Days 11-16: Budapest and Szentendre

Dear readers,

My trip from Riga to Budapest began with an unexpected flight change: I had been scheduled to leave Riga at noon on June 30th and to arrive in Budapest four hours later, but LOT Polish Airlines moved the second leg of my flight, from Budapest to Warsaw, to the next day, July 1st. They had threatened, in an email, to cancel my flight, as they claimed to have been unable to get through to me about the change, but I had saved it by calling the company through which I booked it, for which I owe thanks to Skype for enabling people to make phone calls from their computers.

My expectation was that I would spend the night of June 30th in the airport, as I did not want to have to change a bunch of my money to Polish zlotys, make the trip from the airport to the city, and then come right back the next day. An airline official in Riga told me that I should look for a support desk in Warsaw if I wanted help, as they were not authorised, in Riga, to promise me accommodations. She was professional and did not charge me for my bag's being 23.5 kilograms. I had bought some black bread and dried figs, which I had improvidently eaten the night before, for my trip and had part of a bag of granola with me for the night.

When I got to Warsaw, I quickly found a help desk and complained about my predicament, first asking if there were any way for me to get to Budapest that night, and, upon learning that I could get in at 11:00 PM with a change in Munich, asking if they could offer me any food or hotel vouchers. The woman at the help desk made a couple of phone calls and was all ready to put me up for the night when, looking at my reservation again, she said, "You learned about the flight change two days ago." Here I kept a straight face and said, veridically, that I had been unable to contact the airline or make any new arrangements, as I did not have a phone with me (and one can only call 1-800 numbers via Skype), at which point she arranged for me to stay at the nearby Merriott, even giving me food vouchers for lunch and dinner. The hotel was only a three-minute walk from the airport's exit, and they checked me in immediately.

High-class hotels next to airports are too strange to be described in brief, but I have, alas, no time to describe this one in much depth. It is like a bubble in which one is insulated from the rest of the world: one is surrounding by smiling, efficient, knowledgeable staff trained to cater to one's every whim; the temperature and humidity of one's room, and of all of the hotel's premises, are carefully controlled; every surface shines, and the hotel is quiet, but one can still hear the hum of human activity, making it feel alive. The hotel had a gym on the second floor, of which I availed myself. Meals there were so big that I felt as though they were trying to kill me. I had a nicer room than I had probably ever stayed in and had access to fast, reliable Wi-Fi.

My flight to Budapest was easy, and I even arrived in the city well-rested. I met a young woman from Budapest on the bus into town who, when it became clear that I would not be able to make my way to the front of the bus to get a ticket, offered me one of hers, which I took with some embarrassment, as I could not very well pay her for it. She told me a little bit about the city and her studies in London, and, when we got to the edge of town, she offered me yet another ticket and rode the subway with me, as we were initially going in the same direction. Budapest's subway is not yet up to the standard of those in more modern European capitals: one cannot buy tickets in the stations themselves, but has to do so at nearby kiosks, and, instead of one's pressing them against a scanner to get into the subway, there are human ticket collectors who ask to see one's ticket when one steps inside. The subway is not badly marked, though, and one can find one's way around easily enough if one has taken the subway before.

My impressions of Budapest have been too varied for me to sum them up in any way. My first tourist activity here was to visit the House of Terror, which was awful (and expensive). It was about how much life sucked in Hungary during the years of communism and taught me nothing new. Someone at the hostel suggested that it had been dumbed down, to some degree, because using simpler language in the displays would help tourists whose native language was not English. Whatever the case, I was mostly dissuaded from museum visits after this one, having partly tired, over the past few days, of museums in general, and to spend most of my free cash on food.

There is no good black bread here, unlike in the pre-Baltic states. The stone fruits and sour cherries here are quite good. Of the local dishes I have so far tried beef stew, which would be fantastic with a proper cut of beef, and goulash, which is a bit of a tease, as it is so hot when one first orders it that one cannot immediately eat it, and one has to skim the fat off of the top of it anyway. I am going to try a trifle-like dish with a weird name, paprika chicken, and a popular fruit soup. I have not yet had ice cream on this trip, despite how good it has looked here, but have tried the famous poppyseed cake, which is good. Hungarians appear, based on the one restaurant that I have so far visited, to be anathema to vegetables, which may reflect that few vegetables were available to them historically due to the coil content of their farmlands.

In lieu of visiting museums, I decided to take a free walking tour here to learn more about the city. It turns out that the modern Hungarian state was founded in 896 when some king or other united the tribes living there (and Christened them, I presume). Celts, and then Romans, had settled in Hungary before the nomads came, attracted by its being protected on all sides by mountains and having plenty of spring water (which is what gave rise to the more contemporary popularity of baths here). Of the possible routes to growing rich--farming, fishing, being on trade routes, salt mining, spice production, and warfare (I gather that pottery and weaving could get individual families or villages rich but would do little for entire nations.)--the Hungarians chose the latter, warfare, amassing giant territories in the Middle Ages. The Ottomans conquered them in the early 17 century and were expelled in the late 18th century, after which point the Hungarians fought wars with their neighbours until signing a peace treaty with the kingdom in Austria in around 1853, forming the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The formation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire required the foundation of a new, eastern capital, and the cities of Buda, which had a medieval fortress or two, and Pest, across the river from it, were chosen, and Budapest was born. The city grew quickly and was intensively developed for the 1896 expo in honour of the country's thousand-year history, at which new inventions, works of art, and technologies were shown off. Hungary was, at the turn of the century, as developed a nation as any other, but it was trashed during World War I (I do not know by whom; I do not know with whom it sided.), again destroyed in World War II (having been occupied by the Nazis), and wrecked definitively during the years of communist rule, in which its farmlands were misappropriated and stripped clean, its economy was flipped on its head, and its workforce was made to advance heavy industry despite a lack of any proper infrastructure for it, and all products of its labour were stolen from it. The country has been gradually rebuilding since 1991, but, through no fault of its own, it still has a long way to go; a tailor whom I met, the group leader for the city tour, sews her own clothes (i.e., the ones that she sells), as the textile industry was, like every other one, trashed during communist rule.

