54. In the courtyard

When the weather is fine in Paris, we have an extra room, a tiny courtyard (about 2mx3m) of which we have exclusive use. We eat all our meals out there, and during the day I’ve been sitting out there and working. No sun reaches down directly, but seven stories above I can see a small square of blue sky.

So I’ve been working away, finishing a chapter and listening to my neighbourhood. More than 20 apartments (from our building and next door) overlook the courtyard, so on a fine day you get a fascinating selection of the sounds of Parisian life. Most of the time, it’s impossible to tell which window is produce what sound, since everything bounces around the courtyard. So we haven’t yet worked out which neighbour listens to classical music all day, though we’d like to meet him (or her). This morning we had Chopin Nocturnes with our breakfast; on Monday afternoon I worked to the accompaniment of Purcell viol fantasias; on Tuesday around apéro time we had  The Barber of Seville. He has good taste.

There is also a very amateur guitarist. He likes songs that have three chords (not always the same three, I will say) which can be repeated ad infinitum, sometimes with a little melodic riff. He practises quite diligently once he gets going, but fortunately he doesn’t apply himself very often. And when he learns how to tune his guitar, we will be grateful.

There is someone else who turns on his computer about 5pm and then sits chatting on MSN.

There is someone with a glorious bass voice (perhaps the one listening to Rossini? we don’t know), but he never sings more than a few bars at a time. Mostly he does exercises, but (being a singer) only for a minute or two.

Yesterday there were some workmen in a third-floor apartment in the next building. They had a very jolly day, chatting away with each other and with the owners. Occasionally they would congratulate themselves on a particularly fine bit of work (‘Ah, mais c’est bien fait ça, c’est merveilleux…’

Around 5pm they were listening to ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll.

There is a woman who has the most amazing telephone conversations. Perhaps the reception is very bad in her apartment, or perhaps the phone is right by her window, but whatever it is we always hear every word, and very loudly too. She also takes a very long time to finish calls. ‘AU REVOIR ! CIAO ! BISOU BISOU! CIAO! BYE! À BIENTÔT MON AMOUR! CIAO ! BISOUS ! BYE !’ (This goes on, increasing in volume, for about ten minutes, as we try to stifle our laughter.)

About two summers ago there was a lady – well, I suppose there were two people, but we only ever heard her – who used to make very noisy love in the early afternoon. Every afternoon. We don’t hear that any more, but we do hear a baby from time to time.

53. A nice piece of Franglais

This is my current favourite mistranslation, from the lifts at the Abbesses metro station. Possibly intended to get rid of foolish English-speaking tourists (ejected to some bottomless pit under Montmartre…).

52. Midsummer night’s dream

Midsummer day in Paris is the Fête de la musique.  This means that from the late afternoon there is live music happening everywhere, on every street and street corner. This is theoretically – and in many respects in reality – a wonderful thing. We wandered up the hill to Montmartre around 6 and the rue des Abbesses (the main street) was thronged with people wandering around, chatting, eating (barbecues going on everywhere also) and listening. The problem is that because there’s music coming from everywhere, everyone seems to feel an obligation to compete with everyone else, so the volume got a little unbearable. And unfortunately the worse the music, the louder it was played, or so it seemed. Anyway, we escaped down to the river and there found a tango dancing evening (with great music being played at a very tactful volume).

Paris is so very good at providing archetypal Parisian scenes and moments.

And the light, on this midsummer eve! The photos in the post below were taken about 10pm.

51. It’s the fault of the light in Paris

50. Oslo

At 1:58 yesterday morning Roy stubbed his toe whilst coming back from the loo, and yelled. So I woke up, and looked out the window… and the sun was about to rise.

And when I got out of bed soon after 7, this is what I saw out the window:

The Oslofjord is about 100km long and very very beautiful. Some more pictures of it (from sailing out in the evening) are posted below.

