30.12.2008: kilts, crocs and coal smoke

This may seem an odd way to start an entry, but I want to give you a brief(-ish) explanation of the heating system in former USSR/Eastern Bloc countries. I realise this is something with which many of you are all-too-familiar, but for those who aren't, here goes ...

Basically, in Russia, KZ and much of Eastern Europe, the standard means of keeping the cold at bay during winter is via a series of pipes that run to iron radiators in every flat. The radiators aren't free-standing like the old-fashioned Western ones - they're permanent, pre-installed fixtures, and you can see the pipes and taps that connect them to the central heating system. And along these pipes runs ... well, hot water.

These ancient-looking radiators are a central feature of domestic life during the colder part of the year. Not only are they your first line of defence against the freezing temperatures; they're also the means by which you dry your washing during those times when leaving it on an outside clothesline inevitably results in rigid pairs of jeans that can almost stand and walk by themselves.

Now, before you go thinking "Gosh, it all sounds so primitive and soviet", consider this: in most flats, the hot water pipes run through the bathroom, exposed along one wall, and the water inside them is usually near boiling point. This means that nearly everyone in the former USSR has something that many rich Westerners pay a fortune for: heated towel rails :-)

Still, I vividly remember the first time I became aware of this seemingly inadequate and old-fangled* system, and quite frankly I was concerned. It happened while I was living in Moscow. I was sitting at a plastic table in an outdoor market with my friend Jane, eating horrible greasy dumplings and chatting to a local guy who had spent a couple of years living in the USA, and hence spoke pretty good English. This was around October, and the weather was beginning to turn cold, so naturally the whole not-wanting-to-freeze-to-death-inside-my-flat issue was a priority at the time. I asked the guy: "How do you keep your place warm in winter?", and he explained the entire thing for me.

The basic gist of his explanation was this: the flats in Moscow are all warmed from a central location, and my radiators (he claimed) would provide ample warmth to see me through till spring. "Russian men walk around in their underwear in January", he assured me. My response to this was pretty much as follows: "Oh my gods, I'm going to die".

Turns out, though, that the guy in the market was right. As outmoded and ineffectual as they look, the radiators really work. To give you an example, in my current flat in Almaty we have a thermomemeter which we move from inside to outside and back whenever we want to check the temperature. Last week, outside temps were averaging around -5C, but inside it was a comfy +20.

I mention all of this because - to state the obvious - all this hot water has to actually come from somewhere. This never really occurred to me in Moscow, but here it impresses itself upon you a bit more strongly.

To explain: Early in 2008, I was getting a ride home from school with the father of a colleague - a very well-educated and cheerful middle-aged guy who wanted to practise his English with a native speaker, and hence offered me a lift in his ridiculous blimp-sized SUV. As we cruised through the outskirts of Almaty towards my old flat, I noticed that we were driving through clouds of thick white smoke. I'd seen these before, mostly rising from roadsides but sometimes from vents in the middle of the road itself, so I asked about their origins. My new conversation partner informed me that the smoke was actually coming from a multitude of coal fires burning underneath and around the city. Looking back now, I don't really know what kind of answer I was expecting - but that definitely wasn't it!

"Why are there so many coal fires?", I asked.

"Because we need them to heat our homes", was the straightforward reply.

End of story, more or less, aside from a P.S. he threw in, explaining that the quality of coal in KZ is poor, so you have to burn a lot more of it than you would, say, lovely rich German or British coal. Hence the fires being so numerous.

This brief conversation initiated me into something that has become a daily fact of life during winter: the presence of coal smoke in the atmosphere, especially in the evenings. And to be honest, although I'm sure it's doing horrible things to my lungs, I like it very much. Lately when I open my bedroom window to have a cigarette, I often find myself enjoying the rich odour of burning minerals. Environmental worries and health conerns aside, it really is a wonderfully warm, earthy and engaging winter smell.

The other great thing about coal smoke is that it hangs so thick and still in the air, like a mist that imbues everything around you with a slight sense of mystery. This works particularly well in combination with the orange fog lamps that illuminate most main streets here, blurring the edges of things and giving me a feeling reminiscent of the one I get when I fly over a city I've never visited on a cloudy night. I absolutely love that feeling - the lights bobbing up and down through holes in the cloud cover, but maintaining a complete, hermetic silence, almost as though whatever's going on in the city is somehow secret. And as a bonus, these orange lights are quite uncommon where I grew up. Result: walking home at night along the smoky, orange-lit streets, I quite often get a little momentary thrill of awareness, as it registers in my brain that I'm alone in the heart of a deeply foreign country, and yet somehow, magically, I seem to know more or less where I'm going.

