The French don’t usually get things wrong in the kitchen. But I’m perpetually confused when I hear people talking about blini here. The term “blini”, in my understanding of the issue, is Russian for crêpes. Maybe the difference (perhaps?) is that the French product is “blini”, while the Russian “блины” should be transliterated as “bliny.” Either way, order a блины in Russia, and you’ll end up with pretty much the exact spitting image of a French crêpe.

In terms of recommendations of how to spend a holiday in Russia, I’d tell anyone to sample the delights on offer from the Teremok bliny kiosks dotted around St. Petersburg and the small restaurants in Moscow. Yes, Teremok is a fast-food chain, but don’t worry, it’s a total league above BlinDonalts (strange but true – this greasy fast-food chain puts even the best Russian fare to shame). For starters, I’d take the salmon, cream and dill or creamy mushroom bliny (but they’ve cut back on the cream in recent years – a real shame. Avoid the mushrooms with cheese; it’s a mere shadow on the creamy mushrooms…). Dessert would be a toss-up between the apple and caramel or the creamy sweet tvorog cheese with peaches (anything with condensed milk is also heavenly). If the sugar hit hasn’t caused your teeth to fall out by this stage, I recommend topping it all off with a honey beer…

Hang on, where was I? Oh yeah…the blini in France, by contrast, are small, thick pancakes intended to be decked with salmon or caviar. They are more like a cross between American-style pancakes and pikelets.

Pfft. That’s all I can say about that.

When it comes to religious matters, I’m usually left in the liturgical dark. I’m interested in as far as cultural feasts and festivals, but I always get things a little confused.

For instance, when I was a kid, I heard that an old cure for hiccups was to say ten Ave Marias. So I did just that (‘Ave Maria, Ave Maria‘ etc, etc, ten times over) and wondered why the problem remained. Only later on did I find out that Ave Maria is actually the Latin name for the Hail Mary prayer, and buggered if I was going to chant that ten times over. I just resorted back to holding my breath…

I’m equally muddle-headed over all the goings on for Easter. I knew when the chocolate was delivered, and that was pretty much my scope of concern. But I’ve become interested in Fasching festivities over the past few years (garish costumes, overindulgence, pancakes – how could I resist?)

Borrowed, stolen, adapted – call it what you will – from pagan European traditions, the pre-Lenten period is one of carnival and celebration. It’s as good an excuse as any to kick out a long winter and welcome the coming spring. Maslenitsa in Russia, for instance, corresponds both to the mythological Slavic sun festival and the Christian pre-Lenten feasting on dairy (at this stage, meat is already forbidden). Russian pancakes (bliny) are a symbol of Maslenitsa because they are round and golden and thought to represent the sun.

In France, Mardi Gras (“Fat Tuesday”) is celebrated as the last day of carnival, much to the delight of the school children, who get to wear fancy-dress costumes to school. It’s like a French Halloween, but without the focus on the ghoulish and ghastly.

Whilst Mardi Gras is associated with the Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day of the UK, Australia and Canada, there is a slight difference. The annual French festival associated with crêpes is called Chandeleur. It’s held on February 2nd, and is often linked with Mardi Gras because the dates are often similar. If you notice a recurring theme here, you wouldn’t be half wrong. French crêpes, like the Russian bliny, are thought to have solar symbolism and also fulfil the very practical purpose of using up all the eggs, butter and milk before Lent kicks in.

Mmm… my mouth waters at the thought of it all!


This is the only photo I have of Guillaume's magnificent crêpes. It's got nothing to do with Chandeleur or Maslenitsa though - he was cooking up a storm for our St. Petersburg housewarming party. It was one of those nights - as you can see - with the red wine of the "sangria" already streaking the walls. Don't worry - even though it was on the stove, it wasn't being served hot - we were just a little short of surface space!

I see that the Thalys train is offering a special price of 30€ on their Paris-Brussels return tickets – but there’s a catch – it’s only for the night owls!

If you’re young enough (sorry, it’s not just at heart either), feel like leaving Paris at 20:25 or 21:55 on a Saturday night and returning at 7 or 8 on the first trains of the morning, then this is the deal for you!

