Nihon News Part XIII
The Long Way Home
Again I'm skipping a part, omitting my travels in Japan between the end
of my internship and the end of my visa, which easily furnish enough
material for a separate letter. This last part begins with my boarding
the night bus in Tokyo on April 13, 2002, and ends with my arrival in
Switzerland, where I'm writing you from.
I felt the first pangs of farewell as the bus pulled out of Tokyo Station
and took to the expressway, carrying me through the Tokyo lights and past
the lively Shibuya train station, which from four or five stories above
ground seemed strangely remote and unreal. For the first time, I could
see what some people mean when they liken Tokyo to Blade Runner, and it
felt odd that the city would reveal this one facet just as I was leaving.
It had turned into a strange world before I had even left it.
When in Shimonoseki I got on board the Orient Ferry liner, the Utopia 3,
a paint-reinforced steel construction, only eleven other passengers
accompanied me, three of which were Japanese. With these, and with a
Chinese student who was returning from a year abroad, I could communicate
some. All three Japanese were avid China travellers: the middle-aged guy
intended to study the language for a year, the retiree gave vague hints
about progressing west all the way to Pakistan, and the young woman from
the Nippon Steel Oita works hoped to visit Xian's rural surroundings.
Before, I'd thought I'd chosen the leisurely way home, but listening to
these people I felt like a fast food tourist.
Later I began to feel queasy despite the rather calm seas, and both men
told me to drink beer, insisting one could never be both drunk and
boat-drunk. (Boat-drunk is the literal translation of the Japanese word
for sea-sick.) I couldn't see the point of exchanging one nauseated
stupor for another and successfully tried my preferred remedy, sleep.
Unfortunately, it stopped working once I got up for breakfast, and after
making the horrible mistake of eating the pickled vegetables I had to
hurry outside for fresh air or else. Things started looking up after
that: the sea calmed down more, staying calm even during the thunderstorm
that night, when sheets of lightning revealed the empty monochrome
vastness surrounding our dinky island of light, light so feeble it could
not even bring out features other than spray and foam on the surface of
the sea.
The Qingdao harbor was geared towards freight, not passengers, and only
after a bumpy ride in a guarded bus past open storage and workers wearing
bamboo helmets did we arrive at the customs hall. Unlike its unassuming
exterior, its insides possessed a certain grandeur, despite the low
lighting and the greenish-blue tiles. The customs officials wore dull
green uniforms, clean and ironed, but threadbare and a little frayed at
the cuffs. I passed customs quickly, but had a harder time getting to
the travel agency where I picked up my ticket to Beijing. From there, I
proceeded to the Bank of China, allegedly the only bank to change foreign
currencies into Chinese yuan, or kwai, as the Chinese call them.
Unfortunately, I wanted to change a 2000-yen bill as well, which the
teller refused to accept, claiming those bills were no good in China, so,
feigning ignorance, I took that bill to the Merchant Bank of China, which
not only accepted it without a hitch but also gave me a better rate.
Instead of sitting idle, I headed for the Roman Catholic church German
friars had built nearly seventy years ago. Neither the simple exterior
nor the cheesy murals inside impressed me much, but the plaques for
tourists surprised me. These plaques, explaining the person and nature
of Jesus Christ inside a church, reminded me of how little East Asians
know of Christianity, and conversely, how little we know of their beliefs
and culture.
Rather than making a beeline for the next attraction - the aquarium, the
underground museum, or one of the parks - I went shopping and sat for a
while in front of the train station. There, I got into a very basic
conversation with a man from Beijing without ever speaking a word: we
merely traded scraps of paper with Chinese characters. Here I first
experienced the real advantage of a script made up of ideograms, as it
enables communication even if neither person speaks the other's language.
I started to walk toward the waterfront, but bumped into the young
Japanese woman from my ship. She did not yet have a ticket for Xian, and
the travel agent had told her to check back at five to see if she could
leave that evening, so we waited in a fast food joint and chatted until
then. After she had picked up her ticket, we decided to eat in one of
the little roadside seafood shops where you choose your food out of the
containers displayed on the sidewalk, and the owner prepares it for you,
cheap and fresh and, if you choose wisely, tasty. At least you don't
shrivel up if you don't choose wisely.
