The tipping point came at The Hermitage.
I wrote in my last post about how I’d gone to greater effort to be able to visit Russia than anywhere else, and that I’d been underwhelmed by what I found in Moscow. I finished that post with a ‘maybe’: maybe Saint Petersburg would be better. By Friday – my fifth day in Saint Petersburg, my eleventh in Russia - I’d given up on that idea. The problem wasn’t Moscow. The problem was Russia.
There’s a perceived pressure when travelling, and especially when one is foolish enough to start writing a travelogue, for everything to be wonderful, to be having adventures and accumulating stories, to dial all your senses up to eleven until you’re overwhelmed, and happily overwhelmed at that. And it doubles when you’re going somewhere with a little bit of mystery and otherness to it, like Russia. I’m not suggesting for a moment that anybody reading this has created that sort of pressure, by the way, but a lifetime of travel shows, ads, Facebook posts and Instagram photos have.
Sometimes the reality, especially when you’ve been travelling for four months, is rather different. Sometimes the reality is having your third serious cold in ten weeks. With shitty weather. With a hundred minor difficulties that are each perfectly manageable and no big deal on their own, but that are each part of a greater whole that is just too much bloody effort, and sometimes you can’t be bothered and you wish you’d just stayed home. That was the point I had reached at The Hermitage. I jumped on Facebook and made my confession: I wasn’t enjoying myself. It might have been the smartest thing I did in Russia, because I unburdened myself of that perceived pressure.
I genuinely felt at the time that I’d given Saint Petersburg a fair chance. I’d ended up with an extra day here, thanks to the ghost bus incident in Poland, which had in turn forced me to shave a Schengen visa day back from Tallinn, my next destination inside the zone. So six days became seven, but when I got sick in Moscow seven days once again became six. I’d use the extra time to bum around the hostel on my first day, stay warm, try to recover and maybe even get some writing done.
The hostel and I got off to an awkward start, and our relationship never really recovered. Upon checking in I was confronted with a full, A4 page ‘guest contract’ to sign. This being Russia, it was in Russian, and the hostel staff member couldn’t understand – or hide his impatience for – my insistence on being told, line by line, what I was signing. We were there a while, but eventually I signed, having known all along that I had no choice unless I wanted to spend the night wandering the streets of Saint Petersburg, insulin bag in hand, dying of man flu. But hey, signing documents without reading them has never gone badly for anybody in Russia, ever, right?
Then we had another stand-off over the wifi: the hostel’s internet is set up so you have to log-in via Facebook, with who knew what data falling into the clutches of who knew what Russian company. I kept objecting until they gave me access to the staff log-in to shut me up. Even then, the network was so slow as to be effectively unusable, especially because my paranoia meant that I wouldn’t touch an internet connection the entire time I was in Russia unless I could get it to accept my VPN. Now that I think about it, I probably shouldn’t have bothered worrying. If we’ve learned anything from the rolling Trump farce, it’s that if Russians really wanted any of my data they can get it easily enough.
I finally roused myself to go exploring on day two. I’d read something about there being a museum in the Smolny Institute, the building that had been the headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet during the 1917 revolution, so I headed in that direction. Saint Petersburg is a big, sprawling city, and I’d already walked a couple of kilometres by the time I got there, only to be stopped by a guard (or maybe a police officer. There’s so many different uniforms in this country it’s impossible to tell). I’d just seen other people walk in, but when I approached the guard blocked the gate. ‘Nyet’, he said.
Hmm. ‘Is this the museum?, I asked, with little optimism that he would understand me.
‘Nyet’.
I looked back down at Google Maps on my phone. It clearly stated there was a museum here. I simplified my question down to a single word. ‘Museum’? I pointed at the door.
‘Nyet’. This time I got a shake of the head as well.
I eventually unravelled the explanation: there is a museum there, but it’s still an official building of some kind. A black Mercedes had in fact roared up as I was there, depositing a posse of VIP sorts who certainly didn’t wait for the guard to say ‘da’ before marching inside. Museum visits are strictly by appointment-only: I wasn’t getting into the Smolny Institute.
I hadn’t realised, either, that Smolny was relatively remote from the other interesting parts of Saint Petersburg, so I kept walking – heading for Finland Station - when I probably should have hopped a train into the city centre. I wonder, if I’d done that, whether I might have come to appreciate Saint Petersburg a little earlier. Instead I walked for about 45 minutes, in drizzling rain, through a streetscape of office blocks and light industry: not quite the triumphant first walk through town I was after. And Finland Station was a disappointment too. It’s where Lenin arrived late to the revolution in 1917, and promptly gave a speech that upset many a 20th century apple cart. I’m not sure what I expected to find there, but the spot was marked only with a Lenin statue, and I’d seen quite enough of those over the past few weeks already. Dispirited with my first day out and about in Saint Petersburg, then, I gave up and returned to the hostel for a few hours of wifi dropouts and being glared at by the guy who was working when I arrived.
Two days in, and Saint Petersburg was so far no better than Moscow. But I had a pair of aces up my sleeve on day three: the Museum of Russian Political History and the Museum of Russian Political Police. If a museum about political police, in what’s still effectively a police state, couldn’t lift me out of my malaise then nothing could. But, of course, none of the signs were in English, and even if I’d been able to read them the displays appeared to be no more than photos of old Soviet secret police chiefs, along with the odd document they’d signed ordering the arrest or execution of someone or other. I fiddled on my phone for 15 minutes, waiting just long enough to make a respectful departure, and went on my way. I didn’t want to put undue pressure on the Museum of Russian Political History, but as yet I’d had nothing but sickness and strike-outs since arriving in Saint Petersburg.
I had plenty of time, so I walked the couple of kilometres between the museums. It was a good decision, because for the first time I caught some hint of the Saint Petersburg I’d read such good things about. The route took me past The Hermitage and across the River Neva to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where I thought for a delightful moment that I’d snuck in without paying before I found out the grounds are free, while all the buildings cost extra. You could walk along the walls for 300 rubles (about $7), and I was amazed to see people actually paying it: they were getting the exact same view of Saint Petersburg as I’d gotten walking along the front of the fortress, but with an extra height of five metres. A tourist and her money are soon parted, I guess.
Whilst at the Fortress I came across a statue of an inverse Donald Trump: a tiny head and enormous hands, but every bit as creepy:
The museum, thankfully, didn’t disappoint, at least not overall. It certainly has its weaknesses as a museum – Russia’s political history is so complex and so fascinating that they really need a building several times bigger than what they have to adequately cover it, but the location was presumably chosen because Lenin based himself there for a period during 2017. It’s odd: I felt Lenin’s presence (in a ‘close to history’ sense, nothing mystical) more in the room where he had an office than when I’d stood and looked at his body the previous week.
I half-expected to find a complete whitewash of history as I moved through the museum, but it’s more of an incomplete whitewash. The displays flit from year to year, from 1905 to 1917 to 1920 to 1936 to 1941: it’s not that they prefer not to mention the Great Purge, for instance, but they simply don’t have the space to linger: one must be getting onto Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, before lurching forward another 20 years to get to Sakharov.
Putin, conveniently enough, appears only at the very end of the route. We get some mentions of corruption-busting politicians and journalists who were assassinated during the Yeltsin era, but the journey ends on December 31, 1999, with a recording of Putin’s address to the nation upon becoming President. There’s no room left to explore the mysterious deaths of Alexander Litvinenko or Anna Politkovskaya, or to note the invasions of Georgia or Ukraine. Unfortunate, isn’t it?
I’d half-decided to use the next day to go out to one of the big palace complexes on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg – the Peterhof, perhaps, or the Catherine Palace – but my inability to choose which one hints at my ambivalence. To be honest, despite a somewhat better day I was still struggling for motivation to leave the hostel (except to search for usable wifi). I ended up leaving it too late to get out to either and instead visited the Battleship Aurora, whose crew famously fired the first shots of the November 1917 revolution:
It clearly didn’t make much of an impression. When I started planning out and drafting this piece I had to use the placeholder text ‘What did I do on Thursday?’, until I went through photos, because I honestly couldn’t remember. I never did get the hang of Thursdays.
I’d left The Hermitage to Friday, when I could take advantage of the later opening hours. Things started out well enough: I bought an online ticket to avoid an hour long wait, and a kindly staff member showed me the right entrance (the gallery stretches out across several buildings). Things went downhill, though, when I got in. The info desk at this entrance didn’t have an English map, only Russian ones, and I’d gotten disoriented on the way in. I asked the woman there to show me, on the Russian map, where we were so I could navigate to another entrance and look for an English one there. ‘No English’, she replied.