The thing is, why would I want to leave Paris on a Saturday evening? Is the nightlife in Brussels that good? Asking around, I found a few people who answered in the affirmative, but I’m still not sure if they were pulling my leg or not.

Speaking of having my leg pulled… I spent this morning googling to determine whether or not the motorways of Belgium can really be seen from the moon. I know it’s an urban legend about the Great Wall of China being spotted from outer space, but I just heard the one about the Belgian highways from my rideshare driver when I was going to Amsterdam. Apparently, the renowned illumination of Belgium’s highway system makes it the only man-made structure visible from the moon at night.

Not that I would be spending my evening camped out along the highway…

But does anyone out there know if it would be worthwhile having a white night in Brussels? Wave the tag of “sale” or “promo” at me, and it’s usually like waving a red rag at a bull – but what do you think about this one? Anyone?

Now I’m not one for philosophy, but writing about my Caucasian cognac picnic in the last post brought all the memories flooding back to me.

After a few cognacs chased by lush dark chocolate (I was only in it for the chocolate, honest), my Pre-Elbrus Region National Park ranger and I started talking about the big issues of world militarism, nationalist struggles and Chechnya. But in my broken Russian and my guide’s state of sobriety (i.e. non-existent) the conversation was simplified, to say the least.

It all started with a musing about tourism in the area. He was saying it was a shame that when there was a war in Chechnya the tourists didn’t come from Moscow. He muttered this with a shake of his head and a “what would Muscovites know anyway” grimace. Erring on the side of caution (and in this case the Muscovites), I interjected that wasn’t Chechnya only something like 100km away (as a high-altitude crow would fly)? He brushed aside my fears, with a dismissive “pfft” (French ancestry perhaps?) and announced that only peaceful people were welcome in the Kabardino-Balkaria Republic, and anyone else could go home for all he cared.

Right. (Change the topic, change the topic…)

“But why are there huge machine guns posts on all the hills around here then?” I asked, as this question had uncomfortably plagued me throughout my stay.

It turned out that they were just there to create controlled avalanches (I breathed a sigh of relief and treasured recent addition of the word “avalanche” to my Russian vocabulary).

He went on, and launched into a spiel about world peace. This was sometimes difficult for me to discern whether someone was talking about the world or peace (in Russian it’s the same word), but in this case it was pretty clear.

His words will remain with me to my dying days:

“Look, we are two, sitting here, enjoying a drink. I – I’m a Muslim man, and you, a… Christian… Christian?” I nodded a sort of theoretical agreement, “Christian girl, and we can both sit here, enjoying a drink together, regardless of religion. Well… technically, I shouldn’t be drinking, but I only drink cognac… and vodka… Well, I don’t drink beer… but really, that’s not for religious reasons, I just don’t like the taste…”

So I’d just gotten into a “roosky djeep” with one of the strangest of strangers. He was fully decked out in an ensemble of army camouflage hand-me-downs (not that there’s anything particularly unusual or ominous about this in Russia), and had shed his carload of passengers to take me to some tenth century Alanian ruins in the Baksan River region at the foot of Mount Elbrus…

Regarding the alcohol question, I’d finally been cajoled into admitted that I drank beer, after my protests of teetotalism went unheeded. He veered off the road and took a little track which lead to a handful of concrete apartment blocks and screeched to a halt in front of one that must have had a kiosk on the ground floor. He came back to the car bearing gifts – three bottles of beer, one bottle of Caucasian cognac and one of carbonated water, a block of dark chocolate (for the cognac), a knot of stringy smoked cheese (for the beer) and a loaf of bread (who knows what that was for – maybe to complete the impression that we were actually going on a picnic?)

The cheese warrants further description, because you pull little bits off, strand by strand, and munch on them along with whatever other assorted salty seafood snacks that work well washed down with beer.

We saw the ruins, but that was the anti-climax of the day. Like I said, my driver decided to ensure that they were well and truly ruined by driving over them to prove the prowess of his “roosky djeep.” The most interesting thing was the overview I was provided with about the area – because it turns out I had chanced to meet up with the National Park Ranger. But he hated his job, as much as I tried to convince him it was a noble occupation, because all he did was drive around all day and say: ‘No fires, no glass bottles, no hunting’ which to him really meant ‘No shashlik, no vodka, no fun.’

