Uncle travelling Gjerulf

As I am writing this, I still haven’t had the opportunity to  upload my last post, so I guess both will be posted simultaneously.

On Saturday I googled churches in Kathmandu, and I got several hits. I chose KICC, Kathmandu International Christian Congregation, and found out where they have their Sunday service. After breakfast on Sunday, I checked out of my hotel room, and took a taxi to the church. It was a very friendly crowd, and lots of people came up to me, asked if I had been in town long, and whether it was my first time there. In the beginning of the service, people who were there for the first time were asked to stand up, and the microphone was passed around so everyone could introduce themselves!

The songs sung during the service were all English hymns that I didn’t know, but it was very nice. Nepal has a serious problem with electricity, and power comes and goes on a set schedule, a “load shedding schedule” in order to keep the grid from breaking down. The “children’s talk” was early on in the  service, and the guy leading the service was talking about how God has no “load shedding schedule”, his power is working everywhere, all the time! After the children’s talk, the children left, and went to Sunday school, and the pastor gave a sermon where he was talking about the situation in Gaza, and how to react to the Isreali attacks. His conclusion was that the history of God’s chosen people in the Old Testament shows that the Jews have a special position with God, but they are still held accountable for their acts, and that this is how he  figured we should look at the current situation.

After the service, some Norwegians came up to me, and it turned out I had found the place where the people from both the Norwegian Tibet Mission and Normisjon use to come on Sundays! I got to film some of them, and got a greeting from one of the Norwegian teenagers there to the teenagers in the congregation of Vardeneset back home. I was invited to join some of the younger people there for lunch at a café, and afterwards I went home with a couple of the Norwegians. I got to borrow a Nepali sim card from them, and the Lonely Planet guides to Nepal and to India! I then called up my CouchSurfing host Milan, who lives in Bhaktapur, 15 km from Kathmandu, and I went to meet him. The 15 kilometers here take about an hour by bus, because of traffic and horrible road quality. I have lived with his family for the last couple of nights.

His nephew Sujan showed me around Bhaktapur yesterday, and we went to a couple of temples in Kathmandu today. The hindu temple area of Pashupatinath was quite special, as there were pyres along the river there, where they were cremating people. before the cremations, they took the corpse to the river and washed the feet, poured some of the water down the throat of the corpse, and then covered it in an orange shroud, flower petals and some red powder. After the pyre was burned down, they flushed the ashes into the river, where street kids were rummaging through it to search for coins. A little downstream, people were washing their hair, themselves, and their clothes! There were holy cows walking around the temple grounds, and lots and lots of monkeys were playing and chasing each other on the streets, walls and rooftops. If anyone took out any food, the monkeys would follow them around until the food was gone, hoping for some scraps. There were people selling fruit, that was given out in small, black plastic bags, and the monkeys would also follow any black plastic bag around, knowing it might contain a snack coming their way!

The second temple we went to was Bodhnath, which is a Tibetan buddhist temple, the only one in the world where Tibetan buddhism is practiced freely, without oppression. The biggest change was that there were pictures of the CURRENT Dalai Lama in the shrines, and it was free of the throngs of military that dominated the monasteries and temples in Tibet… It also has the worlds largest stupa (chörten in Tibetan). There I could pass on some of the things I learned in Tibet to my “guide”, Sujan! The chörten is surrounded by prayer wheels, like everywhere in Tibet, all of them inscribed with the holy words “om mani padme hom.” For the first time, I saw white, western buddhists walking around in the red monks’ robes, or prostrating themselves in front of the chörten alongside the Tibetans!

Tomorrow will be a small festival, and Milan has invited me to stay and experience it. It is the first day of a new Nepali month (lunar calendar) and it apparently marks mid winter. It involves a bath, supposed to be taken in cold water, because in a legend, a monkey fell from a tree into the water, had a bath, and came a long way towards enlightenment as a result (or so I gather.) None of the people here will be taking a bath, however, because it is too cold, and Milan and his family has no running hot water. The water they do have is pumped from a well into a tank on the roof, whenever there happens to be electricity for the pump… It will, however, involve a feast with lots of special traditional Nepali food!

