In the morning I pour Victoria tea and find the last couple of Tim Tams to put with it. “Hey thanks for letting me stay here last night. I wouldn’t have been good company for anyone”, I offer as some kind of backhanded apology.
“You were better off staying home last night, it rained most of the time and we ended up mostly being cold and wet, huddled under umbrellas”, she says sadly, before brightening up and continuing,
“Did you find something to eat?”
I’m sure I look guilty for a moment before answering,
“I found some pasta and used some random vegetables. I’ll get some more today.”
“Oh from that jar in the front of the fridge?’
“Umm… the pickled stuff..yeah.”
“Oh don’t worry so much about that, it’s been there forever”.
I smile and thank her again before heading out into the street. I’ve just realised that I haven’t actually been inside the Kremlin itself yet and want to see the Armoury before I leave Moscow tonight.
I’m glad to visit it, the electronic audio guide I pay for takes me on a neat cruise through the rooms discovering the crazy array of weaponry, clothing, dinnerware and carriages that Russian royalty had enjoyed over time. I haven’t seen a sleigh-carriage before and there’s a crazy array of them to choose from here. By the time I finish the Armoury I’m eager to keep moving and return to Victoria’s apartment. Whilst I’ve enjoyed my time in the city, I’m more than ready to leave Moscow. The place hasn’t exactly captured my imagination, but Moscow was never the reason I wanted to come to Russia. Those experiences lie on the other side of the Ural mountain range.
 I explain to Victoria that I will take my suitcase to the Sunday Session party and then go straight from there to the inter-city train station. She suddenly realises and exclaims,
“So I won’t see you again!”
“Well, not for a while…..but I have something for your collection of stuffed animals and teddy bears.”
On her windowsill, a coffee table and a desk of drawers in her room are an amazing array of these little keepsakes she has collected on her travels. I give her a small Koala to add to them, to remind her she has to come and visit me in Australia sometime soon. I then also produce a section of an enormous scarf my sister-in-law had made for me the previous Christmas. Karen had spent a lot of time knitting it, capably assisted by my nephew and nieces as required, to remind me of my connections to the rest of my family. The full scarf is well over five metres long, composed of different coloured sections made from different kinds and styles of yarn. At one point we had it wrapped around all my family sitting around the loungeroom in Darwin. Karen wanted me to take it on my travels to be my reminder of all of them. When it was completely rolled up it formed a disc over twenty centimetres in diameter and over ten centimetres tall. When I was leaving Australia, I cut off a section a bit over a metre long that was small enough to take with me. My aim was to get pictures of my hosts and their friends to remember both their connection to me and for me to my family. Victoria poses for a lovely shot wearing the scarf and her glorious smile. With that formality finished we hug and I drag my suitcase into the street.
The Sunday Session is an Australian pastime to deal with the problem of wanting to have some beers with your friends, but not wanting to be hungover Monday morning. So the answer is to start drinking around midday Sunday and finish up by nine to give you plenty of time to recover. A couchsurfer from Perth, Ben, is living in Moscow and he’s arranged for a Sunday Session to happen at his apartment today. After trying to find my way alone, I decide fate is pushing me to try a taxi. Two drivers are sitting inside the second taxi on the rank sharing a cigarette sheltered from the rain. I smile and say hello, in Russian, and hold out the piece of scrap paper I have written the address on in Russian. They look at each other, have a brief discussion and decide who will be taking me somewhere. My driver waves me to sit down and we lurch into the traffic, turning completely in the opposite direction to where I thought we should be going. I’ve heard taxi rides in Russia can be a fun experience for foreigners, but since my own brief attempt to find my way met with abject failure, I decide to trust him for a while. With his next turn we enter the street I’m looking for. During this time I manage to tell him, in Russian, that I’m Australian, I’ve been in Moscow for one week and I like Russia. He tells me it’s raining and that’s about as far as we get when he points at an apartment building with the number emblazoned on it.
Ben meets me downstairs where he checks the paper sign he’s posted advising the Couchsurfing party is at this door.
“The babushkas in the building don’t like anything foreign or unusual, so when I‘ve done this before with a note in English, they’ve pulled it down within an hour.”
Ben’s apartment is true to the style I had already discovered, decrepit on the outside giving way to luxury inside the front door. There must be a lot of work in doing renovations in this country. I’m somehow relieved to be talking to another Australian, especially one from my adopted city of Perth. I’m about to suggest I go for a beer mission when he shows me the slab of half-litre cans of Baltika 7 he’s acquired. He smiles and says,
“No worries, there’s plenty here, if we need more later, we can just get them from the shops downstairs.”
I love his proper Aussie style and crack one open with him. I’m running Moscow early, being exactly on time at four.
“The other Sunday Sessions I’ve had here had people arriving from six or seven and staying all night”, he says.
“They don’t really get the idea of the session.”
“Nope, but I kind of like their style too, they party like Australians.”
“They do know how to keep a session going”, I add with a broad smile, remembering Friday night’s madness.
“So what do you make of Moscow life then?”, I ask.
“I liked Moscow when I first arrived”, he begins thoughtfully,
“but after a few weeks I grew to hate it, everything’s difficult, it’s like the city hates you. I’ve spoken to a few other people who’ve moved here and told me you go through a time of hating everything about it and then you seem to form a truce.”
“I don’t think I like this city, it’s just another big city to me. Sure it has things that are different, but it’s still just another big city.”
“Maybe…I dunno…I wonder what I have left to eat?”. He distracts himself, wandering into the kitchen to check the fridge.
“I have some vegemite with me if we want to make something Australian”, I offer.
He smiles and says sadly,
“I have no bread”. So with this patriotic need established, I stride off purposely to find some bread.
After walking for a few minutes I begin to doubt I’m even vaguely in the right place. Nothing looks like it should and I keep looking back to his apartment block trying to find his window; hoping he’s on the balcony. While searching for the apartment I realise it’s on the other side of the block. Now oriented, I walk back and find the shop more easily. This navigating within the nests of apartment buildings can be tricky. Inside the shop I meet some of the people from Friday night while I’m acquiring the bread and a one litre can of Baltika 7 so I can get a picture of myself holding it.
Nastya and Ben
Ben and I immediately set about preparing vegemite sandwiches for everyone, eating a few ourselves before switching into a mass production mode. All Australians love to share this spread with everyone around the world, mostly for the incredibly distasteful expressions it normally causes. It is an acquired taste and, for me, is best consumed with bread with butter. Thus prepared, the two of us hand them out to the six or seven people who have arrived, waiting expectantly for their faces to contort. They don’t. They love it. I’m lost for words. Ben looks thoughtful for a moment,
“Oh yeah…I gave some to some Russians when I first got here and they liked it too”. I shrug and keep making more as everyone tries and enjoys it. This just isn’t meant to happen and I find myself wondering what it is in the Russian palate that makes vegemite such an agreeable option. Only one person doesn’t like it so much, but doesn’t really mind it either. I’m almost disappointed to miss out on the normal reaction, but at the same time I’m amazed with the unexpected connection with the Russian people.
The Sunday Session has begun in earnest and over the next few hours grows with more and more Couchsurfers and their friends arriving. I spread the word about my eclipse chasing madness and discover that one of the girls there, Irina (who made the Irish Cream on Tuesday night), will be a part of a group who will ride horses through part of the Altai Mountains at the time. They will see Totality from a small village in the hills. I’m impressed with her dedication to the cause and we agree to meet up afterwards to trade photos and stories.
 Someone asks me what I think of Moscow and Russia.
“I like the Russian people but I don’t really like this city”, I begin and then pause, thinking how to continue.
“In so many ways it’s just another city. I think when a city reaches a certain size it becomes its own country”,
“Moscow is not a Russian city”, Sasha the Siberian interjects, “I’m glad you’re going to visit the real Russia beyond the Urals. Life is different there, people are different. So many tourists only visit Moscow and St Petersburg and think they’ve visited Russia.”
There are nods and noises of agreement from all the Russians who are listening, even the Muscovites seem to agree.
“It’s not really a Russian city, but it’s still my city”, Irina adds.
“I think there are plenty of cities that don’t belong to their country anymore”, I begin, thinking out loud,
”I mean, they’re still inside that country, but not any part of it. London, New York, Sydney, Moscow and others. It’s like they all belong some another country”. It’s the first time I’ve really seen it this way and I start to wonder what kind of country it is exactly.
 Nastya and Maya
Suddenly an exuberant redhead taps me on the shoulder and looks at me expectantly. I don’t recognise her or know how to react until she says,
“Hi, I’m Natasha”.
I surge from my seat to give her the hug Healey had asked me to pass on. Formalities aside, I duck into the kitchen to the fridge to rescue the packet of Tim-Tams I’ve brought for her. She is one of the Couchsurfing Ambassadors in Moscow and I especially want to meet her, since she knows a Couchsurfing friend of mine from Perth, Healey. He’d stayed with her when they were both in Poland a few years earlier, so he had more recently entrusted me with a packet of Tim Tams to deliver to her personally. She stashes them in her handbag and we shift to the balcony to trade news while she has a cigarette.
Natasha and Sasha the Siberian
What follows is a long session of laughter, photographs and increasing madness as the beers take hold of the group. At some point I fetch the small number of tiny clip-on Koalas I had put aside to give out today and make sure everyone that I’ve met more than once receives one. Ben then puts his huge Australian flag across the door to his loungeroom, which leads inevitably to even more photographs of Natasha wrapping herself in it and posing salaciously. One of the very cute local girls, Nastya, asks
 “Do you have any more Koalas? I missed out before.”
She looks so sweet and forlorn it’s hard to refuse, but I look at my suitcase in despair.
“I have some more, but it would take time to get them out…. and I need to keep them for the rest of my trip.”
She looks so sad, that I add,
“If I get a kiss, I’m sure I could find the energy.”
She withdraws at first looking shy, then both her and her friend, Maya, who also wants one, decide to provide the necessary encouragement. Maya is a very beautiful young lady with huge, soft eyes that make me feel like I could drown a sweet death inside them. Koalas suitably distributed I notice my scarf on top of everything and proceed to spend a long time taking photos of almost everyone wrapped in it.
Natasha’s friend Anna and I have our picture taken together and Natasha thinks we look like we’re a good couple. We immediately agree we’ve actually been married for a few years already and have been keeping it a carefully guarded secret. We then pose for some more pictures to prove the point and I ponder that it has taken me just over a week to find myself a Russian bride. Around eleven I start to pack everything away and then hear the sound of slapping and giggling coming from the entrance of the apartment. I venture into the area only to have my arse suddenly slapped by two different women, one of them is Natasha. Ben has explained to everyone this is an ancient Australian party tradition and I confirm it wholeheartedly by returning the favour. After a frenzy of arse slapping madness we find eight or more people all standing against the walls between the doorway, the bathroom and the kitchen. Every time someone ventures into the zone a solid slapping session commences leaving us all howling with laughter. I realise I have to go and fetch my bags from the loungeroom to get them to the door. Natasha and her friend, Anna, also have to leave. So after lengthy goodbyes to everyone, I’m escorted back to the Metro station by my wife and her beautiful friend.
 Sometimes I think I cram two or three days into just one, which is the best excuse I can summon for losing a day every now and then. After the amazing day and the night’s festivities, I awake suddenly only a few hours later being evacuated for the cleaner to arrive. I have another shower to try to become at least semi-conscious and shamble into the street, still riding on the effects of a six in the morning beer. I can’t say I remember much of how I spend the next few hours, but at the end of it I’m lying on a bench outside her apartment building waiting for her to respond to my troubled query on when I could go back to sleep. I think the effects of the beer have well and truly worn off by now and I’m left with only the body sickness that comes with a good hangover. I had acquired some Mors juice and finished a litre of it, which was helping a little. This kind of juice is something Victoria introduced me to, its made from different berries from the forest and is something Russian people still make for themselves. This version is packaged, available all over the country and utterly delicious. When I receive her message, I’m working on finishing the second litre carton. It gives me enough energy to shamble back upstairs and pass out again just after one o’clock.
Victoria wakes me around five to tell me,
“I’m going to a celebration that the American embassy is running and I’m wondering if you would like to come?” I check with my proprioreceptive nervous system on this question and discover that whilst all my limbs and organs still seem to be intact, none of them like the idea of working together to move anywhere. I try to negotiate with the warring parties and can find no resolution to the problem that doesn’t involve sleeping for another twelve hours.
“I don’t think I can move anywhere right now”, I say meekly, hoping she won’t beat me mercilessly.
“Oh I thought so… I just wanted to ask in case you were planning on going. Oh..you know you won’t be able to get outside without the key.”
“Yes, I think I’m not going to be able to go anywhere until tomorrow”.
With that response she checks her bag and pockets for everything before waving goodbye and heading out the door. Being locked inside her apartment seems entirely a better prospect than roaming the city with a torturous hangover. I know she isn’t entirely happy, but I still thank her quietly for letting me lie and suffer by myself.
I wake up again after eight feeling significantly less like my internal organs have been blended into a kind of sick slurry and venture to the kitchen to see if I can find anything to eat. It’s moments like these the guidebooks never seem to cover. I now cannot leave the apartment, since I can’t unlock the deadlock. I don’t have any food here. I can’t drink the tap water and there’s only a litre bottle left that isn’t mine. I hope for forgiveness when I replace everything in the morning and turn to the cupboard to try and find something filling. I can’t understand the Russian written on most of the packets, so figure I’ll have to go with something I’m pretty sure I know. I’m overjoyed to find a packet of instant spaghetti and set about getting a pot full of water boiling on the stove. While the pasta is cooking I see if I can find something to use as a sauce and come up with a few gherkins and something pickled in a jar involving tomatoes and…..other things. In the interests of the exploration of international cuisine I give you “Pickled stuff and gherkin on a bed of spaghetti”; a delightful mixture of Russian and Italian mainstays brought together in a moment of desperation. It isn’t bad actually, so I finish it and check my email on Victoria’s laptop. I return to bed again and sleep provides blessed relief from the torment I do like to inflict on my body.
Sun Quan (left) and Sun Ce
So let’s meet the Wus. Actually Wu is just the name of the kingdom that they form in the southern part of the Han empire. The real surname to watch is Sun (pronounced Soon, but quickly). Sun Ce (pronounced Tser) is the ruler of the area when the book starts, he hands it to Sun Quan (pronounced chew-an) who is the main man for most of the book. Sun Quan has some brilliant generals, some fantastic advisors and he himself is one smart cookie. His problem his he never makes up his mind whether he wants to defeat Cao Cao and prevent him from usurping the throne, or actively help him usurp the throne, or just sit down in the south and let the Wei and Shu Kingdoms fight it out then deal with the winner. He does all of these things and manages in the end to nobble the Shu kingdom utterly by killing Guan Yu and taking his lands, but just twenty years later the Wu kingdom (led by Sun Quan’s son) is a vassal under the Jin Dynasty. Sun Quan never seems to want the emperor position for himself and there’s quite a few times when you get the feeling he’s just getting by standing his ground; wishing he was spending more time relaxing.
 From the TV tower in Hanyang, that’s Hankou on the left
and Wuchang on the right. Yangtze river on the right, Han river on the left.
 You have to respect him for his efforts, he never loses his kingdom; but I end up hating him for screwing up Zhuge Liang’s plans. If Sun Quan hadn’t killed Guan Yu when he did, he never would have. The Wei kingdom would have fallen to Shu in another five or ten years and Zhuge Liang would have left a frickin amazing dynasty behind him. So that’s enough of politics from the novel, let’s check in on what’s there today. Wuchang is the capital of the Wu kingdom at the start of the book and today it forms the eastern side of Wuhan, a huge industrial city formed by combing three older towns; Hankou in the north, Wuchang in the east and Hanyang to the south. Nowadays the whole of Wuhan is a tremendous construction zone. The train stations are being extended to build a subway system, they’ve just finished connecting the fast train line from Nanjing, buildings are going up in every direction you care to look and it’s hard to find anywhere quiet. The three towns are separated by the intersection of the Han and Yangtze rivers, that meet almost at right angles in the centre of Wuhan. At that intersection there’s a place called Turtle Mountain. It’s called that because it’s higher than all the surrounding ground and apparently saved the locals from heavy flooding many times. They would all gather on the turtle’s back and wait until the water receded. This isn’t such a big problem nowadays with the Three Gorges Dam controlling the Yangtze river; but it is a cool park with a 280 metre television tower on top of it that you can visit for the view.
 Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei on Turtle Mountain
I was well happy to find statues of Three Kingdoms characters placed along the top of the walk along Turtle Mountain, but most surprised to find one of Cao Cao there. In the story he is an outright evil; a Machiavellian, paranoid, devious and self obsessed kinda guy. I couldn’t understand why anyone would build a statue of him; except as an object of disgust on whom you can spit. I did talk to a number of Chinese people about this question and imagine my surprise when I discovered that the communist government really like Cao Cao and are the ones responsible for his promotion. The angle they use is that he was a revolutionary leader, just like them, and he was doing everything to free the Chinese people from the oppression of a corrupt and decadent emperor. Well, he certainly did replace the emperor and Cao Cao was only a megalomaniacal psychopath, so maybe that’s a little better. Oh no hang on… there’s a whole section where Cao Cao disappears into the pleasure palace he builds for himself for half a year or so and does nothing but play with concubines. Nope, he was worse. I’m still amazed they wanted to promote him when they should have been pushing the righteous Liu Bei. In the end Cao Cao does become emperor, so I’m guessing they just want to be seen to be on the winning side.
I stayed with a couchsurfing host, a French woman, who teaches way in the south of Hanyang at Jianghan university. I was only planning to stay a few days, but end up being there a week. This is partly because she’s so much fun and partly because it’s university holiday time and she manages to get me my own two bedroom apartment with airconditioning and internet access. It’s an apartment they provide for teachers working there. Best couchsurf ever! Ines has been working for four years now on putting the WOO! into Wuhan. I think it’s worked. She’s always up for a drink and a smoke, a walk and a dance, a talk with some music and definitely a laugh whenever possible. We go to an array of restaurants for Chinese, Uighur, Italian and French food at different times. She also hosts a Kiwi guy, Sam, at the same time, who sleeps on her couch and the three of us have a spectacularly excessive day and night together one Wednesday.
Ines and the Yellow Crane Tower
 It all started when she joins Sam and I for a visit to the Yellow Crane tower. The tower has been there a long time and been rebuilt a few times when it burns down. It has always been the symbol of Wuchang and now increasingly of Wuhan. The tower is an interesting place to visit and the view is fantastic, but superseded for me by the enormous bell hanging in a frame behind the tower. For ten yuan you can give it three good bashes with a log conveniently suspended next to it. With each ring the guy next to it yells something out in Chinese that I’m sure guarantees me good fortune, cold beers, eternal life and the polish women’s nymphomaniac netball team will use me as their mascot and sex toy. 
 We’re feeling hungry by the time we leave the Tower grounds and head for a huge restaurant street to find Drunken Shrimps. Ines tells me about it with a perverse delight, so I have to try it. When we choose a restaurant that can serve it and sit down at one of the huge tables on the street, we have an entertaining time choosing what else to order. None of us speaks or reads much Chinese and the place is very busy and noisy so we’re not sure what to do. Ines then walks around the tables with the waitress pointing at dishes and asking what meat is in them – the limit of her chinese. Doing this she orders up a storm – especially our Drunken Shrimps. To make this dish you take a bowl of watery soy vinegar soup, add a couple of handfuls of small live shrimps and some bean sprouts. Then pour in Baijiu (Chinese sake) and wait for the shrimps to stop thrashing around and die. Then eat them. Wasn’t bad at all. But the dumpling soup or insanely hot slices of chilli beef served cold were probably better.
 Sam considering dinner options
This guy is tired of the insistent musos by now
While we’re eating all that with rice, musicians with an amazing array of instruments come to our table to try and get us to pay for a song or two. Some tables having parties love it and keep them for a while, but most say no; just like us. The quality of the performers is pretty average, but occasionally a real musician floats through and one or two tables in the restaurant pay them for a song. One group is determined to have us foreigners pay and we get auld langsyne and jingle bells played for us. This is despite asking them repeatedly not to. In the end I flip them 20 yuan for the sheer amusement value of having these guys playing traditional Chinese instruments as commercial whores for the foreigners. We stay in the restaurant for ages, enough time to finish off 17 half litre beers between us. This is when a fairly drunk Chinese guy lurches up to the table to welcome us to China and Wuhan. Apparently it’s is birthday and in true Chinese style he’s busy getting mashed. Well, he’s probably had one beer by now. His friends join us as you challenges anyone at the table to finish a whole bottle of beer in a race with him. We resist for a while, then I decide to go for it and we order two new cold beers.
 A crowd gathers around our table and people from the next restaurant stand up and lean in closer forming a couple of rows of spectators watching in awe as we start drinking. We bang down the bottles at the same time, but this is only because he saw me putting mine down and decided to finish to not lose too much face. I point out the centimetre of beer left in his bottle and he demands a new challenge as the crowd laughs and breaks up. Everyone wants to know where I’m from and I happily tell them in Chinese ‘I’m a crazy Australian’. One man gives me a big thumbs up and says,
“That’s very good.”
Before the guy can arrange beers for the new challenge, his last beer kicks in and his friends take him home red faced and burbling. We decide it’s time to hit a nightclub.
Chinese nightclubs have a standard format that never seems to vary around the country. The drinks are incredibly expensive, the beer is always warm and only available six bottles at a time. If you want spirits, you have to buy a whole bottle, which they will happily mix in a jug for you with ice and green tea. The music is mostly recent Chinese pop, with a smattering of American pop from anytime in the last forty years. The décor is the only thing slightly different, but it’s always one large room with blooths around the edges and tables in the middle. Dancefloors seem to be an optional accessory. The one thing I like about their style is that about once an hour live performers will jump onto a small platform and put on a show. It might be one or two dancers or a singer or even a group. They do three or four numbers in different places in the nightclub and give the atmosphere a huge lift everytime.
Hot Ines Action
Sam decides the drinks are too expensive and ducks outside to buy some baijiu from a small shop and sneak it into some coke. When he returns I’ve acquired some beers and glasses of coke that he then tops up with the Chinese sake. I have a small mouthful of the resulting mix and it takes a huge force of will over the next ten minutes to not throw up in the middle of the club. This stuff is vile. I know if I even stand up, I’m going to lose dinner and feel greatly relieved when the waves of pressure die down. Thankfully this passes and we get on with a night of increasingly silly dance challenges that culminate in Sam doing worm like manouevres leaning against the bar. He gets bounced and we follow into the night.
On the way home we discuss the Chinese idea of losing face. This is a primal driver for most locals, gaining and losing face can make or break your life, marriage, career and friendships. Losing control of yourself is bad, having somebody obviously beat you in some social way is worse and having someone lower on the social hierarchy beat you is unthinkably bad. So we start to wonder if you can buy and sell face. How much does it cost to gain face? Is there a sliding scale based on your current and desired position? How do you bargain for this. Can you trade on the face market? If a poor guy with criminal history marries a rich girl from a good family does he gain face, or does she just lose face? Do they meet somewhere inbetween in the face stakes? Can her old man pop out to the local face market and prop up her failing stocks? If somebody finds out that you bought face, do you still gain face? Or lose even more? So if I know that you bought face can I blackmail you over revealing that? And if you make it public and then accuse me, do we both just lose face? Who loses more? We decide we need to form a lobby group to get the Chinese government to form a group to properly explore all these issues.
 Dance like you’ve never danced before!
We finish the night having some beers on the roof of the building we’re staying in while listening to music on my portable music player. The sun appearing in the sky becomes our signal to sleep. I pass out quickly feeling very happy that reading a book has brought me here to have this experience.
“We’re stopped here anyway, just ask her to open the door!”, he pleads emphatically.
“But this is a public bus, it can’t just stop anywhere.”
“Let me put this another way; if she doesn’t open that door in the next minute I’m going to be pissing all over it.”
It’s not a threat, it’s a statement of fact. Phillipe suddenly understands the direness of the situation and starts talking in Chinese to the bus conductor. They appear to have the same exchange because I see her eyes go wide open in shock. The instant the bus stops rolling in the barely moving traffic, she barks at the driver and the door is opening. There’s a flash of movement as Paul leaps out of the bus and runs jaggedly down the slope a few metres. He stops and unzips to let loose a strong stream of clear urine. I’m about one metre behind him and Don is close by. We three Australians provide liquid nourishment for the grassy verge amidst laughter and applause from all the couchsurfers on the bus.
I suppose drinking three half litre beers and getting on a bus was risky, but with the traffic hardly moving, the risk went critical. It seems to take an aeon, but the three of us make our way back onto the bus before it gets a chance to move again. Even the Chinese people onboard think its very funny and greet as with broad, knowing smiles. Phillipe is shaking his head in disbelief.
“I think I’ve lived in China for more than six years, but I’ve NEVER seen a public bus pull up for a toilet break before.”
This causes a fresh cascade of laughter, so I take the moment to crack the top off another beer.
After we get back to Shanghai city, the couchsurfing group breaks up and Don and I find ourselves sitting in a nearby Pizza Hut eating kimchi and black pepper beef pizzas. It’s all about the novelty value of the toppings rather than actually wanting to eat there. We decide it’s time to head back to Ray’s place to sleep for a few hours before joining the couchsurfers at the bar that hosts Shanghai’s weekly meetups. The place is owned by a local couchsurfer, Aimee, who provides half price drinks to all the CSers that visit; guaranteeing a good crowd. So we head into the Shanghai metro system and spend half an hour jumping trains to arrive at Ray’s place in Pudong. I think it takes about five minutes for me to have a shower and be asleep in bed.
 Cocktails Ray style The bar is in the Luwan area of inner Shanghai, famous for a main street with nests of interconnecting alleyways filled with bars, shops and other distractions. Don and I are on our way in a taxi when Ray calls to find out where we are. He’s sitting in an Australian ex-pat bar called Kakadu and wants to know if we feel like a beer. We’ve still got a couple of hours before the meetup, so he gives new directions to the driver and just ten minutes later we’re walking into the bar. Ray has our beers waiting for us.
The room is dominated by a spectacularly enormous fishtank behind the bar. You can see through it to a dining area, but your eyes are caught by the myriad of colourful and varied south American fish. The owner collects them and only he is allowed to feed them. This explains why most fish in the tank actually gather together when he approaches the glass and they also turn to follow him around the room. Apparently these fish do remember who is associated with food and act accordingly. They simply ignore any other person who approaches the tank from either side.
 The fishtank of sin  A few beers and yarns with Ray takes a few hours and we head off to the meetup a little late. I’ve taken a photograph of the directions written in Chinese that are posted on the couchsurfing website in the Shanghai city forum. I then show this to the taxi driver and soon we are dropped at the entrance to an alleyway and he’s pointing down it saying something in Chinese. Don and I look at each other and amble down it looking for the Bell bar. We end up weaving through some narrow alleys past a myriad of shops and cafes hunting for our bar before I spot the bell logo high in a window. The place is a small wooden building with two floors. Five years ago it was somebody’s house, now it’s packed with happy couchsurfers and the odd local creating the buzz of busy conversations. We make our way upstairs and join a group there with someone we’ve met before. Beers are delivered to our table by a young guy with a cheeky smile and the night begins in earnest.
I lose track of the flurry of conversations quickly. The eclipse, travel stories, homebrewing beer and existential philosophy all visit our group for discussion. We eventually move downstairs to meet the owner properly and find a large Chinese girl with an infectious smile and permanent giggle. She welcomes us and makes sure we know about the discount. She’s interrupted by a young man holding a wooden case of some sort. They speak in Chinese for a minute and she turns the music off as he produces an instrument from the case. It turn out he is her boyfriend from inner mongolia. He begins to play and the noisy, boisterous bar falls to silent appreciation of his skill. It is so beautiful, especially in this moment surrounded by our new friends. I’ve forgotten the disappointment of the morning, lost in the moment with this flowing and passionate music.
 Play that funky music mongol boy! Somehow Aimee is now declaring that she will give five long island ice teas for free, if just one person can drink all of them inside two minutes. The guy she’s talking to is laughing, saying nobody can do that. She keeps trying to convince him and asks everybody in the bar a few times if someone wants to take up the challenge. I’m considering it, but decide it would leave me paralytic and I don’t want to be that bad in a strange city. I’m still not entirely surprised when Don steps up and says,
“If you don’t put the coke in them, I’ll do it. I just can’t stand coke.”
There’s a cheer from the crowd and Aimee accepts the bet and begins making the five drinks. I immediately put twenty kuai (the shortname for Chinese yuan money) on Don being able to do it without throwing up. They ask where he’s from.
“Australia.”
“I’m not taking that bet, Australians are crazy, he’ll probably do it.”
The crowd agrees and nobody takes the bet. Shame, I could have done with the money.
 Encouraging Don's hard work The timer starts and Don works his way steadily down the line of glasses. He pauses between each one for a swig of water and continues. It’s all over in a minute and the crowd goes crazy. I hand Don a lemonade for him to skull, he’s going to need some sugar with that dose. The night gradually fades and we end up trading contact details with people. At two in the morning Don and I are the only people left. We give Aimee big hugs before shuffling into the street hoping a taxi will swoop down from above and just fly us home.
  That's exactly how it looked...
 So close..and yet so far away...
I look out the window at the clouds and feel sure I wont see the Total eclipse today. Last night the hotel we’re staying in experienced a mad roaming party as more than fifty couchsurfers from more than fifteen different countries setup parties in four different rooms on one floor. The rooms were packed and hot as everyone shared beers and other drinks chatting with everyone around them. One room has a soundsystem going strong, another has a game of mahjong in full swing. It comes complete with a bevy of spectators watching how to play the game as the most of the participants learn. One of the local CSers organized it to share this part of Chinese culture with all the visitors.
I’m particularly happy to see two people in particular arrive. One is Taylor, a Canadian compulsive hitchhiker who has just managed to hitch his way from Turkey to Shanghai across a number of central asian countries. He stayed with me when he was hitching around Australia and enjoy our collective madness. The other is Marco, from Italy, who was with me at the last Total Eclipse in Novosibirsk in Russia a year ago. When he arrives after one in the morning myself and Don give him huge hugs and can’t believe we’ve all made it together to the next one. And then there’s Don. He shared the last eclipse with me, as well as numerous other adventures over the last ten or fifteen years; he’s my brother from another mother. There’s one more person in this unlikely gathering and that’s a French native, Alex who I only met few days ago in Shanghai. He’s another passionate couchsurfer and I already know we will be friends for a long time to come.
The festivities were still going strong at three when I decided sleep was best, but it’s Alex who woke me up this morning with some heavy duty snoring from the floor of the room. He surfed my couch last night. Normally it’s me fulfilling the snoring role and I suddenly feel very sorry for anyone who’s shared a room with me….but I was talking about the eclipse. We have just over an hour to make it to Jianshanwei beach near Shanghai. We meet the huge group of couchsurfers in the hotel lobby and make our way to the beach in an endless series of small vans. They are fitted with a few rows of small dodgy benches and serve as a kind of group taxi in most parts of china. You have to pay to get onto the beach itself, no problem, it’s China; everything has a price.
We set ourselves up and first contact happens a minute later. In less than an hour we will see the black sun. This will be the fourth time for me but for the first time I can feel a growing tension knot in my stomach because I still think we wont see it. I’ve travelled so far to make my pilgrimage to be a part of the timeless moment…..and this one is even more special. This will be the longest Totality in my lifetime. To miss this would tear a large hole in my eclipse chasing career. I look to the sky and almost can’t believe it when I clearly see the sun through the clouds. I raise my eclipse glasses and can see the moon shadow growing slowly on its face. Maybe we WILL see it.
 
Some of the couchsurfers with us have brought cameras and the special equipment to get photographs of the celestial magic. They are busily setting everything up wishing they got here earlier to catch first contact. I move around the group chatting to people randomly and not really listening to anything. I can feel my heart beating faster and the tension growing stronger. I start wondering who or what I can pray to in order to guarantee I see Totality. It’s something I never do, I am a solidly proud atheist with no need for any God in my life. Well, until this moment, where it seems like a pretty cool idea for the first time. I look up at the sun and start a simple Tibetan inspired chant and find Marco joining in with me.
“Padmasambhava, Padmasambhava, Padmasambhava, Padmasambhava, Padmasambhava, Padmasambhava, Padmasambhava….”
I stop and consider the ridiculousness of what I’m doing. I should have researched more, I let the couchsurfing part of my life rule me and chose to stay with this huge group of friends. If I’d checked weather maps I could have flown to the best location to see it. I find myself chanting again quietly. I suppose when you want something so completely, you’ll pin your hopes on anything at all. Hope Springs Eternal. It’s not an advertisement for durable inner-spring mattresses. My mobile phone burbles into life, my friend in Shanghai city tells me its raining there and they can’t see anything. I look along the coastline towards the ocean and see the rainclouds coming towards us too.
