i have fastforwarded a month and a few thousand miles as writing retrospectively seemed a bit retrospeculative and so 'here' now means hong kong and 'now' is the here and...
things were going dead steady here and i didn't have much to write about but then we have had a right time of it in the last 10 days or so, visiting the city in which my biological grandma grew up and then the village in which my grandfathers first wife lives, and then in the last few days a little jaunt to the excellent nation that calls itself taiwan (and china calls 'chinese taipei'- bastards)
here no-one really tells me what is about to happen, where we are going or who we are due to meet until things present themselves, which totally confuddled me at first but now i quite enjoy. my dad will say we are 'going for a walk' and then we will end up in the flat of some friend or relation and 20 members of their extended family, a loud TV, a few old people amiably shuffling about in their pyjamas and various carcasses that we are presented with and which we eat whilst everyone watches and comments in cantonese on my chopstick technique (which now i have got DOWN). This happened in my grandmas city, when we stumbled into a bustling flat full of 4 generations of cooing family, the space full to the brim of love and laughter and an electric mahjong table. it was so very nice in contrast to all the garish commercialism and fake nokias on the streets outside and the matriach of the evening's initial gambit was 'your cousin ate 7 crabs. here are 7 crabs'.
The TV in the background showed the opening to the Guangdong (city in southern china and centre of the chinese shoe industry, and hence full of loads of duct-tape holding african importers) Asian games 2010. Like the Beijing olympics and the shanghai expo, the ceremony was an orgy of syncronised dances, huge structures and computer enhanced fireworks. this is the china that its government wants the world, and perhaps even more so its own citizens, to see. it took its place among reports of the development of the 'prestige project' of super fast railway building, chinas purported dominance of the Seoul G20 and the odd man run over by a steamroller that constitutes domestic 'news' coverage. but let me hold my critique of china for another moment and get on with it...
The next day we visited the graves of my grandmother's parents, set in sparse grassland an hour out of the city. they were in seperate locations, each one marked with a large circular double ring of concrete (in a figure of 8 shape- the size of the circles denotes the prestige of the family) with a small, tightly engraved tombstone at the head of each, as well as a little plinth to burn offerings (anything burnt, including cash, goes directly to the deceased in the afterlife), all conforming to feng shui principles. My great grandfathers' grave showed his first and last names, his home town, and a few apparently untranslatable sentiments. My grandma's, on the other hand, does not have her own name but only those of her children and her married name, as is/was the custom. Indeed the character for 'woman' in chinese can be seperated into two constituent parts 'son' and 'good'. hooray for the wisdom of confunctionism.
Nearby a small village temple with beautiful carvings and incense lit by invisible worshippers felt much more sacred than the huge statues of buddha or jesus in other, larger places of worship i have visited. across china there are small buddhist shrines and temples (as well as numerous shrines to local deities in houses, shops, restaurants) and for me it is the human peace that is found in these places that gives it the aura. i am perhaps slowly realising that my lack of belief in reincarnation and the worshipping of anyone precludes me from calling myself a buddhist, but the buddha's doctines certainly hold a lot of weight as a way to live a hearty life.
my fondness of the way the chinese flavour their pigs also is a bit of a barrier, and that night i felt like obelix as the huge family of the night before joined us in a 'farmers restaurant' and helped me eat a medium sized pig (and three chickens, and loads of wild veggies, and tarrow covered in sugar), just out of the underground oven. i knawed and sucked and drank lots of beer and then was presented with the brains of the pig, which tasted quite a lot like the fatty cheeks of the big fish of the other week, except a bit more, er, porky.
chinese people have been through many years of turmoil and food has been scarce for lots of people, lots of the time (one history book i read stated that in the late 1800s there were reports of mothers swapping babies with each other so they wouldn;'t have to eat their own), and so it makes perfect sense that they have developed ways of making every bit of nearly every animal into a tasty dish. in addition to that pig brain i have eaten pig ear, pig grotter, congealed pigs blood, ducks blood, chicken foot soup, shark fin soup, giant snails, frogs, peppered horse leg, dog (i didn't ask if it was pedigree), turtle, terrapin, pidgeon, sand worms, salted rice worms, jelly fish, hammer crab, razor clam and, the most curious delicacy of all, the foetus of a killer bee, which i watched being taken from its little hive cocoon and which was like a sack of pollen-scented jelly in the mouth. the dog thing is quite interesting, as it is a delicacy in the same cities in which the economic boom and love for all things western has compelled affluent city folk to groom, love and cherish these cat-sized dogs that are no use to anyone and treated like children. and in restaurants fish kept carefully for feng shui purposes swim next to equally beautiful fish waiting to be chopped and steamed and served with ginger and spring onion. i will leave the analysis/judgement to you, but suffice to say i am visibly putting on weight.
