System Bolaget

As some of you will already know from the title - I am in Sweden. For those of you thinking my typos have just got a little out of control - the System Bolaget are the state run liquor stores in Sweden. Yes, that's right folks, the Swedish state firmly controls the distribution of hard liquor. You cannot buy booze to take away from anywhere else. And they close early on a Saturday afternoon. In fact there are few things more frightening than the across town dash to the nearest System Bolaget - not quite sure if you'll make it. Last time I made such a dash I ended up in a line with other desperate, middle class people who could see the time ticking and weren't sure we were going to even get into the shop on time.
Once in, there's more desperation. The nicer, central city shops don't look that different to a bottle store anywhere else on the planet - except there's no advertising. Just informative signs telling you "red wine", "white wine"...And there's lots of people with big shopping baskets knowing this is the last chance before Monday morning to stock up.
The sight of other reasonably well-dressed middle aged people trying to estimate whether they need one, two or five bottles of red to get through the rest of the weekend is a little ... sobering.
And that's the nice, modern stores. In the outer suburbs you will still be confronted with locked cabinets displaying the goods and the need to front up to the counter to ask the sales assistant to go into the back room for you. Brown paper bags and shameful look as you leave are optional.
Of course you can still stock up on alcoholic beverages at your local supermarket - so long as they are under 3.5% . But the principle remains. The state controls anything stronger and you don't get to buy it after 3pm Saturday.
What's it all about you ask?
Revenue is certainly part of the answer. But I think the bigger answer is ideological. Swedish Social Democracy made peace with the ruling class. It even let the King stay on - he's allowed to chair a committee or two and have some palaces. Part of the price of that peace is massive social control and subtle "policing". And the key way this is done is through the friendly face of paternalism. System Bolaget are just one of the more obvious forms of paternalism. The "Nordic model" for sex work is another.
Having to go to a special shop to buy the hard stuff (in my case two half bottles of French wine) is more than just a charming piece of Swedish oddness -in fact it's not charming at all. There's something deeply creepy about that level of state interference in your life.

What's there to see in Novosibirsk

In Listvyanka a French man told me there was nothing to see in Novosibirsk. He was wrong!

The capital of Siberia is built on the Ob river. It really only began when in 1895 when the trans Siberian railway made it that far. Before then there had been a way station on the trans Siberian track. And before that, much like the rest of Siberia it was taiga, tundra and a lot of mosquitoes. 

The city only got it's present name in the 1950s, but it had been built to be grand. The opera house is the biggest in Russia...a massive concrete dome which dominates the central square. The Lenin statue is huge -a fabulous piece of socialist (not quite) realist sculpture. 

In Siberia no one seems to have noticed that the Soviet era is over.

And nowhere is this more evident than the Museum of the CCCP. My host had recommended this museum as "hands on" and the only thing the eccentric curator could say in English was "you can touch everything". And I did!

Each room has a theme...a child's schoolroom...with books, toys, posters. The office of an important official, with road maps, copies of the complete works of Lenin, a living room - with packaging, household goods, a covetable teaset. 

Propaganda posters and busts of Lenin as far as the eye can see. And a few pictures of Uncle Joe (Stalin that is) as well. 

It was a little overwhelming. I squealed when I found the front page of Pravda announcing perestroika. All this history and politics, alive and real and tangible.

Tangible because it is the artefacts of people's lived experience. Magazines, albums of popular music, fashionable clothes, children's books, curling irons, kitchen equipment, stereos, video games. The things of everyday life. 

To say I would travel to the middle of Siberia again just to revisit this museum is not an overstatement. I could have spent all day looking through the albums, reading children's exercise books, poring over knitting patterns. And next time, with more Russian, I will. 

The French man then was wrong. There are hundreds of things to see in Novosibirsk...and many of them are to be found in a little museum, run by two very eccentric men in a side street off Lenin square. 

Trains through Siberia.

