I got my passport back, and by this time I was more or less in a Zombie State. The moment the border patrol guard was gone, I keeled over in my bunk and tried to get comfortable. At last, I could fall into the waiting arms of sleep. At last I could make at least some attempt to arrive at my destination refreshed and ready for the Embassy visit which was the focus of my journey. At last, I could ...

Wait a second: what's going on? Why the Hell are we going backwards?

It was a largely rhetorical question: I knew there was no hope of me getting an understandable answer from the Ukrainian-speaking carriage attendant, even if I could find him.

And so I closed my eyes.

I've found that when you live as a foreigner – and often when you travel too – there are occasions when you just have to trust that whatever strangeness is happening around you will turn out to be non-fatal, and let it wash over you. Luckily, living in the former USSR provides plenty of practice in this art, and especially in Kazakhstan I learned to worry far less about things that would previously have sent me into Freakout Mode. So I guess that's what happened in this case: I just realised there was nothing I could do, and that realisation coupled with complete exhauston was enough to let me drift off to sleep, without any clear idea of where I might wake up.

I don't know how much later it was when I was shaken violently awake by the sound of an electric drill close by.

"Errr ... huh???"

I peeked into the corridor and saw two guys who looked like customs officers. One of them had a tool kit ... not something I'm used to seeing customs guys carrying! A few minutes later they entered my compartment, lifted up my bunk and asked me to open my suitcase. Ok, no problem. Then they got the drill out, and started removing the ceiling panel.

It was at this point that bells started ringing in my head. I remembered hearing about some of my colleagues crossing the Polish border by bus, and how customs had stripped the bus to find smuggled cartons of cigarettes (worth about $1 a pack in Ukraine, and $4 a pack in Poland).

The weird thing about that episode was that everyone, including the customs officers and most of the ordinary passengers, seemed to have been in on the scam. Customs delved into almost every little hidden space on the bus, and took out maybe ten cartons ... but they deliberately ignored a few obvious places, where most of the contraband cigarettes were hidden. And sure enough, as soon as the border was safely behind them, locals pulled out screwdrivers and crowbars, retrieved all the 'accidentally missed' cartons, and passed them to the driver. My friends, meanwhile, sat stunned in their seats. One of said friends had arrived in Ukraine barely a month earlier, after spending two years in sane and sunly Budapest. Nice introduction to the East for her )))

So anyway, back to my situation: the customs guys took apart my little sleep chamber, felt inside the ceiling with gloved hands, poked into all the corners with mirrors on long sticks and shined torches on the mirrors ... and then, apparently satisfied that I wasn't an evil tobacco smuggler, they smiled politely and left.

A few minutes later I peeked into the corridor again to see if they'd really gone, and if it was ok to sleep. The first thing I saw was a shifty-looking Ukrainian guy loitering less than a metre from me, with a question on the tip of his tongue: "Do you want to buy some cheap cigarettes?"

I closed my compartment door and locked it.

When the train started creeping forward a few minutes later – heading once again for the wonderfully unpronouncable Polish border town of Przemysl** – I lost consciousness entirely.
 
The next time I woke up we were in Przemysl, and my carriage was being jolted about violently in all directions. When I went to the vestibule for a cigarette, I noticed with horror that the carriage which had previously adjoined mine was gone, and that there was a locomotive in its place.
 
"WTF?", was naturally the next thing that went through my mind.
 
My first theory was this: there had been a technical problem with my carriage, and it had been hauled into a goods yard for maintenance, with me still inside. The carriage attendant was still on board, though. I couldn't ask him what was going on, so I just sat in my cabin, being buffeted backwards and forwards, until about 10 minutes later I finally remembered something that Scott had told me, which more or less explained what was happening.
 
"It's ok", I reassured myself. "Everything's going to be fine. They're just changing the wheels."

Mm-hmm, that's right; going from Ukraine to Poland, every train has its wheels taken off and replaced with wheels of a different size ... while the passengers are on board! Not only can I not imagine how this is done; I can't even imagine why it's done. I mean, if the rails are a different size in Poland, why not just get everyone to change trains at the border? I really don't get it. But anyway, that's what happened ... and it was not a gentle process!


3: STEAM & THINGS

Anyway, once the new wheels were affixed, the rest of the journey to Krakow passed smoothly, and I finally, finally slept.

