All posts in Ex-Soviet Union

  • The Transsiberian Railway

    Ulan-Ude’s giant head of Lenin looking imposing.

    The Trains

    The Russian Railway website does not generally work with foreign credit cards, which meant that we had to get friends to buy our train tickets once we arrived in Russia. As it was the end of August — prime vacation season — this meant that the quality of trains we had access to was not… always the best.

    For one thing, the toilets were questionable. On most of the trains that we took across Russia’s hinterland, the toilet flushed with the aid of a foot lever, and “flushing” was a hatch opening up in the bottom of the toilet and spraying your poop directly onto the tracks.

    Because of the risk of contaminating groundwater, you can’t be having poop on the tracks in all regions, so each settlement was flanked by a half-hour kontrolnaya zona, during which the train attendants would come through the train and lock each bathroom until we had safely passed all signs of human habitation. If you had to go? Tough luck. You should have known not to drink any water while approaching a town.

    Occasionally, the trains we took had a mix of older and newer rolling stock. The newer rolling stock had suction toilets of the kind you might find on airplanes, which sometimes made it possible to go to the bathroom even in the station (I say sometimes because, confusingly, these too were often locked). This did not mean they were without issues. At each stop where people got on, the train attendant would go around to everybody (except for us, whom she skirted with her eyes, certain that we would not understand what she was about to say) and say, “the hot water is at the back and NO TOILET PAPER IN THE TOILET.”

    Did the toilet have a bidet or something to make this easier on everybody? Of course not.

    Surprisingly enough, people did not want to toss their noticeably used toilet paper in the garbage can for all to see, so the toilets inevitably broke. Breaking meant the toilet filled with an unflushable amount of water. As soon as it happened, the same train attendant would come back through the car, peeking into each compartment and wagging her finger. “DON’T PUT TOILET PAPER IN THE TOILET.”

    The first train we took, from St. Petersburg to Moscow, was the last train with tickets available, and for good reason. The train didn’t simply go from St. Petersburg to Moscow, but actually from St. Petersburg to Krasnodar, in the south of Russia, close to Crimea. Crimea is a popular vacation destination, and taking land transport from St. Petersburg to Crimea takes a long time, which means it’s an option preferred by Russians of lower economic classes.

    Picture us, innocent, having just bought the last available ticket to Moscow at the train station. As yet, we know none of this. We settle into our berths and get ready for an uneventful trip.

    This was not to be. One of us proposed buying something from the canteen, but the train attendant didn’t have change for the large bills that the ATM had spit out. We decided to ask around on the train if anybody had change, and that is how we met Boris and Lena.

    Lena was a 42-year-old taxi driver and Boris was a 26-year-old of uncertain occupation (his styling was a bit mobster-esque, but he was also cheerful and friendly and loved to cook — “he made all this!” Lena exclaimed, reprising her exclamations each time a new dish was brought out. Their two-year-old, Misha alternately explored the train and gazed out the window and passing trains, gasping after each one.

    Lena and Boris taught us how to do things that are not allowed on trains. Smoking, for example. The technique was to walk to the back of the wagon and go onto the platform where the doors were. After that, you had to go between the cars, where the movements of the floor could chop off your toe if you weren’t wearing proper footwear, and the clattering din was enough to give you a headache if the smoke from four cigarettes didn’t do it first.

    Since so many people were doing it, the train attendants couldn’t do much more than wag a finger and say nielzya (not allowed) because, really, how to kick every single passenger off the whole, entire train?

    Lena and Boris were also generous people who took us under their wing from first “would you happen to have any change?” “Yes, we have change,” they said. “But wouldn’t you like some coffee?” They handed Adem a packet of instant, which we drank.

    Coffee turned into apples and apples turned into sandwiches spread with lard and grated spam, and lard and grated spam turned into shots of Russian homemade vodka samugon. As the bottle of liquor got pulled out, I began to fear potentially going blind from the effects of moonshine of uncertain provenance, so I told Lena that I wasn’t drinking because I was trying to get pregnant, a lie (I didn’t smoke either, though I did allow myself to be shown how it was done.) After she’d had a shot herself, she drunkenly leaned into me and told me in a low voice that sometimes, when you really want to get pregnant and can’t, the problem is that you can’t relax and what better way to relax than to have a drink and forget your troubles? She cited two friends who had tried for a baby for a long time only to finally conceive during a night of drunken nookie and/or a day of drunken embryonic implantation.

    Adem accepted the samugon and got quickly and gloriously drunk as the shots kept getting thrust into his hands. He tried to refuse, but not speaking Russian, had few tools with which to do so. Waving his hands? Not good enough. The only words he knew in Russian were spasiba and nyet, but these two were not enough to communicate. He repeated nyet like a whimpering mantra, but his refusals were refused by an increasingly aggressive and drunken Lena, who had taken out yet another bag of food and busily tried to force a burger past his lips and into his mouth. Hurriedly, I told Lena that he wasn’t hungry anymore and that I quite fancied the burger that she was trying to foie-gras feed him but not before feeling a delicious wave of schadenfreude wash over me. “This,” I would say to a groaning Adem later in words laced with I-told-you-so, “is how foreign people feel when they come to Turkey. Now tell me, again, how wonderful Turkish hospitality is.”

    Lena and Boris gave us one last gift of a dried fish before we arrived in Moscow, a fish we would take all across Russia and back and christened Gagariba (a portmanteau of Gagarin and the Russian word for “fish.”) On the platform in Moscow, we were picked up by the friends we were staying with.

    “We are so surprised about you taking this train!” they said. “How was it? Was it crazy? You know this is the train of Russians who can’t afford to fly to go on vacation?”

    Ulan-Ude


    Ulan Ude, the capital of the Buryat respublika, is a polluted, ugly city. It is such a hole that even Yandex, the Google and Google Maps of Russia, hasn’t really bothered with it. It could not tell us any public transit details, nor was it much help for calling taxis. This was a surprise, considering that Yandex has even mapped dachaville, middle of nowhere respublika. The more we got to know Ulan-Ude, the more we understood. The only ingredients in the food are meat and dough (dill, if you are lucky and cabbage if you are very lucky), our boogers turned black from the pollution, and even in mid-September it was very very cold.

