11.08.2008: closed in (and locked out!)

So, Karelia: why the attraction? Well, it's a long story. Let me try to shorten it as much as I can.

To start with, Karelia straddles the border of Russia and Finland, and it's home to a great corpus of folklore belonging to both of those two countries. For example, the Finnish national folk song, the Kalevala, springs from there and is sung in the Karelian dialect. It's a beautiful old tale full of myth and poetry, and like the sagas of Iceland it reveals some of the area's cultural heritage. (And incidentally, in my last band we tried to set a small section of it to music. It was, er ... well, it was ok I guess. You have to try these things from time to time.)

The mystique surrounding Karelia - and especially its unique dialect - has captivated some fairly distinguished minds over the years. In the early 20th century, for instance, an English scholar of languages came across Karelian, and was so inspired that he used it as the foundation of a fictitious language he'd been trying to create. His main motivation for this unusual endeavour was that he'd been working on a novel in his spare time, and along with human characters he'd decided to feature other, non-human races in his story as well. Our scholarly friend decided that inventing a language for these non-humans might bring an air of authenticity to the tale, and it seems he was right. The novel was completed some years later, and ended up being serialised under the name Lord of The Rings. And that's how it came to be that almost every fantasy geek in the world can recite at least a word or two of bastardised Karelian - otherwise known as "Elvish"*.

Plus, quite aside from the historical and literary associations, Karelia is widely regarded as being extremely pretty. So for all these reasons, it seemed like the place to go.

However, my two weeks in Karelia wasn't a holiday per se, but rather a summer job. I spent my time at a college nestled in woodlands near the tiny village of Ruokolahti, teaching English to several busloads of teenagers from St. Petersburg and Moscow. The camp's location was gorgeous: the day I arrived I got an email from a colleague in Almaty saying "Where are you?", and I responded "I think I'm in some kind of ESL heaven". That feeling didn't last long, though ...

For a start, the college was on a promontory, surrounded on three sides by water - which was all very scenic, but meant that there was nowhere to go. I'd imagined lots and lots of forest walks, cycling and what-have-you ... but you can't really cycle on a lake :-( There was one road out, and it lead to a petrol station, a highway and not much else. And the nearest town of Imatra - accessible every two days by bus - was duller than the three minutes that follow whenever a newsreader says "and now over to the finance desk".

Ruokolahti also gave me my first experience of a phenomenon that I quickly grew to loathe: the Eternally Locked Door that is (or at least should be) the symbol of the Finnish education system. Here's a typical day:

- Wake up. Kitchen closed and locked (so no coffee).
- Go outside to smoke, remembering to unlatch all the locked doors on your way so you can get back in.
- Go to computer room. Computer room locked.
- Go to teachers' room. Teachers' room locked (despite the fact that I'd put a sign on the door, taped over the lock, saying "Please don't lock this door. Kiitos!**").
- Return later to computer room. Room unlocked, but electricity switched off at fusebox.
- Open fusebox and turn on electricity. Check emails.
- Go to breakfast. Get locked in if you spend too long eating / drinking the coffee you'd waited hours for.
- Go to lessons ill-prepared because of the locked teachers' room.
- Take a 5-minute break. Come back to find someone has locked your classroom.
- Find staff. Plead for classroom to be unlocked. Finish lesson.
- Take your washing to the laundry. Find it locked.
- Go back at regular intervals, until you get lucky and find it open.
- Put your washing in the machine. Come back an hour later to find it locked inside the laundry.
- Try to break the boredom of the evening by using some of the camp's facilities (rowboats, exercise room, swimming pool etc). Find them locked.
- Search for the right person to find the right person to find the right person to go and get the key. Fail. Return to room.

... and so on, ad infinitum.