Siberia is big. This should be obvious. But the body and the mind don't really understand how big until they travel through it. Slowly.
I have been using my nerdy train handbook and the nerdy calculation table for working out just how slowly. And for the last five hours we haven't gone much over 60km. I could drive to Novosibirsk faster. Except I probably couldn't because Russian driving is special and particular.
The aim appears to be to wait till one can't see if there is on-coming traffic, especially if this also happens to be a blind corner or the brow of a hill or both. Then one speeds up till the front of the van is virtually on the bumper of the car being passed. Next, a deft manoeuvre out into what is hopefully open road and a roar of speed. The most exciting part is not re-entering the correct lane until the last possible moment. One must achieve re-entry at the point where a fiery death is almost inevitable in a head-on with a truck.
Now I don't mind living a little dangerously, but I will leave the driving to the experts.
Trains, albeit slow ones, it is.
Siberia is tundra and taiga. Wide open spaces then birch forest so tight it's like the trees are hugging - a monumental group hug for hundreds of square kilometres.
And it is unbelievably lovely. As the sun sinks, long shadows stretch out between the birch, hills roll gently away, the long summer grass sways and the endless sky blushes slightly.
But there's an awful lot of it.
Siberia has long been where Russia has sent it's exiles or where they have sent themselves. It's a land for people who don't want to be disturbed or who are too disturbing to have near.
Little villages fringe the railway line...wooden houses that don't look like they have changed much in the last century : each with a garden overflowing now it's summer with vegetables and flowers.
Russians appear to love flowers. There is a flower shop in almost every apartment complex I have passed. Given in parts of Siberia the ground doesn't unfreeze till July and is frozen again by November, I guess I can see why a bit of bright life might feel a necessity.
The sky is clear over Siberia tonight. There's a sliver of a moon and the only other light is the occasional headlight from a long distance truck on the Irkutsk to Moscow highway. I don't think I mind too much that we are rolling along at 50 km.

Olkhon Islabd

It's a little hard to maintain my signature cynicism somewhere as genuinely lovely as Olkhon Island. But I will try.
Getting here is interesting. My driver, Sergey, who I think used to be a paratrooper, quickly steered his large van off the road and onto what appeared to be a track. Of course I use the word road very loosely. A cleared stretch of bumpy dirt comes closer.
It soon became obvious why Sergey had made this initially troubling decision. The nasty little animal track was smoother than the made road.
We bumped along it for sometime with Sergey making disapproving noises at other drivers and driving at a speed that seemed a touch reckless. But between moments of horror and stretches of discomfort, we would top a rise and below us would spread a vista of water, rocks, forest - the wild beauty of the island. Sergey would take his hands off the wheel, and gesture expansively. I would agree that it was marvellous, hoping quick affirmation would return his hands firmly to the wheel and the tyres to connection with the track.
But once here all discomfort is quickly forgotten. There are long Sandy beaches, fringed with pine forest and with water which varies from intense sapphire blue to sparkling jewel green. There are little rocky bays, soaring cliffs, the gentle sound of waves. And a whole lot of Shamanism.
Think poles tied with coloured ribbons, trees with coloured ribbons, rocks with coloured ribbons. Today I even saw a young man in the regalia, including bells sewn to everything. The effect ruined only slightly by his baseball cap and selfie taking.
Beaches here come with portable Banya - the Russian sauna. Stand around long enough and you will get to witness that great Russian tradition...overweight, middle aged women in bikinis running from banya to the freezing water of the lake and back. This edifying sight did not encourage me to try either activity or buy a bikini.
Standing above the action is a charming cafe, wherein I purchased a delicious pot of sea blackthorn tea. Sea blackthorn is a tiny yellow fruit, a hip I think, from a fairly rare plant. It has a sour, citrus flavour. It's fabulous. What I didn't know was that it is also a fiendishly powerful diuretic.
Sometime around the time I was wading in the ankle achingly cold water of the lake, it occurred to me that I needed to answer nature's call. But there is no shelter, no convenient bush, not even a largish rock. Just sand, space and a lot of sunburnt Russians. Really, bright red, painfully skin cancer causing sunburn. But that's another story.
I make it about half way back to my guesthouse and then I realise, it's just not going to work. I give in. I stand on a bare hillside, looking at one of the most spectacular views I have seen recently, and just let nature take her course.
A little piece of a hillside in one of Shamanism's most sacred places will now forever have a little of my genetic material.