    We were not in Ulan Ude for the public transit or for the taxis or the food, though. We were there for Russia’s Buddhist temple complex of Ivolginskiy Datsan, the only Buddhist spiritual centre of the Soviet Union.

    Our first morning in Ulan Ude, we put on inappropriate clothing for the weather, blew the aforementioned black boogers out of our noses, and took three marshrutki to the complex.

    By the time we arrived, we’d had plenty of time to realize that our summer outfits were unfit for the rainy weather, so we ducked into the gatehouse to warm up and see if we had to pay to visit the complex. The lady inside proposed an English-speaking tour guide, and soon, for the price of 500 rubles, we were being led into the complex by Anna, a guide with a flat voice and a tenuous knowledge of English.

    “Dear our guests,” she intoned for the first time of many. “Before we start the tour, I must ask where you are from.”

    “Turkey,” we said.

    “Oh my,” she said flatly. She turned to Adem. “I have been working here for five years and I have never met anybody from Turkey before.”

    She ushered us closer to the main temple and began. “Dear our guests, please take a look at this beautiful temple.”

    It was, admittedly, beautiful.

    “Here,” she continued, “lives a monk who is the phenomenon in Russia and all over the world. At this time he is 166 years old.”

    Adem would later confess to me that he didn’t hear this part.

    “Dear our guests. Please listen carefully to this history of Buddhism in Russia. Our Great Queen Catherine allowed Buddhist temples to be built during her reign. She was a great supporter of Buddhism.”

    “Dear our guests. Please pay attention to this beautiful Buddhist university. This is where the Buddhist monks in Russia study. There are only men in this university.”

    “Dear our guests. Please pay attention to this beautiful prayer wheel.”

    “Dear our guests. Please pay attention to this sacred rock.”

    The sacred rock was up on a pedestal, looking much like a regular rock. Anna continued, “If you stand ten metres behind this rock, close your eyes, and concentrate on it, then walk towards the rock and touch it, you can make a prayer and it will be answered.”

    “Oh cool,” we said, nodding enthusiastically since we were the only people on the tour.

    “Now,” said Anna. “You must touch the rock.” Stand here, about ten metres behind. Reach your hands forward, close your eyes, and walk towards the rock. When you touch it, make a prayer.

    Adem and I looked at each other in horror. His spatial awareness and sense of direction are only barely acceptable and mine are about as developed as those of a bumper car. Neither of us wanted to embarrass ourselves by closing our eyes, holding our hands out, and walking in a direction that would certainly not be on the way to the rock.

    On the other hand, neither of us wanted to seem disrespectful by refusing to touch the rock. What to say anyway? “Sorry, I am spatially challenged. I must have done something wrong in a previous reincarnation to be so challenged in prayer.” “Sorry, my life is already so great that I literally don’t have anything else I could wish for.” “Sorry, I don’t have any friends or relatives to pray for.”

    Rather than disappoint Anna, we gamely took up our positions ten metres behind the rock. I went first. Adem stood behind me with his eyes open periodically yelling, “Left!” “Right!” “Left!” “Okay, now just left. Just left, no, now right.”

    Finally, I touched the rock. Relief flooded through me. I quickly prayed that I would never have to touch the rock again.

    Adem repeated the performance as I yelled directions behind him. Having touched the rock, he walked triumphantly back to where Anna and I were standing. We looked at her expectantly. Where were we going next? To the Buddhist library, perhaps? As dear her guests, to pay attention to more beautiful things?

    “I think,” said Anna slowly as we looked at her triumphantly, “that you both need to try again.” We blinked. “Sometimes,” she said slowly, “your concentration is just not enough.”

    Adem and I looked at each other. We took our places at the start of the finish line. We concentrated. And, somehow, miraculously, we both managed to touch the rock again without getting directions yelled at us. It was truly a miracle. I didn’t even open my eyes.

    We returned to the guide. “This is the end of the tour,” she said. “But if you would like to go see the phenomenon in Russia and all over the world, I can arrange for you to receive his blessing. He lives in the most beautiful temple, over there.”

    We definitely wanted to see the most beautiful temple in the complex. “Of course we want to,” we said.

    “Great,” Anna said. “That will be another 500 rubles.”

    Adem grumbled something about religion and capitalism while I reached into my purse.

    “Okay,” said Anna. “When you go into the temple there will be a monk. He will let you in. You will take a scarf as an offering to the phenomenon in Russia and all over the world. You will go up to the lama and you will make these gestures. Now, he is in very deep meditation, so you will not be able to speak to him. But, you can speak to him in your mind. You may stand in front of him for as long as you wish and speak to him for as long as you like. Afterwards, ask the monk that let you in for a scarf. He will tie it into a special knot. With this scarf, if you press the knot to your forehead, you can commune with him wherever in the world you go.”

    We nodded. She led us to the temple and waved us in, but stayed outside herself.

    Inside the foyer, we encountered the monk of which Anna had spoken. Though decked out in robes, he was absorbed in playing a game of Candy Crush. He had a plastic bottle of Coca Cola in his other hand. He briefly looked up and motioned with his head that we could go in.

    The inside of the temple was underwhelming compared to its facade. We pressed gamely forward until we realized.

    The phenomenon in Russia and all over the world was at the front of the temple.

    Bald and seated in meditation posture, missing his eyeballs.

    He was dead, and mummified, and obviously so.

    Unfortunately, you are not supposed to turn around in Buddhist temples, so we could not tell if the monk at the back was watching us. So, we stood in front of the phenomenon in Russia and all over the world for a minute, pretending to commune through our minds. After we decided that we had communed for a respectful enough period, we walked backwards out of the temple to the foyer.  The monk had clearly not been watching us after all — he was still absorbed in Candy Crush and, rather than ask him for the communion scarf, we scampered out of the temple only to be once again surprised by the placid face of Anna who had waited outside. She did us a kindness by not commenting on our lack of scarf for future communions with the Phenomenon in Russia and all over the world.

    “You know,” Anna said reflectively as soon as we got out. “Some people claim that he is dead, but in fact, he is alive and just in very deep meditation. Did you know that the monks here even take his body temperature, and it sometimes goes up to 34 degrees?”

