The wandering thoughts of an non-navigable mind are briefly reined in by the predictability of birch, snow, cedar, birch, snow pine and the clinking of our train lumbering faithfully eastward, deeper and deeper into this enchanted land: Siberia. After 3.5 weeks of movement, transfers, time changes, newness, it’s hard to believe that tomorrow, for awhile at least, our wanderings will end. We will reach our long-awaited destination: Irkutsk. Less than a day left. 15 hours to be precise. An evening, a night, a morning (local time anyway—my body begs to differ, not sure what to do about the six time zones we’ve crossed over land since last Thursday night). And then we will be there.
Lots has happened since I penned my last words from the Black Sea coast. We spent four days in Odessa, wandering the city’s pretty streets, parks and coastline (and, briefly, part of the 4000-km of catacombs that wind beneath the city’s surface). We explored, awaiting news of our invitations’ arrival—and we did, along with some other news: my Commonwealth Scholarship application was successful. We climbed on another train and headed towards Kyiv.
We arrived Monday morning, made some phone calls, arranged to meet the friend of a friend to whom our invitations had been sent at the metro nearest the consulate. By some miracle, we met this stranger without too much trouble, and headed towards the Russian consulate, 1 hour left in the 3 hour window (10-1) that applications may be submitted. We are greeted by a sign on the door that reads: March 3rd, The Consular Department is closed due to technical reasons. We stand, too tired to do anything but laugh at our bad luck. Still standing, contemplating our next move, we see someone push through the supposedly closed door. We tentatively follow behind. A man asks us if we’re here to get VISAs. We hurriedly nod yes, and he says we should wait for the commandant to see if he will allow us in. He returns, asks us the same question, then confirms that all our papers are in order and sends us inside. A friendly woman receives our documents and asks us when we’d like them to be ready. We look at the price list and decide Thursday—and luckily so, for when we reach the cashier we count out all of our remaining hrivna (or grivna, depending on your language preference). The woman jokes with Mark, as the transliteration of his last name in Russian closely resembles “hooligan”. She hands us our receipt and pick-up slip and we are out the door, no more than ten minutes leater than we’d entered. We look at each other, a little stunned. Were we just in the Russian consulate?? Where were the lines? Where were the people senselessly reprimanding us? The nonsensical inefficiency? We muse over this experience, by far the most pleasant of Russian bureaucracy we (I’d even bet ANYONE) has ever had.
We buy a map of Kyiv and roughly plan the afternoon’s adventures. We begin at St. Sofia’s Cathedral (one of the oldest Orthodox cathedrals in Rus), then seek out an Indian restaurant mentioned in a guide book (unfortunately also closed—and actually not working—for “technical reasons”), and by the end of the day end up on the top of a hill with a very large sword-wielding Soviet woman (her sword was, apparently, lopped off so that it would be shorter than nearby monastery cathedrals). Evening comes. We meet our CouchSurfing hosts—and French Canadian CouchSurfing roommate—eat, drink and collapse for the night.
Tuesday we head to the train station. After hours of being sent from window to window, being told one thing at one place and having it contradicted at the next, we learn a hard lesson: there is something harder than buying Russian train tickets—buying Russian train tickets in the Ukraine. We return home exhausted, with tickets as far as Yekaterinburg, to a Quebecois dinner of crepes, ham, cheese, asparagus and maple syrup. Wednesday we return to the Kievsko-Pecherskoe Lavra—a monastery famous for its network of underground caves, dug out by monks seeking even greater solitude. We get lost in the underground tunnels, and find ourselves in the middle of a subterranean orthodox service, lit by beeswax candles and the untrained voices of fellow cave-goers. On our way home we happen on the closest thing to a soup kitchen we’ve seen yet—a couple serving tea and kasha from the back of their car. We enjoy the food sitting on a curb, pleasantly surprised by our find—social welfare of any form is something we’d given up on finding in the lands of the former USSR. When Mark offers them money they tell him that the government pays for this; every once in a while, volunteers drive cars to different parts of the city and feed whoever’s hungry.
Thursday we take our bags to the train station, wander around a park on the banks of the Dnepr, buy pickles from (and give them away to) an old lady on the street, eat pelmeni and borscht, and catch our train. Somewhere in the middle of this, I check my e-mail to find some more news: I’d been accepted to Notre Dame. In the wee hours of Friday morning, we cross back into Russia.