the next day we headed and to my grandfathers village, tucked away on a side road on the edge of a rapidly-growing city. This was the part of my whole trip in china that i had been looking forward to most. According to my dad there are only three surnames in the village, leung (the one i would have been if i had taken my dad's name) is the dominant one, and in theory we can be traced back to the founder of the village who was apparently quite a legend. my grandfather, not thinking i could handle village life, had booked us into a hotel, which i was a bit gutted about, but i persuaded them over a sumptuous welcoming banquet, which it must have taken several people all day to prepare, that we should all stay in the family home the next night.
there were loads of things to be picked apart from what i saw that night and the next, even though no-one spoke a word of english and didn't even seem to understand my scantily-toned mandarin. my granddad seemed much more at home here than alone in his hong kong flat- he was the oldest and this was the house he was born into, with big photos of his mother and father on the wall. he was clearly orchestrating the event of our homecoming (my dad hadn't been there for a few years either) and everyone seemed to be really pleased to have him, and us, there. i sort of picked up the backstory - my grandfather, who was in the nationalist army (the one defeated by mao) had an arranged marriage to his first wife but then for some reason had left after only a few months and married my grandma, and then they had escaped to hong kong when the nationalists were defeated. he had 6 children and worked as a coolie (dock labourer) and night porter for up to 20 hours per day to feed my dad and his siblings.
for 30 years contact between hong kong and china was almost impossible (if someone in china got a letter from hong kong they would be questioned by the police and often charged with spying, which could lead to execution), but after 1979 things became easier, and in the 80s he returned to his village to find that his first wife, whom he had abandoned, had stayed single, looked after the house (living on handouts from other villagers), apparently waiting for him to come back or waiting to die. it must have been a pretty emotional moment when he found her there. he then proceeded to rebuild the house (it was, i was told proudly, the highest house in the village for a time) and support his first wife, and returning every few months just like he was doing now.
his first wife was super pleased to meet me, and did as old people seem to do- ignore the fact i don't understand what they are saying and just talk at me animatedly. which was great and after a while i did the same back. the women here seem so much less reserved and more intuitive than the men, at least to me.
she was tiny and hunchbacked with a kind of cackling voice, and her and my grandfather seemed to really enjoy each others company. so i was seeing this, i was seeing how my father acted in his home village, i was doing some intense environment absorbtion and seeing how village lift ticked, compared to zimbabwe and india (details different, themes so similar). i try to stay away from cliche and over romanticisation but it is hard cos they are often true- by and large people struggle and are happy unless they are hungry or lovesick, and the conversation is of things that can be touched and kissed and eaten, and an unquestioned god/diety/ancestor that is just there and must be revered. things make sense- the village is centred on a huge banyan tree and a well, with irrigation ditches leading to fish ponds around the village. people wake up at dawn and eat at dusk, and everyone, regardless of age, helps to move the rice from field to plate. old people are respected because they have the most wisdom, and if people are angry they shout and fight and then get the fuck on with whatever they have to do.
unlike mugabe though, the chinese authorities at least paid off the people it took land from. cities are only allowed to build on 'new' land on the edge of cities, which makes the farmers who have been there generations and then sell it to them suddenly landless, with some money, and with the new status of 'city dwellers' rather than 'farmers', which allows them a far greater freedom. it seemed that everyone had used their money and freedom to build taller houses and indulge more readily in their tobacco pipes (which had to be direct decendents of the opium pipes that were ubiquitous in china before the commies).