    Adem and I nodded. Of course. Even in Siberia, it gets hot sometimes.

    Anna walked us out to the gatehouse. The marshrutka to takes us back to Ulan Ude was already there. “Just a moment,” she said. “I’m going to ask the driver to wait for you. I need you to give reviews of my tour.”

    She waved us into the gatehouse and spoke to the driver while we bought camel-wool socks, then came into the gatehouse waving an iPhone which she put onto video mode. “Do you think you could say some things about my tour in your languages?”

    We both gave a short, complimentary review, and then skipped outside to the van without a door that would drive us back to the city.

    Four Putins

    Travelling in Russia, we knew enough to keep our mouths shut about any political opinions we might have about Russia – at least until we knew it was safe. And so, if anybody asked us if we had heard of Putin or had any thoughts on him, we evasively said things like, “Oh yeah, Putin. I think I’ve heard of that guy. He’s some famous person in Russia, right?”

    We probably needn’t have worried, as not only did we not meet anybody who was a great fan of Putin (I’m not sure what official statistics are saying, but my guess based on the people we met, with whom we mostly only spoke Russian, is that his popularity has taken a dip), but people mostly only seemed to ask us what we thought about Putin in order to tell us what they thought about Putin.

    Lena and Boris said they used to like him, but now think he’s horrible.

    A couple of drunk guys in the dining car of the train who were travelling to the middle of nowhere and were planning to go to the banya and tried to get us to buy them vodka told us that they thought he was horrible, too.

    Another woman, unconvinced by our evasive answers about how much we knew pressed us to tell her what we really thought. “We think,” we finally said carefully, “that he is smart, and cruel.”

    “I agree,” she said. “Anyway, I am not so interested in politics.”

    Finally, in Buryatia, we met a man who told us about his belief in a Russian YouTube conspiracy.

    It is common knowledge that Putin is an ex-KGB agent, and the KGB and its heir the FSB have lots of resources at their disposal. These include plastic surgery and other methods of disguise.

    At some point or other, the world’s best plastic surgeons were tasked with creating decoy Putins. The reason for this is unclear – to protect the real Putin? Just to mess with people?

    Whatever the case, the evidence for this is (apparently) overwhelming. For example, it explains why, even though Putin (allegedly) used to speak German so fluently that he could be mistaken for an honest-to-goodness Bavarian, he has recently been known to make basic mistakes when speaking German. It also explains why Putin and his ex-wife Lyudmila recently divorced.

    I mean, why would Lyudmila claim that Putin was no longer the man she married, unless… he… was… LITERALLY… no longer the man she married?

    I like to imagine this conversation.

    Putin: Lyuda dear, what’s for dinner tonight? Something involving potatoes, kasha, or dill? No, no wait, don’t tell me. It could also involve cabbage, beets, or sour cream. Hmmm…. Even after 30 years of marriage,  you still know how to keep me guessing.

    Lyudmila: Volodka, I’ve been thinking recently.

    Putin: Pierog?

    Lyudmila: I would like a divorce.

    Putin: (surprised) But why?

    Lyudmila: (bursting into tears). You’re just not the man I married anymore! The man I married spoke German like a Bavarian! The man I married came by his good looks honestly! And you speak of surprises. Surprises! After this long! HOW can you POSSIBLY not know after 30 YEARS that I ALWAYS make vareniki on Thursdays? You claim to have been a KGB AGENT!

    In one version of the legend, the other three Putins offed the real Putin. This is apparently why Putin has been acting out of character lately, though it isn’t clear exactly in what way his behaviour has been out of character (except for the German mistakes.)

    We would just like to say

    We were shown around/helped/encouraged by some very kind friends (and some very kind people we met along the way), to whom we owe a lot for the great time we had. Thank you 🙂

  • A Few Specific Muslims I Have Talked To

    Over the course of the last few years, I’ve talked to many Muslim people about faith. For some reason, these are the ones that stand out in my memory for the unexpectedness of what they said, the sincerity of their belief, the difference between my perception of what a Muslim looks like and what they looked like, their personal qualities, or some combination of these things. I’ve tried to write what they said without interpreting it here – although of course the questions that I asked in order to get them to talk more may betray some expectations I may have had.

    Azerbaijan, 2015 – Khalid

    I met Khalid online while in Azerbaijan. We spent a day walking through the old city talking about life in Azerbaijan, life in general. Many people in Azerbaijan are not particularly religious. Khalid was more religious than many – religious enough in any case to feel the need to impress on me fairly early on that “ISIS and people like them are not real Islam.”

    As we were walking through Baku’s old city, he said, “You know, the world is a bit like a video game. Game companies and programmers create video games with certain parameters, and certain rules for winning. I understand that God could have created the world in any way he chose, but he chose this way. So I think that the most important thing about life is to follow the rules of this game, because the rules could be completely different if God had willed it.”

    img_3074

    Kyrgyzstan, 2016 – Marina

    Marina did my nails at a salon in Bishkek. She was a cheerful ethnically Russian woman originally from Kyrgyzstan, who’d donned a shirt that day which betrayed more than a hint of cleavage.

    “Do you like this job?” I asked her. “Oh yes!” she said. “I love this job. I love making people feel happy and beautiful. It is very interesting and funny for me.”

    “How did you end up doing this job?” I asked.

    “Well,” she said, “I used to live in Dubai. My first ex-husband was Syrian. And I had no job. I was very bored. He said that I would get an education and continue university when I got married to him, but really I was just all the time at home – no education, nothing! And you know, in Dubai you have people to do everything for you so I didn’t even do houseworks. We divorced and I moved back here to where I grew up and got trained to do this job. I’m very happy now doing this.”

    “That’s great.” I said.

    “So where are you from?” she asked.

    “Canada,” I said. “But I actually live in Istanbul with my boyfriend.”

    “Is he Turkish?” she asked.

    “Yes, he is,” I answered.

    “Does his family like you?” she asked. “My second ex-husband was Turkish and his family did not like me.”

    “Oh?” I said. “Why not? Because you weren’t Muslim?”

