Stories from the North of the East (part 3)

For the final part of this trilogy I'm going back to St. Petersburg. On paper, not live. We did so much, it's hard to pick a few highlights. Celebrating Victory day on the 9th of may, when people dress up their cars as tanks, carry tank-balloons and real tanks are parked next to mobile toilets. Shopping for Converse, having a drink at the Spy-cafe (picture swings on chains instead of barstools), discovering Spaceinvader street art at Lennon street, visiting Peterhof's fountains and St Catherine's palace. Ana found the palace extremely dissapointing: "I thought it was much bigger, when I was smaller". The golden ballroom with mirrors, wooden floors and decorative ceilings did impress me, even at 32. Breakfast for 150 Rubl (3,70) at the Nevsky Grand Hotel, which to us included secretive giggles and an (illegal) lunch package. Watching 'Russia's next Top Model', from out bunkbed. Being surroundede and questioned by a bunch of schoolchildren who seem to have never seen an English speaking foreigner before.
Of course I also went to the Hermitage. It was beautifull, artsy, jadajadajada. I loved the ceilings and the floors, which are gorgeously decorated. But at one point, I was just done. Only 5% is on display, wich means that 95% is in storage somewhere, and a negligible percentage of the collection is abroad, hanging in other museums. The paintings, sculptures, murals, vases were bought in a time of war when the people of Russia were either starving or fighting for their tsars. People who would hardly see any food in real life, and not even on a painting by Jan Fyt (room 245) To me, it all just seemed wrong. The funniest part about the Hermitage were the old ladies sitting on the chairs, who were guarding the halls. Whilst praying, yawning, phone-checking and nodding off they were boring themselves to an early death.

Another unforgettable experience was grocery shopping, Sovjet Style. The first supermarket near our hostel had empty shelves. The only place I had seen so many empty shelves before, was in Ikea. The fridges didn't cool the goods, they seemed to be heating the 2 bottles of Coke that were left in them. Trying to buy anything was impossible, because even if you would find an item, the cashiers didn't have any change. This meant that the other supermarket in the street, had queues one can only find in Russia. The third supermarket had stocked shelves and no queues; so far, so good. I picked up a carton of orange juice, when Ana forced me to put it down. What went wrong?
- you choose the goods, which all have their own number,
- supermarketman tells you the number and you have to memorize it,
- you tell the numbers to the supermarketlady at the till,
- you pay,
- with your receipt you go to all the cashiers again, who give you the goods; one by one.
Cumbersome, right? But apparently it's good for your memory.

The trainjourney to Peterhof fountains was also eerie. It was delayed for obscure reasons and the last time I sat on wooden benches, I was in Thailand. But the craziest part was the men and women who kept walking by, offering us all kinds of stuff, in a variaty of combinations. Trainshedules (5x), ice-cream and water (4x), toiletrefresher, mini-footballs, pastry, tights, crisps, waterbottles, pens. A total of 12 people came by carrying, combining and selling these vendibles. Actually, the craziest part was the lunatic who kept warning fellow-travelers for Armageddon on the 21st of may, when all drunks and junks would be killed. To him this was enough reason to hoist up the lowcut jeans of a young girl leaving the train, who in his eyes was probably doomed with this public display of inappropriate behaviour.
Of course, the 21st of may came and went without any problems and I was already home, glueing holiday-pictures in an album of this marvelous journey to the North of the East.