The architecture here is interesting. Because Budapest was formed so recently and mostly developed in the second half of the 19th century, much of its buildings are built after those of Paris' city centre, which seems to have influenced architecture all over the Western world. The buildings that I have in mind are those four or five storeys tall with broad, flat facades and a sort of scalloped trim, like the frosting on store-bought cakes, along the roof. The main site of the 1896 expo includes a giant column modelled after those of the Roman Empire, bronze statues of a bunch of kings riding horses, and one of those semicircles of columns, also modelled after some classical analogue to it. The old fortresses on two of Budapest's hills (on the "Buda" side) are old fortresses. There is a victory statue, smaller than the one made for the expo, up on one of the hills (as well, now that I think of it, as a semicircle of pillars with a king on horseback) on one of Buda's hills. It has the obligatory accoutrement of a cathedral, churches, and museums in the city centre, as well as a massive synagogue, which I did not pay the money to visit. One of the hostel employees here pointed out that statues, victory columns, and the like are usually built for people who won wars (i.e., conquered other peoples), not for those who have helped to further the common good for all human beings. I had thought of this before, especially in and around Saint Petersburg, where, looking at the lavish palaces in which the rich lived, one thinks of all of the poor who laboured to make those palaces possible to build, sleeping in wooden shacks and eaten slop for dinner after 16-hour workdays in the fields. The world is full of injustice, and I think that one's goal when travelling is, rather than condemning people for their iniquity, to understand them, as people everyone are flawed, and one could find cause to excoriate them all day long.

The only day-trip that I took on this trip was to Szentendre, a delightful touristy town near Budapest, which I reached by suburban train. Taking the train there would have been nearly impossible, as it was a weekend, and no one was working at the ticket counters (I do not know if anyone ever works there regardless.), without a hostel employee's giving me a rough sense of how to do it. (Also, a local helped me to find the station, while another one helped me to get my ticket. People here have been enormously welcoming.) The tricky part is in buying two tickets, one for travel within Budapest's city limits and one for travel without them, but staying on the same train: it is far from impossible, but one could probably incur serious fines by not doing it right.

The train ride itself was not bad, as it took us past Budapest's Roman ruins, which I was, before I got here, planning to visit, and Szentendre was magical. I felt, when I got there, as though I had stepped out of Hungary and into medieval Germany: it is a town of two-storey, several-hundred-year-old buildings with ornate facades, of little churches and cobblestoned streets, some of which lead down to the river, the Danube. Local craftsmen had set up stalls on the city's main street and were selling knickknacks of all varieties, food vendors grilled big, smokey chunks of meat, and bakers made traditional pastries shaped like corndogs without the dog, which are made of dough baked on a rotating rod (hence their being hollow), right on the street, so that the whole town centre smelled of baking dough and grilled meat. The tourist information centre was at the very entrance to the main street (from the train station, where everyone starts), the edge of town had one of those free outdoor workout spots (with chin-up bars, dip bars, and the like), there was plenty of green space, and there are even reminders of Szentendre's considerable Serbian community, which was kicked out something like a hundred years ago. I did not try any of the food there or the churches that cost money to enter, as I am on a tight budget, but I did visit what might be the smallest synagogue in the world. This I found more affective than visits to larger sites, as it told the story of a small enough community of people that the numbers meant something to me. Something like 279 Jews were expelled from Szentendre toward the end of World War II, when the Nazis arrived, of which only 36 returned. One of these started to build a synagogue but died in 1997, before it was done, and either his or someone else's grandson decided to continue building it in memory of the entire community. The synagogue had historic photos of some of Szentendre's Jewish photos and family relics. The woman manning it gave me a little kippah to wear as I entered it and tried to give me an information card in Hebrew before I explained that I did not speak it.

The rest of my impressions of Budapest, are, unfortunately, multifarious, meaning that I have a lot more to write. There was a gay pride parade here a few days ago, as a result of which the main street through town was fenced off (along with many streets nearby it, making it hard to get back from the city centre to the hostel here). Someone who had gone there explained that she was made to drink some of the water that she had brought in the presence of a police officer to prove that it was not a Molotov cocktail--non-participants were not allowed to come within a city block of the procession, and people leaving the parade were advised to hide their rainbow flags so as not to be attacked. I do not blame their behaviour entirely on communism's having destroyed their society, as the Hungarians were, historically, overwhelmingly, Roman Catholic, which, I believe, means that they are not supposed to like homosexuals. This, in itself, is confusing to me, as, if God made man in his image, and lots of people are lesbian, gay, queer, or questioning, than God himself, unless he screwed up the job of reproducing His image, is, Himself, lesbian, gay, queer, or questioning, meaning that the Bible, if I am not mistaken, condemns Him. I am glad that I am not religious, as these types of issues could tie me into all sorts of knots if I wanted to follow the religion punctiliously.