The train for Beijing left on time, and I squeezed myself into the bottom
bunk, where I fell asleep as soon as the lights went off. I woke up to
flat, treeless landscapes zipping by my window, punctuated by brick
houses and open waste dumps. When I arrived in Beijing, street vendors
kept trying to sell me city maps and to guide me to hotels. I declined,
expecting to meet my friend Lenny as soon as I had left the station, but
after a wait of twenty minutes I grew suspicious, and soon realized that
I had not arrived at the West Station, as my travel agency had told me,
but was standing outside the Central Station. I spotted a little bus
with a sign saying "Beijing West Station" and boarded it. It waited
until all seats were taken and then started weaving its way through the
chaotic Beijing traffic, but by the time I arrived at my destination,
Lenny was nowhere to be seen, and nobody answered when I called his
number, so I ate a lunch of peanuts and coke to pass time and called him
again. This time he answered, and I found out he had taken a taxi to the
Central Station about the same time I had boarded my bus. He told me to
take a taxi to the Xijiao hotel, where he'd wait for me, but I made the
mistake of taking a taxi whose driver accosted me with a "taxi, taxi" and
took me to the Xinqiao hotel, without even bothering to run his meter.
He insisted it was the right place ("Xinqiao, no problem, oggey, no
problem") and demanded eighty kwai, which I knew was too much. Because
he held my travel bag, I couldn't very well refuse payment without
running the risk of losing my bag, but I only handed him two twenties,
which fooled him long enough to give me my bag. After counting, he got
upset, but I refused to pay more, and after initially lowering his demand
to sixty, then fifty, he cursed and drove off. (I later figured out that
even forty kwai had been too much for the distance he'd taken me.) With
the help of the Xinqiao hotel staff I got a taxi that took me to the
right place, and boy, was I ever glad to see Lenny!
And what a guide I had in Lenny. Because he knows some Chinese, he knew
which bus or subway to take to get to the Summer Palace or Tiananmen
Square, and I shudder to think how much time and money I would have
wasted on taxis, for Beijing is a sprawling city. We did the expected:
took our pictures in front of the enormous Mao portrait on the Tiananmen,
strolled through the forbidden city (where I found it childishly
gratifying to eavesdrop on a Japanese tour group), paid a rather brief
visit to the Summer Palace on a clear but muggy day that made me feel
queasy on the bouncy bus ride back, and went out for Peking duck.
(Incidentally, the municipal basketball team are the "Beijing Ducks."
And I used to think "Fighting Gobblers" sounded underwhelming...)
We bucked tradition by not visiting the Great Wall, though, and cycling
instead to the Sacred Way and the Ming Tombs together with five of
Lenny's classmates. None of us had done this before, and before long we
found ourselves on the wrong side of a road with four lanes of steady
traffic going either way. We did what I would never do in Switzerland or
Japan but didn't consider twice in Beijing: we pushed our bikes across
the road one or two lanes at a time, rotating the bikes parallel to the
road every time we paused between lanes to let the traffic surge around
us.
Getting to our destination took longer than expected, because Korean girl
#1 (Jian Xian Zhou, but I never managed to remember the names of the two
Korean girls and had Lenny write them down for me later) fell and
bloodied her knee, and my front tire went flat. Fortunately, bicycle
repairmen who'll fix anything for a song dot the roads in China, so I
didn't have to torture my borrowed bicycle for long. Having given the
overpriced restaurants near the Sacred Way the slip, we ate bouza, little
dumplings filled with either meat or greens, at a dirt cheap roadside
vendor's, who also gave us a free sample of some dessert. Everyone took
turns trying it and spitting it out because it tasted burnt.
When I saw the Sacred Way, I knew I'd seen pictures before of this long
stone road and its large guardian statues standing in regular intervals
on either side with willows drooping above them. The overcast skies fit
the mood of the place, giving these morbid stony beasts and officials the
gravity they deserved. Some of us detracted from this gravity by
ignoring the signs pleading with visitors to respect and preserve the
cultural heritage; coming from Switzerland via Japan I simply couldn't
climb on the statues, even though it looked like fun.
The closest tomb lay about four miles from the Sacred Way. By the time I
arrived there, pain shot through my left knee with every pedal stroke,
and I was glad to do some walking again. We had chosen to visit the
Changling Emperor's tomb, because a poster at the Sacred Way had
described it as the largest and most impressive, and we assumed that
meant it boasted the most extensive tunnel system. You can imagine our
disappointment in finding that all of the tomb was aboveground, and later
learned that only the tomb of the Dingling Emperor (insert your own pun),
which we had no time to visit, had tunnels open to visitors. We went to
retrieve our bikes, and tried to pay the old lady who demanded a fee the
amount an official employee had quoted, but she protested and held a bike
hostage until some locals came and sided with her. Not in a mood for
international incidents, we paid the extra couple kwai. Korean girl #2
(Jiang Su Ying) had declared she was too exhausted to pedal back, and
wanted to hire a ride. Lenny and I joined her - I because of my knee and
Lenny because I needed an interpreter - and we succeeded in hiring a
minivan to take us back. It was the Chinese copy of the little Suzuki
Carry vans that are half as wide as they are high (banned from Beijing
taxi service for aesthetic reasons), but because the benches were no
longer fastened to the floorboards we managed to fit in three bikes and
three passengers. Thank goodness our driver was adept at avoiding
potholes.
On Sunday I went to the international church with Lenny and his roommate
Gregory. Municipal regulations forbid Chinese nationals from attending
this church, but whether those were intended to keep the Chinese from
getting into Christianity or to prevent the church from being overrun by
Chinese eager to practice English I don't know. After church we went for
curry rice at a Japanese restaurant with two other Americans. The rice
was neither white nor sticky, but at least they brought us a Japanese
menu upon request. We found that of the five guys present three had ties
to Summerville, South Carolina: Ben's aunt lives there, Gregory grew up
there (his father and brother still live there), and most of my American
relatives live there as well. My aunt even taught Gregory in middle
school.
After a rainy Monday which discouraged sightseeing and kept us inside
except to visit the Centre de Formation Franco-Chinois aux Métiers de
l'Energie, located in the Civil Engineering and Architectural University
of Beijing, I packed and headed for the station with Lenny bright and
early Tuesday morning. I regretted having to say good bye so soon, and
for the first of many times felt a pang of homesickness. Eager as I was
to see Mongolia and Russia, I nevertheless started counting down the
nights until I reached home and occasionally wished I had stepped on a
plane in Beijing.
The farther we left Beijing behind, the clearer the air became, and soon
we could see the first mountains in the distance. Kate, the guide of the
Sundowners tour group in the same wagon, who'd taken this train several
times already, alerted everyone to the upcoming crossing of the Great
Wall, which had us snapping pictures like crazy through the grimy windows
of the German-built carriage. At this point the Wall descended into the
valley to cross a river, with fortified towers guarding the road into the
mountains (and, perhaps, the tourist parking lot). The train continued
through the first range and from there through nearly treeless plains,
passing villages of squat brick houses as red as the soil and, once, an
enormous coal power plant. As we moved north, snow appeared on the
ground here and there, and the earth turned a dark brown like that of
moist pine bark. In the valley I saw a convoy of trucks fording a creek;
asphalt was absent in the villages we passed, though the larger towns
usually had a road or two made of concrete blocks. Winter might have
ended in the valleys, but the snow in higher regions had yet to melt, and
most creeks still carried little water in the crumbling ravines they had
carved through the dusty tableland. Near Datong, the Great Wall once
more came into view along a range which drew near us from the north, and
ran parallel to the train line for miles. Though this part had not
benefited from the restauration as had the section we first passed, its
length sufficed to impress me and make me wonder how many man-hours must
have went into it, how many slave laborers must have died for it.
A few hours after Datong, as the sun was setting, the horizon widened and
the train began its crossing of the Gobi desert. We had hardly left human
civilization before nature started invading the train in the form of
desert dust, reducing visibility in the carriage below that in Beijing on
a bad day. The dust didn't make breathing or speaking uncomfortable, but
even so, once the sun had set, most everyone tried to get a little sleep
in anticipation of the late-night passport control awaiting us.
At nine o'clock already the train stopped, and the Chinese border guards
handed us the usual forms. Woe to those who hadn't gone to the toilet,
for it was locked and remained locked for several hours (unless, like
Supergran of the Sundowners group, you had brought a UK gas key). "You
write Chinese very well," the guard returning our passports said - a
handsome reward for memorizing the two characters for Switzerland Gregory
had taught me. We passed over into Mongolia, where Kate managed to
persuade the conductor to let us descend before the carriages were lifted
off the bogies. We watched how the workers towed away the Chinese bogies
and spirited those for the Mongolian tracks in place with a pulley
system, stopping them beneath the carriages with the weight of their
bodies. Once the carriages had been lowered onto the new bogies, we had
to hurry aboard, and the rough shunting resumed as we were maneuvered out
of the shed back onto the main line. There, the passengers who had
gotten off to buy duty-free items (mainly fruit) boarded, and the
Mongolian guards checked our passports. Russell, the tireless talker
with the look of a tousled, ruddy teddy bear with sunglasses and a
paintbrush moustache, had an expired Mongolian visa and had to leave the
train with an imperious Mongolian border guard and a stressed Kate in
order to get an extension, which cost him fifty US dollars and started
him on a new topic of conversation, but other than that, we all crossed
without a hitch and finally got some much-needed sleep.
When I woke, we had approached within view of Ulan Bator, or Ulaan
Baatar, as the locals spell it, a city of 600'000 spreading like a
blanket across the valley and up the greyish brown slopes, which, I was
told, turn juicy green in summer. A representative of Nature Tours
picked me up at the station and drove me to my host family, an elderly
couple named Galia and Arvii. No sooner had I arrived that Mrs Galia
served bread and tea, beautiful beige bread that gladdened my heart, and
my elation made perfect sense to Mrs Galia once I had told her I came
from the east. This solid, crusty bread was both a pleasure to my palate
and a sign I was nearing home.