Intermezzo 3: die Fledermaus

"I bloody hate Classic FM." Any performance, especially a classic, that starts with that phrase is worth an award. After 9 days of Operadagen, watching 6 shows and writing 2 reviews, it would be wrong to leave out my opinion on the funniest thing I've seen all week. Make that all year.
Die Fledermaus by Johann Straus jr, performed by Opera Della Luna is a gem. Luckily it was nothing like I expected. When I found out it was 2.5 hours, I allready planned my escape during intermission. I anticipated 150 minutes of non-stop opera-singing on a folding chair. But nothing of the sort, it was an operette, which is more like a funny musical, or in this case a good old British soap-opera. Even the red pluche love seat tip-up seats weren't too uncomfortable.
Back to the stage where a group of well-trained singers are dancing, acting and singing their asses off. The story is funny and contemporary, it's hard to believe that it was written in 1874. Well, the original version anyway, because I'm pretty sure they didn't have Brad Pitt, X-factor, Versace and text-messages back then. Stale marriage, rehab-clinics, parties, medling ex-lovers, revenge and jealousy are of all ages, and those are the key ingredients of die Fledermaus.
The stage changes three time in accordance to the three acts; from a tigerprint filled livingroom of the Eisenstein family, through a polarbear-infused partyroom at Orlofsky's to the psychedelic office space of Dr Frank, head of the rehab clinic.
The story is too long, twisty-turny to explain here, but imagine this scene: two Brits, pretending to be French, bothering the public by walking right through the audience and having the following conversation:
- it's magnifique,
- it's terrafique,
- it's, how we the Parisians say, 'periferique'
When they notice the uptitles (instead of subtitles) on the closed curtains they refer to the rehabcenter (afkick kliniek) as 'asskick clinic' and you can go there with alcohol, cocaine and translation problems. To me, that's class. The show is every alcoholics wet dream, since a lot of the songs sing to the praise of Pinot Noir, or even better, Champagne. Champagne is the always the answer, according to die Fledermaus. Looking at the Della Luna's tourlist, Rotterdam was the odd one out in a whole list of British based towns, this makes it extra special. This was awesome. Encore! Champagne!

Intermezzo 2: review Vivaldi LP2

Here's a little secret; I like Vivaldi's four seasons. I got through a large part of my examperiods during my social work studies on Vivaldi and other classics. Cause there are some things Rage Against the Machine, Live, Alanis Morrisette and Pearl Jam can't help you with, while Nigel Kennedy on violin can. So when I was asked to once more escort the ITI-group to the Las Palmas 2 to attend a performance called 'Caged Vivaldi; the Four Seasons, but different', I thought, "Why not?".

Well, here's why not. Sometimes you need to leave things alone. Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring are fine as they were.
Just as I started to wonder, what exactly is different in this show, a guy sat down behind the piano and started 'playing' it. Now I am not a musician (repeat: NOT a musician), but I do know when I want to run for earplugs. This was it. It sounded horrible, like a 2-year old hitting random keys with a toycar. Accompanying it with dancers/actors who pretend to be the appointed season didn't help either, although Eric de Kuyper was his charming grandpa-self. After autumn, I couldn't help but thinking, 'Oh lord. Two more seasons'. The violinist and harpsichord (thanks Google Translate, it's criminal, but the English word for klavecimbel still isn't household-material) made up for the piano-bits. I especially enjoyed the dramatic bits from summer and winter, the ones usually know for their commercial purposes.
At one point it got so bad, I started having imaginary conversations with the bearded guy next to me. I talk during tv-shows, films, etcetera, very bad habit. One group of friends almost banned me from their tuesday cinema activities and threatened to sit elsewhere.
Me: "if this was a movie, I'd fall asleep"
Bearded guy: "please don't. I'm yawning too"
Me: "I could be in bed right now, watching Dexter"
Bearded guy: "cool, what season are you in?"
Me: "It's still autumn... I mean 3, episode 9. Miguel is going crazy"
Beraded guy: -spoiler alert-
After a while, I couldn't contain myself anymore and actually started whispering in his direction.
Me: "I feel like giving up my seat for this old guy pretending to be Winter"
Bearded guy: "I think it's part of the show"
Me: "we should play along. Do you think he can improvise?"
Bearded guy giggles a bit and shakes his head before staring back to the light blue harpsichord. (I like using the word harpsichord, lord knows when the next opportunity will be to use the word harpsichord.)

When the best part of an evening is the conversation that happened mainly in your head, it's a no-go. Vivaldi is like going to H&M, solid and nice, you know what you're gonna get. It never get's old, even after almost 300 years. But if you want to listen to it, just put on a Nigel Kennedy cd or search it on Spotify. The piano bits and the Cage (4 seating areas, divided by curtains, where the public moved into after each season) did not add anything to the show. If anything, it derogated my Vivaldi-experience.