Impressions, impressions! I noted not having much time to write, as one spends all day sightseeing and much of one's evening exercising. People in hostels are often social, and many tasks take longer than it seems that they should. I visited a gym here that may have been aimed at homosexuals: all of the weights were in a windowless basement plastered with photos of very muscular men, who were, in fairness, all at least in a partial state of dress; the other men working out there were incredibly muscular, and the gym played some sort of rave music. Water here, as in all of Europe, is potable, putting Russia to shame. The main market here is pretty neat, though greengrocers there will not let one touch or smell their fruit, ensuring that they not be able to confirm its quality. There is an island here, Margaret Island, the whole circumference of which is lined with a track, as in a running track made of that pebbly, ruddy material that is good for one's joints. I have gone running a couple of times as the sun was setting over Buda, the older part of town. The sunset's slow unfolding reminded me of the ripening skin of a peach: it was a pale, still green just above the horizon, a little yellower above that, and a full-blown salmon pink higher up, licking the wisps of cloud with pale scarlet. The river water looked, at dusk, like a kaleidoscope of shifting black and white tesserae, and the hills farther off were so clearly outlined in the moist summer air as to appear to have been etched into the sky, as though both hill and sky were part of a diorama. Little stick-like trees, houses, telephone poles, and a TV tower stood out, depthless, on it, and, for some time, one could still see little spots of colour, people, running along the track from the bridge above before everything melted into a featureless murk.

There are, surprisingly, few mosquitoes in Budapest. It has free water fountains everywhere, including by the track on Margaret Island, and little outdoor gyms like the one in Szentendre. It is famous for its baths, which I did not bother to try, and its Jewish quarter, which I hoped to see on a free walking tour that I missed. This frustrated me, and so I read up on the history of Jews in Hungary on Wikipedia as penance--they were mistreated for hundreds of years, became part of the middle class from the end of the 18th century onward, and then were exterminated during World War II, though not as early as in many nearby countries, as the Nazis did not arrive until 1944. Although Hungary is not as developed as, say, Germany or France, it is now a flourishing society full of artists and scholars, and its shortcomings are largely the fault of the communists, whom I hate, just like the citizens of every former Soviet colony in Europe that I have visited. In Riga, I read the letter that some commander in the Soviet Army wrote to Latvia. While I cannot remember its exact wording, it said something like: "Dear Latvian people, our army is [some enormous number] strong. Your army has [some small number of people]. In the interests of uniting our peoples peacefully, we propose that you join us as a Soviet republic. This war has already been marked by enough bloodshed... &c." Similar letters to the rest of the future Soviet republics must have been written. Russian can go on priding itself for having formed the Soviet Union without force. They seem to be the only people on earth, surprisingly enough, to approve of the former Soviet rule.

I have learned to say "hello" and "thank you" in Hungarian but do not yet know any other phrases by heart, and I am unlikely to learn any, as I will be heading to Brno, in the south of the Czech Republic, tomorrow morning. I forgot to mention, in an earlier post, liking the parts of Christian ideology tied in with finding inner peace, reconciling oneself with the parts of one's life that one cannot control, wishing for a better future, and so on but dislike much of the thinking that goes along with it. I have noted, based on Russia's having one of the largest economies in the world and, thus, a high GDP, that a better measure for a country's development would be to subtract the wealth of the top one or two percent of the population, then look at its GDP, as the top one or two percent in practically every country live obscenely well, which says nothing about the bottom 98 or 99%. Gas in Finland cost something like 1.24, 1.34, and 1.43 Euros (for different types), if memory serves, while in Estonia it was closer to one Euro per litre. I have been blown away by how quiet it has been in literally every city that I have visited since leaving Russia, and it occurred to me the other day that the cause of the quiet is people's not leaning nonstop on their horns while driving. There are functional bike lanes, which tons of people use, here, and, like in Riga and Tallinn, people walk on the sidewalk and the sidewalk only, while, when it was asked on a popular radio show in Moscow if the city needed bike lanes, callers replied, "What do we need bike lanes for? We don't even have roads!" Someone whom I met in Tallinn said, when I described Russian society to him, "It sounds like they lack any vestige of the sort of cooperation that you expect in a cohesive society."

My only plans for today, now that I have seen much of the city, is to try more of the local cuisine, visit a swimming pool, and keep writing. I have not seen as many museums as I initially expected to do and have, at times, cursed myself for returning time and again to the same countries over the past few years rather than trying something new. It has occurred to me, though, that one can change more from a trip from Victoria than from a trip to Thailand if one has the right mindset. I often think of how I would like to redo much of the past several years of my life, planning my travels more rationally and saving more money, but I am willing to accept that past mistakes, if such they were, have helped to shape me. I plan to try a lot of local food in Vienna, where I will be staying for a day, and the Czech Republic, and I may visit a bunch of museums in Prague, in part to make up for having missed out on some stuff here, and in part because I will, after all, be visiting the city for a second time, and there is little to see by walking that I have not yet seen (I should think). One generally thinks a lot while travelling. I expect the coming days of my trip to be interesting and hope to get as much writing done as possible.

Sincerely,

Max

One of Budapest's huge boulevards.

Fancy 19th-century buildings.

Hungarians like books.

Some sort of castle building.

This bakery was acceptable.

Budapest's cathedral.

Budapest has lots of amusing statues like this.

Budapest's palace from across the water.

The ruins of a castle on the same hill as the castle.

This appears to be some sort of wall.

Some important guy on a horse.

These look oddly like boysenberries.

A fascinating building from above.

The river from a bridge.

Historical Budapest turned sideways.

The famous parliament building.

This appears to be Szentendre.

People sell stuff on the main pedestrian street.

This guy appears to be deep in thought (in Szentendre).

An old back-alley in Szentendre.

This house was overgrown with ivy.

A memorial plaque by the world's smallest synagogue.

Part of Szentendre from above.

One of those tiny chapels that Europeans used to build.

Heroes' Square, built for the 1896 expo. 

These look like salal berries. (I did not, naturally, try them.)

I did not see a single one of these in Moscow.

A Holocaust memorial in Budapest's Jewish Quarter.

The famous synagogue.

The hill on which the freedom memorial rests.

Budapest from the aforesaid hill.

As above.

Another cool statue.

Shoes Along the Danube. Jews got shot here in 1944.

The parliament building, less imposing, from the side.

