Turkish hangovers

My mind might have been utterly thrown from its castings by the goings on in Shella but I haven’t been able to forget the gastro-spectacular that was Istanbul. Before I reflect on a megadose of sun and coast and boat, on nuptials and guests and donkeys, I think I need to post a final and non-conclusive set of abridged highlights of Istanbul.

1. Variations on the theme of eggplant and lamb
Not one day passed during which either Andy, Rebekah, myself or indeed all three of us did not order a meal whose key components were eggplant and lamb. Speared eggplant and lamb shishkebabs, spicy lamb meatballs on eggplant puree, lamb and veggies wrapped in eggplant, sizzling lamb with eggplant…the trajectory of these dishes was from superlative to superlative along a course plotted by lemon, tomato, garlic, yoghurt, parsley, olive oil and chilli. If I were to put forward a candidate for best savoury dish in Istanbul, it would be the sizzling meatballs chez Rumeli served on a very hot cast iron plate with eggplant, tomato and yoghurt. Unfortunately, no photo exists of this extraordinary plate: the steam bursting forth fogged up the lens of my camera and I was not able to wait.

2. Baklava
Many eastern Mediterranean cultures claim baklava as their own, the regional furore over the genesis of a sweet dish being comparable to the ongoing trans-Tasman hostilities regarding cultural ownership of the pavlova. Such parochialism, I spurn, indeed I find that myths of origins can be overlooked with the assistance of sufficient syrup and crushed nuts and honey. During our glittering ascent into the sublime, baklava will be served as an inflight snack.

3. POMEGRANATE JUICE
If you’d asked me last week, last month, last year, I would have told you that I was too old and jaded and weary and worldly and boozy to be genuinely moved by fruit juice. Then I came to Istanbul and started drinking pomegranate juice, tart blood and gold pleasure.
The glorious juices of this fruit - this fruit that moonlights as a jewel - are pressed in the streets and do splendid things for a hangover. I’ve noticed that most of the jewellery that I seem to be wearing these days is pomegranate influenced. This can only be a good thing. After ten days in bright white Lamu sun, I am fancying myself a little on the pomegranate side too, complexion wise.

And yet, and yet, of Istanbul there’s so much more: domed ceilings and ceremonial columns and mosaics and the skyline at night and meze and the fishermen and Iznik ceramics and running into old friends on the street and apple tea and bazaar life and hammam hammam hammamdullahlah…

Figgery pokery

Let me tell you what was wrong with this dish.
1. The blackcurrant sorbet accelerated the hardening of the figgy caramel in which the caramelised figs were wallowing, resulting in a large amount of inaccessible caramel.
2. It wasn’t served on pistachio coloured plates.
3. The plate upon which it was served wasn’t edible.
4. The menu proclaimed that the dish would be served with cream and it was not.

Apart from these quibbles, these figs were the best sweet things I’ve eaten in a mighty long time. I say this having just left Turkish delight heartland, having recently scoffed all manner of nutty, syrupy pastries. Hot caramelised obscenely figgy figs with a caramel made from honey, fig syrup and butter is the stuff of culinary fantasy. The dollop of sharp and acidic sorbet, surprisingly, made the whole dish even better, cutting through the sweetness of the figs and meddling with the texture of the caramel. And the nuts! Perfectly placed walnuts, delightfully crushed pistachios!

If it were possible to eat these figs in the bath, it would also be dangerous to so do, so intensely and deliriously pleasurable were they for the eating. Negotiating traffic afterwards was difficult. In fact, having eaten these figs and thus eliminated the prospect of rational discourse, the only realistic follow-up option was to go to a Turkish bath. Andy sauntered off to the men’s baths, I to the women’s. I lay on a hot marble platform and try to gaze at the sky through the star-shaped perforations in the dome above me. I was thwarted by recollections of the figs. I bathed and steamed, a woman scrubbed many months of grime from my body; I steamed and bathed a little more and all of a sudden it was time for dinner. This blog is testimony that I have survived to tell the tale.

Preliminaries

Q. It's Turkish. It's delightful. What is It?
A. Turkish Delight!

As I’ve had the great pleasure to discover, the delights of Turkey extend far beyond one particular variety of confectionary and indeed beyond the pleasures of the gullet. I wouldn’t have predicted a favourable response to Turkish delight, nougat (nougat!) and other sweets, like the chewy delicacy whose genesis was, I am sure, a vat of milk in which a handful of cardamon pods had been steeped, when rolled in coconut. I would have been wrong. Here’s a tasting shot from the spice market, all rosewater and pistachio and honey and fig and cardamon and syrup and walnut and outrageous, fabulous abundance.

