Second Leg: Yekaterinburg to Novosibirsk

Taiga, through a rainy window.

After a considerable amount of searching about, I've finally unearthed an internet cafe in Novosibirsk. My train to Irkutsk doesn't roll out until eleven tonight, so I've got some time to kill. There don't seem to be any other tourists here, and none of the locals I've encountered speak more than basic English. This has given occasion for some pretty amusing pantomime sequences during the past 24 hours. At restaurants, I'll ask for a menu in English, more likely than not in vain. A good deal of chuckling ensues; I helplessly flip back and forth between the Cyrillic menu and the Lonely Planet language index, while the waitresses huddle. Eventually something recognizable is offered, and I reconcile myself to my culinary fate, ruing my failure to get the Rosetta Stone discs like everyone suggested.

Afternoon stop

The second leg of the train journey went more quickly than the first. My cabin mates during the latest stretch on the train included a father and son, the latter of whom was probably about 8 years old and the apple of his father's eye. They spent most of the time playing video games together. In the bunk above mine was a leggy young woman whom I at first assumed was the mother, but due to her total lack of interaction with the other two, I eventually figured out that she was unrelated (confirmed by warm reunion with gentleman friend at the Novosibirsk train station). Her activities were confined to applying makeup and toying with her cellphone. In fact, everyone seemed most interested in keeping to themselves, so it seemed a good idea to follow their example. Despite the squawk of unending disco and pop that was piped into each cabin, I buried myself in a collection of Russian magic tales. My favorite involved a young malachite worker. Until visiting a geology museum in Yekaterinburg, I had forgetten that this stone, one of my favorites, is plentiful in the Urals. In any case, the worker, Danilushko, becomes so obsessed by his craft that he forsakes his wife to carve amongst a shadowy group of masters under the auspices of the "mistress of the mountain". His wife misses him so much that she takes up his old trade, seemingly guided by fate. Eventually, her loyalty moves the mistress of the mountain to allow the husband escape his obsession and return home.

Yum - in earnest, this time.

For most of the journey, we passed through a sort of taiga-savannah landscape. Marshy grasses, with yellow, white, and indigo flowers, surrounded clumps of birch. The name Pasquaney might apply better here than to the shores of Lake Newfound. The train stopped infrequently, and some of the more remote stations that we passed were simply referred to by their distance in kilometers from Moscow. Still, the line in the opposite direction was very busy due to a steady steam of freight trains bringing coal to the heavy manufacturing plants of the Urals. In the afternoon, we stopped at a town called Babinsk, where several babushkas prowled the platform, selling dried fish, fur hats, and various fresh fruits and vegetables. A cup of raspberries cost me 100 rubles.

Wow, that is a long block!

Very inviting.

Small adjustments.

I'm looking forward to moving onto Irkutsk and the companionship of the hostel where I'll be staying. Novosibirsk has little in the way of conventional tourist attractions, though it does have plenty of enormous Soviet apartment blocks that give it a dingier, slightly more austere quality than Moscow or Yekaterinburg - which is why I arranged to stay here in the first place. One does get a sense, from the little details that are just visible on balconies and inside windows, that the interiors are very lovingly looked after. Human will adapt to the most spartan of circumstances. But beyond this whiff of the USSR, there's not much to do. I've now been a while without a real conversation, and I expect I'll run into some other international types on Lake Baikal. Between now and then, however, I have two nights on the train. The first thing to do after boarding is to make your bed with sheets and a mattress provided by the provodnitsa - the lady (they work in shifts of two, actually) who takes care of each carriage, generally ruling with an iron fist but keeping things far cleaner than anything Amtrak offers. At 11:30, it may be difficult to enter a compartment discreetly. I spent some of the morning at a produce stall (they seem to be everywhere, while supermarkets are comparatively scarce) by my hotel, stocking back up on apples, cucumbers, and tomatoes to get me through the next day, along with the supplies I still have from Moscow. These trips are sort of like going on a series of brief camping trips with strangers, only there's no need to worry about the elements.

Produce for sale in Yekaterinburg.

I'll get to Irkutsk in two days and will be staying there and in a town called Listvyanka on the lake for a total of three nights. Tschuss!