my insistance on staying at the home on the second night paid off, and my dad was the happiest and least stressed i have seen him the entire trip, talking a bit about his childhood and what is important to him as we sat by the fish pond outside the house with beer and mbira. it also meant i could get up at dawn with my good friend henry, who joined us for this trip, and watch the village swing into action. suddenly the little rivers at the side of the fields made sense (buckets were used to water the plants... ). a man with a stick tried unsuccessfully and it has to be said very comically to herd a gaggle of gabbling geese across a road. the market, on a bridge between our village and the next, salted fish, repaired bicycle tyres and stared blankly at the two strangers passing by. posters of mao could be seen in the odd living room, but peoples' attention was clearly much more focused on the rice grains drying on the concrete basketball pitch and the greying sky that would force them to sack it all up again.
like much of my trip- no revelations, no massive emotions, but a slow absorbtion of a culture and a family that is no longer abstract. and lots and lots of food.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Monday, November 08, 2010
Super Best Friends Train
45 hours in
we sit
a china teapot
4 tomatoes, 2 fat-fingered cucumbers
and the three of us
the lady, 74, the kindest eyes in town
the man, Anselmo, salting and cutting
a language of 3 common words
cramped and happy in coach 3
____
On the 76 hour train ride from Moscow to Almaty, capital of Kazakhstan, I experienced a little of what train-hoppers used to tell me about in America- after the initial day or so time kind of swirls into the swaying of the carriages and ones mind kind of seperates into two- the totally immediate and apparently insignificant (taking out the pips of a pomegranite with a knife one by one) and the totally abstract and memory filled. The two trigger each other off. The middle bit- normal reactions and appetites and logistical worries- seems dulled and inaccessible. Superb.
As described in the previous post, I was sharing an open carriage with around 50 other people, split by little walls with beds attached, with bedding and hot water provided. I got on and offered some peanut brittle around, which was refused by everyone as always seemed to happen, but in the process passed on 2 bits of information implicitly: 1. i don't speak the same language as you 2. i am not a threat and quite messy when I eat. The man across from me, Anselmo (so called not because that was his name, but because he reminded me strongly of the heroic character with the same name from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls), gestured to the crucifix around his neck and that everything we had was to be shared, and proceeded to pull out a flatbread, tomatoes, cucumbers and a film canister filled with salt. The lady sat next to him, who by the end of the journey was scoulding me in Russian like I was her own child, brought out a jar of honey with little bits of lemon in. Bloody genius.
Anselmo was one of those men who have clearly had huge and varied experiences and no doubt their faire share of hard times, but have learnt through them to be totally humble, generous and straight up loving to the people and the world around them, and as a consequence his step was light and his eyes sparkled like a magician in disguise. It is to meet people like him (even if we don't have a shared language- if we did this blog post would be much longer for sure) that I travel.
Through silent observation, shared food and tea and us talking to each other in languages that made no sense to the other but were significant anyway, and the fact that the whole situation was pretty unique anyway, we created an atmosphere that i can't in any way convey here in words but that was totally magic. Summed up in our silent, sunset mind-reading tea ceremonies.
The rest of the carriages were dominated by young families and males who I can only guess were either businessmen or migrant workers, or both. We communed in the smoking end of the carriage and on the regular and long platform stops. These were highlights too- each few hundred miles a new and more elaborate collection of food hawkers- platform goddesses with boiled eggs in their arms and chilrden at their ankles.
A myriad of gastronomic delights. Breads stuffed with minced lamb, steamed dumplings with carrot and spring onion, cartloads of melons big as fat babies, huge dried fish, paper cup-fulls of sunflower seeds that left their mark on the carriage floor... and at stops further east the saliva-inducing smell of lamb being roasted over charcoal... and as we travelled east the faces of the hawkers were slightly different, and I couldn't tell you the point at which everyone suddenly looked a lot like my reflection in the mirror but it happened... or was that a dream?
The scenery also kept slowly melting into itself- first forest, then low hills, then a slow but sure decrease of vegetation from trees to bushes to slow-waving straw-coloured grasslands, to tiny bushes clinging to the now yellow soil, to the cracked and moon-like landscape of the roof of the Kazakh steppe; the huge expanse of land that still sustains only the odd herder and contrasts with a white to azure sky that picks little holes in the mind if you look at it for too long
snow and sun
suffocate in turn
leaving yellow stalk grass
husky and mute
the trees hunchbacked
the foxes cunning
This is where the USSR used to do their nuclear testing back in the day. There was a whole deep day of this out of the window and i have to say it is one of the best days i have had on my whole travel so far. On the morning of the 3rd day we woke to see the landscape change in reverse as we went down the other side, a popping in the ears barely perceptible, and the back of the journey broken. It was around this time that i really started chatting to the uzbek with 5 gold teeth and the russian
the russian extra
freckled
fat scars like lips on his cheeks
intense, soft eyes like shifting dunes
rimmed with lichen
he is determined to tell me his story
of why the barely enclosed rage
of a thousand men returned from war
bubbles clear under his skin
through tone and gesture alone
and a single mobile video of his victory
in an army-fatigued bare knucke wrestle
i glimpse and grope
at a shared history:
every other man in our
70km/h train circle of men
wore the uniform of the red army.