I had planned to - and indeed managed to - meet up with a long-time collaborator in Istanbul but one of the unscripted pleasures of Turkey was colliding with an old friend, Rebekah, on the main drag. Rebekah had befriended a commentator on the mores, and, apparently, the lesses of travelling in Turkey. Not only did this anonymous expert deem apple tea a chemical overload for tourists, he claimed that any chocolate flavoured sweets, including chocolate baklava were a travesty. Travesty they may be, mighty good they unquestionably are.

And then there was the baklava and the hammam with the hot marble platform and the Grand Bazaar and the pomegranates and Byzantine architecture and eggplants and Iznik glazing and the Bosporus and all of that. Right now, there’s me with Rebekah to meet in front of the Blue Mosque and a flight to catch tonight and then who knows how many hours of transit in which to write about the delights of not-Constantinople, at least ten of which will be spent in an airport buzzing with wireless waves. There will be more and I pledge 'pon my honour, it will be well flavoured.

Alas, one of the best meals I ate, spicy lamb kofte with tomato and yoghurt and eggplant, served sizzling, generated so much steam that the lens of my camera fogged up. And yet another was eaten in such a marvellous restaurant, near the grill, in high spirits that I clean forgot to take a photograph.

Not the Orient Express

I left Romania on the most comfortably appointed sleeper train in which I have ever had the pleasure to travel. Wood panelling! Soft mattresses! A distinct and welcome absence of grime, disinfectant, stale cigar smoke, lime, insects and cold draughts! The Chisinau-Bucharest train had undermined my affection for a good long train trip so much so that I had thought of flying to Istanbul rather than braving another stinky rattle-trap and slightly threatening cabin-mate. This time, I booked my ticket through a travel agent at Bucharest station, decided to splurge on the second snazziest grade of travel (three in a cabin), and insisted that I sleep in a wimmin only cabin; 56 euros and 20 hours of travel later, and here I am in Istanbul, my commitment to long-haul train travel reaffirmed.

I stared out the window as the sun turned the fields and forests and hills and sky from green and yellow and brown and blue to the most extraordinary shades of purple and orange and red and white. Men in hats sat in hay-carts driven by donkeys, kids played soccer in fields just harvested and little groups with baskets sat under trees and picked mushrooms. In between times, I had Daniel Deronda and an old Guardian to entertain me.

The internet had provided me with a number of different and contradictory factoids about the visa requirements for entering Turkey. I was pretty sure, if not entirely certain, that I could buy a visa at the border but had no idea how much that would cost or what currency would be needed. The blogs yielded stories of dodgy border guards refusing various currencies and requiring a little extra currency to lubricate the process. I spent my last Romanian lei on beer and took a handful of euros and US dollars to the visa dealer at the border. Here’s my addition to the factoids. If you hold a British passport and you are entering Turkey by train, a visa will cost either £10 or 15 euros or US$20, making it most economical to pay in euros (I think). Woman of experience I may be, but I haven’t yet bribed a border guard. Someday.

Transparent as the process was, there was still a lot of waiting around to be done. The train pulled into Bulgarian border control at about 1.30am and left the Turkish control two hours later; most of that time was spent shivering in queues. I’ve had ample opportunity of late to observe the social habits of people in queues and particularly to wonder at the overwhelming urge that many people seem to have to form groups and committees and engage in chit-chat. I think I missed out on that gene. At any rate, I was on autopilot and had forgotten to pre-program small talk and so didn’t really join in the banter. I was cold and I didn’t really want to tell my life story in five easy chunks* to some strangers in the dark. And, misanthrope that I am, I didn’t really want to hear a set of soundbites about the English speakers around me. I’ve never really needed to talk to kill time and forming bonds with other people through complaint is a habit I’m trying to break. Solidarity in the face of adversity is one thing but the kinds of connections I see wealthy westerners like myself forming with each other when they are stuck in a new environment don’t really appeal.