First Leg: Moscow to Yekaterinburg

Farewell at Kazansky Station

First of all, I should note that pictures will have to wait until I'm back in the States, unfortunately. I'm going to try and update my account at each stop, but no promises. The next entry should come from Novosibirsk, a couple days from now. To begin, I'll start at Kazansky Station in Moscow where, after several days getting over jetlag and skulking around Moscow with Cole Akeson, my old friend from Macalester, the real adventure began.

The care with which Cole and Inga, his Russian girlfriend tucked me into my cabin on the train at its very beginning drove home the scale of this journey. They probably understand the distance and conditions better than anyone else I've talked to since I hatched this plan last year, and they made sure I got exactly the right bunk and had my backpack safely stowed away beneath my cabin before taking their leave.

Settling in.

Traveling in a second-class kupe involves getting comfortable with tight space. As befits someone who likes apartments and reads Napoleonic era naval fiction, I generally enjoy this sort of thing, but it would be very difficult to stay cooped up in a compartment for a week, which is the length of the journey if you go straight across from Moscow to Bejing. There are four bunks to a cabin, two below and two up top, with about as much space in-between as the width of another bunk. Generally, I spent a good deal of time on the first leg of the trip considering the relative merits of sitting upright, lying down, or curling up in a three-quarters position. I read the guidebook and a travel book that I brought along, In Xanadu, practically cover to cover, and also wrote up four separate entries in my journal. This urge occurred not because I had particularly interesting things to jot down, but because writing provided a welcome break from reading. I noted minor triumphs, such as discovering that the toiled flushed via a foot pedal, or that you have to press the bottom of the tap in the bathroom for water rather than fiddling with the knobs on the wall. I am actually a little concerned that I may run out of things to read, but since I have not yet broached War and Peace, it probably won't be a problem.

Oleg and Ivan.

Gradually, over the course of the first afternoon, I made the acquaintance of the other guys in my cabin. Across from me was a silent fellow whose name I never did catch, though he did extend a helping hand when I needed to prop up my bunk to get at my backpack. He spent the ride watching American action movies on his laptop and listening to his iPod, and he disappeared during the night as I dozed off. On the top bunks were two chattier characters, especially Oleg, who, along with his buddy Ivan, was off to Lake Baikal for eight days of backpacking around the shores. When the stewardess came by to take our orders for meals, these two helped decide what I should have, and then took me along to the restaurant car when it was time to actually eat. This carriage was deserted except for the second morning when a couple of young policemen sat at the table across from us. They avoided any eye contact and sat staring miserably out the window, on the verge of tears or a temper tantrum, I couldn't tell which. Nearby, the stewardess and her friends were carving a deliciously fresh watermelon into generous slices, which I eyed greedily, to little avail. Our own two restaurant meals consisted of meat, a grain (pasta or barley), and some canned vegetable, all floating in a sea of grease. At least it was filling. 

Yum.

Cabin meals, by contrast, were much more pleasant. The second morning, having slept deeply until 9:30, I woke to some shifting around in the bunk on top of me. Oleg's legs were soon snaking down from above; next, he was encouraging me to join him for breakfast and asking if I wanted some hot water for tea from the samovar at the end of the corridor. Thanks to Cole and Inga, I was prepared with some food of my own, so we shared bread, sausage, cucumber, tomato, and some nuts and dried fruit. Between Ivan's Kindle's Russian-English translation capabilities and some shared rudimentary German, we established some basics of background and interests. By the afternoon, when the train stopped for a half-hour at a deserted station to attach a new engine, Oleg was escorting me around the platform as if I was a younger, foolish cousin. Ivan even gave me an ice-cream, one of a sack that he had purchased at a kiosk on the platform. For some reason, Russian ice cream doesn't seem to melt.

An hour or two later, after passing by more of the rolling, green forest that seems to be a mix of deciduous and conifers, we came to the Yekaterinburg Station. 1500 kilometers complete - the first of five legs. In all, it took about 27 hours. For the time being, I'm cooling my heels in cafes and wandering around town, trying to stay fully hydrated and well-fed to make the next stage of the train as pleasant as possible. I head off for Novosibirsk tonight around 6 PM.