This appears to be for Liszt. His hands are huge.

Part of the Jewish Quarter--derelict facades.

This is, I think, a building in the park with monuments for the expo.

Evening light near where I was staying.

Days 1-10: St. Petersburg, Tallinn, and Riga

Dear fellow human beings,

I intend to write to you about the first ten days of my summer trip through Russia and Europe, but I am in a bit of a bind, as I am snowed in with all sorts of other work, and, since I never ended up updating my travel blog last summer, I am going to spend much of the coming week putting up photos and old emails rather than posting new material. The long and the short of this might be more of a gain for you than a loss: rather than writing blow-by-blow descriptions of each day of my trip, I will limit myself to general impressions from each leg of it.

My main impressions of Saint Petersburg, since I spent most of my time in nearby historic towns (Gatchina, Pavlovsk, and Pushkin), was that palace grounds look pretty much the same the whole world round. They vary in style a little bit, but the basic principle is the same: those in power have lots of money, giant palaces, and huge swaths of woods for hunting and taking promenades, while the disenfranchised live in wooden huts without, alas, forests for hunting and promenades. Whole teams of museum curators and art specialists have done an admirable job of restoring the palaces in the aforementioned towns, all of which were razed to the ground in World War II. Saint Petersburg itself was largely trashed during the war. Perhaps my main lasting impression of it is that I would like to one day return to see the Menshikov Palace in town and Mr. Menshikov's, the first-ever city mayor's (if my memory holds), summer home in Lomonosov. Every time I go to Saint Petersburg and think that I have seen it all, I discover something further worth visiting. This, in itself, is worth something.

My escape from Saint Petersburg was exciting, in part because it involved travelling a long distance, and in part because it involved leaving Russia. I opted to take a bus from Saint Petersburg to Helsinki (for 1000 roubles, or $20) and a ferry to Tallinn, partly to save money, and partly to be able to say that I had seen Helsinki. I saw, reading over someone's shoulder while lining up to use the bathroom partway there, that the British voting public had elected to secede from the European Union, which disappointed me. Most of the views that I caught of Finland itself, once we entered it (not without my being questioned at the border, but not for long; the Russians were happy to let me go), were of evergreens. I fell asleep over my book and kept rereading the same one or two sentences until we were pretty much there.

When we reached the ferry terminal, the driver cordially shook my hand, and I was informed, when I had walked inside, by someone who spoke nearly fluent English that I needed to get to another terminal, across the harbour; he gave me a map and wished me a good day. On the way there, I was struck by all of the qualities that I had missed while in Russia: law and order, cleanliness, and basic human decency. The streets and sidewalks were even, people did not drive like kamikaze pilots, and pedestrians shared the sidewalk instead of trying to shove one another off of it. There were lots of European-looking buildings, trees, and statues; since Helsinki mostly started to develop in the 19th century, most of its fancier buildings were, if I have my architecture right, neoclassical. When I got lost, someone whipped out his phone and gave me further directions, even saying, "Thank you," when I bid him a good day, and, when I got lost a second time, a shipyard hand directed me the right way around the harbour and even produced a tourist map for me (this man was over fifty years old but still spoke serviceable English), after which someone out walking said that he had seen me going the wrong way and that I should take a shuttle bus back. The ferry terminal, once I got there, was clean and well-staffed, with free bathrooms and clear signage. The ferry ride itself was fine and gave me a good view, naturally, of the strait separating Finland from mainland Europe. (Note: this is, apparently, called the Gulf of Finland.)

Tallinn is a part of fairytale Europe. Large sections of its medieval wall, including guard towers, are intact; it is full of churches and 17th-century houses (none of which, regrettably, has been turned into a museum showing what a 17th-century house would look like on the inside); it is full of little parks and green spaces. I learned, during my visit to the open air museum at the edge of town, that Tallinn had good soil, was largely agrarian right up until the early 20th century, and was not particularly Christian until, if my memory holds, the early 18th century, when the Bible and related writings were finally translated into Estonian. Tallinn grew rich as a sea port, much like Riga, Stockholm, and Gdansk (though it did not, I do not think, have, unlike Gdansk, large stores of amber). The Soviets beat up on the Estonians and sent their intelligentsia to labour camps following the end of World War II. It was not heavily bombed during the war. Its people--mostly tourists, admittedly--seem generally happy, and it seems to be moving quickly away from its Soviet past. Buses have little screens on them, like Austrian trains, that show the next few stops in advance, and there are recycling bins, which people use, everywhere. There are lots of Russians still living in Tallinn, and they are easy to spot: they wear six-inch high heels, skin-tight dresses, and several layers of make-up or white tee-shirts and jeans, lean close together when talking, and complain constantly about the way in which other people treat them and the cost of groceries. The rest of the society seems to correct for them: even the dogs here, sociable and energetic, are different.

Riga is a much different pot of beans (I do not think that such an idiom exists, but I cannot remember its correct analogue. So be it.). (Edit: I meant "a whole different kettle of fish.") It was, like any self-respecting European city, reduced to rubble during World War II, and, since it fell behind the Iron Curtain, nobody did much to restore it until the 1990s. So many Latvians were deported and killed during the years of Soviet reign that the percentage of Latvians in the country fell to something like 52% before it regained its independence. As such, it suffered much more than Estonia and is still struggling to recover. While Riga's buses are almost as good as Tallinn's (minus the little TV screens showing which stops are coming up), and they are a huge step up from their Russian counterparts, in which the drivers are protected from passengers by closed-off booths that appear to have bullet-proof glass, the population seems somewhat more downtrodden, and it is hard to imagine that the country's national identity is quite as well-formed given how many hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were sent here to work once the natives of the region had been killed off. One hears as much Russian spoken here as Latvian, and one can spot Russians from a ways off based on the sour disdain imprinted in their features, their tasteless dress, and, in the case of women of over 50 years of age, their dyed hair. Bus drivers here are plenty friendly, as in Tallinn. The employees of grocery stores do not seem to want to say a word.