That could mean two things – either she was repeating that she had no English maps, or saying she didn’t speak English. Probably both, in fact. But never mind, all I wanted her to do was point to where we were, so I gestured around the room and then pointed at the map, hoping she’d get the gist of the question. ‘No English’, she repeated, and turned her back. And no amount of saying ‘excuse me’ could get her to turn around again: I’d been dismissed. I don’t think I’m one of those ugly tourists who expects everybody to speak English or to go out of their way for me, but this woman worked in visitor services in Saint Petersburg’s biggest tourist attraction. To simply turn her back on me, to ignore my attempts to communicate, was too much.
This woman was in a small minority of unnecessarily rude people in Russia. Indeed, several times strangers who spoke English jumped in when I was struggling in a restaurant or shop, offering to serve as a translator. Rudeness wasn’t the issue, and Russia’s reputation for it is as undeserved as it is in France.
No. I was just sick and tired of everything being just a bit more difficult than it needed to be. Tired of not being able to communicate. Tired of getting lost. Tired of having to scout out food options. Tired of pushing through illness, and bad weather, and general indifference in pursuit of the time of my life. Tired, just for a moment, of travelling. Tired of not being home. It’s not entirely a coincidence that it was Russia – a place I’d invested a lot of time and effort in getting to, and certainly not the easiest of countries to visit – but it could have been somewhere else too. And so I declared that I was hating my time there, and I was, but I’d misdiagnosed the issue. But conceding defeat – giving up on liking Russia – was an unwitting stroke of genius. Pressure lifted, indifferent about what I did with my remaining time, I even managed to somehow enjoy myself.
The Hermitage collection is mostly made up of the landscapes and fat babies genres, like the Louvre, but I enjoyed wandering around once I’d vented my frustrations a little. There’s a couple of Leonardo da Vinci paintings that had a similar scene to the one at the Mona Lisa, on a smaller scale. And there’s an enormous hall with both walls covered with hundreds of portraits of Russian military officers, some of whom caused me to laugh out loud in a most disrespectful fashion:
The Hermitage is centred around the Winter Palace, which was the city residence of the Tsars. Many of the state rooms have been kept as they were pre-revolution, like the throne room:
Once the seat of imperial power, it’s now a museum exhibit. Hopefully a similar fate eventually befalls our own throne (or Britain’s, rather).
Having seen the Hermitage I discarded any remaining notion of going to the Peterhof or Catherine Palace, as I figured they would be much the same thing. I’m probably the only tourist ever to visit Saint Petersburg and go to neither, but that’s okay.
I had to find an Internet café to watch the Swans game, and along the way caught a fleeting glimpse – too fleeting for a photo, alas – of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle with a periscope on the roof and stickers of The Beatles, wearing Sgt Pepper costumes, on the side. It was a rare Russian moment of utter delight, and because this was Russia, where no such delight could be left to fester, it was followed just two minutes later by seeing an overly aggressive bouncer capsicum spraying two young men. There wasn’t much I could do, but I gave them my water bottle to rinse out their eyes and kept going. The man sitting next to me at the Internet café, an Arsenal fan, was watching them play at Homebush stadium, a five minute walk away from where the Swans were playing GWS. The world really is much smaller than it looks.
After the game I wandered about with no particular place to be and finally – almost, but not quite too late – found the Saint Petersburg I’d been looking for. I started following a canal into an old industrial area, and found a newly opened park – with beanbags and clean, free public toilets no less – built into the middle of a former shipbuilding dock. I fell asleep in a bean bag for a while, woke up with low blood sugar and rushed off to buy something to eat, unwittingly leaving my camera behind. But when I dashed back ten minutes later, one of the group who had swooped on my beanbag escorted me to the office where they’d handed it in as lost property. “Not all Russians are unkind”, he told me. I know, mate. I know.
I kept roaming along the canals and eventually tracked one back towards the Neva, where I arrived in good time to catch the sunset hitting the river and the Hermitage:
And Russia and I were finally able to part on good terms.
I had said I wasn't going to write anything about Russia, so frustrated was I by my time there. I mostly didn't enjoy myself: I was sick, I was cold, I was tired, and I was rather too easily irritated by things I might have shrugged off if I weren't sick, and cold, and tired. A litany of disappointment and dysfunction isn't fun to read - or to write - but I'm going to try, because to leave out one place when writing about everywhere else seems silly, and because I'm trying to finish this project that I still only half-regret starting. And planning out and drafting a piece is helping to extract the bits and pieces I did enjoy, out of 13 days that were mostly just one nagging little thing after another.
I'd been nervous about my train into Ukraine, but that was as nothing compared to the crossing out of Ukraine and into Russia. The two countries are at war with each other: both know it, though only Ukraine admits it, and it’s remarkable that the train between their two capitals is running at all. I'd belatedly decided to get a train, rather than bus, for two reasons: one is that I thought any border guard entrepreneurship was more likely at some anonymous road border crossing, and the other was that I'd rather be sent to a gulag than spend 18 hours on an overnight bus.
I had a four-bed sleeper carriage, and I drew the short straw and had a top bunk. Unlike the Florence to Vienna one, I at least had a proper bed – complete with pillow, no less – and a safety barrier to stop me falling out. What it didn’t have was a step-ladder, and while the other occupants in the carriage, Vitaly and Misha, didn’t speak English they pointed at a tiny block of wood attached to the wall, next to the cabin door. Evidently I was to use this as a step up onto my bed, but my first attempt was a disaster. I strongly suspect I’m neither the tallest or the most agile Australian to try travelling around Eastern Europe, and my demonstration of wall-climbing – I simply couldn’t get my foot up on that thing - must have been the biggest national embarrassment in these parts since Tony Abbott shirt-fronted Vladimir Putin. Cue much laughter from Vitaly and Misha, and as Vitaly took a phone call the word ‘Australia’ featured prominently in the conversation.
I was rescued by the fourth occupant of the cabin. Xenia – a dancer and choreographer from Omsk, about half-way along the Trans-Siberian Railway – spoke a little English, and just as importantly she knew how to get up on the top bunk. There was a second wooden block on the other side of the door frame, and Xenia climbed up Spider-Man style, using both lower bunks and the wooden footholds to get up. I followed her lead, but being neither a dancer or a choreographer I don’t think I matched her for style or grace. Vitaly moved on from teasing me to teasing Xenia, I think about finding an Australian husband, though Xenia declined to fully translate.
As usual, the border crossing was something of an anti-climax, though it was still a touch confusing. We went through Ukrainian passport control only a couple of hours after leaving Kyiv, and at most border crossings we would then roll forward a few hundred meters and then do it all again with the Russians. But this time the train sped off, clearly plunging us deep into Russia without our passports being checked. Nobody else seemed bothered by this, so I assumed it was normal and tried to get some sleep, question mark over the legality of my presence notwithstanding. We only eventually passed through Russian control about three hours later: I didn’t have any problems, but watched curiously as the guard took out a magnifying lens and examined not only the page with my hard-won Russian visa, but random other pages as well. Are there secret anti-forgery marks hidden in Australian passports or something? If so, I’m surprised that Russian guards know to look for them but apparently nobody else does. Anyway, after a minute or so of this he was satisfied, and my presence in Russia was officially tolerated.
The drama unfolded not at the border, but after arriving in Moscow. The first thing I needed to do was get some money out, so after looking around for an ATM – they can be difficult to find in Russia – I eventually spotted one and went to take out my card –
No card. No credit card.
I have some people of delicate sensibilities reading this, so just insert as many words starting with ‘f’ and ‘s’ here as you, yourself, might use after arriving in Russia and finding that you’d lost a credit card. In Russia.
Racing back to the platform, the train was of course already gone: that famous Russian train efficiency had not worked to my advantage. There were police officers on the platform (naturally, it’s a police state), and I was able to half-communicate the scale of the disaster to him. He radioed ahead to somebody and motioned me to follow, and we were met outside the station’s police office by a translator. I’d been in Russia fifteen minutes and I was in a police station. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind.
The translator’s name was Alora, and after only a couple of minutes waiting we were shown into an office belonging to what seemed to be a more senior officer. There was nothing in the office except a desk, chair and a telephone, so I said to Alora that it must just be an interview room. No, she said, this was his office. All Russian offices are like this.