a belarussian with bright blue eyes
has lenin's head tattooed on his shoulder
___
Towards the end of the journey I was invited to gamble with cards by said russian. I declined but went to watch. As soon as I sat down with him I realised there was some tension going on- everyone else seemed to have left the vicinity of him and he kept looking down the corridor. Eventually he got up and disappeared, and a moment later two massive Russian police, who i didn't even know where on the train, passed by in the direction he went. I sat for a bit and then went back to my own seat, with my new mama clucking her disapproval... later I found out that everyone thought the russian was trying to cheat me out of money and the police, with no evidence, had tried to get a bribe out of him anyway. At least this is what i think happened from the gesticulations of various people.
______
We reach the border late at night
Around the tran huge banks of lights
Dogs and barbed wire
Glimpse memories of the iron curtain
Inside the carriage
we sit silent and sleep tense
Starched uniforms in control
the secrets of luggage brashly rummaged
My visa is not in order
I don't and won't know why
The old lady pleads my case with conviction
My passport is stamped and we go
____
I have just read this post and i think i have failed to capture the moments of it. Maybe i have partly forgotten it myself. Early in the morning of the 4th day we arrived to another sunny city and everyone got off sharpish without saying goodbye.
we sit
a china teapot
4 tomatoes, 2 fat-fingered cucumbers
and the three of us
the lady, 74, the kindest eyes in town
the man, Anselmo, salting and cutting
a language of 3 common words
cramped and happy in coach 3
____
On the 76 hour train ride from Moscow to Almaty, capital of Kazakhstan, I experienced a little of what train-hoppers used to tell me about in America- after the initial day or so time kind of swirls into the swaying of the carriages and ones mind kind of seperates into two- the totally immediate and apparently insignificant (taking out the pips of a pomegranite with a knife one by one) and the totally abstract and memory filled. The two trigger each other off. The middle bit- normal reactions and appetites and logistical worries- seems dulled and inaccessible. Superb.
As described in the previous post, I was sharing an open carriage with around 50 other people, split by little walls with beds attached, with bedding and hot water provided. I got on and offered some peanut brittle around, which was refused by everyone as always seemed to happen, but in the process passed on 2 bits of information implicitly: 1. i don't speak the same language as you 2. i am not a threat and quite messy when I eat. The man across from me, Anselmo (so called not because that was his name, but because he reminded me strongly of the heroic character with the same name from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls), gestured to the crucifix around his neck and that everything we had was to be shared, and proceeded to pull out a flatbread, tomatoes, cucumbers and a film canister filled with salt. The lady sat next to him, who by the end of the journey was scoulding me in Russian like I was her own child, brought out a jar of honey with little bits of lemon in. Bloody genius.
Anselmo was one of those men who have clearly had huge and varied experiences and no doubt their faire share of hard times, but have learnt through them to be totally humble, generous and straight up loving to the people and the world around them, and as a consequence his step was light and his eyes sparkled like a magician in disguise. It is to meet people like him (even if we don't have a shared language- if we did this blog post would be much longer for sure) that I travel.
Through silent observation, shared food and tea and us talking to each other in languages that made no sense to the other but were significant anyway, and the fact that the whole situation was pretty unique anyway, we created an atmosphere that i can't in any way convey here in words but that was totally magic. Summed up in our silent, sunset mind-reading tea ceremonies.
The rest of the carriages were dominated by young families and males who I can only guess were either businessmen or migrant workers, or both. We communed in the smoking end of the carriage and on the regular and long platform stops. These were highlights too- each few hundred miles a new and more elaborate collection of food hawkers- platform goddesses with boiled eggs in their arms and chilrden at their ankles.
