A Traveller’s World

I was flying from Norway to Malta via Pisa, Italy, with just a backpack and a safari vest to give myself the mobility and freedom I needed to finally start appreciating the process of travelling. With four hours on my hands between the planes, I figured I would have at least two hours to spend in Pisa and even pre-booked the five-minute train ride from Trenitalia’s website, to spare the time needed to figure out the ticketing machines. Pisa is small, and thus better explored by foot. I hoped to get to see the Falling Tower instead of sitting at the airport doing nothing.

The reality proved to be even better than the expectations. The plane wasn’t late, despite a 20-minute delay on departure, it must have taken me a quarter of an hour to get to the train and within a few minutes there I was – walking the streets of Galileo’s hometown.

Just following the signs, I walked and I walked, expecting noisy screaming Italy with disorderly traffic and cramped streets with battered pavement seemingly dating back to Roman times. Pisa met me with a lazy mid-day softness and the smell of ozone. Nobody screamed and the only people rushing were the tourists. The cars waited for you to pass, the people were quiet and polite and the regular refugees were selling fakes along the street leading up from the station.

The Duomo and the Falling Tower seem strangely non-photogenic when I reach them. It is the angle of the tower than is disconcerting. Either I get the tower straight and everything else is bending to the left – or I get the tower straight and everything else is bending to the right. The few shots where the alignment of the Duomo and the tourists is correct do not do justice to the tower, because I can’t find the right angle to shoot from, and its top gets cut off.

I rush back after a while because I still have to grab a bite before leaving for the airport. As usual, I pass by the better cafes to find an even better one only to realise there are none. I end up almost near the station too tired to go back to find those really good ones again, and decide to turn onto a side street. Two pizza joints seem completely out of the question, while the third one, an empty cafe with plastic tables and chairs and paper table cloths in white and red seems to be just the right thing.

The man behind the counter greets me warmly – me or the obviously well-known customer who walks in with me? I order an omelet with zucchini, the first thing I see really, and try to order water and wine from the lady in charge, but water proves to be complicated enough, as she doesn’t speak any English. Raising her hands, she begs me to stop at once. Her daughter, the polyglot, will deal with me in English, I am told. Sit, sit.

I sit at the wall, facing the TV, somewhat intimidated by the home-stay feel of this cafe. When you don’t belong, privacy becomes a necessity. The customers who came in every five minutes were all greeted with equal warmth reserved for long-time acquaintances. It made the language barrier and my strangeness all the more noticeable.

When I had eaten, the polyglot daughter, a girl of about twenty, came to ask me whether I wanted anything else, fruit or coffee. Yes, coffee – and red wine. Somehow ordering two things didn’t quite work that day, but the wine request got through. Red wine? Italian? Yes, yes, please. She left with my dishes and came back with a huge glass, like the ones made for serving aged wines, on the bottom of which the 125ml of red looked like a tiny mouthful. Chianti, she announced, proudly placing the glass on the table and bowing her head slightly, with the air of an embassy reception hostess. The wine, nearly hot, exuded a warm mellow aroma, reminiscent of the earth and the flowers on a hot sunny day. It had the unmistakable flavour of Chianti, the warmth, the aftertaste…

 As I was leaving, the owner, her husband and the polyglot daughter were all saying good-bye to me, with the warmth reserved for a long-term acquaintance.

These notes are not mine. They were posten as a comment to one of In Your Pocket Guide articles. However, this is one of the most brilliant description I have ever come across 🙂

