In The 'Burgs

Well I said I never do it and I did. I'm not talking about a taxation return or a deportment class but rather flying Aeroflot. A hefty cash incentive and improved safety record saw me calculate the dollar value of my life and board on old Tupelov plane from Moscow to St Petersburg. On the bright side, in terms of age we were peers. Hard to say which was falling apart worse.

The Tupelov looked all engine from the outside, like a drag racing plane. Whilst I had the novel experience of sitting eye level with a jet engine and though it looked like an aeronautical hotrod - it took a while to get off the ground. Whether to save fuel or in a wrestle with gravity I do not nor want to know.

I have to note, following the no show for a couple of hours of the airport shuttle and an unsuccessful last ditch $80, 15 minute cab ride (the most expensive of my life thus far), that Aeroflot were very good in providing me with a free replacement flight when they could have legitimately not done so.
Due to the latitude and the season (white nights) I was able to take the above photo at around 1130pm, without flash. I didn't get any pictures of the interior but it was so kitsch and the music so cheesy that I wanted to take it all home, minus the unsmiling hostesses of course. There were some other minor dramas that night that nearly resulted in me sleeping in a stairwell but a few hours after landing I was able fall gratefully and safely into a bed.

One of the things that struck me most about St Petersburg was how dramatic and simply brooding and moody the sky was. This view from my hostel could have been rendered in oil .

Having not been to Europe, I would have blissfully believed that the Russians were solely responsible for the beautiful city that St Petersburg is.
Fortuitously for my ignorance I met an American architect who explained between beers that the architectural and sculptural work were the labors of predominately Italian and French artists hired by the Tsar to create buildings echoing the styles in Europe. Given the huge class divide of the times he clearly had an abundance of money but a dearth of conscience.

Like a heavily iced cake, at times it could all be a little too sweet and I understand how the locals could wander around in seeming ignorance of their surroundings

Horses. More reliable and better smelling than a Lada.

The more Soviet style monoliths I had expected were really only visible in the outer parts of the city, they had a knack of seeming to loom over you even though they probably didn't really angle forward. There were however still some impressively sternly, yet ornately styled buildings in the historical centre, proving conclusively that Russians have always been cranky. If Boris had ever met his hangover World War III was on.

In addition to the beautiful buildings there were also some remarkable statues, so finely sculptured as to project a regal, almost human defiance of the elements.

Or at least a willingness to robustly debate such matters with you.

This is the very stark image of Alexanders column looking down at the scrums that eventuate on a busy day at the Hermitage. Everybody has elbows. Old ladies have 9.
The Hermitage is an amazing collection of human brilliance and creativity housed inside a former palace and is the city's major attraction.
Part Louvre, part Better Homes and Garden.

The opulence of the interior rooms makes for a unique museum experience but the maze of rooms makes navigation and finding a bathroom difficult. Turn left at the Van Gogh, go straight past the Gauguin and hang a sharp impressionist right at the Cezanne...try not to pee in the 1000 year old vase, even if it smells like someone else already did.

I think if I was a political prisoner during the Stalin years I would happily do time in the gulag rather than be the housekeeper for the Hermitage.

In fact this is what they did to their last housekeeper after he missed a spot.

Stunning interiors were not just confined to the hermitage. This video will serve the dual purpose of showing the decorative interior of a cathedral (which I'll name when I can remember the 8 consecutive consonants forming its name) and causing motion sickness.



Fresco paintings and metalwork were all the rage as well.

The following may look like some bizarre anti-commercial music video on high rotation on PhlegmTV but the audio is worth a listen. I wasn't allowed to take pictures but I recorded the audio and some poor saps butt. With no amplification except as provided by the design of the church and natural voices it made the hairs on my neck stand up. The singing that is.

be well.

Remembering Nepal

This ones a little bit of cheat's post, more for my record and to celebrate my good fortune, then anything else. A long time ago now I bitched about my external drive and a few other things being stolen in transit. On that drive were photos of my first couple of weeks in India and also some of Nepal.

I was convinced all those photos including ones I took at the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort were gone forever. However about a month ago I had a care package arrive from home and inside an obscure pocket of a jacket was a long-lost memory card I'd given up for dust.

I was pleased to see at least some of the lost photos were on the card. None from the Taj, maybe one day I'll go back again, or the Red Fort but happily many from Nepal. So this is actually retro post from around October '06, very unblogventional I know, but perhaps explains the lack of anything remotely resembling details in this post.

The picture below is looking out over Kathmandu, unspectacular but noteworthy as one of the few dull landscapes in the country.