Forest fires

Were blogger to allow me to post photos of the wonderful scenery around Lake Baikal, you would be as underwhelmed as I am. Not because it isn't marvellous, I have seen travel photos before - it's spectacular. But right now, with air quality in the red "Danger, danger Will Rodger's" zone and a thick smoke haze over everything, it's a little hard to see the attraction, or indeed see (or breathe!).
There is considerable irony in me travelling thousands of kilometres from Australia to find myself on the edges of one of the planet's largest forest fires. Apparently a chunk of Siberia the size of Belgium is burning and while Mr Putin has sent the army in, no one appears to be doing much. No monsoon buckets sweeping over Lake Baikal. Though that could be a good thing, a couple of accidental Baikal seals in the mix could make that forest fire a lot worse.
Let me explain. Baikal is home to a huge number of species found nowhere else. This includes a small fish apparently 80% fat. I have eaten said fish, and can attest it was melt in the mouth fish fatty goodness. The tour guide could not believe I ate not one (she suggests people at least try it) but six!
Another weird species is the Baikal seal. The world's only fresh water seal they were apparently cut off in the lake from their migration back to the sea and have adapted. To eating the 80% fat fish it would seem. Because these are not sleek, elegant seals. No, they look like someone has inserted a bicycle pump and turned them into little seal blimps. Incredibly cute, but so over inflated I was afraid the two I saw in the aquarium might pop!
So I can see why the monsoon buckets aren't in operation, one or two seals on a forest fire and the thing would have enough fat fuel to burn indefinitely!

Things you really shouldn't put in your mouth

Marmot. Yep. Marmot. Large, furry rat like creatures. Actually a type of ground squirrel. Herodotus apparently claims that they collect gold dust in their burrows. He could be right.
I won't go into the exact details of how I came to consume what is apparently an endangered species, for obvious reasons.
I'd also like to reassure you all that stories of the black plague are much exaggerated. And that was raw marmot. I can assure you, what I ate was anything but raw!
Which leads us to the step by step guide for catching, cooking and consuming your marmot.
First you will need the right terrain - high, bare, rocky outcrops deep in the Mongolian steppe are best.
Then you will need an ancient, wooden rifle, with a stand made from what looks like two random sticks and a state of the art snipers sight. You'll also need a slightly over-excited semi nomadic horse herder to wield said weapon. No ladies need apply. In outback Mongolia hunting is men's work!
Once your herder returns with the marmot, the real fun begins.
Marmots are quite cute frolicking among the rocks. Their little paws and oversized bellies are still quite sweet, even when the head shot has categorically sent it over the rainbow bridge.
The next step is the tricky one...skinning the marmot. But this is not any old skinning...no...this involves removing the skin and all the flesh and leaving just the spinal cord, while keeping the skin completely whole - cute little paws and all.
If you are finding this hard to imagine, let me assure you, it was no easier to believe while watching!
Somewhere in the middle of the skinning comes the nasty process of removing the intestines. No creatures intestines smell good. At best they are greeney grey sausages of nasty. But something about that marmot diet of plant roots and gold dust means their intestines are particularly icky. So icky only the herder and I managed to stick around. Even the dog ran away whimpering. So did the other Mongolians.
Now, you should have a marmot bag, complete with most of the flesh. And a nasty looking bowl of marmot innards...heart, lungs, liver, kidneys ... other bits I didn't recognise but which should generally be on the inside not the outside.
While all this skinning and messing about with the slimy insides has been happening, the wise marmot chef will have already prepared a hot fire and filled it with rocks. The wise marmot chef will also have brought a tool for extracting said rocks once heated. I was not with wise chefs.
You see, the next part of the process involves shoving rocks glowing red from the fire into the recesses of the the de-skeletoned carcass. But my companions only had an ancient adjustable spanner -which didn't really adjust and two sticks they were trying to use like oversized chopsticks. In the near dark. As it began to rain.
At one point I think someone actually tried picking up the stones with their hands. This was a mistake. The process made even more complex because as well as trying to force red hot rocks into your marmot, you also have to stuff in the goopey remnants in the offal bowl. Everything except the liver...special treatment for that! At the same time you have to make sure not too much steam escapes, that you don't give yourself third degree burns and you don't lose any of the precious innards.
Finally, if all goes well, and despite a poor start and much agitated shouting in Mongolian it appeared to in my case, you should end up with something that looks very like a marmot. Minus the head of course. I suspect there are easier ways of sealing the neck than your driver spending half an hour in a tool box on the top of the van, to find a single piece of rusty wire. Nonetheless, it seemed to suffice.
But then you ask, is this enough? Will the hot rocks really cook the little critter from the inside out?
And of course the answer is no! There is yet another step in this process.
Using that ancient Mongolian tool, the butane blowtorch, the marmot carcass has to be thoroughly scorched and scraped. And I mean thoroughly. A solid forty five minutes of searing blowtorch action and scorched fur scraping went into the production of my first marmot. Burned marmot fur, if you are wondering, smells only slightly better than marmot intestine.
Of course while waiting for your marmot to be fully seared, there is another delicacy to whet your appetite. Marmot liver, wrapped in caul fat, shoved on a stick and barbecued in the open flames till the outside is as burned as the marmot carcass.
The surprise is that it's delicious. Try and forget everything you have seen, forget that it might have plague, forget burned protein causes cancer - and just focus on that liver cooked in its own animal fat.
But the main show is yet to come.
Once your herder has decided the marmot is toasted to perfection it gets opened up. Imagine a giant, swollen, seared balloon, complete with its own little paws and tail. Then imagine it sliced down the middle. Rather than deflate it opens up like a big, marmoty bowl. And in the bowl is the marmot juice. This you pour out into a shared bowl and pass round. And what does essence of marmot taste like? Well, to be honest, like marmite. Delicious, meaty, rich marmite. No wonder the little critters are endangered.
Finally, there's the contents of the marmot bag and then the bag itself. Those contents, seared, steamed, unidentified bits of marmot innards anyone? I passed on that. I also passed on grabbing the hot rocks out of the marmot for "a hot stone massage". Given the toughened outdoor men who had tried picking up rocks were now squealing and throwing these "massage tools" about I decided trying to treat serious burns in the wilderness was a step too far for my cultural immersion.
The actual marmot carcass gets cut up last, into large strips. It then you see that the inside of a marmot is mainly fat. Thick white chewy fat. Now I like a bit of bacon rind. Don't mind the skin off a chicken. Used to enjoy pork belly before I gave up the flesh of the pig. But marmot fat is a step too far for me. I politely nibbled some unidentified meat lumps off of a great strip of fat, and yes, they were tasty but by then I had more than enough marmot for one lifetime.
I am assured that actually your strips of marmot fat are best consumed two or three days later, when "softer". I am wondering if in the summer, with no refrigeration, "softer" might be a euphemism.
Of course I have forgotten, there is another gift your marmot carcass can give you - knuckle bones! Apparently the only other ones like them come from wolves. If you really want the full experience you need to digest your marmot while watching someone expert with a knife extract the tiny, perfect knuckle bones from seared marmot paws.