Oh, the clock doesn’t work. Look, that clock there shows different time to this one here. It’s just not like home, is it. Gosh, these clocks that don’t work, you’d think they’d get onto it. Is that other feller there working or just loafing? Oh, complained the Australian couple, nodding to each other, you wouldn’t get this kind of trouble with immigration at home, would you? We-he-he-heeeelll, blustered a drunk and whiskery American gent apparently exploring his second youth, they told you this was gonna be a sleeper train, did they? We-he-he-he-heeeell! Don’t believe a word they say, that’s what I say. And always, I say always, always watch your pockets. I’m going to ask the conductor whether he knows what time it is. Is that all we’re waiting for? For them to stamp our passports? What about that other feller? What’s he doing?

And so it went on. I don’t suppose anyone is much good with sparkling repartee at three in the morning.

I watched locals who had made the trip before bring out thermoses. I envied the squat old ladies their fur lined boots and lurid headscarves; they looked warm and I was cold. I’d made friends with the conductor, a round man with a very impressive walrus moustache, and his offsider, an impassioned Romanian patriot named Orlando, and they told me how bad EU membership was for Romania and Bulgaria. I got to wishing that I was still a smoker and tried to whistle the theme tune from ‘Cabaret’ instead but it was too cold to stay on target. The slightly loopy Romanian lady with whom I was sharing a cabin gave me the low-down on her cats and her June to November fruit and vegetable pickling program in the Ceaucescu years. Comatose small talk is easier in French. ‘Dearie me,’ a middle-aged Australian man intoned loudly and dramatically at least five times within a twenty minute interval and I resolved to eliminate the expression from my expostulatory vocabulary, so silly did he sound.

Eventually, everybody got their passport stamped, everybody got back on the train, everybody got to Istanbul. The last twenty minutes of the trip sheared by the coast, the view broken from time to time by the remnants of the old walls of Constantinople. Walking down the platform, I passed the stained glass windows of the Orient Express café and remembered that I’d been at the other end of the line in Venice six weeks ago. The first thing I noticed when I left the station was what claimed to be a baklavaria, an omen which portends very well, I’d say.

* My life in Five Easy Responses
1. I’m Australian. 2. I’ve come from Bucharest. 3. I’m going to Istanbul to meet a friend. 4. Yes, I’m travelling alone. 5. No, it’s fine, I like travelling on my own.

Bloodsuckers

Feeling a little feeble, my time in Bucharest has been on the quiet side. I didn't even make it to Transylvania. I didn't need to go out of Bucharest to see how the vampiric urge has been displaced.

Isn't there something noted in passing in Dracula about the Count's money being invested in the financial markets? And to think, this time last year, I was teaching Drac, 'nineteenth century with a vengeance' to first year students at Sydney.

Given that I had not yet found the reserves of pluck which did Mina so well in Stoker's book, I thought a cup of English tea might soothe my ills and restore my gumption. I realised I was wrong when this arrived.

Ah, Bucharest. The English language listings guide to the city, celebrating eight years of publication, makes the following back-handed assessment of the city: More than seven years since we began publishing out half-decent guide to what was then unquestionably Europe's worst city, we have watched and commented as Bucharest has developed into, well, questionably not Europe's worst city.

Questionably not Europe's worst city. What can I add? There's a supermarket chain called Angst, a chocolate bar called Laura, and a beer called Burger.

All aboard for Istanbul!

Triumph of the (Architectural) Will

Beautiful, inspiring arts building in atmospheric downtown Chisinau. I was so entranced by the structure that it affected the camera angle. Note peasant woman walking past for scale.

The excitement is engulfing

From the below, it should be clear that I was quite happy to get on the train to Bucharest from Chisinau. Five hours was scheduled to clear the border from Moldova into Romania, one of the far eastern borders of the EU. A Romanian Customs guard, having made a very cursory check that I wasn't planning to make my fortune smuggling any cheap booze or untaxed ciggies into Romania, sat down and chatted at me for an hour in English and French. He showed me all the placed in a train cabin it is possible for people smugglers to conceal their cargo. His passion was maps and he got very excited about mine. Next time I'm in Romania, I'll know all the places to visit. Feeling a little tired and under the weather, I decided to slow down a little and not bolt around the country like a deranged creature. I'm here in Bucharest, a city that is as dead as a doornail on a Sunday afternoon, for a few more days and will use it as my base for an expedition into the cold heart of Transylvania and then I'll jump on yet another night train all the way to Istanbul.

