day eight: adaptability

So the plan changed a bit. Or some might say "a lot".

Yesterday morning I was in a cafe in Krakow, writing my 'Clash of Civilisations' essay, when I got a message from my friend Scott. The message was basically this: "I'm in Leipzig, and I'm going to see a man about a bike. Riding to the Polish border after that – can you meet me in Gorlitz on Wednesday?"

To put that in perspective: the distance between Krakow and Gorlitz by road is 428km. In my first five days, making my way slowly by bicycle and super-slow regional trains,  I'd managed to cover a little over 200kms.

I'd actually determined some rules of thumb before leaving Lviv, which were these:  if you can get there in a day on the bike, do it. If you can't, get a train. If it costs more than 10 Euros to get to the next destination by train (paying for myself and for the bike), you're going too fast.

So yeah ... this was a bit of a change.

Meanwhile, Muhammad had caught up with me. I'd more or less done the research for the essay, but hadn't started writing. The plan was to stay put in Krakow for two nights and one full day, and write it there. (It's due today, btw.) As it turned out, my full day in Krakow was taken up with other stuff, so yesterday I had a mountainous task before me: write 2,500 words in a single day, and get to the next city, Katowice. That meant either a 2.5 hour train journey or a full day's bike ride.

My decision: "Alright, then, let's do this thing. I'll start the essay in Krakow, get myself to Katowice and finish writing there. Then I'll race over and join Scott."

So I sat in Krakow and wrote for as long as I could, then grabbed a train. At 7pm, having just arrived in Katowice, I had a little over 1,000 words written. So I wandered into the centre, chose a cosy-looking cafe as my venue to finish off the work, and sat down to coffee and Greek salad and Islam.

Six hours later I was still at the cafe, and I'd been befriended by the Moldovan family who run it. This was great on the one hand - they were extremely warm and friendly, and even gave me a lift back to my hostel afterwards - but it meant that I hadn't quite finished writing when I got back at about 1:30am.

I finally submitted the essay just before 4am, and collapsed on the bed to be woken five hours later by my alarm. Some helpful advice from the receptionist got me to my next destination, which was Gliwice, and from there I travelled to the low-key, moderately cute town of Opole, where I am now. So far today I've done two 'short hops' by regional train and 33kms of cycling, but there's more to come. I'm booked at a hotel in Wroclaw tonight, and that's another 100kms from here. So we'll see how long my 'rules of thumb' can last!

One of these days, I'll have a 'normal' holiday ... you know, the kind that are advertised with phrases like "Relax, unwind and recharge your batteries in beautiful xxxx" and "Put your feet up and forget the cares of everyday life in xxxx".

Right now, though, this holiday seems pretty close to perfect )))

day four: the joy of place names

Covered about 80kms today, which is the minimum pace I'll have to keep if I want to get to Zgorzelec (i.e. the German border) in a reasonable time. About 45 of those were by train, and then, after waiting out a fairly ferocious downpour that started the moment I left the railway station, I did the other 35 by bike.

I ended up in the small town of Ladna, and if you speak Russian, you'll understand immediately why I had to stay there. There are just so many terrible comic possibilities ;-)

See, in Russian, the word "ladna" (spelled with an "o" on the end, but pronounced with an [a] sound) literally translates as "ok". However, the meaning really depends on your tone. It can be used in a friendly or neutral way, but with the right intonation it signals something else – something more like the American English "what-ever" of frustration/exasperation. Altogether, then, it can mean anything from "Yep, no problem" to "I'm completely over this, can we move on please?" to "You're talking bullshit, but I can't be bothered arguing 'cause there's clearly no way to penetrate your stupidity". Such a versatile little word )))

So as I rode past the amusing signs saying "Glass Factory: Ladna", "Supermarket: Ladna" and so on – as if every signwriter in the town was just horribly, terminally bored – I imagined various silly dialogues, beginning with one person asking "So where are you staying at the moment?" and the other replying "Ladna", then another question answered with "Ladna" etc. etc. until a fight resulted. Ah, the joy of place names that translate badly!

Incidentally, two days ago there was a town called "Lazy" about 10kms off my route. I considered going there just to get my photo taken next to the town sign, but in the end I couldn't be bothered.

(Next time you see me, you can slap me for that joke if you like.)

The scenery today was more dramatic than yesterday. My cycling route skirted around the edge of a low mountain range (actually I'm not sure if you'd call them low mountains or tall hills, but ladna, doesn't matter), so there were some valleys of splendour and the like.

I particularly appreciated the wildflowers on this part of the journey. At this time of year, Poland essentially becomes a sea of wildflowers. On every square metre of land not otherwise occupied, they spring up in their millions, adding bold, broad strokes of yellow and occasional purple or white pointillist dots to nature's canvas. If there's so much as a vacant lot between two houses, the wildflowers will claim it and thrive on it. They look especially vivid late in the day or after rain, which were exactly the conditions in which I saw them yesterday ... hence the appreciation, I guess.

You know, while I was cycling today, I had a moment when I suddenly thought "This should be my life". I mean, it is my life, in the sense that I'm doing it now and I appear to be breathing (sometimes very heavily!). And there are obviously good reasons why it can't be a full-time thing – super-important reasons like family, the need to make a living etc. etc.