I left their apartment in the early afternoon to explore the city on
foot. Mrs Galia had given me a rough map of downtown Ulaan Baatar, and I
intended to head for a bank in order to change some dollars into tögrög,
but first I stopped at the State Department Store, where I browsed among
the souvenirs. My watch showed nearly four o'clock when I arrived at the
bank, and to my surprise the bank had already closed at three thirty! I
hurried to the next one, breathed a premature sigh of relief when I saw
it was open until four o'clock - but the doors were already locked. Back
at the department store the clerk who had changed my kwai into tögrög had
left her booth, and so I was left with what little cash my Chinese money
had netted and the wan hope that my MasterCard might come to the rescue.
I had a Mongolian Pizza for dinner (mutton and cheese) and made the
mistake of ordering water, which in Mongolia means bottled water, not tap
water, and cost nearly as much as the pizza, bringing the total bill to
more than what I had in cash. The restaurant accepted MasterCard - I had
checked before entering - but their card reader didn't accept mine, and I
ended up paying in dollars at a preposterous exchange rate. Flush with
tögrög from the change they gave me, I went to the nearby internet cafe
to let my family know I had made it to Ulaan Baatar. Just before
leaving, I noticed something odd about their clock. A quick glance at my
wristwatch revealed the mystery: Mongolia was on daylight saving time.
With a sigh, I set my watch. Mrs Galia's bread had cheered me, but it
was a mere symbol. My watch seemed much more real - and it showed Tokyo
time.
The next day was unusually warm, ideal for a stroll through the
traditional quarter. Its nomadic settlement of round yurts stood
immediately next to tall, rectangular apartment blocks. I took only a
picture or two and left without entering the settlement proper, because I
felt I was already invading their privacy. On the way to the city center
I bought commemorative stamps of no postal value off a vagrant with a bad
fever sore; while I was negotiating the price a Mongolian in neat
business attire approached and shoved the hapless vendor away, angry with
him for having accosted me. Since I was interested in those stamps, I had
to wait for the younger man's zeal to wear off. At the State Department
Store supermarket I bought lunch and some provisions, and checked the
cosmetics shelf to confirm that they were indeed selling M-Budget
shampoo, as Mark, the Swiss guy from Pfeffingen who had also spent the
last night at Mrs Galia's, had told me. If that misdirected stock of
shampoo and the many ethnic restaurants suggested Ulaan Baatar had caught
up with globalization after many years of self-imposed communist
isolation, the begging children and shoe-shine men peopling the dusty
Peace Avenue and the old Sandoz logo atop a building, complete with the
green cartoon dinosaur, indicated otherwise. I found further proof of
Mongolian poverty at the Natural History Museum. Some of the stuffed
animals showed signs of popped seams, and I dare not imagine what defects
those in the darkened rooms that I only saw in the beam of my flashlight
might have revealed upon closer inspection. (I used my flashlight after
observing the Mongolian guide of a Japanese tour group I'd been
eavesdropping on using hers.) Even highlights like dinosaur nests and
dinosaur skeletons found in the Mongolian desert were displayed in halls
that needed renovation. What a shame to see such a great exhibition in
such straits!
That night, I awoke at midnight and dashed to the toilet. It was the
beginning of the runs that only stopped after ingesting an inhumane
amount of pills and waiting a full twelve hours. Mrs Galia cared for me,
serving me black tea and toast and contributing the bulk of said pills
(ugol aktivirovanniy and Talazol). She theorized that my upset stomach
came from the contrast between drinking yoghurt-like tarag in the morning
and eating mutton stew in the evening. I would have expected the
horrible eating habits of student life to have made my stomach immune to
contrasts, but I couldn't offer a better explanation either. I knew I
was empty when the coal tablets came out the other end, finely pureed,
which gave me the courage to go out in the early afternoon and buy a few
travel necessities; but I forgot toilet paper and had to hope the roll
Russell had given me on the trip up from Beijing would suffice despite my
current state. I had neglected the constipative effects of train travel.
My bowels moved less than a cat in the sun, perhaps in part because I
sustained myself on a cautious diet of soup, bread, and water all the way
to Irkutsk.
The Sundowners group again occupied seats in the same carriage, so I
joined their group for conversation. Russell was in the thick of it,
asking another Australian if he agreed the Mongolian women were
exceptionally beautiful. John said he only had eyes for his wife - she
was in earshot - closing that subject, and when our group, which
contained a few veterans, found out he had just left the Navy, the
conversation turned to glorious ANZAC deeds past and present. Someone
asked about the Swiss army, but before I could answer, Russell said:
"You've got airports in your mountains!"