A brief stop near Yekaterinburg.

A last note: I have never before visited a country where postcards are so scarce (plenty of magnets and Soviet-era pins, however). So, unfortunately, those of you whose addresses I asked for before my departure may not get anything in the mail after all.

In front of the Yekaterinburg city hall.

Apple and Aggregate Demand

A couple of weeks ago, I came across two articles that I found in combination to make about the most insightful point about sociology and economics that I’ve seen in a couple months. The first was a post on the website AtlanticCities.com that displayed the geography of cellphone use in several major American cities, comparing iPhone and Android users (Blackberry, too, but they barely show up). In these maps, the red dots are iPhone users and green Android.

The correlation between affluence and choice of phone, as author Emily Badger points out, is strongly positive. For instance, iPhones are common in Northwest DC, while Androids turn up in great numbers in Prince Georges County. 

I don’t know a lot about the functionality of either gadget, but they both seem to satisfy the basic requirements for a Smartphone, while Apple has a major advantage in style and cachet, much as their computers do over PCs. Whatever their incremental advantages in capability, iPhones do not on their own warrant the enormous premium that consumers are willing to pay. In short, iPhones – like Apple products in general – convincingly demonstrate the limitations of economic rationality. 

As luck would have it, Paul Krugman published an op-ed about Apple a couple days after the AtlanticCities post made the rounds on Facebook. Krugman is interested in the reasons why economic recovery has been so slow, and in this particular column he ruminates about how our recent crisis, while quite similar to a couple of other depressions in the twentieth century, might be different. He suggests that in Apple’s case, its profits have more to do with market dominance than actual investments in production (this observation would not have applied several years ago). Unlike earlier corporate giants – GM is Krugman’s example – Apple employs a tiny number of American workers. Even though plenty of Chinese people do manufacture the parts, their take, as well as that of their employers, is marginal. Apple, however, reaps extraordinary profits because their market allows them to divorce the price for their products from their costs.

In short, Apple no longer really needs to compete with products like Android to remain in a dominant position. While this will likely have devastating effects for the company over the long term – eventually it will be superceded by a scrappy competitor that takes the risks that Apple eschews – in the meantime, Apple sits on a vast pile of cash that would have a stimulative effect if the company was compelled to invest it. The longer middle and upper-income consumers succumb to marketing and peer pressure, however, the longer Apple can delay putting its reserves to work.

The Warped Geography of Game of Thrones

I am devoted to Game of Thrones. Somewhere, deep within my imagination, it strokes an enduring fantasy of achieving order through medieval valor and romance. This is an old fascination of mine that was most fully realized during my childhood through the Narnia and Lord of the Rings books. Though the plot and characters in these series held an appeal, it was their nuanced place-making that captured me for good. As the stories unfolded, their landscapes became as fully formed as any character (more so in the case of Lord of the Rings, in which nearly all the members of the Fellowship are one-dimensional). Consider The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis’ conclusion to the seven-part series, when the remaining Pevensie children romp across nearly the entire length of Narnia as they transcend death and ascend to Aslan’s country, an allegory for heaven.

Game of Thrones is heir to this fantasy tradition of geomorphological complexity, though R.R. Martin’s motive is purely to entertain. The HBO series makes an explicitly geographical appeal to its audience through its title sequence, a fevered birds-eye journey across whichever cities figure prominently in a particular episode. The modeling of the landscape is exquisite, with cities that literally unfurl before the viewer’s eyes, while the inverted curvature of the land is shrewdly bizarre. Most intriguingly, viewers are treated to sights of new cities, as the close-up of the map of Westeros and its twin continent across the Narrow Sea, Essos, shifts from one episode to the next. I am usually up and about during title sequences, but I watch closely during Game of Thrones for new landmarks.