While Tallinn was full of quaint museums about its city walls, its country's history, the art of the Russian icon, and so forth, Riga mostly seems to feature museums about World War II, the Holocaust, partisan movements to regain independence, and the public demonstrations that helped the country to finally do so in 1991. Here I encountered something that I had not come across during all of my time in Moscow: open discussion of the past. When I read, on one of the information plaques in a museum about the barricades set up in Riga in 1991, of the Soviet propaganda machine's having claimed that Europe was crumbling, everything in the West was terrible, and everyone in the Soviet Union was happy and productive, it occurred to me that Russia had not bothered to hire new copywriters since before the fall of the Soviet Union. Essentially everyone whom I met in Moscow claimed that the Soviet Union did more good than bad, that Russia helped its satellite states (or colonies, in simpler terms), that Ukraine's statehood was a fiction, and that the Soviet army had "won" World War II. When I mention Joseph Stalin's having killed some 20-30 million people, many Russians counter that he could not have acted otherwise, as there was a war, and that we in the West blow everything out of proportion. Based on my experience, they tend to pretend that none of the bad stuff in the Soviet Union happened and to eschew all dialogue about their collective past, as though by wishing it away, they can erase it.

Latvians are not like that (yes, I am generalising). They know that their country was conquered many times and that they have had to fight to get it back. They know that whole populations, such as that of the Jews, have been wiped out here, and, based on their museums, they are determined to remember the past and predicate their current identity on it. A museum employee here told me an interesting story: he met a young woman from Belarus who had bought the party line about the Soviet Union's having freed and supported the pre-Baltic countries (and Eastern Europe in general) until she visited Poland, Lithuania, Riga, and Estonia. If the people of every one of those countries claimed that the Soviet Union had ravaged their lands, stolen their farms and grain, and deported, jailed, tortured, and killed their citizens, and only one country, that of her home, claimed the opposite, how was she to believe the one country? Many Russians visit, when they travel, isolated resort towns in, say, Bulgaria or Turkey, where they interact with other Russian holidaymakers intent on carousing and overeating, and, while there are now increasingly more young people visiting other countries independently and encountering new ideas, they are still relatively few in number—in part, admittedly, because of Russia’s geographic and political isolation, but in part, too, because of a lack of willingness, I should think, to view history and culture from another point of view.

Riga has just the kind of old house that I complained of Tallinn’s lacking, and visiting it is, like everything else here, dirt cheap. In fact, it has both a merchant’s house and an old house from the Jewish ghetto, which sucked almost as much as the ghettos in Vilnius, Lodz, and Warsaw. The architecture here was, before the war, much like that of Lubeck (with a double-dot above the 'u') and Konigsburg (also double-dotted), naturally, as they were, for a time, all part of the same kingdom, though the few old buildings that have remained here reminded me more of Baden-Wurtemberg's architecture, oddly, than of that of northern Germany. Something like two million Latvians formed a human chain from Riga to Vilnius (an unbroken human chain) in 1991 to protest communism (Like the Hungarian and Czech revolutions, this was never discussed, in my presence, while I was in Russia). Food here is so cheap that I bought a week's worth out of over-excitement and have been furiously eating it since then. Perhaps my most interesting excursion, to more or less finish off my notes, has been to Riga's open air museum, where I found so many wild strawberries and blueberries that I could have spent my whole time there collecting them. The woods there smell of pine, which made me realise, once I had again encountered it, how miserable one's life is in its absence, and the birdsong is fabulous. The mosquitoes of the pre-Baltic are industrial-sized and leave welts almost as big as those of horse flies. The other wildlife here has so far proven banal.

My final note, besides that I will be stuck overnight in the Warsaw airport due to an arbitrary change in my flight times, is that I met a great many interesting people in Tallinn. One of them posited that one meets more independent, experienced travellers in Tallinn than in more popular places like Rome or Paris, while my tour guide through Tallinn's Patarei prison claimed that part of the reason for the insurgency of ethnically Russian people living in the east of Ukraine is that the closer peasants were to Moscow during Ukrainian's famine, the more of them died. I met someone who said that the world was chock full of problems but that we could make it better by focusing on our own little corner of it, while another traveller said that we needed to fight for some right related to the privacy of our data and that a major reason for the migration of so many Muslims to Europe today is that the West gave the developing world the medical revolution with no industrial revolution: give people the tools to make their population skyrocket without giving them the tools to develop an economy, and you end up with an overcrowded country bereft of skilled workers, a service sector, any sort of industry or manufacturing, and the potential for self-governance. This young man claimed that we would do better to give Syria roads, factories, and basic job training than to let the Syrians abandon their country, as those coming into Europe have, on the whole, no useful job skills anyway, and they will continue to leave until their own country is fixed. I read a fascinating article in the Atlantic several months ago about the problem of giving aid to so-called third-world countries; the issue is much more complex than any single fix could address.

That more or less sums up my thoughts for now. I expect to be write at the end of my trips to Budapest, Prague, Gottingen (with a double-dot), Leiden, and London, and I hope to have loaded enough photos onto my blog over the coming week to have finished posting musings about Russia by around mid-July and to have finished posting photos from the current trip by the time I finish it. I am overloaded with work and overanxious, and I am put out at LOT Polish Air's having decided to push my flight to Budapest back a day, just as some other European company pushed my flight to Paris forward a day last year. I think a lot about future travels and, to a lesser degree, the mistakes of my past that I would like to be able to correct. I think a lot in general and am sure not to be able to record all of my thoughts in this chronicle, but I hope to at least get the majority of them.