We almost went to Georgia, he thought it would be a laugh until I reminded him the impossibility of me leaving Russia with a single entry visa. To get to the Georgian border, you need to go up this car lift. The lift operator was my guy’s cousin, so we had tea with him in his caravan at the top of car lift. Talk about an inland lighthouse keeper – he just basically waited his lonely life away up there, drinking tea, until a car honked from below to be let up.

Speaking of oddball Russian stories, let me tell you the one how I almost went on a day trip to Georgia…

I was staying in a “tour base” about 4km from a grocery store, café and mosque on the main road between Tyrnyauz and Terskol, which impressively dead-ends at Mount Elbrus. The reason I was there was there and my entire life possessions in a Tyrnyauz apartment was a whole other story, so let it just suffice to say I was walking to the grocery store to buy a toothbrush and see nearby tenth century Alanian (proto-Ossetian) ruins when this story begins.

Picking my way past the debris of the winter’s avalanches and distracted by the adjacent river, I was quite enjoying my walk in the woods, until a carload of men stopped to ask me where I was going.

‘This way’, I replied, ambiguously, and kept walking. They drove another metre, and repeated their question.

‘But where?’ The conversation continued along these lines with a few more steps and jolts from their 4WD, until I finally answered that I was going to town. They told me to get in the car, that they’d take me. I refused and kept walking. The farce continued for about a hundred metres when I eventually agreed to get in and have a lift.

They prompted me to talk about what I was doing in the Caucasus, and why I was walking along the road that day, and I pulled out my map and showed them the ruin site that I wanted to visit. The several passengers in the back (and one other in the front) groaned and they beckoned the driver to stop. Huh? What had I said? What had I done?

They all got out and proceeded to follow on foot as the driver unfurled his “tour guide” feathers and announced that he would show me all the best places in the Upper Baksan Valley. He was the only one who could do it, because he had the “roosky djeep” (Russian Jeep. I think we even drove over some of the ruins later in the afternoon, just so he could prove how off-road it was), and now, the big question, did I prefer vodka or cognac?

to be continued…

I’m going to Switzerland in March, which I’m most excited about.

Hold on – that sentence sounded most Jane Austen-esque (overly romantic sentiments conveyed through stilted dialogue). I’d better stop myself there before I get charged with an insult to Eliza Bennet offence.

But there is a reason I’ve been conveyed back to the early nineteenth century, and it’s all due to Google. You see, I just thought I’d google the name of the place where I will visit. The first and only relevant reference came up with this text by Johann Gottfried Ebel:

It seems to me that I’ve stumbled on the original Lonely Planet, published in a Jean Gaudin translation in 1810.

Looks like I’ll just have to look forward to the baths of Louësche (Leukerbad)! Hope they’re still accepting customers!

Oh no. Of course the reality of the situation is far less amusing. I just typed the name wrong.

Siders (French: Sierre) exists in the twenty-first century too. I’m not being transported in both place and time.

I’m going with the family that I’m au-pairing for. I won’t say “woo hoo!” because then you won’t be able to determine if I’m being sarcastic or not, and maybe the wrong impression will be reached.

I will issue a collective “woo hoo” though for having some new material to write about (and everyone reading issues a sigh of relief) – but never fear, I’ve still got plenty of oddball stories about Russia up my sleeve!

I intended to write and post this for Valentine’s Day, but – of course – I forgot. So it will just have to convey my very best belated well-wishes to everyone out there in Blogland.

I once met a couple who had a pretty geographically extreme relationship. A “mere” 7350 kilometres separated their birthplaces – but the irony is that they were still born in the same country (yet not the same continent). How is that possible?

Gosh! This sounds like a riddle! C’mon, anyone out there with the answer? It’s not France and her colonies… the two places are geographically separated, but not by a body of water…

No surprise that the country is Russia – and the two birthplaces were Kaliningrad and Roosky Ostrov (Russky Island).

Kaliningrad is a Russian enclave and Baltic Sea port located between Lithuania and Poland, which was formerly the east Prussian capital and German town of Königsberg, founded by the Teutonic Knights in 1256.

Following the 1945 occupation of Königsberg by the Soviet Army, it became territorially part of the Soviet Union during the Potsdam peace settlement.