Oh, just one more whinge about Moldova... How’s this for a catch-22. Foreigners have to have their passport on them at all times as they are subject to spot checks from the police, presumably to check that they're not outstaying the toasty warm welcome. My hotel wouldn’t release my passport for the duration of my stay. For me, this wasn’t a problem because I am in the unusual situation of holding two passports. So whilst the UK passport with the Moldovan entry stamp languished in the safe (I hoped) at the hotel, I flashed my Australian passport – which I realised in retrospect entitled me to nothing, whose lack of entry stamp and the visa necessary for Australia made me an illegal alien – at the cops who didn’t even check it. They looked at the stamps from Asia, slapped each other on the back, pointed at me, laughed, and gave back my passport.

Sayonara Moldova

I made it from Odessa to Chisinau and posting this from Bucharest is a happy sign that Chisinau and Moldova are well behind me. Twenty four hours is not enough time to refine an informed opinion about any country, I know. Underinformed as my gut instinct may be, I am nevertheless bound to state that Moldova is not the country for me. I had wanted to travel from Odessa to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, on the train. Not being sure whether this train was actually operational, I took the advice of a friend and posted a query on the Lonely Planet Thorntree site, a very useful resource if one is travelling in these parts or indeed anywhere off the proverbial beaten track. I was overwhelmed with useful responses: not only did I discover that the train was no longer running because of the trouble in Transdniestr, I found out the particulars of the correct bus. Transdniestr is a region in the east of Moldova (ie, the part near Odessa) which is still faithful to the ideals of the former Soviet Union (yes). Trains from the Ukraine no longer run through there and loopy foreigners like myself are strongly advised not to travel through at the moment as a fee will be levied for the privilege and drama, ranging from low level official corruption to low level incarceration is the norm. In spite of the firm belief of the distinguished upper echelons of my family to the contrary, I’m always happy to heed a travel warning. My LP interlocutor advised that only the 11am and the 3.30pm buses to Chisinau from Odessa go through Palanku and hence not through Transdniestr. Got that? Now write it in Cyrillic. I ignored the fifteen other buses to Chisinau and bought a ticket on the 11am bus (or so I hoped). I found the bus, the driver took my bag, I even bought a cup of sweet sweet instant coffee with powdered milk: everything was looking so good that I thought I’d get on the bus. Unfortunately, I took leave of my Ukrainian street-smarts and opened the door of the bus on the left. What I opened was the door to the driver’s seat. Ooooh, how we all laughed! Ooooh, what a great opportunity for cross-cultural charades that was! Did I want to drive the bus to Chisinau? Noooo, I did not! Was I feeling like a conspicuous foreign silly? Ooooh, yes I was, particularly after someone decided to do a kangaroo hop.

I slunk onto the bus and submerged myself in Ivanhoe until the border checks. As the only person on the bus who wasn’t either Ukrainian or Moldovan, I was sure that the delays (an hour leaving Ukraine, an hour entering Moldova fifty metres later) had something to do with me but when the bus arrived in Chisinau an hour before schedule, that certainty abated. I know that a number of conversations about me took place very near me, I just have no idea what the substance of those conversations might have been. Happily, I didn’t get summonsed for interrogation by border guards, unlike many of my fellow passengers. You know, you never know how much a passport can mean until you’ve given it up at a place where it might really come in handy. Like the Ukraine-Moldova border. The situation demanded meek compliance and in turn I gave my passport to the cross looking Ukrainian border guard and then to her Moldovan counterpart and just sat there waiting hopefully. Both times, the passports were returned to the bus in a big bundle and a schmick looking Moldovan lad took it upon himself to distribute them. ‘Caaa-Try-Ooooh-Nya,’ twice he smirkingly read, waiting for a solid snicker from the gallery before handing my passport back to me with a great flourish. Being engrossed in a novel about the chivalric code, I lowered my head like a proficient damsel, nodded gratefully, murmured ‘spasibo spasibo’ and demurely, smilingly received the proffered passport.

