Barbara goes to Russia

Back through the looking glass : 22/09/06

2006-09-22T20:46:00.000-11:00

I've been a little sick this week, with one of those bugs that make your back ache and your brain bake. So I've been 'at home' more than I intended, listening to the sounds of the building and the court yard. Each morning at a certain time the metal shutters begin opening out. At first I thought painters were arriving daily to set up their ladders such was the clacking of metal joints. On my landing the young women who have their apartments next to me then begin heading off to work. They have the same difficulties with their ancient keys that I do, and struggle to turn them. Church bells ring for early morning mass at around the same time; it's a lovely unifying sound across the whole district, and makes me think of Millet's The gleaners (another example of my undeveloped aesthetique?)

Later, the two women behind the geranium pots across the way start to natter. For a short while they talk with great animation. I've read Swann's Way, I know they're planning lunch, and then dinner. "Good morning Emmeline. What vegetable is it that you would prefer with the pressed duck?" one is saying to the other; and "Is it that you think a goat cheese might go well with the Bordeaux Danielle". At this point I usually start to consider my own lunch and dinner, meals far more utilitarian than theirs.

Apres midi the small children all begin to play in the court-yard: "Maman, Maman regard! Regardez-moi!!"

Towards evening there's a constant slow trudge of feet coming up the stairs. Staying in other apartments around Paris I'd imagined entire buildings filled with the very old. Now I understand. They're not old, they have many escaliers et étages to deal with each day and the building stair case is just one of them.

ON THE NATION- ETOILE LINE

Emmeline and Danielle and all the children and apparently all the men in the apartments begin preparations for the evening meal. Things are chopped, pots are stirred, plates are distributed and people begin eating. At this point there is much discussion, perhaps of the cassoulet.

The "Eiffel" does its twinkly thing every hour; I tried to ignore it but in the end it had to be photographed. The building gradually quietens. One male voice continues to talk loudly, on the telephone, on the staircase, in the court yard, his animation and laughter increasing with the night, to 1:00 am, 2:00 am. But the French 'tolerance' prevails and no-one yells a complaint. Is his discussion intellectuel? I imagine Foucault, Derida. Or beaucoup d'absinthe.

Finally we are all asleep.

I'm sad to bid my blog goodbye, I've really enjoyed writing it, even in Russia where we were so busy I scrambled to get anything online. It was very nice knowing I had a few readers out there. . . I even discovered one in Paris:

LEISA AFTER A JOLLY LUNCH

So thank you to everyone who has written to me both on and off blog. It's been great fun hearing from you. A demain mes amis!

Bibliotheque Cujas : 22/09/06

2006-09-22T20:16:00.000-11:00

I spent a very good morning at the Bibliotheque Cujas, the central law library for a variety of different Universities in Paris and the largest and most extensive law collection in France. The Bibliotheque Cujas has a collection of material of great value to scholars and academics although the library also currently caters for higher level undergraduates. This will change with the opening of a new centralised law library nearby, which will then be used by all University Law faculties in Paris (I think I'm correct in saying this). One huge student law library sounded like rather a good idea. The Bibliotheque Cujas faces similar problems to us, with students coming to them without background legal research skills, and needing to be taught from scratch by the librarians.

I was given a tour of the inner workings of the Library, the reading rooms, and the way the Library makes its huge collection available to its clients. As with most very large libraries the shelves are not open; instead it uses a retrieval board by which allocated numbers light up when the selected choices have been brought into the reading rooms.

Legislative process

I quizzed the specialist legislation librarian about how to use Legifrance, as she has central responsibility for it, and also how the legislative process happens in France. I'll outline it briefly here for anyone who might be interested:

France has a centralised government i.e. no state based laws to deal with although there are provincial bureaucratic rulings that operate at the local level. These are physically available from the Mairie (Town Hall) of each region.

Lois

The procedure in the Parlement (Assemblee Nationale et Senat) for bringing into being new laws is similar to but different from ours i.e. the Petite Loi is introduced in the lower house (generally, I can't say whether this is always the case) but the toing and froing between lower and upper houses is more extensive and open to more change, and a piece of introduced legislation will move backwards and forwards between the Houses up to five times.

Extrinsic materials

Questions can be put to the Assemblee by an MP regarding a Loi in its different incarnations on the way towards achieving the force of law, and these will be answered in print (spoken but reported I think) and the answers will form part of what we would think of as extrinsic material. Travaux preparatoire contain the government's explanatory material relating to the legislation, in some ways like our explanatory memoranda, but more open to interpolation of new paragraphs of explanation.