Intermezzo - review The Air We Breathe

If you are a loyal reader, you were probably expecting the final stories on my journey to Russia. Sorry, that's up next, sometimes life happens in between me and my blog-plans.
This week I was lucky enough to land a temporary paid job at the Operadays (Operadagen) in Rotterdam as box-office employee / informationpoint ("I'm so sorry, but for these tickets you have to go the REAL box-office on your left"). A paid job includes a well-needed routine and the added bonus is that I'm being fed (dinner at cafe Floor for a week). And off course, I get to see some performances.

Yesterday I went to 'The Air We Breathe'. It was a total guess, because a) opera is not my genre, b) the poster doesn't give much clues on what to expect and c) the review in the festival-paper wasn't much of a help either.
The plan to cycle to the Maassilo alone was interrupted when the organisation needed someone to go on the bus with a group of guests who travelled especially to Rotterdam for the Operadagen-festival. Sure, I'll do it. Someone whispers to me that they are important. I'll keep that in mind, but if you have a group of people on a bus, it doesn't matter if they are 10-year-olds going on a schooltrip or ITI-vips on their way to a theatre.

We arrived a bit too late due to traffic. Pleasantly unexpected, the performance starts as soon as you walk into the catacombic cellars of the Maassilo. It's damp and the concrete walls are dimly lit. All of us sit spread around an area that reminds me of children in a playground-sandbox; scattered yet together. To my surprise the audience is expected to sing along. This is fun. It reminds me of Ben Folds' Army, so I like the idea of a capella audience-involvement. (watch and wait for it, 2:32). The singing does distract me from listening to the real talents though.
The storyline escapes me, but that's not the point of opera anyway, it's the emotion that counts. Ninety minutes of praising sounds, tunes, singing and vocal chords was a bit too long, I think. I'm not the only one; at 20:55 the first guy gives up and leaves his platform. It's around this time that I'm getting confused on whether to sing 'hoo aa ooo' or 'hoe whaaa hoe'. Than a young, happy chap catches my eye, and I realise it's Merlijn Twaalfhoven. I just got conducted by Merlijn Twaalfhoven! The Air we Breathe is full of little surprises, mainly in the shape of fellow audience members who turn out to be a part of it, when they stand up from their clique and sing their socks of. All of a sudden the huge amount of people make sense, because I know how many persons we should have inside according to ticketsales.
The next 'aha' moment is when I spot the light-projection that's moving on the white curtains; they remind me of clouds passing by. Now take a look at that poster.
Being here is like lying in a field (gras, yellow flowers, sandbox), watching clouds and doing nothing more but breathing.
This is probably why I come out of the Maassilo incredibly mellow. I had had a tough day. Rotterdam can be extremely depressing on a rainy day in may. Especially when you've been looking for a job for two months and just catalogued your 19 rejections. Sometimes all you need is a tourbus full of foreigners and an enthousiastic busdriver with a microphone to sprinkle some Rotterdam=magic-dust in your eyes. Top this off with a beautifull performance (read: sound-experience) and you're good to go again.

Why should you go see this: The performance is really special and seeing Merlijn Twaalfhoven live in action is worth so much more than 16 euro. The Maassilo is awesome and 'the Air We Breathe' makes opera approachable. I left the show completely calm and Zen. The ITI-group was enthousiastic too, I also got them home safe and sound.
Why not: 90 minutes is a bit long, but we accidentally solved that problem by being a bit too late.
Go see and experience for yourself.