I made several appeals to common sense in the face of this obsessive locking behaviour. (After all, we were in a forest. Who was going to break in - mutant squirrels with tiny machine guns and opposable thumbs?) But of course, obsession always wins out over common sense, and such was the case in Ruokolahti. Just as a leopard will resist all attempts to persuade it that a hound's tooth motif would be a bold personal statement, so it seems that a Finnish employee won't be convinced that not locking everything in sight would ultimately make things run more smoothly.

Meanwhile, in between wandering the hallways of my picturesque prison and checking doors, I taught a morning and an afternoon class. The morning students were pretty good, but afternoons were dominated by "the hip-hop boys" - a group of rich white kids from St Petersburg intent on behaving like disenfranchised black kids from Brooklyn. (Y'unnastan what ah's tawkin 'bout, niggah?) It was the classic teenaged Bad Boy thing: individually most of them were nice enough, but together they were an utter nightmare. Half my day was spent trying to counter their various schemes, all aimed at making my lessons degenerate into violent chaos. There were a couple of occasions on which I was really tempted to just give up, go back to my room and sleep.

The effect of this was twofold. First, it made me feel bad for the students in that class who actually did want to learn something. And second, it increased my appreciation for the teenaged students I'd taught in Almaty. I thought especially about the class I used to refer to as 'The Pixies', most of whom were a similar age to the Ruokolahti hip-hop kids but immeasurably more mature, well-behaved and pleasant. One or two of my Ruokolahti terrors actually made disparaging comments to me about Kazakh people ... to which I found myself thinking "Man, you have no frikkin' idea how ironic that remark is, coming from a devolved little Noviy Russkiy thug like you!"

My one umbrella of sanity in this storm of madness*** was a super-smart, super-cool 13-year-old called Olya, who was in my morning group. Whether I encountered calm, even-tempered, unflappable Olya, sarcastic and mock-reproachful Olya, or excitable, bouncy, huggy Olya, hanging out with her made the aaaarrgghhh!!!! go away when I was just about to strangle my hip-hop losers or physically assault the Finnish staff for barring me from yet another room. Koroche: along with the mild weather and the woodpeckers, Olya was pretty much the best thing about Finland at that point.

I'm still quite amazed that teaching allows me to meet and get to know these unlikely people. By "unlikely", I mean people who are totally unlike anyone I could've imagined getting to know before I joined this profession. Many of you have probably heard me say this, but the fact is that I've met more interesting folk in the last three years than I did in the 15 before that. (Btw, if I met you more than three years ago, don't be offended. It just makes you the fabulous exception :-) At first it could've been explained away as a fluke, but it's been happening for too long now - hence the amazement. And it means that, even factoring in the negative experiences I've had (like my tussles with the hip-hop kids, and teaching unbelievably arrogant Indian and Nepalese brahmin in Sydney), teaching has actually raised my opinion of humanity. I think I could now describe myself as an 'ex-misanthropist'; I used to think that humans were largely a waste of precious natural resources, but now I've met too many good ones to maintain such a negative view.

That's kind of an amazing change, don't you think?

Anyway, I mention all of this because Olya was just the latest reminder of the 'Unlikely Factor', which I want to talk about again later. There were more of these reminders to come at my next summer school, which was located on the outskirts of the 14th Century town of Porvoo (pronounced like "Pour-veaux" if it was French). Before I got there, though, I had two more days to fill in Helsinki.

After breaking my personal land speed record on a Finnish train (now standing at 226km/h), I arrived in the capital and headed to my hostel. Reception gave me a swipe card and sent me to a separate building. I looked at the front door and realised that getting through it would entail using the card.

So: *swipe*.

I'm through ... but a metre inside the entrance, another door stands in my way.

"Ok, then."

*swipe*

Through the inner door, and inside the building.

I board the lift and press five. Nothing happens. Then I see why: I need to swipe again to make the little "5" light up.

A third *swipe*, and I'm on my way upstairs.

Of course, this isn't the last time I'll need to use the card. It's also my room key. *Swipe* number four sees me into my room, protected from the rest of the world by a degree of security that would impress a member of the British royal family.