Shift a few hours forward to the reception desk of the hotel at which I planned to stay the night, cheapish and near the train station from whence would depart the sleeper train to Bucharest the following night. Apologising for the fact that I had to use English (my Romany and Russian both being blunt instruments), I asked whether they had a single room for one night, all smiles and cultural diplomacy. ‘When are you leaving’ asked the older woman of the two staffing the desk, immediately taking charge of the official welcome. ‘Um, I don’t know exactly,’ I demurred.
Hatchet-face (for in truth, she was possessed of such a face.): (Early triumph of logic.) Well, if you don’t know, you can’t stay.
Catri (for ‘tis my name.): (Suddenly a bit desperate and tired, actually.) Um, I don’t know but I can leave as early as you want. (Smiles.)
Hatchet-face: (Mildly threatening.) We need to know.
Catri: (Beseechingly.) When…?
H-F: (Authoritatively.) Ten am in the morning, no later.
C: (Bright and conciliatory, ignoring tautology.) OK, fine, that’s TERRIFIC! Can I leave my bags here for the day tomorrow?
H-F: (Scoffing.) Where?
C: (Lost.) Here?
H-F: (Once more with the upper hand.) Here? Here,—ha!—no. We have no luggage room here.
C: (Pauses. Slightly baffled. Bright idea finally sparks.) Is there a luggage room at the train station?
H-F: (Reluctantly.) At train station, there is a luggage room.
C: (Earnestly wanting to be triumphant, but instead opting for a conciliatory smile, smiles.) Great. Can I check in?
H-F: (Sternly.) PASSPORT?

And so it went on, and so I found myself in a pretty marginal hotel room, muttering away to myself in a most unladylike fashion. I won’t go into detail about the trouble the hotel had processing my credit card nor will I expostulate against organizations which advertise their rates in one currency (say, US dollars, ready money in any country in the world) and demand payment in another (say, Moldovan lei, current ONLY in Moldova and worthless elsewhere). I’ll also leave to your imagination the number of ATMs which rejected my card, the non-funny banter I exchanged with the bank staff at the joint where I had to withdraw money on my Visa card and exchange it, thus paying double fees, and the slightly terse interchange I had with my receptionist friend on finally returning with Moldovan hard cash to pay the bill. Oh yes, and that twenty dollar note that I’d brought with me from the Ukraine which I couldn’t change because it had a crease down the middle. Ah, the memories.

I'm sure the wineries are beautiful and that if you happen to speak Moldovan the locals are lovely... For the brief duration of my stay, being in Moldova was like being in a bank queue and forever being shunted to a different counter and told to return in an hour, tomorrow, when the cleaner has returned from holidays, perpetually. Pure Kafka.

Moving along

I have been a little less adventurous than I could have been as far as Ukrainian food is concerned. This is partially because I had a little wonder as to whether I might be getting sick, decided that the Ukraine was high on the list of countries in which I didn’t want to be sick and alone, and so resolved to eat lots of garlic and raw vegetables. I could eat borscht and potato dumplings and blinis and curd cheese pancakes with cherries and potato salad three times a day but otherwise, to be sadly frank, Ukrainian cuisine doesn’t appeal to me enormously. I’m proud of my stout constitution and can generally cope with dishes that draw together three different kinds of fats. When heavy animal fats are the main ingredient in every dish (hello lard! hello suet! hello dripping!), I’m less enthusiastic. I like chocolate, but I couldn’t face the bacon in chocolate dessert that I saw advertised in a few places. The dish that stopped me in Lviv, Cossack bacon fat with raw garlic, is more frequently known as Salo, I discovered. Mussolini, Pasolini, lick it up; the rest of you, avoid it like the Black Death. I endorse the film but I cannot endorse the dish, dubbed a ‘strategic snack’ in one Kyiv restaurant.

Tomorrow I take the bus to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, a country known for difficult bureaucracy, obscurity, organised crime and cheap wine. I’ll be stuffing American dollars into my socks, staring into middle distance throughout the customs checks and readying to sample the best and the cheapest the Moldovan sommeliers can bear to pour once I’ve made it through.

Name that film!

G’an!

In what film, banned for decades in the UK and elsewhere, do these steps feature?
They are in Odessa, there are 192 of them, and I walked up and down them all today.

You can do it!

Park life

Kyiv is a fantastically green city, full of huge tree-lined avenues and parks in which there are currently groups of people camping waiting for a pretext to protest the results of the elections just past. Even the industrial areas are a bit bosky.