The thing is, though, other than the factors I just mentioned, most of the stuff that generally keeps us stationary seems kinda empty to me when I get 'on the road'. I don't need a nice house or even a 'place to call home'; don't want a car; couldn't care less about flat-screen TVs or a private vege garden or the familiar faces of neighbours or any of that palaver. The world is ridiculously large (as you realise only too well when you try to traverse a little bit of it by bicycle!), and so varied and interesting, and life is way too finite for my liking! So I ask myself: what the Hell are we all doing, missing out on so much by staying in one place? Why don't we all just gather together our loved ones, get rid of all our unnecessary stuff, work out a way to earn money while mobile, and disappear into the blue?

I know that's a horribly flawed and idealistic argument, and the lifestyle it recommends is virtually impossible to sustain (especially on an English teacher's salary!). Still, those were my thoughts last night and I'm recording them faithfully here, cos y'know, I sometimes do that.

Meanwhile, to the guy who makes those insanely delicious fruit-and-spice-infused vodkas in Kazimierz (the 'Bohemian Quarter' of Krakow): I'll see you tomorrow night, my friend!

Take care everyone :-)
Anthony.

day three: sleepy rural jihad

A much easier ride today; I had 50kms to cover, but still feeling a bit sore from yesterday, I did the first 30 by train. I disembarked near the small, rather sleepy and relaxed town of Lancut, and cycled into the centre.

 On the way in, while passing a completely nondescript-looking building, I got a timely reminder that my other mission – Islam, civilisational clashes etc. – is still a topical one, and that I'm not the only person with these issues on my mind.

When I finally got out onto the highway, the roads were much better than yesterday. For most of the way I was riding on a pedestrian/bike path, separated from the highway by a deep ditch. Hooray for that! The worst thing about riding long-distance is that you get those moments when an enormous truck passes you less than a metre away, displacing enough air to knock you off course and remind you of how vulnerable you are out there. The fewer of those moments I have, the happier I'll be :-)

I also invented something today called the "handlebar clothesline", for the purpose of drying clothes while on the move. Obviously this was intended for highway use only – I'm not that much of an exhibitionist that I want to ride around town with my underwear flying like a flag on my bike! Sadly, though, I have to report that it wasn't quite the success story I'd hoped for. You need to tie your clothes firmly to the bars, and that means relatively little of their surface area is exposed to sun and wind.

Oh well ... maybe I'll find a way to improve on the first version.

I'm in Rzeszow now – a very pleasant, smallish city in Podkarpatskie (literally "beneath the Carpathians") province.

I've actually been here once before, and it was only about a month ago. I came to see off my friend Scott when he returned to England after living in Ukraine for four years. (Wizzair, the UK budget airline, flies to and from Rzeszow, so you can sometimes get ridiculously cheap tickets to London from here.) On that occasion, half the town turned up in the rynek* to watch the final of Euro 2012. This time it's a bit quieter, which I certainly don't mind ... in fact, the laidback atmosphere is far preferable to the throng of sports fans.

Ok ... that's about it.

Tomorrow I'm out of Podkarpackie, and into the neighbouring Malopolskie province, of which Krakow is the capital. Woo-hoo! Krakow, here I come (yet) again!

Good night )))


* I used this word in the first entry too. It literally means "market" (in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and probably a few other languages), and it often serves as a label for the main square of a town. Stick with me, and your Polish will improve every day :-)

day two: deceived

It lied to me! The bastard lied! How could it do that?

By “it”, I mean the internet of course. Our beloved information superhighway lavishly embroidered the truth, mercilessly stretching credibility on the rack of deceit in order to fashion the kind of spurious tale that you expect from grandparents when they tell you how they spent their youth. In the middle of its fish-that-got-away story, this so-called "internet" (if that's even its real name) turned dramatically to its audience, held its hands as far apart as they could go, and said “No kidding, it was THIS BIG!”

Whoever would’ve thought it could do that? I mean, it’s the internet, right – the medium of our times, domain of scrupulously tested and verifiable fact, a pristine beacon of unbiased truth in an otherwise compromised world. I’m shocked, appalled and disappointed. 

Well ok .. not really.

The thing is, when I looked up the distance from Przemsyl to Jaroslaw, the first answer I got was 23km, but that was as the crow flies*. I looked for actual road distance, and found first a site that said the distance was 27km, then later another which said it was 33.

Being an optimist, I added 27 and 33 together, divided by two and came up with a probable distance of 30kms. And that was what I thought I’d have to cycle today … that, along with the 10km from Krasiczyn to Przemsyl. 

Wrong!

After riding for about seven or eight kilometres out of Przemysl, I saw a sign that said “Jaroslaw 34kms”. So it seemed the further I rode, the further away my destination was :-( 

Two years ago I cycled 55kms through southern Finland, and it was a great day. Quite difficult and strenuous in places, to be sure, but really, really cool. I’d finished by about 2 or 3pm, and then I could just relax and say a fond and somewhat sad farewell to one of my favourite corners of the Earth. (I was due to fly out the following day.) 

As I mentioned before, I'm not in such good shape now as I was then, and today that was obvious. However, I was also carrying a lot more stuff on my back than I had in Finland – dragging a laptop and a couple of uni textbooks along with you really makes a difference when you’re on a bike.

Anyway, about 8kms out of Jaroslaw, I was so exhausted, and so many bits of me were in pain, that I really didn’t think I’d be able to make it. I walked beside the bike for a couple of kilometres, and even that was an immense effort. Seriously … I was screwed. 

.

Eventually I found a roadside service station and rested there for a while, drinking canned iced coffee and trying to forget that I had to get on the bike again in a few minutes. It revived me a little, and in the end I made it to Jaroslaw, shattered but more or less alive.

