It's frustrating that I can't properly blog the past week and a half here, but I'm on the free hostel computer that I don't really feel right about monopolizing for more fifteen minutes or so. Thus I'll leave it at the following: St. Petersburg is my new favourite city in the world. It's gorgeous and radiant with creative energy. The people are full of personality and are a refreshingly inconsistent mixture of overly friendly, and Parisian-like brusque. As far as such things go the city is also just gorgeous. Broad avenues flanked by relatively unassuming palaces that are a humane four or five stories (as opposed to the skyscrapers of North American cities), and interspersed with canals spanned with ornate bridges and these perfect tranquil parks full of people sketching or performing puppet shows for awed children. I met these Maritimers on exchange from Mt. A and some Aussies that were travelling with them on their way to teach in Tomsk. They were awesome for drinking in parks and staying out until a still relatively light 4 a.m. with. So most days I wandered around by myself a bit, doing things like reading Fitzgerald in the Old Europe Hotel while drinking a relatively but duly expensive gin and tonic as slowly as possible and listening to a live harpist; sitting on a beach on the Neva drinking beer and watching a sailing regatta as dancers in white body paint pranced around and did Capoeira in celebration of Russia Day; talking Russian lit. and the greatness that was Stalin with a homeless dude who promptly decided I was his best friend and who thuroughly freaked me out by telling me about all the times he had been in jail. It's really nice to be travelling alone for a bit, although it's making me nostalgic for friends and family. And I keep wanting to bring up an inside joke to Karin or Brent and find that no one around will find it even remotely funny at all except myself. Cuba Hostel was cool too.
Moscow: Really big and really smelly and really hot. Overwhelmingly so at first, but I'm starting to digest it. Saw the huge war memorial which was spotted with brides (more brides than anything else oddly... I guess remembering the fallen of the Great Patriotic War is important to Russians entering matrimony), saw the huge exhibition of the successes of the USSR turned crazy capitalist themepark/flea market/who knows and paid too much for the worst pasta I've ever eaten, and saw the statue garden from Juliet Johnson's historical capital lecture. It was also weird and undergoing existential crisis. Can't comment more for now. Again met cool people and learned new card games. Going to the Tchaikovsky International Classical Music Competition tonight. Going to hear some piano playing tonight.
Love to everyone,
Ben
Monday, June 18, 2007
Monday, June 11, 2007
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Far too much to report in just 52 minutes and 6 lousy seconds
I'm at an internet cafe in Peterburg at the other end of Nevsky Prospekt from the Hermitage and time is stupidly expensive and so despite my desperate desire to write every detail of the million and a half things that have happened in the last week and a half, my pocket book doth protest and so I present to you this inadequate summary (I haven't written it yet, so who knows, maybe I'm being unduly fatalistic... but if this pointless aside is any indication I'll probably crash and burn on the whole brevity and only get down a fraction of what I wanted to):
So I left you in Van in the depths of Kurdistan, we were heading to some sort of concert involving a guitar. Quite an experience that turned out to be, let me tell you! So we follow these two new "friends" of ours down some side streets in the dark of 11pm and finally come to this unlit alleyway leading to a doorway. At this point I'm convinced that we are about to be kidnapped by the PKK. Not wanting to be rude though, I follow them in and we found ourselves in this spacious appartment belonging to this artist friend/brother of theirs (the distinction between friend and brother among males in Turkey is very blurred). This new guy is the coolest yet: expressionist art covers the walls of his bedroom/living room, he's got musical instruments all over the place, and this serenely benevolent look to him. This last was in stark contrast to the look on the face of the elder of the two men that brought us... he was looking lecherous and wouldn't stop clumsily complementing Karin. Anyway... this guy got to be a bit (actually a lot) too much and so we got out of there after only about fourty five minutes and a beer each. He seemed to have this feeling of entitlement where he expected that if he so debased himself by giving her compliment after compliment he didn't need to take no for an answer. We left Van very very early the next morning.