Some time later I had my first glimpse of Poland's "cultural capital", and I have to say it was very pleasant (apart from the biting cold). As I mentioned in the last entry, the christmas market with its steaming sausages, its steaming hot wine and its steaming everything-else-that-had-been-heated-to-above-freezing was rather wonderful. And there were plenty of poky little streets to explore in this beautiful medieval city. I mean, it didn't blow my mind the way Tallinn does – but then, few other places in Europe can compete with that level of prettiness.

(I have to ignore Tallinn when I'm rating other European cities, 'cause it just throws the whole scale. With that done, I'd probably put Krakow somewhere not too far from the top.)

The alternative, 'arty' vibe in the city was definitely not something I'd expected to encounter – especially after living in nearby Lviv for a few months, where said vibe exists only in pockets. On my second night in Krakow, I spent most of the evening in an underground 'rock club' where I danced to everything from Rammstein to The Doors, sharing the premises with a motley collection of metalheads, punks, goths, rockers and other interesting folk. The next morning I woke up on a sofa in the hostel reception, alongside other guests and staff members who'd all come back and collapsed with me after a great but exhausting night out.

This was definitely a contrast to Lviv, where the 'cool' clubs are frighteningly pedestrian, sleazy and depressing (and where I haven't dared to venture into any of the less reputable ones, for fear of throwing up in disgust).

And that – apart from a little bribery to get myself a private compartment on the way back, which I'd actually purchased but then been denied – was my first visit to Krakow.

Which brings me almost back to the present moment, sitting on the bench in the main market (sans christmas stalls this time) and hoping my laptop battery doesn't run out as I scribble down my thoughts (or at least, as I do the electronic equivalent of scribbling ... i.e. typing anything that comes to mind at 20,000 kph, then going back later and wondering what the Hell I was trying to say, and whether it can be organised into anything that approaches coherency).

So ... how did I end up here again, on this chilly May evening?

Hmmm, good question. Glad you asked ;-)

Tell you later.


... to be continued


* shapka - I've mentioned these before in The Manor, but in case you've forgotten, they're those tall furry hats that are popular in Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere within the 'former Soviet world'.

** I remember in the 1990s seeing a fake news story on The Onion (political satire website), to the effect that Clinton was sending the US Army into the former Yugoslavia to bomb it with vowels. The article was full of stuff like "Officials in the regional capital of Brzlsmc say that the shortage of vowels here could lead to ethnic cleansing if the situation doesn't improve soon." I often think of that silly piece of humour when faced with names like "Przemysl".

stranded (a bit):

a european odyssey in several parts

Er ... hmmm. Technically this is my third time in Krakow. To say that, though, almost seems like a form of cheating. The second visit was just a whistle-stop en route to a further-away destination, and the third (i.e. now) was completely unplanned ... kind of a "stranded by the dysfunctional character of Polish public transport and by my own unobservant nature" type situation.

As I write this, I'm sitting at one end of the huge and elegant main market square, where five months ago I bought one hell of a fabulous kielbasa (Polish sausage) at the Xmas market. Almost as memorable as the sausage was the mulled wine, which I sipped while walking around in -12C, blowing on my cup to make the steam rise up in clouds and warm my frozen face.

I love doing that!

Anyway, it's now a little after 1am on a Tuesday morning, and the square is thinly populated by ... well, by the kinds of people who thinly populate squares at 1am on weeknights. Most of them are drunk, and one or two are singing. (I just heard a few bars of Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2U, somewhat massacred by two drunken Polish girls staggering home from a bar.)

Under normal circumstances, I'd probably be thinking "Wow, it's great to be back in Krakow!" My first impressions of this city were very positive, and I told myself that I had to return here in warmer weather, to see how it looked in its beautiful spring green coat. But as you've no doubt guessed, the present circumstances depart somewhat from normality. I feel that my relationship with "Poland's cultural capital" has taken another strange turn ... and I use the word "another" quite deliberately.

Let's start at the beginning ...


1: SLEEP DISRUPTION

My friend Scott – as all who know him will surely attest – can be rather persuasive. He first demonstrated this ability when we lived together in Kazakhstan, and has continued to do so over the last six months. (We work together now in Lviv.) And I have to say that, when it's cold and snowy outside, and I don't have to work the following day, I'm rather an easy target :-)

Here's a case in point: on the night before my visa run* to Poland last December, as we were finishing up at work, Scott said "Hey, you're going to another country tomorrow. Let's have a quick drink to celebrate!" I agreed, adding the caveat "but it has to be only one. My train leaves at 7:20 in the morning." However, that night we saw the first real snow in Lviv; the streets were icy-cold and glistening, and the cafes were warm and full.