A myriad of gastronomic delights. Breads stuffed with minced lamb, steamed dumplings with carrot and spring onion, cartloads of melons big as fat babies, huge dried fish, paper cup-fulls of sunflower seeds that left their mark on the carriage floor... and at stops further east the saliva-inducing smell of lamb being roasted over charcoal... and as we travelled east the faces of the hawkers were slightly different, and I couldn't tell you the point at which everyone suddenly looked a lot like my reflection in the mirror but it happened... or was that a dream?
The scenery also kept slowly melting into itself- first forest, then low hills, then a slow but sure decrease of vegetation from trees to bushes to slow-waving straw-coloured grasslands, to tiny bushes clinging to the now yellow soil, to the cracked and moon-like landscape of the roof of the Kazakh steppe; the huge expanse of land that still sustains only the odd herder and contrasts with a white to azure sky that picks little holes in the mind if you look at it for too long
snow and sun
suffocate in turn
leaving yellow stalk grass
husky and mute
the trees hunchbacked
the foxes cunning
This is where the USSR used to do their nuclear testing back in the day. There was a whole deep day of this out of the window and i have to say it is one of the best days i have had on my whole travel so far. On the morning of the 3rd day we woke to see the landscape change in reverse as we went down the other side, a popping in the ears barely perceptible, and the back of the journey broken. It was around this time that i really started chatting to the uzbek with 5 gold teeth and the russian
the russian extra
freckled
fat scars like lips on his cheeks
intense, soft eyes like shifting dunes
rimmed with lichen
he is determined to tell me his story
of why the barely enclosed rage
of a thousand men returned from war
bubbles clear under his skin
through tone and gesture alone
and a single mobile video of his victory
in an army-fatigued bare knucke wrestle
i glimpse and grope
at a shared history:
every other man in our
70km/h train circle of men
wore the uniform of the red army.
a belarussian with bright blue eyes
has lenin's head tattooed on his shoulder
___
Towards the end of the journey I was invited to gamble with cards by said russian. I declined but went to watch. As soon as I sat down with him I realised there was some tension going on- everyone else seemed to have left the vicinity of him and he kept looking down the corridor. Eventually he got up and disappeared, and a moment later two massive Russian police, who i didn't even know where on the train, passed by in the direction he went. I sat for a bit and then went back to my own seat, with my new mama clucking her disapproval... later I found out that everyone thought the russian was trying to cheat me out of money and the police, with no evidence, had tried to get a bribe out of him anyway. At least this is what i think happened from the gesticulations of various people.
______
We reach the border late at night
Around the tran huge banks of lights
Dogs and barbed wire
Glimpse memories of the iron curtain
Inside the carriage
we sit silent and sleep tense
Starched uniforms in control
the secrets of luggage brashly rummaged
My visa is not in order
I don't and won't know why
The old lady pleads my case with conviction
My passport is stamped and we go
____
I have just read this post and i think i have failed to capture the moments of it. Maybe i have partly forgotten it myself. Early in the morning of the 4th day we arrived to another sunny city and everyone got off sharpish without saying goodbye.
Sunday, November 07, 2010
Moscow
In all honesty I could not remember a single thing about the train from Riga to Moscow, except that we arrived at the border at 2130 on the day before my Russian visa started, and that it was left to my fellow passengers to argue fervently on my behalf until the robust female Russian border guard sighed and stamped my passport and people mumbled receptive acknowledgements when I grinned and mumbled a thanks (the border people were still nearby) to the general company.
Fortunately I wrote some stuff down and reading it back now after spending a total of 220 hours on trains as far west as riga and as far east as shanghai, i can say that what i wrote contained themes that echoed along the desolate expanses and uncountable scrag-ends of cities (coming into the outskirts of a city on a train is sort of like sneaking up behind it when it hasn't got it's makeup on) out of the window, and the cosy and time-paused warmth of the carriages.
The first was the physicality of the train itself. The 'Moskva Express' was a huge hulk, much wider and higher than British trains and with a little step ladder to get into the carriages, which even the most dainty of local old ladies swung up neatly. Each of the 'hard sleeper' carriages was split into open compartments containing 6 beds in sets of two across three sides, with the top bunk folding down during the day and the bottom one being the seating. At the end of each carriage was a coal-fired boiling water dispenser, a list of times of station stops and a little room where a conductor sat, responsible for the safety and happiness of his carriage. The train tickets are much cheaper than planes (maybe 1/3 of the price) but take much longer, so as a consequence the carriage is made up of the type of people who know the value of things, young and old, that I find are by far the most wise and interesting.