    “I am Muslim!” she crowed. “I converted before I even married my first husband – and he didn’t even believe in anything, not anything, nothing. He didn’t want me to become a Muslim. But for me being Muslim felt right. My second husband’s family just didn’t like me because I was not Turkish. They wanted to their son a Turkish girl. You must be careful with your boyfriend and his family.”

    “How did you decide to convert to Islam?” I asked.

    “Well,” she said. “It didn’t happen immediately. Actually, it used to be, I used to have a job and on my breaks I would go out behind a mosque… to smoke. And I would hear the call to prayer – you know the call to prayer? And it didn’t happen immediately, but I felt something. I really felt it. And for me religion is something you feel. So I converted. Not everybody understands that religion is something you feel. I tried to explain it to my mother once. I said, “If you named your daughter Ayshe, how would you feel?” And she said, “That name is feel wrong for my daughter.” And I said that if I had a daughter named like “Maria,” or “Anna” I feel myself the same way that “Ayshe” is for her. Then she was understanding me.

    At the end of the pedicure, I asked her if she drank.

    “Of course!” she said. “Yes, of course I drink!”

    “What kind of vodka would you recommend I bring home from Kyrgyzstan?” I asked.

    “They are mostly all nice,” she said. “If you pay a little more, they are better.”

     

    Kyrgyzstan, Ramadan 2016 – Nurdin

    Nurdin was an AirBnB host in his late twenties that I found along the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul. Despite being ethnically Kyrgyz (Kyrgyz people are – at least traditionally – Muslims) he was observing his first Ramadan fast. His parents, brother, and sister-in-law were not fasting, so he spent a lot of time in his room until after sunset when he would come and join the rest of us to eat. I didn’t understand he was fasting until I’d been staying at his place for five days already; I invited him to go hiking with me if he wasn’t busy and he apologized for not coming as he didn’t think he could force his body to hike if he wasn’t eating all day.

    “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I hadn’t realized you were observing Ramadan. Of course you shouldn’t go hiking.”

    “Yes,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t tell you, but I just think Ramadan and religion are private things – you do them for yourself, they are between you and God. It is not good to do them only to boast to other people that you’re doing them. You know, here in Kyrgyzstan we have big problems with radicalization these days – these people are not practicing the real Islam, but I want to practice Islam in a good way. So that’s why I didn’t tell you.”

    Turkey, 2014 – Ayse

    Ayse was an incongruously kind and patient housekeeper for the first (and last) family I worked with in Turkey. She arrived wearing her hijab every morning, but usually removed it to tie her hair back if the man of the family wasn’t home. One day I tried asking her to help me with something in broken Turkish; she asked if it could wait until after. It was then that I noticed she had her head covered. “Oh sorry,” I said. “Yes, go do your prayers. It’s not urgent.”

    “You know the prayers?!” she asked excitedly. “Do you know Ramadan too?!”

     

  • Gulshada from Osh

    I arrived in Osh, a small city in Southern Kyrygzstan, in the evening. The light fell warmly on the unkempt buildings as my taxi driver whipped me around corners before finally depositing me in front of a grocery store and overcharging me a paltry dollar.

    The owner of the guesthouse I’d booked for that week came to pick me up there. She boasted several gold teeth and a friendly demeanor. The garden of her house, which had received wonderful reviews on Booking.com, smelled strongly of pig shit. I would later learn that it was also infested with cockroaches, and purposely left the bathroom lights on all night so that I wouldn’t see them scurrying out of the way as I marched towards the porcelain throne, my nocturnal bathroom journeys an unpleasant side-effect of eating Kyrgyz watermelon, apparently too early in the season.

    Gulshada’s husband, who spent most of his time working in the garden, spoke Russian with a strange accent. The night I arrived, Gulshada informed me that Osh was part of a traditional Uzbek kingdom and that, because of this, much of the population including her and her husband, was Uzbek. “Now there are fewer Uzbeks than before because there was some fighting between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz people a few years ago,” she said.

    I attributed Gulshada’s husband’s accent to an Uzbek linguistic influence and his slow speech to consideration for my own poor Russian. People in Osh seemed to have a generally tenuous grasp of Russian anyway; one woman at the bazaar didn’t even know her numbers in Russian, only in a language that sounded to me like funny Turkish (the language was definitely Kyrgyz or Uzbek, but I couldn’t tell which one.) So I thought little more of it until Gulshada showed up the next day to see how things were going. I was weighing my options about leaving because of the afore-mentioned cockroaches and pig shit smell, and wondering if it would be worth the hassle to find another hotel and get a refund. I mentioned the cockroaches to Gulshada, who shrugged and said, “They probably walked in from the garden. It’s warm, you know, the door is usually open.” Having not made a decision one way or the other about leaving, I changed the subject.

    “So how did you meet your husband?” I asked. “Oh, she said, “you know, he actually worked for me. And then of course, we fall in love and get married. He’s a good man and he loves my son, even though I had my son with my second husband. He even likes to pretend they look alike. But now he is kind of like a child because he has a brain tumour. Actually, that is why I started running guesthouses. Three years ago it was bad – he forgot everything, he even forgot his name. We took him to the hospital and they said, ‘It’s a brain tumour. There’s nothing we can do so take him home.’ In Kyrgyzstan the hospital system is very bad. So I brought him home and took care of him with natural remedies, and because of that I had to quit my job and I couldn’t work for three years. So because of that I started doing guesthouses. Now he is doing better. He can talk, he can work. But as you probably noticed, he is kind of like a child…”

    I felt a pang of curiosity about whether or not the diagnosis of a brain tumour was correct (is it possible for patients to make that kind of recovery in the event of a brain tumour? Or were the symptoms more consistent with those of a stroke?) This was immediately met with a pang of guilt, and I decided to stay for the remaining few days, pig shit smell and cockroaches or no. Meanwhile, Gulshada sat on the couch and answered her phone, chattering loudly as I sipped kvas and continued feeling slightly guilty about the fact that I come from a place with free socialized healthcare and relatively small number of cockroaches.

    Gulshada hung up.

    “That was my daughter,” she said. “She is feeling stressed out. Her husband is feeling frustrated at work.”

    “Oh,” I said.