And after all that, guess what? The town is completely uninspiring! Really. Maybe I missed the good bit (always possible), but unlike the places I left behind today, and unlike Rzeszow (where I’ll be tomorrow), I see no charm here at all … it’s basically a collection of shopping malls, interspersed with some car repair places and petrol stations. 

Still, what a brilliant problem to have, eh? While so much of the world is struggling to get rid of horrible impurities in their water supply, my big issue is “Hey! I had to cycle further than I thought!” 

Damn privileged is what I am, no question.

Tomorrow will be a lot easier. I need to have a less intense day, or I’m never gonna get this essay written.

Will let you know how things go. Until then, stay well and happy )))

Anthony.

* (If English is not your native language and you haven't heard this expression before, it means "in a perfectly straight line".)

day one: on the road with muhammad

Right then ... finally we can get back to the original purpose of this damn blog, which was to tell you where I am at any given moment and what the Hell I'm doing there.

Before I get to that, though, I want to quickly share three facts which may help throw some context onto my present situation.

Fact #1: As most of you know, I'm in my final year of a linguistics degree. To graduate, though, I need to complete a whole bunch of 'core units' plus some unrelated subjects of my choice. The core units are basically done, so now I'm primarily studying 'historical inquiry' (which is history, more or less, but with more emphasis on the worldviews of historians than on the events they describe) and religion. And within the religious field, I've chosen Islam as my focus.

Fact #2: a very simple fact, which I've come to realise gradually over many successive visits: Poland is an extremely cool place.

Fact #3: My fitness has declined terribly in the last two years, and I really want to try and claw it back to the level it was at before. So when vacation time came up this year, I started thinking of ways I could have a 'physical holiday'. I wanted to do it in Ukraine if I could, but for various reasons that just wasn't feasible.

So, where does that put me? Well it puts me on the outdoor terrace of a building complex that used to be the stables and granary of a giant castle, in a tiny Polish village called Krasiczyn*.

Not entirely making sense yet, is it?

No, Anthony, it isn't.

Er ... ok. Well, I'm here at the end of Day One, and I arrived by bicycle. How many more days there will be after this one is yet to be determined. See, I've set myself two tasks this week (and probably part of next week), which are these: cross the southern half of Poland by bicycle and regional train, and write an essay about the 'Clash of Civilisations Hypothesis' along the way.

Ultimate success in this mission will mean two things: first, I reach Zgorzelec on the German border, almost waving distance from Dresden. And second, I plumb the depths of Islamic theology and politics, and come up with a decent response to Samuel Huntington's thesis (Huntington being the guy who made the phrase "clash of civilisations" famous in a 1993 academic paper, stirring up quite a controversy in the process).

The two goals are quite different, in several respects. For a start, I must finish the essay, but I don't necessarily need to traverse the entire breadth of Poland. It would be nice, of course, but it isn't life-and-death. There's certainly not enough time to do all of it on the bike, which is what I'd ideally like to do. So I'm gonna cycle as much as I can and do the rest by rail. The regional trains are extremely cheap and also extremely slow (a journey of 40-50kms can last well over an hour), so you can still take in a bit of the landscape as you go along.

Having said that, I still might not get there, 'cause obviously the family is being quite understanding by allowing me to go off alone on this ridiculous mission, and I don't want to drag it out forever. However, I would at least like to make it to Wroclaw, 'cause I've heard such nice things about it. And so, as usual, we'll see what happens :-)

Anyway ... the journey kicked off today in Przemysl**. Although in fact, it really started at the bike hire shop in L'viv, where the guy was so keen to tell me all the details of all the local cycling tours I can do with his spanking new company, that I had to make a mad dash across the city afterwards to catch my bus.

In the process of negotiating the chronically decayed Ukrainian footpaths, I badly ripped one leg of my jeans on the bike chain. That's gonna cost me about two hours of sewing that would otherwise have been devoted to Huntington's Big Civilisation Idea Thingy.

My torn leg tucked into my sock, I arrived at the bus station just as the bus was pulling out onto the road, and stood pleading with the driver to wait for me while I bought a ticket. I guess the guy took pity on this weird, out-of-breath foreigner with a gaping tear in one leg of his trousers, 'cause he agreed to wait, and after grabbing a ticket inside the bus station I ran out to the road and jumped on.

The driver later extorted me somewhat by charging an extra 50 hryvnias for taking my bicycle in the luggage hold of his bus, whereas I happen to know that the 'official' fee is only ten. But y'know, I didn't really mind. The guy had basically held up traffic for me at L'viv bus station, and if he hadn't done that, I would've had eight hours to wait for the next bus.

A few hours and an argument with Polish customs later (the bastards took all my $1.50/packet Ukrainian cigarettes!), we arrived in Przemysl. It's a town I've been through many times, 'cause it's the border crossing by rail between Poland and Ukraine, but I've only actually been into it twice – both times in the last month.

Przemysl leaves a rather striking impression ... on me at least. It is, in a sense, the 'end of Europe'. Going just a few kilometres east from there by road, you come to the Shegyni border checkpoint, which vividly marks the transition from the EU to the former USSR. It does this mainly by making you sit on a bus/train/bench for a few hours while officials comb through bags, unscrew the ceilings of vehicles to search for contraband, and take your documents away for extended periods to run them through nobody-knows-what kind of computer systems, eventually returning them with a smile (on the Polish side) or a world-weary sigh (on the Ukrainian side).

