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.