A frequent flyer can find in Russia’s airports a useful encapsulation of the country’s problems and oddities. In their family resemblances, Russia’s airports show how far the Soviet system squeezed the variety from the vast Russian continent; in their idiosyncrasies, they suggest how far it failed to. They illustrate how much of that system, and the mindset it created, live on, 15 years after the old empire nominally collapsed. Russia’s awful, grimy, gaudy airports reveal how much hasn’t changed in the world’s biggest country—but also, on closer inspection, how much is beginning to. Sheremetyevo: Landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, first-time visitors may be unnerved to see their more experienced co-passengers limbering up, as if for a football match or gladiatorial combat. When the plane stops taxiing, or before, the Sheremetyevo regular begins to run.Sheremetyevo is war. The international terminal was built for the 1980 Olympics, to showcase the Soviet Union’s modernity; now it recalls the old regime’s everyday callousness (the anarchic domestic terminal is even worse). On a bad day, the queue at passport control stretches almost to the runway. The Sheremetyevo virgin soon meets the various species of Moscow queue-jumper: the brazen hoodlum; the incremental babushka; the queue-surfing clans who relocate in groups when one of their number reaches the front. The immigration officer—usually sporting peroxide blond hair, six-inch heels and an abbreviated skirt—offers an early insight into Russian notions of customer service. Reflecting the country’s neo-imperialist confidence, the immigration form was for most of this year available only in Russian (“distributed free”, it says, in case anyone is tempted to pay).As with most Russian problems, cash can mitigate the Sheremetyevo ordeal: beautiful girls meet VIPs at the gate and escort them straight to the counter. If he passes customs unmolested, the visitor emerges into a crush of criminal-looking taxi drivers. If, as it will be, the traffic is bad on Leningradskoe Shosse, the road into town, the driver may try to ingratiate himself by driving on the pavement; a 50-rouble backhander will settle things if the police pull him over. On his return to Sheremetyevo, to reach his departure gate the visitor must negotiate a bewildering series of queues, starting with one to get into the building: if he is unassertive, he will still be standing in one of them when his plane takes off. There is nowhere to sit. Forlorn African students camp out in the upstairs corridors. The attendants in the overpriced food kiosks are proof incarnate that the profit motive is not yet universal—though stewardesses on Russian carriers offer unofficial upgrades on reasonable terms. For a small consideration, they sometimes oblige smokers on long-haul flights by turning off the smoke alarms in the toilets. Mineralnye Vody: To reach this airport, in the north Caucasus, passengers pass through a series of military roadblocks, where documents and the boots of cars are checked by slouching policemen, looking for weapons or terrorists. But a sensible terrorist would leave his weapons at home and buy new ones at the airport, where a wide selection of enormous knives and ornamental Caucasian swords is on sale. There are also embossed Caucasian drinking horns, and a large number of Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra.Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell. In Soviet times, before the region that the airport serves was desolated by separatist insurgencies, blood feuds and government brutality, the nearby mineral spas were popular holiday resorts. The building is incongruously large for a part of Russia that today, for all its macho hospitality and merriment, feels more African than European in its violence, poverty and corruption. It is weirdly cold inside. Feral cats have been sighted. The floor has not been cleaned since perestroika; the toilets are hauntingly squalid. On the wall there are arrival and departure boards that no longer work, and a big, proud map of the Soviet Union. Vladikavkaz: Roughly meaning “to rule the Caucasus”, this city, south of Mineralnye Vody, is an old tsarist garrison and the capital of North Ossetia, one of the semi-autonomous ethnic republics of the north Caucasus. Backed by the Caucasus mountains and bisected by the rugged Terek river, Vladikavkaz might be pleasant, were it not for the occasional terrorist eruption and internecine gangster bombing. The Ossetians are Christians, give or take some residual animism, and are Moscow’s traditional allies against the restive Muslims of the other republics. Like several other local peoples, the neighbouring Ingush were deported by Stalin in 1944; the Ossetians took part of their territory, and the two fought a war in 1992.Vladikavkaz airport is actually closer to another, smaller town, obscure and unremarkable until September 2004: Beslan. The road to the airport leads past the auxiliary cemetery that was used to bury the hostages slain in the terrorist atrocity at a Beslan school; toys and drinks (because the dead children were denied water by their captors) are scattered on the graves. The airport ought to be hyper-sensitive to security risks.It seems not to be. When your correspondent passed through, he noticed a couple of shady characters and their hulking bodyguard talking to an airport official. The official took their documents to the security desk. “Who are they?” asked the security officer. “They are businessmen,” replied the official, as the documents were