Curiously, the basic geography of the worlds in these three enormously popular series is consistent in its elemental form, both physical and cultural. The heroes of each story – Starks, Pevensies, hobbitses – share a deep attachment to some territory in the northwestern reaches of the known continents. In these cool, stimulating latitudes, existence is simple, modest, and just. Food is abundant but wealth not too excessive, while spiritual fulfillment is within reach if characters attend to community and religion. To the south and east, however, lie treacherous lands, where dusky inhabitants are primitive and hedonistic, yet skilled in warfare. Calormen and its perfidious Tisrocs and Tarkaans become the chief villains in the later Narnia books, while Khal Drogo and his savage Dothraki horde menace Westeros in Game of Thrones. Beyond Mordor, itself occupying the southeast corner of Tolkien’s map of Middle-Earth, live the Haradrim, who wear turbans and fight atop Mûmakil, a larger, more aggressive cousin to the elephant.

Many observers flatly accuse the creators of these stories of racism. I prefer to emphasize the role that environmental determinism, the simplistic but alluring notion that human temperament and behavior is shaped by physical geography, plays in constructing an inherently problematic setting. The concept has an ancient, resilient history. Aristotle theorized about the existence of frigid, temperate, and torrid zones, speculating that humans could only survive in temperate regions. These ideas became particularly prominent among western academics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when leading geographers Friedrich Ratzel, Ellen Churchill Semple, and Ellsworth Huntington developed a counterfeit scholarship of determinism to buttress the systemic racism upon which western imperialism rested.

Given the context that Tolkien and Lewis wrote in, it is not surprising that their stories reflect underlying white anxieties about decolonization and the world order. However, in recreating their basic geography, particularly its cultural aspects, Game of Thrones perpetuates these discredited, corrosive theories of racial hierarchy. Their subtlety makes them all the more insidious. No doubt, for a white viewer like myself, the show’s geography appeals to the insecurities fostered by our deeply engrained discourse of race. When the reign of Robert Baratheon, King of Westeros at the beginning of the first season, dissolves in a haze of drink, whores, and boar hunting, the geographic origin of his downfall is implicit. King’s Landing, the capital, is a humid, languid place, home to a scheming elite and its wretched underclass. Living in so permissive a clime, the once lean and fierce king naturally succumbs to his baser instincts.

Popery and Tweed

Ireland! At times like this, I wish I had four stomachs. Between Belfast and Dublin, we drove across Northern Ireland to County Donegal, the northern outpost of the Republic. It was once part of Ulster, but like two other counties in the old province, it became part of the Republic because most of its inhabitants were Catholic around the time of independence. 

This hilltop, just west of Derry, is the site of a Celtic fort called Grianan Ailigh. Apparently the name means stone fort. The restored structure is a only simple stone ring perhaps 150 feet in diameter, but apparently it was significant enough in the second century to be included in Ptolemy's world map. The earliest fort was built in 1700 BC. 

This is the village of Ardara, which is known for woolen textiles. Donegal is fairly rugged country, swarming with sheep. I found myself a lovely tweed vest that still smells of mutton.

This fellow was working in the upstairs of factory in the tiny village of Killybegs. His son is a fisherman in Gloucester. He was quite a chatty fellow and happy to be photographed. The exposure is overly long but at least you can get a sense of the shuttle's movement on the loom.

Destined to become a blanket. 

We stayed in a b & b on Muckross Head, on the north shore of Donegal Bay. Behind me is Slieve League, the biggest coastal cliff in Europe. Christopher and I had hoped to climb it, but the weather was wetter than we were willing to endure. 

Tide was luckily out when we inspected the tip of the head. Our b & b was on the peninsula on the right of the photograph below. 

Viaduc Millau

While staying in the Corrèze this summer, I took our rental car out for a spin through the Massif Central and, eventually, south to the Viaduc Millau. It was a good deal longer of a drive than I anticipated but well worth it. Remembering the splash it made in international news pages when it opened in 2004, I particularly wanted to see the bridge. Until then, the Tarn Valley in southern France slowed traffic between Paris and the Mediterranean tremendously, as its walls are so steep that cars could only descend and ascend on steep switchbacks. Now, he viaduct simply leaps a mile and a half across the gorge.

While it is difficult to appreciate the height of the bridge in person because of the scale of the surrounding landscape, it is the tallest in the world (though other spans cross deeper chasms). The piers rise higher than the Eiffel Tower.

Its symmetry, gentle curve, and white color give the bridge an almost dreamlike quality. It is slender and elegant. Apparently there was some concern that motorists, distracted by the architecture or blinded by fog, would be prone to accidents on the bridge.