The officer took details of the card, and where I thought I’d left it. His most pressing concern was the PIN: had I written the number on the card? Apparently many Russians do. No, I assured him. That’s not how we do it in Australia at all. He called the train operators, who in turn called the cleaners – it didn’t escape my notice that this was considerably more helpful than the Austrian train company had been when I lost my insulin – and they reported that they hadn’t found my card, but had located my sunglasses (I told them not to worry about them). The officer said he’d call again that evening to see if it turned up, and would tell Alora if there was any news.
Very well. My unplanned encounter with Russian law enforcement had been quite pleasant, as far as these things go. I needed to get onto the card company, of course, to kill the missing card and arrange a replacement, and that meant finding some wifi. According to Alora, though, I would need a Russian phone number to use almost all public wifi networks in Russia (the only reason I can think of for this is so traffic can be traced back to individuals. As I said, this is a police state). I asked her to show me where I could get a SIM card, and she guided me to a shuttered mobile phone shop.
It was only when she lifted the shutter and went behind the desk that I learned Alora’s not a police translator at all. She works in the mobile phone shop, and the police had simply asked her, as the only person around who spoke English, to help with a distraught Australian who had lost something or other. Not only did she do that, but as she was figuring out a SIM card for me (the first one didn’t work), she let me use her own mobile data to check that my card hadn’t been used (it hadn’t) and request that it be cancelled. In a trip where many strangers have gone out of their way to ease my path, just because they could, Alora tops the list. Oh, and by the way, she works a 24 hour shift. 24 hours on, then 48 hours at home, then another 24 hours. I don’t understand how anybody does that.
The credit card never did turn up, and there were no attempts to use it either. I’d very hurriedly used it to buy a drink at McDonald’s on my way out of Kyiv, and I think I must have left it behind there, where it’s probably still waiting for me to come and reclaim it.
A somewhat stressful start, then. I’m not silly enough to travel with only one card, of course, so I was able to get some money (albeit at an extortionate exchange rate) and find my way to the hostel, where I was promptly told to dump my stuff and come back later while they dealt with a ‘maintenance issue’. I wasn’t told what it was, but the staff were being told to leave for the afternoon too so I’m willing to bet it involved large quantities of insecticide.
So I walked towards the city centre, and for the most iconic spot in all of Russia: Red Square, and the Alice in Wonderland-esque St Basil’s Cathedral:
That walk might have been the first time that Russia disappointed, albeit subtly, and it was unambiguously my fault. Getting to Russia at all was time-consuming and expensive: unlike other European countries Russia and Ukraine require Australians to have tourist visas. The Russian one cost something like $180 and involved filling out a nine page application form, taking and printing passport photos, obtaining a letter of invitation from a hotel that I never stayed at but that charges $20 for letters of invitation, and mailing my passport off to the Russian embassy. The website said to allow ten business days for processing, and when it came back they’d left a little note in the passport, intended for internal use, that showed they had processed the visa the day after it arrived at the embassy but had marked it as not to be mailed back until the tenth business day. Nice.
All of that effort had two effects. One was that it pushed Russia further up into my consciousness and imagination as I prepared for this trip than other countries, which might have otherwise been more eagerly anticipated. And the other was that it became imbued with a greater sense of mystery, of otherness, than anywhere else in Europe. I was ready for Moscow to be different in a way that… it isn’t.
There are differences, of course, just as there are differences between France and Spain, between Italy and Croatia and between Czechia and Poland. But the things that unite Russia and Western Europe are stronger than the things that divide them: it is very much a European city and a European culture. I shouldn’t have expected anything different, and if you’d asked me to explain ahead of time what differences I thought I’d find I might have struggled to do so. But the idea was lodged in my head, anyway, and so when I walked through a very European Moscow I didn’t find what I was looking for. I’d played the expectations game and lost.
I was here, though, and on the first US Independence Day since the American capital moved to Moscow, no less. I must have missed any events they held to mark the occasion, but souvenir shops have certainly noticed the new warmth in relations:
Later I found matching Trump and Putin Babushka dolls: inside Putin were Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Stalin and Lenin, whilst Trump had Bush and Obama. Vladimir Putin might harbour an inner dictator or two, but there is certainly nothing of Barack Obama hidden inside Donald Trump.
There’s no shortage of Putin memorabilia for sale. There are Putin t-shirts, Putin calendars, Putin mugs and Putin cigarette lighters. The magnets were the worst. One of them had one of those holographic surfaces so the image changed depending on the angle you looked at it from: Putin’s eyes literally follow you around the room. But here’s the thing: I never saw anybody wearing a Putin t-shirt, and nowhere that I went had a Putin calendar hanging on the wall. I wonder to what extent this cult of personality is for tourists’ benefit?
Marx, Lenin and even Stalin are everywhere too. On my two kilometre walk from the hostel I found no less than seven Lenins, either statues or stone reliefs set into the walls. Soviet insignia remains on many buildings, including one in the Kremlin the serves as the executive office building. The only things more common than the symbols of Communism are symbols of consumerism: Gucci, Versace, Bvlgari and so on all had shops near my hostel, and it’s a weird juxtaposition. Soviet gear outnumbers even the Putin stuff in the souvenir stores, too. I felt conflicted: I admit that I indulged in a little bit of Soviet kitsch myself, but can you possibly imagine a German shop selling imitation SS caps and badges? Because Russian ones do the equivalent.
Near the entrance to Red Square I found a trio of street performers dressed up as - and bearing the faintest, there if you go looking for it resemblance to - Lenin, Stalin and Putin. I didn’t take a photo, as they would have reasonably expected a tip but I only had a 500 Ruble note (about $12, too much for a photo), and unfortunately I didn’t find them again. But I was treated to the odd spectacle of a uniformed Stalin seizing a tourist’s camera and ordering him to smile, as Lenin waved his arm in the air beseechingly and Putin stared impassively at the camera from behind dark sunglasses. And all without any apparent irony.
That was, unfortunately, the best day in Moscow. There were still good moments, but some of the things I had looked forward to were underwhelming, and by the end of day three I was descending into my third, and worst, cold in only ten weeks. I left home about a week too early to get the flu shot, and I must be gaining immunity manually by catching every single bug that’s going around Europe in succession. The cold was made doubly miserable by the weather: if not for the onion domes on the churches I could have been in Melbourne, because it was July, it was 13 degrees and it was pouring with rain.
Little, unnecessary difficulties started to get under my skin: my phone, the ungrateful bastard, is showing signs that it doesn’t want to go all the way around Europe after all. It isn’t holding a charge, and is difficult to get charging in the first place: one must angle it just so. I’ve nursed it so far – I didn’t particularly want to buy a new phone in Russia, of all places – but it’s frustrating. I withdrew some cash from an ATM, in full view of bank staff, but when it spat out a 5000 Ruble note I asked them to change it into something shops might actually accept. They just flat out refused, despite it being their note from their machine. I went to try and buy lunch, but my note was, as expected, refused. I went back to the bank and threatened to lapse into a diabetic coma on their carpet if they didn’t change the note. At first they demanded commission(!) but eventually gave in to get rid of me. Play the diabetes card. It works.
A couple of things I’d looked forward to proved disappointing. Visiting the Kremlin is really all about the churches, which as I’ve probably said too many times now have lost their lustre. I was able to walk around near one of the government buildings – the one with the Soviet decoration I mentioned earlier – but going inside was out of the question. The zoo here isn’t well known in the West but has a reputation for having an enormous collection of oddball species kept nowhere else, but I didn’t know they’re almost entirely off-display. I went to a Cosmonauts Museum: some but not all the exhibits had English signage, and while I’d gone out of curiosity about how the space race might be portrayed from a Russian perspective, the museum mostly had a deliberately internationalist approach, and it was much more like, say, the Smithsonian’s space gallery than I’d hoped to find.
One bright spot was the Museum of Soviet Arcade Game Machines. It’s not *really* a museum, just a games arcade, but all the machines date back to the Soviet era, and in return for your 450 rubles (about $10) you get 15 Soviet kopek coins with which to operate the machines:
This was Soviet kitsch I could unapologetically indulge in. I’ve always sucked at playing arcade games – or anything that requires manual dexterity, to be honest. Soviet arcade games are no different. I tried to shoot rabbits in a game called ‘Winter Hunt’ or something like that: I’m pretty sure when winter comes I’ll be starving to death, though I did manage to torpedo some -presumably American - submarines and blow up some tanks. I only ended up playing 14 of my 15 coins: I looked down at the last one, saw that it was a Soviet coin minted in 1984, and decided that would make the perfect souvenir.