The next stop was Dogubayezit and Mt. Ararat towering above. The town turned out to be a bustling border town (Iran was all of 20 clicks away... we went to the border! :D). That day we ended up on this tour of the region which we got for a steal of 20 lira each. First stop was this amazing palace/fortress about a kilometer up on a bluff overlooking the town. You shall see pictures, as I keep promising, later. Next we were onto muddy roads heading to the highly dubious "Noah's Ark", but that's not really worth talking about. What was far more interesting was getting marooned for 4 hours in a tiny Kurdish village en route. Halfway through the wait the clouds across the valley opened up and Ararat was just there... first the small peak, and shortly after the main 51-hundred metre snow coated temale. Between the three of us I think we probably took several hundred thousand pictures of it happening. The village children and ladies found us vaguely interesting. It was interesting, whereas the cities in Eastern Turkey were 80% occupied by men, the village was pretty much 100% women... It's funny how things come together. A few men turned up shortly before we unstuck ourselves. They were either commuters or had been minding livestock grazing on the mountain plains. ON the topic of those mountain plains: the landscape in this area was the cherry on the cake of landscapes that was Turkey. If you're a landscape lover and you go nowhere else... go to Eastern Turkey. Getting back to the tour though, after unsticking ourselves we pulled briefly into the visitor centre at the supposed site uncovered by some rabidly evangelical american, where the ark eventually landed. No one takes the dude seriously except the Dogubayezit tourism industry who I suspect of an ulterior motive for doing so. So we moved on quickly and headed for a glance at the Iranian border over which we saw the sun set, and then to another slightly larger village at the foot of the Mountain where we got some good pictures of Brent and I gamboling around looking ridiculous (we were trying to reproduce a picture in the Turkey Lonely Planet of 2003 in which Children are running and playing in a field below the mountain.)
I'm going to start a new paragraph now because I feel like it's been a while. We headed back to town and had a very pleasant anniversary dinner (we had been on the road together for exactly 2 months!) which was interrupted by this very drunk, very flamboyant old man with the oddest mannerisms. He would routinely lick his fingertips with a slightly mischievous look on his face, and then groom the wings of his hair with them. For whatever reason he payed for our dinner and refused to hear any of our protests. He kept repeating that he "likes... people." He took us back to his rather lavish office about a block away, furnished with several poofy leather couches and a huge mahogany desk, and proceeded to ramble to us randomly about the nature of wealth, and how he has lots of gay and lesbian friends, how he left his wife, that his son converted to christianity, that money is to be spent, and something incoherent (but not positive) about Jews. We left after about 25 minutes mostly because we were all exhausted and a bit wary of a repeat of the previous night. He was just getting drunker and drunker and less and less coherent as it was, and we thought it better to leave him to pass out in peace.
The next morning we took off for Erzerum where we were catching a late flight back to Istanbul. This was a day earlier than had originally been planned due to a relatively last minute change of my ticket by my travel agent (which we'll return to shortly assuming the time remains... if I don't get to it, ask me about it some time. It's a story). Erzerum hosts the central command against Russian and Persian (they probably mean Iranian, but I'll agree that Darius seemed rather intimidating in the 300... at least I assume he did... I didn't actually end up seeing the movie this spring... I heard it was ethically problematic). The town was a shot of modern bussle after a week in the poorest region of the country. I couldn't really enjoy it though (skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to hear me be grossly culturally insensitive)... I had a pretty bad case of traveller's diarrhoea which was exacerbated by the total lack of normal, sit down toilets and bathrooms stocked with toilet paper. That's one respect in which I'm a total Western cultural imperialist: I think access to regular sit-down flush toilets and plentiful toilet paper when one has diarrhoea should be a universal human right. Squat toilets... although probably more hygenic for the lack of ass contact... are stupid and unpleasant.
13 minutes left. *choke*
I'm going to skip over the hell that was my Airplane/visa/accomodation troubles of the following two days and jump straight to walking through the door of Cuba hostel in Peterburg. An awesome, chill, and relatively inexpensive place 30 seconds from the Kazan Cathedral, and 5 minutes from the Hermitage. My first full day here I spent wandering down Nevsky Prospekt to the Nevsky Gardens at he very end of it. Hung out there for a while and, bleeding heart romantic that I am, read the first paragraph of Crime and Punishment while leaning on Dostoyevsky's grave. For all the melodrama in that it was cool. It was really like having a dead guy talk to me.
I spent pretty much all of today (my second day) in the Hermitage, being slapped in the face by the veined but glowingly lit hand of Rembrandt's Old Jewish Man... and the 20 something other paintings by Rembrandt in the collection. And everything else that I saw in the collection. And the architecture and decor of the palace itself. And pretty much everything about the damned place. Long story short... I'm probably going to spend all of tomorrow there too.
Non-sequitor:
Food is stupidly expensive here. As such I've been eating a lot of American fast food and giggling internally at the possible political interpretations of my motives for doing so (kind of kicking a man when he's down isn't it?). Gaah! 2 minutes. I'm going to publish this now and hope for the best. Typos, spelling errors and everything.