The clouds are almost boiling as they shift across the face of the sun. They’re thick enough now that you can look at the partial eclipse without the special dark eclipse glasses. We’re not going to see it today. At each eclipse I’ve captured one photograph with myself and the Totality in the background. This time I get a picture with myself and the sun appearing as a tiny sliver. There’s only ten minutes to go and I can see a patch in the clouds moving towards us. We ARE going to see it today. There’s a phenomena I’ve heard of where the clouds part during Totality, then close when it finishes. It’s been documented many thousands of times and a few of my friends have actually seen it happen. It makes the moment even more mystical. I would sacrifice anything to have that happen for me now.
The gap passes us four minutes before Totality and the sky begins to darken. A cool wind starts up and all I can think of is that it become stronger and wash away these clouds. The sky slowly edges to darkness and the lights come on along the walkway beside the beach.
People begin whooping and screaming and all I feel is emptiness. I scream louder as if I could force the clouds away from me.
Totality brings darkness.
The sky is suddenly dark at ten in the morning and I wish I was somewhere else. My eyes strain to see through the clouds. My heart yearns for a gap. In this moment of unfulfilled desperation I can see why people used to sacrifice precious objects and even their children to win this fight against nature. My mind screams against this insanity, but my soul is crying for the black sun.
The sky begins to lighten and I know I’ve missed the greatest eclipse of my life.
I’m surrounded by such good people and all I can think of is the gaping hole in my existence. If only I’d researched better, if only I’d thought more carefully about it, if only…if only…if only.
A new resolve appears. I know when the next one is. I have another chance. There will always be another one. I only have to wait a year.
I turn away from the beach and can only think of drinking more beer to fill the rest of the day with happy warmth.
 Marco the Italian Eclispe Chaser
 New Italian Eclispegear(tm) sunnies
I just don’t know how to react, so laughter is the only answer. There are a group of rather beautiful Chinese girls gathered in a neat semi-circle around our table. They are all dressed in the same sexy outfits and they’re singing ‘I’m a little teapot’ – including choreographed dance movements. This can only mean one thing. I’m in Shanghai Hooters. Most Australian men have heard of this American franchise and have impressions of busty women being flirtatious in what is essentially a bar that serves a range of hot snack food. All of those impressions are clearly radically incorrect given the example in front of me now.
 I see you baby, shaking that arse... “Hey, Dhuges, tell them it’s your birthday, it’s brilliant!”, Ray advises me mischieviously. After they finish their performance we all clap and cheer uproariously and I sip at my beer again remembering Ray had told us we had to come here, but not why exactly. When our waitress comes by again I tell her it is indeed my birthday and she turns up the flirting even more.
“I’ll tell the girls and we’ll give you our special song later!”
Even as she’s talking some unfeasibly loud American pop music starts on the sound system and she leaves to join all the girls taking up their positions around the bar. They are standing on top of bar stools so everyone can see their sexy dance moves matching the blaring soundtrack. More than half the men in the place suddenly have cameras of all kinds in their hands taking pictures and videos of the moment.
We order some chicken wings and I ask for the hottest version they have. What returns are a set of wings that are covered in a concentrated chilli and spice paste so hot that just bringing it near your faces makes your eyes water. I love it, but an only handle a few of them and everybody else sets about ordering the mild version. One of the girls is now standing next to a nearby table and clapping her hands. One by one all the girls move to join her, each one clapping their hands in unison until the crew is summoned. Then the first girl announces that these guys wanted a song, so they’re going to give him a happy one. It turns out to be a kind of Hooters Girl cheerleading chant, again with matching sexy dance moves. Again the whole place is laughing uproariously and taking pictures.
 Don't oversell yourselves now... There aren’t that many people inside and I’m surprised that the vast majority are Chinese; our group are the only foreigners for most of the night. Ray tells me they had a work dinner here that was arranged by one of the Chinese girls in the office.
“Did she know what Hooters is?”, I ask incredulously.
“Well, apparently she did….but Hooters here just isn’t the same as the original version.”
“Well, I’m sure that’s true, not that I’ve ever been to one before.”
“Yeah, me neither, this is it.”
Maybe our impressions were wrong, maybe this is what Hooters is meant to be. A strange combination of innocence and salaciousness put together in a way only the Chinese could manage. Luckily we have an American guy with us so we consult him.
“Nope, this is nothing like how they run it. Having the girls sing and dance is…. weird…maybe in some of them they do it, but not any I’ve been in…and certainly not nursery rhymes… that’s.. I don’t know what that is.”
I start to look around again as the girls are gathering at our table to sing me ‘Happy Birthday’. The costumes are right and our waitress is being obviously flirty. The jugs of beer are American style and size and the décor looks like what I’ve seen in pictures. But… but the whole thing seems like an artist’s impression of the idea. There’s no real content, everything is contrived purely appearance and nothing more. They dance the agreed moves together, but without conviction or real pleasure. They flirt and pout and pose, but it’s definitely a half-rehearsed show. Ray is busily telling the girls to sign my shirt and our waitress wants me to buy a Hooters shirt before they’ll sign it.
“Do you have one that will actually fit me?”
She looks at my gargantuan frame and decides not. She produces a permanent marker and signs her name on my back, as do all the girls. The feeling of having seven girls writing on your back at some time is strangely sensual. A little ticklish, but very comfortable.
 Can I autograph all of you next? Eventually the place closes for the night and we’re the last patrons, we’ve been continually trying to get them to sing for us again and enjoying it afresh every time they do. At one point they have another foreigner standing on a chair as they all sing to him before he blows out the candles on his birthday cake. It’s been a strangely amusing and thoroughly enjoyable time seeing the Chinese interpretation of American redneck culture. I highly recommend it – and don’t forgot to choose who’s birthday it is before you go in…
“You need to get some business cards mate.”
I look across the room in his office and raise an eyebrow at Ray.
“You know I’m not working for quite a while yet.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah…. But everyone has them here, personal ones and then one for every business they’re involved in.”
“Yeah right”, I nod, thinking what I would put on a business card now.
After fifteen years in the IT world I’m taking a break from normal working life to explore what the rest of the world has going on. I wouldn’t call myself an IT Professional right now, but what can I put on the card instead? How do I define myself now? Who am I when I’m not working?
I must look particularly confused as I ponder this, because Ray continues,
“Hey, just put your name and your Chinese mobile number, maybe your email if you want. You’ll find it really handy when you meet anyone here. Seriously, everyone does it, check out mine.”
Ray produces his work and private cards and I read through them slowly, considering the layout and content to decide what I would put on it. Ray works for an Australian based company that builds architectural models. He’s one of those guys who is a genius with his hands, he can do anything, make anything and do both unbelievably well. If he can picture it, he can produce it. So he used to work for these guys making the models, but now it’s all about running quality control on the Chinese factories that do a lot of work now.
None of this is really helping with my newfound identity crisis. Maybe I can say I’m an Abalone diver. Apparently they do alright and it sounds like a cool job title. But Chinese people might take me too seriously and try to get me to work for them doing that. So I need something that sounds good, but gives me freedom to move; something that will explain to the people of China who I am and what I do. Maybe I’m a writer. That’s a great profession for travellers with no particular date to return home. Then no-one will question why I’m wandering aimlessly around China. I like the sound of it and look up again.
“Okay mate, you talked me into it …. so how can I get them made?”
“Ahh..too easy…”
He bundles over to his assistant Jessica and asks her if she can organize it for me. She comes over with a card and a pen and asks me to write what I want to have on it. I have a new inspiration as the pen touches my hand and I fill in all the details.
“Do you want me to translate it into Chinese too?”, she asks.
“I suppose I do…oh I already have a Chinese name that this crazy girl I travelled with in Australia gave me.”
I do my best impression of it and she eventually recognises and adds it.
“And what’s this?”, she asks pointing to my new identity.
“That’s my job, just put it somewhere on the card.”
She looks confused, but smiles and does it without understanding; as the Chinese do. I ask for it to be on a red card with gold letters (I’ve heard that’s particularly auspicious in China) and she heads off to the shop downstairs that makes them. She calls back to tell me the ‘gold’ they have looks like a bad yellow. I choose to use black writing instead. I always liked red and black together.
Two hundred cards arrive later and I pick the one from the top of the stack to give to Ray.
“Here ya go mate, you can have the first one.”
Ray looks at it and reads it through then starts chuckling and looks up at me smiling.
“Nice one, that works.”
There in the bottom right corner in english and chinese are the words I’ve chosen to tell the people of China who I am.
“Crazy Penguin.”
We stop in traffic and I glance out the window. I’m soon transfixed by the crazy moment I’ve just joined. There is a young chinese man sitting on top of a makeshift wooden ladder – it appears to have been his last project. He is intently focused on cutting the top off a metal lamppost using an old hacksaw. I watch for a little while wondering why he wants to cut the top off a perfectly good lamppost. I mean, it’s decorative, functional, what does he have against it? Then I consider that the cables that provide power to those lights must run through the middle of the pole. The pole he’s cutting with a metal saw. Are we about to witness a public electrocution?
I turn to my friend in the car and ask,
“Hey Ray… Can you tell me why he’s cutting the top off this lamppost?”
Ray turns and looks puzzled for a minute, then a huge smile breaks across his face.
“Nope. No idea at all. I told you you’re gonna see something crazy almost every day you’re here.”
“Well yes.. but.. I mean.. what could he possibly achieve by cutting it off? What problem is he trying to fix? And is he about to cut the cables and jump around for our viewing pleasure?”
Ray turns around fully now and leans forward to consider the situation.
“Nope. No idea. Maybe we should stop him or something.”
“Can we ask the driver? Or maybe Jessica knows?”
Ray turns to consult his assistant and translator the lovely Jessica, a Jiangsu local from nearby Shanghai where we are now. She talks to the driver, who is a local Shanghainese man. The net conclusion is that of the four people in the car, none of us can comprehend the slightest reason for the scene before us.
“Don’t think about it too hard mate”, Ray offers, “If you do, you’re gonna be properly crazy in a month or two.”
I ponder the likelihood of that and turn back to watch our man. He has stopped sawing about halfway through the pole and is now examining the hacksaw blade. By the look of it, it was handed down from his grandfather – it’s probably the original blade. Our car gently moves forward again and we leave him to his destiny. Ray grabs my shoulder and gives me the phrase I’m going to repeat to myself daily for months,
“No problem, this is China.”
 What is he doing???
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is one of the four masterpieces of chinese classic literature. Written in the 14th Century by Luo Guanzhong, it is shakespearian in style; telling a story based on real events. It covers the period of time from 169AD to 280AD where the Han Dynasty is failing, the eunuchs holding real power in the court and the emporer being kept ignorant of the reality while he plays with concubines all day. Nice life if you can get it. There are real histories from the time that Luo Guanzhong uses to frame the story and he adds numerous famous poems and songs written in the intervening thousand years. The english translation I read is spectacular. I found it engaging, intriguing and utterly addictive, so many nights I was awake after two in the morning telling myself ‘just one more chapter’. Finishing it inspired me so much that a good part of my time in China was spent visiting places of significance in the story and the tombs and temples of the main characters that exist to this day. I’m just going to assume none of you have ever heard of this amazing book (except from me raving about it), or know anything about it, so in this first part, I need to introduce you to it so when we visit the places later on, I can talk more about what’s there today.
“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”
What a way to start a work like this and when you land in the story the empire is dividing. The book ends with the uniting of the empire and the start of the Jin dynasty. So to give you some idea on why I’ve travelled to these places, I’m going to spend this first entry describing the main characters. First who they are and then a particularly illustrative story from the book, told my way, to give you some idea on what kind of person they are. The opening of the story gives us three of the primary men who are near the centre of almost all the book. Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei. Now, you need to know a little something about chinese names. The first one is always the family name, the second is their given name. All of them have another name, their ‘styled’ name. This is one they choose themselves to further describe to the world who they are, or aspire to be. Some also have a Taoist name, a name in religion as it were. So without further ado, let’s say hello to Liu Bei.
 Me and the boys. Zhang Fei, Liu Bei, Guan Yu, Zhuge Liang and Zhao Zilong
In Jingzhou
Liu Bei (pronounced lee-ew bay) styled Xuande (Shu-an-der), is a part of the imperial family. Liu is the surname of every emporer of the Han Dynasty. He is officially declared during the book as the ‘Imperial Uncle’ of the emporer he spends most of his time trying to reinstate to real power. However, his father held no position in court, something that is used against him repeatedly. Xuande means something like ‘proclamation of virtue’ and he does indeed spend far too much time being very nice to everyone. He becomes a very benevolent ruler who spends a lot of his time really caring for his people and threatening to kill himself when they suffer as a result of his actions. This does get on your tits a bit, since if he showed more backbone at several particular moments, the whole history of China would be different. In fact, his close friends and advisors tell him exactly that and prompt him to seek a better strategist advisor; Zhuge Liang.
The story that best shows his character is when he is forced to leave the city of Xinye after repeated attacks by the emporer’s forces under the command of Cao Cao (evil bastard). Despite advice from the incomparable Zhuge Liang and others he does not want to leave his people in the city. The compromise Zhuge Liang proposes is that they post notices telling the people they can move with Liu Bei’s troops or stay in the city and hope for the best. In a testament to their regard for the man, they largely follow. This slows down movement a huge amount and Cao Cao’s forces pursue constantly with the aim to destroy the rebel army. Yeah, Cao Cao should wear a black helmet and have a way deep voice. Liu Bei is advised many times to leave the people and run with the army to the next town. He refuses every time and every time he ends up virtually weeping for his people’s fate. This culminates when the main force of Cao Cao’s army catches them and Liu Bei wants to cut his own head off with a sword; tricky, but impressive if you can do it. He is stopped by Zhang Fei who tells him ‘If you die, none of us can survive’. So a man of the people, but he really loves his comforts when he gets them. He does have a tomb today in Chengdu, but it’s inside the Zhuge Liang temple (Wuhou Ci) to give you some idea on how he’s regarded today.
Guan Yu (Lord Guan in the translation – pronounced Gw-an Yoo), styled Yunchang is a fugitive on the run when we meet him in the first chapter. He killed a bully in his hometown who happened to be rather wealthy and well connected; so leaving is the only option. He is worshipped as the epitome of loyalty, righteousness and the brother you want to have. He is a much better general than Liu Bei or Zhang Fei, wiser, more restrained, but a hopeless politician. His style name means ‘beautiful beard’ and he’s well famous for his long beard and bushy eyebrows. In any statue, you can recognise him because of it. He ends up running the central provinces of the old empire for quite a while, but loses it all to the Wu (southern) kingdom because of his failure as a politician to maintain good relations. He also never picks quality advisors, I think relying on his own abilities above all others. He has two tombs today and a number of temples, the most of any of the characters and more than Zhuge Liang dammit. He has two tombs because his head is in one in Dayang and his body is in the other in Luoyang. Met a nasty end courtesy of the Wu kingdom.
The story that best describes him is after Liu Bei is defeated badly by Cao Cao, they all split up. Guan Yu ends up being taken in by Cao Cao and awarded the title of deputy General in his army. Guany Yu also happens to have both of Liu Bei’s wives under his protection at the time. He makes sure they have their own private quarters in the emperor’s palace and then stands guard himself outside the door most of the time to protect them from any hint of dishonour. He tells Cao Cao that he is waiting only for news of Liu Bei’s wherabouts to rejoin his master. Cao Cao honours him with a huge banquet every few days and a lesser one most days in a hefty bid to win over this incredible general. The moment news arrives, Guan Yu asks to leave and join his master. Cao Cao agrees, but doesn’t bother to tell anybody else about it. Guan Yu leaves immediately with Liu Bei’s wives and then kills most of the guards at a few border crossings on the way, because he does not have official permission to leave. Cao Cao does eventually send a rider with imperial permission for Guan Yu to leave, but he largely discovers the bloodbath left behind. Cao Cao was hoping one of his border guards would kill the pesky general. This is one of his famous moments of absolutely loyalty Guan Yu shows to Liu Bei and a good reason he is still worshipped as a demigod of loyalty and honour.
Zhang Fei, styled Yide seems to have little history before the events in the book, apart from being a notably good warrior. Yide means something like helping the virtuous, but should mean ‘general pissant’. He is a very good general, with plenty of tricks of his own that he uses to great effect. His problem is when he isn’t being a general in battle, he seems a little lost and repeatedly drinks too much. Whilst he has plenty of respect for his superiors, especially Liu Bei and Guan Yu, he lacks any for his subordinates and routinely punishes them too much – often while drunk. He’s noted for a quick temper and ability to sleep with his eyes open that scares the crap out his subordiantes who think he’s always watching. He often gets a bad run in the book and the real histories speak more of his capabilities as a magnificent warrior and general. I only found one temple to Zhang Fei, it’s on the Yangtze river between Chonqing and Yichang, but my boat didn’t stop there…dammit.