But it was the high point. as the week went on I got sicker and sicker, and the weather bleaker and bleaker. I pushed through, risking pneumonia by lining up in the freezing cold to go through Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square. There’s some debate about whether it’s really his body on display: if it is, then whoever did the embalming did an absolutely terrible job, but I’m always wary of assuming a conspiracy when simple incompetence explains something instead. So it’s him. Probably.
I made one last gesture of defiance against common sense on my last day. I’d wanted to spend some time in Gorky Park – Moscow’s answer to Central Park – but the weather made it pointless: there’d be nobody else there. So I went to the ‘Muzeon’ – a big park full of sculptures – instead. It includes a little area with some old Communist statues, that were dumped here after the fall of the Soviet Union and were eventually cleaned up and turned upright again. I might have enjoyed it if I could concentrate on something other than trying to breathe, and I lingered only a little while before giving up and calling time on a dissatisfying six days. Perhaps Saint Petersburg would be better.
"Hello. I'm hoping you can help me. I'm having trouble with your visa application website. It won't accept my passport photo."
To apply for a visa to Ukraine you must upload a passport photo to the online application form. It was being uncooperative, and so I rang the Ukrainian embassy.
"It was working fine for me," came the response.
Okay, but I can't get it to accept the file. Are you able to help me figure out what the problem is?
"No."
... right. Is there anybody in the embassy who might be -
"No."
... So who would I need to speak to for help with your website?
"Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kyiv."
Okay. Are you able to connect me to somebody there who speaks English?
"No."
... If I can't get this website to work, am I able to apply for a visa by mail instead?
"No."
So if I can't make this application online, how can I get a visa to visit Ukraine?
"You can't."
... right. Well, thanks for -
Click.
*
With my sister's help we eventually determined that the problem was my fault. The photo needed to be 35 pixels wide. Mine was 36. The Ukrainian government are sticklers for accuracy, if nothing else. But I got my visa, and I was going to Ukraine. I'd expected that the somewhat unproductive phone conversation might prove a foretaste for what I was getting myself in for, but the opposite was true. Ukraine was great.
I'd been just a touch anxious about going to Ukraine. Specifically, I was anxious about the border crossing: this is a country where public servants, like border guards, are paid a relative pittance, and it's not unimaginable that they might boost their income with unofficial fees and charges. And unlike most borders I've crossed, the Ukrainians put on a full show: trios of camouflage-wearing, gun toting guards come into every carriage, not only checking passports but randomly inspecting bags, and a sniffer dog roams up and down the train. It seems more likely that people would be smuggling stuff from Ukraine to the EU, rather than the reverse, but maybe I'm wrong.
My fears were misplaced. After some thumbing through my passport, lingering over the page with my Ukrainian visa for a good 30 seconds or so, I was given the stamp of approval to enter Ukraine, and the dog wasn't interested in my bags either. I was in Ukraine, which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the rest of Europe.
The differences are subtle, but they are there. The one I discovered first and found most disconcerting was that toilet paper rolls here come without the cardboard roll. Just the toilet paper, tightly wrapped up like a bandage. By extension, this logically means there are no toilet roll holders either. And the first bathrooms I used during a stopover at Lviv station had squat toilets, which filled me with horror: four more days of this? I negotiated access, using sign language with the attendant, to the disabled toilet and put off that reckoning for another time, and thankfully Western toilets seem to be the commode de jour throughout Kyiv. Reckoning averted.
I'll be calling it 'Kyiv' throughout this post, by the way. That's the Ukrainian spelling of 'Kiev', and the spelling has apparently become a touchy subject, especially since the 2014 revolution. And who am I to tell Ukrainians how to spell their capital city? Kyiv it is.
The first order of business after my overnight train arrived was finding something to eat, followed by getting my insulin safely into the hostel fridge after 24 hours of travelling. The something to eat turned out to be McDonald's hash browns, broken up inside the remains of a bread roll I'd kept as a fallback for dinner the previous night: linguistically-challenged diabetic vegetarians can't take enough precautions in Eastern Europe. Another subtle difference: Maccas hash browns here taste much better than Australian ones, which you can possibly put down to the much higher levels of pollution in Ukrainian potato crops. Breakfast was easier than getting to the hostel: each bus driver swore that the bus I needed was the 12, or the 14, or perhaps the 7. I gave up and walked, which I might not have done if I'd realised it was 2km, almost entirely uphill.
The hostel staff member on duty, Oksana, who turned out to be the staff member on duty for more or less the entire time I was in Kyiv. I later learned that she earns 150 gryvnas - that's $7.50 - a day. Oksana was a one-woman band, serving as receptionist, cleaner, laundry attendant and a myriad of other little duties. We got along quite well, I think, although the language barrier was such that our conversations worked like ink blot tests, each of us reaching opposite conclusions about what the other had said, or what was agreed. I wanted to do some washing, and only after I had definitively established that the hostel had both a washing machine and dryer, not just a clothes horse, and put all of my available clothes in the wash did Oksana bring out the clothes horse. It was the 'dryer'.
I was a bit of an oddity at the hostel. Kyiv doesn't get many Western tourists - places that would be overrun on the other side of the EU border are eerily quiet there - and apart from a French guy who departed the day after I arrived, and an American chef based there while he found a place to live, I was the only Western tourist in the place. Most of the 'guests' were actually residents, with at least half of the beds permanently occupied. Oksana called on two of them - Olya, a comic book artist and fierce DC-over-Marvel partisan, and Tom, a Nigerian doctor hoping to continue his studies in New Zealand or Australia - to translate for me, and they helped reduce the number of ink blot tests to a minimum. As much as I enjoyed Tom's company his reason for living in a hostel is outrageous: as a black man he was paying up to three times what white Ukrainians do in private rentals, and he was understandably tired of it.
I bummed around the hostel for most of that day, waiting for the footy - our unbeaten run East of the Iron Curtain continues - before heading out for a brief walk. I wandered up to St Sophia's Cathedral - if I never see the inside of another Catholic cathedral I think I'll live, but Orthodox churches retain some novelty value - but because it had an entry fee I walked a further ten minutes to the illustriously named St Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery. It was free and looked much the same:
Lots of religious buildings in Ukraine and Russia have the gold domes: I assume it's not real gold or I doubt they could have survived the wars and Communism. No photos are allowed inside Orthodox churches, I've found, but they mustn't hold congregations in them like Catholic ones do: they're typically pretty small and there's no seating inside, just altars and the most thoroughly painted-over walls this side of Hosier Lane.
From the monastery I made my way downhill to the Maidan, the square in the centre of Kyiv that hosted the protests leading to the revolution. Vladimir Putin responded by invading and annexing Crimea - even stealing the Ukrainian Navy's war dolphins, the monster - as well as starting a proxy war in Eastern Ukraine, and it's not hard to figure out who this sign, which runs almost the length of the Maidan, is directed towards:
Continuing down the main avenue through the centre of Kyiv, the proportions of the city felt all wrong. The road is enormous - probably ten lanes wide - for really quite modest traffic, and it's lined on both sides with skyscrapers from the Socialist Grandiosity school of architectural design. But while there were certainly plenty of people around, it felt like a city built for ten million people that was occupied by only three million. But I eventually found everybody. Spreading out from each major metro station are webs of little shops, and sometimes full-grown subterranean shopping malls. I don’t know why they're all dug in beneath the surface, but at least I found where all the Kievans are hiding. The shopping burrows are impossible to navigate at first, but prove very useful when it's pouring with rain, and you can just about walk across town without venturing above ground.
I had to go in search of pants - yet again - the next day, as I would be spending Sunday in a place where pants are mandatory. I'm spending far too much of this holiday clothes shopping, which along with watching Hawthorn win is one of the worst ways to spend one’s time on the planet. To delay the inevitable, before going shopping I headed to the ‘National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World Wa’r. It had an even grander name until 2015, when it was changed from "Great Patriotic War", the Soviet name for World War II. Apparently Soviet symbols became rather less popular after the 2014 revolution, as symbols of Russian oppression: thousands of Lenin statues got toppled across the country, too.
While the museum does mostly focus on World War II, it's not shy about commenting on contemporary conflicts as well. As you enter the precinct, three battered, captured vehicles from the war in Eastern Ukraine are parked out the front. Each carries a sign, tracing the vehicle back to a Russian army unit and declaring they are material evidence of Russian aggression. And if that doesn't drive the point home perhaps this outnumbered, but defiant, Ukrainian-flag themed tank will:
The museum is built in the base of the Motherland Monument, Ukraine's answer to the Statue of Liberty:
… and it's surprisingly good: most of the signage is only in Ukrainian, but the English audio guide was enough for me to get the gist. It gilds no lilies about Soviet cooperation with the Nazis before 1941, and it even has an exhibit of letters between German soldiers and their families, to make the point that there were human tragedies on both sides of the war.