Going in the Poland-Ukraine direction, the next place you encounter after the checkpoint is the tumbledown village of Butsiv. This place could hardly contrast more sharply with its Polish neighbour. While Przemysl's charm derives from its dramatic setting on a hillside that leads down to a river, its expansive 'rynek' (market square) with cosy cafes, open-air bars and grand churches ranged around at different elevations, and its relaxed, thoroughly European atmosphere, Butsiv's appeal lies in its being the kind of place where an unidentified shape on the roadside can turn out to be a foraging chicken with its head shoved firmly into the long grass. Przemysl's streets are laid with elegantly-arranged cobbles, lined by Volkswagen Golfs, and frequented by cyclists. Butsiv's aren't laid with anything much at all, they're lined with bits of metal randomly sticking out of the ground and open sewer canals, and the Golfs have been replaced by Ladas – along with the occasional hulking wreck of a  Soviet-era truck.

Both exercise a certain kind of attraction (partly depending on your taste in decrepit and/or abandoned motor vehicles), but transiting from one to the other is a bit like following a nice rendition of the Moonlight Sonata with an AC/DC medley (Bon Scott era, of course – we'll have none of that other dreadful Scottish git with his stupid hat!), or having a main course of delicate Japanese cuisine with a slab of chocolate mud cake for dessert. Or, I don't know, some kind of indulgent massagey thing followed by a punch in the throat. The good metaphors seem to be floating just out of reach today.

(See what I did there? Hehe.)

Anyway ... so I got to Przemysl late in the afternoon, went to one of the aforementioned cosy cafes for a cappuccino and a quick re-read of Huntington, then jumped on my bike and rode about 10kms along winding country roads, some of them flanked by deeply-shaded forests. It was a stunning ride (though a very short one compared to those I'll be doing in the coming days), and at the end of it I arrived here in Krasiczyn.

I'll try not to bore you with too much detail about this place, but it is pretty damn cool and quite a find (I'd never heard of it until a few days ago). The highlight so far has been dinner at the castle. I wandered in there at about eight, as the sun was starting to dip below the horizon, and there was no-one around the ramparts at all. I don't think I'd be boasting too much if I said that, for someone born a long way from Europe, I've seen quite a decent number of castles in my time ... but I don't think I've ever had an entire one to myself before. Think I might buy one ;-)

Inside the castle walls, I enjoyed a sumptuous meal of shopska (goat's cheese salad) and zhurek (a traditional Polish fermented rye soup with sausage, egg and spices, served in a bowl made of crispy bread  –  truly one of the finest  things you can put in your mouth in Eastern Europe), and washed it down with a glass of Chilean dry red, which you can only get in Ukraine if you're prepared to live without one of your kidneys. All this amid the elegant arches of a proper castle dining hall. And the total bill? A bit less than eight Euros. Amazing.

Then I exited the castle to find myself in near-total darkness. The path leading away from the castle was very dimly lit, and ancient trees with sturdy, angled trunks towered all around me as the full moon poked eerily through their silhouetted leaves. It was spooky ... but in a really, really satisfying way.

Finally I arrived back at my hostel, which was constructed out of the ruins of the former castle granary, and is nowadays guarded by two black cats – one of whom is currently trying to unplug my computer at the wall socket – and a super-friendly, floppy-eared dog shaped like an oversized marzipan log.

Short version: Krasiczyn had obliged me with a perfect evening :-)

See, I really do love this country, for all the unexpected and fabulous stuff it throws at you. I mean, that's so not how I was expecting to end my day when I woke up this morning! Poland retains the ability to surprise, always holding a little more up its sleeve ... and I retain the ability to go "Oh, how you rock!" every time it reveals another snippet of coolness.  

So yeah ... blah freakin' blah. Now you've got the context, plus a bit of ramble about the country which I currently have a crush on. Tomorrow the 'quest' gets serious: I have to cover sth like 40kms to reach a place called Jaroslaw, and start putting pen to paper on this essay.

I like to think of it as my 'road trip with Muhammad'. Let's see how far we can travel together ...



* Polish "cz" is roughly equivalent to the "ch" in English "cheese", so this place is pronounced like "Krasichen".

** Absolutely no idea how it's pronounced! Every time I say my version of "Przemysl" to Polish people, they have no idea what I'm talking about. Polish is quite the challenge ... but a stunner of a language, nonetheless :-)

 

the can-opener effect

Hello there!

About two months ago we moved out of the horrible burbs of L'viv, to a flat in a much nicer, more central part of town. During the settling-in process, I was confronted with a classic example of something that has always fascinated me about ex-Soviet republics: namely, the sheer number of physical, functional items here that simply don’t do the rather straightforward tasks they’re designed for.

Let me explain: our new flat has a bath with a typical 'European-style' fixture*. The hot and cold taps are mounted on a sturdy metal frame, and a shower head is attached. The head is connected to the frame by a kind of cable, made of little interlocking metal rings that flex like a rubber pipe.

This standard Euro-shower ensemble also includes one extra part – a plastic ring attached high up on the wall, into which you can put the shower head for a 'hands-free' wash. Of course, the principle here is one of choice. When you're in the mood for simply relaxing under a stream of hot water for 10 minutes, warming your muscles on a cold morning and splashing a bit of soap around for a general clean, you can go hands-free. But when your mission is a more thorough and/or site-specific one, you unhook, grab the shower head and manouevre it by hand, ensuring optimal  washage of the requisite body parts.

All of this is fine and groovy, except for one thing: this kind of fixture is also common in Ukraine now, but builders here haven’t quite got their heads around the "dual option" concept yet. When installing a Euro-shower, they do strange things with the little plastic ring. Most commonly, they either throw it away (judging by its absence from many bathrooms), or they attach it so low down on the wall that you couldn’t possibly stand under it without amputating your entire body up to the chest.

