Volodya

Volodya stumbles out of the breakfast room, stuffed with sausage and bacon and bread rolls. His belly hangs in front like a huge vertical stingray with its tail missing, nestling its head on his rib cage.

Volodya’s sunburn evokes fiery dried chilis hanging on a porch in some country where people appreciate spices a lot more than they do where he himself comes from. And yet, before he reclines on the banana-shaped sun lounge, does he erect the flaccid umbrella handily positioned right next to it? No, he does not. 

He's on a mission, and umbrellas are definitely not part of it.

Volodya is from one of those parts of the world where people are SO conscious of the apparent lack of sunshine that they will drench themselves in it at the slightest opportunity. They will do this even if it ultimately ages them beyond their years, and even if it takes a sizeable portion of their annual salary to get them into position under the brutal UV rays. 

They will even pay by the hour for access to tiny, sterile beaches in soul-destroying non-places like Sharm el-Sheikh, where sun lounges are packed together like commuters on a London tube, or like male Emperor penguins circling the Pole while balancing eggs on their feet.

And in a way, this is exactly what Volodya is. He is one of an apparently growing number of people who disappear from their homes in Russia, Ukraine, Germany and other self-identified sunless countries each summer, to cram themselves with cold cuts and trudge around in small circles - sometimes on the periphery of the impeccably manicured sunbathing lawn, and sometimes in the centre. 

Personally, I have a few different reactions to this, and none of them are good.

First off, I find it possibly the single most depressing thing about Europe (other than the resurgence of the xenophobic Far Right), that when they find a stretch of coastline which might reasonably be called a ‘beach’, their standard reaction is to stack it with these sun lounges, then pile middle aged people on top of said lounges, so that they may spend roughly a sixth of their year desperately trying to become redder than a bleeding walrus. 

And secondly, I wonder: are these people really as sunshine-deprived as they think they are?

I mean, certainly the Russian and Ukrainian winters are long, and the body’s supplies of Vitamin E or D or whatever-that-sun-vitamin-is probably become a little depleted during this time. But actually, despite the low temperatures, there’s plenty of sunshine in those places. 

In fact, some of the most beautiful mornings I’ve ever woken up to (and this is coming from someone who’s avowedly not a morning person) are the crisp, cold and gloriously sunny mornings you get during a Russian or Ukrainian winter. Not only that, but when spring and summer roll around, there’s as much sunlight to go around as there is in most other places. 

And as for Germany: in their case, I just don't get it at all. They have relatively mild winters and long hot summers when the Sun hangs around until 10pm, even in August.     

So why this desperate flocking to the beach? Because “desperate” is exactly what it is, and that’s what makes it such a sad spectacle. There’s a sense that, if you find a square metre of sand adjoining a body of water that has any kind of tidal motion, you should immediately organise to put yourself on it and to stay for as long as possible, even if it’s actually pretty crap and you’re being charged extortionately for it by the locals.

I don’t know the answer to this. But I’d like to.

Meanwhile, I’m sharing one corner of the island of Crete with a few hundred Volodyas. My summer school had to downsize one of its camps in Finland, and reduce the number of teachers. So they asked me to come here and do this camp instead. 

The Gates of My Sun-lounge Prison

Skaleta, Isle of Crete, 22.06.16

The island itself is beautiful, in a harsh and red-hued way (though the weather is appalling - 35 degrees every day!). But rather than hire a school or college, the summer camp people chose to hold this camp in a resort hotel, where the Volodyas gather to do their sun-worshipping rituals.

My dislike of resort hotels (already quite considerable, as you’ve no doubt noticed) is growing almost by the hour ... but I'm only here for about 12 days, and there should be at least one or two opportunities to get out of this sun-lounge prison and explore the island properly.

In the meantime, at least it’s a resort hotel in a country that understands food. So the meals are good, if nothing else.

See you :-)

Huge Cocoons and Tiny Stars

Hello!

It’s a funny word, "cocoon", don't you think?

I ask that because I’m sitting in one now. 

Today is one of those brutal travelling days that your mother warned you about ... or at least, she would've done if she'd been a hippie backpacker in the 60s, who'd spent several years trekking through Asia and Africa and possibly some time on a kibbutz. If not, then she probably focused her warnings on other stuff like running with scissors. 

But anyway, it is (brutal, I mean).  

I only managed about two hours' sleep last night, and the journey started at 6:15 this morning when I left my flat in Almaty. There’s a hotel room in Athens with my name on it, but that room (and more importantly, the bed it hopefully contains) is still more than ten hours away – four and a half of flying, an hour on the Athens metro, and about five hours of sitting around in airports like this one in Baku, Azerbaijan. 

So far, my five-hour transit stop at Heydar Aliyev airport has been about as much fun as a transit stop can be – which is to say “not that much, really, but there have at least been a few entertaining moments to leaven the boredom”.

Zvjozdochka

(larger than actual size)

The first of those moments happened shortly after we landed, while I was unloading my pockets to walk through the security screening thingie. Inspecting my minutiae, one of the staff there noticed with some delight that I had a zvjozdochka in amongst my keys and loose change. 