Tomorrow I should also book a place to trek from in Pokhara, and go to Kathmandu and give back the books and sim card. From Kathmandu, I’ve gathered that I should go west to Pokhara, for a two or three day hike in the mountains, and then head south to Royal Chitwan National park, where it is much warmer, and I can ride elephants on safari around the park, and see Bengal tigers, rhinos, monkeys, fresh water dolphins, crocodiles and Gharials. (The latter is described as a prehistoric slender beast of an animal, with a long snout full of bad teeth, living on a diet of river fish) From Chitwan I go to the border, and head into India, before my visa runs out on the 23rd. I’m considering taking a round trip of India before I head east, and if so my first stop there might be Agra, but I haven’t quite made up my mind yet.

January 10

I am sitting on the roof of my hotel, it’s 5:45 pm, the sun has just gone down, and the temperature dropped rapidly. It’s still a lot warmer than the temperatures I’ve had so far on my trip; I have gotten quite far south, but am at rather high elevation.

Yesterday morning we got up and went directly to the border. There we were joined by Marc, the Frenchman from the other day. The crossing went smoothly, and we could see considerable relief on Marc’s face as we’d gotten safely out of Tibet and China, and into Nepal. He is a journalist, and he’s been working on a project to document China’s oppression of Tibet. He was carrying a bag full of camera equipment, and a laptop full of hundreds of pictures of soldiers, police and official buildings in Tibet, and was hence REALLY lucky that the soldier at the x-ray machine looked away from the monitor just as his bags were going through…

The trip from the border to Kathmandu was only about 100 kilometers, but it took five hours… The road was at best only just worthy to call a road, as it snaked along the steep valley out of Himalaya, and at it’s worst the land cruiser was literally climbing over stretches where the road had been reclaimed by the hillside, and all that was left was the rocky landslide, flattened by countless passing motorcycles, cars, lorries and buses with people hanging out of the windows and clinging on to the roofs. As we descended, the temperatures rose and the faces of the people changed from the Tibetan to the subcontinental Nepali, which are darker and more resemble the Indians. Almost everybody speaks English here, and all signs are written in both Nepali and English.

Kathmandu is an absolutely gorgeous city. Walking around down town, I am continuously reminded of the old, narrow alleyways of Rome, and the climate also resembles that of the great old capitol of that ancient empire. The smells are rather different, however. There is an everchanging odour of incense, garbage, food, cow dung, pine trees, and a zillion others that I haven’t the faintest idea how to describe. Walking along the narrow streets, or over the crowded plazas is a continuous assault on the ears. Streets that in every other place I’ve been to would be pedestrian, at least at the busy hours of the day, have cars, bicycles, motorbikes and rickshaws eeking up and down all the time, honking, ringing, whistling and shouting constantly, to make people move out of the way. Last night, and all of today, I’ve just been walking aimlessly around, taking in the city through sight, smell, hearing and especially taste. I really liked the food in Russia, but the food here in Kathmandu has equalled, and sometimes surpassed that cuisine from the northern end of this massive continent.

Tomorrow I am going to stay with a CouchSurfer 15 kilometers from the city centre. He has warned me that his home is not of western standards, most particularly he has no running hot water, but I am accustomed to such minor inconveniences by now, and I’m not letting it stand in the way of getting to know a Nepali family in their own home! My hotel room for tonight is about 1,5 by 2,5 meters, I have a cot to sleep on, a nightstand, a garbage can, and a candle. Electricity comes and goes on a set, but regularly changing schedule, so that every part of the city has electricity 8 hours a day. I’m not sure whether this is because there is not enough energy to power the whole city at the same time, or because the new maoist government is using it to somehow control the inhabitants, but it is just something people here have gotten used to.

The Latin American party rather turned out to be an info-evening, where Latin American students at the university of Kazan presented their country. It was kind of fun, because I never expected to see something like that in Russia, and also it reminded me of my time in the United World College of the Adriatic in Italy, where such things were rather commonplace. It wasn’t a party, however, so Pavel and his friend and I went to a restaurant after a while, had some REALLY GOOD Italian pizza and some beers. Afterwards, they showed me the town, and helped me by tickets for Ekaterinburg.

The next day I spent the morning trying to contact my host in Ekat, and surfing for a host in Irkutsk. I went around town by myself, and Kazan’s a really beautiful city. I went around the old Kremlin for a while and took some pictures. Like the heading in my previous post hints at, Kazan is a multireligious place. It is the capital of Tatarstan, and the Tatars are Muslim. About half of the 1.1 million inhabitants are of Russian ethnicity, and they are of course Orthodox. The result is that inside the Kremlin, the heart of the city, are both the beautiful Kul Sharif Mosque, and an Orthodox church, side by side!