Now I know we keep planes in mountains and bunkers and have airstrips on
alpine slopes, but I doubt even Swiss pilots would take off out of a
tunnel, an idea that strikes me as patently stupid - to say nothing of
trying to land into a tunnel. So I tried to reply without being
confrontational: "Well, I'm not quite sure, but..."
"You've got 'em," Russell broke in, "I know. I've been to your country
more often than you have. You're driving your bus through that valley,
and suddenly one of those bastards shoots out of a mountain."
I was too surprised to do anything but laugh; most of the Sundowners
folks reacted in disbelief, especially since Russell had just referred to
Dorothy, who has Polish ancestry, as "Polski with Knife." Still, nobody
disliked him. He had a good heart and the unpolished charm of an
overgrown kid. He was arouond fifty, single again, and had decided to
begin traveling the world again when two of his friends had suddenly
died. In earlier years, he had been a bus driver all over Eurasia, and
many of his stories came from those experiences, as did the foresight to
bring dunny paper and plenty of dollars in cash.
Irkutsk was cold compared to Ulaan Baatar, and the wind turned the
raindrops into pinpricks. I know because I waited for the taxi bus for
at least an hour until I realized the vans followed a circular route and
would never return on my side of the road. Downtown, on another quest
for a bank, I happened upon the Kanazawa road, where a sculpture and a
replica of the Kenrokuen Kotobashi lantern commemorated Irkutsk's sister
city. Shivering, but determined to find the obelisk marking the
centennial of the transsiberian railroad, I walked along the Angara, the
river that drains Lake Baikal and receives the waters of the smaller
Irkut north of the town center. The obelisk was nothing special, not
worth braving the wind, boring compared to Yuri Gagarin's oversized head
that looked like the other half of the headless rider. Before returning
home, I scouted out the bus terminal and bought food, pleased at how
rudiment after rudiment of Russian dripped from my vast vat of forgotten
knowledge back into my active memory.
Ten more nights.
The next morning I boarded the bus for Listvyanka on the shore of Lake
Baikal. The road out there ran straight most of the way, up and down
rolling hills of silver birch, the rattling bus, which had seen service
in Germany in a previous life, struggling up the incline and hurtling
down the other side to gain momentum for the next ascent. Finally, after
an hour and a half, Listvyanka: a town of perhaps three dozen wooden
houses, a bar or two, and a general store, clustered around a harbor
where ships stood surrounded by ice.
I left the town and hiked out toward the lake, first along the road,
which curved away from the Angara to the Baikal shore. When it lead away
from the lake, I clambered down the embankment and made my way along the
rocks and gravel that lined the water. On the south side of the lake I
could make out snow-capped mountains, and in the middle ice floes floated
westward. I wanted to see more of the lake, so I climbed up the second
hill beyond Listvyanka. Brownish-orange butterflies with a white trim
flitted across my path between birches and pines, a kite circled
overhead, and occasionally a cawing crow broke the silence. Halfway up I
came upon a structure that looked like a dutch windmill without the
vanes, gleaming white with vertical ribs, which upon closer inspection
turned out to be an observatory. Two more stood higher up, the last
accessible via an artificial ridge and guarded by a loud but chained
German Shepherd. I had a broad view from the top, but that didn't change
what I saw: a body of water, partially frozen over, bordered by white,
rugged mountains on the far side. Kate had passed around a Russian
publication that proclaimed Lake Baikal the jewel of creation, more
beautiful even than the award-winning Norwegian fyords, but it looked
oddly familiar to someone who had studied in Lausanne. Lake? Check.
Mountains? Check. Granted, Baikal water is clearer and Lake Geneva
doesn't freeze over, but from atop a hill they look quite alike. I
thought I'd be impressed by the size of Lake Baikal, which covers an area
larger than three quarters of Switzerland, but if you can't see the end
of something, anything beyond what you can see will fail to impress you.
I believe the expectations I had entertained kept me from appreciating
the austere beauty of Lake Baikal as much as I could have. I did enjoy
the silence and seclusion, but the bileful dog kept disrupting the
former, so I ambled back down. In Listvyanka, I ate bread and yoghurt,
the latter with my army knife for want of a spoon, bought a souvenir at
one of the stands that had sprouted up since morning, and then ate
grilled omul, an indigenous fish Mark had recommended. Not wanting to
miss the bus back to Irkutsk, I gave up the limnological museum, and
instead bought ice cream in one of the bars to pass time - fie on
contrasts!
Emboldened by an uneventful night, I piled on the contrasts the next day
when I had a Serbian bean dish at the Cafe Belgrad, a locale Sonya had
recommended. For over two hours Sonya had shown me around Irkutsk,
explaining the churches, the convent in the gingerbread-house Cathedral
of the Apparition of Our Lord, the eternal flame guarded by five
uniformed children more skilled at marching in time than my boot camp
unit, guiding me through the university, around the town center with the
intricate carved trims on its houses, and to the museum of local history;
then she had to leave to babysit for family friends. I almost didn't get
to meet Sonya at all, because whenever I called the number she had given
me, she wasn't in, and the other members of her family spoke English as
well as I speak Russian. (How I got in touch with Sonya in the first
place requires a long explanation if you don't know IFES, the
International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, and none at all if you
do.) Sonya speaks excellent English, and her explanations fleshed out
Irkutsk with much more history and personality than I could have ever
discovered on my own. The Lenin monument, for instance, stands on the
old site of a Lutheran church torn down by communists, the paved
footpaths around it running along the old foundations: Irkutsk just
lately decided to return the plot to the Lutheran Church and move the
statue. To me this would look like Russia is changing, but Sonya put a
damper on any such optimism by asserting that Russia has never truly
outgrown monarchy: When Vladimir ousted Nicholas II, he changed the name
but not the power of his position, and even today's Russians treat his
eigth successor, again Vladimir, with a reverence and loyalty reminiscent
of that due to a king.
Those thoughts came back to haunt me when I saw Russian villages on my
three-day trip to Moscow. These small and ordered agglomerations of
variations on the simple theme of a wooden house could not hide their
poverty, and only rarely did I see signs of life in the dirt roads or the
vegetable plots adjacent to every house. I never saw a car, and I could
not say with certainty whether a certain village had telephones or
running water. I wondered what gave these peasants the strength to
persevere: complacent loyalty, lower expectations, or, as rumor had it,
vodka.
There was certainly no shortage of the latter on my train. After the
young lady with her feline Yoda of a Sphinx cat left in Krasnoyarsk, the
conductor, Natasha, had a man sleep off the effects of what smelled like
rancid cologne on the free cot. Luckily, he left in Novosibirsk, and
Sergey, an army lieutenant on leave making his way home to Kiev, joined
us instead. Nobody on the whole train spoke more than a few snatches of
English, which led to many stunted conversations shaped more by the props
we had than by what we would have liked to discuss. Sasha, a twenty-one
year old with a Chechnya Special Forces tattoo on his right arm,
introduced me to "Rrahshan rrohck" and kept asking if I liked Japanese
girls, pulling his eyes into grotesque slits. Gena (pronounce the g like
a French j), tall and soft-spoken, on her way from Vladivostok to Moscow
in the hope of getting a visa for Germany, where her fiancé had a job,
practiced her German on me, the closest I ever got to a conversation.
Sergey taught me basic culinary Russian, offering me food and naming it:
kalbasa, khlyeb, sirr, and kefir. From Sverdlovsk to Pyerm, Dima and
Dima joined us, two big men with paunches, one a balding blond
firefighter, a major, the other a curly-haired sports shop owner. No
sooner had they sat down than they began to eat, chicken wing after
chicken wing, washing them down with white wine and juice. They talked
as they ate, trying rusty German ("Ich bin Genosse Lehrer"), Dima the
firefighter asking me about the Swiss and their army rifles and Dima the
salesman giving me his business card. Both referred to Sverdlovsk as
Yekaterinburg. When they had finished their meal, Dima the firefighter
downed more than a liter of beer without any apparent effect - size does
matter - and then, after some more talk, during the course of which Dima
the firefighter's breathing grew more laboured and you could see the
blood rising in his cheeks, the two took short naps until they got off
again, but not without telling me which church to visit in Moscow in
order to see Putin leaving the Easter service.
Five more nights.
Moscow was unusually hot; even the man picking me up at the station in
his Volga 3110 commented on it. During the ride along wide boulevards he
praised Moscow for its beauty, its many trees, and promised me I'd enjoy
the city - "la ville est trčs belle."
I walked down to the Kreml that evening, the setting sun reflecting off
golden bulbs I could just barely see above the huge concrete Krushchev
building dominating the northern side of the hillock. Snapping photos, I
walked around toward the west and crossed the Moskva, gaining a better
view of the Kreml. The river was brown and filthy, I noticed as I
strolled along its bank, crossing it again to end up in the Red Square to
the east of the Kreml. The square is closed in, clockwise, by the Kreml
and the Lenin mausoleum, a sandstone cathedral in Western style, the GUM,
full of luxury boutiques, and the St. Basilius cathedral, a building that
obscures its basic symmetry with exuberant colored bulbs, making it look
like a sanctified jester's cap. The cobblestones covering the square are
grey - not red. I continued on around the next corner back to the park
on the north side of the Kreml, past the eternal fire and the sidewalk
cafés, until I had come full circle. Then I returned to my lodgings,
making a little detour to take pictures of one of the seven iconic towers
built during the Stalin era. These towers, forming a ring around the
city, grandiose and grotesque, severe in their angles and deep window
recesses but at the same time whimsical in their spired height, are what
might have happened had Dracula designed Cinderella's castle, fantastic
landmarks of a fantastic city. Dusk fell, and I returned to take my
first shower in three days before heading to bed.