Stories from the North of the East (part 2)

The second part of this blog is devoted to Moscow. Ana was more than willing to skip Moscow, but you cannot go to Russia and ignore it's capital. And, Ana will confirm this, it wasn't bad at all. She warned that the city would be coldhearted, unfriendly for tourists and just not nice to people in general. Nobody was more surprised than her when our first encounter on the subwaystation was a young girl asking us if we needed some help finding directions. That was after a more than pleasant trainjourney from Minsk; a train where the carpet in the hallway is covered with carpet (to protect the carpet, probably).
Funny story; Ana was buying the sleepertrain-tickets in Minsk and the railway personal wanted my middle name.
Ana: "She doesn't have one".
RWperson: "How come she doesn't have a middle name?"
Ana: "Because she's Dutch, she just doesn't have a middle name. It's not in her passport."
RWperson: "But we have to fill in something...?"
Needless to say, the section remained empty, but according to Bellarussian regulation my proper name would be Therese Jan-Jaap Klok.
She also had to fight to get us bottom-beds. They were there, they were available, they didn't cost anything else, but it was just uncommon to give a duo two bottombeds. Lucky for me Ana is very determined.
The best part of Moscow, was the 'Vassily' Basilic; saint Basil's Church. It was magic, you only see that fairytale building for the first time once. Laying my eyes on it, looking up from my tourist-guide, with it's gorgeous round domes ('raindrops' I said, 'onions' Ana calls them), small towers, colourfull decorations and religic icons to finish it off.
So, we got lucky with the journey, the people, the hostel (Fresh Hostel), the weather and the subway. As in: we didn't get lost in that spiderweb of 12 different lines and 185 stations.
We only stayed in Moscow for two days and one night, but I got to see a good part of the city; Red Square, Kremlin, 3 McDonalds, Arbat street, loads of subwaystations and their subsequent pieces of art, the changing of the guards and heaps of schoolchildren imitating those guards, kicking their legs up in the air. We went to VDNCh, I didn't put some consonants in random order here, the park is actually called VDNCh. Please skip this hellhole of a carnivalesque fair. I should have read the description in my travel guide better; I skimmed the text, picking up words like; glory, architecture, fountains and youths. If I read more closely I would have read: misplaced glory of the past, kitchy architecture, flashy fountains and masses of skateboarding youths whizzing by. Well, it was clear from the start that the people who wrote the travelguide, which describes both Moscow and St-Petersburg, clearly were more fond of the latter. We spent our last (and second) night in Moscow on the busy Leningradsky trainstation, amidst hundreds of other fellow-travellers. We waited there for several hours, entertaining ourselves with music, Keith Richards' Life, machine-coffee and Russian Sudoku, before boarding the sleepertrain to St-Petersburg.
Moscow was awesome, but I was in for more treats in St-Petersburg, coming up in part 3.

Stories from the North of the East (part 1)

For a long time I wanted to go to Russia. "Why Russia?" people ask me when I tell them this. "Why skiing?/Greece?/France" I ask them in return, because, why not Russia? But I know the answer, ever since I saw a picture of the Vassily Church in a children's book, I wanted to see it in real life. Twenty-seven years down the line, I made it happen.
My journey started with a bonus-trip to Riga, since AirBaltic postponed my flight to Minsk with one day. Hotel, taxi-transfer and complimentary coffee at the airport were all paid for. Me being a sucker for freebees, was gratefull for the opportunity. Riga is Baltic for beginners; the capital of Latvia can be seen in a couple of days. The city centre is so compact, that I was able to cross of the complete map with places worth seen according to the sightseeing map I picked up from the taxi. So that's your basic churches, museums, (war)monuments, fountains, a bridge with locks, a sparkly Christmas-statue, parks, flowermarket, ghosthouses and a TGI Friday's. I know, but when this girl craves a burger, there's no way she's having a salad. The funniest thing was hearing the Latvian version of Marco Borsato's 'de meeste dromen zijn bedrog' on the radio before taking a half-empty Fokker 50 to Minsk.