In the evening, Pavel showed me a really interesting place. It was a sort of bath house, where we were first put in big barrels, where only our heads stuck out. There we were steamed with herbal steam, like veggies in a pot, until we were nice and cooked. They even measured our blood pressure both going in and coming out… Then we were led out, served herbal tea made on the same kinds of herbs, and ordered to lie down under heavy blankets to keep the heat from the barrels while we drank. After a while, some big Russian men came and gave us a massage that could knock the wind out of a medium sized rhino… An experience I won’t soon forget!

My train left Kazan at 2:28 am, so we sat up with some beer and snacks and watched The Simpsons on my laptop(!), and then Pavel even followed me to the train in the middle of the night! An exemplary host, he was amazingly helpful!

When I arrived in Ekaterinburg, I still hadn’t managed to contact my host, so I took the metro downtown, and went to an internet cafe where I posted an emergency message on the CS Ekaterinburg forum. After about an hour, I was contacted by a girl who could host me with her family, and then immediately after, my original host called me! One of her cs friends had seen that I couldn’t get in touch with her, and called her. It turned out she was having troubles with her cell, so we couldn’t call each other!

Today I am looking around town, and a nice surfer just came to meet me, so now I’m off.

(If you’re wondering about the title, look up Ekaterinburg on Wikipedia…)

Yesterday I took the metro downtown, and walked around Moscow, but not really for long. I saw the changing of the guard at the Grave of the Unknown Soldier, with the soldiers marching in that peculiar way without bending their knees! Then I went to the Krasnaya Ploschad, Red Square, took a picture of Lenin’s tomb, and marvelled at St.Basil’s cathedral. The cathedral was built between 1555 and 1561, after Ivan the Terrible’s victory over the stronghold of Kazan, where I am now. Then I walked around the Kremlin, before I went to meet the couchsurfer, Arthur, who helped me get the train ticket.

The Moscow metro is worth a mention. Most of the stations, at least those close to town, are almost breathtaking in their decoration. Taking a trip on the circle line, and getting off on each station, to walk around for a few minutes, is like being in the world’s busiest art gallery! Another thing I’ve noticed is that russians read a lot! I’ve seen countless people at the metro, dangling around from one arm, with their gaze firmly stuck to a book in the other hand!

After I’d gotten a ticket for the night train at 00:35, I went back home, and had some supper. I spent almost an hour getting what I needed for a really good Russian meal, in an overcrowded supermarket at a mall near Kievskaya. When I finally reached the check out, however, the cash registry broke down… I literally left my groceries on the counter and walked out. I went to another supermarket, but by then I was so hungry that I grabbed a frozen pizza and some coca cola…

I spent a nice evening with my host Jimmy and his two cats, before I went to catch the train to Kazan. Being me, I was of course a bit on the late side, so when I reached the Komsomolskaya metro station, I had to RUN to Kazanskii station to catch the train. (You try running with a full 85 litre backpack on your back, and a stuffed daypack on your stomach, and you’ll soon find out that it’s not necessarily a good idea…) I managed to huff and puff, soaked through with sweat, up to the train as it was about to move out. Luckily the provodnitsa (train car manager) let me on! As soon as I got through the door, it closed, and the train started moving.

My two train trips so far have been on “platzkartny” in an open sleeping car, which is the lowest fare you can get and still have a “bed”, and it feels quite safe.  So far I haven’t met anyone who speaks English on the train, but everyone is very eager to try to communicate, and I had hardly even sat down on the the train last night before the guy next to me insisted I try some of the food he’d brought! After a while we made our beds, and climbed in. A roll-out-mattress, pillow, woollen blankets, clean linen and a small hand towel are included in the price, and handed out by the provodnitsa. It is, however so excruciatingly hot in the trains, that the blankets are absolutely superfluous. To put it that way, if my bedroom at home was that hot, I’d forego both pajamas, blankets and sheets. I lay on my bunk watching a couple of episodes of a tv show I have on my computer, before trying to go to sleep, but because of the heat it got pretty late before I managed. When I woke up around 10:30 this morning, the view from the window was hypnotizing, with the White Birch standing amidst the black trunks of other trees, like ghost trees, and all covered by a thin layer of the year’s first snow, and still some snow drifting through the air.