And we had a very happy day in Oslo. It reminded us a little of Sydney – it’s much much smaller, but the fjord is not unlike Sydney Harbour, and we spent much of the afternoon on Bygdøy, one of the islands, which was leafy green suburban, rather like Sydney eastern suburbs but more tasteful; lovely Norwegian white wooden houses. Also, there’s a brand-new opera house built right on the waterside (it only opened a few months ago). Amongst other things, they’re performing Figaros bryllup. I think bryllup is a good word (tonight in our concert, Roy’s performing Grieg’s ‘Bryllupsdag på Troldhaugen’). They’re not short of money in Oslo – sitting under a staircase in the foyer of this brand new opera house is a Fazioli grand…

We’ve also been having fun time trying to decipher Norwegian; Hannah would enjoy this very much too I think. Amongst the sentences we’ve worked out: ‘Persen måt ansver for hund’ (sign in park; hint: beneath picture of dog – I loved this sentence construction); and ‘Spis, drikk og vær glad!’ (on a restaurant awning). Today for lunch we had ‘kremak fiskkesuppe met fersk brot’ and it was gorgeous – rich broth with ‘this morning’s catch from the fish market’ (I don’t remember the Norwegian for that). I believed them about that (I saw the fish market too) – I don’t think I’ve ever had fresher, sweeter mussels.

When we apologetically ask pretty Norwegian girls in cafes if we may/they can speak English, the response is always, ‘Yes, of course!’ And their pronunciation is so perfect…

In Oslo it was sunny; this made us very happy after a week of miserable weather. We pottered around the city centre a little, admired the train station (of course) and then took the ferry across to Bygdøy. Oslo is a city of boats (more so than Sydney, even) – in the main harbour there were heaps of beautiful old sailing ships, and the fjord was covered with small boats, yachts, ferries, all sorts. On Bygdøy there is a Viking ship museum (Vikingskiphuset), a Sjøfartsmuseet (get it? sailors… seafarers), and museums for the Polar explorers and ships. I don’t know which boats were meant to be stopping at this little port though (the sign says ‘Oslo’):

We also spent a long time gaping at the hillsides covered in wildflowers – I’ve never seen dianthus growing wild before; it was everywhere. Also lots of wild irises, small flowers that looked like (true) geraniums, blue ones like cornflowers (possibly they were cornflowers), red poppies, a yellow sort of sedum, white candytuft (I think; something similar anyway), plus lilac trees in bloom everywhere and wild roses. They were amazingly beautiful.

Perhaps because the weather was so gorgeous there were children out everywhere on excursions. The little ones all wear fluorescent jackets and looked very sweet trundling around the city in formation.

Our ship docked beneath a rather amazing 14^th-18^th century fortress-castle on a headland, and when we were coming back in the afternoon we had enough time left to wander up and explore it a little. Whilst we were there we could hear the announcements over the ship’s PA. When we heard one summoning everyone up to the top deck for ‘the great British sailaway’ – ‘Come on up and let’s show Oslo that we’re British!’ – we considered just going back to the train station and taking the train to Kristiansand, our next port (like the Norwegians wouldn’t have worked out that the 3000 loud-English-speaking, dopey-looking people wandering around their city were British). Instead, we got back on board and watched the sailaway in the quietest place we could find, right in the bow, up high, where the noise of the wind carried away most of ‘We will rock you’ being played at industrial deafness levels, me feeling extremely happy not to be British and Roy feeling terribly embarrassed that he was. It just seems so unbelievably crass to be sailing out of a foreign city with British music blasting away so very loudly (and Oslo harbour was so quiet, because the fjord water is so still and calm and there was no wind) and all waving Union Jacks (and drinking beer).

So today we have been in Kristiansand, near the south-west corner of Norway. The town apparently gets more hours of sunshine than anywhere else in Scandinavia; this may be true but today it was cold and damp again.

Kristiansand has ‘Northern Europe’s largest collection of white wooden houses’ (mostly from the 17^th century). And there were indeed a lot of them. The town was named by and for Christian IV of Denmark, who also named Christiania (Oslo) and Kristiansund (note the vowel change) somewhere up the western coast of the country. This lack of originality must have been rather confusing; or perhaps it just saved trouble when he had to think of a name for anywhere new.