stamped. The party appeared to reach the runway via a side door, with a large hold-all seemingly unexamined.Kaliningrad: This airport has a sort of holding pen in which passengers are kept before being released onto the tarmac. Surveying the assembled crew, with their standard-issue gangster coats and tattoos, it becomes obvious why Kaliningrad has a reputation as a smugglers’ haven.It used to be Königsberg, city of Kant and celebrated Prussian architecture. By the time the Nazis, British bombers and the Red Army had finished with it, little of pre-war Königsberg was left. Then Stalin took a shine to it, deported the remaining Germans and incorporated the region into the Soviet Union. It is now an island of Russia in a sea of European Union—an anomaly that is profitable for a certain class of businessmen. As well as contraband, the exclave boasts most of the world’s amber and Russia’s ageing Baltic fleet. The Kremlin worries that the Poles or the Germans might try to take Kaliningrad back; but, in truth, no one else really wants it. As the aromas of vodka and Dagestani cognac waft around the airport holding pen, the consolation for the nervous traveller is that if one group of dodgy passengers starts something nasty on the flight, another one will probably finish it.Vladivostok (“to rule the east”): At the other end of the Russian empire, near China and on the Sea of Japan, Vladivostok is the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railway. It became famous during the Russian civil war as a wild eastern entrepot of refugees and interventionists; nowadays it is described (mostly by people who haven’t been there) as Russia’s Hong Kong or San Francisco. Here you face a classic Russian-airport dilemma.You have clambered around the tsarist fort, and inside the decommissioned Soviet submarine. You have seen the children riding reindeer on the cigarette-ash beach, and peered at the disconsolate alligator in the aquarium. You have also met the mayor, known in the city, not altogether affectionately, as “Winnie the Pooh”, or “Vinnie Pookh”. He acquired his nickname during his fabled reign as a gangland boss. The mayor has ridden the post-Soviet escalator from crime to business and on into politics, securing his office after his main election rival was wounded in a grenade attack. In response to questions about his past, the mayor inquires whether you yourself have ever been in prison. You are not sure whether the mayor is asking or offering. A dubious car arrives to take you to Vladivostok airport, about an hour’s drive from the city, along a road lined with the forests that, like crab and salmon, are one of the great but fragile prizes of far-eastern Russian power struggles. Your driver is keener on talking than driving. “The Chinese are too cunning for us,” he says, decelerating with every fresh lament. “We are giving away our natural resources”. The factories are all closed; there is no place for anyone over 40 in the new Russia. It becomes clear that this driver is not entirely sober. You are running perilously late for your flight out of Vladivostok. Should you or shouldn’t you ask him to go faster?Murmansk: Well into the month of May, the runway at Murmansk is still fringed with snow; it dusts the pine trees over which incoming planes descend, along with still-frozen ponds and rivers. In the airport’s VIP lounge there is a set of sofas of daunting tastelessness. The main terminal is mostly empty, save for a bar, a pool table and some fruit machines. Downstairs, outside the toilets, there is a strange drawing of a man wearing a trilby hat, silhouetted against the sun. But upstairs there is a lovely metallic relief on the wall, depicting everything that is produced in the Murmansk region, or that was once produced.The biggest city anywhere inside the Arctic Circle, Murmansk was built for and shaped by war. It was founded during the first world war, and was a destination for the famous allied sea convoys during the second, when it was utterly destroyed. When the Kursk submarine was raised from the floor of the Barents Sea in 2000, the corpse-laden wreck was towed back to the nearby dry docks; nuclear icebreakers are their regular customers. A church was built in memory of the dead sailors, and stands amid the other monuments to deceased warriors. Otherwise, Murmansk is cluttered with the usual post-Soviet paraphernalia: a Lenin statue; shabby kiosks; gambling halls; pavements that seem to dissolve into the road. For all that, the Arctic setting has its own appeal. Icy it may still be, but from late spring the Murmansk girls don their short skirts, and it is light around the clock. In the small hours, down at the port, seagulls wheel around the cranes resting motionless, like giant, paralysed insects, against the illuminated pink clouds. A Ferris wheel rotates on a hill above the town.Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: In tsarist times, Sakhalin island was a giant prison camp. Visiting in 1890, Chekhov considered it the most depressing of the many depressing places in Russia. From 1905, when Russia lost its war with Japan, the southern part of Sakhalin was ruled by the Japanese; it was taken back in 1945, along with four smaller islands that the two countries still bicker over. Traces of Japanese architecture are still visible; so are the descendants of the Korean slave labourers whom the Japanese imported. The Soviet experiment bequeathed sparse squares and omnipresent Lenins. After the experiment failed, many of Sakhalin’s inhabitants fled its wasting beauty. Salmon can still be scooped by hand from its rivers in the spawning season, but much of the fishing fleet is rusting in the bays.Yet Siberia and Russia’s far east have always been lands of opportunity, as well as exile. On Sakhalin, today’s opportunities are mostly in oil and gas, which foreign consortia are extracting from beneath the frigid Sea of Okhotsk, off the island’s northern shore. New pipelines cut through forests, and up and down mountains, to an export terminal in the south. A stone’s throw away, there are elderly Russians living on what they can fish and find in the forest; the few remaining indigenous reindeer-herders survive on even less. But in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the capital, there are new hotels, bars and jobs.The primitive domestic terminal at the airport has a tannoy system, but the announcements are inaudible, and their main effect is to spread fear. Destination names are put up, taken down and put up again above the check-in desks. The upper floor is appointed with weirdly ornate Soviet chandeliers. Last year a family of bears wandered onto the runway: the airport authorities hunted them in vain. But there is also a new international terminal to serve the flights from Japan and South Korea. The staff there speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolence.Irkutsk: Five hours ahead of Moscow, in eastern Siberia, Irkutsk is the nearest city to Lake Baikal, the world’s largest body of fresh water—water so clear that it induces vertigo in many of its visitors. The drive to the lake leads through vast forests, past the roadside shamanistic altars of the indigenous Buryats, under an enormous Siberian sky. In the 19th century Irkutsk was home to many of the so-called Decembrists, and the wives who followed them into exile after their 1825 revolt against the tsar: men and events that might have changed Russia’s history, and the world’s. Alexander Kolchak, a diehard White commander, was shot in Irkutsk in 1920; his body was thrown into the icy Angara river. Planes descend into the city’s airport over identikit Soviet apartment blocks and rickety Siberian dachas. The current arrivals terminal is a hut on the apron of the tarmac. Passengers wait in the street until the baggage-handlers feel inclined to pass their bags through a hole in the hut’s wall. The bags then circulate on a terrifying metal device apparently borrowed from a medieval torture chamber. The nearby departure terminal is chaos, though by ascending an obscure staircase passengers can find an interesting photographic display on “minerals of eastern Siberia”.The staff speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolenceThe hut, however, is only temporary: a new, modern terminal is being built. It will be needed if the local authorities attract all the tourists they are hoping for. Lake Baikal, the awesomely beautiful main draw, was threatened by a new oil pipeline—until Vladimir Putin ordered its route moved away from the shores of what Buryats call the “Sacred Sea”.Yekaterinburg: Long-term residents of this city in the Urals shudder when they recall the state of its airport in the 1990s: never any taxis, they say, and very often no luggage. The arrivals hall still has a faint abattoir feel. But, next to it, a colonnaded Soviet edifice has been turned into a business terminal. And there is a new, glass-walled international terminal of positively Scandinavian gleam and efficiency, erected recently using private money. It has a swanky bar that serves edible food. There is an internet café where the internet connections work. “An airport”, says one of its managers proudly, “is a city’s visiting card.”It is not too fanciful to see the contrasting parts of Yekaterinburg’s airport as a metaphor for the city’s development. It was in Yekaterinburg that the Bolsheviks murdered the last tsar in 1918. Outside town, close to the border between Europe and Asia, there is a memorial to the local victims of Stalin’s purges—a rare and moving place in a generally amnesiac nation.In a nearby cemetery stand what wry locals describe as memorials to the victims of early capitalism: life-size statues (complete with car keys) of the dead gangsters who earned the city its 1990s sobriquet, the Chicago of the Urals. Because of the military industries that moved there during the war, Yekaterinburg was closed to foreigners until 1990. But these days most of the surviving crooks have gone straight, or into politics. Hoteliers are parlaying the city’s infamy into a tourist attraction, foreign consulates are being opened, and businessmen and tourists can fly directly to the new airport. Sheremetyevo: Ignore the snarling waitresses and look again at Sheremetyevo: something is happening. Its operators have come under pressure from Domodedovo, Moscow’s other main airport, which was reconstructed a few years ago, and to which airlines have migrated in such numbers that its spacious facilities are often overrun. Sheremetyevo is getting a makeover (as are several of the other airports mentioned in this article).There is a new café. There are now electric screens on the baggage carousels, displaying the numbers and origins of incoming flights (even if they do not, as yet, always correspond to the baggage circulating on them, much of which is still wrapped in clingfilm to keep out thieves). The nightmarish domestic terminal is being replaced, and a third terminal is going up. A new train service will one day replace the agony of Leningradskoe Shosse. Haltingly, frustratingly but undeniably, Sheremetyevo has started to change—much like Russia itself.