Have a good summer! Enjoy life wherever you are. I made a note to myself querying whether Russians' apparent unwillingness to discuss the past is due to collective guilt or straight ignorance. It is probably unfair to stick them all in the same bucket (again, I have got my idioms confused). Perhaps travelling should encourage one to judge less and to observe more. It should also encourage brevity, which remains, alas, a quality elusive to my writing.

Sincerely,

Max

Starting to Engage in a Foreign Culture: An Epilogue

Dear readers,

I spent most of my year in Russia condemning its citizens and rejecting its culture, but, with my time there winding down, I started making a bit more of an effort to understand the country. There are plenty of Russians who realise that the government steals from the people and that there is nothing that they can do to stop it. There are plenty of people who realise that life in Europe is much better than in Russia and that to protest conditions back home is to risk being thrown in jail or killed. There are also plenty of people who smiled at me, told jokes, cleaned up after themselves when they had barbeques, and so forth--what I finally accepted about Russia is that the people living there are, shockingly, wildly different, as in any country, and that generalisations about Russians as a whole are too simplistic to accurately describe them.

I have a couple of funny anecdotes about culture shock in Russia. One is that I found Russian men incredibly difficult to talk to. My interactions with them would begin with my asking them, "How's it going?"

"Fine," they would answer.

"What's new?"

"Nothing."

"So what have you been up to of late?"

"Work."

"... Do you even like talking?"

"Yes."

I complained of this difficulty to a female Russian friend, who explained to me that chicks talk and men do stuff. It is considered effeminate for a Russian man to talk too much. This is, of course, not to be extended to all Russian men, but I often found it the case.

My other anecdote is, on second thought, not funny. Dogs in Russia are crazy. They bark at everything that approaches them, often get into fights with one another, and will often stand at attention, like little soldiers, almost motionless, and growl when they see another dog within, say, two hundred metres of them. Their owners, for their part, yell constantly at them, pull them close to their legs when anyone walks or runs past (to prevent attack, presumably), and jerk desperately at their leashes, as though in a tug-of-war, when they see other dogs and try to interact with them. Soon before I left Russia, someone's dog took an interest in me, walking up to met with its tail wagging, and, when I extended my hand a few centimetres for the dog to sniff, it jumped back, snorting, and its owner told me, "Keep your hands off my dog." I would, to their credit, sometimes see dog owners chatting politely with one another, but I generally found them unfriendly, and I wondered if their dogs' aggression might be reflect their owners' attitude toward their fellow human beings.

I would often joke, while in Russia, with the Ph.D student whom I mentioned about how much Russia sucked and how far behind the rest of the world it was. Communication in the foreigners' wing of the dormitory was a combination of words, laughter, and energetic gesticulation. I think that my favourite interactions with Kyoon-Tek, my neighbour, were when he said, when I asked him why he kept buying bottled water instead of a filter, "I don't trust Russian technology," and when, after I showed him, with my hands, where the quality of life in Russia and in first-world countries lay, he raised his hand up to his head and said, "But Russians think they live up here!" Our claims about Russia were largely one-sided and, to some degree, unfair, but, as with most stereotypes, there was at least a grain of truth to them.

I have two more anecdotes to tell, one funny and the other sobering. The funny one is that people would often ask me, when I stretched in the hall of the dormitory after running, if everything was OK; the sobering one is that the police booked a friend of mine for walking down the street near a demonstration during the 2014 protests of Putin's presidency and, over the course of interrogations lasting up to nine hours, knocked out two of his teeth. He had no legal recourse, naturally, as he would have had to deal with the police again in order to press charges against them, and they were within their rights to hold him for up to seventy-two hours on the suspicion of his having committed a crime, during which time they were free to find out, in whatever ways they found fit, of what he might be guilty.

I mean for this post to be something of a conclusion to the year that I spent in Russia. I kept telling people, for all of June, that I did not want to leave, and it was not only the disruption of my routines that bothered me, but the sense that I was leaving just as everything was starting to get interesting. My translation teacher had had me over for tea a couple of times. I had started hanging out with the other translation students. I had also made connections with a film producer and a museum curator, for both of whom I was doing translations, and I was dismayed by the thought of how many interesting meetings and interactions I would miss out on by taking off so soon. A former study abroad student (on the other end, in the United States) told me that I would feel the same if I were to leave in two months' or two years' time, rather than at the end of June, as one can never attend all of the interesting gatherings and events that one would like, and I thought of the advice of a friend of mine from Vancouver to always leave a party while the going is good, as, if you stay later and later in an attempt to squeeze as much fun as possible out of it, you will merely tire yourself out and be left with memories of an unsatisfied longing (these are not his exact words). It was time for me to go in late June, just as it was time for many of my friends, now graduating students of the program, to leave the lives that they had known in search of something new. I would never again need to have an individual tutor in Russian linguistics or literature, as I had mastered what I needed of those subjects; my friends were tiring of life in the dormitory and were ready for more adult lives and apartments. I would never, if I returned, say, for another year, recreate the atmosphere of intimacy and discovery that people had helped me to create in that first year, as none of what I now experienced would be new, and my new friends would not be the same as the old, just as a city is not the same when one visits it for a second time and one's second baseball game is not the same as one's first. All of this made good sense to me, and my regret at leaving diminished slightly.