And yes ... I think you can guess what happened ;-)

In fact, as I was walking home through the pristine snow at 5am the next morning – accompanied by some random guy who claimed to be a 'skinhead' and enthusiastically outlined his views on Pan-Slavic Solidarity and Death to All Russians** – I realised that I'd barely have time to iron, pack and get a taxi in time to be on the train.

But hey ... gotta live while you can, right?

As it turned out, this was a fitting start to a weekend characterised by weird sleeping patterns, continually disrupted by random occurences.

The first wake-up call came an hour later, when my taxi driver dropped me at the wrong station. I'd almost fallen asleep in the passenger seat, but to get my train I had to run with my wheelie bag through a thick blanket of white for about 15 minutes. A nearby LED display showed
-13C, and the wind whipped me mercilessly as I struggled along the roadside. That will always wake you up ... especially when your train is leaving soon and you're not entirely sure that you're running in the right direction!

I reached the station and found the platform with only minutes to spare. As I climbed the stairs to the platform, the clock showed 7:18am. My train's exact departure time: 7:19. The platform was deserted, and the signs on the carriages were cryptic. I had no idea which was my carriage, and no time to find out ... so I threw my bag through the nearest open door and leapt in behind it. I almost lost my footing as the train jolted forward and began rolling out of the station, pulling my right foot in behind me to avoid the crush of the closing door.

The conductor showed me to my place in the carriage (which by some miracle was the right one), and I thankfully discovered that I had a whole cabin to myself – a rare luxury in this part of the world, where you normally have to share your sleeper compartment with strangers. I collapsed on the lower bed, thinking "Yay! I can sleep all day, and arrive refreshed!"

I could hardly have been more wrong.

The journey ahead was a mini-adventure in itself, and an education for those like me who had never before travelled by land from the wilds of Eastern Europe to the 'civilised' territories of the EU. I was about to make rather an unusual border crossing ... and it's not the kind of thing you can sleep through.

I'll tell you about that soon. For now, let me wish you a good night :-)

... to be continued ...



* "visa run": I mentioned these once before, but in case you missed it: this is where you get a visa for the country where you're living, but at some point you have to go to another country to either change your visa type or extend the validity of the visa. It's common to a lot of countries, from Russia to Thailand and beyond.

*** "Pan-Slavic solidarity and death to all Russians": a plainly self-contradictory philosophy of course. But then, it seems to me that zealots of all kinds are drawn only to ideas which clearly contradict themselves ... have you noticed that too?

word nerd vs. big blue watery thing

waddle, waddle, waddle ... kick.

"Ow!"

difficult.

waddle, waddle, stop.
hesitate ... leap ...

(1/2 a second of suspended time)

SPLASH!

ohmigod: shock of water ... cold!
salty taste ... awful.

open eyes. blue everywhere.
Yuliya nowhere.

surface. breathe.
awareness of the tide,
pushing me towards ... wait, I see legs!
found her.

ok ... swim, swim, stop. swim a bit more.
look around: girlfriend location check.

but what's ...
and the amazing swirly patterns on the rocks ...
are they really ...
and how close is it to ...

"Aaaarrgghhh!!!"

rock ... very, very sharp!

can't be more than 20cm below the surface;
can't swim over it,
can't go round it,
and now I'm on top of it.

brain dredges up long-forgotten coral references:

"knife-edged and deadly",
"slicing through human skin like razor blades" 

hands try to push away into the blue;
tide pushes back.

breathe ... push ...
ignore cuts and scratches on legs;
ignore salt in wounds;
ignore impulse to inspect the bleeding.

A quasi-haiku of reassuring self-talk:

clarity
calm, rational thoughts
push into the open sea
breathing normally
relax

off the coral now, and swimming

look down.
freak out ... abyss!
empty, blue, shadowy and vertiginous.

no way of telling
how deep ...
what lives there ...
what might suddenly appear

no escape route,
except back to the razor blade mountain.

don't panic

look for Yuliya.
ok, still there,
and seems to be enjoying
(weird)

look for boat. where's ...

whatthe   

ok: now you can panic.