On arrival, a semi-civilized crowd rushes to the passport control stands. Unfortunately, when 10 planes arrive at the same time, even the fastest runners have to wait for an hour. I socialize with people around and behind me, and as time goes by, all of us become increasingly anxious about the luggage that is on the belt somewhere over there, somewhere we thankfully can’t see. I start telling horror stories about bottles and cigarettes and jewellery being stolen from checked-in bags. Nobody is really impressed. As my queue approaches, it turns out many never bothered to read the immigration form and didn’t fill in the return journey slip – which results in them being sent to the back of the queue. Another hour… On my way back, by the way, a pack of cigarettes was stolen from a box of 10, that was torn open and put back into my bag. A pack of cigarettes! Taken out of a box! I mean, who has time for this!.. 

I last went to Ukraine in 2005 – and, no, not much has changed since. I could have probably had a different impression had I stayed in Kiev, but, unfortunately, my visits are almost entirely limited to an obscure working-class city of Cherkassy, some 180 kilometres from the Ukrainian capital. Not that I was much impressed by Kiev either. Don’t get me wrong – I appreciate the greenery and the buildings, and I have seen the squat toilets and rude people before, but it’s just a capital city with an effective metro system, ugly Soviet houses and many Orthodox churches.

Ukrainians are very proud of their food. Or at least, this was my impression. Russians don’t have any food of their own, I’ve been told, borsch is Ukrainian, and, moreover, Ukrainian is more like the old Slavonic than Russian is, hence… Exactly, hence, Russian stems from Ukrainian! And Russian food as well. No, this was not a joke. And this was long before tensions started to form between the two countries. Some of the food is good, of course. I suppose in good restaurants in Kiev you can get your heart’s desire. In Cherkassy, it is oversalted and overcooked with too much animal fat. And the bread is tragic, even in the best restaurants. Perhaps they don’t use preservatives?

On the positive side, Cherkassy is small, with parallel streets crossing at right angles throughout the city, making it impossible to get lost. The climate is pleasant and even though there is no sea you can swim in the river pretty much the whole summer.

It seems people started drinking less. On approaching Cherkassy, however, I stopped at the roadside cafe – oh no, not to go to the toilet! you wouldn’t want that! – and saw two rather decent men sitting outside with some insignificant food and discussing business casually over a one-litre bottle of vodka. As I watched in disbelief – mind you, both of them were drinking, which means one of them was driving – a group of three were seated at another table, ordering a similar bottle of vodka… Again, all of them were drinking. I don’t think you get to see this often…

Would a tourist actually want to come to Cherkassy and what would he do? Honestly, I am not sure. Food and drink is cheaper than in Kiev, of course, so if one is not picky this will do. Petty crime is almost non-existent, but there is seldom anyone who speaks English and is able to help. As the city has basically been a village until a chemical factory was built in the Soviet times, there are no monuments or places of interest in the city itself, although some local museums in the neighbouring villages may attract those with a special interest in Ukrainian culture.