Like I said this was all a long time ago and because the acid rain in Korea (courtesy of China) has been killing my brain cells faster than I can replenish them by watching Gladiators - I can't remember where anything was. So here's a picture of, um, somewhere...
Now that I think about it, from memory, it may have been a factory outlet for Nike.

Here are some sweeping generalisations, expect some revisions when I sit my Broad Stereotypes exam in May.

I went to Nepal for a way-too brief week, it was a short direct hop from Kolkata so worth a peek. I very much wish I'd been able to stay longer and organise some trekking, although I did eventually get to the Himalaya it was on the Indian side of the range. Nepal is one of those great places that allows you a visa on arrival so it took almost no organisation to get there. Once there it is a beautiful, beautiful country.

By all accounts Nepal is a poor country, and I think I remember reading something saying it's actually poorer than India. Certainly the Indian Rupee actually became a pleasantly strong currency once I landed and a western dollar went a long, long, long way. I tracked a decent amount of Kathmandu on foot and also spent a lot of hours travelling through the countryside to see a few different sides of it.

For whatever neogeosocioecoenviro reasons it didn't feel like 'that' poor a country. Certainly the disparity between rich and poor was nowhere near as vast, and the people on the streets, stalls and shops nowhere as desperate, as I had expected. I swear the kid in the green shirt escaped from the cover of Mad Magazine.

I don't know whether it's aided by such a small population, low cost of living or perhaps more equitable access to agriculture and Pokemon's, but it never really struck me as a massively poverty stricken country. Maybe because even the poor (at least the majority) were in houses. Then again, a week, even in such a small place, is no space of time at all.

I loved travelling India - there are few places in the world where you can have that kind of freedom and variety of experience - but...

...that said I can't deny that I found Nepal to be a cleaner, more honest, less desperate and hassle laden experience. There, it was rare I was treated like a walking wallet in the same way a cat looks at a bird as a drumstick with feathers and a deathwish.

This was a shot waiting for the sun to rise on a mountain, in....ah....yeah that place, to get a view of another mountain range...called....I think...shit. I give up. Anyhoo, I do remember cloud cover killed the view. Maybe it was called the 'You're Like Sooooo Stupid for Getting Up at 5am to Look At a Bunch of Clouds' mountain. Yes, true. It's a little known fact that mountains actually speak, and sound like Valley Girls when they do.

There was a Japanese guy doing some water paintings of the view. He was pretty good. Inscrutable. But pretty good.
Of course, with the cloud cover he kind of had to guess.

At least I think he had to guess. I couldn't quite tell, him being inscrutable and all.

Again at the risk of offending, I wonder whether character of Nepal has some religious basis. To me the Hinduism I've encountered, including Nepal, seemed more about reflexively asking any of a million idols for material gain (even by those who possessed a fair degree of comfort) than considerations of living a good life. The curtain between the religious and the economic was rarely divinable.
Meanwhile Nepal is predominately Buddhist, the people came across as capable, reliable, steadfast and less apparently needy. Nepalese Gurkha soldiers and tribal Sherpa's are well known and respected for their hardiness.
While I was there one of the days was a "dog holiday" with masses of happy woofers running around with leis around their necks looking for cats to wale on. I'm not exactly sure what it was about (maybe their fleas took the day off) and neither were they dogs, but they definitely made the most of it. Whatever 'it' was.

My skill level didn't allow me to do justice and capture what my eyes saw when it came to the mountains. I have great vivid memories (at least until the next time it rains) but ended up with numerous underwhelming shots of patches of grey mountain, capped in white which is only marginally more white than the background. Here's one.

A bit better quality on this one.

Especially coming from a country where the tallest natural object is essentially a granite speed hump, particularly when compared to the mountain of foreign debt, I found the mountains stunning, humbling and awe inspiring. At the time I was reading a book written about the climbing season on Everest in '96 when 15 people died (sometimes on-radio and only meters from help) shaking my head at the insanity of where they went and what they put their minds and bodies through.

Also while I was in Nepal I got a tattoo as a memento. No excess baggage or customs fees making it the travellers smart and environmentally sound (you can offset it against your methane footprint) choice IMHO. The experience was quite novel, given the artist Gagun was about 17, knew about that number of English words and moonlighted as a dentist. Hence the sign language. Still I made sure it was sufficiently sanitary and it turned out like I wanted.

Probably more concerning was the fact his gun was regulated by something resembling a hotwired car battery and that the power to the district kept blacking out. Still, aided by some candles, the fortuitous discovery of some Australian wine at the local shop and his one playable CD in the form of Pearl Jam, we got there in the end.