Commencement

Commencement of an Act happens by published 'Declaration',(I have to double check this as it's from memory) and the date of the Declaration is the date of commencement of the Act. I asked if there were some automatic period of time by which a Declaration must be published, but the answer strangely was no.

Code Civile

The Code Civile, which I had misunderstood as codifying all French civil laws, in fact sits alongside certain major pieces of legislation. These Acts of parliament are not fully consolidated, although the Civil Code is. The part of the law which is codified functions in much the same way as the US Codes, but it seems that the part of their legislative process relating to other Acts more resembles the UK process, which I've never fully understood and no-one has ever been able to explain to me properly. These Acts are not consolidated.

Legifrance

Legifrance goes back in time in fulltext for only a number of years; prior to that it provides only the number title and description of legislative material, but the fulltext of these can be requested from the Bibliotheque Cujas. It provides detailed fulltext material with all changes, declarations and travaux preparatoire available from its site. It is of course free, although the Bibliotheque Cujas reference librarians also use LexisNexis.fr (mais naturellement).

Reference services

The Library is very happy to receive questions from anywhere, provided of course there's been a proper attention paid to resolving the question first before presenting it to them. Naturally, I carry around in my head several unresolved reference queries which have frustrated me over the course of time, so I left them with one from 2004. What legislation in France protects the privacy of any person from being photographed without their consent?

Their reference librarian took a quick stab at it, no luck. She's going to email me!

Situé

Finally, the Library is in a rather wonderful part of Paris – next to the Sorbonne, and set just off that huge circular Place surrounding the Pantheon. It's within walking distance of anywhere that matters i.e. St Germain des Pres, heaps of Indie cinemas, Notre Dame de Paris. The librarians are lucky enough to have quite civilised ideas of working conditions i.e. they can turn off their own fluorescent lights (I noticed most people did), and they can open their windows! No battery hen psychosis in the making there.

Dejeuner

I had a very good North African lunch with my two colleagues who had been at the Russian conference. They were very welcoming and hospitable.

Then I went for quite a long walk down to the Seine and across the Ile St Louis to see an exhibition of Italian photographers at the Maison Europeene de Photographie. The sun was shining, the air calm and smooth; it was a day for us all to enjoy.

42, rue Cler : 19/09/06

2006-09-19T20:44:00.000-11:00

It's so nice to be back in Paris; it seems that I've just stepped away for a day or two, and that strangely the leaves are now in Autumn rather than Winter as they were.

I slept under windows open to the sky last night, and the pleasure of the night air was intense after so many stifling hotel evenings. My apartment is very high, the highest you can be without being a chambre de bonne. The view is so enchanting I sat by the window all morning to daydream and read Lydia Chukoskaya's wonderful Akhmatova Journals.

This is s book I've owned for many years, but I could never permit myself to read more than a page now and then, as I didn't want to finish. Now it's time to reach the end.

I'm in the 7^th (as we say). I've been inching my way around the arrondissements and this time am living below the Eiffel Tower, if you need a landmark to fix to. This area contains the Hotel des Invalides (built for disabled soldiers in the 1670s), the Ecole Militaire and the wonderful Musee de l'Armee which contains among many other interesting things Napolean's dear little bed and his two petit slippers side by side. The Musee d'Orsay is also within walking distance. It houses my favourite painting d'Hiver possibly an instance of my undeveloped colonial aesthetique. I can't remember who painted it; nobody famous.

I don't have any plans apart from seeing a couple of friends and going to a concert or two if I can find anything pleasing to moi. Like their Brisbane counterparts, Paris concert-goers seem to cling to 'old favourites'. I've already scrutinised a number of posters for Vivaldi's Quatre Saisons, and Mozart's Petite musique de Nuit. But the myriad of Churches dotted across Paris, enticing enough for their medieval architecture, also have many lunchtime concerts where it's possible to hear Lully or Poulenc or Faure or other French composers, just en passant. And there's always the astonishing organist Olivier Latry at Notre Dame de Paris.

My little apartment is delightful but rather impractical. For example in spite of the plethora of prints and water colours, arrangements of flowers and dried things, and carefully selected 'appointments', there is nothing to wash the dishes with. I was forced to read many French labels in order to find the perfect liquide ultra degraissant with an agreablement parfume a l'orange. And just when the lights went out in the Supermarche too, one of a chain usefully named 'Shopi'. Prue will remember these for their aisles forever lined with half unpacked boxes.