The word zvjozdochka  translates as sth like ‘tiny little star’. Ex-Soviet peoples use it to refer to a miniature tin of kampfa (a.k.a. 'tiger balm'), which comes emblazoned with a bright yellow Communist star on the front. 

When she saw it, the security guard let out a little gasp, grabbed the tin and opened it. She held it up to her nose and inhaled, savouring the kampfa smell. And I got the distinct sense that this was a nostalgic moment – as if the zvjozdochka was something she remembered from her childhood but hadn’t seen for a long time, and taking in its aroma was sending her back in time.

That in itself fascinated me, because the zvjozdochka is one of those things that’s absolutely ubiquitous in the ex-Soviet countries I’m familiar with – especially in Ukraine, where babushkas sell them in the street. In my mind, it almost qualifies as a symbol of those countries. 

But Azerbaijan, since it frantically boarded the escape pod and jettisoned itself out of the imploding USSR in 1991, has turned more towards the Turkic world. It was a natural move – both Turkey and Azerbaijan are Eurasian Muslim nations, and their languages are closely related (the Azeris speak a language often called ‘Azeri Turkish’, and just reading signs in the airport was enough to see the striking similarities). I suspect there may also be a kind of ‘enemy of my enemy’ type bond between them, given that both countries have what you might euphemistically call a 'rocky relationship' with neighbouring Armenia.

It's also done better economically than most of its former ‘sister republics’. To an extent, I imagine this has made it possible for the Azeris to throw off the old trappings of Soviethood – and perhaps the poor zvjozdochka has been a casualty of that process.

Anyway ... I offered the little star as a gift to the security guard, but she declined with a smile, even after my second attempt. 

I guess her unwillingness to accept gifts from passengers in the security screening area could be seen as a good sign for Azerbaijan, too :-)

I then arrived in the transit lounge, where my first concern was to find the smoking area. After that, I took a wander to acquaint myself with the space where I was going to be spending the next four hours. It was then that I spotted the words  “cocoon area” on a sign, right under “toilets” and “worship room”, with an arrow pointing diagonally left.

Obviously, this was a sign that I had to follow.

A minute later, I was surrounded by these rather unusual things:

Cocoon Cafe  

Heydar Aliyev Airport. Baku Azerbaijan, 20.06.16 

Basically, what you've got here is a bunch of two-storey oversized cubby houses, a couple of them with cafes or shops inside and most with seating upstairs and downstairs. They're in a rather large hall with an ornate patterned skylight, a few scattered trees and some songbirds. 

Now, I'm not going to say this is the greatest architectural masterpiece of our age, but I do think it's quite nifty. When you've got an airport building, you can either make it a series of bland rectangular halls, or you can, y'know, do something interesting.

Obviously the second one is preferable. And the cocoons are kinda cool – they're playful, 'organic' in style, and interestingly, slightly Islamic-looking at the same time.

As it happens, I've had several conversations this year with people who wanted to attack modern art, architecture etc. etc. I always find this a tiresome thing to talk about, because I'm a fan of both classical and modern architectural styles. I get tired of defending the latter from this weird belief that a building can only be 'beautiful' if it was built (or looks like it was built) more than 100 years ago.  

When it comes to visual art, the conversation is even worse; here I'm a committed modernist, with zero love for, say, classical painting, or impressionism, or pretty much anything that came before the surrealist movement. None of it speaks to me, or ever has.  

In fact, if you want to have an argument with me, here's a tip: just repeat the line which appears in nearly every media story about modern art. You know, the one about how today's artists are talentless wankers, incapable of doing anything apart from painting a few black squares on a canvas, writing some meaningless nonsense about it and selling it for a million dollars. 

I'll tell you, in turn, that you're doing the work of the Dark Side by encouraging people to remain relentlessly conservative and literalist in how they view the world. I'll then go on to explain that I find Monet less interesting than most traffic signs, that I simply could not care less about van Gogh's use of light and shade, and that looking at a Cezanne painting reminds me of that moment when the hypnotist clicks his fingers and you immediately fall into a deep sleep*. 

Mission Accomplished: the argument is on ;-) 

Empty Nest

Heydar Aliyev Airport. Baku Azerbaijan, 20.06.16

But I don't feel argumentative today. More than anything, I feel sleepy! So I'm just going to quietly appreciate Baku airport's modest example of the joys of modern design, meditating on the fact that when you let a modern architect off the leash, you don't always get the functional concrete monstrosities that people complain about. Sometimes you get big fun coccoons :-)

Btw, the other cool thing about today is that it's the first of 58. I'll be visiting half a dozen countries, working in two of them, staying with friends in another, and no doubt collecting some tales to tell along the way. So in all likelihood, I'll be ranting wildly over the next 7-8 weeks.

Hope you'll join me for some, if not all, of the journey :-)

Bye!



(* Notice, though, that I didn't say any of those people were bad. They clearly weren't. I only said that I don't like them, which is a key difference between me and most 'anti-modernist' folk.)