Still marvelling at the Relentless Finnish Lockdown, I headed to the supermarket to grab some food, and maybe a bottle of something to nurse while I sifted through photos and write emails. But it was 6:30pm on a Saturday, which - unbeknownst to me at this point - meant that every bottle shop**** in Finland was closed until Monday. I'd encountered a similar problem on my previous visit to Helsinki, when I discovered that bottle shops close at 8pm on weeknights. But the earlier close on Saturdays took me by surprise.

Incredibly, this policy is aimed at reducing alcohol consumption (at least officially) ... and yet, what do you see when you wander through central Helsinki on a Friday or Saturday night? Well, two things: one, an endless succession of wine bars, and two, an endless succession of drunks, many of them singing very loudly and badly. I kid you not: for every one drunk you see on the streets of Moscow, you see ten in the Finnish capital. And broken bottles are legion; I've never been in a city that can boast as much glass scattered on its pavements.

From an outsider's perspective, it seemed to me that everyone in Finland must be buying absurd quantities of alcohol during the week to circumvent their country's stupid laws. Then, because their fridges are full of drink they've already paid for, they opt for a nation-wide bender. Or else they just go to a wine bar in the centre and pay eight times as much to get smashed.

Still, at least closing the bottle shops early gives Finns something else to lock, which I suppose provides them with some degree of satisfaction ;-)

*ahem*

Sorry.

I could fulminate about the minor annoyances of Finland for a lot longer, 'cause I'd previously regarded these people as being admirably sensible, intelligent and forward-thinking folk. And I'm sure many of them are. However, as I stayed longer in their country, I encountered more and more irritiating little absurdities like this, and felt my admiration beginning to wane.

Let's skip that, though, and cut to Porvoo.

I'd been to the town once before on a day-trip from Helsinki in 2006. There was no denying that it was a pretty place - if not exactly action-packed - and my first impressions were confirmed when I got back there. This time the summer was in full swing, the days were long and balmy, and I had two weeks to settle into the vibe.

To give you the tour guide summary: Porvoo lies on a picturesque river leading to an archipelago in the Gulf of Finland. A highway runs through the centre, neatly dividing the new parts of town from the old. Porvoo's planners have either been extremely clever or been made to look that way by a happy accident. What I mean is, by focussing all recent construction on the far side of the highway, they've left the Old Town intact and largely untouched by modern architectural developments. It's possible to disappear completely in cobbled streets lined with rustic wooden buildings. And if you hive off the main street towards the river, you find yourself even more ensconced among shaded docks and boat sheds leading down to the water's edge. Nowadays these areas are filled with little galleries, museums, shops and the odd café. It's a really pleasant, low-key, de-stressing atmosphere.

Anyway ... my first moments in Porvoo were actually spent with two punk girls, whom I asked directions to the Runebergsgatan (the street on which my college was located). I could've asked other people who were standing closer to me, but the punks looked so fantastic in their heavy eye make-up, tartan skirts and half-a-bottle-of-spray hairdos that I naturally had to talk to them. They clearly had no idea where I was going, but they tried really hard to help me anyway, walking to a major intersection and peering down each road as if some memory of the Runebergsgatan might come back to them if they stared hard enough. It was a great re-introduction to the town :-)

Having found the new college, I settled in (not without locked-door issues of course), met the students, was assigned a class ... and then proceeded to get violently ill. The previous week I'd caught some kind of virus, which I thought had almost gone. But now I felt it returning with a vengeance.