I also love the effect of approaching headlights on coal smoke. The pic you can see below was taken in an unlit laneway just around the corner from my flat. It didn't quite capture the moment as I would've liked, but I think you get some vague idea of how the headlamps resolve the cold, smoke-filled air into grainy little packets of light and dark, like manually-aged film stock. All very atmospheric and cool, methinks.

In any case, that's where I get my heat from. Now you know.

Of course, all the coal fires and bar radiators in the world aren't going to help you when you decide to go outside in late December wearing a kilt. And if that seems like a wild and ridiculous tangent ... well, yeah, I guess it is. Bear with me, though.

Last weekend our school had its annual New Year party. The inevitable corollary was that, throughout December, much of the talk in teachers' rooms around Almaty concerned what people were planning to wear to the Big Occasion. I stupidly ignored this up until about ten days before, thinking it ridiculous that anyone would spend a month planning a party outfit. Big mistake!

As the date loomed closer, a realisation struck me: I was going to be one of just four foreigners at this party (the majority having flown home to Britain or The US for Xmas/New Year), and there was simply no way I could afford to be the only person who hadn't made a genuine effort. So then the pendulum swung the other way - I went from "Yeah, whatever" to "Oh my gods, what the hell am I going to wear?".

With less than a week to go - and after many fruitless hours of wandering around clothing markets and the like, trying to get inspired - the answer suddenly crystallised in my head: I should wear a kilt. And the more I thought about it, the more it had to be a kilt, and the less I could stand the thought of wearing anything else.

Let me pause for a second to put this into some kind of context. Fine though the kilt idea may have seemed, there were certain realities to bear in mind ... most significantly, the fact that I was having my little costume-party daydreams in Kazakhstan, of all places. The chances of a man voluntarily wearing a skirt here, in this very 'manly' culture, were about equal to the chances of the Flying Spaghetti Monster** hosting next year's Nobel Prize ceremony in his secret network of caves on the island of Sicily. Which, in turn, made the chances of finding them on sale rather spectacularly low. And here was I, with less than a week to find one.

Those of you who've been reading this blog for a while might recall my absolute jubilation when I found a sink plug in Moscow after searching for over a month. This little mini-drama has replayed itself many times during the last few years. It goes like this: you conceive of something you want - usually something quite simple - and you go out and try to find it, only to discover that bringing home the desired object is going to be a Mission that could for last weeks or even months. So you chip away slowly at the task, asking local people for advice when the opportunity crops up, trying not to be too disheartened if/when they react with utter puzzlement, keeping an eye out for leads and signs every time you enter a retail environment, and so on. And when at last you do find the item in question, you're so happy that you want to throw a party, or at least tell everyone you see for the next two days "Hey, guess what? I found coat hangers!" - or whatever it might be.

(Btw, this constitutes one of the little joys of living in a foreign country, imho. It's just ... well, obviously it takes time.)

So here was the dilemma: on this occasion, it wasn't something basic and relatively universal I was looking for, but something quite specific and foreign ... and I had so little time! It was therefore going to be one of two things: either a thrilling personal triumph against impressive odds, or (far more likely) an exercise in complete futility.

Five days passed with me in Kilt-search Mode. I gave nearly all of my classes the same homework assignment ("Find a kilt for Anthony"); I emailed or texted every 'alternative' person I know here, asking them to tell me where they or their punk friends shop for clothes ('cause I figured a punk shop might be as good a bet as anything else); I searched the web for costume hire places; and I traipsed around shopping centres going "Shotlandskaya Yubka Yest?" ("Do you have a Scottish skirt?") over and over again until my head was entirely clogged with porridge***.

On Friday afternoon, after one final exhausting retail sortée in sub-zero temperatures with my friend Adel, I gave up. That night, I spent a good amount of time pouting and moaning, wondering whether I ought to stay away from the party altogether.

And then on Saturday morning, my colleague Zhazira - one of the Stammtisch people who I wrote about last time - worked a miracle. I hadn't mentioned my kilt-wearing plans to the members of the Stammtisch, 'cause I wanted to turn up at the party and surprise them all with my mysteriously-acquired Shotlandskaya Yubka - but having admitted defeat, it seemed pointless to keep the secret any longer. So I told Zhazira on Friday that I'd spent the week unsuccessfully looking for a kilt, and the next morning she made a few phone calls. Result: by lunch time I was sitting in a taxi, heading for a costume shop which had exactly what I needed, complete with sash and sporen.