The story that best describes this man is when he holds off Cao Cao’s entire army at a bridge. By himself. This is the same time where Liu Bei wanted to kill himself for causing suffering to his people and it’s Zhang Fei who saves the day completely. Before Cao Cao’s troops arrive, he has his men go behind the hill on his side of the river and drag trees behind their horses to raise a huge amount of dust. This makes Cao Cao think there’s a huge army waiting to ambush them if they try to cross the bridge or the river. Then Zhang Fei astride his horse challenges someone to fight him. Repeatedly. He yells so strongly and loudly at one of Cao Cao’s generals that they drop dead on the spot. The army turns back and Zhang Fei laughs.
So these three swear an oath of brotherhood in the first chapter. Liu Bei is elder brother, Guan Yu second and Zhang Fei third. This oath and the brotherhood loyalty these three show throughout the story is why they are regarded as the forces of righteousness. Another general, Zhao Yun, styled Zilong (and normally called Zhao Zilong), joins this group to form the hard core of fighting brilliance that becomes the Shu Han Kingdom later on. Now Zhuge Liang is going to get a whole post to himself later because I love him so much, so let’s just say his style name is Kongming. The Kong is a refence to Kong Fuzi (Confucious) and the ming means ‘bright’. I think you see where he’s going with that.
Hot Cao Cao Action
In Wuhan
So the last main man you need to meet is Cao Cao (pronounced tsow-tsow). He becomes the prime minister under the Han emporer after winning a series of battles, both of bloodshed and politics. He spends all his time working to become the next emporer and holds the court utterly in his sway. I think Machiavelli is a pussy next to this guy. At one point he has the empress beaten to death and nobody says a word. He is the epitome of an opportunistic politician, if there’s any way to achieve his desired end, he will take it without a thought. He routinely shows public regret on his actions killing people, their friends, their families, their pets and… you get the picture…but the regret always seems purely politic to make him seem more like an acceptable confucian king. I’m not sure he has anything but statues commemorating his contribution to history.
The story that best shows his character is when he is running from a bad defeat very early in the story and seeks refuge with his uncle. His uncle welcomes him and his aide and bids them make themself comfortable while he fetches some wine from the village and his family prepares a banquet. Cao Cao is sitting inside when he overhears a conversation between his family members outside.
“We’ll string him up tightly, there’s no way he’ll get out of this….his life is ours”…followed by laughter. Cao Cao’s paranoia overcomes him and he and his aide rush out and slaughter everyone in sight. Members of his own family. Imagine his surprise when he finds a trussed up pig awaiting slaughter. Filled with fear and regret he flees and meets his uncle on the road, returning with the wine. Thinking quickly, Cao Cao kills his uncle on the spot so no-one will know what happened and to avoid revenge. Keep your friends close and this guy as far away from you as possible.
Right, that’s it. There’s a host of other dudes who will come into the picture over the story, but this crew are the main contingent. So onwards and upwards to the next post where we have a look at the Kingdom of Wu, who were based in modern day Wuchang (now the eastern side of Wuhan), then later Nanjing (the first time it was used as a capital city).
The Tretyakov Gallery
It’s Friday and today has been an emotionally draining time. Later in the day I discover the train tickets are still not ready and I ask him to send them to my couchsurfing host’s apartment directly. I’m glad I’ve already been talking to Alisha for a couple of weeks about my visit, so this is no problem. It does add to my worries; without those tickets, this is going to be a very strange journey in Russia. The thing that’s really twisting my mind is a painting I saw in the Tretyakov gallery this morning. The gallery is awesome and I had already seen a number of the paintings before, but there’s nothing like the real thing. I can’t find a good picture on the internet of the painting that is haunting me and I suspect no picture can capture it. You just have to be there.
It’s called ‘The Demon Prostrate’ and is kind of a picture of Satan just after his exile from heaven. And it kinda isn’t. The body in the picture is angular and beautiful, with dark skin; but it takes a while to be able to notice that, because the entire picture lives in the eyes. Betrayal, fury, disappointment, confusion – like a child punished savagely for someone else’s crime. These eyes beg for sympathy, but warn of a purely malevolent intent. They draw you closer to empathy, but reject you with spite at the same time. There is pure animal madness in them as well as the savage pure discipline of a conquering hero. I’ve never felt anything like the flow of emotions this picture draws from me effortlessly. You’re left feeling somehow robbed and richer at the same time.
My guide tells me Vrubel produced this piece of mad genius when he was on the verge of the massive nervous breakdown that heralded the end of his career and soon life. Already driven by his own demon, it seems Vrubel tried to take control back by overthrowing him and instead captures the moments before it claims him entirely. He repainted the eyes in this picture over forty times. Even after it had been exhibited to some acclaim, he continued to change them until they reached this final state. Probably exacerbated by third stage syphilis, this was the beginning of the end of the artist’s mind and provides a dark and complete insight into his internal struggle. If you’re passing by Moscow, I’d highly recommend a visit.
On the street in Arbat
I still feel like my insides have been rearranged with a cricket bat when I meet Ludmilla at the entrance to the Metro station near the café. I just want the demon’s eyes out of my head. The place is certainly very new, modern and belongs more in Europe than Moscow. Ludmilla’s English is not conversational, but still so much better than my Russian, so we chat in stilted fashion while we peruse the menu. Alexander arrives just after our drinks and this helps conversation a lot. He asks me to call him Sasha, so I should take a moment to explain Russian names. Everybody has at least three or four. Your first name and family name are pretty set, but there are standard shortenings for first names that everyone uses with friends. Alexander and Alexandra both get shortened to Sasha, but Vladimir is Volodya, Dimitry is Dima, Nataliya becomes Natasha and Anastasia becomes Nastya. To further confuse this there is not a huge variety of first names in Russia, so it’s quite normal to have two or three people with the same name at any gathering. To add to this you also have a patronymic name which is derived from your father’s name. It has male and female versions so you can always tell someone’s sex from their patronymic name. Lenin’s father’s name was Ilya, which is why he is Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Volodya to his mates. So in the interests of identifying this confusing array of Russians with the same name, I’ll add my own epithet to their short name. So anyway, it turns out that Sasha the Siberian had been a top English graduate in his hometown of Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia. We all chat much more freely as more people arrive and soon we have a group of eight or so Couchsurfers, including the Dutch guy, Hanspeter, and Tanya, one of the locals from Tuesday night. Tanya is short for Tatiana by the way.
During dessert Ludmilla and the other locals discuss our itinerary before we gather together and leave. What follows is an incredible trek across the city to discover places that were full, weren’t open yet or were too expensive for some of the group to want to pay to get in. We see a lot of the streetlife at night and not so much of the nightclubs. I’m amused to see large black vans filled with beautiful women parked next to the entrance of a casino. I ask what they were doing and my hosts diplomatically explain it’s for rich men to have some fun. We end up getting beers at pavement shops twice during the mission and drink them on the way to the next place. On the way I find myself explaining the Australian love of shortening words to Sasha the Siberian.
“Anything with three syllables is going to be pinched, even two is a little long. A heavy Australian accent is made unique by the way words are shortened and slid together into an endless stream of whiny noise.”
“Yes, we like to shorten words too…everybody’s name, places…it’s common to not say the whole thing”, he says.
“True? I suspect all languages do it to some degree, but one of my favourites is un-fucking-believable.”
He laughs at hearing the sausage word created,
“But that’s longer!”
“True, but it’s spelled u-n-f-k-n-b-l-v-b-l”
He bursts out laughing and we toast with the beers we’re carrying as he says the letters over and over again.
“But it’s not the best one, the best Australian saying is ‘No wuckers’. It was originally ‘No worries’.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that before”, he says, nodding.
“Somewhere it became ‘No fucking worries’, then ‘No wucking furries’…Until someone realised that’s too damn long and made it ‘No wuckers’.”
He laughs with each variation and his eyes shine with the amusement of learning the final part.
“You don’t get that one so much in cities, I’ve heard it more in the country”, I add.
“So Australian changes around the country?”
“The accent certainly does, words do as well, but you can normally understand it everywhere.”
“Russian doesn’t really change across the country, we speak the same language everywhere.”
“Really? Over such a big country I’d expect so many more variations!”
“Not really, the Trans-Siberian line connects everyone and we all move around doing national service too. So the culture might be different, but not so much the language”.
I make a note to see if I can pick different accents as I cross the country.
 Beery goodness from St Pete’s
Actually the beer stops introduce me to another curious part of the Russian psyche, when in a group; everyone likes to wait for someone else to take responsibility for leading. It doesn’t seem to be for politeness, more that nobody wants the burden. We stop to pick up the beers and then ten minutes later we’re still standing around sipping them and finishing second cigarettes.
“What are we were waiting for?”, I ask.
“Nothing.”
“Well…Davai davai”, I chant, trying to move everyone. This is followed by more of the same as all the foreigners present agree they also thought we were waiting for something or someone. The locals agree that indeed we aren’t waiting for anything and we stand sipping beer for a while longer. I’m not sure who moves first, but a few of us start walking saying,
“Davai davai”.
They point in the right direction and we surge onwards. After a little while it occurs to the two of us at the head of the group that we have no idea where we are or where we’re going; but somehow we’re leading everyone. We pause and wait for a couple of our local group members to stroll by and start following them. After a short time, they realise we aren’t quite heading in the right direction and cross the road and curve back slightly in the direction we had come.
By the second stop I’d figured out this would probably happen again and keep up the pressure to keep moving. The only other explanation of these pauses is that it is technically illegal to be walking down the street drinking beer, but everyone does it. So if we finish beers near the shops, we’re less likely to be hassled.
“When was the last time any of you have been bothered about this law?”, I ask.
They look thoughtful and generally agree it’s been a long time. All it really takes is someone prepared to say, ‘Davai davai’ and everyone will follow pretty directly – just as Ayuna had done yesterday. Finally, we resolve to head to a place called ‘Soup’ to actually sit down for a while. The walk across the city has stretched into a three hour tour and we all just want to sit down anywhere. Well….anywhere with a beer.
We’re led to a table and I’m forced to order a beer and two shots of vodka. Sasha the Siberian smiles and does the same. Some of the others order soup, apparently it really is well known for the soups they make here. This is apparently a common format for Russian clubs; you enter in a group, are seated and enjoy table service. You could head for a dancefloor, if it has one, but this one has more of a café style atmosphere. I enjoy sitting down more than anything and learn some new Russian toasts. Most of the Moscow locals were horrified at the thought of saying ‘Ha zdorovie’, a traditional Slavic toast meaning ‘to your health’. It’s probably the first toast any foreigner learns and I discovered I had to find some new ones to be really Russian. To make it more difficult, when I ask for another one that was the equivalent of ‘cheers’, their faces cloud over and then they say, ‘there’s too many’. I laugh and demand they pick one. Sasha the Siberian tells me the Russian word that effectively means ‘to our future’ and we drink our first shot together. A while later he tells me another one of his favourites, which means ‘Let’s do it’, so we can finish the second one.
Thus armed against the cool night air and regenerating our tired legs we make for Krisis Zhanre. Apparently the live music only gets started there about midnight and when we enter the first band is only a couple of songs into their set. The clubs name in Russian glows on the wall and the place is packed and vibrant. Sasha the Siberian and I stash our coats in the coatroom I find hidden at the back of the dancefloor and he volunteers to find some beers while I wait with the rest of the group. We finish them quickly and all of us launch ourselves onto the dancefloor with mad abandon. The band finishes, we don’t, but the DJ keeps us going as they setup for the next band.
This new drug called ‘B’ will explode your mind
Dancing, beers, vodka and shouted happiness prevail for a few hours. At one point all the Couchsurfers join together in a circle with arms around each other and keep dancing together. This only lasts a minute thanks to some filthy looks from bouncers, we have to break it up. I’m baffled as to what was so bad. Konstantin, one of the locals, leads me to a back area for a cigarette. We travel past the end of the bar, finding ourselves in a group of tables and then open French windows that lead to a small outdoor location designed for smoking. The back ‘wall’ of this area is a canvas tent that conceals a building site. Konstantin produces a cigarette which I then drop on the floor almost instantly. As I bend over to retrieve it, he looks appalled at the idea and stomps on it whilst producing another. I can’t picture anyone in Australia doing that; a single cigarette is worth up to seventy five cents. However, in Russia a whole packet costs the same; which would help to explain why almost everyone smokes, everywhere. Konstantin leans forward after lighting up and explains the bouncer’s reaction to our mini-mosh. Apparently the worst thing you can do is to be moving together in a big group like that, it’s banned in every pub, club and venue. Moshing is strictly forbidden thanks to the bad reputation it has for causing unforeseen injuries as the mass hysteria takes over and everyone in the room is heaving together as one. People have been suffocated, trampled and generally damaged. Which is probably why I love the mosh so much, I’ve already been in many good ones and loved every minute of it. The surge of energy I get from moving both together with the crowd and by myself within it is spectacular and invigorating.
Somehow we get talking to a pair of Mexicans who are visiting Moscow and I discover this club is a huge hangout for ex-pats in general. I’m more than happy to throw myself into the night and see where we all land. For most of the next few hours I find myself drinking beers and returning to the smoking area to enjoy random conversations with Mexicans, Americans, Germans, Serbians and a host of Muscovites. I meet an extraordinarily drunk local who gives me his card so we can go out drinking again tomorrow night. He’s out with his girlfriend and an old mate who’s in town for the weekend. All three of them are at the level of drunkenness that would get them removed from an Australian pub with vigour, but none of them seem to have a problem finding another round. I pass Tania on the dancefloor and she leans in close to be heard,
“Are you coming back with us all to my place after this?”
“Definitely! When are we going?”
She shrugs and says,
“Soon maybe.”
 One of the rarer effects of drinking too much Russian Vodka
It’s while talking to an American journalist about where the country is going under Putin that I realise I have no real idea where I am in the city. We walked here after the monster trek, leaving me with no orientation for a Metro station and I’m not entirely confident about organising a Russian people’s taxi with my poor language skills. The idea of being alone and lost in the middle of Moscow makes me feel suddenly vulnerable, so I move to return to the group. To my horror they have disappeared. I look in every corner of the club and can’t find anyone. I retrieve my jacket and begin to work through my options on finding my way home. It’s just after six in the morning and I’m floating on a sea of beer inspired warm comfort. I think if I can get directions to the Metro I can navigate myself home safely without a problem. So when I walk into four members of the group standing together outside, I give a little cheer. They look up at me and smile.
“I thought you’d gone home already!”, I accuse them.
“You’re still going!”, the chorus of voices chime.
“I couldn’t go, I have no idea where I am right now.”
They laugh and Hanspeter says,
“Moscow!”
“Really? I thought I was in Africa somewhere! How the hell did I get here?!?!…..What happened to Tania? One minute she’s saying we’re all going there and now she’s disappeared with her friend.”
“Oh they left half an hour ago, I think they were looking for you, but you’d disappeared.”
“I was out the back in the smoking tent talking to drunk Russians”
And that’s what Moscow really looks like
They laugh as we meander to the Metro station. As we separate at the circle line station I wonder when exactly the best time to send a message to Victoria is. I opt for an SMS five minutes before I arrive back and follow with a phonecall when I get there. She buzzes me in the building and ushers me inside the apartment with a tired smile.
“Good night?”
“Was extensive and great fun; good people, good music, good conversations, what more is there to cram into an evening?”
She smiles evilly and adds,
“Oh maybe one or two things, but you can’t have everything.”
I laugh on my way to the shower. By the time I return she’s already sound asleep again, so I stretch out onto my mattress setup on the floor and blissfully follow the trend for unconsciousness.
So I’m addicted to food. I can’t live without it, my life seems empty if it’s not there. The flavours, the textures, the sensations of eating and then of being full fill me with pleasure. Oh Thai food is the most evil habit I picked up. Luxurious and complex flavours arriving in a cascade of triumphant wonder. The first layer hits your tastebuds and the ride begins, the chilli is sharp and dominates at first, but gives way to the sweet coconut milk and ginger. The spices are bringing up the rear, spreading the flavour to all corners of the taste universe, carrying their banners, they plant them in every place they visit to guarantee their return. The rice balances and evens out the flavour tidal wave and the aftertaste is smooth, sweet and filled with smells and hints of the blends of spices and fresh ingredients. A flash of Kaffir lime. A buzz of clove. A spark of cinnamon. Oh the experience is wonderfully sensual and I can barely wait for the next mouthful.