Riding the train to Mongolia

Let's not speak too soon, because I am yet to cross the border into Mongolia, but this has been a remarkably simple trip.
The train station was where the hostel receptionist said it would be. The security check was straight forward. The waiting room was easy to find. The nice Swedish diplomat in my carriage agreed to swap top for bottom bunk.
I am always suspicious when things go according to plan. But fingers crossed my next post will not be from a lonely border town platform as I wave to the departing train.
This fear has been created by the tour guide I met at dinner. To suggest the young man was a little jaded by his career choice would be understatement. He at least did not refer to his tour group as "children" like the nice fellow who had joined us earlier...but this was definitely a young man who has travelled this route too many times!
The story he regaled us with, as we ate fairly mediocre pork and canned mushrooms was of the Russian customs officials depositing a group of Thai monks in the border town between Russia and Mongolia. They were apparently in possession of contraband...tramodol he thinks.
So now I am sitting on the train thinking about what might be in my luggage. There's nothing of course...but just walking past those "Declare it!" signs in Australian airports is enough to have me wondering if there might be a stray raisin in the bottoms my bag. Those little beagles make me nervous. The whole process of crossing borders, bring yelled at by men in uniforms in languages I don't speak - it's all terribly stressful.
And on top of that I have to decide whether to sit on the train for three hours while they change the bogeys at the border or to wander around a border town at what will be way, way past my bed time.
What pleasures can a Chinese border town offer? Cheap beer? Drinking at the moment gives me a headache! Cheap food? Everything I eat just passed straight through. I think three hours in the dark, with no air-conditioning doesn't seem do bad.
Stay tuned.

Drinking beer in Beijing

Big call out to Nick for the Great Leap Brewery recommendation. But instead of finding my way to one of great newer venues, I opted for the original, down a hutong, with directions that will mess with your head.
It's hard to believe you can go all the way to China and find the kind of neighbourhood bar, making fantastic craft beer, that you want on the corner of your street at home.
I managed to make friends with the locals and ended up with a dinner of the ice cream I bought on the way and two huge slices of water melon. The bar tenders humour extended to exclaiming "Happiness!" every time I took a bite. I suggested I reminded him of his grandma and he agreed.
The beer is very good. The Little General IPA is a standout...hoppy and very drinkable. The Honey Ma session ale has a more reasonable ABV and a delicious ginger tang. I finished with the smooth and bitter East City Porter.
Altogether, a fine night out in Beijing!