The train started moving right on time, but at my arrival in Kazan it was an hour late, so I got here around 14:30 instead of 13:25. Pavel, my host, had taken time off from work to come meet me at the station, and hence lost an hour more of work than planned! Pavel is actually not a couchsurfer, but he lives with his boyfriend, Michael, who is. Michael, however, is out of town but Pavel has agreed to host me nonetheless. He’s a really nice guy; not only did he wait for me at the station for over an hour, he’d also bought me food, so I could eat as soon as we got home.  He’s at work again now, but tonight he’s taking me to a sort of show that some of the international students here in Kazan are putting on, so I’m having a latin-american evening in Russia!

I also need to get train tickets to Yekaterinburg, preferably for late tomorrow night, because I unfortunately need to keep moving, if I’m going to be able to get out of Russia before my visa runs out on November 30.

Ok, so I haven’t had time to write for a while, so I’ll do a quick update.
In Novgorod I was hosted by Aleksey and his family, but unfortunately Aleksey was very busy and had to work the whole weekend. On Saturday I spent the day in the centre of Novgorod, which has a beautiful historical Kremlin, or Fort. (The Novgorodians call it Detinets, “Young Men’s Compound) Next year the city will celebrate its 1150th anniversary, so unfortunately everything was undergoing renovations. Still, I got to see a museum with archeological finds from the town, dating back to it’s viking heritage, (it was called Holmgard, the capital of Gardarike), complete with a viking sword and viking dragon broches! It also had an impressive collection of russian icons.

On Sunday, Aleksey drove me and his mother and father out to a small monastery  a place called Peryn, outside the city, dating back to 995 AD. Then he drove us to St.Yuryev Monastery, where he left us because he had to work. His mother works as a tourist guide, and knew very very much about everything we saw that day. Unfortunately, she didn’t speak much English, so there was very little of her knowledge that she managed to communicate to me. Being a guide, she also knew the people at the ticket stands, so we got in everywhere for free! We hitched a ride with a tourist bus from St.Yuryev to the nearby museum of wooden architecture, where I got to try my hand at weaving and spinning, and try some old Russian children’s toys!
The buildings in that museum were moved from 26 different locations in the Novgorod region, and dated from the 16th to early 20th century. In the museum we also met a Swedish girl, who turned out to be Aleksey’s swedish teacher in university!

After catching a bus back to the centre of Novgorod, we also went back to the museum where I’d been the day before, but this time I got to see the treasury, which had so much gold, silver and jewelry that one could get almost dizzy! Last we went to the St.Sophia cathedral, which is the oldest stone church in Russia, almost 1000 years old, and still standing, still being in use! I’d been there the day before, but this time, with Aleksey’s mother, I got to go to a place that tourist normally can’t get to; up on the choir’s gallery! There were some amazing iconic frescoes, almost as old as the church itself!

Sunday evening I took the night train to Moscow, and I arrived here Monday morning at 5:32am. I was supposed to meet my host, Jimmy, at 7:30, but my phone didn’t work in Moscow, so I couldn’t get hold of him. Eventually, when the shops opened, I managed to get myself a new sim card, but by then Jimmy was at work, he works at the American embassy, and he couldn’t meet me before 5:30pm, which meant that I lugged all my belongings around Moscow the whole day! When I finally met up with him, we also met with Luka from Italy, with whom I’ve been sharing a room the last couple of days.

Soon after we arrived in his apartment, a huge place in a secure area, where many of the foreign ambassadors live, he got an sms about a couchsurfers’ meeting at a Banya, a Russian bath house, that same night. I really needed to relax after carrying all my stuff around all day, so I decided to go. I met some really nice people, and we had a lot of fun. We had a private area all to ourselves, with a pool table, karaoke, two sitting groups, a Turkish steam bath, a Finnish sauna and a cold water pool. One of the girls, Arina, were celebrating her birthday, and there was a lot of vodka and beer going around. After a while some of the guys cooked up a plan to have a strip show as a birthday present for Arina, but I don’t know if she was more flattered or embarrassed… The only thing that was a little disappointing, was that it wasn’t a REAL Russian banya with the Venik (bunches of birch twigs with the leaves still on), so I’ll have to try again later. 