You can spend a lifetime discovering different styles of food from around the world. Learning to prepare and cook them is like a meditation on this sensuality. You prepare yourself for the experience as you prepare the experience for yourself. Even the stages of the preparation are a source of further pleasure with my pet Thai food. The smell of dry spices being ground together in the pestle and mortar. The smell of the paste being prepared. Each step builds another piece of the puzzle until the final form becomes clear as you devour the dish.
Sure you can go without for a few days if you choose to, longer if you want to make a point. After a few weeks you will surely die…well make that a couple of months in my case. Eating is a habit, but one necessary for staying alive. Food is one of the most basic joys in life, eating for pleasure rather than survival is one of the signs of a robust society…and often one of the signs of a robust person. Everybody eats, not everyone knows the deeper joys of eating.
So I’m addicted to beer. I feel like it’s such a baseline part of my lifestyle that not having it there would feel like a part of me is missing. A honey wheat beer on a hot summer day in Australia is unbeatable. A hefty stout on a cold, wet winter day anywhere lifts you to a higher place. At either time the feeling of warm happiness as you get your shine on is what draws you back over and over again. Sure, when you’re younger you have too much and just get drunk. Then something changes, you begin to see the flavour is important. The quality of the drink will determine how you feel the next day. Absorbing a lot of a good beer is no problem, but even a small amount of a poor one leaves you feeling washed out with a headache.
The styles, flavours and potency of beers are so varied you can spend a lifetime exploring them. Those monks in Europe spent so much time in the middle ages perfecting so many styles to help them enjoy their lives; so now you can benefit from their studies. Even today more new blends and ideas are being explored and manufactured. With the advent of microbreweries we see a new age of the common man being able to lend his particular creativity to create his desires in liquid form.
Sure you can go without for a few days, weeks or months…..but why would you? The relaxation and removal of those daily inhibitions and masks comes as a relief. Leave your work personality behind. The true ability for enjoyment comes when you can see that you’ve entered beer acquisition mode on a night and start finishing half a pint because you already want the next one. It only takes an hour for that desire to go away, the trick is conquering it in the moment. It’s a matter of forming the right habits. The joy in drinking comes from having the shine, not shining your vomit stained shoes.
So I’m addicted to cigarettes. I feel like there’s a monkey on my back pushing me towards the shop to get another packet. I resent thinking of a smoke every time a beer or two passes my lips. Sure, at first it was a huge rush. The feeling of warm satisfaction with yourself is calming. Now it’s just a habit, part of drinking time. It feels like something is missing when that smoke isn’t available. You can’t really enjoy it past the first one or two, but stopping there is almost impossible. Smoking cigars a few times a year was so much better, enjoying the flavour and letting the sensation flow over you – especially when accompanied by a good port. Smoking a few Indonesian clove cigarettes when you’ve already got your shine on feels great too.
You can’t enjoy the flavours of cigarettes. It’s shades of grey on the same thing. It’s not about enjoying the experience. It’s about the nicotine receptors in your brain screaming for attention like a little baby. MORE! MORE! Where’s my bottle!!! You certainly can’t make them yourself in most places. If you could, it’s be all about cigars again, enjoying the flavour.
Sure you’ve lived without them for a significant part of your life, why are they so omnipresent now? You tell yourself it’s a social thing while travelling, that you can stop anytime, but choose not to, that it still feels good. Then you wake up coughing, feeling like your lung is trying to turn itself inside out to rid itself of the vile toxin. Every morning you swear it will never happen again, but it does.
I blame the Russian government, it was there that this crossed into the world of habit, binding itself to the beer like a strangler fig. When I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. Simple as that. So do I throw both away to break the combined habit? It’s the only logical approach. Beer can come back by itself later, without it’s ginger stepson.
But right now, I’m just going to finish this beer with one more smoke. Just one more.
There’s a horrific tearing sound and the shriek of metal being tortured and twisted fills my ears. I have one moment to glance out the window before being flung clear into the icy atmosphere; surrounded by the final screams of everyone onboard. The last thing I will remember is the abject terror on the face of the person in the seat next to me as we both know our luck and time has run out.
I don’t know why I do this to myself every time a plane takes off. I keep picturing exactly how the end will happen when catastrophe strikes mid-air. I look out the window again and we’re steadily rising above the city below on the way to my next destination. In a few minutes we will pass through the clouds and the turbulence will arrive then.
The shaking starts as it always does, throwing the whole cabin around as if they’re just checking our seatbelts. Then it gets harder and I look down the length of the cabin to try and see if it’s really as bad as it feels. What’s that sound? That’s new. I don’t remember hearing it before. Like a deep hammering, shaking my bones. I can’t hear it so much as feel it. The announcement system crackles into life,
“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We’ve encountered some unusual turbulence and will be returning to….”
The voice is cut off and the silence only lasts a second before the hammering gets deeper and deeper. I glance out the window and the next few moments seems to last a lifetime. The engine has blossomed into flame and is shedding parts constantly. Some of them are blown against the plane’s fuselage on the way down. The wing seems to actually be flapping, it’s bending too much as waves of pressure pass down its length. In the final moment I can hear no noise, just remember watching the wing falling away as the plane starts spinning and I lose consciousness.
Maybe one day I’ll stop this self-torture and be fascinated with the experience again; like I used to be as a child. I’ve been flying since before I can remember. When I was eleven months old I was evacuated from Darwin after cyclone Tracy destroyed the town on Christmas Day, 1974. We spent more than fifteen hours flying to Tasmania on a Hercules military transport plane. When my mother passed out due to exhaustion, apparently I was quite happy to be passed around the plane to play with everyone else there. When she woke up in a panic she found me in the arms of a hostess (yes they did have them on these flights) with a group of women all gurgling happily over me. So flying should be completely natural to me. I figured out by the time I was twelve, I had flown the equivalent of around the world once, just visiting family around Australia and taking one family trip to Singapore. By the time I was twenty one, I was close to a second circumnavigation with flights to and from school and some holidays. In the last five years alone I’ve circumnavigated the world more than twice more on long distance flights to England, Turkey, Russia and China. So why do I still spend so much time thinking about dying on one?
I normally sit there telling myself the facts to put it in perspective. There are more than a million people in the air at any one time nowadays. I suspect half of them are in China and India. The safety record of the Boeing aircraft we all trust in is frankly extraordinary. If cars were this safe there’d be a lot more people alive today. You’re more likely to be struck by lightning than be involved in an accident on a modern commercial jet.
Of course the news reports every air disaster around the world; if it bleeds, it leads. However, at least half the reason they get reported so enthusiastically is that it’s so unusual. So am I just a victim of media hysteria?
I can remember when I was about ten years old hating being a part of the group of kids on a plane having to wear a stupid badge and being cosseted by the hostesses. The experience was so normal to me that I couldn’t understand why everyone made a big deal of it. The next year I learned to take off the badge and follow an adult off the plane so I didn’t have to wait with the kids anymore. They only caught me once; much to my disgust. I remember once holding the hand of this old man who was frankly terrified of the whole experience. I was busy looking out the window seeing the earth get further away and the view get better and better. He asked me if I was afraid too. It frankly hadn’t really occurred to me. I didn’t like it when the plane shook as we passed through the clouds, but once we were above them, the view was worth it. I hated going through Mt Isa or Alice Springs, as every flight used to do, because the plane shook so much during takeoff and landing. I don’t remember being so worried about crashing, I just didn’t like the shaking. Over time I learned that everyone is terrified of planes and flying in some way. Adults would always act so concerned about me flying that I’d go along with it and agree with them. So have I learned this fear?
I think the first time I remember being genuinely terrified on a plane was landing in Tennant Creek on the twenty seat jet that does the milk run flight from Darwin through Katherine, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs. I was on it for work and would have been about twenty three. It landed sideways. When it touched the ground one wing was less than fifty centimeters from the ground while the other was high in the air. Everyone moaned involuntarily as it rocked across the tarmac before finally planting all the wheels firmly down. That moment touched me deeply, for the first time I saw the very real chance of death in flying. Even flying in a light aircraft from Jabiru to Gunbalunya a few times had never been this bad; shaky and a few worrying drops, but not like this. The helicopter ride I once took from Jabiru back to Darwin wasn’t a problem – I fell asleep for one hour of the trip. Since that landing in Tennant Creek, things have got worse for my imagination. I think it was the first time I flew to England that really kicked it in.
So we were cruising at about 36,000 feet over the Bay of Bengal when the shaking started. The first thought that entered my mind was the possibility of the plane plunging more than ten kilometres into the briny deep. Even as I was thinking that, I was thinking,
“Why is this suddenly a problem?”
I spent the next couple of hours, until the shaking finally stopped, constantly picturing how the end would come. The only question was whether the shock of the cold outside would kill me quickly or if depressurization would do the trick. The idea of being utterly frozen with burst eardrums and still falling for kilometres into the ocean seems a much worse fate. I form the conclusion that I want to go out in a mid-air explosion. That way you’d be dead in a moment and not have to go through all that tumbling through the endless void suffering agonizing pain until the end arrives with a short, sharp stop. But…but what if you survived all that somehow. What if you were floating in the ocean, bleeding from every orifice, suffering numerous broken bones and probably blind and deaf? Best not to think about it really. And that is soooo NEVER an option for me. So why is it that since that moment I always do this to myself on takeoff?
Maybe the answer’s simple, or a combination of many things. It only ever strikes hard at takeoff. Once we’re in stable flight the fear dissipates. If we enter light turbulence it’s not a big problem, but heavy turbulence with those sudden drops; that will flip me out every time. At landing I’m always really calm, I think that with every second we’re closer to the ground, so each moment brings less chance of becoming part of a twisted wreck of flaming metal. As you get older the reality of death becomes more apparent. You know there are so many ways to die and at the end of that experience; there is no more experience. I think the real seat of the fear is that I will experience incredible pain in my last moments, minutes or hours. I just want to go out quickly and a mid-air cremation would suit me perfectly. I’d prefer to have my body in a coffin filled with explosives that is flung into the air high above my funeral party to provide an instant cremation and light show all at once……but I suppose a Boeing 767 could work for me. Which means only one thing is sure; the next time I’m walking out of an airport thinking about this, I’ll probably get hit by a bus. Now if it could just be a bus filled with beautiful nuns who will take care of me as I recover…
I decide that the Novodevichy convent and cemetery will be my primary destination for the day and bounce into the street to find my way there. I stop at a small pavement shop to get something for breakfast and discover they can’t change a thousand rouble note, so I can’t buy anything. I don’t know what to do exactly, so I wander back into the street, still hungry and looking for a bigger shop. I end up being refused at two more pavement shops and start to wonder if it’s because I’m a foreigner or if they really don’t keep change. I now wish I hadn’t already spent the last of my small change; fifty and hundred rouble notes. I soon walk past a supermarket and this time manage to acquire a packet of chips and a curious flavoured liquid yoghurt drink. There is always a broad range of milk based food and drink in any shop in Russia. This varies through milk, butter and cheese from different animals to yoghurts with consistency from almost cheese-like to pretty much milk. This drink is a chocolate flavoured milk-like yoghurt and goes well with the sour cream and chive chips. It doesn’t, however, encourage me to have more later; the yoghurt is just too bitter for my taste. I’m used to drinking Iced Coffee from a carton almost every day while I’m in Australia; a habit gained during my misspent youth. It has too much coffee and too much sugar, but in perfect balance. It sets your heart beating and your eyes spinning; I know anything that feels that crazy good has to be bad for me and I love it.
    The Cathedral of the Virgin of Smolensk in the Novodevichy convent truly is gloriously beautiful; the iconostasis is the best I see in Russia. Five tiers high and richly ornamented, it dominates the room entirely. I have to tear myself away from the incredibly detailed visual smorgasbord to appreciate all the other amazing frescoes on the central pillars, walls and ceilings. One dour looking nun watches over the visitors idling through the building that has already stood for almost five hundred years. I walk around the convent grounds and decide to sit on a bench under tree for a while, absorbing and luxuriating in the calmness of the gardens. The strange and twisted history of this place (as a prison, refuge and storehouse) doesn’t seem to sit heavy upon it today. I sit and soak in the warmth and idyllic calm of the convent atmosphere.
  Some time later I stroll next door to the cemetery. I decide I don’t really want to pay for a tour this time and just wander in to drift around the place. There are plenty of large, spreading trees providing shade to the cool cemetery grounds. I tag along with an English speaking tour group for a few stops before tiring of it and decide that since I can read the gravestones, I can figure out who’s in them and the more decorative ones are probably more famous people. I turn from Gogol’s grave to discover Anton Chekhov’s almost opposite and figure I’m half right, Chekhov’s grave is decidedly unornamented; but is unusual in that it’s a simple Gothic arch shape with his name printed on it. The cemetery is the resting place of many figures from the worlds of Russian politics, arts and the military. Stalin’s right hand man, Vyacheslav Molotov, lies here. It is after him that the Finnish people named the Molotov cocktail. This was the humble petrol bomb they used to great effect against Russian tanks during the Winter war of 1939/40. Since then the Molotov cocktail has been used by many countries and has become a universal symbol of both a people’s resistance to armed forces and a university student’s idea of a fun night in Paris.
However, it’s Boris Yeltsin’s grave I’m interested in visiting. I did have an idea of taking some vodka with me to either leave there or pour at its base, but wasn’t sure how it’s be viewed. The grave is a sculpture of a Russian flag waving in the wind, his name on the piece is faint at first, but certainly visible. I did always like his style in the early years when he faced down the military coup in 1991 by standing on a tank and making speeches before staging a one man breaking of the siege. That he then oversaw the final demise of the Soviet Union was just as amazing, becoming the first president of the Russian Federation. Somebody had to be there to make the changes happen, but his decision on an economic pathway certainly seemed to destroy Russian finances for many years. I also loved the video of him trying to conduct a band at some official occasion whilst being monstrously drunk. The real conductor was standing behind him and conducted only while Yeltsin had his back turned and his arms waving in a crazed frenzy trying to conduct. Every time Yeltsin turned to check on him, the poor conductor froze and acted like he was doing nothing. Such a lovely moment, it must be something Australian to love seeing political leaders heavily refreshed in public and enjoying themselves.
 Boris’ final resting place
 After some more time enjoying the variety and styles of the graves here I decide I’m hungry and have to go and check out the crazy Georgian restaurant, Genatsvale, on Old Arbat St. Entering it seems like a strange ritual as you leave Moscow and enter some small, ancient town in the middle of Georgia. The uneven cobble stones outside lead you through an enormous broken clay pot to heavy wooden doors. I open them and step inside to find a waitress who shows me to a table. Even inside, the restaurant has different levels; like the uneven streets of the old town. On the left is a waterwheel turning lazily in a small stream with tables above, below and around it. Fish swim in the carefully lit stream and there are different sections around the huge room; raised verandahs and an open cobbled square in front of the bar. She gives me a menu, with English translations thankfully, and I set about ordering up a storm. Lavash bread, Bozbashi soup and a kind of open kebab with grilled meat and vegetables served on a wooden board. My first taste of Georgian food starts a lasting love affair, it is easily the best food I have from any of the old Soviet republics. Spicy, but simple, filled with flavour and always made me want more. The Bozbashi soup is mutton meatballs in a spicy, red, cloudy broth of paprika, onion, tomato and dill. It becomes a staple of mine across Russia. Everyone prepares it slightly differently, but the core was the same and delicious with lavash bread. This is baked in discs about twenty centimetres in diameter and rises in the centre to about two centimetres. It is always sliced up, is quite soft and absorbs juice from your plate or soup perfectly. The main course had deliciously grilled lamb and the salad, tomato and cucumber that came with it balanced it perfectly. It also came with freshly made Adzhika sauce. This ‘sharp’ chilli sauce is another instant favourite and I find a bottle of it later to have ready at hand for the rest of the trip.
After a fantastic lunch like that, I can do nothing but waddle the fifty metres down the road and slide into my favourite internet café again. I’m particularly happy to find another Couchsurfing meetup began about fifteen minutes ago. Ayuna, a Moscow local who was at the last meetup, has arranged a meeting right next to the beach volleyball competition that’s going on at the moment. I bless her genius and wonder how such an incredibly Australian style of sport had caught on here. I decide to leave and join the group to see what it’s like.