Amazing.

So off I went to the party, tartan-clad and knees bared to the frigid cold. Walking through the streets of Almaty in a tartan skirt - albeit for a very short distance - was truly a great experience. And guess what? Along with Nailya (another Stammtisch person, who turned up in a black witch's outfit, then metamorphosised half-way through the evening to become a bright green butterfly), I won best costume! True story.

The party itself was exactly the kind of surreal experience that my flatmate Tania and I had been hoping for. Sitting in the banquet room of a Chinese restaurant were (at a guess) slightly less than 100 Kazakh and Russian people, dressed to the nines in everything from fairy gowns to shiny blue 70s suits to hot pants. At least one of them - my boss Aiman - had come straight from the hairdressers to the party (I suspect she was far from alone in this regard), and the amount of hairspray and lacquer in the room was just mindboggling.

Into this sea of chiffon and cocktail dresses waded a muscle-bound man in an Egyptian costume with a Pharaoh's head-dress, followed by a scantily-clad woman in Cleopatra make-up. I thought "Oh no, here comes the soft porn dancing again!" (because last year we were treated to three girls in Santa costumes that stopped just below the thigh, executing a series of dance moves that were calculated to show what they had beneath their costumes), but I was wrong. Instead, the performers swayed and gyrated for a bit, did a spot of fire-eating, then dragged a large box into the centre of the floor. From the box emerged an enormous python, and then another - the second one an albino. They showed off the snakes for a minute or two, and various people touched them ... all of which was totally unexpected and cool, but just the start of the spectacle, really. I turned away to say "hello" to someone, and when I turned back, my colleague Nailya (she of the butterfly costume) had the albino python wrapped around her shoulders, and was dancing around with it going "On krasovchik!" ("He's a beauty!"). Things were gettin' decidedly weird.

Meanwhile, mild-mannered and gentle Alla - our tall, Russian, strikingly beautiful Exams Co-ordinator - was sitting off to one side, looking rather nervous. (She told me later that she's terrified of snakes.) Poor Alla had no idea how much more harrowing things were about to become, though. The next box to be opened contained an anaconda, which produced the requisite gasps from the crowd. And then, in the final box ... a frikkin' crocodile! By a total accident of feng shui, the croc came out of its box facing Alla at a distance of about three feet. The big muscly Pharaoh guy had its tail, but you knew that wouldn't have stopped the creature if it had decided to have an Alla-flavoured snack. She looked utterly petrified (no more so than I would've been), and I was thinking "Oh my gods, I can picture the headline right now: "Beast Devours Beauty - Office Party Crocodile Stunt Leads to Tragedy in Kazakhstan".

Fortunately, though, the croc remained placid and kept its jaws shut - even when Cleopatra Woman picked it up by the tail and started swinging it in circles around the room! So Alla lived to tell the tale, and the rest of the evening involved ... well, lots of Chinese food, continual re-filling of vodka and wine glasses, and strange games conducted by the MC. (I never understand what the Hell is going on in these Russian party games, but one of them involved placing a long thin balloon between the legs of male party-goers, who were tied to chairs. Their female partners then had to inflate the balloons through a tube, and the couple with the largest crotch-balloon won a prize.) Most importantly, though, there was no death by zoological misadventure - at least, not as far as I'm aware.

Now I'm gearing up for one more party - the actual New Year's Eve, for which Tania and I have invited some friends and students around. Looking forward to it; we've got a great view from the flat, and the NYE fireworks display in Almaty is truly something to see. (It's totally different to Aust., because fireworks are legal here, so everyone gets in on the act and our courtyard will undoubtedly explode in a shower of pyrotechnics at midnight. We'll be sure to have the windows closed!)

After that, I'll be travelling for about a week. Won't go into the details now, but suffice to say it will involve a day's worth of train travel one way, a lot of steppe, and temperatures that boggle the mind when you add in the wind chill factor. So ... should be either a) loads of fun or b) fatal. Or possibly both. Anyway, I'll tell you about it when (or maybe I should say "if") I get back.

In the meantime ... Happy New Year!

Anthony.

(*A real word, just in case you're wondering ... and what a good one, no?)

(**A deity worshipped by an increasing number of people, many of whom prefer to be known as "Pastafarians". The Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster currently has about 27,000 fans on Facebook, and sightings of their meatball-flanked messiah are rather frequent.)

(***Slight improvisation on a great Russian expression, "kasha v golodye". It means "porridge in the head", and it's used to denote ... well, you can probably work it out. I'm sure we've all had those porridge-in-the-head days :-)