The train rolls on, and to my left the gathering darkness of the forest outside the window slowing brings into focus the reflection of f an old man with eyes like he has been in Douglas Adams' Total Pespective Vortex. Opposite and above is curled a woman of about 50-60, who earlier gave me a gherkin and whose wrinkles are squashed into a spiders web by the hand supporting her head. In the middle of the night I awake badly needing a wee as the train slows into a station. I arrive at the toilet just as the conductor locks the toilet (so no-one shits down onto the tracks in the station) and engages me in a discussion of the premier league, , but now i REALLY need a wee in an irrational way that happens in the middle of the night when you stand up quickly and I tell him as much, but as there is a copper on the platform I cant piss under the train and then I resolve to piss in a ... well to cut a long story short i ending up pissing all over my pants and the floor of the guard's washroom and thank the god of chamberpots that it is the middle of the night and i can waddle my steamy crotch back to the triage area of my bed without the whole carriage thinking that i was incontinent.
I arrived in the sunshine at Moscow's Leningradski station at 7am two days later. After getting completely lost, having de ja vue (all the major stations look EXACTLY the same and i kept finding them and thinking i had been there already) and stomping round the wide and traffic-filled streets of Moscow all day, I met my couchsurfing host Dima at the end of a Metro line at which a Kyrgyzstan national thought that I was his countryman. This mistake potentially explained a lot- people had been rude to me all day (pushing me out of the way on the metro, closing the metro ticket counter in my face when I finally got to the front of the queue) and Russians- especially in Moscow- are known for their dislike of people from the further reaches of the former USSR. Something akin to Mexicans in america. I didn't know whether to feel better for this revelation or worse.
Dima and Roman (Dima's flatmate who had just hitchiked to massive distance to the Ukraine and back, only spending 4 hours in the Ukraine, just for kicks) were perfect hosts, showing me the sights (we sneaked into a beautiful piano lesson in the Moscow conservetoire until we were noticed and kicked out). They lived in an old soviet apartment block and ate the suitably russian meal of smoked mackeral and boiled potatos on my first night. On the second night I saw the couchsurfing 'community' in action, going to a 'Banya', like a Turkish bath with sauna, steam room and ritual flogging with hot leaves. It was very interesting, a members of the small, young, middle classes of Moscow with expats, students and one other surfer, a french girl from Brittany on her way to Mongolia. Later Dima showed me some totally hilarious videos of Boris Yeltsin behaving like a drunk teenager on youtube- they were well worth looking at and made me think he was probably the greatest ever russian leader.
Moscow is certainly beautiful in the extreme- huge, historical and supremely detailed buildings, leafy parks with statues, metro stations with chandaliers on the ceiling, oil paintings on the walls and gravestone-sized slabs of marble on the floors. This, and my couchsurfing hosts, are about all I found positive in this imposing city. The people on the whole were unresponsive to my parkbench greetings. Prices were comparable to London and all the public toilets cost the equivalent of 50p. People were dressed immaculately and showed the wealth they had, or were in the throes of base poverty and sleeping on the metro circle line. Money was clearly the dominent father, son and holy spirit. Fat men dressed as Lenin and Stalin charged 50 roubles for a photo with them, competing with a monkey dressed as a baby (same price) and every multinational food outlet you could imagine for the tourist dollar. Russian police imposed huge on the spot fines for visa irregularities that had no basis in fact. The Courgettes were pumped with so much water to make them bigger that my 8-egg omelette i made for the next train ride didn't stick together.
But no mind- i scooped it dripping into a cut off yoghurt container and got on a train that would take me the longest distance yet- over 3000km and 72 hours over the Kazakh steppe to Almaty.
Fortunately I wrote some stuff down and reading it back now after spending a total of 220 hours on trains as far west as riga and as far east as shanghai, i can say that what i wrote contained themes that echoed along the desolate expanses and uncountable scrag-ends of cities (coming into the outskirts of a city on a train is sort of like sneaking up behind it when it hasn't got it's makeup on) out of the window, and the cosy and time-paused warmth of the carriages.