The Beach Volleyball Outdoor Stadium
There is indeed a temporary stadium setup at the foot of the hill of Victory Park that I stumble into almost immediately after walking out of the Metro station. It also seems there really is a beach volleyball competition going on inside it. As I drift around the edges of it finding the meeting spot, I love the sheer randomness of finding such an event in Moscow while I happen to be passing through. More importantly, I would never have known it was on without the Couchsurfing connection. Ayuna finds me quickly and says they had decided not to pay any money and sit on top of the hill instead. I figure I might choose to go in later and follow her to meet the group. This time we have four nationalities represented and we sit on newspaper on the grassy hill watching the sun get lower in the sky. We talk about what has brought us together in Moscow this fine day. I suddenly think to ask about the problem with changing the thousand rouble note that morning. Ayuna bursts out laughing and explains,
“Oh that’s everywhere; the small shops often can’t do it at all, which is bad because the Bankomats like to give out the big notes. Some of them only give out thousand rouble notes that you can’t use anywhere.”
“I try to get smaller amounts out, but the machines don’t always let you”, adds another local girl.
“Sometimes you can get it in hundred rouble notes, but I’m not sure which one that was.”
As she finishes, she drifts off into silent thought for a while, before seeming to decide she really doesn’t know.
“So, what’s the best way to change a big note?” I ask in blank curiosity.
“Ummm…supermarkets normally can, Metro ticket windows…the bigger the shop, the more likely they can do it”, Ayuna explains.
“But you can’t change money, you have to buy something, nobody will just change money for you”, advises her friend.
I nod slowly, trying to remember to always carry smaller change in the future. Ayuna takes the moment to launch a barrage of questions,
“So what are you doing in Russia? Where are you going and how long are you here?”
I tell them of my planned Trans-Siberian adventure and then my eclipse chasing history.
“That’s what has really brought me here. To Russia.”
I stare into the distance for a moment, enjoying the city view.
“You’ve come all the way to Russia to look at the sun?”, Ayuna asks with a bewildered expression.
“Well, really it’s not to look at the sun, so much as much as the moon sitting perfectly in front of it. The black sun. Have you seen one?”
The group looks puzzled in thought for a minute, before one of the German girls remembers,
“I saw one about 2000 I think, we had to use special glasses and a pinhole camera so we didn’t look at the sun directly.”
“But did the sun turn black? Could you look straight at it without the glasses and see the corona around the edge for a few minutes?”
“I…don’t know…I think so….”
“I think if you had seen it you would know….maybe it was only partial where you were, the Totality follows a narrow path only one hundred kilometres wide.”
This explanation has become almost a mantra to me,
“It is not eclipses that I chase; it is Total Solar Eclipses. It’s not the same, when I say the word ‘Eclipse’, I mean Totality. The partials and hybrids are something else, something lesser”, I pause, trying to find the right words.
“It’s like trying to describe a six foot high ice-cream, multi-flavoured, decorated wedding cake to someone who has only ever seen a mars bar.”
The idea makes them laugh and then consider.
“The black sun lives for a few short minutes and your brain is pushed out of its comfort zone. The sun never looks like this, for your entire life it has always done the same thing every day. Sunrises and sunsets change, the length of the day changes and even the colour of the sun can change. But it doesn’t turn black in the middle of the day”. I’m lost in my passion again.
“Totality taunts you with the failure of your expectation of consistency. Nothing is permanent, everything changes. Even the sun is an exception to its own rules”.
I stop talking and let the view absorb me for a while as the girls chat.
Ayuna suddenly says its time to go and the group follows wordlessly down the hill.
The peak in Victory Park
 A typical moronic marsupial
This story is dedicated to Vivi who gave me inspiration on a day of blankness.
Kangaroos are dumb. They are one of the stupidest animals ever invented. Have you ever seen a travelling show of performing kangaroos? I don’t think so. The reason is they are too dumb to learn any tricks. Sure they can carry their babies in a cool pouch, which looks rather cute; but not smart. They’re born dumb and I suspect get worse over time. The reality is they are creatures built for survival in harsh conditions. Living in the Australian countryside they run on instinct alone. So for evidence of their stupidity we need only look to the vast number of dead kangaroos by the side of EVERY highway that crosses the great outback. Their favourite trick is to stand by the side of the road around sunset, and for an hour or so afterwards, for the opportunity to jump in front of passing cars.
For the more squeamish people out there who look into their big brown eyes and can’t bear the thought of hurting one, remember this; they want to die. We are only helping them achieve their goals. When you approach with high beams on and loud music resonating on the soundsystem they wait patiently for the right moment. That moment is when you are less than ten metres away and cannot possibly react, or, if you do, you will roll your car and possibly die. At that moment the kangaroo will leap happily into your pathway with a clear desire to die. Even travelling at just sixty kilometres an hour, this will ensure a fatal encounter with a moronic marsupial. Perhaps life is so hard for them that they desire a quick end, perhaps they just want to try and make you roll the car to even out the death toll. One hundred thousand kangaroos and then one or two people meeting their fate might make it feel better for them. Maybe it’s a game for the boys,
“Hey, jump in front of this one and if you live you’ll be legend!”
I’ve spent far too long considering these possibilities and, anthropomorphism aside, there is only one reasonable explanation; kangaroos are unfeasibly stupid.
Further evidence is the number of times you will actually pass the moron marsupial and it will determinedly leap into the side of your car. The only two cars I’ve ever owned both sported a small dent caused by this little trick. In some ways this one bothers me more, because you think you’ve managed to avoid killing them, only to hear that loud thump behind you. You just have to hope it’s hitting the side of the car, because if a good sized one goes under the wheel of your average car, you stand a good chance of meeting a tree by the side of the road on a fairly intimate basis. So once you accept that they’re trying to die, the question to consider is: How do you deal with it?
As for any moment you kill some Australian wildlife with your rolling tonne of naked steel, there is etiquette you must obey. Firstly, stop the car well off the side of the road. Give yourself space to easily open your door and walk out without being in the way of the next semi-trailer rolling down the highway. They can’t stop and will clean you up in less time than it takes to think “Those headlights are quite high off the ground”. Next you must find the body of the animal you have hit. If you can’t find it after searching for a few minutes, then you can wipe your forehead and feel happier that your karma is a little lighter. If you find it and it’s still alive, but cannot walk, crawl or fly; then you’re going to have to grow a pair and finish the job. Sounds cruel? No. Cruel is leaving a dying animal by the side of the road to spend its final hours in agony unable to see its family one last time or watch that video it recorded last week and never got back to. Kindness here involves a heavy object and a sharp skull fracture.
Now some people like to whinge and moan and try to carry the kangaroo to one of the many animal shelters around the country that look after injured animals. That being said, if you do find yourself with a dead mother and living joey in her pouch, you should take it to the animal shelter; the joeys often recover and get released back into the wild. Now I’ve talked to many people who’ve worked with these shelters and here’s a hint I’ll pass on to you. If the animal is so badly hurt it cannot move by itself, the chances are the moment your car turns back onto the highway, they’re going to be finishing the job for you. Animals hurt that badly won’t recover. All you’re doing is trying to make yourself feel better by passing the responsibility to someone else; you selfish git. Keep one thing in mind; they’re trying to die, you’re only helping them out.
So let’s assume you have identified a fresh kangaroo corpse courtesy of a short stop at the end of your bumper bar. It’s not moving, there’s probably blood everywhere and the local people would be deciding how to cook it (why use a spear when a car works better). Get it off the road. Way off the road and into whatever vegetation is near. If you’re in the desert, you’re probably in a 4WD and don’t need to be told any of this; you’ve hardened the fuck up already. The reason you get it off the road is that the next average car flying around a corner at a hundred k’s and hour can use a kangaroo tail as a neat launching ramp to oblivion. Now go and poke at that tail to understand what I mean, it’s solid muscle with a core of bone, it may as well be a speed bump. A Red kangaroo tail IS a frickin speed bump. The rest of the body acts in a similar way, but is more likely to get picked up on a tyre, get wrapped around the axle and send the car sliding into an anthill. You have killed the animal, clean up the mess so that nobody else has to suffer.
The last thing to keep in mind is that kangaroos are also delicious. If you’ve killed one by the side of the road, you could at least do the right thing and eat it. Of course, if you’re a bit uncomfortable with gutting and skinning your dinner, you can just buy the meat in almost any supermarket. Either way, while you’re preparing it you can consider that perhaps they are selflessly offering their flesh to you as food when they leap in front of your car.
 Quiet dog or zen master?
Maybe countless generations ago they learned the selflessness of Buddhist compassion and are trying to teach us. I’m sure every time a pack of dingoes pulled one down for dinner they felt like they were partaking in some kind of spiritual experience; but didn’t want to tell their mates about it in case they sound a bit weird. I wonder what dingo for “Cease to grasp” sounds like. Oh no, I have it… dingoes are actually zen Buddhists, which is why they don’t bark. We should learn from their example and comprehend this fundamental lesson purely by sharing with them the enlightening experience of kangaroo flesh. Oh, and for the vegetarians out there; studies have shown that kangaroo IS a vegetable. At least they act like one.
 My leg is made from vegetables sir, please try it.
The only tricky thing with kangaroo steaks is that you must cook it quickly and properly. Leaving it on the barbie too long results in something with the texture and flavour of burnt car tyres. If you manage to chew your way through a piece, you will wish you hadn’t. My top recipe recommendation is to find yourself a healthy rosemary bush and trim off some of the older and drier stems. Then cut them into nice satay length skewers and thread diced kangaroo meat onto them. Leave the rosemary leaves intact so that the kangaroo becomes steeped in the flavour as you cook it. Coat them lightly in olive oil and then chuck them on your barbecue grill at a medium heat. They will be done in five minutes, so pay attention and turn once. If you’re out in the countryside with your ‘roo body, you can consider the aboriginal style of cooking which involves throwing the whole thing onto hot coals for a few hours. The tail is especially good cooked this way.
So there you go! Dealing with kangaroos made easy for you by your local Territorian advocate of eating your enemy. At the end of the day its us or them. Man.
 But can he stand up to one tonne of naked steel?
The strangest part of having a brain injury is you never quite know what the total effects will be, how long any will last and if you will ever recover fully. The most depressing part of my injury was that I completely lost my sense of taste. Along with it went pretty well all my sense of smell. For someone who loves to enjoy good food and drink far too much, this deepened the nightmare and sent me spiraling downwards even faster. The tiredness and dizziness were passing, the permanent headache meant I was taking ibuprofen daily for the first two weeks, but to not taste or smell something is unthinkable.
I suppose it’s always true that you only appreciate something once you don’t have it anymore. When everything you eat, from a spicy thai curry to a meat pie tastes like wet cardboard, it’s hard to enjoy it anymore. It felt like somebody had taken me to a fantastically beautiful place and then turned all the lights out. You can remember what things used to be like, you can feel around in the darkness to try and understand where you are, but you are never the same. It’s curious the only way I can describe the loss of two senses is in terms of the loss of another.
You can’t remember a taste.
No really, you just can’t. You can remember that you liked it, you can enjoy the sensation again and recognize it, but you just can’t summon it back up like you can with a sound or a picture. All you’re left with is a feeling of a hollow memory that you can never fill. This drives me crazy more than anything. I know I’m eating an incredible thai green curry that should be filling my mouth with sensation and all I sense is wet cardboard. I can feel the burn of chilli on my lips. I could be eating paper coated in deep heat and it would be the same.
Okay, no it wouldn’t be exactly the same, as I discover during this time there is more to enjoying eating than simply a good taste or mix of flavours. I begin to seek different foods for their texture and mouth feel. I try raw vegetables again and discover that I still don’t like them, even focusing on the texture doesn’t make it better. I eat a frozen spaghetti meal that I don’t thaw out because it feels so strange. This starts me messing around with temperature of food and drink. Warm beer tastes the same as cold beer. It feels different, slimy, but tastes the same. This leads me to another strange discovery.
Your body reacts to food even when your sense of taste and smell are missing. The only way I decide that something I eat is good or not is how my body feels while eating it and afterwards. It’s like a three way switch. Good, Bad or Neutral. Bad means I will actually stop eating it immediately. My body doesn’t like it and that’s the only feedback I get. I really cannot continue eating something when my body is screaming at me how bad it is. McDonalds and other fast food places fall firmly into this category every time. My body hates them. Anything that has been deep fried I cannot eat. I try fish again and my body doesn’t like it either – but that’s normal. Neutral means my body hasn’t rejected it, but isn’t interested in having it again any time soon. Most bread feels like this, potato, starches. And Subway rolls. Good means my body loves it and wants more ….Now! I have a unique experience with this one in Turkey eating a Testi Kebab in Kappadokya. This is meat, vegetables, herbs and spices cooked in a small clay pot that is sealed with bread dough to form a simple pressure cooker. I eat a few mouthfuls and immediately order another one, the drive is so strong after having a lot of Neutral food in the preceding week.
This created an interesting travel experience for me. Most food from Turkey is in my memory next to wet cardboard. However, there were some things my body liked so much I still enjoy them. Gozleme are great if prepared with fresh ingredients and made on the spot for you. Testi Kebabs are the best Turkish food and I never grow tired of them, but you can only get them in Kappadokya. Tomato and cucumber by themselves are solidly Neutral, as is any kind of Turkish bread.
I remember with absolute clarity the moment I woke up one morning and could clearly smell the blanket I was wrapped in. I could almost taste that smell and actually put it in my mouth to see if it was true. It was. It was like someone kicked open the door and let the light flood back in. I still have that blanket. It only lasted a few minutes, soon enough it was taken away from me, leaving me back in the land of wet cardboard. That morning gave me the hope I was missing at the time, hope that one day I might have the gift of taste back permanently. That happened in the first week I was in Turkey and made the eclipse festival I was at seem even grander and more glorious for a day. Only the experience of seeing the Total Eclipse the next day could beat this revelation of smell and taste. Comparing three minutes of taste against three minutes of Totality makes me realise how much I would miss my eyesight.
This keeps happening to me, for a few minutes it’s like the wires are connected. It’s now been three months since that night. I never know when it happens, but becomes more often once I stop getting dizzy all the time. I try to understand what triggers it, but can never find a connection; it seems purely random as my poor brain heals itself. I think about the six month mark I can say that I have a sense of taste again. It doesn’t feel as strong as it used to be, I don’t feel that I react to flavour as much as I used to. Maybe this time has trained my body to look to other sensations, texture, temperature and that overall reaction. I find myself changing the way I cook old standard dishes to incorporate new things, change spice levels and rearrange them. Now three years later I’ve become even fussier about ingredients and how I prepare them. I start mixing raw spices together to make the flavours stronger.
Maybe I’ve turned the nightmare into an interesting experience, but I still feel like I lost part of my sense of taste and smell forever. I can’t really know, however, because there’s this one problem:
You can’t remember a taste.
Russian Beery Goodness.
I’m early for tonight’s couchsurfing meetup, so I distract myself within the inevitable cluster of pavement shops around the station exit. I find one that not only has beer on tap, but they will sell it to me in large plastic bottles or even a half litre cup. I’m forced to buy a cup of невское (Nevskoy), a beer from St Petersburg to see if it’s any good. It is, especially on a sunny day. I then spend the next fifteen minutes trying to identify people who look like a group of Couchsurfers. This is a constant problem and a funny idea; there is no standard Couchsurfer. We come from all walks of life, ages and attitudes; but all share the love of travel and the experiences that come with it. I can’t see any likely looking group and send messages to the meeting organiser, Max, and Nikolai (who helped me with my train ticket), to see if they can help me. I receive calls from both of them and shortly discover that neither of them can understand me very well over the phone so we can’t figure out what is going on. I find myself crossing between the two Metro exits for the station wondering if I’m going to be able to find anyone. It’s with immense relief that I finally recognise Max from his picture on the website and I call out his name to check. He turns towards me and smiles, starting my first amazing night with the Russians.
In the meetup group there’s a French girl, a Swiss guy, two Kazakhstani girls and the other eight or so people are Russian and mostly from Moscow. Now that we’re all together, we collect supplies (beer and picnic food) and then walk through a massive park that starts next to the train station to find our spot. It turns out to be by a man made lake with an island in the middle filled with bird life. This makes watching the sunset even more beautiful. The circus tent setup on the other edge of the lake pumping out crazy hits of the seventies certainly adds a certain je ne sais quoi. The Kazakhstani girls are pretty well Moscow locals now and they’re more interested in whether I have any Australian money with me than anything else. I still have the fifteen dollars that I left the country with and happily give out the five and ten dollar notes. They, like everyone else, are amazed that it’s made of plastic and looks like monopoly money. For a moment they think I’m playing some kind of joke. I also give them some coins, which are also passed around everyone to have a look at our Australian money and the crazy animals we have on it.