Four more nights.
Easter dawned to reveal cloudless skies, and I again headed for the
Kreml, this time to buy tickets and see the cathedrals that supported the
bulbs I had glimpsed the day before. The Kreml is an odd collection of
sacred and secular buildings enclosed by a red wall. Guard towers with
pointy roofs stud the wall, and three gates control the access to the
inner sanctum. There, another large cobbled square separates the
cathedrals and bell towers from the more recent party buildings. In the
bright morning sun, the golden bulbs and crosses gleamed as though aware
of the occasion, but oblivious that nobody was celebrating Easter inside.
They weren't designed for services or masses anyway, but rather for more
pompous ceremony where the church bestowed legitimacy on regents or
eulogized them - hence their location within a government fortification.
These days, they serve as monuments to past glory and as exposition halls
for invaluable icon paintings.
I took the subway to the Novodevichy convent, located to the southeast of
the city center in a bend of the Moskva. The entrance fee there was a
fifth of that to the Kreml, but still more than sevenfold the fee they
charged Russians. A truncated rectangle of a wall, once a defense with
twelve proud towers, now a prayer walk, surrounds the chapels and living
quarters of the convent, a verdant, peaceful place until someone began
ringing the chimes in the main church tower. I have never heard a bell
ringing with such a high pitch, such a feverish cadence, and for such a
long time. It never stopped ringing for more than a few minutes, taking
up again with renewed frenzy. I soon returned home.
I left the house again that evening intending to buy sausage, cheese and
mineral water. As I walked down the broad major ring road toward the new
Arbat road, two Russians passed me coming my way: a tall guy and a short,
stocky guy who was in a hurry. A wad of dollars wrapped in plastic fell
out of the short man's briefcase onto the sidewalk without him noticing.
The tall guy picked it up and called out, but not very loudly, and then,
the short guy not hearing, shoved it in his shoulder bag. He started to
walk alongside me and said something to me about fifty-fifty, which I
tried to refuse, but I couldn't get the point across that I didn't want
to be involved. Right as I reached the shop I wanted to get my food at,
the short guy runs up, and while he is quizzing the tall guy, I try to
extricate myself from the mess and walk into the shop. The short guy
gets frantic and demands to see my wallet, for the tall guy has no
dollars in his, and I show it to him instead of indicating the tall guy's
shoulder bag. I take my money away before he grabs it and walk back into
the store, but he's seen dollars, and follows me. The store lady
complains when I push him away from me into the counter; I pull out my
wallet again and try to reason - in Russian - instead of ratting on the
tall guy. (That's a lesson my school days taught me well: you don't rat
on other people.) The short guy grabs my dollars, I try to grab them
back, a struggle ensues, in which we leave the shop and I drag him to the
ground as the tall guy quietly disappears. I get up: the short guy is
holding twenty-three dollars and half of my second twenty-dollar bill,
and my fifty-franc bill too. Frustrated, I let him know in plain English
that it's my money. He, agitated, crumples up the fifty francs, cussing,
stuffs them down the front of my shirt, and disappears. I still haven't
quite realized what has happened, shrug, bow in apology to the
shopkeeper, and pick up the coins that had fallen out of my wallet, then
slowly walk along, trying to decide what to do next. I stop, and as I
stand there licking my bleeding pinky, a bowlegged guy who had seen the
whole affair walks up to me, pulls an ID of some kind out of his Nike
vest, and says "You, khooligan. Shtraf." He asks for an ID and I show
him my passport, never letting it go, still incredulous that I, who just
lost all my dollars, should have to pay a fine for bad behaviour while
being robbed. He tells me to follow him, and I do, trying to find out
where he's going. By and by I gather that he's taking me to the police
station, but he says he'll let me off for twenty dollars. He brushes
away the torn twenty-dollar bill I offer him, showing far more interest
in my wallet, which I hasten to put away. He reiterates his offer, but
he's lost all my trust and I insist on going to the police. As he leads
the way, I transfer two hundred rubles from my wallet to my other pocket;
then, when he starts to turn into a courtyard off the street, insisting
the police is back there, I balk and ask for his ID again. Of course I
can't read it, but I'm looking for the word "militsia" or another
indication he is a real police officer. He points to the superscript and
rattles off an abbreviation, I counter that the police uses PSD, not his
abbreviation, he insists I follow him anyway, and as I see an elderly
lady walking through the archway he has indicated, I follow him, but drop
behind about ten feet once in the courtyard. I can't make out any police
station, and as he takes another road back to the main street, waiting
for me in order to repeat his twenty-dollar offer, I'm quite certain he
has no legal right to fine me and again state my wish to be taken to the
police station. One last time he says "dvatset dollar," grabbing my arm,
but I shake him off, and as I turn onto the main street, he walks away in
the other direction.