On arriving back in Oslo, on a plane filled with some Dagestanian ex-refugees and their unruly children, we were all made to pass through a metal detector and have our bags x-rayed before even being admitted to a passport control stand. It seems I am not the only one who is little impressed by Ukraine…

I went to church to pray yesterday, and as I walked in, four people had just started praying the Rosary out loud in English. This unplanned-for Rosary praying reminded me of Maundy Thursday in Valletta this April.

The Maltese have a tradition of visiting seven churches on Thursday night or Friday morning during the Holy Week. The Body of Christ is carried to an Altar of Repose that is usually decorated with flowers and statues and candles. After the Mass, the faithful would go to make seven visits to any of the Altars of Repose, spending any time from a couple of minutes to a quarter of an hour or longer before our Lord.

In Valletta, where I stayed, the number of churches far exceeds seven, so we never had to go anywhere far for the visits – which I thought were a good tradition to imitate. I wasn’t prepared for the power of the moment, though. The first church I entered seemed incredibly noisy. I am used to adoration, but I am also used to silence in church. This place seemed to buzz like a beehive. What an unusually talkative population we’ve got here! I admit thinking. Then, when my eyes and ears got used to the sounds and symbols around, I noticed a pattern in the noise. It sounded like prayer.

Oh but of course! The people were not chatting leisurely, they were praying the Rosary. Aloud. Two middle-aged British gentlemen behind me prayed a decade in English together and left for another altar. A family with a pram squeezed inside. Some were kneeling, some were standing, and reciting a decade, usually in pairs, husband and wife, mother and daughter, taking turns to say the Hail Mary, then perhaps linger awhile and leave to give space to the newcomers. The Republic street was surreal that night. Filled with tourists by day and completely empty by night it looked like a scene from a typical pilgrimage site that Thursday. Men, women and children with rosaries in their hands, candles on the ground, the buzz from the open over-packed twenty-something churches. We took turns to pray the last decade in St.Dominic’s just across the street from our house. Feeling sad that it was only seven visits, and not twenty-seven, I contemplated the two angels placed in front of the altar. One was holding a cluster of grapes and some wheat while the other was holding a cup. It was a beautiful thought that in his omniscience Jesus, the Incarnate Word, may have drawn strength from our prayers during that hour at Gethsemane that began His sorrowful passion…

I find it difficult to write journalistic prose about Malta, something along the lines of 5000 years of history, beaches and diving and 300 days of sunshine. Granted, the history is incredible, the peoples who have lived on the island made it an eclectic mix of baroque architecture, antique furniture, British fast food and a strange language that is almost a dialect of Arabic – with a lot of Italian loanwords.

Last time I went to Malta, I stayed in a house in Valletta that must have been 400 years old. Cold and damp it was, indeed, but just touching those stones feels like hundreds of yoears of history become real, that you become part of that history.

To me, Malta is also a profoundly spiritual place, and much of its history is intertwined with the history of spirituality and later Christianity. St. Paul landed on the island and the first bishop of Malta, Publius, whose church is in Floriana just outside Valletta city gates, was ordained by Paul. Today, the charismatic aspect of faith is widely practiced. Alongside the well-known prosessions, festas, and the carnival season. It would be naive to assume that the whole country is united in one eager practice of faith – there are atheists and libertarians on Malta as anywhere else, but still the visual aspect of faith is striking to me, someone who grew up and lived in a visually deprived post-Protestant environment of Northern Europe. After the Holy Week celebrations, I started thinking in images. Words seemed to take much more time to utter and had linear meaning, while images seemed to strike at the heart and allow for multiple interpretations.

Then again, time seems to flow differently on Malta. Having to wait 40 minutes for an order in restaurant did not seem to annoy anyone but us. But, when I asked to pack my order to have it on the go, because we were in a hurry– and what’s the point of that I wonder? – it only meant we had to eat it on the street waiting for a bus that didn’t come util much later anyway. When you get into the rhythm of it, it flows smoothly.  Initial adjustment can probably drive someone mad.

I look forward to going back this September. I will probably enjoy the sea, the sunshine and the history. But there is also something else, something that is difficult to descibe and easy to overlook – the old-fashioned unadulterated life that has not yet been polluted with materialism. I hope it will last. For some time, at least…