This may result in some degree of frustration if, like me, you're passionate about your morning showers and you prefer them to be relaxing (as opposed to being an exercise in fine-grained manual dexterity). It means that, whilst you've very nearly got a functioning shower, what you actually have is just a fancy hose for cleaning the bath.

Even better than that, however, is the shower in our new flat. In accordance with Ukrainian tradition, the plastic ring is affixed to the wall about two feet off the ground, for that classic “Gee, this looks like it would be perfect for the children of two particularly diminutive dwarves” effect. But when you try to put the shower head into the wall-fitting, you make a very interesting discovery: namely, that the fitting is designed in such a way that it simply cannot work.

You should be able to see what I mean (I think) in the photo here. As I mentioned, the head is attached to a metal cable, and the length of cable that inevitably sticks out horizontally behind the plastic ring is greater than the distance between the ring and the wall fixture. This means that there’s no way you can actually get a shower head into it – I mean, just no way at all. And this isn't a consequence of poor installation: it results from the inherently stupid nature of the thing itself.

This is just the latest in a long stream of dysfunctional products I've encountered in the former USSR, and especially in Ukraine. There are corkscrews so flimsy that they successfully open less than one bottle of wine in their lifetimes; matches whose heads melt together in humid weather, so that when you open the matchbox you're greeted by the sight of 50 cranially-conjoined wooden siblings; washing machines with a cycle of well over two hours (some of which leap wildly around the room as they wash, providing free entertainment for the flat's occupants); staplers that can staple a maximum of two pages; soap that doesn't lather, but rather streaks onto your skin then blocks your plug hole; ovens that require you to stand for about three minutes forcibly holding down a button while they drum up the courage to work all by themselves ... and on the list goes.

But why, you may ask, am I telling you all of this, and why in so much detail? Well, fair question. Before I answer it, though, I hope you'll bear with me a little longer, because there is a point ... and I mean one that goes beyond the general desire to complain or a tendency to find ineptitude and bad design quite funny.

See, as I mentioned at the start, these kinds of self-defeating 'conveniences' genuinely intrigue me. To illustrate why, I want to tell you about one specific useless household product which I've come across several times in different places, and which seems to me somehow 'iconic'.

So ... ready for some more domestic minutiae?

Ok, here we go.

In Russia and Kazakhstan, one kind of product that’s almost guaranteed not to do what it should is the humble can opener. I’m not thinking here of the old-fashioned type with the blade which you jab violently into the top of the can. (I actually prefer those nowadays – they’re so satisfying to use!) I’m talking about the ones with a key on top, which you calmly turn a couple of dozen times, until your flakes of tuna are freed from their cruel incarceration.

You can get super-modern versions of these key-style openers in Russia and KZ, but you generally have to go to a glitzy chain supermarket like Ramstor to find them, and they cost an arm and a leg and a firstborn child (although admittedly, if you bring someone else's firstborn, you'll rarely be asked to show proof of its identity).

(A side-note here: while I find the actual shops themselves mildly annoying, I think Ramstor must be the coolest name for a supermarket chain in the known universe. Every time I say, hear or even think the word, I get Rammstein vocalist Till Lindemann in my head, singing something like this:

Rammmm Stor-r-r-r-r,
What a terrible chor-r-r-r-r-r-e!
Ich muss zum Superrrrmarkt jetzt laufen,
und dort machen die Einkaufen
r-r-Rammmstor-r-r-r-!!!

und so fort.)

Sorry; back to the almost-having-a-point.

So you can go to r-r-r-RAMMMMstor-r-r if you want to, and spend almost $10 on a slick and shiny Western-looking can-opener with sexy contoured plastic bits. But y’know, most English teachers are on a fairly modest salary, so they tend to just buy the basic model at their local shop. Which they then take home and try to use.

This is generally the moment when they discover that turning the key will cause it to immediately break off, leaving the tuna flakes imprisoned inside their mini-Bastille. And if they were to go and buy a replacement can opener of the same type, they'd find there's about a 70% chance that the exact same thing would happen again.

So it's “Hello!” to another product which, by its nature, completely and spectacularly fails to fulfil its one and only purpose.

Here's the thing, though: one night in late-2007 or early-2008, I was with Scott in our flat in Almaty, and we experienced the ‘can opener effect’ for ourselves (though not for the first time in my case). We brought a new opener home from the local 24hr supermarket, stuck it on top of a can of something, turned it once, and watched in dismay as the metal key bent like toffee and the can fell to the floor. And right then, the following thought (or something very much like it) flashed through my tiny eggshell mind:

“Oh holy crap … imagine being the person who made that! I mean, imagine – imaaagine – that assembling these useless bits of domestic detritus on some horrible factory floor in China was your regular source of income, the means by which you fed and clothed your family, the thing you called your ‘career’. How would that feel?”

This thought has stayed with me ever since.

I personally find it somewhat mind-blowing, for a couple of reasons. First, on the happy-clappy, sunnily-disposed side, it does seems to offer a little perspective on whatever issues you may be having with your own job at any given time. And ridiculous though this may seem, I have actually put it to constructive use. There have been a couple of occasions when I’ve been stressed out and/or pissed off with one or other aspect of teaching, and I've just taken a moment to compare my frustrations with the plight of Mr Crappy Can Opener Guy.

The comparison does tend to be somewhat comforting :-)

On the other, less positively-spun side of things, it’s just incredible to me that these utterly useless objects are the focus of someone’s daily work routine. The people who make them, I'd argue, should be numbered among the unsung victims of globalisation.