    “They live in Bishkek,” Gulshada continued. “And because there are tensions between Uzbek and Kyrgyz people in this country, Uzbek people can get a job but it’s very difficult for them to advance at work. They have to work in low-level positions, because there is fear that if they get some power than something will happen.”

    “That sucks,” I said.

    “Yeah,” said Gulshada. “It’s tough to be Uzbek in Kyrgyzstan.”

  • Kyrgyzstan: Yurts, Russian, and Radicalization Fears and Realities

    As an adolescent, I hated yurts, which smacked of a patronizing variety of poseur-hippie that rubbed me in all the wrong ways. The offensive yurts always seemed to pop up on university campuses, at homeschooling conferences, and random stretches of grass, accompanied by a posse of beckoning dreadlocked evangelists, “Hey, do you want to come and see our yurt? Come inside!”

    It’s not that yurts aren’t cool, it was just that they seemed so cliché.

    With this in mind, it is with a touch of embarrassment that I confess that my greatest goal for my trip to Kyrgyzstan was to, at some point, sleep in a yurt. I knew it was likely to be a tourist yurt, but sleeping in a yurt in Kyrgyzstan makes me less of a poseur than homeschooling-conference hippies, right?

    Maybe not, but people can change.

    Anyway, at an undeniably touristic yurt camp where I stayed, where German tourists flock to bask in the natural glory that are the pastures and mountains of Kyrgyzstan, I fell in with a group of Kyrgyz tourists who, like me, were entirely unused to yurt-living.  They arrived a few hours after I did, and cheerfully plonked themselves beside me in the dining yurt and began chattering.

    almaluu yurt camp kyrgyzstan

    The afore-mentioned dining yurt

    “I slept in a yurt once before actually,” said one of my new buddies. “But it wasn’t as comfortable as these ones. It was a real yurt.”

    “You mean you don’t stay in yurts regularly, not even for vacation?” I asked. “No,” said another girl. “We don’t. We’re from Bishkek.”

    The following night, the same girls regaled me with tales of their daytime activity, a show of traditional horse games and archery. As we ate we watched a young Kyrgyz girl dance to traditional music and then stood while she conducted a “master class” which was supposed to be a way for us to experience Kyrgyz dance, and was definitely a way to make us all look like total idiots. The Kyrgyz women were barely better than me at the moves, which surprised me. I’d thought that they would have at least some background, though movies or a lesson in an elementary school gym class – something. It didn’t appear to be the case.

    We sat down again to munch on cookies and sip tea mixed with jam. The conversation went on in Russian, so I mostly focused on eating because unless I’m being spoken to directly, it’s hard for me to follow. I looked around at them. They comprised a wider variety of ages than I’d first assumed. The youngest girl I met was 15, and the oldest member of the group was in his early thirties.

    “How did you all meet each other?” I asked, as the conversation lulled.

    “Actually,” one explained, “This is a program called Muras and it’s about kochman. In Kyrgyz, kochman means nomad, and this program is about bringing youth who are Kyrgyz but who don’t have their culture anymore to experience the traditional Kyrgyz culture. You know, all Kyrgyz people used to be nomads and live in yurts, but now there are also a lot of people like us who live sedentary lives in Bishkek and speak usually Russian.”

    “Are there any Kyrgyz people who don’t even speak Kyrgyz?” I asked.

    “Yeah, maybe. We go to school in Russian and university in Russian, and maybe there are some parents who speak only Russian at home. In Bishkek, it’s possible. Or people speak Kyrgyz, but not at an academic level. Anyway, with this program we go around Kyrgyzstan for ten days for free, and we see some traditional things like what it is like to live in yurt, riding horses, dances, crafts and things like that. Some of us are writers, bloggers, and journalism students. We take pictures and write about our experience in order to encourage other youth to know more about traditional Kyrgyz culture.”

    “I have another question,” I said. “During the Soviet Union, Kazakh people were forced into collective farming and more or less stopped being nomads. Did that happen in Kyrgyzstan too?”

    “Actually, yes, there are lots of sedentary Kyrgyz people now,” said the woman sitting next to me, a doctoral student called Gulbara. “What usually happens nowadays is that people in the villages have some animals, but instead of taking them to pasture in the summertime they pay another shepherd to take his animals to pasture. So maybe only five people from every village go to live in a yurt in the summer. The rest stay in town and work. A lot of people don’t want to stay in yurts. Moving is expensive, and being in a yurt can be a bit boring.

    Next up was an interview with camp staff, conducted by the journalistically inclined members of the group. The gist of the interview, translated for me later, was that the woman working at her camp loved her job because she saw it as a way to combat the rise of radicalization in Kyrgyzstan. “Why are youth interested in radicalization?” she asked. “Why not be interested in our traditions? That’s why I do what I do.”

    I asked one girl, a journalist called Jibek, about her job outside of this program. “I mostly write about success stories,” she said. “In Russian and sometimes in English.” “Not in Kyrgyz?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Actually, my English is better than my Kyrgyz.”

    At the next meal, I got a question I wasn’t prepared for: “So, what did you know about Kyrgyzstan before coming?”

    I stammered, both because I was expected to answer in Russian because I hadn’t expected the question. “Um, I heard that you have yurts, that you eat a lot of meat, that you used to be a part of the Soviet Union… but you know, North Americans really know nothing about Central Asia. Really nothing. So I can’t say I was raised to think about Kyrgyzstan at all.”

    “Well,” said one of my conversation partners helpfully, “Kyrgyzstan is actually kind of a contradicted country. We are right next to China and we look Asian, but we’re not Chinese. We speak a Turkic language, but we’re not Turkish. Many of us speak Russian and we were part of the Soviet Union, but we’re not Russian either. And we have many different ethnic groups – Kyrgyz, Russian, Uzbek, Muslim Chinese, some Turks and Koreans. And we’re kind of at a strategic location between all of those countries, so everybody wants a piece of the pie – especially China.”

    The next day the group was rejoined by a woman working for UNICEF Kyrgyzstan, and the topic of radicalization came up again. “I work with education and things,” she said, “and some healthcare too. There is a big problem with radicalization in Kyrgyzstan, so we had a measles epidemic recently because of it. There were some people that were telling parents that vaccines weren’t halal, and that’s all it took.”