"Where's the f!@#%ing boat?
The f!@#%ing boat has f!@#%ing gone! F!@#%CK!!!"

stomach turns like a pancake ...
and again, for more frying on the bottom side.

no more hai and no more ku;
just lots of pissed off noises,
and against-the-current exertions,

constricted in my ill-fitting life-jacket 
this is probably the least fun
I could have
with my pants off*.

Anthony's introduction to the Red Sea (and to snorkelling) is definitely not going well.

Twenty minutes later, back on the boat, I try to explain to The Belle why I'd had such a relentlessly awful experience in the water. The problem is, I'm not even sure myself. I mean, being dropped so close to the wall of coral certainly had something to do with it ... as did the fact that our boat pulled away from us, following people who had jumped out earlier and swum to another location.

But it was more than that. For me, the whole thing was a heart-pounding terror – the equivalent of a claustrophobe spending 20 minutes in a broken-down elevator, or a pogonophobe** being forced to wear a suit lined with stubble for a week.

I guess part of it was about the sea itself. I don't get in it very often, and every time I do, it has an effect similar to that "staring up at the night sky and feeling very tiny and insignificant" feeling. I'm aware – sometimes consciously, sometimes not – that what I'm immersed in is the biggest and most powerful thing on our planet, and it makes me realise just how small and ineffectual I am by comparison. This knowledge tends to overwhelm me a little.

Btw, this 20-minute stress-a-thon was part of a day-long excursion which included both snorkelling and diving – and the diving part (which had seemed far scarier than snorkelling when we booked the trip) was up next.

After the horridness of snorkelling, it seemed clear that there was no way I'd enjoy diving. I therefore told Yuliya that I didn't want to do it, and when we got the call to go below deck and suit up, I stayed above in the sunshine.

Here's the thing, though: with no-one else around, I was free to begin the process of talking myself into something that scared the shit out of me. I had no idea if it would work this time, but it has in the past ... especially when I've been able to add a "This may be the only time I get such an opportunity" clause to the mix.

About 10 minutes later, I joined My Belle in the lower cabin. 

Our first task was to read the waiver form. Of course the confidentiality clause prevents me from telling you exactly what was in it (and I don't remember the wording anyway), but here's the general gist:

You may die of fright. You may drown. Your arms and legs and torso and reproductive organs may end up in the digestive system of a shark. Your equipment may fail, fall off, strangle you or explode in an underwater ball of flame. You may break your back, lose your mind, throw up your spleen or bleed the entire contents of your arteries out your ears due to pressure changes. Or you may simply be sliced into julienne by the boat propellor. In all of these cases, or in the event of any other disaster our lawyers haven't dreamed up yet, our company reserves the right to say "I'm sorry, we don't know this person – they must've snuck onto our boat and stolen our equipment while we weren't looking." So it's your problem, basically.

Have a great time!

When we'd both finished reading we held our pens poised above the document, ready to add our sginatures but hesitating at the grimness of it all. I asked Yuliya "How did you feel about all of that?"

"Terrified", was her reply.

And so we signed.

I distinctly remember the song that was in my head while I was adding my scrawl to the document: it was Neuroticfish's They're Coming to Take Me Away. How appropriate.

Almost immediately after we'd signed our lives away, a nervous Yuliya was loaded up with an oxygen tank that weighed almost as much as she does, helped to her feet, and lowered into the sea. On her way in she bruised her elbow rather badly. Then she disappeared beneath the surface. I tried to relax.

(Ha ... like that was going to happen!)

Half an hour later she was back, telling me how incredible the experience had been. And then it was my turn.

Tank on, wetsuit on, mask on.
Off the boat, into the water next to the instructor.

Instructor says "go under the water and breathe".
I try. The panic returns. I surface.

"Try again. Hold the oxygen tightly in your mouth."

I do as he says. Same panic.

"You're not doing as I say!"

He was wrong; there was some other problem. I couldn't quite work it out, but something was making me see red every time I went beneath the surface. I could breathe from the tank, but my heart started racing each time I took a breath, and I had this feeling that I couldn't get the whole action to work ... like the first time you get behind the wheel of a car, and there seem to be far too many things to think about at once.

"You have to listen to me!",

he says.

"I am listening, but something else is wrong. Just a second ... I'll try one more time."

Down into the blue again, and ... wait, got it!

I came up and adjusted my mask, which I'd suddenly realised had been jammed against my nostrils the whole time, making it impossible to breathe out through my nose.