I mean, we all know about lethal factory fires in Asia, appalling conditions in sweatshops, workforce lockdowns, and all that terrible stuff. And it is terrible, without question. But what about the person who knows for a near-certainty that, at the end of their professional life, they’ll be looking back on 40-plus years of labouring every day to make metal and/or plastic gizmos which get loaded onto a truck, make their way out into the world and either

a) fall to pieces immediately upon being purchased; or
b) simply don't work?

Isn’t that, in a way, the ultimate in postmodern existential angst?

So yeah ... since first having this thought, when things fall to pieces in my hands I often react quite differently than I used to. The "Damn stupid corkscrew!" response is far less common nowadays, and a "The people who made this thing must be out of their minds with despair!" train of thought is fairly dominant. And as I said above, the can-opener has become my personal icon for these people.

Btw, one notable exception to everything I've just said is computer software. I still swear at it regularly and loudly, wishing horrible diseases upon the testicles of its creators. Maybe that's because I know many of them should be in the Existential Hell of Dysfunctional Manufacture, but they're not. Smug bastards are making more cash than a lot of us who are actually doing something vaguely useful.

That aside, I would like to dedicate this entry, and the several glasses of wine which have accompanied it, to the Fall-Apart Can-Opener People – those humble working class folk whose efforts to feed their families result in former Soviet citizens (and no doubt many others) being deluged with stuff they can't use, in the service of economic progress. I hope they know there's at least one crackpot out there thinking of them!

Bye )))



* I call this a 'European-style' shower because I've seen a lot of them in Europe and none anywhere else. 

dead romans

Question: have you ever given any thought to where the names of our months come from?

I hope the answer is "no", because if you have considered this, you've probably concluded that the time you spent was sadly wasted. Or at least, that's my feeling about it. 

Hmmm ... perhaps I should throw in a disclaimer here. What I'm about to say definitely doesn't score highly on the 'most important issues facing our world today' scale. In fact it's been barred from that scale, and invited to participate instead in the slightly less prestigious 2012 "Why the Hell would anyone give this so much as a passing thought?" online poll, viewable at www.crackpot-blogger.com.

But y'know, I'm like that. I'll give a passing thought to almost anything – and then write a couple of thousand words about it!

Anyway ... what I wanted to say is that, for some reason, I find the long list of Roman gods and Emperors on our calendar a little dull and unsatisfying, when you compare them to what else is out there. 

Not a biggie, I know. I just think we could do better. 

Heck, even naming all the months after your relatives would be an improvement ... which, as it happens, is what the now-deceased former president of Turkmenistan did. He renamed the month of April Gorbansoltan after his mother, decreeing at the same time that this should also be the new word for "bread". Exactly why he wanted Turkmeni citizens to put his mum into a clay oven for a few hours, then slap her on a bench and fill her with the contents of a doner kebab, is one of the great mysteries the president took with him to his grave. An enigmatic bunch, these Central Asian leaders ...

But y'know, while that may have been silly, at least it was audacious and kinda original.

Our system does have an upside, though, in that it's shared among quite a number of languages. The calendar as we know it predominates both in Western Europe and in her former colonial territories, as far away as Papua New Guinea (and Australia of course). This means twelve less things to remember if you're learning, say, French (which has Janvier, Fevrier, Mars etc ...), German (Januar, Februar and so on ...), Norwegian (exactly the same as German), Romanian (Ianuarie, Februarie, Martie ...), or almost any other continental tongue. Even Turkish has echoes of the system, with Mart, Mayis and Ağustos all making appearances.

But in case you're thinking this is mainly a Germanic and Roman/Latin affair – with a bit of spillage into surrounding areas and occupied territories – let's indulge in a little tangent to consider the pleasantly weird Magyar (Hungarian) language for a moment.

Magyar is one of Europe's great linguistic oddities, and therefore well worth considering for its own sake. For a start, if you go looking for its closest relatives, you won't find them anywhere on da Continent. In fact, they're thousands of kms away in the autonomous Khanti-Mansy district of western Siberia. Pretty impressively obscure, no? And for a language nerd like me, this sort of isolation – coupled with Magyar's utter dissimilarity to every single one of its neighbours – makes it rather interesting.

So let's continue ... if only to humour me, your slightly creepy but eternally grateful virtual host.

Up for it? Ok, cool.

Magyar was originally written using runes, but now Roman letters are used, augmented by lots of comical squiggly hats. (They're more correctly known as 'diacritics', but I prefer my term.) It features some admirably weird syntax, which you can see in some of its question/answer structures. For example, if a doctor visits you at your house in Budapest, and after the consultation you want to find out if s/he's still there, you don't ask "Has the doctor gone?", or "Doctor went out?". Instead you ask "Away went the doctor?". And you don't answer "Yes"; you answer "Away."*

Let's consider that in dialogue form:

"Away went the doctor?"
"Away, away."

It's almost poetry, isn't it?

And this is pretty typical of how Magyar sounds to the foreigner.

Anyone who's tried to learn it also knows about the highly agglutinative structure** of Magyar, which allows for the construction of wonderfully outlandish words like megszentségteleníthetetlensígeskedései (meaning sth like "people doing things which make it nearly impossible for something to be desecrated"). But that's just one tiny aspect of a rich lexicon, which contains two words for "red", a single word for "the monotonous nature of the learning process", four levels of politeness with different verb choices for each level (something normally associated with Far Eastern languages), a fossilised smorgasbord of old Turkic loan words connected with horseriding, and an endless selection of kinship terms like Ősnagyapa, which translates rather brilliantly as "great great great great great great great great great great grandfather".