Appearances can be deceptive. Whilst Kyiv might look like a greenie’s dream, Soviet-era cars and tractors and trucks sputter through the streets of the city spewing out clouds of black smoke at swallowing height. I’m not convinced the proliferation of trees quite balances things out, she writes, coughing and rubbing her eyes...


There are plenty of parks in Odessa too, and they are all full of people. Very nice, very nice.

Shackled

More padlocks d’amour, this time in Odessa, on the ‘Mother-in-law Bridge,’ apocryphally so named because it was built at the behest of a Communist official who wanted a quicker way for his mother-in-law to get home and outta his house. Romantic site to make a public assertion of true love, non?
Eavesdropping and deciphering the explanatory gestures exchanged by a group near me on the bridge, I deduce that the keys are turned up here on the bridge and then thrown into the wasteland fifty metres below. That’s commitment.

Mulling up

Whatever happened to mulled wine? It was a vital fixture of my undergraduate life, a means of doctoring cheap wine into something delectably drinkable. Just add cinnamon sticks and cloves and orange slices and brown sugar to a cask or two of goon et voilà,* instant European fireside ambience, general loquacity and bonhomie. Mulled wine is closer to blood temperature than room temperature; the ensuing rapid alcohol absorption rate contributes to the conviviality. A regular reader of this blog lived in a house I frequented frequently in which was installed a pot-bellied stove. This stove mulled wine through winter as bees buzzed in the hives on the roof. Can a more wholesome image of that particular alpaca scarf wearing, dreadlocked, earnest slice of mid-nineties undergraduate space-cake be evoked? Sigh (fondly). Shudder (ruefully). Deny (vehemently). Move on (immediately). I refuse to attribute my taste for mulled wine solely to hopelessly accelerated nostalgia. It is good stuff: warming liquid gingerbread, pleasantly intoxicating, spicy sweet and deeply atmospheric.

Mulled wine, I recall hazily, was also a feature of a couple of parties in my tinier than tiny post-graduate apartment/garret in Paris. It was revived not just because the weather was cold but because it had performed so sturdily over Christmas in Grindelwald and NYE in Vienna. I do realise that it is slightly obnoxious to recall the pleasures of a draught of gluhwein and a plate of spätzli halfway down a Swiss ski slope but do so I must. Laura and Alex and I, underclothed and ill-housed as we were as we hailed in the New Year of 2003, were saved by the warming powers of mulled wine and hot rum punch. And hence, mulled wine until early spring.

After that, however, there seems to be a distinct and lamentable absence of mulled wine in my life. Should I blame global warming? After all, mulled wine is not a warm weather drink? Has Sydney lacked the chilliness which justifies mulled wine? Have I forgotten something? Is there a collective will to throw off the daggy whiff of hippydom which e’er shall waft over a pot of mulled wine? Is mulled wine destined to be the lentil soup of the boozocracy, condemned for its wholesome associations in spite of its inherent Goodness?

Shift to the Ukraine, where most menus have a hot cocktails section and all bars served mulled wine. It’s under 10 degrees outside and so a pudding of baked cottage cheese and cherries (only cooked on the weekend!) and a goblet of mulled wine seemed not only appropriate but necessary. My heart did warm and my cheeks, they did redden; my soul verily became a winged thing and flitter and fly with glee!

In the absence of anyone with whom to discuss such thorny questions as men who call themselves feminists, the lure of the system, and the impossibility of full fee paying local students in Australian universities (it was the nineties…), I set myself to silent resolutions. Comrades, the time is ripening for the next mulled wine revival. If the revival of mulled wine could somehow be connected to the sudden proliferation of small and charming bars in Sydney, I could be relied upon to return to Sydney before the end of next winter. Otherwise, a delay until gin and tonic season proper could be on the cards. Yet another wedding, this one scheduled for December 2008, forecloses the threat of staying away until Pimms season.

* This is not a recipe blog but to pre-empt discussion of variants, I note the following: apple and pear can be added to mulled wine aux belles étudiantes, as can cardamon and vanilla pods, cassia bark and star anise, although preferably not all at once. I lost my innocence somewhere along the way and learnt to add a reasonable dash of brandy to the mix.

I is putting the You in Ukraine

Nothing has yet passed in the Ukraine that has not been a little strange. If I am ever again in a position to instruct novices in literary theory, when the classes on Russian Formalism roll by, I will be well equipped with anecdotes to illustrate Victor Shlovksy’s (was it?) ideas about ostraninie.