This was a real shame, because the students in Porvoo (all adults) couldn't have been more welcoming. On our first evening there, a group of them invited me to be their guest at a drinking session in one of the dorm rooms. I reminded them that the principal of the college (a sour-faced, sour-mannered, obstructionist bitch called Sabine) had told them during the day that the college had a no alcohol policy. The reply: "Yes, but we are Russian people. We will find a way." From that point on, I knew I was going to have a lot of fun in this town :-)

Unfortunately, though, the fun would have to wait. The virus I'd picked up in Ruokolahti was draining my energy and turning me into a zombie (although for some reason I never developed a craving for brains). For the first week of my stay, it was all I could do to struggle through lessons before retiring to my room to collapse on my bed and sleep. I knew I was missing out on all manner o' high-jinks, but there was nothing I could do - my body just refused to go the distance.

Stupid body >:-[

On the first weekend I started to feel better, though still sluggish and a little on the cranky side. The students had disappeared on an excursion to Helsinki, so I decided to have a productive weekend exploring the countryside by bicycle (which was great), prepping lessons for Week Two, catching up with emails and so on. However, once again I had the locked door problem to deal with before I could actually get anything done. This would probably have been insurmountable had I not been in such a volatile mood due to the illness. As it was, though, my crankiness made me disinclined to be 'beaten' by the Finns' ridiculous obsession. In fact, it pushed me to commit my first deliberate crime in a foreign country.

I'd been telling the college all week that there was no syllabus for the course, that all the classroom materials had to be found &/or created by me, and that access to the teacher's room was absolutely essential if they wanted the summer camp to be a success. This, of course, was met with breezy indifference. So on Friday night, in a moment of pique, I joined the Dodgy Criminal Element by forcing the door of the teachers' room and breaking in. It was my first ever break & enter ... and it felt great! Had the college staff confronted me about it, I'm sure that whatever authorities they chose to bring in would've been on their side - but that was never going to happen. The Finns I'd met had struck me as being all about preserving equilibrium, so I knew I'd get away with this intrusion, because they were basically too conflict-averse to say anything. And I was right :-) I repeated the break & enter several times, and nothing was ever said. When they discovered what had happened, the college simply replaced the old lock with an even more enormous one.

Anyway, on Saturday evening the students arrived back from their excursion, and I began trying to make up for lost time by hanging out with them. The following week was by far my best in Finland. I went for long walk-and-talks around town and in the countryside, taught some English, learned some Russian, found a pub with a pool table (thanks Pasha!), learned a bit about photography (thanks Ilya!), listened to melancholic folk songs played on acoustic guitar (thanks Masha!), played racquet sports, witnessed my first ever Russian drag show, sat drinking late at night on deserted riverside promenades with my students, helped out with a translation project (translating Andi Sex Gang's***** spoken word material into Russian for some kind of web group), and generally took the opportunity to spend as much time as possible with a very entertaining group of people. It was a fabulous week.

Probably the highlight, though, was teaching about half-a-dozen Russians to play pool. In particular, my favourite student Karina - another of those 'unlikely people' - had never played before, and she loved it. (I think she's now developing an addiction to Russkiy Billiard, which is vaguely similar to western billiards but more difficult.) So on my last three evenings in Porvoo I found myself with an enthusiastic pool partner - which was great, because once I started playing I began to realise how much I'd missed it! And despite the fact that we lost every single game we played on the last night, I think that's going to be my happiest memory of Porvoo: circling a pool table with Karina, in a sticky-floored pub with semi-naked brass mermaids propping up the bar, neon beer signs on the walls, a karaoke machine in one corner (where 40-something Finns sang dinosaur rock standards) and a tiny, filthy smoking room next to the slot machines. It was one of those "Gosh, this is such an unlikely thing for me to be doing, and I'm having so much fun - if only I could freeze time!" experiences.

Mind you, there are plenty of other things I'll remember about Finland - and despite my complaints on this page, I think the good memories will outweigh the bad. The natural environment was beautiful, for one thing. Along with the woodpeckers (whose tok-tok-toking never failed to grab my attention), I came face-to-face with wild hare and ridiculously cute hedgehogs, listened to exotic birdsong as I sat in parks and forests, rode through villages almost completely hidden in fields of wildflowers and long, reedy grass (like the one in the photo above), wandered among giant stones in shaded groves, and so on and so forth. So I have to give Finland its props: it isn't quite New Zealand or Norway, but it's pretty damn cute.