After the museum I conspired to put off the shopping just a little bit longer by walking 3km to the centre, and along the way popped my head into a 'sporting goods' store:
I didn't need a license, I was assured. Not for a pistol, or for a rifle, or for a bloody machine gun. The guys were happy for me to wander around taking pictures, and one pulled out a rifle, apparently with the intention of allowing me to try it for size, but I lost confidence when he kept pointing the damn thing in my direction, so I made my excuses and fled.
After that the clothes-shopping didn't seem so scary, and I found socially acceptable pants without too much trouble. Velvet and the tight crotch look must only be a Croatian thing this year.
The heavens opened on my way back from the shopping centre, and so I fled into the nearest subway station. The one I entered was at the bottom of a hill, so the platform wasn't *too* far underground. But upon arrival at my destination I was confronted by this:
Hold onto the sides and don't look down. Hold onto the sides and don't look down. Hold onto the sides and don't look down.
Only after getting to the top did I let go of the sides and look down. You couldn't get any hint from the top of the escalator of just how long it was, so I'm grateful I started at the bottom and knew what I was in for. Many stations in Kyiv - and in Moscow and Saint Petersburg - are buried 50 metres or more underground, and I assume it has something to do with needing nuclear missile shelters. I'll never feel nervous at Parliament station again.
My modest plans for the evening - to charge my phone and camera, prepare some food for the next day and get an early night - went awry when I got back to the hostel, where everybody was sitting in the dark. A power outage: an authentic Ukrainian experience, but also an immediate problem for somebody with months worth of insulin to keep cool. It went straight back into the insulated bag it travels in, but as I was going to be out from early the next day until late, I wouldn't be around to see it safely back in the fridge, and had a serious problem if the lights didn't come back on reasonably quickly. Less critically but not much less upsettingly, I had no way of charging my camera for one of the most eagerly-anticipated days of the entire journey.
I waited around for a couple of hours, sitting in the increasingly dark kitchen with Tom, Olya and the American chef. He turned out to be a certifiably despicable person, who claimed the Rothschilds own all but three central banks in the world (Russia, Iran and North Korea being the hold-outs). His Ukrainian wife, back in America, had left him and taken the kids, accusing him of abuse - she's lying, of course, they're always lying, of course - so he was in Ukraine” to find another one and start again". And off he walked into the night, looking to do just that. I wish him no luck at all.
The hours ticked by, and the lights stayed out. An electrician came - the rest of Kyiv had regained power, but our building was holding out - but he determined that it was a fault with the connection to the grid. A government technician would be required, and it was a Saturday night. I decided to throw money at the problem. I crossed the road to another hostel where for $7 I could have a bed for the night. I didn't intend to actually sleep there – 18 bed dorms, so sleeping there was unthinkable and I'd rather stay in my own, pitch black dorm - but I could store my insulin and charge my batteries.
I didn't know, meanwhile, Oksana was working on almost the same solution and had snaffled me a bed, for free, in the company's other hostel ten minutes away instead. But I felt a little guilty even going across to investigate. My $7 - effectively spare change - was almost how much Oksana would make that day, and while I was working out my plan B the hostel's residents were resigning themselves to a night in the dark. One person, who works as a freelancer, was even more agitated about the power than I was. They were a week behind on their board, and had been told to pay up or get out: without Internet they couldn't see if they'd been paid for some work they had done. I covered the $30 they owed, rather than see them kicked out on the street: it's less than I will pay for a single night in most of Western Europe.
*
There's an adrenaline rush when you pass through the first checkpoint into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. This is a forbidden place. Abandoned. Poisoned. Deadly. I've wanted to go there ever since I first learned that tour groups ventured in. In reality it's none of those things, at least not entirely, but there is still an other-worldliness to it. It didn't disappoint.
First: yes, it is safe to visit Chernobyl. Mostly. On the bus ride they had a short video that described how much radiation we would be exposed to at various times during the day, and compared that with more regular activities. The short version of the maths is that I copped more radiation flying from Melbourne to Lisbon than I did in Chernobyl.
I say 'mostly' because, well, it's only mostly safe. There *are* places where the radiation is so intense, even after 30 years, that hanging about for even an hour or two will send you to hospital. I'm not sure whether it's possible to visit Chernobyl independently - security is pretty tight, and I doubt they'd let you wander about on your own - but you shouldn't want to anyway. I might dislike group tours, but I'm not silly enough to try to blunder about a radioactive wasteland on my own.
There were 14 of us on the tour. For some reason we had reached an unspoken agreement that names were not to be exchanged, and the only person with whom I had a proper introduction was an Englishman named Alistair. He lives in Frankfurt so, as is my habit with Brits living in Europe, I asked if he was watching the Brexit negotiations anxiously. A little, he confessed. I asked what he did for a living: he's an economist with the European Central Bank. "Oh, so you really are screwed, then", I laughed. He laughed too, but I'm not sure his heart was in it.
Aside from Alistair we had three more Brits - an elderly couple and their adult son, who were in Ukraine because Kyiv was the last European capital the old man hadn't visited. His wife, who I shall call Judi Dench, because she bears a passing resemblance to her, was rather less enthusiastic than the rest of us about being in Chernobyl. We had an American fellow who couldn't resist making awful puns about feeling green around the gills, and three Hungarian boys who spent most of their time wandering off (a bad habit in Chernobyl) and flirting with Vika, our guide, as well as a Dutch couple, two Chinese women and a French guy.
We started the tour with a stop in an abandoned village on the outskirts of the 30km exclusion zone. There are people actually living in the zone - several thousand of them - who, indifferent to the risks, were determined to live out their retirements in their old homes. Unlike the inner exclusion zone - the area within 10km of the reactor, where the radiation levels really are too dangerous to live there - apart from the occasional hotspot this outer district is more or less safe, with average radiation not much different to Kyiv. The people of this village, though, obviously wanted to move on. It was deserted, and the forest had taken over.
It reminded me of Pompeii. A different type of catastrophe, but the same wrenching, sudden, life-upending crisis that's best illustrated by the bits and pieces left behind in the rush to escape. This Lada - or as Vika called it, a Russian Ferrari - would have been the owner's pride and joy. It cost a year's wages, and had a waiting list of three years. Now it's a rusting hulk in a forest:
I knew before coming that the Ukrainian government had banned tours from entering the buildings, which was deeply disappointing, but understandable. They are ruins, falling apart and becoming less structurally sound with every passing year. But Vika announced that we were simply going to ignore the rules and go in anyway.
I had mixed feelings about our brazen lack of respect for the law: I desperately wanted to fully explore, but a little voice on my shoulder was screaming that my insurance company would have a pretty clear-cut case for refusing cover if something happened. So I chose my steps with care, testing the floor to see that it would hold my weight with each step. I'm only ever going to be here once.
Lunch was at a canteen in the town of Chernobyl itself: it's there to serve the few hundred workers - mostly those who maintain the reactors - who live there, and the revenue from the tour groups apparently provides financial support to self-settlers who have moved back into the area. While they grow their own food, everything served at the canteen comes from outside the zone: no glow in the dark carrots. I ate with the Dutch couple and the Frenchman, who were old enough to share their memories of the disaster. Even as every other Western European government, including the Netherlands, were tracking the fallout and warning their citizens to stay inside, the French government was insisting the cloud hadn't reached them. The Maginot line had finally stopped something, I suggested. The French guy just about choked on his pickled vegetables.
We had Geiger counters with us, which we all took turns playing with, and so we knew that the radiation here was only about twice the normal background rate: well within safe levels. It's funny, though, how an invisible, destructive force can gnaw away at you, whispering in your ear to be scared, to panic. I kept it well contained: the Geigers were there to tell me if I needed to move on quickly, and I was able to suspend disbelief and trust the science.
But I was still edgy, like everyone else, and some in the group weren't quite so good at hiding it. Alistair mentioned that the reactor monitoring system had apparently been targeted in one of those recent ransomware attacks, and became agitated that Vika - a perhaps 20 year old non-scientist who has been guiding tours for all of two months - didn't know anything about it. The Ukrainian government would have cancelled the tours if they couldn't monitor the radiation, I said, and besides, we had the Geigers anyway. But Judi Dench heard all this and was beside herself. "How do we know they haven't gotten into the reactor itself and turned off the cooling?", she wanted to know. I told her the hackers were just stealing data to try to extort money, not looking to cause a nuclear disaster. She was unconvinced.