A well dressed man walked past me carrying a framed print of a naked woman being embraced by a panda.

I watched nuns watching Ukrainian b-boys break it down on the street in Kyiv.

A very cranky museum attendant at the Lviv History Museum (the black building), having established that I was Australian and spoke a little bit of German, hauled me over to a cardinal’s robe and aggressively explained that this cardinal, of Ukrainian origin, had visited Australia in the 60s. I made interested noises. He glared and then left me.

In spite of a three hour wait on the Slovakian border for customs, during which I became increasingly concerned by the non-appearance of my passport, the train from Kosice to Lviv arrived on time.

The phone in the hall had no dial.

I took a sip of what I thought was apple-juice at breakfast and discovered it to be something like smoked bison grass cordial.

You can't tapdance on cobblestones

New cobblestones were being laid in one of the squares in Lviv and a huge crowd had gathered to watch. People who looked like they should have better things to do nudged each other and pointed at the piles of old cobbles and their sharp squared replacements. I, having nothing at all better to do, watched and wondered. Most of the cobblestoned streets and squares in Lviv aren't in great shape so I surmised that the citizenry was present to show their support for the civic smoothing of the ways.

Trying to get anywhere in a hurry on uneven cobblestones is quite a business. I am extremely impressed by the platoons of women wearing extremely tight stilleto boots (gold lamé, leopard print, patent black are de rigeur) who conduct their daily business around town with such conditions underfoot. People also seem to drive quite fast, making the cobblestone tapdance even more challenging.

I'm not sure whether this sign, posed near a school, is destined to warn motorists as to the presence of schoolchildren dashing hither and thither on the cobblestones or to act as an encouragement to bolt.

Cossack Dancing

Like the young adventuress I diligently aspire to be, I have been fearlessly Trying New Things since I left Sydney. I have had many more stunning successes on the eating front than disasters but today the stars were apparently not aligned for eating well.

I stumbled into Dyzga, a café behind the main square, yesterday. One of the waiters spoke an English far less broken than my Russian and there was a menu in English on offer. They were playing Amalia Rodrigues; I drank coffee and ate a truly magnificent potato salad, crunchy with pickles. I earmarked the Snack Cossack’s Trick, surely a dose of bona fide Western Ukrainian fare, for today’s lunch.

The Cossack’s Trick was either a very nasty trick played on unsuspecting tourists or a dish just a little too genuine for a palate refined out of the fields. The menu told me that the dish involved Ukrainian bacon, pickled cucumbers, garlic toasts, cabbage. Fair enough, I thought, when in Lviv, eat like a Lvivski.

This is what arrived.
Note first the fluorescent plastic Cossack’s swords as they were the nicest touch of the whole dish. What I anticipated would be garlic toast turned out to be hunks of rye bread and slices of raw garlic. Rustic style, I guess. I wasn’t particularly heartbroken by the lack of cabbage on my plate but did wonder at the authenticity of the large olives. Enormous Caucasian olives, there you go, I thought to myself and speared one with a sword. It turned out to be a spicy salty pickled plum. My tastebuds were very confused, too confused to appreciate the plum which I might have otherwise relished. Half a jar full of slightly chlorinated pickles, I could have coped with under other conditions but, and here’s where it all gets really awful, the prevailing conditions involved Ukrainian bacon. That stuff that you might think is some sort of compressed chicken product or cheese or something, that stuff is Ukrainian bacon and it is a nightmare made of pure lard. Ukrainian bacon is slices of pork fat and really entirely unappetising. Wondering whether the bacon was just an unattractive delicacy, with the aid of a sword, I nibbled at one piece and needed to chew on a piece of raw garlic to clear away the taste and texture. I managed to eat most of the bread, a couple of plums, and only just dented the pile of pickles. I do not regret for a moment leaving the rest untouched: it was truly awful.

It’s turning my stomach just writing about this. I’m going to find a martini for dinner; I haven’t drunk a martini for weeks and I am convinced it will make everything better. Lviv, I sense, is just the city to deliver the goods. There’s a flashy deco hotel called the Grand Hotel up the road which has just had a paint job and that’s where I’m heading. With luck, I shall board an early train to Kiev tomorrow morning with my memory of the cruel plateful of Cossack bacon blubber erased.