I am left with the thought of all of the museums that I did not visit and the public lectures that I did not attend. Perhaps my most important realisation, over the year, about Russian culture is that it is not the Russians' fault that I did not like it there and not their job to make me happy. I am reminded, funnily, of my first-ever trip to Europe, during which friends of my parents did my wash for me. I do not know if I thanked them--I would like to imagine that I was sufficiently well-bred to do so; but I know for sure, as I remember it distinctly, that I felt entitled to having had my clothes' washed, as though it were only natural--it was their job, after all--for my hosts to have done so for me. Perhaps a positive effect of one's visiting an entirely foreign culture is to be stripped of this sense of entitlement and reminded that nobody owes one anything. I can blame Russians until I am blue in the face for not agreeing with my views of the world, or I can accept that I am just as liable to be wrong as they are and that my cultural values are not absolutely right. It is discomfiting to be in a culture that one finds repulsive, but, if one dislikes it enough, one can always leave it, as I have done, without blaming the culture itself for one's not having liked it. Perhaps an apt summary of this whole paragraph is that it behooves each of us to adapt to the cultures in which we find ourselves (and, more broadly speaking, to adapt to our life circumstances) rather than demanding--futilely--that they adapt to us.

I keep returning, in my mind, to the scene of my departure from the dormitory, shortly after midnight, in a taxi, when my two Korean neighbours shook my hand and wished me success in life. I am reminded of the last scene of Anton Chekhov's The Steppe, in which the main character, a little boy, who has been sent to a different town for boarding school and finally arrived there, days later, by caravan, is seen off. The men who travelled with him--a priest, a merchant, a couple of labourers, and so on--all shake his hands and yell, "Hurrah!" as they depart, leaving him standing in front of his new school and wondering, as he tries to picture it, what his new life will be like and what changes await him in the coming years. I am, perhaps, in much the same shoes as Yegorushka, the hero of that tale, having come to the end of one stage of life and entered another, less certain one. I have talked a great deal with friends and family about the different directions that my post-student life could now take. I have been convinced by my teachers at the institute that I will cherish my memories of my time there for many years and that the most important people in my life, of all of those whom I met in Russia, will stay with me. I am reminded of the past, when, in elementary school, I would sometimes wonder what kind of person I would be in five years' time. I think that even then I had an inkling that my wildest guesses would be far from the truth and that we can never accurately predict the types of twists that our life will take.

I leave you with this thought, having failed to end this piece as gracefully as Chekhov did his (for which, I hope, I will not be ill judged). I survived a storm, much like Yegorushka, and a lot of other hardships (many self-generated) while in Russia, and I am now moving toward something different and unrepeatable. My main thoughts are on getting to bed. I have a set of clothes to wash and need to get some sleep before I head for Prague. I suppose that one needs to take an ever-renewing interest in life so that it not fall into a rote routine. I hope to learn to do this irrespective of my chances to travel in the future and to keep this ability with me forevermore.

Sincerely,

Max

One last loaf of challah before I left.

My Last Month or Two in Russia: Preparing to Leave

Dear readers,

My experience of Moscow started to improve in mid-April, and by early May I would admit, with some fastidiousness, that it had even begun to grow pleasant. The sky in Moscow starts to open up in the spring, and its many deciduous trees, which one does not notice during the winter, burst into bloom. Running outdoors becomes more pleasant. Fluff from the blossoming poplars carpets the streets so thickly that it looks like wool. One accepts, in the spring, that Russia is a country in which nothing works and nobody cares. The trams go more or less where they are supposed to. Short-haired Central Asian men in neon orange safety vests sweep dust from the edge of the roads. One takes greater notice of the trams, cleaning men, and soft, orange sunsets, which go for so long that it seems that they could stretch into the following morning.

I had a lot of friends in the dormitory. By the end of the year I was not baking as much as I had been. The halls of the dormitory were now hot and bright, and people came and went more frequently, preparing to go home for the summer or to stick around, the place half-empty and silent. People now stood outside smoking and chatting until all hours of the night. My work was going more or less indifferently. I was mostly looking forward to getting out more over my last few weeks and trying to make summer plans at this point. The whole month of May had a certain laziness to it, a sense of gentle passage into something indeterminate and unimportant, as though it did not matter where the month or I ended up.

One of the fruits of my efforts to get out more as the end of the school year approached was a pair of trips to friends' summer homes. One trip was for a day with an artist friend who had invited her family, other artist friends, and friends of those friends, so that the company was large and, to my way of thinking, somewhat impersonal, which did not really bother me. I tried tea made from a real samovar there, and I sat with my friend's father, mostly silent, as he heated the water for it over an empty fire, stuffing pine cones into a slot where they turned to ash and helped to heat the water evenly, or something like that. We ate and laughed a lot that day, and, with little else, to do, took a short walk. The idea of a visit to one's summer home is to escape the noise and crowds of the city, and this we accomplished, so that I felt as though I had entered a different country.

My second trip to a summer home was, perhaps, even more interesting. I went this time with relatives of a friend, his two female cousins, both roughly my age, and the one's six-year-old daughter. Their summer house was not as developed as the first one that I had visited--it was newer, and, as one of the women with whom I went pointed out, they did not have a man around to help them. The road leading up to it, once we had exited the highway for a paved road and the paved road for a dirt one, was an unmaintained field where part of the grass had been flattened previously by tire treads. The summer house was surrounded by a wooden fence--it was the first thing that they had erected once they had bought the plot, my friends' cousin explained--and it included a toolshed, a little greenhouse, some vegetable plots, and a lot of weeds. The house itself looked like a barn, from a distance, and had a wooden front porch. It had not yet been outfitted with plumbing or electricity, but it had a sort of indoor outhouse that was treated so as not to stink, and it was supplied with water (non-potable unless boiled) from its own well.

