New Year’s Feast

Ded Moroz, or "Grandfather Frost." He's like Santa Claus, except he comes on New Year's, wears blue and doesn't bring half as many presents.

I swayed slightly, the champagne bubbles working themselves into the lining of my empty stomach like so many grains of sand. I pictured myself face-planting into one of the ten or so Russian salads spread on the table before me (Russian New Year’s is traditionally celebrated “at the table”).

When I say salad, I mean it in the Russian sense, which is a heavy meat-and-potato based mixture designed to simultaneously soak up alcohol and put on a layer of blubber against the cold. No lettuce is involved; instead, the ingredients list resembles all those leftovers you might consider feeding your cat: Liver and eggs, beets under a layer of sour cream, pickles with potatoes and some form of grey meat, various mixtures of all forms of fish and root vegetables. Two standouts were “Silyotka under a Fur Coat” – potatoes, eggs, beets and apples on top of fish in oil – and the traditional Salad Olivye – potatoes, pickles, peas, onion, eggs and beef – that is always eaten on New Year’s.

It goes without saying that the second largest ingredient in any of these recipes is a coating of mayonnaise or sour cream. All were served cold. A mix of rice, crab, eggs, mayonnaise, onion, peppers and crab meat under cream sauce was the token international flavor at the table.

After I packed my gut like a real Russian muzhik and botched a toast to my hosts’ “gostepriimstvo” (hospitality), we headed over to a friend’s for a taste of Ukrainian New Year’s.

At least in comparison to the initial smorgasbord, the table here was still feeling the effects of the Ukrainian Famine. Three unidentified salads – one looked to contain either sardines or burnt string beans – glistened next to a platter of smoked fish.

As we sat down, Babushka Yulia, come from Ukraine to celebrate the New Year, just stared at me through the topography of her wrinkled face. Her wispy hair bound up in a platok and feet wrapped against the cold, she was a picture of the world-weary complacence that is so often found on the countenance of those who have lived through the Soviet regime.

I was too full to eat more than a bite of the “sala,” which, to put it nicely, is bacon’s sickly cousin. To put it bluntly, gelatinous pig fat. But my curiosity got the best of me when my attention was drawn to a 2-and-a-half liter water bottle of samogon (moonshine) glistening like pure glycerine on the headboard.

To the New Year!

Descent into Koporye

Tourist season is over here in Petersburg, and for good reason.  Here the twilight of the year brings the cold of the Russian winter with the rain of an Indian monsoon, all under the cover of near-constant darkness.

But nevertheless, we felt like getting somewhere really off the beaten path, where not even Russians usually get to.  The fortress of Koporye, a military stronghold dating from 1240 AD that remains virtually un-restored, pure ruins, seemed like a good bet.  Its location in a cedar forest to the south of Petersburg doesn’t even attract the Russian dacha vacationer (a specimen who, I can attest, is perfectly content to splash about on the “beach” of a muddy brook before supping on some butter-slathered pork fat) due to the proximity of the region’s largest nuclear power plant.

As a rather spoiled study abroad student, I might say smugly that the ruins were middling to average.  I mean, broken stones are broken stones, and the initial charm wears off — “But what’s under that tower?  Oh, another featureless underground chamber” — after approximately four hours under a mean winter rain.  Welcome to the swamps of St. Petersburg.

Plank bridge through the bowels of a tower.

The best part of the trip was getting there (almost didn’t make it, of course).  A bleary-eyed, 7 a.m. sprint to the Pushkinskaya metro, a breathless climb up the escalator, a cold elektrichka ride to freeze the fresh sweat in the small of your back — reminds me why my ideal Sunday morning is spent in untroubled slumber.

After the elektrichka, we got on an ancient local train that shuffled us past a pastoral of pale fields and smokestacks somehow connected to the web of structures comprising the region’s nuclear power plant, something like the visions of a French Impressionist banished to a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

At 9:55 a.m., we disembark in the middle of nowhere.  At 10:00, a purple Lada emanating a heavy bass beat splashes by.  At 10:07, cell phones lose contact with the civilized world.  At 10:15, same purple Lada returns to give us a respite from the rain and a lift to the fortress.

The young dude driving didn’t say much.  I guess if I lived in out here, I’d probably spend my Sunday driving around listening to ’80s Russian dance music, too.

We climbed around the fort for awhile, but a bus full of Russian tourists appeared unexpectedly and drove us out.  Just goes to show you that in the era of the flight-hotel-rental car package, nowhere is safe.

Luckily, a salmon sandwich and a chance to indulge my babushka photo-fetish roused my from these gloomy musings on the way back. 