Getting to Beijing

In what has been termed my AC/DC moment, thunder struck the moment I exited Dondang subway station. I had exited at the wrong exit, I was in a park and for good measure enormous drops of torrential rain had just began to fall.
It had been a trying day.
I did eventually find my rather charming hutong hostel, but not before getting soaked to the skin and having to shelter beneath the overhang of a very official looking guard post. The official looking guard just glared at the damp muffle aged woman, weighed down with her damp backpack.
From the comfort of my enormous bed (no doubles in China only beds big enough for three or four reasonably friendly people) I can reflect on god experience of catching a train in China.
It is easier than expected. The systems are efficient and work. There is some signage in English.
There is also endless queuing and there's always someone who tries to elbow you out of your space in the queue or just steps in front of you. You have to push to get in anywhere.
These things are tiring. They are presumably tiring for Chinese folk too. There's a lot of tired looking people.
But once on the train, it is a marvel! Three hundred and three km for most of the journey. Whizzing past fields, towns and most amazing of all endless enormous cities.
The whole plain between Xi'an and Beijing seems to be a series of huge conglomerations of tower blocks that go on forever and high rise office blocks. Oh, and huge power stations, often in among the tower blocks!
It's not the China of charming paintings, but it is magnificent!
And between these huge cities, whose names I have never heard and where I am unlikely to ever go, there are dirt roads, farm tracks, shirtless men in the fields and little walled farms where bone suspects life had not changed much in generations.
It's the kind of thing you can only see out the window of a train. It makes for queuing and pushing and worrying about directions totally worthwhile.
I am not sure if I like travelling in China. It's hot, it's hard work, there's a lot of uncertainty and having to trust folk. But it's able to dish up some sights you wouldn't get anywhere else.

A funny thing happened

There are lots of not so funny things that have happened on my trip so far and I have been away only a few days. I couldn't find my driver at the airport. I got the squirts and spent most of today in bed or sitting listlessly on the couch. I had to eat mediocre Korean food to find something with no wheat and less than volcanic amounts of chilli.
But there have been some belly laughs. My terracotta warriors guide realising none of us had Wechat so she had no way of finding us if we got list in the ten thousand other visitors to the site. Or her and the driver arguing about where we were to be dropped off. Or her discovering her transmitter was out of charge and having to do a deal with the wheelchair men to find us new headsets. They had new headsets so this must happen often. But I don't think it was a scam...the poor girl had turned the colour of the grey red dragon fruit I've been eating and started mumbling in an odd mixture of mandarin and English. If it was an act, it was a convincing one!
All those things were pretty funny. Her actually losing some of the group and calling out to them ever more desperately over the headset system was also amusing. She found them, which was less amusing but probably for the best.
All slightly unpleasant schadenfreude I guess.
The really genuine laughs though were provided by my second tour. Not just did our guide explain how she married her boyfriend of twenty years not for love, not because of children or elderly parents or social stigma - but because she wanted to buy a parking space and there would be less paperwork if she was married!
Now I am paperwork adverse, but marriage does seem like an extreme action to avoid it.
Her triumph though was the detailed description of her diagnosis of her dogs stomach issues from a careful examination of their poop. This intricate scatological talk delivered as we ate dinner in otherwise salubrious surrounds. Nothing like a bit of poop to put other people off...resulting in more of everything for me!

Travelling light

I think the ultimate in travelling light isn't about the size of your pack, it's about what's in your head. The real baggage we all carry about isn't shoes and sleeping bags and souvenirs, it's all ghat other stuff that travels with us in our heads.
I have lost count box the number of times people have called me brave for heading off alone - and its nice that they think that. I count bravery as being one of the qualities I admire most in people and the one whose lack causes me the most horror. To be too frightened to actually live a full life seems to me to be taking away from that which actually allows us to be human.
The cliche is that bravery is feeling the fear and found it anyway. And it's a cliche because it's true. I hate flying, but I just take a deep breath, accept the two or twelve or fourteen hours of terror and get on that plane.
It took me an hour to work up the courage to try out for Xi'an Metro. I knew there'd be another awkward exchange as I tried to buy a ticket. The difficulty of following a subway map in a language I don't speak and the inevitable crush of humanity. But then you have to tell yourself - what could possibly go wrong? Screw up, find the way back to the starting point. Begin again.
Fear, defeated by logic! Or in this case by thirty three degree heat, sore feet and the need to not walk another five km!
So I am trying to travel light. I've bought my fear along with me, it insists on coming, but it's walking a few paces behind, minding it's own business. I can feel it there, watching for a moment of weakness, but I won't be letting it ride on my shoulders and weigh me down.