The architect was Norman Foster, but the engineers were French, to the pride of the locals. The bridge cost 400 million Euros to construct; the toll to cross was 7 Euros. 

The Troubles Writ Large

I recently spent a few days in Belfast, an austere and shabby city that is nonetheless in its best shape in a half-century. Tensions between Unionists and Republicans still run high, but the violence that wracked Northern Ireland for so long is over, at least for now.

The conflict has dramatically affected the city’s physical landscape, especially in the poorer Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods that directly abut each other. Both groups use murals, as political propaganda and to relieve the drab expanses of brick that characterize much of the city’s housing stock. Let’s start with Sandy Row, a Unionist stronghold only a stone’s throw from the pubs and gin palaces frequented by the students at Queen’s University.

The Unionists, who have festooned their neighborhood with Union Jacks, revere Queen Elizabeth for obvious reasons, but the ubiquity of William of Orange in their murals seemed more obscure until I remembered that he quashed hopes for Irish independence at the Battle of Boyne. The above shot of the Queen is intended to suggest how down-at-heels the neighborhood is. The architecture is typical of UK “estate” housing.

These four paramilitary members are Protestant martyrs, memorialized here along the Shankill road, which is separated from downtown Belfast by an entrenched highway (similar to the Cross-Bronx Expressway, actually). Shankill Road gave its name to the eponymous Butchers, a gang that tortured Catholics (and a few Protestants) with butcher knives before killing them. Most members were caught and put away, but the leader, Lenny Murphy, evaded capture until a Provisional IRA hit squad got him.

The Red Hand is a symbol of Ulster that is traced back to Gaelic culture and the O’Neill clan, who were the last Catholics to rule the area until they fled in 1607 to seek help from the Spanish against the English invaders.

The Peace Line, as the wall running behind these houses is called, divides Shankill from the Catholic Falls Road neighborhood. First built to provide a temporary reprieve from the violence that erupted in the sixties, it has endured. Belfast has recently opened more gates in the wall, and there is serious talk about dismantling it altogether.

The murals on Falls Road are more sophisticated artistically than those of the Unionists and, to my mind, more effective as propaganda. They aim to justify the Republican cause by emphasizing persecution and expressing commonality with other liberation movements.

Bobby Sands was a Republican martyr who died on a hunger strike to protest the UK’s failure to treat IRA inmates as political prisoners. Eleven other men met the same fate. Subsequently, the UK changed its policy.

These next shots are from Derry, near the border with the Republic on the north coast. Derry is much smaller than Belfast but was another site of conflict during the Troubles. Bloody Sunday, in which British paratroopers killed thirteen unarmed Catholic marchers in 1972, took place here.

From the old city walls, I took these shots of the Bogside, one of the city’s Catholic quarters. As you can see by the architecture, it is a working-class place, and for a couple of years in the early seventies, it was beyond the reach of the UK security forces.

The woman holding the microphone, Bernadette Devlin, was a Republican MP from the area in the seventies.

The schoolgirl is Annette McGavigan, a fourteen year old who was caught in crossfire in 1971.

A British soldier breaks down a door during Operation Motorman, the 1972 campaign that allowed UK forces to take control of the Bogside. They subsequently leveled much of the housing close to the downtown and replaced it with far more porous structures, as you can observe in the picture of the Bogside.

A boy faces off against a British Saracen armored vehicle.

In this shot, back in Belfast, you can make out a police car. Note how a sort of modern chain mail extends down from the sides of the car nearly to the ground, protecting the chassis. This adaptation is to guard the undercarriage against Molotov cocktails.

As my presence suggests, the murals have gained a new function as tourist sites. Tour buses actually blocked me from photographing some of the murals along Falls Road. The city is still poor, especially in contrast to bustling Dublin, which I visited later on in the week, but it is safe. I watched several British and Irish athletes compete on a big screen by the city hall, and although the crowds were substantial, cheering seemed consciously muted. There was some trouble in Derry a few days before we arrived – offense was given to a Catholic storekeeper on a Protestant march – but no blows were exchanged. I hope the truce endures.