travel notes
Life on a train: You take naps after breakfast, play endless card games, wander the hallways and make idle conversation. You go stand between cars on the walkway enclosed with accordion rubber and close your eyes to the middle of the night, feel the cold rush of air blowing in at the places the rubber doesn't join. The wind and the train moving over the tracks howls and clatters and the silence outside beyond in the scruffy clumps of grass in the Gobi desert joins in louder. Somewhere there are camels under the stars, horses sagging under their shadows in the moonlight. Between the windows of the car, the provodnitsas stand in the glare of light, smoking, lumpy-ankled in their blue uniforms, up all night to keep order between the Mongolian traders bringing crates of fruit back from the Chinese border, the surly Western tourists/travellers, and Chinese taking snuff in their compartments crowded with sunflower shells and spilled Chinese Tang dust. After a few weeks of travelling, especially through "budget destinations" like China and Mongolia, you meet so many others that to hear someone say they've been travelling for seven months straight is nothing. Over and over, you ask and are asked the same questions: where are you coming from, where are you going, what's next? How long are you travelling for? In the restaurant car twenty Germans singing drinking songs are getting glared at by the mean-looking waitress, some other foreigners, and some Russians working their way through a tableful of beers.
In St Petersburg: Walking through the damp, mossy courtyards connected with courtyards full of locked metal doors and flooded cellars, all tall buildings all around, no sunlight, no sounds of traffic this far in, this deep. When we come out, two boys are standing in a second-story window, throwing paper airplanes out onto the street from a hoard pre-folded in a cardboard box. We throw them back and they always miss, twirling straight up in the air, then spiralling down-flat into puddles in the dips in the sidewalk. Walking away one boy calls out do svedanya-goodbye-quickly-he knows we're foreigners.
At the East-West Hostel in St Petersburg: on the fourth floor, from the door opposite the hostel kids spit sunflower seeds through the broken peephole in the door, yelling "fuck your mother!" in English after us as we go down the stairs.
In the churches: Russian ladies cross themselves at every picture of Christ, and head coverings separate the religious from the tourists. One fragile old woman with thick legs inside lumpy wool stockings (is this a recurring theme or what?) has a cane with a rabbit fur handle. This afternoon I'd rather be napping.
Things I shouldn't forget to write about: at the doll museum crocheted dolls in the banya (bath house) with chest hair and pubic hair and big saggy tits and cigarettes.
Also: Outside the metro stations are old priests asking for donations, all in black robes with long skirts and long beards coming to a point. Old ladies have lavender and purple hair. Running into the old guy from the hostel at the Peter and Paul Fortress, in the prison cell, coming out quick as a shot; then behind him the sound of something big falling and echoing in that little chamber.
In St Petersburg: Walking through the damp, mossy courtyards connected with courtyards full of locked metal doors and flooded cellars, all tall buildings all around, no sunlight, no sounds of traffic this far in, this deep. When we come out, two boys are standing in a second-story window, throwing paper airplanes out onto the street from a hoard pre-folded in a cardboard box. We throw them back and they always miss, twirling straight up in the air, then spiralling down-flat into puddles in the dips in the sidewalk. Walking away one boy calls out do svedanya-goodbye-quickly-he knows we're foreigners.
At the East-West Hostel in St Petersburg: on the fourth floor, from the door opposite the hostel kids spit sunflower seeds through the broken peephole in the door, yelling "fuck your mother!" in English after us as we go down the stairs.
In the churches: Russian ladies cross themselves at every picture of Christ, and head coverings separate the religious from the tourists. One fragile old woman with thick legs inside lumpy wool stockings (is this a recurring theme or what?) has a cane with a rabbit fur handle. This afternoon I'd rather be napping.
Things I shouldn't forget to write about: at the doll museum crocheted dolls in the banya (bath house) with chest hair and pubic hair and big saggy tits and cigarettes.
Also: Outside the metro stations are old priests asking for donations, all in black robes with long skirts and long beards coming to a point. Old ladies have lavender and purple hair. Running into the old guy from the hostel at the Peter and Paul Fortress, in the prison cell, coming out quick as a shot; then behind him the sound of something big falling and echoing in that little chamber.