The adjustment couldn't have been more than a few millimetres, but when I went under the fourth time, everything was absolutely fine ... oxygen ok, heart ok, panic levels pretty close to absolute zero.

So that had been the problem all along ... so simple! And the same for snorkelling: the panic had been my unconscious reaction to something that hadn't even registered in my conscious mind – i.e. that my nasal passage was being forced closed. And that's all.

With that sorted, we did the other pre-flight tests, and then the instructor deflated my buoyancy vest and I began to sink. And then to swim very gently.

I looked down. There was the void again, as deep and almost-limitless as before, but this time I couldn't take my eyes off it (whereas before I couldn't look for more than half a second without the fear taking hold).

As we descended, the instructor kept checking that I was ok with pressure and so on, and gently guiding me down towards the seabed. I was transfixed. Not the most original metaphor, I know, but at times I really felt as though I was flying in slow motion over the surface of an alien world. I could see valleys, country roads, little mountain ranges, and other geographical features which we don't have on our planet.

The beauty of it all was just absolutely mind-bending.

A few minutes later we were almost at the bottom, and I was still staring straight down in complete wonder. Suddenly the instructor pointed ahead. I looked up, realising I'd been so intent on the seabed that it hadn't occurred to me that this was a 3-D environment ... I could look in any direction I wanted. Stupid first-timer!

Then it became apparent why the instructor had chosen that particular moment to make his pointing motions: we were approaching, and in fact almost touching, a vertical underwater cliff. It was a coral city! Lots of fish winding between rocky outcrops, plants waving about softly, and so on and so forth. This was just magical.

We swam around the base of the cliff for a minute or two, then headed out onto the sea floor, ascending and descending slightly to get over ridges of coral growing on the bottom. I was truly stunned at this point ... everywhere I looked was life, and lots of it.

The whole dive lasted for about 25 minutes, and after heaving myself back onto the boat I had one thing to say to Yuliya: "How soon can we go again?"

Before we headed back to Sharm, we snorkelled again – this time in calm waters that were absolutely teeming with fish. You'd literally stick your head under the surface and find them swimming beside your cheek ... or you'd look down and see a whole school of colourful, sucker-mouthed aquatic folk passing beneath you, with some sword-shaped companions in tow. No fear this time ... just a sense of "Wow, this is frikkin' unbelievable!"

And then, as I was preparing boarding the boat for the final time, someone shouted "Jelly!" The implication was that we couldn't get back to the boat without risking a jellyfish sting, 'cause there was one hanging around near the ladder. I stayed at a safe distance, treading water; stuck my head under water for a second, and saw another jelly about six inches away from my face. Went "Aaaaaah!", tried to paddle away from it, and actually touched the damn thing with my hand.

Uh-oh ... poison time!

But nothing happened. No pain, no paralysis, no poisoned hands of death closing around my heart. No change at all.

I was then joined by an Egyptian guy who I'd met earlier in the day. He asked why I was here doing essentially nothing, and I said "There's a jellyfish over there, and we're waiting for it to move away from the boat. There's one around here somewhere too".

"Like this one?", he said.

"Er ... yeah."

By "this one", he meant the jelly that he was now holding in his hand (probably the same one I'd touched a minute eaerlier). He'd picked it up in his palm, turning it upside down so that the creature's outer 'umbrella' flopped over the sides of his hand, and its insides were visible.

"Don't worry", he said cheerfully. "They're not dangerous."

Apparently not. Hmmm ... that's certainly one difference between Australia and Egypt that I hadn't anticipated!

Heading back to Sharm el-Sheikh, I felt contented and reflective: this had been an amazing day. It's not often that you get to discover a whole new kind of physical environment that you've never seen before, whilst overcoming a blinding fear at the same time. All in all, I'd say it was worth the airfare by itself. And it definitely won't be the last time I venture under the sea. Stay tuned for more fishy adventures ...

:-)



* Many years ago I had a colleague called Odette who was very fond of the expression "It's the most fun you can have with your pants on!". I always found it quite amusing ... hence the desire to 'flip the phrase over' when describing a horrible experience which entailed me wearing only bathers.

(A ridiculous footnote, if ever there was one!)   

** pogonophobia = fear of beards. (Margaret Thatcher was apparently a pogonophobe, and wouldn't let any of the ministers in her cabinet grow facial hair.)