May the peace of the lord be with you always.
[your line: and also with you]
So I left you in Van in the depths of Kurdistan, we were heading to some sort of concert involving a guitar. Quite an experience that turned out to be, let me tell you! So we follow these two new "friends" of ours down some side streets in the dark of 11pm and finally come to this unlit alleyway leading to a doorway. At this point I'm convinced that we are about to be kidnapped by the PKK. Not wanting to be rude though, I follow them in and we found ourselves in this spacious appartment belonging to this artist friend/brother of theirs (the distinction between friend and brother among males in Turkey is very blurred). This new guy is the coolest yet: expressionist art covers the walls of his bedroom/living room, he's got musical instruments all over the place, and this serenely benevolent look to him. This last was in stark contrast to the look on the face of the elder of the two men that brought us... he was looking lecherous and wouldn't stop clumsily complementing Karin. Anyway... this guy got to be a bit (actually a lot) too much and so we got out of there after only about fourty five minutes and a beer each. He seemed to have this feeling of entitlement where he expected that if he so debased himself by giving her compliment after compliment he didn't need to take no for an answer. We left Van very very early the next morning.
The next stop was Dogubayezit and Mt. Ararat towering above. The town turned out to be a bustling border town (Iran was all of 20 clicks away... we went to the border! :D). That day we ended up on this tour of the region which we got for a steal of 20 lira each. First stop was this amazing palace/fortress about a kilometer up on a bluff overlooking the town. You shall see pictures, as I keep promising, later. Next we were onto muddy roads heading to the highly dubious "Noah's Ark", but that's not really worth talking about. What was far more interesting was getting marooned for 4 hours in a tiny Kurdish village en route. Halfway through the wait the clouds across the valley opened up and Ararat was just there... first the small peak, and shortly after the main 51-hundred metre snow coated temale. Between the three of us I think we probably took several hundred thousand pictures of it happening. The village children and ladies found us vaguely interesting. It was interesting, whereas the cities in Eastern Turkey were 80% occupied by men, the village was pretty much 100% women... It's funny how things come together. A few men turned up shortly before we unstuck ourselves. They were either commuters or had been minding livestock grazing on the mountain plains. ON the topic of those mountain plains: the landscape in this area was the cherry on the cake of landscapes that was Turkey. If you're a landscape lover and you go nowhere else... go to Eastern Turkey. Getting back to the tour though, after unsticking ourselves we pulled briefly into the visitor centre at the supposed site uncovered by some rabidly evangelical american, where the ark eventually landed. No one takes the dude seriously except the Dogubayezit tourism industry who I suspect of an ulterior motive for doing so. So we moved on quickly and headed for a glance at the Iranian border over which we saw the sun set, and then to another slightly larger village at the foot of the Mountain where we got some good pictures of Brent and I gamboling around looking ridiculous (we were trying to reproduce a picture in the Turkey Lonely Planet of 2003 in which Children are running and playing in a field below the mountain.)
I'm going to start a new paragraph now because I feel like it's been a while. We headed back to town and had a very pleasant anniversary dinner (we had been on the road together for exactly 2 months!) which was interrupted by this very drunk, very flamboyant old man with the oddest mannerisms. He would routinely lick his fingertips with a slightly mischievous look on his face, and then groom the wings of his hair with them. For whatever reason he payed for our dinner and refused to hear any of our protests. He kept repeating that he "likes... people." He took us back to his rather lavish office about a block away, furnished with several poofy leather couches and a huge mahogany desk, and proceeded to ramble to us randomly about the nature of wealth, and how he has lots of gay and lesbian friends, how he left his wife, that his son converted to christianity, that money is to be spent, and something incoherent (but not positive) about Jews. We left after about 25 minutes mostly because we were all exhausted and a bit wary of a repeat of the previous night. He was just getting drunker and drunker and less and less coherent as it was, and we thought it better to leave him to pass out in peace.