    It seemed funny to me. Kyrgyzstan seemed utterly different from Turkey; few women were wearing Islamic coverings and I heard the call to prayer drifting from a nearby mosque only rarely. Still, the topic of radicalization had come up twice, and it seemed as though people were talking enough about it that it must have been current.

    I left the yurt camp and my new friends to work for a few days in the nearest large town of Karakol. My homestay host had things to say about radicalization to. “Kyrgyzstan has some very nice, very good traditions and very good things,” he said. “But also some problems. Like radicalization is a big problem. In the south, about 1000 people went to join radical Islamist organizations this year. (Note: I’m just quoting, but this link claims 500.)  It is mostly happening in the south, among young men who are not educated and don’t have anything good to do in their life. Yes, it’s a problem. A very big problem.

    It seemed almost preposterous to me, as on the surface Kyrgyzstan had none of the overt aggressiveness that Turkey sometimes has, particularly when it came to young men. I occasionally got greeted in the street, but nobody touched me or tried to follow me, and most people did not even extend their greeting to flirtation.

    I was standing in line at the airport in Bishkek waiting for my flight to Istanbul when the bombs went off at Ataturk airport. The latest news appears to indicate that one of the bombers was from Kyrgyzstan, so I guess there was something to what everybody seemed to be saying.

    The main gist of the trip, however, was not radicalization but hospitality. And yurts. They were as good as I imagined.

    IMG_3689

  • What the Fog: Horseback Riding in the Mountains in Kyrgyzstan

    The other day I went horseback riding in the mountains. First, I stopped by a yurt for some kumis, a traditional Kyrgyz spring beverage of fermented horse milk. Please note the very cool yurt storage system. This yurt also had a stove and chimney (these are not uncommon yurt accessories).IMG_3718

    Then I got on my horse. He did absolutely nothing that I told him to.
    IMG_3722

    Because I was so inexperienced, my guide had to take my horse and attach our two horses with a rope. It was a blow to my ego and, I’m sure, to my horse’s. Fortunately, the guide’s horse did embarrass himself by farting no less than 15 times on the way up the mountain. I had never heard a horse fart before, but here I am today telling you about it.

    My horse responded by seeming to try to get his mouth as close to the source of the farts as possible. My first thought? “That’s disgusting. Like that movie The Human Centipede.” My second thought: “Huh. The equestrian centipede.”

    All I can say is that, when you are climbing up a mountain in Kyrgyzstan in a fog thicker than your Mom and you have unwittingly thought of the most disgusting movie that exists on earth, it pays to be able to distract yourself with a good vocabulary.

    We saw some of the best views in Kyrgyzstan.

    IMG_3723

    If you look really closely, you can see a yurt on the right.

    IMG_3724

    On the way back, it started pouring rain. We had already been dampened by the fog, but the rain soaked us through. We hightailed it back to the yurt, at which point I learned that being on the back of a trotting horse requires some more supportive undergarments because otherwise it is very painful in the chestal region. The yurt inhabitants quickly stripped me of my shirt and gave me a shapeless cardigan worthy of the finest elderly Kyrgyz lady. There is not much privacy in a yurt, so it was a bit of an undertaking. I was thankful and felt much better.

    I think my guide felt a bit badly to have taken me up when the weather was so bad. I would, however, recommend going horseback riding in Kyrgyzstan when the weather is nice, since from the bottom the mountains look like this.

    IMG_3739I had fun anyway, but if I had the chance to do it over again I would postpone the trip to another day.

  • Cultural Learnings of Kyrgyzstan for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Canada

    The countries Central Asia are the new Timbuktu of the world, a cluster of vaguely exotic locales whose location nobody is exactly sure of – at least, nobody outside of the ex-Soviet Union and maybe Turkey. Sacha Baron Cohen took advantage of this lack of knowledge in his shock humour classic Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, a terrible movie that has, nonetheless, at least put the idea of Central Asia in people’s heads.

    Still, when I told people were I was going I was met with polite nodding or an honest, “actually, I’m not really sure where that is.”

    Well, I’m in Kyrgyzstan, not Kazakhstan, though if you didn’t notice that in the title you wouldn’t be alone. There’s a reason for this change, and it’s not my desire to trick you or hold your lack of knowledge over your head. In fact, I was supposed to be going to Kazakhstan, and would have succeeded if it weren’t for my own stupidity. For you see, I bought a visa to Kazakhstan last year only to be pleasantly surprised when the visa indicated I was eligible to spend 30 days as long as I did it within the next year.

    So I waited 8 months. Finally, I bought a ticket, booked a place to stay, and took the bus to the airport. There was traffic and I arrived late enough to start hyperventilating in line about whether I would actually manage to have them put my baggage on the plane. All in vain as it turned out. I arrived at the counter one minute before the check-in deadline, placed my bag on the conveyor belt, and handed my passport to the check-in agent.

    “Where is your visa to Kazakhstan?” she asked.

    I flipped through the pages of my passport and handed it back to her.

    “But this visa is expired,” she said. “See? February 8, 2016.”

    “No no,” I said with mortifying self-assuredness, “it doesn’t expire until August. See? 08/02/2016.”

    She took a picture of it and made a call. Adem grabbed it to look. “Kate,” he said, “look at this other date. It says 23/06/2015. There is no way you can be right.

    The bizarre calm of accepting fear fulfilled descended over me. Adem and I strolled to the ticket counter in the hopes of cancelling the ticket before the plane took off. While we were there, I booked another ticket to Kyrgyzstan for the following week.

    And that is the story of how I was once almost deported from Kazakhstan, except not really. It’s just the story of a three hundred dollar mistake that motivated me to scarf down a brownie and cry for a bit.

    I arrived in Kyrgyzstan yesterday. The interior of the airport smelled funny, though I couldn’t place the scent. Body odour – of course, a classic – but something else. People pushed towards the customs officials in a line that resembled people waiting for the release of a new iPhone. (A.K.A. NO LINE.) When I was finally able to push my way to the front, I could see that the border officials were wearing hats that made them look like they were from North Korea.