 The Russians however, cause me consternation by knowing only one other thing about Australia. It’s somewhere near this amazing paradise, a utopia they call New Zealand.
“Have there been some Kiwis…err…people from New Zealand visiting here this week or something?” I ask in bewilderment.
“No, no….we just always knew about New Zealand”, ventures Olya.
“So what exactly do you think is so perfect about New Zealand?”
“It’s warm all the time, it doesn’t rain or snow too much, the weather is so good…everyone owns a tractor and has their own farm…it’s really safe…and there’s plenty of jobs for everyone”
So this is Russian utopia.
“You’ve described Australia better than New Zealand, except the tractor part, that’s not even true in New Zealand.”
“Oh no, I’ve been talking to a guy from New Zealand on email and he told me everything”, she says defiantly.
I smile and appreciate the Kiwi’s effort.
“He just loves his country and wants you to visit. So do I for that matter, but after you go there, you should visit Australia and discover the true paradise”, I say.
“New Zealand is not known for good weather or being warm, more for fantastically beautiful and mountainous countryside…oh and adventure sports. You’re saying ‘New Zealand’ and describing Australia.”
“Maybe, I don’t really know, but you’re Australian, of course you like your country more, you’re just saying that.”
“New Zealand is largely further south than Australia and suffers from Antarctic weather much more. A poorer economy means that half the people from New Zealand now live in Australia.”
 She’s unconvinced, as are they all. This belief in the New Zealand utopia seems to be held deeply and completely. My views are absolutely baffling to most of them, so I invite them to go look it all up on the internet and see for themselves. After all, it is a beautiful country to visit. The hours evaporate with laughter as we all drink more beer and share stories. The sun finally sets some time around eleven. This is the cue for about half the people to start moving to catch their trains home, the last Metro is at one, so you have to start moving if you need to cross the city.
The plan had always been to move to Max’s apartment after the park, but I didn’t quite realise that would be around midnight, but go along with it anyway. The group of us wander around a small supermarket in pairs and groups acquiring more beer and snacks. We land back in Max’s apartment and the festivities continue. Nikolai is telling me about his job doing scientific demonstrations for children. We end up discussing the fun I’ve had making hydrogen from household ingredients and then exploding it in various ways. I promise to email him the recipe. This leads me to realise it’s now after one and I have no idea how I will get home. Nikolai says I can just couchsurf his place that night when we decide to leave. I send a message to Victoria who responds straight away saying it’s fine and to have a great time.
Olya and Max in a shirt made for two
I’m feeling very warm and happy, filled with nice beer and surrounded by good people. I’m most amazed how natural it feels to be in this apartment surrounded by Russians and feeling completely at home. After growing up with so many impressions of what the country and people must be like, it comes as a small revelation that they’re just like me; only speaking another language. I think the singing begins when Max puts on a bunch of Queen songs and starts joining in. Nikolai sings during a few songs and I lend my voice too. This results in me singing a few more songs by myself and having Max ask me to quiet down; my voice is very loud when I get carried away. Well, I did study it at University and have been known to break out into opera at inappropriate moments.
“Do one more proper opera song”, Tania, one of the locals, implores me.
“Well, I have one that’s both short, beautiful and not so loud”.
So it is that I sing Lasciatemi Morire in Russia for the first time. It means “You leave me to die”. This is the song I will sing during the Totality. My own offering made at the end of my pilgrimage to see the dark sun.
Nikolai Twinkletoes at work.
They love it and want more, but I promised to stop so, I grab another beer before heading to the balcony to talk to the smokers for a while. Irina then brews up some homemade Irish cream for everyone, which disappears quickly. Even Hanspeter, the Dutch guy, makes a break from his vodka consumption for it. This is also a strange moment of realisation for me, the only person drinking vodka isn’t Russian.
“So why aren’t we all drinking vodka?” I ask generally.
“Plenty of Russians don’t really drink it away from special occasions”, Nikolai advises me. One of the locals decides she wants to dance and the dance floor is created in an instant. The guys who know how to, take turns dancing different styles with her and a couple of the other girls. So for the rest of the night we groove around the salsa, waltz and swing dancers keeping the party moving in the middle of the small loungeroom. I find myself spending time on the balcony smoking the odd cigarette with the people there and staring out into the city. The night view is beautiful. It’s of all the nearby apartment blocks giving way to the general city and is of a kind I can’t say I’ve seen before. We trade stories of travel and dreams until the sky lightens with the first touch of dawn’s light.
Suddenly it’s five o’clock Wednesday morning and Nikolai and I aim to waft into the street to find a taxi of some sort. Well, we do eventually make it out after many fond goodbyes, final dances and final drinks. It’s around ten degrees at this time of night, after being in the low twenties during the day. Finding a taxi is a curious process which involves flagging down some random man who’s driving past and asking him to drive us to Nikolai’s house. Apparently this is quite normal here. For three hundred roubles (AUD$15) we get home safely in the hands of a complete stranger. Which leads me to mention the glory of the Russian people’s taxi service.
Every car in Russia is a potential taxi. This is one of my favourite elements of Russian culture. On the one hand I need a ride and will pay for the service, on the other I will trust in a complete stranger to safely deliver me home in the middle of the night, or anytime really. I now have more faith in the Russian people’s taxi service than any business with the same role. The longest we ever wait for a car in any city is five minutes. That’s for a long trip with two dropoff points and we only have to ask three drivers before we find one who’s willing to do it. I have never found a business capable of delivering nearly this level of convenience. You also get to chat with an average person living their daily life, not someone who has been on duty for ten hours already and will be doing this six days a week.
Nikolai shows me a bed and one quick shower later finds me drifting off into a happy reverie.
I wake with a start, fighting for breath. I’m not sure where I am and I can’t remember how I got here. There is only blackness. I find it incredibly hard to open my eyes and the light seems determined to cut my head in half. The headache I can understand, I know I was drinking too much. But there’s something more fundamentally wrong this time. Where the hell am I? I turn my head to one side and my head is spinning slowly. When I open my eyes they keep looking in the direction that my head is spinning. There’s something really wrong with me. Now I have it. I’m in a hospital. Well, that’s probably a good thing, but how did I get here exactly? I close my eyes and move my head upright again to stop the spinning. It slows down and dies away and I think I pass out again.
I wake again with only one thought. My mouth is a desert. I think there are several species of lizard living in it fighting to survive on the moisture that’s left. I send out raiding parties to find a new oasis but find nothing. I’m going to have to open my eyes and maybe speak. Oh god. Communication with the outside world seems like something that happened only in my distant past. I can sense someone moving nearby and I manage to open my eyes slowly.
“You’re awake. How are you?”
It’s a nurse.
“Water.”
It’s all I can say before passing out again.
I wake up again feeling a little better. There’s a tube going into my arm and I’m absorbing water at a reckless pace. The headache is still like nothing I’ve felt before. It’s intense and over my whole head. My thoughts are slow and shattered. Forming more than a few words into a sentence is an impossible task. Moving is only slightly easier. I sit up and wish I hadn’t….the room spins badly and I let out a moan as I fall back on the pillow.
“Just rest. How are you?”
“I don’t know…..where am I”
“Where do you think you are?”
“I’m in a hospital in Melbourne I hope.”
“Yes.”
“How…am I here?”
“You don’t remember?”
This effort has drained me of all my energy and I simply cannot speak anymore. I think I pass out again.
“You’ve got to go.”
I don’t know where I am anymore. I open my eyes slowly and remember the hospital. I still have no idea how I’m here or why I feel so bad. There’s something seriously wrong with me.
“You’ve been here long enough. You’ve got to go.”
“Go where?”
“Home.”
I can picture my room with absolute clarity and the idea of lying in my bed sounds damn fine to me. I manage to sit up and turn sideways on the bed. I then have to stop and look at the floor until my head stops spinning.
“Why am I so dizzy?”
“You were very drunk.”
“Yes. But I’ve done that many times. This is new.”
“You’ve got to go.”
“Where’s my wallet? My sunglasses?”
“Your wallet is here.”
I examine it and discover plenty of money still there, but my credit card is missing. What happened last night?
I sign some paperwork and shamble onto the street. My sunglasses are missing. I have more than enough money to get home and a taxi is waiting at the door. I arrive home about one o’clock on Thursday afternoon. I get a phone call on my mobile. It’s the hospital telling me they have my sunglasses if I can come back and get them. For some reason I call a taxi and go fetch them. I just want everything to be back to normal. My flatmates know there’s something really wrong with me. I have no energy and the dizziness is crippling. I have a shower and notice in the mirror that there’s a faint bruise on my forehead, near the temple. The effort of the journey has drained me utterly and when I get home I sleep until the next day.
I am not in any way better. Nothing has changed. I realise I need to call my work, I tell them I’m very sick and hope to be in on Monday. I don’t believe for a moment that’s true. I call my bank and cancel my credit card, then collapse again. I sleep another twelve hours and that night I send a message to my mother asking if there’s some obvious medical reason I’m in such bad shape, she’s a nurse and might be able to figure it out. I manage to eat a plate of a curry that I’d cooked a few days earlier and fall asleep again.
I wake up early on Saturday afternoon with my aunt sitting on my bed telling me I’m leaving with her to stay at her house for a few days. That sounds like a good idea and I manage to pack a backpack and shamble along with me aunt. In all this time I still can’t figure out how I ended up in hospital. I can remember the earlier parts of the night, meeting for a pub quiz night, moving to another bar and having beers. Then I’m walking down Flinders street in the middle of Melbourne city with a clear plan to get a taxi home. I’m walking to the taxi rank and then… I’m in a taxi.. and then… suddenly I’m standing on a street. There’s policemen and an ambulance. I’m talking to people. I have no idea what’s going on. The ambulance people ask me if I have cover. I do and show them. I think I get into the ambulance. I don’t know why. I feel fine, even good, very happy. Then nothing. Then the nightmare that has been the last few days begins. I get to my aunt’s house and she makes me eat a vegetable soup. The one hour of being awake has drained all the energy from me and I sleep until Sunday afternoon.
My aunt tells me I’m going to her doctor first thing Monday morning to find out why I’m still crippled. The dizziness has not got any better at all. I cant walk for more than fifty metres without feeling dangerously exhausted. I’m afraid to go very far, since I’m sure I will collapse again and wake up back in hospital. This has been one of the most confusing and terrifying experiences of my life. I finally send some messages to my friends telling them I’m in a bad way and ask them if they can tell me anything that might explain it. The last friend who was with me that night left the bar at some point before me. He tells me I wasn’t very drunk at all, still telling stories and having fun, nothing unusual at all. I have no way of knowing how long I was there, but I do remember talking to some strangers for a while….but I’m sure I was alone when I was looking for the taxi….but now I think there were two people in the back of the taxi…I’m not sure, it’s not clear. Nothing is clear.
The doctor examines me briefly and sends me to get a CAT scan. I’m not really sure what’s going on, it’s all too complex. I just get in a taxi and end up at a building with the machine in it. When I sit up after the scan is done the operator looks at me with incredible concern and tells me to move slowly and take all the time I need. I sit in the building with the machine, I think I’m waiting for the pictures….but I’m not sure. I’m so tired. I walk out and go back to my aunt’s house and fall asleep for a few more hours. I have a message from the doctor on my mobile telling me to come back to her office as soon as I can. I manage to return and she asks if I want to lie down. I do so.
“You have bruises the size of matchheads on the surface of your brain. A number of them. You hit your head very hard right here.”
She indicates the bruised spot.
“What does that mean? How long will I feel like this?”
“There’s no hard answers. You might be like this for a few weeks, months or possibly permanently. We wont know until we see how you go over the next few weeks.”
It’s probably the worst news I’ve ever heard.
“Why did the hospital kick me out when I have a brain injury?”
“I don’t know. I think they just thought you were drunk.”
“Did they say anything about how I go there? I’m still not sure.”
“Only that you arrived in the ambulance and they kept you overnight for observation.”
“Well they didn’t fucking observe very much.”
The burst of anger leaves me drained again and I melt onto the bed and pass out.
I wake up half an hour later to find her talking with my aunt and writing a medical certificate for my work. I will be spending the next few weeks at home largely asleep. My anger at the hospital surges for the first week, but I don’t want to make their life any harder. I’ve worked as IT support in a hospital and I’m sure they had good reasons to let me go at the time. I’m really angry at myself for landing in this situation. I spend a lot of time forming theories on what happened, a spiked drink, people following me home to rob me, jumping out of the taxi at some point…all theories, it’s been three years now and I still dont know. The one thought that drives me through months of slow recovery is that I want to see a Total Eclipse in Turkey. The thought of missing that is worse than the painful nightmare I’m living in.
I fly to Istanbul just six weeks after that night. The first three weeks in Turkey are still recovery time, it takes more than four months to find any kind of normality again after the dizziness stops. I’m mostly very grateful for my amazing family for looking after me again. I knew I would be fine once they knew I wasn’t.
I’ve been walking for just ten minutes dragging my suitcase through the streets of Moscow and already I’m lost. I printed out the directions Victoria gave me to find her apartment building, but correlating the map and the reality before me seems impossible.
 I think I’m on Victoria’s street, I’ve tried to follow her directions about archways and building numbers and after another ten minutes of walking around the area not being sure what building I’m in front of, I have to call her. Russian apartment buildings have a strange logic of their own, which is worse since I’m not used to navigating within any kind of large apartment building development. Like most Australians, I’ve always lived in houses or small blocks of flats. These arrangements of huge rectangular monoliths, dropped on the landscape like Tetris bricks, baffle me. I can’t say there was ever a clear development strategy for their placement and since Tetris was written by a Russian, perhaps it was originally designed to assist with this process. In any case, it takes another few minutes on the phone to establish that I am close to her apartment block, but on the wrong side of it and at the next building. This being rectified, I see her waving at me from her balcony a minute later.
 Russian apartments are deceptive creatures. I think the maintenance schedule on them finished at some point twenty or thirty years ago, so it’s normal for them to look incredibly run down. The elevators are genuine seventies (or maybe earlier) technology, with hard buttons that stay in and pop out when you reach the floor. I often find myself saying a quiet prayer whilst moving in them and sometimes take the stairs down for…ummm…the exercise. Victoria is standing in her doorway with her huge smile warming the whole building. She closes the vast and heavy outer door behind me and turns the deadlock closed. This is always where the outside of the buildings, right up to the apartment doorway, give way to a routinely lovely interior. It’s quite normal for every outer door to be different or customised in some way; it’s the first taste you have of the personalities living within. Victoria shares the two bedroom apartment with another woman and ushers me first into her bedroom to leave my suitcase and then to the kitchen for some tea. The Russians have a permanent affair with this drink; it’s everywhere. She tells me she has a student coming soon and it’s quite normal for them to be in and out all day. Sometimes she meets them somewhere else too, so I will have to check with her to find when I can get back into the apartment later.
“I’m just planning to be out wandering in the city again today. Is there anything else you think I should check out?”
“The Novedevichy Convent has the most beautiful cathedral, you have to see it! The graveyard next door is interesting too, but the convent is wonderful.”
The way she looks when she speaks about the convent tells me I absolutely have to visit. The graveyard next to the Convent is the resting place of more famous Russians than you could poke a tree at whilst suffering some kind of spasmodic fit and I already plan to visit Boris Yeltsin’s grave there.
“Oh and I should warn you about Russian beers too”, she continues.
I look up with absolute interest, exploring the beers here is definitely on my agenda.
“You can get the European ones you already know, but they’re all made inside Russia and they’re all terrible. The only good ones are the real Russian beers like Baltika and Nevskoy.”
I nod sagely and try to commit everything to memory. Well the bit about staying off European beers anyway, this aligns perfect with my evil plans for Russian beery mayhem.
As Victoria starts to become absorbed in her laptop and work, I move back to her bedroom to sort out my suitcase and sleeping gear. She has laid out a thin foam mattress with blankets and a sheet. I’ve also brought a compact air mattress, not the self-inflating foam type; a real one with long tubes that fill with air to lift you about three centimetres off the floor. It rolls down to the same size as the compact, ultra-thin sleeping bag I brought to match it, so I put all that together to form a very comfortable corner of her room. As I prepare my small backpack for a day of wandering, I remember she has a plate of chocolate biscuits on her kitchen table. In the interests of spreading a little Australian culture I happen to have packets of Tim Tams with me to share the joy of a Tim Tam Slam with my hosts. This is when you bite off diagonally opposite corners and use the resulting creation as a straw in a cup of hot coffee. The result is the coffee melts the inside of the biscuit, giving you a few seconds from the moment you feel the coffee reach your lips, to when you must place the whole biscuit in your mouth and luxuriate in a foodgasm. The chocolate shell of the biscuit only lasts a short time after the rest has dissolved, so if you’re too slow it will cover your hands in sticky, chocolatey napalm. The molten coffee, chocolate, sugar and wafers create an altogether addictive experience. So I explain all this to Victoria as I hand her a packet to try it with. I also find myself picking up a glass to fill with water from the tap before stopping myself again.