Yesterday I was in good shape, since I’d managed to turn down most of the vodka in the Banya, but I was still too exhausted from carrying around all my stuff, so I stayed in, relaxed, washed some clothes and uploaded some photos and log posts. In the evening I went out to the weekly CS meeting in Moscow, and met some of the people from the banya, and many other couchsurfers. The Moscow CS community is very active!

Today I’m going to go around the centre of Moscow WITHOUT all my luggage, and just enjoy it. I’m meeting up with a couchsurfer I met yesterday, who’s helping me buy a train ticket, seeing as that is apparently one of the most difficult things you can do as a foreigner in Russia…

(Wall-of-text-warning hereby issued)

I arrived in St. Petersburg yesterday. Unfortunately I lost my auntie on the way through immigration, so I didn’t get to say goodbye. Instead I was turned loose on the Russian society straight away…
I arrived with directions to my nice couchsurfing host Natalia on my cell phone, and I managed really well. By the time I got here, I got to try a ride in an old, worn out minivan, find the Metro, change Metro trains and finally go by tram. I have no idea exactly how often the metro and the tram leaves, but I haven’t waited more than 3 minutes for either, even when I just lost the previous one!

When I got here, Natalia wasn’t home yet, but she had left the keys to her apartment with her neighbour(!) so I got in with the help of a really nice boy who spoke not a word of English.

By the time my host arrived, I’d found the local grocery shop and done some shopping, and that’s about it. She had another visitor with her as well, a friend and fellow Piter (that’s St.Petersburg) couchsurfer, Maria, whose apartment is being renovated. We had a nice chicken dinner with white wine, and talked for hours before going to bed.

St Peter and Paul Cathedral

Today I woke up late, had breakfast, took the tram and metro downtown, and walked around Piter the whole day. My feet are killing me right now, but it’s been really nice. I walked around the Petrograd side for a while, just looking at the architecture and life in general. I then went to the St Peter and Paul Fortress, and went inside the St Peter and Paul Cathedral. Then I walked to St.Isaak cathedral, where I met Natalia, and we went up on the colonnade around the Cupola together. After a truly Russian meal of soup and cabbage rolls with buckwheat, I walked around a bit more, around the Nevsky Prospekt. I went by the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood and got a view of the beautifully lit church at night. I walked through the Gostiny Dvor, (a shopping mall from 1750) saw the massive statue of Catherine II in Ostrovskogo, the bell tower of the City Duma, and even managed to catch an orthodox mass in the Kazan Cathedral!

The Cathedral of the Icon of the Virgin of Kazan is very obviously strongly inspired by St Peter’s in Rome, although it’s a lot smaller. It even has the semi-circular colonnade in front! As I entered, I heard the chant of an orthodox priest, and as I approached the area where they held mass, I saw a small group of people standing there, turned towards the priest who was standing by a lectern, all making the sign of the cross at the mention of certain words in the chanted text. Soon a small choir, hidden on a balcony high up on the wall at the back, started singing replies to the priest, with beautiful harmonies.  After some time, another priest came around with the incense, before the mass continued. At the end, people gathered close to a priest that stood on the steps in front, and he said something that he had in handwriting on a piece of paper, possibly a sermon or an explanation of sorts. After that people started leaving, and a few came up to him and said a few words, then he put his hand on their heads and said something, before they kissed the air above his hand. I’m not sure whether it was a blessing or a forgiveness of sins, or what, but it looked like a very nice, personal and informal ritual. I didn’t understand anything that was said throughout the mass, with the exception of the occasional “Bog” (God) “Gospodin” (Lord) and “pomolimo” (pray) but I stood there with the others, making the sign of the cross and bowing in respect whenever they did. It felt nice to get out of the traffic and the noise and the stressed out crowds, and come into a holy place for an hour.

After the mass, I strolled along the Nevsky prospekt, up to the Palace Square, with the huge Alexander Column. I realized that I was quite far away from any Metro station, so I again crossed the Neva and actually went back to the same station I got off on earlier. Even though my feet were aching by then and I REALLY didn’t feel like walking anymore, I was lucky to get a beatiful view of the Hermitage and the rest of the waterfront by night from the Dvortsovy bridge across the river Neva, on the way to the station.

Natalia and Maria convinced me I should head down to Novgorod for a couple of days, on my way to Moscow, so I’m now trying to get someone there to host me on short notice… fingers crossed!