And yet, amongst all of this lavish lexical content, there's no verb "to have". You literally can't say "I have a toy squid" in Magyar. To grasp the oddness of that, monitor one hour of pub conversation between yourself and some friends, and then delete all the parts of that conversation which would've been impossible if the word "have" wasn't available to English-speakers. You'll probably find that what you're left with is quite fragmentary ... just little shards of disjointed chat, with an uncomfortable lack of intelligibility or resolution.    

So yeah ... the point (insofar as I have one) is that while staying within the bounds of Europe, Magyar is one of the most 'foreign' languages you can run into. Pretty much everything about it is organised differently to what we've come to expect of European languages. Which leads me to the question: what are their months called? Surely they've got some weird and wonderful system, haven't they?

Errrrr ... well, no. They have január, február, március, április and so on, like everyone else.

To me, this is a tiny bit disappointing.

If you delve back into history a bit, you find that Magyar used to have some wild names for months, like "Boldog Asszony hava" ("Month of the Bountiful Queen", a reference to a prominent goddess in Hungarian pagan myths, who women used to pray to during childbirth). But they ditched all of that some time ago, in favour of the same old Dead Gods and Emperors that we all know. Good news for the aspiring Euro-polyglot, of course, but a shame for anyone who enjoys the 'surprise factor' of learning a foreign language.

Luckily, though, there are some European cultures that have gone their own way in labelling their calendars. And thank the (non-Roman) gods that they have! I mean, there are simply loads of things to name your months after, if you can be bothered to show some imagination.

A case in point is Finnish (which has so many cool features that I just can't stop using it as an example). The Finns call March maaliskuu, roughly translated as "earthy month". It got its name because, during maaliskuu, you get the first glimpses of earth as it begins to emerge from underneath the winter snows. Similarly, February is helmikuu, meaning "month of pearls", because the little ice droplets that form on trees in February are reminiscent of tiny pearls.

Great, isn't it?

October, on the other hand, is rather less romantically known as lokakuu, "the month of mud". Oh well ... can't win them all.

Over in the Slavic world, meanwhile, I stumbled onto a great example a few years ago. Soon after I first came to Ukraine, I was surprised to discover that the Ukrainian names for months bore no relation at all to the Russian ones, and that it used an entirely different system.

Why the surprise? Well, because the two languages are intimately related. Lots of 'basic terms' are almost the same, which makes those particular Ukrainian words easy to learn if you already know the Russian ones.

By way of example, here are the numbers one to six:

Russian       Ukrainian
a-din               o-den
dva                  dva
tri                     tre
ch'-tә-ri           cho-te-ri
pyet'                 pet'
shest'                shist'

... see what I mean?**** 

I expected that a comparative list of months would look like this as well – i.e. almost the same, with a few odd vowel substitutions. And since Russian is a member of the Dead Gods and Emperors Club (with Janvar, Fevral, Mart etc.), I was therefore ready to meet another variation on the same old theme ... until I encountered the Ukrainian word for December, which is "Hruden" (груден).

That just threw me completely.

Not only was I surprised by its dissimilarity to Russian декябрь (Dekyabr, "December"), but its resemblance to another Russian term was ... erm, how can I put this? Striking? Yeah, that's probably the word I'm looking for.

See, Ukrainian груден looks an awful lot like an adverbial or plural form of the Russian word грудь (pronounced "grud"), which means "breast". Could that really be a month name? I mean, could the Ukrainian calendar really end with "a month of breasts"? And if so, exactly how would that be celebrated?

Unfortunately, it wasn't so. If you look up "Ukrainian month names" on the internet, you'll find something entirely non-breast-related. Груден is in fact listed as "the month of frozen clods" – a reference to the fact that the earth beneath your feet is all frozen in December.

And I had such high hopes for my "month of breasts" :-( 

Oh well ...

Anyway, I've since found out three things that are relevant to this train of thought. First, other Ukrainian months are also named after natural phenomena (so now, for example, we're in Berezn*****, "the month of birch trees", and this will soon give way to Kviten, "the month of flowering").

Secondly, Ukrainian shares this system with a number of other Slavic languages such as Czech and Serbo-Croat (though in Croat, March is Ožujak, "the lying month" – I'd love to know where that came from!).

In fact the only reason I didn't realise this sooner is because the first Slavic language I had contact with was Russian, which turns out to be the oddball of the family in many respects. When you go south and west of Russia, you find that its linguistic cousins are more adventurous with their calendars. In fact, there's even a month in Czech (Zari = September) which has been etymologically traced to the time of year when male deer most want to ...

*ahem*

(trying to find a polite way to express it)

... let's say when they want to, er, "get intimate with the lady-folk".

Don't know 'bout you, but for me, naming a month "The deer would really like to have copious amounts of sex now" is way, way, WAY more interesting than "Month of Julius, The Misshapen Despotic Tyrant Who Currently Collects Our Taxes".  

Apologies to any Romanophiles who may be reading.
(You know who you are!)

Oh, and I almost forgot the third thing. Apparently, I'm far from being the first person in Ukraine to notice the hruden = russian tits thing. And by "far", I mean "centuries distant". I'm told there have been silly jokes about it here since time immemorial. 

So there you go.

Of course, as soon as you head outside the Eurosphere, the whole calendar-naming thing opens up even more. On one end of the scale, you've got languages like Korean and Mongolian, whose month names literally mean "First Month", "Second Month" and so on (though Mongolians also have individual names for years, and the year which began on Feb 19 1996 is called "Fire Mouse". I do love that one! Seems to me there's a post-modern super hero there, just crying out to be created.)