Have you ever seen that video of the experiment on the effect of tobacco, alcohol and drugs on how spiders make their webs? Hilarious intoxicated insect fun, I say. This particular one was clearly the designated driver when it came to Nepalese spiders. One free coke please bartender. He could seriously come to Korea and help with the architecture, although they would, as always, bury him in the basement for making a structure with a curve.
Look closely Mel. Feel the pride.

Be well.

Burning Down the House

It's odd the way things work out sometimes. I'd met the mother of a student (funnily enough just the day after I'd sooked to a friend about how good things we do are often unnoticed) and one week later she was holding onto me, crying, yelling and asking if I knew where in the crowd of evacuated people her daughter was.

A fire had started on the 8th floor of the academy, this photo taken by a friend with his phone. Just visible on the left hand side of the building is the fire escape, only installed in July last year and running no further than the 5th floor.

I'm also tempted to take some of the blame. That morning my schedule had been changed, leaving me without a free period and nullifying my traditional easing into the week. Usually I like to start Monday slowly and then grind to a complete halt by Tuesday, making the observation during a break that "I'd kill for a spare". As things turned out, I did get the afternoon off but luckily no one was seriously injured.

What scares and angers me the most was how easily the lack of safety measures in the building and organisational planning could have resulted in someone (probably a child) dying. Fire drills I've been part of in school and work environments were always either a pleasant break from routine or pain in the keister, dependant on the weather and what I was doing at the time. I'll definitely be taking them more seriously in the future.

My class and I had it pretty easy. I was teaching on the 9th floor when I smelt smoke. Looking out the window I saw smoke coming up from below but confusingly there was a very faint sound of an alarm which sounded far away, like it was coming from the next building. I asked the children to pack-up, the lack of any kind of alarm or announcement, making me a little uncertain about how far to act. When I opened the classroom door the corridor outside was already filling with smoke, the nearby stairwell was completely filled. It was amazing how quick it had happened.

Now telling the children to leave their belongings, we left the classroom where a man in the corridor motioned for us to go down the stairwell. Sucking in lung fulls of smoke going down the stairs was an educational reminder of how badly human physiology and carbon monoxide mix. Leading the children, I could see very little for the first couple of floors, I had to trust that none of my students had gone back for a bag, phone or nap time. It was a huge relief on the ground to see them all there, upset but okay.

The disorganisation and luck continued outside. Children were left standing in the road when cars were coming through. Most disturbingly people were milling around close to the building as windows above began to blow-out from the heat and be broken by those still on the 8th floor. Fortunately due to problems with heating(!), most of the classes from the 8th floor had been relocated up to the 9th, however there were still two classes and some teachers on the 8th when the fire began.

The fire started on the other side of the floor from where those guys were, making them probably the last to be aware of it. Frighteningly for them, when they gathered in the teacher's office and tried the fire escape door they found building management, in their dispirit wisdom, had bolted it shut. It took them a lot of effort with a coat stand to break the double glazed glass, then passing the students out over the broken glass to move down the fire escape. Of course they could only go as far as the 5th floor where they had to go into the building again to get out.

Had the fire escape not been put in, a mere 6 months before, things would have been very hairy for these guys. They would have needed to get past the fire damaged monitors on the left in the picture below to get down the stairwell behind them.

On the ground there were no records bought down of who was in the building when the fire broke out. Two classes were unaccounted for. I was dreading the thought that people had been caught inside, hoping that the firemen wouldn't come down with bodies. Eventually word begun circulating that the two missing classes had come down, but still no-one could find them for the next 90 minutes.

Telling Lindsay's mother that her daughter had come down safely wasn't very reassuring for her when no one knew where she was. The teacher of that class had evacuated to another branch of the school a couple of streets over but for whatever moronic reason, did not check back for almost two hours. For some unfathomable reason the teacher had an oddly smug look when she finally paraded back with her students, seemingly oblivious to the distress that had been inflicted on those worried about them.

Even when parents had begun arriving to pick-up their children, there was never any roll of names taken or checked against any sort of attendance list. When the fire had started there was no announcement of a fire, no fire sprinklers, no fire wardens, no effective audible bell inside the building - but most importantly, no causalities. Of the 8th floor, every room apart from 3 were destroyed. So now, after impressively minor disruptions, we've temporarily relocated (to a building with fire alarms, two stair wells and a sprinkler system) while they repair the other building.

Apparently (effective communication with employees by Korean employers is about as common as le unicorn) the fire started due to someone leaving a small space heater unattended in a room, with the books and other paper materials found in a school taking care of the rest. On the bright side this has at least laid to rest early theories, formulated over a couple of cold brews, that the cause was a build up of flatulence and an errant spark of wit.