Like frogs sitting in a cooling pond as it slowly fills with radioactive waste, our idea of what constituted 'scary' levels of radiation gradually increased as we got closer and closer to the reactor. The 'safe' level is apparently up to 0.3 microsieverts per hour, and a frisson of nervous excitement passed through the group the first time we crossed that boundary. But 0.3, then 0.5 and even 0.7 microsieverts came to feel normal, even boring over time. At one point we hit 0.9, and rather than back away rapidly like we might have done that morning, the Hungarian boys and I kept walking in the direction of the reactor to see if we could find a spot that was over 1.0. We were in the Exclusion Zone – the twilight zone – and we had left our common sense back at the checkpoint.
Most of the cool stuff is within the 10km exclusion zone. We stopped at a Russian radar station: labelled on old Soviet maps as a 'children's summer camp' that just happened to be guarded around the clock by the Red Army:
It was impossible to get it all into a single photo: it's about 30 metres high and perhaps 200 metres long, and it was built to detect incoming ballistic missiles. After the meltdown the Soviets tried to clean it and get it working again, but it was pretty pointless: even before the accident it apparently couldn't tell the difference between a bird flying over the border and an ICBM. You'd have to feel pretty stupid building something of that size only to find it doesn't work.
Before leaving the radar site we pottered through the old Army barracks - again ignoring the rules - and I picked my way across rotted floorboards into a room on the top floor, where I found a battered piano. I started tapping the keys, getting the shock of my life when I found that not only did some of them still work, but were even still in tune:
From the barracks we headed on to a kindergarten, where we found our first gamma radiation hotspot. This was a relatively mild one - the Geiger counters were singing at us to get out of there, but were 'only' showing a level of about six microsieverts: roughly 40 times what we'd left behind in Kyiv, and 20 times the safe dose. That nervous excitement from earlier became a morbid fascination: how close were we each willing to get? For me the answer was 'not very': I was content to put three reckless Hungarian boys between me and the death rays.
But not for long, because we were heading straight for the reactor itself. Dotted around the zone are little yellow signs indicating where the worst hotspots are, where walking through the vegetation is asking for radiation poisoning. Outside the 10km zone they're very rare: once inside it they start popping up occasionally, but by the time you're within a kilometre or so of the reactor they're every 20m or so along the roads. We first pulled up just across the cooling pond from the reactor:
As if the deserted road, the silence and the Geiger counters spiking with every breath of wind wasn't enough to evoke apocalyptic visions, a pack of dogs were busy dismantling a kill just off the road. They're everywhere in the zone, and must have been reintroduced by the self-settlers: after the accident troops went in and shot every dog or cat they found, an act of mercy before they died of radiation poisoning. The ones there now seem to be doing okay. Some are accustomed to humans, and hang about the canteen or the cooling pond waiting for food from the tour groups. Aside from the dogs, the zone is home to everything from bears to bison: an accidental wildlife refuge, and one of the biggest in Europe.
I thought we were as close to the reactor as we were going to get, but I was wrong. We next stopped about 300 metres away - no photos allowed this close, apparently for fear that terrorists might be able to use them to identify weaknesses in the containment structure - to feed some fish. Somebody released catfish and carp into the cooling pond 20 years ago, and they've been living on handouts from workers and tour groups ever since: the catfish are now over two metres long. There's lots of radioactive material in the ponds, but Vika said it's okay because it's buried in the sediment. I didn't bother pointing out that both carp and catfish usually make their living from digging through such sediment for food: it's just lucky they keep getting fed by the tours. We briefly drove even closer to the reactor, stopping for a look around essentially at the back gate, about 50 metres away from a lake of molten radioactive goo.
The last stop on the tour was the most iconic: Pripyat. Although the reactors took their name from Chernobyl, Pripyat was a much bigger city, built to house workers only a couple of kilometres away from the plants. Needless to say, it remains uninhabitable, and likely will be for thousands of years. We stopped at the ferry terminal - a fast ferry ran between here and Kyiv, and now lies rusting on the river bank:
I was bemused by the vending machines here. They sold soda water, but rather than dispensing bottles they had a cup: it would be filled from a tap in the machine, then when you finished your drink you had to replace the cup, which the machine could then automatically wash for the next person to use. Very environmentally friendly, the Soviets, when they weren't spilling radioactive waste all over the place.
My attention was drawn away from the vending machines by another hotspot. The Geiger counters really didn't like this one:
That’s 48 microsieverts. Remember the ‘safe’ rate is 0.3. I didn't linger long.
Pripyat is in pretty bad condition even for a town that was deserted 30 years ago, but the damage wasn't done by the meltdown itself. After they managed to cap the reactor, clean-up crews tore through the town, removing as much radioactive material as they could but smashing windows, breaking down walls and ripping apart furniture and flooring as they went. You can see the devastation in the local supermarket:
And in the pool:
The tour finished up in the fair ground:
Neither the Ferris wheel or the dodgem cars were ever used. They were due to open on May Day, and the accident happened on April 26. I bet the kids were really looking forward to it, too.
*
Nothing the next day - my last in Kyiv - could possibly have matched Chernobyl. I had read about a 'cave monastery', which sounded potentially interesting, so I went to check it out. Unfortunately it turned out to be an otherwise normal monastery - with churches that I've become inured to - with crypts dug into caves. The walls have all been covered with lime and painted white, so they just look like narrow tunnels with glass coffins for dead monks lining the walls. I wasn't the only tourist, but I was squeezing through these tiny corridors as pilgrims were going from coffin to coffin, either kissing the lid or an image of the deceased at each grave. It's a problem that churches (and other religious buildings) have to wrestle with. Many are major attractions, and draw much of their income from tourists, but it interferes with their proper religious function. I felt like a voyeur, getting in the way of the pilgrims' devotions.
I left as quickly as I could wriggle through the crowd, and returned to the hostel to get my stuff together for the most anxiety-inducing border crossing of them all: Ukraine to Russia, two countries that are unofficially at war with each other.
Nothing could possibly go wrong.
The radio started playing 'Enter Sandman' by Metallica as the bus left Kraków. 'Exit light', the lyrics go. 'Enter night'. Apt.
I didn't want to go. This trip is ultimately about enjoying myself, and it would take a fairly macabre, or at least ignorant and immature, mind to enjoy that place.
I didn't want to go, but I couldn't not go, either. I've come to Europe to enjoy myself, but also to stare history in the face, to try to not only know it but to see it, feel it, understand it. To not go, when I was so close, when I had no excuse, would be a cop-out. I almost missed out on a ticket, and paid an exorbitant amount for a tour to make sure I got one. Because I had to go.
I don't want to write about it. I want to leave the thoughts, leave the horror, back where they belong rather than have to share it, spread it, perpetuate it. But to go, and not to write, would be a cop-out.
It's disturbing, how ordinary it all looks. Take away the barbed wire and it looks like an ordinary barracks, or maybe even an ugly sort of university or school. Take away the gate with the hideous taunt, 'Arbeit Macht Frei', and it could be a regular work site. Today there are food shops and souvenir stands. Bus parking bays and toilet blocks. It's disturbing, how it's just like any other tourist attraction.
I didn't want to go to Auschwitz, but I had to. And now I'm writing this - I haven't even half-finished the Prague post yet, but maybe if I write this bit now I'll stop Googling about the Holocaust, which is what I've been doing all night. Because that's certainly not helping to catch up on my writing either.
I don't know what to write. What do you write about a place that was purpose-designed for mass murder? How do you use words to describe a place that has a room full of braids of women's hair, cut from their heads after they were gassed to death, for use in mattresses? What can you add to that? How can words express what it's like to look into a cell where people were deliberately left to starve to death?
I don't know what to write. I don't know what to write about the enormous long corridor of photos of inmates. People who were deemed able to work, so instead of being murdered immediately were forced to work themselves to death instead. Most photos had their age, the date they arrived at the camp and the date, if known, that they died. Few lasted more than a couple of months. In some of those inmate photos, mostly of the women, people are smiling for the camera. How did that instinct - to put on a happy face for the record - still prevail at that moment? I don't know what to write.
The ones that really got to me were two twins, next to each other on the wall. They were 16. One outlived the other by two months:
I don't know what to write.