Voga Boatman Episode 7: Moscow

Moscow (“Moskva” in Russian).  The onion-domed, haphazard old Russian counterpoint to St. Petersburg’s deliberate, neo-classical facades.  A constant, hectic race-for-survival, as contrasted with a haughty weekend stroll down Nevsky Prospekt.  The motherly homeland to the forward-looking father figure of Petersburg (much has been made of the automated voice on each city’s metro: Male in Petersburg, female in Moscow).

I saw (again) Lenin’s body still intact in his tomb, with Stalin, long since removed from embalmed glory, buried outside, next to the Kremlin wall.  It gave me a guilty thrill, but I have to say it’s time to knock Lenin down a peg or two.  Forget this nonsense about letting him “rest in peace”; it’s a pile of chemically preserved flesh.  Nonetheless, this pile of flesh is still far too revered.  Stalin was discredited in the ’60s and has at least become a controversial figure (the very least he should be after destroying millions of his countrymen), but Lenin still remains a goodly hero in the mass mentality.  It was this glittering golden god, however, who set the standard for ritualized destruction of innocent peasants, declaring “Merciless mass terror against the kulaks … Death to them!”

So I’m with Gorbachev on this one.  But now that my rant’s over, I can say it was a nice little trip, in all.

Old ladies (the more polite Russian term can be loosely translated as "well-lived") in Russia often wear their hair purple. This is on account of the cheap shampoo their pensions afford.

The Slava ("Glory") watch company, which used to sell parts to Swiss watchmakers.

A small bit of nature in the middle of the big city.

Volga Boatman Episode 2: Nizhny Novgorod

Nizhny Novgorod.  In this provincial trading center (an old Russian saying called St. Petersburg the head, Moscow the heart, and Nizhny Novgorod the wallet of Russia), everyone seems to rest easier.  And why not, when the worn red bricks of the Kremlin are echoing your name as marshrutkas (buses that look more like glorified vans) careen by?  Here you can fall for the Volga’s simple charm as you stroll along the “Naberezhnaya” promenade, and forget everything but the path of a leaf on the breeze.

I lived in Nizhny all this summer, and a wave of nostalgia hit me along with the scent of the city’s fall glory (a heavy chemical stench soon pushed all other smells aside, as per usual).

A babushka on the bus. Incredible character in the faces of these elders, some of whom remember Lenin.

A busker takes a break on the pedestrian thoroughfare Bol'shaya Pakrovskaya, the most important of Nizhny's many strolling places.

Side-street discovery: An old mental hospital.

Flower market.

So much character in every square foot ...

My Nizhny hosts, Olga and Sergei, at the port station.

Ode to a Fly on a Cucumber

A babushka examines the produce at Сенной Рынок (Sennoy Rinok).

An open-air market isn’t the first form of trade when you think of Russia, the country whose winter conquered Napoleon’s and Hitler’s armies, the land whose peasants used to sleep on top of the stove, and the birthplace of the radiator (although this is disputed). Nevertheless, the bazaar-style market (рынок, “rinok”) is an integral part of Russian commerce to this day, and a damn fine thing it is, too. Those rinok sellers are out there hawking pineapples even when it’s a cold and rainy; in other words, every day.

An imposing babushka (notice a trend here?) advances toward the peppers with her bartering game face on.

Granted, the fly maternity ward you’re bound to find on every uncovered pile of “salty cucumbers” (pickles) doesn’t exactly whet the appetite, the giant tubs of goat cheese make you wish you remembered more of your fourth-grade unit on pasteurization, and the pounds upon pounds of steaming raw flesh in the damp meat section are nearly enough to convert you to Hinduism.

Does that smell rotten to you?

But where else can you try everything before you buy, even as you haggle over the price with the ubiquitous Uzbek manning the stall? For that matter, where else can you find prices that are flexible enough to fluctuate wildly depending on the seller’s mood, the short lifespan of natural produce, or the foreign accent of the buyer?

Despite the pitfalls (I’ve spent a weekend hunched over the toilet after a poor choice of salty cucumber), the rinok makes me pine for those long-lost days when not every food product came in a shrink-wrapped, Styrofoam-plated, factory-tagged and plastic-bagged package. When you could taste a product and know you were only one or two steps removed from its producer.

Several of my American friends who just arrived here are losing weight even as they eat like horses (the Russian expression is actually “Eat (guzzle) like a pig,” whereas a boozer “Drinks like a horse”), and the only reason we can figure is the lack of processed food in the Russian home. And no one can begrudge the taste; after you become acclimated, you actually come to enjoy having your salad doused in 80-percent milk-fat sour cream that’s fresh from the countryside.

Now if only the granola bar would finally arrive in Russia …