“Can you drink this water?” I ask, pointing to the tap.
“No. Not at all. You must boil that first, you can’t drink the water in any Russian city.” Thus informed, I put down the glass and resolve to buy more bottled water when I’m out during the day.
“There’s a bottle in the fridge if you want some now”, Victoria adds.
“Thanks! Are you coming along to the Couchsurfing meetup tonight?” I ask hopefully while drinking a glass.
“I won’t be able to make it, but you should definitely go and meet more of the local guys”
“When should I be back here?”
“It doesn’t matter, really. You can be out until all hours, just give me a quick ring and I’ll let you back in the apartment when you want”. I feel a little surprised and happy, she had written this on her profile on the website, but it’s always good to hear it. I’m especially glad she’s happy with the kind of random wanderings I specialise in.
“Wow! Thanks for that, but I should be back before midnight I think. When does the Metro close?”
“Midnight’s fine, I’m normally awake past then anyway. Last trains are around one in the morning.”
“Thanks again, I’m so happy you’re relaxed about it.”
“Don’t worry, I know what it’s like to travel, you never quite know what’s going to happen and I like to party all night sometimes too! …but on Saturday morning the cleaner comes and you’ll have to be out of here for a few hours starting at ten.”
“No worries, I’ll catch you tonight!”
“I hope you enjoy Moscow!”
 After watching Victoria’s lips during the conversation I begin my fascination with how russians speak. They have the most amazingly agile lips. This provides a curious juxtaposition of happy activity within a usually stern, dour face.
She breaks the standard russian look with her smile and waves me goodbye with her free hand, the other still holding the cup of tea. With her words and smile in my head I wander into the warm streets. I’m feeling the sun on my back again and wondering if anyone will believe it’s hot enough for me to be working up a sweat just walking through the Russian capital.
I rely a lot on my history with Couchsurfing to find me the best travel experience anywhere in the world. Couchsurfing is the website hub for a global community of travellers. The central idea is that you can stay with a local resident for free. You might be on a couch, the floor, a bed or even a tent in their backyard. It’s as different as the hosts and guests are different. The reason I was drawn to the group was to have a chance to meet and live with people from as many different countries and cultures as I can possibly manage. I first heard about it when I was travelling in Turkey, when I met an Australian guy in Cannakale. He had just spent three months travelling from Germany to Turkey through four countries and couchsurfed every night. He would do a search on nearby towns for a someone who was able to host him and would then travel to the first person who responded on the site. I loved the idea and when I got back to Australia I started hosting people.
 Instant hat party; My house in Perth, Australia
I’ve had innumerable amazing, beautiful and always enlightening experiences with the people that have stayed with me. I’ve now been a member of the Couchsurfing global community for over three years and in that time I’ve hosted more than one hundred and fifty people from a wide variety of countries: From Canada to Vietnam, from Taiwan to Jamaica, from England to China, from Ireland to Estonia, from New Zealand to Germany, from South Africa to Malaysia and from America to Finland.
 Relaxing Russians; Ekaterinburg, Russia
So if you want a way to feel like you’re travelling when you’re busy working, you know where to go. I love the experience of having these people staying with me all the time, it keeps giving you the global experience that is normally only available when you’re travelling.
It doesn’t stop with hosting though…in my time in Perth I met and invited to my home for parties people from Armenia, Italy, France, Serbia, Iceland, Pakistan, Croatia and many others. When I say ‘global community’ I really mean it. Perth has a thriving local couchsurfing community. Every two weeks there is a meeting in a pub in the middle of the city for all the travellers and locals to meet, talk and enjoy each other’s company.
 Marrying Cute German Beer; Perth, Australia
We’ve had local people who have heard about it come along to find out who these crazy people are; in under a month they’re hosting their first surfers. We also have travelers arrive at the meetup with their backpacks hoping to find someone who can host them. They always do. The community is extremely open to everyone who is open to this one crazy idea; I will let a virtual stranger from another country stay in my home.
So how can this be safe? ….I hear you asking in disbelief. Of course, any community can have the worst people try to abuse it. However, the answer is in the reference system that applies to everyone with a profile on the website. You make your profile giving as much information about yourself as you can so prospective hosts and surfers will know what kind of person you are. After someone surfs with you, or you surf with them, you can both leave references for each other. If someone does something bad, you can tell the rest of the community what they did. They cannot remove your reference, so it is completely free for you to tell the truth. If someone gets a negative reference, it becomes very hard for them to have another surfer or find another host. If they get three negative references, their profile gets a red tag at the top warning about this. The community protects itself from those people who behave badly. I’ve now met over one thousand couchsurfers from around the world and only ever met two people like this. One is no longer a part of the community and the other has three negative references. That’s 0.001%. You don’t get such good odds meeting people in your local pub.
 Santarchy Fun; Perth, Australia
I’ve now also surfed with (stayed with) many people across Russia and China now. There is no doubt in my mind that I can visit the most foreign and remote countries and find some couchsurfers who will welcome me and make my stay unforgettable. Many of the people I’ve met are now good friends of mine; next year I will travel to a wedding in South Africa of a particularly amazing couple that I had the good fortune to meet in sunny Perth….
 Sharing the Total Eclipse; Shanghai, China
and if you’re worried about your family at home, there’s a special sign for people who are happy to host families travelling or if you are only happy with people who know you have a 14 month old child. Couchsurfers are the quality kind of good people you will want your family to share their time with.
So how does it work exactly? When I’m hosting, I normally ask guests to bring music, to share cooking with me, to sit with a bottle of good wine and talk into the night about our lives, the world and the communities we come from. Every host is different and will ask for different things, but the only idea you need remember is: How do I be a good guest? The answer is: How would you behave staying with a close friend?
 Taiwanese Rodeo Action; El Caballo, Australia
Help around the house, take them out, share your time freely and take pleasure in the experience. Some hosts wont let you do anything, but you can always leave a small present when you leave. I normally carry little souvenirs from Australia to remind my hosts they have a reason to come and visit my country. Above all, talk to your host often…the chances are you will have something in common and be able to share your love with your new friend from another part of the global community we live in today. Does it get any better than that?
 The evil peg goblin strikes again! Perth, Australia
I wake up with the domes of St Basil’s Cathedral on my mind and decide I’d better go back and see the inside. Outside the day is warm and sunny, so I decide that the best way to get there is on a boat. I start walking to the nearby river where my guide says I can catch one, but I’m not ready for the impact the russian foreign ministry building has on me. It is one of seven Stalinist gothic wedding cake buildings here in sunny Moscow. They are apparently known as the seven sisters and must have been built during one of Stalin’s lowest moments of self esteem, since they are intense, massive, imposing and entirely unforgettable. They are all similar, but this one did something to me every time I came close to it. I have a vague memory it was used as the building front in the film ‘Brazil’, the really imposing horror story public service building. Seriously, it looks like it should be hanging around in a dark alley sporting a golden tooth and twirling a club. A feeling of menace exudes from it, the building sinks your spirits just walking past it. It’s like hope went there to be tortured to death by fear and paranoia. Even the ex-KGB headquarters doesn’t have this kind of feeling about it. Which isn’t to say that the ex-HQ on Lubyanka square doesn’t have its own horror. It has a terrible calm about it, like a black hole you disappear into without a trace and no scream could ever emerge. It’s just that the foreign ministry building would knock at your door in the middle of the night and shoot you in the stomach for fun.
  The ferry jetty is easy to find and for a fee I can spend an hour and a half on a cruiser drifting along the Moskva River through the middle of Moscow. What I don’t appreciate at first is that I can also buy a beer onboard and just kick back to let the city drift past me. After all the walking in my first two days, this is perfection. I’m amused to find they don’t actually stock any Russian beers on the boat, so I end up enjoying some fine products of the Czech Republic instead. As I relax on the upper deck I watch industrial buildings give way to beautiful parkland and one beer give way to the next. I pass Gorky Park without a care in the world, or any real desire to actually visit it; I am happy to enjoy a relaxing afternoon letting Moscow flow gently by. Sparrow Hills arrives all too quickly and I decide to leave the ferry and climb the hill. Victoria had mentioned how beautiful the the view is on a sunny day. I pass by the ski ramp that’s setup next to the jetty. Apparently in winter this is a huge attraction, but in summer it looks as out of place as fur hats on an Australian beach. On the way up the hill I walk through the very beautiful ecological gardens. The pathways lead you through verdant forest replete with lush undergrowth and flower patches. The bright, warm sunlight trickles through the forest canopy to cover the ground with gently moving speckled patches of golden warmth. I feel like I’m in some kind of European fairy tale and would not have been surprised to see a little girl wearing a red hood skipping down the pathway with a basket of goodies for her grandmother. I wonder what kind of wolves would await her in a Russian forest and start picturing the foreign ministry building wearing a fur coat.
I see the gothic wedding cake building of the Moscow State University building perched atop the hill in all its monolithic glory. I begin to wonder if some modern architect would design a building that looked like this, but with huge statues of a man in a tuxedo and a woman in her wedding gown on top of it and a giant slice cut out of it. Now that’d be real art-chitecture. Naturally there’s a nest of pavement shops around the Sparrow Hills lookout and there’s even a bride and groom having their pictures taken with the view of Moscow in the background. It really is a spectacular view of the city itself, with the river in the foreground, the stadium across the water and the rest of the city stretching into the distance. I quietly thank Victoria for inspiring me to be up here on such a great day.
   I eventually descend the hill again and get back on the ferry, which I have to pay for again. Apparently you can ride it all the way to the end of it’s path or get off at one of the many stops along the way, but the ticket works only once. I enjoy floating past the scenery and notice a tall building that looks like a flying saucer has landed on its roof. We pass by it and I take photos of it with the building in front of it that has a giant treble clef mounted on its domed roof. This must just be the area for cool roof ornaments; every building should have one. I then spend the rest of the ferry trip taking more pictures of Moscow in this wonderful afternoon light. There’s enough cloud cover to stop it from being overwhelming, but it has such a crisp, clear quality that everything seems somehow more sharply real. The golden spires of the Christ the Redeemer cathedral positively glow golden and white in a city of brown and smudged. I can’t say I’m in any way prepared for the most shockingly overdone statue of Peter the Great I think could ever have been conceived. I suppose Moscow just wants a piece of the Peter story and history as well, but….I mean….having a rostral column with the boat prows sticking out of it would have been enough…they have two of them in St Petersburg being lighthouses….but then they stick an enormous boat on top of it…with an even more enormous statue of Pete himself the size of the frickin mast…and there’s a city at his feet…on the boat…..okay, they’re trying to summarize the magnificent career of this crazy epileptic that shaped modern Russia more than any other individual…but the effect of it is almost comical …So anyway, after I take a few hundred pictures of it, we move on down the river and finally float past the Kremlin. I see a glimpse of St Basil’s from the river side before jumping off the boat to find my way inside..
The cathedral is a glorious building with many beautiful frescoes and the central room is especially hard to leave. A male voice choir is in attendance and they are singing seriously beautiful Russian hymns. Hearing their voices in this room gives me a musicgasm as I become absorbed into the resonant richness that at once calms and lifts you on its gentle persistence. Each time they finish a song nobody moves or makes a noise until one of the singers breaks the spell first The music leaves me feeling serene and blissful; calm as a hindu cow. I make a visit to the souvenir shops carefully placed at every possible corner inside the building and completely fail to find some souvenirs of the single towers turned into ice-creams, back scratchers, massagers and ummm….delicate massagers. As I wander back into Red Square I feel that the view of the onion domes from the outside is truly matched by the art and music on the inside; it really is damn good even though everybody says it is.
“Bir chok sok bira lutfen”, I pronounce carefully.
“What?”
“Yeah, that’s how you ask for a very cold beer in Turkish.”
Tanya giggles then continues,
“So that’s the thing you can say in seven different languages?”
“Yup.. think it might be more now…but it’s been the most useful thing to learn for some reason.”
“What about saying ‘I love you’?”
“Oh I can say that in a few languages too, but it’s not really my style to walk up to random foreign women and tell them I love them. Just too painfully fake for me.”
“I can say it in five languages I think.”
“You actually speak five languages Tanya, so you could say it and then write poetry about your man in his language of choice.”
She looks confused and embarrassed for a while, then starts again.
“Well..maybe it’s true, I hadn’t thought about it. But I’m learning Finnish now, so it will be six soon.”
“So you like finnish men then?”
She cast her eyes down and her face blushes a little.
“Yes, there’s one in particular I like a lot”
“You think he’s cute, so you’re going to learn his language?”
“Ummm…..something like that…Do you think he will like me?”
“Tanya, you’re beautiful, incredibly smart and have a wickedly cute smile. He’d have to be blind or stupid to not like you.”
She shifts uncomfortably and looks out of the train window for a moment.
“So how do you say ‘I love you’ in finnish?”
“Umm… oh it would be ‘minä rakastan sinua’…it literally translates as ‘I’ ‘love’ and ‘you’.”
Something twinges in my mind and I can feel a surge of laughter building in me.
“Wait a minute…hold up there…so the finnish word for ‘love’ is rakastan?”
“Umm..yes… the verb is rakkaus and the conjugation is right… so you can just say ‘rakastan sinua’ and it works.”
“You don’t think it sounds like a country somewhere in central asia?”
She pauses and her head falls to one side as she considers it. A smile grows slowly on her face.
“Maybe you’re right…it does…maybe somewhere near pakistan or kyrgyzstan.”
“But this is the country of love. Every time you say it’s name you’re saying ‘I love'”, I add. I’m enjoying the idea immensely.
“It is! It is!”, Tanya erupts excitedly and we both laugh hysterically for a while. Tanya looks up at me and asks,
“So where should this country be exactly?”
“Hmmm…. I think it exists wherever love does. A country without land to get attached to.”
“It’s a good point.”
Tanya’s features darken for a while. She is from Serbia and grew up there during the vicious war in the nineties. I think she could teach the world something about how much damage war does to a country’s children, but you’d hardly know talking to her every day. She’s normally filled with a bright, happy, positive energy that is highly addictive. She grabs my arm and continues,
“So how would you get a into Rakastan?”
“I think you just have to be in love to get the visa.”
“With another person?”
“Hmmm…good point…not necessarily…I think if you feel love in your heart it’s enough. So it could be love for the world, or a plant, or a poem… just the feeling is what’s important.”
“I want to go there!”, she announces wistfully.
“Well, I just declared myself president, seeing as how I discovered it, so I’d be happy to process your visa application for you now.”
She laughs and pretends to take her heart out and hold it gently in her hands.
“Here you go, is there enough love for my visa?”
“I’m not sure. Tell me about your finnish boy.”
She blushes again and looks down at her hands. She shifts uncomfortably again before looking into the distance and talking quietly.
“He’s lovely…so cute and sweet and he will be a doctor too, so we have everything in common and he’s just…wonderful.”
She turns slowly to look at me as she talks and her eyes have the soft, affectionate light in them that only comes with love.
“Welcome to Rakastan Miss Tanya! I hope you enjoy your stay here and you can always talk to our local guides if you need anything.”
“Thank you! So where can I find a guide?”
“Well…right now I’m the only one, but maybe you’d like to start the training program to become a Rakastan guide?”
“I think I want to be the postmaster instead.”
 The Postmaster General of Rakastan
“Well..okay Miss Postmaster General of Rakastan, I hope you love your new job! … but why do you want to be the Postmaster?”
“I think it means every message of love will come by me to get to its destination.”
“You perve!”
She bursts out laughing and shakes her head furiously.
“No! ..not like that.. it’s just good to know there’s love in the world and the messages are proof.”
An announcement sounds above our heads that we’ve arrived at our station.
“So how do you get around in Rakastan exactly?”, she asks.
“On wings of pure love?”, I offer, unconvinced.
“On the back of a big furry bear”, Tanya replies.
“No! No! I’ve got it! You have giant penguins carry you around in their flippers to keep you safe and warm.”
We both giggle at the image for a few moments.
“I think penguins would be perfect”, Tanya concludes.
I can’t help but agree and ponder what tasks to begin first in my new role as the leader of Rakastan: The Country of Love.
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I explain to Victoria that I will take my suitcase to the Sunday Session party and then go straight from there to the inter-city train station. She suddenly realises and exclaims,
