To Russia with love

This is the third little blog about Russia. I remember two other trips one involved St Petersburgh and the other Nizhny Novgorod…don’t you just love that name? St Petersburgh was beautiful. Laid out, as you probably know in Europeon style and with some beautiful original masterpieces in the art galleries etc. I rmeber standing trasnfixed by a Monet for ages. There was plenty to do in our time off. Not that we had much.

I think it was in St Petersburgh where we were staying in a modern old communist style hotel. Quite an odd place in that each floor seemed to have a small cafe/bar type place where you were supposed to take your breakfast. I definitely had my own room and I had my usual set of phone calls that I used to get to my Hotel Rooms in Russia. The one’s where you are offered a ‘beautiful Russian lady’ for your companion. This was usually said before I spoke and then they realised that ‘Jo’ was a woman. I’ve noticed across Europe that not many other countries reduce Joanne, Joanna or in my case Jo-Anne to Jo. Jo is most definitely seen as a male name. Anyway, those phone calls always made me laugh and I always appologised to Mark assuming he’d have had the same offers but was lumbered with me for the evening.

Before we went out we decided we wanted a beer. Off to the little cafe/bar we went and were provided with a nice bottle each of czech bud. The original recipe by all accounts. We sat down and the only other person in there was a guy with very blood shot eyes. He was up for a chat and he turned out to be Swedish. He said that he quite often flew in for the weekend as th flights were cheap and so was the alcohol. He was drinking tumblers…yes tumblers, probably not quite half a pint, of vodka. No wonder his eyes were red and he was still there three hours later when we came back from  our meal.

It did strike me as rather sad that you could be so desparate for cheap booze that you’d fly into a beautiful city like St Petersburgh and barely move from the hotel. Just sit there and drink yourself stupid.

I was in our drinks cupbaord, here at home, the day before yesterday looking for Vermouth for a Nigel Slater recipe. Could I find any? No. What I did find was three bottles of unopened vodka. Neither of us drink vodka although I might turn my hand to the odd cocktail or two now I know it’s there. Does make ou wondewr how or why we acquired it.

So Mark and I went out. On another occasion we’d decided to go for a beer on the way home thinking that a city bar would be a lot more cheery than the bleery eyed drinkers bar in the hotel. We found one down some basement steps.

There weren’t many in and so we sat down with our beers. In the next few minutes a keyboard was set up and a guy started playing with a woman singing some ‘western’ hits in English and some Russian songs. I found it very funny because the English sort of resembled what it was supposed to be but was more a ‘sound-a-like-‘ version of words that really didn’t have any meaning as they were sung at all. People, the few that were there, were up and dancing and it was only 6pm. I can’t remember if I joined in but I do remember smiling alot.

It reminds me of a time when a Russian dance troup were at a Europeon festval somewhere. I think it was Austria and Token Women may have been playing. They wanted everyone on the bill to play together (generally most musicians I know’s nightmare) and the only think we found we had in common was ‘Those were the days my friend’ as the melody turned out to be a Russian Folk song originally. No wonder it’s so catchy.

Then there was Nizhny. We had a to get a train. This time I was travelling with two Marks. The one I normally worked with and the Amercian mentioned in previous blog who liked to eat his puddings first and wore a ring on his thumb.

This was such a memorable trip because it involved a train ride through Russia overnight. Nizhny Novgorod is 400 miles East of Moscow where the Oka river empties into the Volga. The train journey made me feel like I was in some kind of movey. Our compartment had a guard at the door in a red coat with a very serious expression on his face.. We were ‘welcomed’ on board and spent the first half of the night playing cards to gas lamps. I have longed to remember that card game because it was brillaint but I can’t. I know it was quite complicated, involved a lot of strategic thinking and was captivating. We then slept on our bunks rolling about to the trains motion and were woken in the morning to tea from a samovar.

What I hadn’t realised was that Russian crosses time zones. I had naively assumed that the general principle was one country, one time zone. I now know differently. adjust your watches and bed times accordingly. We had to get up for our training days a lot earlier I remember.

Nizhny was under snow and there in the streets were sleighs, yes, horse drawn sleighs with people wrapped up in furs with their hands in muffs etc. Bloody freezing but magical to see. The other thing that was amazing was the Volga was frozen. It freezes so deeply and so solidly that you can ride a sleigh, car, lorry across or walk or whatever. I always wondered at what point you knew not to. The town also had those magical icicles. There had been plenty in Moscow. So long and speer like that you were terrfiied of walking underneath but had little choice. I wonder what the stats are on ‘speered by icicle. Let’s just say that in March 2010 St Petersburgh’s thaw killed five and injured 150 from falling icicles and that actually made the British papers. I assume they knock them off where they can but sometimes you can’t preveent those accidents and the snow can be so deep and driven that bodies are sometimes found frozen underneath.

I found Russia, interesting and magical in parts. Disturbing also in it’s race to embrace wetern culture making millionaires over night and leaving some working three jobs a day to afford bread and other basics.

So those are the Russian cronicles. More soon about something else.