Advertisement
Published: July 23rd 2013
Edit Blog Post
P1010029
Probably not the right road to Siberia Leaving Kazan I witnessed an example of the kind of thinking that exaggerates so many problems in life. I got a little lost and found myself on the wrong road out of town. Stuck in a traffic jam I looked at my map and saw an alternative route onto the highway that I wanted. Not wanting to go back to Kazan again through the traffic I decided to try the shortcut. As the road deteriorated I experienced a Catch-22 situation: the worse the road became, the less I wanted to turn back and cover the same ground again. I drove over the deteriorating road surface though a couple of villages and thought I had found the connecting road to take me to the highway. I was heartened to see a car coming out of the junction and turned onto the track. Feeling a bit like the frog who doesn’t jump out of a pan of slowly warming water, I bumped poor Agatha over a series of obstacles and ended up in a field of wild flowers, reminded of the quote by Hume that
‘A traveler of good judgment may mistake his way, and be unawares led into a wrong track; and while the road is fair before him, he may go on without suspicion and be followed by others but, when it ends in a coal pit, it requires no great judgment to know that he hath gone wrong,’. I turned the car around and retraced my route.
My next stop was
Oktyabrskiy (Octobertown), one of no fewer than about 50 towns and cities with that name in the Soviet Union, named in honour of the October revolution which, of course, took place in November. I’d been invited to stay there by Andrey, a student in St. Petersburg.
Oktyabrskiy is one of many oil-towns in the Republic of Bashkiria (another semi-autonomous Russian Republic). The grandest building in the city is the Technological Oil University and many inhabitants (such as Andrey’s father) work in the newer oil fields in the North of Russia. I got to meet Andrey’s mother, younger brother and sister. I always enjoy meeting Russian children; there seems something especially sweet to converse with children in a foreign language and I feel on a kind of even footing: some words I can explain to them, some they explain to me. During dinner Andrey’s 10-year-old brother Sasha, who studies
P1010035
A new friend a little English at school, looked at me quizzically and asked: ‘So, in England does everyone speak English? Isn’t that really difficult?’. Later his 5-year-old sister Yulia corrected me when I mispronounced the Russian word for strawberry. To her mother’s embarrassment and my delight, she made me repeat the word until I said it correctly, forcefully demonstrating the correct pronunciation!
Russia has something of a fairytale quality. People go to gather berries and mushrooms in the forest, vast wild areas of the country which don’t belong to anybody. Children are told to take care not to get lost (which is a significant danger, I’ve heard stories of people losing their way and spending several days wandering around) and in some areas you really have to be careful not to be eaten up by wolves or bears. As well as these real-life fairytales, there’s another childhood fantasy that is widely fulfilled – living in a hut in the woods. Most Russian families have access to a dacha, perhaps more of a shed on an allotment than a hut in the woods. But it has the same riotous living-in-nature quality. The word
dacha is derived from the Russian word for gift;
P1010042
Anatoly Mikhailovich (taken by Yulia) originally it was land given by the Tsar. In the Soviet Union each family was given 600 square metres of land, on which many people intensively cultivated produce to eat themselves or to sell.
Andrey’s
dacha has all the integral features: a large vegetable garden, a simple one room concrete building to live in during the summer built by his grandfather, an outside privy, neighbours on all sides and, of course, a banya. They have water, but not electricity; I was told the story of how it was stolen (the transformer and cables were ripped out to be sold for scrap). When we arrived there was actually a samovar smoking on the table and we had tea, then a walk, then more tea, then a barbecue and finished with a
banya. Andrey’s grandfather Anatoly Mikhailovich is a retired oil worker; he used to maintain the nodding donkeys that nestle in the fields and forests around the city.
Many Russian children spend their 3 month summer holidays with grandparents at the
dacha, running around barefoot in a wonderfully anarchic world of strawberries and ponds, half-broken furniture and half-eaten apples, rusty bicycles and endless adventures, catching lizards and being bitten
P1010013
How to play with a nodding donkey by mosquitoes, with bedroom, kitchen and garden rolled together in a mass of books, dishes, clothes and toys, all soiled and mixed up together. There’s the kind of freedom that few European children experience, enough to bring out anybody’s poetic side!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.098s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 15; qc: 29; dbt: 0.0475s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb