Start of the Big Freeze

Last night, when I started writing about the coming cold the temperature was no more than a few degrees below zero. By the time I left the office to start up Balios it was -18 C. Coming home with my mavourneen at around 11 pm, we stopped for some produce at the local grocer. When we got out into the streets again just after a few minutes the temperature had dropped at -26 C. That has to be the most precipitous temperature drop I've ever witnessed in me life in such a short time!

I woke up this morning to more news reports about The Big Freeze. In the Moscow Times, the country's top health official, Gennady Onishchenko, said Monday that schools in Moscow may have to be closed if temperatures were at -25 C or colder for any length of time. (A Russian colleague once said schools would automatically be closed at -30 C.)

Moscow's homeless people were among the most vulnerable, with some even attempting to get themselves arrested by the police as a desperate means to survive the cold. "Spending a night in the police station is better than anything else, at least it's warm down there," The Times quoted an unidentified homeless man as saying. That's one for News of the World.

Or for the birds, as this photo of migrating penguins sent to me by my friend Vika suggests.

"Honestly, we do not have any experience of working at such low temperatures . It hasn't been so cold for years," said Rita Likhachyova, chief doctor at City Clinic No. 7, which operates a separate clinic for the homeless. "Hopefully, the cold spell will not last and the homeless will find shelter. However, we still expect a lot of patients with hypothermia."

Too late for at least five people, who froze to death in the city over the weekend.

Another interesting tidbit for Rupert Murdoch is that police will be allowed to wear valenki. That's almost like seeing bears in Russia's streets.

Postscript: I looked up Tomsk on the Internet and found out it's more than plausible that it exists. At least there's an account by someone who's actually been there. American engineer David MacDonald has written an article about living in Siberia in Clever Magazine.

Siberia moves into Moscow

Don't say you weren't warned.

Even from last week's stupor at work, at a time when most offices in Moscow might have been forgiven for occasional displays of sluggishness and torpor, people came to life with talk of a cold front engulfing the capital in -25 to -34 C weather - temperatures rarely seen this side of John Howard and GW Bush's version of a petrol-guzzling ideal world. Had any of your colleagues resorted to raising eyebrows, citing Gismeteo.ru would've been enough to silence any doubts.

The Russian weather bureau has had its share of flubbed forecasts but this one, you can ignore lethally at your peril. If the warnings weren't clear enough, The Moscow Times made sure that our fellow expatriates took a break from bashing Russia and Russians or talking about Russian women as if they were heifers and pay attention: its online site had the article "Record Cold Blows Toward Moscow" above the fold, as it were, and on Page 3 (indubitably an attention-grabber in the UK) in the paper edition. It warned of a "record cold snap" that gripped Western Siberia over the weekend, of temperatures plummeting to -50 C and below in the Tomsk region.

Interfax news agency, which has yet to attain the credibility of Reuters or AFP, caught a chap at the west Siberian office of the Federal Weather Monitoring Center mixing his maps. Arctic weather in Siberia, Renat Yagudin said, trying metaphor for heightened effect. This anageographic quote may make good copy, but for a seasoned (or even twice-seasoned) traveller like me who quits Murmansk or Lapland in disgust for producing +4 C weather the soundbite sounds somewhat strange.

Ringing the alarm, the article continued: "Moscow will not escape the cold snap, with the mild weather of the last week set to end. Temperatures will drop to minus 21 C on Monday evening as the cold front from Siberia sweeps in, falling to minus 20 to minus 27 C on Tuesday."

Recent residents of Moscow familiar with Portuguese or Finnish literature may have even remarked that reporter Kevin O'Flynn's writing style appeared to have bizarrely taken, if briefly, Jose Saramago's or Markus Nummi's. It was 0 to -1 C just this morning - how can temperatures drop by more than 20 degrees overnight? (Shades of A jangada de pedra or Kadonnut Pariisi?)

How about 50 degrees, as experienced in Tomsk, a region that skeptics insist exists only to prove that severe weather is still possible in the supposed ice-bound wastes of eternally frozen Russia (if only not to disappoint tourists and twice-seasoned travelers)?

In fact the situation was so serious that a state of emergency was actually declared in Tomsk. So extreme that at least one man died in connexion with the weather conditions while hospitals scrambled for cold medicine to treat non-doubters. For good measure utilities and public transport were disrupted. (Since I don't know anyone who has actually been there, so allow me to suspend my belief.)

Like an epidemic, the cold snap also affected other areas. In Novosibirsk, the mercury fell to a 100-year record low of -40 C while in Krasnoyarsk, where some residents were prophetically preparing to head to the beach and asking us for visas, some people even saw it fit to cancel Old New Year's Eve festivities after fearing an onslaught of -40 C. In the Komi-Permyatsky autonomous district, temperatures of -40 to -45 C forced the collapse of a heating system for 600 residents in the Evetsky settlement, thus prompting authorities to evacuate 85 people mostly preschool children to the capital of Vorkuta. (Googling "Evetsky" of course and getting a grand total of zero hits doesn't necessarily mean that the settlement is just a figure of Interfax's imagination.)

For some good news for a change, The Times said freezing temperatures actually (ahem) stopped dead cold an expected flu epidemic in Tyumen. I suppose these successive accounts of Arctic conditions in a "hot" (in retail, tourism, real estate and energy sphere jargon) country such as Russia could cause either tremendous apprehension or mass hysteria in the population, forcing them to actually believe it and take real measures. But since The Moscow Times didn't really affix an asterisk to the report and the calendar does plainly show that there are still 85 days until 1 April, there might be something to all this.

It's 10 pm. I'm going outside now to check.

* In case you were wondering, the coldest inhabited place on Earth - The Moscow Times reports so that you wouldn't have to subscribe to their News Archive - is Oimyakon, in the Sakha republic, where in 1926 a temperature of -71.2 C was recorded.

A Finnish friend writes from China

Upon getting to work, I found an e-mail from Hanna-Kaisa waiting for me in my Inbox. She and her friend Timo were my first guests in this travel and hosting society I've been a member of since around March 2005. While Moscow by itself does not figure too highly in the itinerary of backpackers and independent travelers -mainly due to overlong visa procedures and tedious registration rules, with most preferring to move on without going beyond the three-day grace period before notifying the local immigration office becomes mandatory- even by this measure it did take a while for anyone to ask me for accommodation.

In fact Hanna-Kaisa only asked for accommodation last month in turn after I had written her asking for hosting in Helsinki. The two, however, are the most charming guests one could ever hope for; they even inspired two of my friends and eventual companions to ask about becoming members. Mo mhuirnín, too, duly got into the spirit (not really difficult, since she's a budding adventurer herself) and volunteered to take the two around during their unfortunately too brief stay in Moscow. It was only Timo's allergic reaction to cats that prevented the two from actually staying over at my flat. Otherwise we would've thought nothing about hosting them for a week or even a fortnight. I think an account of their stay is languishing around somewhere in my Draft box and should promptly be brought out for the Teeming Millions out there.

Last we saw them, they were on their way to Omsk from Moscow to meet up with a Finnish friend studying in the foothills of the Urals (it must be recalled that Omsk is also known Ruy-wide as the hometown of Yulia's Dad and a rockin' town where Maria of Murmansk's guitarist boyfriend Andrey visits for gigs from time to time, apart from being the home of Siberian Cossacks and an important rallying point for heroic-tragic White Russian general Aleksandr Vasiliyevich Kolchak during the Russian Civil War) before continuing on the Trans-Siberian Express to Ulan Bator and Beijing.

Although it shouldn't surprise anyone that tourist traffic across the frozen wastes of Siberia continues to be busy all throughout winter (indeed, I still remember how an unusually casually attired middle-aged couple I was on queue with for an opera at the Bolshoi on my first winter here in December 2003 dryly told me how they no longer kept track of the days since setting off through China from Australia on the Trans-Siberian Express) I was still much impressed with the two Finns, who expect to be on the road until the end of March, traveling to Vietnam, Laos, Thailand - as far as their money would last them. They even asked us about passage down the Malaysian peninsula to Singapore on the Oriental Express. They are living a dream I've had for almost a decade.


Anyway, Hanna-Kaisa told me in her e-mail that she had just arrived from the holy mountain in Western China; "3099 metres and about million steps but it was worth it", she recounted in the first line. She must be referring to Emeishan in China's western Sichuan Province, one of the four mountains sacred to Buddhism.

(These shouldn't be confused with the five holy mountains of Taoism, which counts among its ranks the venerable Tai Shan. In a previous life my dear friend Meimei from Shandong by way of Yamagata planted in me a pilgrim's desire to one day pay respects to Tai Shan's towering peaks. Since taking up Chinese studies around 10 years ago I've imagined these holy mountains in my mind's eye as shimmering visions of craggy cliffs whose feet lie shrouded in mists and fog. Scenes so beautiful and so true they've been standardized and produced for mass consumption, not unlike "genuine" Egyptian papyrus art or "authentic" Rembrandt reproductions - or spun off into hideous "tributes", such as Mozart bonbons or James Joyce walking sticks. In Moscow one can find such depictions in factory-rolled ersatz Song Dynasty ink scroll paintings sold in tatty shops in every perekhod or underground passage.

(I call it the Snow Crystal Paradox: any attempt to preserve beauty ultimately destroys the very thing that exudes it. All the more reason to admire the Japanese veneration of impermanence, asymmetry and imperfection. An excellent description of the four sacred Buddhist mountains and the five holy Taoist mountains is available
here.

In photos taken by Quang Tuan Luong from the terragalleria.com site practically all the following 10 traditional scenes of beauty described by Qing Dynasty poet Tan Zhongyue are displayed.

Auspicious Light of the Golden Summit
Moonlit Night at Xixiang Pool
Fairyland of Jiulao Cave
Morning Rain at Hongchunping
Autumn Wind on Baishui Pool
Double-Bridge Spray at Qingyin Pavilion
Snow of Daping
Verdurous Views at Lingyan
Clouds in the Clear Sky above Luofeng
Night Tolls at Shengji

She and Timo had decided to travel separately for the moment, with Timo most likely exploring Shanghai's streets of gold or Beijing's cobbled avenues. "He wanted to see the big cities and I wanted to head to the countryside," Hanna-Kaisa explains. (I myself would've had trouble choosing between the two: I have friends in Nanjing, Changchun, Dalien, Shanghai and Beijing while have always dreamed of going down Huanghe or the Yellow River, setting foot at the Potala Palace in Tibet, walking about in Guilin or visiting the Dunhuang Caves and the Mogao Grottoes.) They'll likely meet up in the southwest, which I take to mean Yunnan Province, which is the gateway to continental Southeast Asia. From there I can imagine them entering Laos through Phongsaly and taking in the mesmerizing Louang Prabang before moving on to Vietnam and the Mekong River.

While we face warnings of Arctic conditions tomorrow in Moscow, Hanna-Kaisa says it's no longer cold in China - at least near Chengdu in Sichuan Province. She's headed toward the south, where, she'll "stop for a longer while in monastery to learn some kungfu."

Her road actually will take her northeast, to the legendary Shaolin Temple near the village of Dengfeng in the Songshan mountains in China's central Henan Province. Shaolinsi is probably the most famous temple in China, less for its long history and role in the development of Buddhism, but mainly for its association with martial arts or Wushu Chan. Every Russian who has seen Jackie Chan's (or more recently Stephen Chow's) movies would certainly know of Shaolin.

Maybe she'll send some photos soon. It would really be good to hear from her again.

Bush, the greatest or biggest terrorist?

Even though I spent the whole day practically napping I still feel out of sorts and not 100 percent recovered from my three-week trip to the Baltics and Finland.

Anyway, I was emptying my box of regular news feeds when I stumbled upon this hilarious (but TRUE) article by Associated Press about "American singer and activist" Harry Belafonte calling George W Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world" following a meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in Caracas over the weekend.

Belafonte led a delegation of Americans including the actor Danny Glover and the Princeton University scholar Cornel West that met the Venezuelan president for more than six hours late Saturday. Some in the group attended Chavez's television and radio broadcast Sunday.

"No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we're here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people...support your revolution," Belafonte told Chavez during the broadcast.

The 78-year-old Belafonte, famous for his calypso-inspired music, including the "Day-O" song, was a close collaborator of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and is now a UNICEF goodwill ambassador. He also has been outspoken in criticizing the U.S. embargo of Cuba.

Now if that didn't make people like Fox Channel's Bill O'Reilly lick their chops in delight for being gifted fresh fodder with which to fuel their diatribes against American bleeding-heart liberals and "leftists" like Belafonte, Glover, Sean Penn, Madonna, Susan Sarandon, Dixie Chicks and others. If it weren't mawkish enough, Belafonte even finished his talk by shouting in Spanish: "Viva la revolucion!"

While I might agree to calling Dubya a terrorist (state-sponsored, legalized terrorism is as bad if not worse than the kind perpetrated by Al-Qaida), it's a bit of a stretch calling him the "greatest". It sounds as flimsy as the kind of claims Muhammad Ali loved to make when he was still top dog of the world boxing's heavyweight division.

Practically a sequel to my 26 August 2005 entry that also touched on Chavez, there is something about this obviously charismatic and controversial figure that inspires other personalities to go off the deep end. Somehow, Chavez is made to look extreme by people who either detest or admire him.

There should be some way to analyse him and his actions without having to resort to ideological ranting. (If there was a way, I'm sure the coldly clinical Ignacio Ramonet of Le Monde Diplomatique would've found it.)

Face of Solzhenitsyn's Russia

I've just come home a couple of hours ago, none the worse for wear considering the terrible experience me and especially my friends had on entering Russia. First of all, we were held up for four hours for a very flimsy reason by Immigration guards. We were even held under questioning (although I must say they were sufficiently polite despite the fact that my friend and I were visibly irritated). After getting to Murmansk from Ivalo, Finland at 2 am, we were invited for questioning again by an investigator who made sure we came by assigning a soldier to accompany us during our trip from the border to the city (it was a treacherous move, because we trusted the soldier, thinking he was just hitching a ride with us; we even gave him food and drink during the four-hour trip, he instead turned us over to the authorities). The questioning this time lasted for no more than five minutes, but still it was the most outrageous move by Russian authorities.

When we finally got to our hotel room, I was so exhausted and emotionally distraught by the latest episode that I immediately fell asleep. My two friends went out to buy food at the 24-hour grocery next door. On their return one of them was mugged by a street thug, who hit him hard on the face. They gave chase, didn't get the money back (he lost almost 1,000 USD in cash and valuables) but was invited by the police for investigation. By the time they got to the station, the criminal was already apprehended and put in jail. He has passed off the money to an accomplice, in the meantime. So my friends stayed all night at the police station answering questions and signing reports. They only got to the hotel at 8 am.

We boarded the train from Murmansk on Saturday evening, and it took 36 hours to get here. I'm all okay but feeling very, very tired. Took a bubble bath but still a bit woozy. Slept only two hours because I finished a book about Helsinki last night. The night before that I finished a novel by Finnish writer Jurani Aho.