The first was the physicality of the train itself. The 'Moskva Express' was a huge hulk, much wider and higher than British trains and with a little step ladder to get into the carriages, which even the most dainty of local old ladies swung up neatly. Each of the 'hard sleeper' carriages was split into open compartments containing 6 beds in sets of two across three sides, with the top bunk folding down during the day and the bottom one being the seating. At the end of each carriage was a coal-fired boiling water dispenser, a list of times of station stops and a little room where a conductor sat, responsible for the safety and happiness of his carriage. The train tickets are much cheaper than planes (maybe 1/3 of the price) but take much longer, so as a consequence the carriage is made up of the type of people who know the value of things, young and old, that I find are by far the most wise and interesting.
The train rolls on, and to my left the gathering darkness of the forest outside the window slowing brings into focus the reflection of f an old man with eyes like he has been in Douglas Adams' Total Pespective Vortex. Opposite and above is curled a woman of about 50-60, who earlier gave me a gherkin and whose wrinkles are squashed into a spiders web by the hand supporting her head. In the middle of the night I awake badly needing a wee as the train slows into a station. I arrive at the toilet just as the conductor locks the toilet (so no-one shits down onto the tracks in the station) and engages me in a discussion of the premier league, , but now i REALLY need a wee in an irrational way that happens in the middle of the night when you stand up quickly and I tell him as much, but as there is a copper on the platform I cant piss under the train and then I resolve to piss in a ... well to cut a long story short i ending up pissing all over my pants and the floor of the guard's washroom and thank the god of chamberpots that it is the middle of the night and i can waddle my steamy crotch back to the triage area of my bed without the whole carriage thinking that i was incontinent.
I arrived in the sunshine at Moscow's Leningradski station at 7am two days later. After getting completely lost, having de ja vue (all the major stations look EXACTLY the same and i kept finding them and thinking i had been there already) and stomping round the wide and traffic-filled streets of Moscow all day, I met my couchsurfing host Dima at the end of a Metro line at which a Kyrgyzstan national thought that I was his countryman. This mistake potentially explained a lot- people had been rude to me all day (pushing me out of the way on the metro, closing the metro ticket counter in my face when I finally got to the front of the queue) and Russians- especially in Moscow- are known for their dislike of people from the further reaches of the former USSR. Something akin to Mexicans in america. I didn't know whether to feel better for this revelation or worse.
Dima and Roman (Dima's flatmate who had just hitchiked to massive distance to the Ukraine and back, only spending 4 hours in the Ukraine, just for kicks) were perfect hosts, showing me the sights (we sneaked into a beautiful piano lesson in the Moscow conservetoire until we were noticed and kicked out). They lived in an old soviet apartment block and ate the suitably russian meal of smoked mackeral and boiled potatos on my first night. On the second night I saw the couchsurfing 'community' in action, going to a 'Banya', like a Turkish bath with sauna, steam room and ritual flogging with hot leaves. It was very interesting, a members of the small, young, middle classes of Moscow with expats, students and one other surfer, a french girl from Brittany on her way to Mongolia. Later Dima showed me some totally hilarious videos of Boris Yeltsin behaving like a drunk teenager on youtube- they were well worth looking at and made me think he was probably the greatest ever russian leader.
Moscow is certainly beautiful in the extreme- huge, historical and supremely detailed buildings, leafy parks with statues, metro stations with chandaliers on the ceiling, oil paintings on the walls and gravestone-sized slabs of marble on the floors. This, and my couchsurfing hosts, are about all I found positive in this imposing city. The people on the whole were unresponsive to my parkbench greetings. Prices were comparable to London and all the public toilets cost the equivalent of 50p. People were dressed immaculately and showed the wealth they had, or were in the throes of base poverty and sleeping on the metro circle line. Money was clearly the dominent father, son and holy spirit. Fat men dressed as Lenin and Stalin charged 50 roubles for a photo with them, competing with a monkey dressed as a baby (same price) and every multinational food outlet you could imagine for the tourist dollar. Russian police imposed huge on the spot fines for visa irregularities that had no basis in fact. The Courgettes were pumped with so much water to make them bigger that my 8-egg omelette i made for the next train ride didn't stick together.
But no mind- i scooped it dripping into a cut off yoghurt container and got on a train that would take me the longest distance yet- over 3000km and 72 hours over the Kazakh steppe to Almaty.
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