On a different note, I'll also remember the fascinating conversations I had with my students about life in St. Pete's, Moscow and Vyburg, along with some silly classroom moments. On the second last day of lessons, I kicked off at 9am by teaching the idiom "to burn the candle at both ends". By that stage most of the students - having been partying for almost two weeks straight - were nearing total exhaustion. As I explained my whiteboard drawing of a candle, I could see about half of my sleepy-heads thinking "Hmmm ... now there's an expression that might come in handy today". They roused for a moment, and a few wrote intensely in their copy books. Then they went back into semi-comatose mode for another half an hour, waiting for me to wake them up later with a game. It was like the stirring of sleeping kittens who think they've just heard the sound of a can-opener being used in another room ... priceless :-)

And now I've left peaceful, bucolic, well-oiled Scandinavia behind, trading it in for dust and smog and noise and traffic chaos and crazy temperatures in a city that I both love and loathe - sometimes at the same time. And to be honest, I'm thrilled.

For those of you who I haven't already told (and who haven't worked it out yet): the city I'm referring to is none other than Almaty. Yep, that's right - I'm back in KZ and I'm staying for another year. A month in Finland and a week in the Baltics gave me a lot of time to think, and I reached a few conclusions about what to do next with my life. Most importantly, I decided that I wasn't ready to leave the 'stan behind. So I didn't :-)

Over half of my students here have lived in Almaty all their lives, and several have described it to me as "One of the most beautiful cities in the world". I have to say, I've always disagreed with this opinion. Almaty isn't beautiful. I mean, yes, there are pretty parts here and there, and certainly the explosion of greenery in May made it a lot more pleasant to walk around. Plus, the Central Asian twist on Soviet architecture is quite a visual feast at times. (Imagine, for example, rows of socialist tower blocks with intricate, islamic-looking patterns carved into their facades, each one different from the next.) But overall, I still don't agree with the locals on this point. What I see here is something far more interesting, at least for me. It may not be as pretty as its residents would like to think, but I'm tempted to say that Almaty has a cool kind of ugly. I didn't notice so much until I had a few beautiful places like Karelia to compare it to ... and right now, the cool kind of ugly really suits my frame of mind.

Of course I'm a little nervous that I might regret my decision later. I mean, I've been back for a week, and already there have been moments when I've thought "You idiot! Wait 'till winter comes and the street dogs get (more) vicious, or until you get run down by an SUV. Then we'll see what a good decision-maker you are." But for the most part, I've literally been wandering around the city thinking "Yay, right move Anthony!" ... which is a great feeling, I must say. Some of the things that irritated or terrified me when I first arrived here last year now have a familiar, almost comforting ring to them - like the complaining gears underneath the floors of overloaded buses, or the unimpressed "mm-hmm" you get from shop assistants when you say "Spasibo" for your change. It all feels like a huge relief after Finland, where everyone was relentlessly cheerful and everything worked perfectly, but where the only reason I had any actual fun was because of woodpeckers and Russian people. So maybe I won't regret coming back for Year Two.

I guess we'll see.

Bye!

* To Tolkien fans: I apologise for the extremely truncated version of this story, which no doubt failed to capture some (or possibly all) of the nuances. I wrote a longer version, but it just seemed like too much of a tangent - even for me.

** Finnish for "thank you".

*** This particular crap metaphor was probably inspired by the fact that we studied and sang the song 'Umbrella' in Olya's class. Or at least, that's the best excuse I can think of, so I'm sticking with it!

****Australian English for "off-licence", "liquor store" etc.

*****Early-80s goth icon who later became more arty, and (I think) partly inspired the so-called 'dark cabaret' style that gave rise to bands like Dresden Dolls.