Some Jews were chosen to work in the crematoria themselves. They were forced to help prepare people for the gas chamber, to help them undress. They weren't allowed to tell the victims why they were really there: they had to go along with the charade, that the chambers were shower cubicles, and then after they were dead they had to transport the bodies to the ovens to be burned. My guide told a story (I haven't found any details online, but I assume it's true) about how one person forced to do this found his own mother in the change room. He helped her undress, followed her into the gas chamber and died there with her.
I don't know what else to write.
*
I wrote that bit a few hours after visiting Auschwitz, knowing it wouldn't get any easier. Then I put the writing away for a while. This chapter about my time in Poland will no doubt suffer a little from the delay, but I needed the break and I took it.
Thankfully - for me, for Poland, for humanity - there is more to this part of the world than that scar left on the landscape by the Nazis. Auschwitz hangs like a dark cloud over my time in Poland and inevitably it will do the same over this post. But I will do my best not to let it drown out the good stuff.
I'm going to mostly skip over my first day in Poland, when I went to the city of Wroclaw, four hours north of Prague, for Poland's only major zoo. Wroclaw, by the way, takes Europe's deceptive pronunciation habits to a whole new level. Out of the name Wroclaw they get something that sounds vaguely like "Brotz lov'. I don't understand how w's can be so versatile. Nor is this a language designed for use with Australian accents: I must have sounded pretty funny - or perhaps awful - to any Poles who had to endure me trying to wrap my tongue around their place names.
The zoo visit was fine, apart from an entirely self-inflicted diabetes scare: I realised on the tram that I had left my testing strips behind at the hostel, but with little enough time for the zoo as it was I decided to push ahead without them. I had the testing kit itself, and I had the special strips that I use to determine if I have ketones when my blood sugar goes high. Because wilful ignorance about just how bad it can get is a key part of my diabetes coping strategy, I can't honestly say I understand what ketones are. Only that they're bad and if I have them my trip gets far too complicated.
To get through the day I figured I could use dead reckoning for low blood sugar - in other words, treat anything that felt like a hypo with sugar - and test for ketones in the afternoon to make sure I hadn't royally stuffed up. And so that's what I did.
The test result was 0.3.
A reading of 0.1 is essentially a 'nil' reading and 0.2 is a warning sign that you might want to take extra insulin. 0.3 isn't dangerous in itself, but if it's that high there's clearly something wrong. My diabetes control, in spite of a slovenly lifestyle, is surprisingly good and I don't think I've ever been at 0.3 before.
So 0.3 is scary, and qualifies as royally stuffing up. What blood hadn't been used for the test must have drained from my face. If that test was accurate, and *if* I couldn't bring things back under control quickly, my time in Poland had potentially become very, very stressful indeed. The sort of stress only an extended stay in hospital could induce.
What I should have done was abandon the zoo, hop on the first tram back and get a proper blood sugar reading so I could figure out what the damage was. But the zoo was no more than two thirds seen, and it's likely to be many years before I am back this way, so I decided to have an each-way bet. I gave myself a middling-sized extra dose of insulin, to jolt the blood sugar into coming down without it being *too* quick (potentially just as dangerous). And to flush - literally flush - the apparent ketones from my system I bought two litres of water and gulped it down until I couldn't drink any more.
Those steps taken, I began rushing about the rest of the zoo, and resisted testing my blood again, however stressful it was, for 45 minutes. There would be no point testing earlier, because my mitigation efforts wouldn't show up in the test, so I just dashed from exhibit to exhibit trying not to dwell too much on whether disaster may have struck. Finally enough time passed and I, somewhat shakily, performed another test.
0.1.
Deep breath. Lots of deep breaths. I was ok. I think the first one must have been a random error in the reading, as I don't think the ketones, if they were there, could have gone away *that* quickly. Either way, there was now no reason not to stay at the zoo for the hour I still had available. Indeed, there was a compelling reason *to* stay: if I may be indelicate, that almost two litres of water I'd binge-drunk was still going to require flushing, ketones or not.
From Wroclaw I made my way by bus to Kraków, the medieval capital and major tourist hub of Poland. Compared to Brotz Lov it's a piece of cake to pronounce: its 'Crack-of': all you've got to do is imagine the 'w' is a bent out of shape 'v' and you're fine.
Navigating the name and navigating the city are two different things, alas, and I was brought unstuck when planning how I would get from the bus station to the hostel. Google Maps was telling me that there were no transport options aside from a 40 minute walk, which I didn't particularly want to tackle with all my bags. I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me, but the only problem was that Google doesn't yet have public transport directions integrated into Maps here yet. There's a perfectly good tram that runs directly from the bus stop to within 100m of the hostel, but in my ignorance I got a taxi instead.
My driver was an easily frustrated woman who couldn't seem to understand where I wanted to go. She wanted a street number, but all I had was a dropped pin on Google Maps, so I showed her. After much squinting and repeated shouts for the street number, she eventually recognised where I wanted to go. "STUDENT?" She yelled, apparently assuming only students stayed in hostels. Yes, I lied. Close enough, and satisfied, off we went. When she pulled up and indicated we were there, however, I was still a kilometre away from where Google wanted to send me, and we argued for a bit before she shrugged her shoulders and drove me into a rather down at heel, strictly residential neighbourhood. I must have accidentally moved the pin as we were wrestling the phone back and forth, but she had driven off and wasn't around to enjoy her vindication. I walked the kilometre back to where she tried to drop me off. When I finally found the hostel I saw they keep an adminotaur in the basement:
A Minotaur with admin privileges?. Best not to open that door.
I was in a six bed dorm and, as the last to turn up, inevitably I got the worst bed. A top bunk, it was directly next to the light, a naked, incandescent bulb that was heating an already hot Kraków night up to what must have been 40 degrees. Sleeping here wouldn't be fun.
Now, I'm not the most extroverted of people and I need my quiet time as much as anybody else, but if I'm going to be sleeping in the same room as people for four nights I want to at least be on friendly terms. That means introducing myself, and perhaps even a little bit of inane chit chat to break the ice. Because everybody was present, and it seemed statistically unlikely that five young travellers would all separately be hanging around in bed at 10PM on a Saturday, I introduced myself and asked the room if they were travelling as a group. A half-stifled laugh from one bunk. Silence from the others, before a grudging 'no'. Then everybody went back to their smartphones.
Not going to be a social hostel then. But after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence I stepped once more into the breach. Seizing on the first moment in which one of my neighbours broke eye contact with Facebook, I said I was from Australia and asked where she was from. 'The US', she replied, and went back to the phone. Nobody else looked up.
I wasn't sure which was more oppressive, the heat or the silence. I went downstairs and asked for a different room, where I found a much more enjoyable group of people. Lisa is a software developer originally from Moscow - but currently London - who works for Google, and though she was less embracing of the title than Sam the rookie banker back in Zagreb, she is very much a genius. She assured me that while she probably *could* access my emails and browser history, Google would be able to detect it and she'd be frog-marched out of the building. It was the only instant firing offence they warned new starters about. Good to know.
Malleu- pronounced 'Mall-or' is a Belgian-Polish aspiring artist: at 19 years old she already speaks six languages (tying for Elsibio from Moldova's trip record), but she had an exam to get into art school looming, and the malign voice of her tutor was whispering in her ear that she would fail. She didn't have any creativity, this bloke had told her. Her work was meaningless. If she somehow got in she would have to work twice as hard as anybody else. She said - putting in a heroic effort to not allow her voice to crack - that he had told her he didn't want to build her hopes up. I told her to ditch the tutor, and that nobody expects a 19 year old to be reinventing the wheel. At least I was able to distract from her woes when I injected my insulin: I've never seen somebody turn quite so pale at the sight of a needle. It took all her self-control not to flee the room.
Alex, from Belarus, had just arrived in the European Union for the first time. Coming from one of Europe's poorest countries, he was trying to do it as cheaply as possible, and that meant hitch-hiking and, where possible, couch-surfing. He had even convinced a restaurant to heat up his leftovers from lunch for him for free. He showed me his collection of selfies taken with all of his drivers - 14 so far - as I explained how hitch-hiking had become much less popular in Australia thanks to Ivan Milat, and that if I tried hitching it was an even money bet whether it was a truck driver or my mother who killed me first. But it's obviously still a thriving tradition in Eastern Europe: Alex said he hadn't had to wait more than half an hour anywhere for a ride, and many of the people pulling over were single women. When I prompted him for a theory about why that is he didn't have one, but I did. Alex looks like a marble statue of Achilles.