    This is not hyperbole; in fact, if anything the hats were like a hyperbolic version of North Korea army hats. They were green with a wide brim and even an extravagantly sloped top that reached it’s peak at the front of the hat and another, smaller, peak at the back. Affixed to the front of this verdant hat-valley was a large red star brooch flanked by sheaves of wheat, the official symbol of the Soviet Union. On the glass of the passport control booth was a large sign showing a camera with a red line crossed through it; I can only assume this is because Kyrgyzstan does not want the secret of the highly embarrassing and amusing border control hats to get out to the rest of the world.

    The sheaves of wheat were a laughably ironic symbol also; during the Soviet Period, collective farming was imposed on neighbouring Kazakhstan, which had previously been largely nomadic. This resulted in mass starvation, with some sources claiming that 38 percent of the population perished. While this didn’t happen in Kyrgyzstan, the sheaves of wheat still seem an ironic symbol for a country that a. is very close to Kazakhstan and b. has not been a Soviet Republic for 25 years.

    I haven’t had a chance to talk to any Kyrgyz people in any depth yet, but the hats were giving me the feeling that Kyrgyzstan may be a bit nostalgic for the Soviet period.

    As I stood in line mentally besmirching the hats, the man next to me said, “So you are from Canada.”

    “Yes,” I said.

    “Why are you coming to Kyrgyzstan?” He sounded like it thought it was a bit weird. In truth, it did seem weird; in that whole crowd of people, I’d seen only two others who looked like tourists from a place that wasn’t Russia. “Well,” he said, “there are lots of beautiful places. You can go hiking.”

    It was my turn to go up to the border counter. I took a deep breath to stave off laughter at the hat and because somebody had vomited next to the counter and it hadn’t yet been cleaned up.

    The border guard looked at my passport. “You’re from Canada?”

    “Yes.”

    “Do you have a visa?”

    “Canadians don’t need a visa to Kyrgyzstan.”

    He looked for a moment at an sheet of paper pasted to the wall of his cubicle to find out whether I was telling the truth. His eyes didn’t appear to focus on anything, which made me wonder if he had actually managed to find Canada at all. After a few seconds he shrugged. “Okay,” he said, and stamped my passport.

    And that is the story of how I’m pretty sure I held the first Canadian passport that that guy had ever stamped.

    As for Bishkek, so far it is dusty and hot, but reasonably green.

    bishkek bus

    The buses and marshrutkas come in different colours. This is a first for me.

    bishkek movie theatre

    The Bishkek movie theatre.

    IMG_3672

    A literacy poster. This baby’s all like, “I don’t understand words.”

    bishkek fountain pool

    Is this a swimming pool, or is everybody just swimming in a fountain?

    IMG_3677

    Kyrgyzstan is an ostensibly Muslim country but, like in Azerbaijan, few women cover. I also had pork shawarma today and they were doing a roaring trade.

     

     

  • Take Care of Your Breasts!: Nostalgia for the Soviet Period in the ex-Soviet Union

    As I planned my trip through Russia and the Caucasus, I began to prepare by interacting with more and more people from ex-Soviet countries. Mostly, I met them online. My friends were typically born after 1980, and spent their childhoods in the perestroika-era Soviet Union. Many of them professed a kind of nostalgia for the Soviet Union of their childhoods. “In some ways, it was a great childhood,” I remember one Russian telling me. “We didn’t know a class system. Of course there were problems but as a child, I wasn’t aware of all that. It was a great childhood, for me.”

    A few friends from other ex-Soviets spoke well of the Soviet education systems of their childhoods, and decried the loss of the education quality that has occurred in their countries since 1991.

    I was surprised to hear these perspectives. The North American collective consciousness had left me with little knowledge of social life in the Soviet Union. Sure, I had nebulous ideas about nuclear armament and Stalin’s purges, but no real timeline or concept that the Soviet Union wasn’t a static entity and that it had undergone massive changes across its history, even if North Americans weren’t easily privy to them. I couldn’t think of anything that the Soviet Union had done that could be considered beneficial to its population. It wasn’t that I had anything against acknowledging that there might have been some good things about the Soviet era. It was simply because, as a North American, my exposure to the social culture and history of the Soviet Union was limited.

    Now that I’ve been to a few ex-Soviet countries, I’ve found that the nostalgia I noticed before I left is common – although not universal – across the ex-Soviet Union. A few months ago I wrote about how little of this nostalgia I noticed in Georgia, but I spoke too soon. At a language-practice meeting in Tbilisi, I met a woman in her fifties. “How was it living in the Soviet Union?” I asked, expecting her to reiterate what the other Georgians had told me about how the evil Russian occupation had not managed to subdue proud and tenacious Georgia. (These statements, I later learned, were somewhat ironic as Stalin himself was . . . Georgian.) She didn’t. “Oh,” she said, “It was wonderful. The education system was excellent. We learned many foreign languages. And it was so cheap to travel from here to Moscow.”

    What characterizes collective memories of the Cold War period for North Americans doesn’t seem to be the same across the post-Soviet world. Did Soviet citizens live with the same terror of nuclear war that North Americans did? I don’t know.

    What I do know is that, these days in the ex-Soviet Union, nostalgia for the Soviet period abounds. It’s certainly not universal; many people have terrible things to say about the difficulties endured during the Soviet era. But . . . it is common, and it takes many forms – from lamenting how expensive travel to Moscow has become since the break-up, to buying postcards and magnet editions of vintage Soviet posters, to spending time at one of the three museums of Soviet Arcade Games that grace Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kazan.

    This is the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games in Moscow. Yes, you can play the games. They only work if you feed them Soviet money though.

    This is the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games in Moscow. Yes, you can play the games, but only if you feed them Soviet money.

    Another Russian friend pointed out that North Americans also have some kind of nostalgia for the Soviet period. “For example,” he said, “the game Fallout is about Nuclear War, which was a big preoccupation of the Cold War.” He was right – with one major difference. In the ex-Soviet Union, nostalgia for the period is about many different aspects of Soviet culture and society whereas in North America, Cold War nostalgia tends to be about . . . the threat of war.

    I picked up these postcards at a gift shop in Moscow. They came in a pack of twenty. Many of them are military themed, but what struck me were the four related to public health campaigns.