The 'Eiffel' is a such beacon of hope to a navigational dyslexic like me. Wherever I am I can always find my way back home. Vive la Tour!!

The Chechens didn't get me after all : 18/09/06

2006-09-18T02:53:00.000-11:00

In the end I wasn't blown up, taken hostage, mugged or even manhandled. In Moscow we occasionally caught the subway together, but mainly, we walked, up and down and round about.

It was quite gruelling, but luckily I had decided to get into training for the long distances on foot by walking and carrying more than usual before I left home. It was very taxing for some however. During one of these peregrinations I began thinking about the elements that go to making a 'great city' because whatever they are Moscow has them all. Power, money, energy, dynamism, history, cruelty, dirt, squalor, low crime and high art all pulse together. And in the end, as with all great cities, indifference reigns.

Where St Petersburg might be described as a grand old lady, her deportment just so, her skirts cut and her hair dressed for a past long gone, Moscow was everything a woman like that might decline to meet. Wherever we went, there was a chaotic melee of traffic and new buildings rising, or old ones undergoing the mother of all renos, tradesmen trucks blaring and delivery vans treble-parked.

THIS IS THE BOLSHOI THEATRE

It was sometimes hard to walk on footpaths because of cars carefully angle-parked herring-bone fashion along the pedestrian spaces. One afternoon we were forced to make way for a shiny Honda as it passed back along the footpath, perhaps unable to shake itself loose from the logjam of parked cars in any other way. There was no observable etiquette of feigned apology either as we flattened ourselves against the buildings to let the driver by.

Curiously, although the Muscovite guides and librarians who spoke to us always made some kind of comparison of their city with St Petersburg, we didn't hear any such insecurity recriprocated by their St Petersburg counterparts.

INTERNAL STAIRCASE TO THE STATE LIBRARY
(I had to photograph it - isn't it pretty?)

It was the librarians of both cities however who displayed something quite wonderful, and very inspiring to us all, and that was an old-fashioned idealism and belief in the value of what they do, and something they had maintained in the face of unimaginable adversities, including looting armies, bombings, seiges, floods, fires and the terrorism of their own state against them. In spite of all of this the immense and valuable collections of both the Russian National Library in St Petersburg and the Russian State Library in Moscow had been preserved and protected by the librarians who had custody of them and their work was described to us with great pride.

Yesterday at the All Russia State Library for Foreign Literature, among the librarians there was a woman now elderly and someone who had obviously lived through many of the catastrophes of the last century. She spoke to us about some of the bequests that had come lately into her collection of rare religious writings, standing in her long dress and black shawl and addressing us in careful English, her beautiful face shining with excitement and hope. I really wanted to photograph her, but she seemed far too wonderful to approach, like an icon in motion.

As my farewell to Moscow I visited Lenin's tomb before heading away to the cattle chutes of Sherametyavo Airport. Naturally the tomb turned out to require lengthy queueing, as is only fitting. Red Square was completely fenced off but once we'd discovered the queue's tail end, in the gardens at the tomb of the unknown soldier, we were able to observe that very moment when the guards are visited by their supervisor, and when he executes his four balletic goose-steps to turn and face the young guardsmen. I was widely congratulated when I captured this moment in a photograph, the leg for one split second fully extended, the gloved hand almost parallel in accordance with regulations.

The mausoleum itself is populated by military personages, all of them sternly sshhing as people inch down the darkened stairways, steering around corners by clinging single file to the wall. The darkness was almost total, perhaps to lend extra gravitas to the occasion, but it seemed comical and child-like, like a game. Once the corpse came into view I was struck by its diminutive ears, and the tentacle like fingers and rather sandy eyebrows. One of the men with us remarked that Lenin no longer had the legs that were there ten years ago. His lower half now consists of a black blanket tucked cosily around what might be his hips, where once a pair of shod feet was on show. Was it really Lenin anyway, or just a plastinated or fibreglass substitute? In the gardens outside where other important dead heroes live on heroically behind walled plaques or in the ground (so many frightening KGB thugs with respectable handsome busts) there was a spot for Gargarin, but not for the Dog.

THIS WOMAN WAS AN OLD REVOLUTIONARY
DEMANDING A RETURN TO COMMUNISM

So Russia is over for me, but not my now incorrectly titled blog. I've developed quite a fondness for it. Already Paris is occupying my thoughts; I now begin practicing my skills as a bad linguist.