I ventured into town the next day. I don't know what this fellow is alleged to have done, but he was clearly framed:
Kraków's old town is centred around what they proudly proclaim is Europe's oldest medieval town square. It's four hectares in size, but the effect is lost a little by a big covered market building plonked directly in the middle of it. There's also a bell towel which is apparently all that's left of the city hall, though I didn't unravel how it came to still be there when the rest is gone. It's now a focal point for events and demonstrations, and as I was going past it was hosting a rally.
These guys are a non-partisan, pro-democracy activist group. Poland has bitter experience of what happens when democracy dies, and the current government has an authoritarian bent. I loved seeing these people standing up and fighting not for a specific vision of Poland, but for a system that guarantees their right to do so. I didn't understand a word, but I joined the crowd and listened for a short while anyway.
After lunch I headed to one of my most eagerly anticipated attractions of the entire trip: the Wieliczka Salt Mine. It is, as the name might suggest, a salt mine: three and a half kilometres of tunnels and chambers, burrowing down 327 metres into almost pure rock salt. The tour takes you down to about 130 metres below ground level, which is almost as deep as the Sydney Harbour Bridge. You're encouraged to lick the walls, like a savoury Polish take on that room in the Willy Wonka movie with the fruit-flavoured wall paper. I couldn't quite bring myself to lick them directly, but I ran my fingers along them and licked those instead: it tasted like salt.
Salt mining was hard and perilous work, and during the medieval period miners were so well paid because of the danger that many could retire after a few years and become landed gentry (the aspirational working class evidently has a long history). Some though, stuck it out, and developed a tradition over the centuries of turning their pick axes to art. Amateur sculptors - many anonymous - have filled the salt mine with carvings: of kings, of religious figures, even seven dwarves working as miners (I'm not sure if this was inspired by Snow White, or if Snow White was inspired by Wieliczka, but it surely can't be a coincidence):
Even more remarkable, though, are the chapels. There are several of them, all carved directly out of the salt: the statues are salt, the altars are salt, even the chandeliers are salt. The best of all is the..., which is still used for weekly masses on Sundays, and was carved by just three miners over the course of 40 years:
It even has a salt relief version of the Last Supper:
I'm not religious, but it's impossible not to admire the dedication, let alone the creativity and talent, that drives people to literally chip away at something for so long.
The next day never really got going, unfortunately. With a half-dreaded visit to Auschwitz looming ahead of me I decided to check out Oskar Schindler's factory near the (tragically, now 'former') Jewish Quarter, thinking I might benefit from a more uplifting story from the Holocaust than what I was bracing for the next day. By the time I got to the factory, though, the tickets were all sold out: I hadn't known they were limited, and after peeking into the exhibit space it's hard to understand why. The place looked deserted, but I obviously wasn't going to be allowed in so I gave up and went to the zoo instead.
As I was on the tram from there to the zoo I got a phone call from a Kraków number. I didn't know what it was about, but I wasn't about to incur roaming charges to find out so I killed the call and thought nothing more of it. Later in the week, shortly after entering the hostel's location into Google Maps, I got another call from a (different) local number. Curious, I plugged the number into Google: it was the hostel, but the staff denied calling. So I looked up that first number and it was... the Oskar Schindler Factory.
Creepy. They didn't have my name or number: I'd gone in, found it sold out and left. I had, however, entered the location into Google Maps. My best guess is somebody was accessing my Google Maps searches somehow and then cloning phone numbers to try to trick me into answering. I've since become rather fanatical about using my VPN.
Speaking of creepy, and on a completely different scale: Auschwitz. I've tried to capture the emotional sucker punch to the solar plexus that is visiting this place in my intro. I don't think I've managed it - I'm not sure it's possible to do so - but I don't want to try again, or to start repeating myself. So I'm going to do the patently absurd, and write about going as if it's any other landmark or museum.
I hate tours, but a day or two before I planned to go I'd gone online and discovered that, like the Schindler factory, there were apparently a limited number of tickets to enter. I couldn't unravel whether the limit was just on the number of guided tours or on the number of people admitted full stop, but there were no tickets available to book so to be safe I searched for a tour company and bought the first available one I found. The tour companies are ticket-scalping parasites: they book up huge numbers of tickets to Auschwitz, which are free, in advance and then charge €40 to bus you there and back. They don't even run the tour: once there you're handed over to a guide who works for the camp itself. It's a scam.
The tour group barely spoke to each other for most of the tour - it's not a place that encourages idle chitchat - but I eventually fell into conversation with an American man, whose name I unfortunately didn't catch so I'll call him Bob. He was an avuncular enough fellow from Virginia Beach, and somehow or other the topic turned to American politics (it wasn't me this time. I swear. At least, I don't think it was. Well. You can't prove it). A middle aged white guy from the city that hosts the US Navy's Atlantic fleet, I had a sneaking suspicion about where Bob's politics might lie, but as we skirted around the elephant in the room he revealed a weird grab bag of views, including that private schools - and thus school vouchers - are a way to get around desegregation. Bob didn't like it, and I wondered if I had once again made the wrong guess based on demographics.
Nope. Bob stated that the US had faced a choice last year between two bad candidates, and I interjected to say that one was quite clearly superior to the other. Bob let that slide, but when I asked straight up which bad candidate he'd settled for, he said he went for Trump, and that he was "feeling pretty damn good" about that choice even now.
I asked what Bob wants Trump to do. Abolishing the IRS and replacing income taxes with a GST came first, so I pointed out that poor people use more of their income on consumption and would pay a higher share of their income in taxes: Bob simply nodded, so I gather that's the point. Bob wants controlled - not 'xenophobic', he was at pains to point out - immigration. And he wants to get rid of Obamacare, which he says doubled his insurance costs. I explained that we have single-payer coverage in Australia, and bet him any amount he wanted that I paid less of my total income for health care, via taxes, than he does via insurance. Bob agreed that that would be true, but he opposes single-payer health care anyway.
Then things got interesting. The Clintons, you see, are criminals. They used their foundation to launder money! I chose not to bother arguing that point, but given that there's a rather significant investigation under way into Trump's own conduct, I asked Bob if he would support impeachment should the Russia investigation come up with the goods. "I don't believe that will happen -"
Sorry, Bob. Let me interrupt. I didn't ask if you thought it would happen. I asked if you would support impeachment if it does. "Well, I'd have to look at that at the time." Uh huh. "And besides, evidence is now coming out that it was really the Democrats, and NOT Trump, who were working with the Russians..."
And our journey through the looking glass was complete. I'm not making an over-inflated comparison between Trump and the Nazis here, lest I be misunderstood. But it was deeply uncomfortable having this fact-optional conversation here, in Auschwitz, where the greatest crime in human history was possible only because too many German Bobs were willing to suspend disbelief.
I didn't get up to much on what was to be my last day in Kraków. My bus was scheduled to take me to Lviv at 4:30PM: it was the latest bus that I felt confident would get me through the border before midnight, which was important because I would be leaving the Schengen zone, and exiting before midnight would avoid wasting an increasingly scarce Schengen visa day. I'd planned, pre-Auschwitz, to make a second attempt at the Schindler factory, but I was mentally Holocaust-ed out and decided to skip it.
Instead I went back to what I do best - wandering aimlessly about, and ended up in the grounds of the Prague castle. I didn't pay to go inside, but I had a few zloty (a wonderful name for a currency) jangling in my pocket and when I saw a sign for a 'Dragon's Den' for three zloty I decided to check it out, despite not having the foggiest clue what it might be. It consisted of a long spiral staircase descending into a cave below the castle that could plausibly serve as a dragon's den. I spent a lot of my time in Kraków in dark places, one way or another.
Finally it was time for the bus. I didn't actually have my ticket paid for, because there was some technical issue with the website and it wouldn't accept payment. Instead I'd contacted the company directly and they had reserved me a seat, to pay the driver in cash when I boarded. Except I didn't board because the bus didn't turn up. I waited, and waited, and waited for the bus to arrive at the bay I'd been told to wait at. Nothing. I paced up and down the station, increasingly agitated, before finding a patch of wifi coverage and firing off an urgent email to the bus line. I never got a response, and I never got my bus either. It just didn't show.
Defeated, on the hook for a rather expensive hotel in Ukraine that I wouldn't get to use, and mourning a lost Schengen day, I returned to my Kraków hostel with my tail between my legs. "What happened?", the woman working, who I'd farewelled two hours earlier, asked when I turned up unannounced. Good question.