    These two cards both address the issue of overdrinking. The one on the right reads, “A river begins with a small stream” and dates to 1929. The Soviet Union obviously continued to struggle with this public health issue as the card on the left, which simply reads, “NO,” dates to 1954. 

    IMG_3276

    These two posters are also about public health issues. The one on the left reads, “Take care of your breasts” while the one on the right reads “After work, go to the bathhouse.” In the Soviet Union, many apartments did not have baths inside, so inhabitants were forced to frequent bathhouses (back before they had connotations of homosexuality.) Both of these posters date to the 1930s.

    Stalin’s purges aside, the social history of the Soviet Union is not well-known in North America. It’s a shame, really, that it isn’t. To conclude this post, I present you with a question my Ukrainian roommate in Georgia asked me about the social culture of North America that proves that a mutual lack of cultural knowledge exists up until the present day.

    “Kate,” he said. “Do people in North America read on the john, or is that just something that people in ex-Soviet countries do?”

    I was quick to assure him that piles of books and magazines are common features of many North American bathrooms. Although the Soviet Union has been gone for 24 years, the vestiges of the Cold War live on in a mutual lack of knowledge about these – admittedly perhaps insignificant – cultural details. Still, I don’t think that a North American one-dimensional understanding of the Soviet and ex-Soviet space is insignificant at all (although, in the case of bathroom reading, perhaps it is.) In fact, the more you know . . . the more you are likely to make reasonable judgments about North American and post Soviet people and their mutual relationships. Sure, there’s bad stuff, but there’s also good stuff. And if you aren’t the sort to divide social movements into such easy moral categories, I can say for sure that there’s plenty of interesting stuff to be learned about the countries that make up the ex-Soviet Union.

    So come on in! The water’s fine!

  • I Love Platzkart

    The legacy of the Cold War has left North Americans with precious little knowledge of the post-Soviet world. Sadly, some of the things that North Americans don’t know are rather nifty.

    Ex-Soviet transportation infrastructure makes North American transportation infrastructure seem an ersatz, shameful excuse. Expensive North American taxis, buses that take forever to arrive, and subway systems that only privilege huge cities pale in comparison to post-Soviet transportation infrastructure, which tends to be efficient and affordable. Yes, the subways are creaky, the buses look like they haven’t been updated since 1940, the marshrutka* drivers clearly have a collective death wish, and the taxis are uncomfortable and painted in jewel-tones, but I’ll be darned if the whole system doesn’t just work better than it does in North America.

    Vladikavkaz tram

    A tram in Vladikavkaz.

    This isn't a taxi, but many post-Soviet taxis do look like this.

    This isn’t a taxi, but many post-Soviet taxis do look like this.

    Although I geek out about all aspects of transportation infrastructure in the former Soviet Union, one particular type of transportation is special.

    Platzkart. I love platzkart.

    Platzkart is a class of train travel. When you travel by train in North America or Europe, you buy either a seat or a berth in a cabin. In the post-Soviet republics, platzkart is an intermediate option. If you buy a ticket in platzkart you will spend the night in a bed in a train car that contains 54 beds. It’s like a hostel . . . in a train.

    Russians tend to feel disdainful towards the idea of platzkart. I told a group of men from Krasnodar about my love for platzkart. “What?!” they yelled all together. “Is it the not showering? Is it not having hot water? Is it feeling dirty and smelly that you like?” They mimed showering with a bucket of cold water in a postage-stamp sized bathroom in platzkart over a several day trip.

    I told another group of Russians from Moscow. “What is it you like about it?” they asked, perplexed. “The smell?”

    I told my Russian teacher, and now every time I change cities she asks whether I travelled platzkart, and then laughs her head off. Of all my Russian friends, she is the kindest to platzkart and can understand why I choose to travel that way – but she still finds it hilarious that I’m such a big fan.

    Each wagon in platzkart contains 54 beds. Half of them are lower berths, and half are upper. At the beginning of the journey, everybody sits on the lower berths. As evening approaches, passengers roll out a provided mattress pad and make the beds with the provided linens.

    Platzkart upper berths

    Platzkart from above, before making the beds.

    Platzkart doesn’t really smell. (There was one time the toilet broke, but that was just once.) Yes, if you have back problems or are a light sleeper, or are taller than 5’6/168 cm or so, platzkart might not be for you. The berths are usually a bit hard, sometimes people snore, and people will probably bump your hands or feet if they stray a few centimeters off the bed, which is easy to do because the beds are only about 170 cm.

    The pros outweigh the cons though. Platzkart is a great social mixer. Spending 12, 24 or 36 hours in the same space with no internet starts conversations flowing. I’ve met missionaries, political scientists, tourists, a girl who moved to Azerbaijan for love (yikes), people who grew up in the train’s destination, and so on. Platzkart holds people captive and all but forces them to exchange stories. Half the time I leave platzkart, I leave with a phone number of somebody who lives in that town. “Give me a call if you need help,” they say. “Really, if anything goes wrong, just call.”

    That’s not to mention the funny things you witness in platzkart. The woman who was trying to get 20 packs of diapers across the border without paying duty? Well, the whole train had to wait, but only the folks in platzkart were able to laugh because we were the only ones who knew what was going on.

    In platzkart, people have shared their food with me, given me advice about travel, patiently corrected my broken Russian, invited me to breakfast in their homes, and promised to help me celebrate my birthday. They have also provided me invaluable information about the cultures of my destinations, things I might not have learned only by travelling to the destination because conversations are more difficult to start when people are not forced to occupy the same space. In fact, a few of my upcoming blog posts started as conversations in platzkart.

    Platzkart is also the safest way to travel as a woman travelling alone in the ex-Soviet Union. It is possible to buy a bed in a four-berth (kupe) or two-berth (lux) cabin, but unless you are travelling with friends, it only means that you will be sharing a cabin with one or three strangers instead of 53. In platzkart, not only will 52 people hear if something goes wrong, stealing is more challenging because everybody keeps an eye on others’ stuff.

    In the upcoming weeks and months, I am planning a series of posts inspired by platzkart conversations. Stay tuned.

    *A marshrutka is to the post-Soviet world what a dolmus is to Turkey.