Minsk was alright. My friend Ana lives there and we stayed in an appartment in an area called Shabany. That's not in the Lonely Planet. Minsk doesn't have many tourists visiting, the amount of red tape and paperwork might have something to do with that. The political situation isn't very attractive either; Belarus is known as the last dictatorship of Europe. Artists are called on to cancel concerts and boycot Belarus to avoid enriching the president. Also, the recent subway-bombing just adds sadness instead of security. Ana showed me the main sights worth seeing; the revolution-square, a lot of Communistic memorabilia, KGB building, state-run shops and fountains. The city is clean, wide and tidy. Minsk surprisingly had a good 'going out'-atmosphere, and it was in the Stravinski bar that I discovered the joy of 'hot cocktails'. We went to two supercute bars called 'Old Minsk' and 'London'. The funniest part about 'London' was the postcards from Milan on the wall and the lack of English translations on the menu. But if I have to choose one thing that was the most special of Minsk, it was attending the Chinese tea party.
Picture this. Me and my guide for one day, Alec, meet up with one of Alec's friends. A tall guy with a ponytail who doesn't speak English and eats his icecreams two at a time. We enter a post-war flat without lighting in the stairway, so I have to hold on to the wooden rail to feel where I'm going. The door is unlocked, maybe because the appartment looks out on the former KGB-building. But maybe not. Our shoes stay in the hall and I'm given a pair of mens slippers. The three of us sit down in a tiny, Sixties style kitchen where our teamaster puts the kettle on. An oldschool kettle and a brandnew MacBook Air in the same kitchen. I'm signalled to follow the two men to the living/bedroom where I see the sweetest thing I ever witnessed in a male house. It's a small table covered with everything one could possibly need for a Chinese tea-ceremony; small porcelain cups, small teapots, a bonsai-tree, Lu Yu (the Saint of tea), and pillows on the floor to sit on. For the next two hours we drink tea and watch our host pour water on leaves, turn cups upside down (to release the flavour), brush the pot (no reason, just to get our attention) and display more tealeaves than I have seen in an average Chines supermarket. It was awesome, but needless to say, I had to pee a lot in the nighttrain to Moskow...


source: http://www.data.minsk.by/belarusnews/032011/344.html
I plan on writing more about the situation in Belarus in my criminological blog www.therighttrace.nl.

To Flee (naar Vlie :) )

Vlieland gets lost in translation, so there is pun intended in the title of this blog. I was honored to be a part of the Easter-fest that took place on a tiny island in the north of the Netherlands. The young festival of 'into the great wide open' decided it was a good idea to spent the holiday weekend on Vlieland, in the appreciated company of good bands, splendid cooks, charming kite-builders and befriended volunteers. It's a seven hour journey (eight if you travel back via Meppel, Lelystad and Utrecht on your way to Rotterdam, but that's a whole other story), but as soon as you get on the boat (I said it was on an island, so yes, traveling involves a boat) even I relax. It forces even the most wound-up, busiest of people (like me) to chill out, feel the wind, smell the sea and drink some local licor. Vlieland can be seen as an escape from everyday life; to Flee or not to Vlie.
Now here's why Vlie is special, everything makes you smile. Example: when I was in the shower, two male campsite-workers where in the girls showers next to mine, singing. With chairs and cups of tea. I'm not sure what Rihanna and Jesus Christ Superstar have to do with chairs and showers, but to them it was a plausible combination. I could have gotten annoyed that my privacy was violated and that in their 40 minute water-waste they used up all the hot water, but instead I giggled quietly in my cubicle. I was blessed that my first shift was behind the bar and I got to see la Boutique Fantastique and Alamo Race Track while pulling pints. And dance till 3 to the sacred tunes of DJ St. Paul. The next day I was surrounded by children with blue ice-creams and bright pink headphones, whilst staring lustingly (sorry Hook) at Swedish bearded men in white suits who fill the stage.

Breakfast was taken care of. As was lunch and dinner. It's cold, so I buy an extra fleece-blanket (and thermo-socks). I feel like going to the beach, so I climb a small dune and there's the sea, ready to give you a pair of wet feet (een kletspootje halen oftewel pootjekletsen). Nothing is a problem. No tears for me this time. Even the last time, when the ex broke up with me on that very same island, it was still a good holiday. There's sunsets, campfires, home-made kites and bunny-ears sticking out of the sand. Plus fulltime boyscouts at ones disposal, unfortunately there was not enough room in my backpack to take those home (Hook also vetoed it..). But they will be there in september in their coloured heavy-armed-bunny t-shirts with the full-on episode of ITGWO 2011, as will I.