49. Oslofjorden

48. Tere hommikust*

I am very proud to announce that by the end of our concert this afternoon there was standing room only in the lounge. This is possibly because everyone was there for the movie screening immediately afterwards (a few people made a grand entrance during the final bars of the Schubert Fantaisie)… but we did have a good audience to begin with, too. There were even two children there, nice young boys who are learning violin and piano and singing in choirs. This restored some of our faith in the adult British population (who have just elected one or two members of the far-right British National Party to the European Parliament; British Labour came third behind the Conservatives and the anti-EU, right-of-centre UK Independents Party).

We are still confined to cabins, since there has been a renewed outbreak of gastro bugs – everyone wanted to see St Petersburg and they’d paid their money for their tours (and couldn’t get off the boat if they weren’t on a tour) and weren’t going to miss them. So those who were beginning to feel ill, and those who were recovering but still infectious, all climbed on the buses…So spending hours in the rain and cold waiting for mysterious Russian buses was perhaps not a bad thing at all for us.

We’re now somewhere between Denmark and Norway, the second of two days at sea before we arrive in Oslo tomorrow. I believe they call this cabin fever.

Tallinn was very beautiful, but made rather less appealing by several cruise-ship-loads of tourists charging around everywhere; at each corner we found ourselves ducking around another tour. Still, it is an extraordinary medieval city, with a particularly lovely jumble of roofs.

We had excellent coffee at a tiny Italian cafe in a 15^th century building, with remains of staircases and doorways all over the place and painted roof-beams. I was drinking my coffee gazing out the window at the hordes of tourists and feeling vaguely homesick, when the door opened and in came two young guys with an unmistakeable accent… they were from Sydney and very friendly; we had a nice conversation and I cheered up!

The sun came out as we wandered so we thought we’d be brave and try sitting outside to eat. We thought we could just manage not to freeze until the food came and that would warm us up. Unfortunately, when we ordered, the waitress declined to inform us that the chef hadn’t turned up to work yet. Three-quarters of an hour later, we went to enquire and discovered that he wasn’t due to arrive for another half an hour. So we found another cafe and this time sat inside, since without realising it we’d got extremely chilled. The second cafe did have a chef in residence, and we had a gorgeous meal – Estonian soft cheese with beetroot and herb oil, and a sort of gratin with fresh baked trout, eggs, potatoes and cheese (I wanted something very starchy and warming!).

The currency in Estonia is the Estonian kroner. The abbreviation for this is eek. There are about 15 eeks to the euro, so when you see a restaurant bill, ‘eek’ is a very good word to have handy.

(That said, our 2-course meal plus carafe of wine plus coffees cost 500 eeks. Work it out…)

The Estonians were much jollier than the Russians.

* ‘Good morning’ in Estonian

47. Chihuahuas in pyjamas

This is how cold it was today in St Petersburg:

It was especially cold standing on the dockside waiting for our little diesel-smelling green bus to come along. We had to wait a very long time, and were starting seriously to contemplate the strange man driving the white minibus, who kept driving past and offering us a lift to the port gates for only 5 euro each (whilst talking on his mobile phone). Anyway, the green bus came at last, got 200m down the road then had to stop while a long long train crossed it (no signs, gates, rails – just a set of tracks that swerved across the road). The train was travelling at approximately 3kph. It was very long. When half of it had got across, it stopped altogether and sat there for awhile. Then it hauled itself on again, and eventually we got to drive on. We got another 500m down the road then had to stop again: the train was crossing back to the other side of the road. It had, however, increased its speed to a breathless 5kph by this stage, so we didn’t have quite so long to wait. So, almost an hour and a half after leaving the ship, we managed to get as far as the port gates. We wandered up the road in search of the 22 bus, which hove into sight. And drove right past us, despite our hopeful gestures. So we chased him and, when he stopped, tried our banging on doors trick, but he ignored us. So we chased him a bit more (I was sprinting quite hard by this time; we really wanted to get out of there.) Another few hundred metres down the road, he stopped at a random, unmarked spot, which clearly had an advantage over the random, unmarked spot at which we’d tried to get on. I made a last desperate dash and managed to get there and jam the doors until Roy came panting up. And thus we arrived at the Nevsky Prospekt.

Today we did manage a decent lunch; we did something quite unusual and chose our restaurant on the recommendation of our guidebook. In this case, it was quite a wise move. We had mushroom and potato pancake/rissole things with sour cream, fish cakes with caviar (I didn’t eat that bit) and sour cream, and baked capsicum stuffed with rice and mushrooms and spices and served with sour cream. All this was very nice. We also got a decent coffee – which did not come with sour cream – and felt refreshed. The health alert is still in place on the ship so we’ve been restricted to eating in the Officers’ Mess all week, and I’ve been feeling increasingly out of sorts as a result. So getting a full, vegetable-laden meal restored my equilibrium considerably.

It was still much too cold to really wander around, and we didn’t have much time (needing to allow 2 hours to get back to ship again!), but we did manage to see the ridiculous but entertaining Church on Spilled Blood (19^th century; looks like a circus. The colours are much brighter than this but it was so dark the camera couldn’t capture them well.)

…and the Great Philharmonic Hall, where Shostakovich’s 7^th (‘Leningrad’) Symphony was premiered and famously broadcast all around the world, in the midst of the siege. There was a very nice music shop/cafe in the foyer, with a Bechstein concert grand in the middle. Of course it was the first thing we noticed when we walked in, and we went over to admire it, and the shop attendants instantly asked if we wanted to try it, and brought over a stool. So we tried that out, then had a nice time browsing through a big stack of old Russian LPs. Amongst other things we acquired piano pieces by М. БАЛАКИРЕВ. (Any guesses?)

46. Я ϶аблүлился*

Today was at times bewildering, frustrating and overwhelming; we were very cold and very wet and spent an awful lot of time in queues. Altogether, an authentic Russian cultural experience.

It is illegal to bring roubles into Russia; you must acquire them upon arrival.

There are no currency exchange facilities on the streets; according to the guidebooks the place to change money is in the big hotels.

There are no big hotels near the commercial docks. In fact there is nothing much at all.

Roubles are the only legal tender (altogether some places will accept dollars or Euros; many places don’t take credit cards; you have to find this out as you go).

Fortunately the bus conductor accepted a $US5 note.

If you don’t have a Russian visa, being on an organised tour is the only way you’re allowed to enter. Therefore, all the passengers went on organised tours. Therefore, there were no facilities (or explanations) for those of us going ashore independently (we don’t have visa but do have Seaman’s Discharge Books, which are acceptable). So when we got off and went through passport control, we found ourselves on one end of a very long dock (3km from the port entrance), surrounded by piles of rubber and with no very clear idea of where we were and where we were meant to be going. Eventually an ancient bus reeking of diesel fumes chugged up, and we got it and it took us to the gates of the port, where we had to go through passport control again. We then had to find the number 22 bus; this we spotted going past and – in the complete absence of anything like a marked bus stop – chased it until it stopped then banged on the doors, and they opened.

It was raining and the windows were all fogged up, so we couldn’t see anything of where we were going. The bus conductor was of the school of thought that believes people will understand if you just talk at them long enough.

We got to Nevsky Prospekt, and it was bucketing rain; my feet were soaked in about ten seconds. Given that there were no cafes in the vicinity to try and thaw/dry out in, we thought we’d head straight for the Hermitage/Winter Palace (our original plan had been to explore the city today and see the museum tomorrow). Since it’s so wet, Roy thought, surely there won’t be a long queue to get in?

There was. All across the great central courtyard. But… we were there, and it was too cold to wander anywhere else, and we thought, surely it will move fairly quickly?

It didn’t.

By the time we got to the head of it, an hour later, it had stopped raining.

We still can’t work out why it moved so slowly, because when we got inside we found that today, exceptionally, the museum was free. Perhaps it was because, once inside, there was a half-hour queue for the cloakroom. There was a whole series of cloakroom counters along a corridor, which was thronged with people, and it was chaos. Attempts to install an orderly system were all brought to nothing by constantly arriving tour groups (mostly Spanish, for some reason) who pushed past all of us practising our queuing skills and made the harassed women behind the counter serve them first. Eventually one Russian woman behind us got very fed up with this and started haranguing the attendant (who was doing the best she could); then, perhaps feeling that by asserting the rights of the patient queuers she’d earned the privilege of going first, pushed herself to the front…

By this time, it was after 1pm (we’d left the ship shortly after 10am) and we were extremely hungry. The cafe in the Hermitage – the main eating venue in St Petersburg’s premier tourist attraction, a World Heritage site and one of the greatest art galleries on the planet – does not accept dollars, euros or credit cards. We had 90 roubles (change from the bus ticket), which was enough to buy one small cake. The chap behind the counter said vaguely that perhaps the museum shop might change some money for us. They didn’t… but they did direct us to another little food stand that did take dollars. So we had a stale tinned-mushroom sandwich, an average coffee and a rather good cherry strudel. Then we got to see some paintings.

It is a pretty amazing building. Those tsars were certainly good at extravagance. It’s even more ornate than Versailles – though, surprisingly, it’s more beautiful – bigger, lighter, more open spaces and a little less gilt and more taste in the decor. After the morning, however, we were too exhausted to see most of it. We contented ourselves with the Dutch/Flemish paintings (they have the most extraordinary collection of Rembrandts) – displayed in a few of the more magnificent halls – and the French (Corot to Picasso), tucked away in a kind of attic up the top with tatty plasterboard walls. Good paintings though. Two whole rooms of Matisse, two particularly magnificent Monet canvasses (and about 6 smaller works), lots of fabulous Gauguin, Cézanne, a big room of Picasso…

Possibly the most striking painting, however, was a late 17^th century Dutch effort by an artist whose name eludes me, depicting Mary Stuart (as in William and Mary). The thing about this painting is it features a sulphur-crested cockatoo (sitting next to Mary). It couldn’t possibly be anything else. So how did a sulphur-crested cockatoo get to Holland in the mid 1680s? I think there is a story in there somewhere.

The other thing they’re not so good at in the Hermitage is showing where the exits are. You get a map with all the rooms numbered when you come in, but the numbers aren’t shown anywhere in the rooms themselves, and because the whole thing is built around a huge interlinked series of quadrangles and corridors, it is hopelessly confusing. We followed signs for an exit and got there to find it would send us straight out into the courtyard; to get our bags back we would have had to queue up to get in again. After a period of (increasingly hysterical on my part) wandering in circles we eventually managed to get out at the right place…

In the toilets there was a sign that read ‘Do not throw toilet paper into toilet’.

This presented a number of interesting possibilities for interpretation. Throw it into the bin? (No one else had.) On the floor? (No one else had, thankfully.) Take it away with you? (I don’t think anyone else had done that, either.) Or did it mean ‘don’t throw the paper’ – perhaps place it carefully in there instead…  It was all too confusing for me, so I did what I usually do and nothing catastrophic seemed to happen.

Then we got out and it was so very cold, though happily no longer raining. We walked along the Neva and then a canal back to the Mariinsky theatre (which is very beautiful, and if we hadn’t been giving a concert tonight we could have seen Eugene Onegin there), where we caught the bus back to the port gates, went through passport control, then caught the diesel-smelling rattly bus back to the ship and went through passport control again – this time after spending twenty minutes in another queue, because a whole lot of tour busses arrived back simultaneously and discharged several hundred passengers. It was cold.

The policemen on street corners had wonderful big billowy ground-length raincoats and Russian hats. There were a lot of them; we found out when we got back that this was because Vladimir Putin was paying a visit to the city. We might have seen him in fact; at least, as we were wandering back a convoy of black vehicles swept past at high speed, preceded by police cars.

Anyway Russia, I have decided, is exhausting.

The pictures show the facing sides of the canal we walked along. One side is the Venice/Paris of the East bit. The other side is a truly horribly Stalinist thing. This really was an awful building – grim, ugly, threatening and just plain nasty. The frieze of happy Soviet workers around the top does nothing much for it.

* I am lost

45. Stockholm archipelago