This trip was more interesting than the other in part because there were only only three other people to interact with, one of whom did not really count, as she was a child, and because nothing was expected of me except that I enjoy myself (which, I suppose, was the case on the other trip, but it did not feel as relaxed). I am a big fan of lying down and availed myself of this proclivity for some time. We ate some of the food that my two hosts had prepared. We also took a walk to a nearby church, which was hundreds of years old, and the village store, where, it was explained to me, the local young people got together. The store was, architecturally, akin to those gas stations that you come across in the middle of nowhere, except that it was not connected, to the left and right, to a highway, but was surrounded by birch trees, a pond, and a gravel parking lot, where the aforementioned youth sat smoking on the hood of their car and talking loudly. It seemed like a strange place to me to hang out, but there was nowhere else, in this little colony of summer houses, to gather, and the general store was abutted by a little bar. It had only opened, my friend's cousin explained, a year or two ago, having begun with its owner's selling vegetables out of the back of his truck.

We had guests, my friends' neighbours, over for dinner that night. Those neighbours had a child of my friend's child's age, and I got to watch the two of them play, which was even more interesting when they were joined by the neighbour's thirteen-year-old girl, who had nothing to do and no problems cavorting with children younger than she. They had spent all day out in the fields doing God knows what--it was perfectly safe, as the thirteen-year-old was the serious, responsible type and could look after them--and did not even come in for dinner until it was already dark out. Our guests left soon after that, and I stepped out into the early night, which was so quiet that I could hear the river-like rustling of the trees in the distance and the calls of various very musical birds, the only one of which I could identify was the cuckoo.

The next day was hotter and a little more active. I had taken a brief turn at mowing the grass by scythe on our first day, as I was eager to seem like Lev Tolstoi and wanted some exercise, and, on the second day, I mowed almost the entire weedy section of my friends' plot, even decapitating a few of their blossoming flowers in the process. I lay down again for a nap, as I had had a hard day of relaxing, and, as evening began to fall, we headed back for the train station, buying fresh milk from a local farmer on the way. My friends would be heading back, naturally, by car. We said a hasty goodbye at the entrance to the train station, which one could only enter with a ticket, and, as my train pulled up, the three of them, my two friends and the one's daughter, waved to me from the overpass above the tracks.

That trip was the highlight of my second semester. My departure from Moscow as a prolonged nightmare, as it entailed the disruption of all of my routines and was leading me toward an unknown future. It was strange for me, in early June, living exactly as I had been doing before when I knew that I would soon have to empty my Russian bank account, pack up my stuff, sell or give away what I did not need, and leave the country for good. These weeks passed quickly, as I was feverishly trying to see everyone whom I could possibly fit into my schedule, and I needed to run a whole gamut of errands, each small when taken on its own, before I left. I threw out all of my notes from the year, including, accidentally, notes that I had been carefully taking about a work that I was translating, used up the last of my baking supplies, and took a last walk to the massive local park. I have, happily, very few distinct memories of this time, as I spent most of it feeling as though my head would explode and I would never finish everything that I had to do before leaving.

I hosted a little going-away party on the last evening of my stay in Moscow, inviting five or six close friends to have bread and whatever they brought with them in my dusty little room. I had not yet packed, naturally, and, when my friends left, having sensed that I was getting antsy, I packed slowly enough that I feared missing the last subway to the train station and, in a panic, got a friend of mine, who was smoking outside, to call a taxi cab for me. Two Korean students from down the hall with whom I was friendly came outside to see me off. One of them, a Ph.D student at Emory studying social realist literature, said, "It has been a pleasure getting to know you, and I wish you all the best in the future," while the other student, who had worked in human resources in Korea, spoke less Russian than the Ph.D student, and was planning to remain in Russia to work, said something forgettable, laughing as he shook my hand.

My taxi ride only cost 301 roubles. The driver was from a former Soviet Republic, had a bizarre last name, and spoke near-fluent Russian; he spent the ride telling me that Russians were very dissatisfied with their country's government  and only ever really liked it when they scored one against the Americans. I waited for my train next to a homeless woman with yellow toenails. I had not managed to pack all of my luggage, having woken up a friend at midnight to leave a bunch of my stuff with her to be mailed later, and was not yet sure if I was ready to exit Moscow. I had made a great many friends there. I did not want to have to decide what my future life might look like. I had grown comfortable in the dormitory and was now going to spend each night, for the coming weeks, in unfamiliar surroundings.

So ended my year of study in Moscow. I have a lot to add in an epilogue summarising the experience. I have changed a lot since I left Vancouver. Perhaps my only point of note is unoriginal: we should look at every day--this is definitely unoriginal--as a little transformation. Being in a country for ten months, with a set start and end date, forces one to think more actively of one's transformation and to see it more clearly as such, but our ability to transform should not be limited to periods in which we face the unfamiliar every day. I hope to carry this idea forward with me and not to see the changes occurring within me as distinct points so much as part of a continuum that began when I was born and will end when I die. I thought a great deal of my childhood over the last few weeks of my time in Moscow and was generally more aware of time's passage. I suppose that there is a mystery in time's passage that we can only tap into once in a while when we are especially receptive to it and to the sensation that it engenders of our never being the same for any two distinct and different seconds of our lives.

Sincerely,

Max

My interest in the world returns. Spring twilight.

Fantastic clouds on a spring day.

A display about Moscow's history leading up to VE Day.

Yet another shot of the Kremlin. Good God.

Wildflowers somewhere.

Crowds form in Victory Park for VE Day.

A memorial to Russia's fallen soldiers.

I swear that I baked more than just challah this year.

Gathering storm clouds over Red Square.

Yet another sidewalk advertisement.

A bronze statue of a couple's farewell at the train station.

A windy day in rural Russia.

This is a different side to the country.

Kids playing out front an old, decaying church.

A church, some trees, and a fork in the road.

Dirt paths.

The incredible azure of the sky the next day.

Village twilight.

The village sunset.

Here I am mowing in pink Latex gloves and someone's rubber boots.

One last view of the village skyline.

Geese crossing the road.

Twilight, as seen from near downtown Moscow.

Lots of poplar fluff.

Ho Chi Minh Square (in Moscow).

Much more poplar fluff. It was everywhere!