Roosky Ostrov, on the other hand, is a small island just near Vladivostok in the Zaliv Petra Velikogo (Peter the Great Gulf) of the Sea of Japan. The closest neighbouring countries are China and North Korea. This is where I met the couple, just through a little chance chatter with the woman at the grocery store. I can’t remember where exactly they had met, but I think they were working on a placement somewhere in the Soviet Union for science or geology.

Ahh… the extremes of love…

Why they didn’t settle in Novisibirsk (because it’s smack bang in the middle of Russia), I’ll never know!

I’ve travelled throughout Europe in most of the ways imaginable. ‘Plane, train, automobile’ can provide a basic enough framework for a description, but that’s only a starter morsel. I’ve done some hair-raising driving in Greece and Germany (ok, so it wasn’t really hair-raising, it was just me having to adjust to driving on the other side of the road), I’ve hitched, I’ve hiked, I’ve shared more than a few rides and I think I’ve already mentioned enough about turning bus-seats into beds.

Trains, you want trains? I’ve dedicated the equivalent hours of a full twenty-five days of my life to Russian trains. That’s not twenty-five instances where I’ve caught trains, but entire twenty-four hour periods spent bumping along to the Arctic North, the Caucasus Mountains or the vast expanse of Eurasian eastward spread from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean (let’s just lump it together as ‘Siberia’ for simplicity’s sake, shall we?)

I figured that little stat out in a long three days going from Kazan to Ulan Ude (I haven’t managed to determine how many “McCafe 3-in-1” super-sweet sachets of coffee I’ve drunk though… that would be numerically impossibly off-the-scale!)

I’ve cycled, motorbiked, boated, rafted, skied (I’m really grasping at movement straws here!), flown… yes, flown – but not just in aeroplanes.

I’ve even been tandem paragliding in Austria, which was an amazing first for me, because usually I’m terrified of heights. Well, I’m a bit of a phobia-butterfly, I like to flit between whatever’s going around (do you know what I mean? One doesn’t tend to think about vertigo when plunged into unknown surrounds in the pitch black, or about being scared to the dark when at the edge of a twenty-storey building…)

But the paragliding was nice. It didn’t convert me into an adrenaline junkie, but it was all very lovely and picture-perfect floating down over the wonderfully-scenic medieval Tyrolean town of Lienz (which, by the by, happens to be my father’s hometown, so I am a little biased in my glowing praise!) Ok, I’ll have to qualify that last phrase – it was all very nice and wonderful except for a painful wedgie throughout the flight and a clumsy crash landing to conclude!

I’ve met the devil at Patriach Ponds.

‘And so what?’ the vast majority of you will be asking, but there will be a few in the know – so this post is dedicated to all those kooky Bulgakov-nuts out there.

For all the rest: The Master and Margarita is an astonishing novel from Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov, which I think is safe to say, has a cult-like following outside Russia today. Those within the vast boundaries of the Russian Federation will probably be most recently aware of the story from the recent ten episode mini-series screened on state television Kanal Rossiya. It’s not so obscure though, as its title gets bandied around frequently as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

Anyway… It’s basically all the havoc the devil wreaks in a visit to a militant godless Soviet Moscow, all from the unassuming starting point of Patriarch Ponds. There’s a bit of Biblical lore, a bit of Goethe, a substantial amount of smooching and a heck of a lot of slapstick laughs. That’s hardly it in a nutshell, but you’ll just have to read it then, won’t you?

I took an Australian friend to Patriarch Ponds when we visited Moscow. In fact, I took everyone there as part of my “essential guided tour” – even when it was winter and the ponds were frozen over. It was only once through that we met this man. With eyes rolling back in his head, he announced that he knew why we were there (and it wasn’t just to wash down marinated aubergine and carrot rolls with our Bochkarev beers…). He knew that we were there to meet the devil, and that we had come on the right day – for he was The Devil! (Mwahuhuhuha)

Yeah right. Thanks mate.

Why is it that young female tourists always get to meet all the local “characters”?

Speaking of the devil, it seems that Andrew Lloyd Webber hopes to transform The Master and Margarita into ‘a stage musical or, more probably, an opera.’ Oh spare us…