The next morning we took off for Erzerum where we were catching a late flight back to Istanbul. This was a day earlier than had originally been planned due to a relatively last minute change of my ticket by my travel agent (which we'll return to shortly assuming the time remains... if I don't get to it, ask me about it some time. It's a story). Erzerum hosts the central command against Russian and Persian (they probably mean Iranian, but I'll agree that Darius seemed rather intimidating in the 300... at least I assume he did... I didn't actually end up seeing the movie this spring... I heard it was ethically problematic). The town was a shot of modern bussle after a week in the poorest region of the country. I couldn't really enjoy it though (skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to hear me be grossly culturally insensitive)... I had a pretty bad case of traveller's diarrhoea which was exacerbated by the total lack of normal, sit down toilets and bathrooms stocked with toilet paper. That's one respect in which I'm a total Western cultural imperialist: I think access to regular sit-down flush toilets and plentiful toilet paper when one has diarrhoea should be a universal human right. Squat toilets... although probably more hygenic for the lack of ass contact... are stupid and unpleasant.
13 minutes left. *choke*
I'm going to skip over the hell that was my Airplane/visa/accomodation
I spent pretty much all of today (my second day) in the Hermitage, being slapped in the face by the veined but glowingly lit hand of Rembrandt's Old Jewish Man... and the 20 something other paintings by Rembrandt in the collection. And everything else that I saw in the collection. And the architecture and decor of the palace itself. And pretty much everything about the damned place. Long story short... I'm probably going to spend all of tomorrow there too.
Non-sequitor:
Food is stupidly expensive here. As such I've been eating a lot of American fast food and giggling internally at the possible political interpretations of my motives for doing so (kind of kicking a man when he's down isn't it?). Gaah! 2 minutes. I'm going to publish this now and hope for the best. Typos, spelling errors and everything.
May the peace of the lord be with you always.
[your line: and also with you]
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Eastern Turkey: They'll basically give you their bed to fuck on
It's insane how nice these people are. Today we became honorary members of a local soccer team, were on centre stage at an impromptu dance party on a boat in the rain, were invited to sleep over at some random family's house after eating at their restaurant (unfortunately after we had already paid for a hotel), and are now being dragged off to a concert which apparently involves a guitar... that's all we know so far. As I write this Karin is reading me an e-mail she just received from a random dude we met a couple of towns ago who says that he hopes to meet her again sometime because he really really likes her.
So basically Eastern Turkey has been the best part of the trip so far because to add to the hospitality the history is mind boggling: we visited the cave in which apparently Abraham (that's right, the one the only... well maybe not only, patriarch of western religion) was born, we hiked around this incredible abandoned 4000 year old town perched on top of 100 m high cliffs above the river Tigris, we drank tea in a "bee-hive house" next to the ruins of the oldest mosque in turkey (from the mid-700s), today we boated out to see this old and elaborately relief-bedecked Armenian cathedral from the mid-800s etc... etc... And still more, the landscape is something out of a Peter Jackson movie (if said Peter Jackson movie is one of the LoTR trilogy because beyond that I can't really comment).
Some basic facts: Pretty much everyone around here is either Kurdish or Arab. The Kurds don't really like Turks. The Arabs (that we've met) don't speak a lot of English and so we don't know that much about them.
We're currently in a city named Van famous for its cats which apparently are all white and have one blue and one golden eye. We haven't seen any though because apparently they're so valuable that no one lets them outside.
Tomorrow we go to Ararat... the very one from Genesis on which Noah's ark landed. From there we're headed to Erzerum to catch a flight back to Istanbul just in time to catch my flight to St. P's.
I need to go but I do so while sending all my love to you my loyal readers.
So basically Eastern Turkey has been the best part of the trip so far because to add to the hospitality the history is mind boggling: we visited the cave in which apparently Abraham (that's right, the one the only... well maybe not only, patriarch of western religion) was born, we hiked around this incredible abandoned 4000 year old town perched on top of 100 m high cliffs above the river Tigris, we drank tea in a "bee-hive house" next to the ruins of the oldest mosque in turkey (from the mid-700s), today we boated out to see this old and elaborately relief-bedecked Armenian cathedral from the mid-800s etc... etc... And still more, the landscape is something out of a Peter Jackson movie (if said Peter Jackson movie is one of the LoTR trilogy because beyond that I can't really comment).
Some basic facts: Pretty much everyone around here is either Kurdish or Arab. The Kurds don't really like Turks. The Arabs (that we've met) don't speak a lot of English and so we don't know that much about them.
We're currently in a city named Van famous for its cats which apparently are all white and have one blue and one golden eye. We haven't seen any though because apparently they're so valuable that no one lets them outside.
Tomorrow we go to Ararat... the very one from Genesis on which Noah's ark landed. From there we're headed to Erzerum to catch a flight back to Istanbul just in time to catch my flight to St. P's.
I need to go but I do so while sending all my love to you my loyal readers.
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