Then there are lots of names that relate fairly directly to seasonal processes and food sources, like Chinese "Meiyue" (plum ripens) and "Layue" (preserved meat month – some time around December).

On yet another ridiculous tangent, what I find most entertaining about "Layue" is that the "yue" part seems to mean "month". If that's right, and if you assume the other part of the word has the same meaning outside of this context (which of course you often can't), it means that "la" is "preserved meat" in Chinese. I really hope that's true! It just tickles me to think of Chinese people raising an eyebrow the first time they hear a Western pop song in which the singer suddenly starts going "Preserved meat-preserved meat-preserved meat-preserved meat" at the end.

Sorry. Bad brain.

Finally, there are the month names which seem totally obscure to the Westerner. They're probably my favourites.

A nice example comes from Sesotho (the majority language of Lesotho in Southern Africa). They have some really cool month names, all of which are perfectly explicable in the context of the culture. They're related to nature and food supply, like a lot of the Slavic ones ... and yet at first glance, through a foreigner's eyes, they're just utterly weird. For example, in Lesotho February is known as Hlakola, which means "wipe it off". (Wtf?). April, meanwhile, is called Mmesa, meaning the "the roaster", and Motsheanong (May) is a contraction of a phrase that translates as "one who laughs at birds".

You have to love that, for sheer out-of-the-blueness.

Still, as I said, all of these can be explained. The laughing at birds thing is a reference to sorghum grain (something like millet), which is an important part of the Sotho people's diet. The grain becomes so hard and stony in May that birds, try as they might, can't eat it. So in the people's imagination, their sorghum plants are sitting out there in the fields for a whole month going "HAAA-haaa ... can't get me now, you dumbass birds!"

Hlakola (Feb) is also sorghum-related, because that's the time when sorghum plants produce a kind of sticky covering that needs to be wiped off if you want them to grow to their full potential. And the "roaster" thing for April ... well, if I say "sorghum", you can probably guess.

Lastly, going back to Chinese, perhaps one of the most fabulous month names I've come across is "Liangyue", which falls some time around October. It literally translates as "good month", and that's it. Nothing fancy – just good. And why? Well, to tell you the truth I haven't the faintest idea.

I suspect there are more than a few wizened historians kicking around who could enlighten us about the origins of "Liangyue", and no doubt it would be quite interesting to hear. And yet, personally I'd rather remain ignorant on this one ... it's much more fun just to try and guess! I mean, imagine you're a high-ranking member of a Chinese imperial dynasty, way back in antiquity. At some point, you have such an utterly fabulous time in October that you decide to promote the idea of calling it "good month" from that point onwards. The obvious question then becomes: what did you do for a whole month that was so damn good?

Whatever the truth may be, it probably isn't as entertaining (or possibly as debauched) as what's going through your mind right now. So I say let's leave that one up to the imagination :-)

Speaking of imagination, though, the original point of this rather silly entry was my being not-so-impressed with the 'Dead Gods and Emperors' system. It falls far short of what we could have on our calendar if we really put our minds to it. And for this reason, I'm handing it over to you. Your task: come up with new month names, and post them here along with brief explanations of each.

Actually I'm inclined to make this something like a competition ... so to fill my end of the bargain, let me offer some prizes. The person who comes up with the best month names will get a fabulous sample of genuine Ukrainian currency (generally unavailable in the outside world), featuring the faces of people who have made a real difference, often in subtle defiance of a nearby superpower.

You'll also get some genuine Ukrainian konfetki, which taste exactly like the chocolates your nan used to offer you out of weirdly-sculpted green glass bowls when you were a kid. Believe me, they're worth competing for!

So, how's about it then? Care to venture a more interesting calendrical system than the one we've got now? Go on ... I'm sure
you can! 

Meanwhile, take care and live well )))

Anthony.


* I got this from the following website, which contains an interesting article called "Hungarian: A Strange Cake on The Menu":  http://www.filolog.com/languageStrangeCake.html

** Agglutination means sticking affixes on a word to modify or add to its meaning. We do it in English, of course, as in 'lick -- licking -- lickable'. But highly agglutinative languages do it more. To increase the complexity of a message, instead of adding more words you add more affixes, creating sort of 'mega-words'. For example, in English we can take a word like "bring" and use it to build the phrase "I bring them", by adding a subject and an object. In Euskara***, which has loads more agglutination, you'd start with "kar" (the root of the verb "to bring"), add "da" at the front (to show present tense), then put "tza" (plural object) after the root, and finish off with "-t" (subject - in this case standing in for "I"). So you'd end up with one word, "dakartzat", containing a whole phrase within it. That's agglutination for ya. Pretty intense, isn't it?

*** The language of the Basque peoples in southern France and Northern Spain. It's another one of those oddities ... no-one is quite sure where it came from. There was a wonderful theory that it was related to the language of the indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido. That would've made the ancient languages of northern Spain and northern Japan close cousins, with no other related languages in the huge geographical area lying between them. How intriguing that would have been! Unfortunately, the theory has been more or less disproven. Shame.

**** These transliterations aren't 100% accurate, but they're as good as I can make them, given the huge differences between Slavic and English vowel sounds.

***** One source I looked at claimed that the Czech "brezen" (March) – for which the most obvious translation is "birch trees" – is actually a reference to getting pregnant. So I guess there are a lot of Sagittarians and Capricorns in the Czech Republic ;-)