Friday morning we step into the streets outside of Moscow’s Kievskii Vokzal and are inundated by an unusual sight. Swarms of people are bustling about, in the way only Russian crowds can bustle, but doing something unusual—they are all buying (or selling) flowers. Men with hundreds of red roses cross the parking lot, others carry tulips or carnations, a few women also wander through with bouquets, both gifted and purchased. Overwhelmed by the crowd (and the sight) Mark and I pause before wading through the sea of flowery-people and Moscow slush. Tired after a night of constant wakings by border control officials, we break down and stop at the first refuge of calm and the promise of warm seats (and reasonably priced coffee): McDonald’s. Why the flowers, you may wonder? March 8 is International Women’s Day. In Russia, the holiday is a strange hybrid of Valentine’s Day, Mothers Day, and the festivities of the coming of spring. Men give women flowers, accompanied by knight-in-shining-armour speeches about a given woman’s exceptional beauty, intelligence, etc. Considering the holiday’s women’s-lib roots, I find this a strange custom, almost ironic; Post-Soviet Russian women, on the whole, aren’t afraid to voice their strong dislike of that other “F-word” (i.e. feminism) and this flower-giving wreaks of old patriarchy. Or, as an ex-pat writer of an Editorial in the Moscow Times notes, a better way to celebrate women, men, would be to forego the chocolate and take out the trash. But so be it. Who am I to judge?
Over McDonald’s coffee, we flip through a free issue o the Moscow Times. There’s an article about the election. The author notes that while the results were all-but-unpredictable, no one really knows how the constitutional quirks in this transfer of power will work themselves out? Medvedev is, after all, the first elected President to take over the presidency. Will Medvedev as President have to fire himself as Prime Minister? May it be a conflict of interest that he also currently heads Gazprom? I flip the page to another article: a record 87 Russians have made the Forbes list this year. After the US, here are more billionaires living in Russia than any other country. And this isn’t old money. The chart shows that most of Russia’s elite
have doubled or tripled in worth since last year. And still old women sitting in wool socks they probably knit themselves sit on just about every street corner with outstretched plastic cups. As Russians like to say of themselves—Russia has always been (and will always be?) a country of extremes. After buying the last 2 tickets from Yekaterinburg to Irkutsk, we spend our layover in Moscow wandering muddy streets, St. Basil's interior, and eventually end up in the Canada Club at the Canadian embassy. We play a few rounds of pool before returning to the train station.After 30 hours sharing a train compartment with an alcoholic Latvian (he had Mark drinking vodka at 8am on Sunday, and was already drinking beer from a 5L bottle when we got off in Yekaterinburg at 5:50am), we arrive one last time at Sverdlovsk Pass. Vokzal. We catch up on some sleep at Tugrul’s then head out to meet Guzial. Together we wander into some festivities of Maslanitsa—a spring festival with strong pagan undertones, that simultaneously marks the beginning of spring and Orthodox lent. We watch a glorified wrestling/king of the castle match, enjoy the traditional singing, join a circle dancing around a fire and hurl some snow into the flames, then decide to go home and make blini to celebrate the occasion (think Pancake Tuesday). We walk once more down the banks of the Iset (our usual route only slightly altered to account for spring water levels) to the obshezhitiye. We enjoy one last meal with old friends, then head back to Tugrul’s to wait for our 4am train.
And that brings me to here—a few hours east of Krasnoyarsk, watching the sun et over the Siberian steppe, pondering both what lies behind and ahead. My thoughts wander from Irkutsk to England to Indiana and back, to the decisions already made and yet to be made, to the anxiety and excitement caused by such situations—uncertainty and anticipation. These thoughts have occupied my mind for the last 4 days, causing restless nights and careful excitement. As they should. This decision will guide the next year (or two) of my life, and probably shape what happens beyond. It should not be taken lightly, though also shouldn’t cause too much unrest—could I really make a wrong decision? But for the brief time between beginning this entry and now, these thoughts escaped my mind, and I am overcome by the rare feeling of being exactly where I should be in the present moment. I was here, on this train, romanced by the open rails ahead, in the present, in Russia. And for now, this is where I should be.