I still don't have my mineral water, and the buzz-cut wannabe cop, whom I
don't want to bump into again, is walking in the direction of my shop, so
I tail him from a distance until he's well past the shop and enter it.
The shopkeeper doesn't look too pleased at seeing the dust-covered
foreigner who staged a scuffle outside her shop, but relaxes as I strain
to buy mineral water with my limited Russian. I fail in my attempt to
explain the story that came to head at her shop, and so I leave,
forty-three dollars poorer, without sympathy, and with nothing to show
for it but the torn half of a twenty-dollar bill.
Back home, I showered and wrote down the events of the evening. I was
not going to let a forty-three dollar story go cold.
Three more nights.
That night, I dreamt of owing and lending and returning money. Towards
morning, things got weird when my friend Hussein from Virginia Tech
appeared as a money lender.
The man who picked me up to take me to the station asked me how I had
liked Moscow. I told him he'd been right, Moscow was beautiful and had a
lot of trees.
On the train to Berlin I met Mike from the Sundowners group, the only one
of them not going to St. Petersburg. It was good to chat with someone
again, but even better to be able to tell the tale of the previous
evening and garner empathy. "Poor bugger!" he said. "I'd'a been
shittin' my pants!" That felt good.
He then told me what he'd seen with his group: far more than I had
managed to see. We talked a bit about the respective advantages of
individual and group travel. I appreciated being able to follow my own
whims and being forced into contact with locals much more than if I had
been in a group, but I doubt I'd have been mugged if someone had
accompanied me. And even if I had been, I would have had someone to vent
my frustration with. I've a good mind to break my tradition of
unaccompanied traveling.
Around midnight, we arrived at the Belarus-Poland border. There, the
guard didn't return my passport with everyone else's, and I had to follow
him along the darkened platform and past two checkpoints into the
guardroom, where two big guards, wearing their hats like halos, got upset
at me for not understanding Russian and yelled at me because the
Belarussian Embassy in Tokyo had written the dates on my visa in
handwriting and written April at first instead of May. After accusing me
of forging my transit visa, threatening to make me return to Minsk to see
the embassy, and yelling around looking serious (with the exception of
the resignated train guard, who'd even taken off his hat, and a rotund
guy who thought everything was a great joke), they photocopied my
passport, handed it to me, and let me go. I'm still not quite sure if
their sternness was sincere or just their way of making the late-night
shift more interesting. I would have been far more anxious had they
instructed me to take my baggage with me when leaving the train.
Two more nights.
Rapeseed fields and fog: all I remember of Poland. We shunted back and
forth for nearly an hour in Frankfurt an der Oder, and a female border
guard yelled at someone - in German! - but didn't find the extra
cigarettes the two men in my compartment had bought in Belarus, didn't
even show up and check. I had refused to take any, so they had hid them
in trash cans or in compartments that had emptied in Poland, retrieving
them once the train began rolling again.
Mike and I took a train to Bahnhof Zoo, then bade each other farewell.
His Lonely Planet guidebook had mentioned the Mitfahrzentrale as a place
to hitch rides all over Germany, but nobody was heading to Basel that
day. I let my family know I was safely in Berlin, e-mailing from an
internet cafe, and spent the better part of the afternoon in a movie
theater (Tuesday is half-price day). I bought a train ticket to Basel
and waited for three hours at the station, reading "Read real Japanese"
for want of fiction. At nine o'clock I boarded the train and settled
down in my crescent-shaped seat.
One more night!
I slept badly. I have had better nights in buses, but that hardly
mattered: I was almost home. To my surprise, my parents picked me up and
drove me to Liestal. There, I had a bath and a nap - in my own bed.
Quite a few people have asked me about reverse culture shock: a bath, a
nap in your own bed, and a family to come home to are a great antidote.
(Bread and cheese don't hurt either.)
But I'm still determined to visit Japan again. I already miss it.
Text file Source (historic): geocities.com/thduggie/japan
geocities.com/thduggie(to report bad content: archivehelp @ gmail)
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