Conference matters : the Legals : 18/09/06

2006-09-18T02:51:00.000-11:00

I haven't referred at all to the legal aspects of our conference, partly because I wanted to ruminate about what had been said and what I had come away with, and partly because some of it was not clear in my head. So here is a kind of summary of my impressions, rather than a 'binding' document.

The over-arching legislation is a Constitution, adopted in 1993, which does what all Constitutions do, that is it establishes the form and structure of government, the judicial system, and the powers of the different levels of state. The separation of powers principle was adopted in 1992.

State power in the Russian Federation is exercised by the President of the Russian Federation, the Federal Assembly (the Federation Council and the State Duma), the Government of the Russian Federation and Courts of the Russian Federation.

The Federation Council is formed by two representatives of each sub unit of the federation - one from the legislative and one from the executive branch and it consists of 178 members from 89 regions. It has very wide powers. There was some oblique discussion about the way these representatives are now being appointed because of changes brought about by Presidential decree. Having the ability to create a pliable upper house gives the President a level of autocracy cloaked as democracy. But these are my thoughts, not anything directly quoted from the Conference.

There are also issues of concern amongst legal thinkers where certain powers fall outside these principles, for example the role of the President which is expressed in the Constitution, rather elasticly, as determining "the guidelines of the internal and foreign policies of the State".

One peculiarity of the Russian system is the role of administrative rule-making. A bureaucratic ruling, made outside the Duma, can over-ride an existing law. All those Russian novels I read long ago suddenly sprang into focus at this point. Judicial law-making is a new phenomenon for Russia, common law precedent not occuping the central role it has in the Anglo-American system. Of what importance are decisions of the Constitutional Court? This is not settled.

The Government

The Constitution sets up a government based upon a Federation of States. The basic subdivision of the Russian Federation is that of the federal subject. There are 88 federal subjects which fall into different types: these are 21 republics which enjoy a high degree of autonomy on most issues and generally correspond to some of Russia's numerous ethnic minorities. The other subjects consist of 48 oblasts (provinces) and 7 krais (territories), as well as 9 autonomous okrugs (autonomous districts), and 1 autonomous oblast. Beyond these there are two federal cities (Moscow and St Petersburg). Each federal subject is a constituent part of the federation. (This information is from the Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia)

The republics include many autonomous regions some of which seem like separate countries to us. North Ossetia was the one that sprang to mind for me, largely because it often seems to be mentioned in relation to its new pro-western leadership. Chechnya is also one although the breakaway movement there has altered its legal status within the Federation in some ways. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republics_of_Russia)

There are also seven large federal districts (four in Europe, three in Asia). These have been added as a new layer between the above subdivisions and the national level. Unlike the federal subjects, the federal districts are not a subnational level of government, but are a level of administration of the national governmen

There was some rather interesting discussion by Professor Sergey Knyazev, Vice Dean of the Law institute of the Far-East State University (i.e. a man clearly not beholden to Moscow) about the contradictory nature of Federal laws when testing the limits of appointment of governors and other figures of regional authority. The President has in recent times taken to making these appointments personally, rather than allowing the regions themselves to hold elections as the Constitution requires. From memory this may have come about after Beslan, but I could be wrong. Professor Knyazev expressed some disquiet about the centralisation of electoral powers in particular to the Federal Government, which he felt was not the intention of the framers.

The Court system

The Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court and the High Arbitration Court are the upper levels of the Russian court system.

There appears to be some cross-fertilisation of the Courts of Arbitration, and the Supreme Court of General Jurisdiction as there are some matters of a commercial nature which might be heard in either. These courts have their own hierarchy of appeals as we would expect. The High Arbitration Court is the supreme judicial authority in settling economic disputes, and I think gives clarity to the courts below it although the Russian system, like the European system, does not rely on precedent.

The emphasis for us was kept firmly upon commercial laws, and the commercial courts. There the law has been drawn from the sources most useful to Russia as a global trading entity. Thus they've adopted a system close to the European Civil law. Although they're not members of the EU they are a member of the European Council, a body whose exact purpose I haven't been able to establish. As a member Russia is signatory to the Convention on Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and this can provide recourse to the European Court of Human Rights for the citizens of Russia.

Try as I might I could not get any answers when questioning the processes of the criminal justice system although I know there is a death penalty. There has been no execution since 1996 as the Constitution decrees the death penalty can be awarded only when the trial is by jury (Chechnya is the exception); for some reason I couldn't grasp jury trials are not easily come by. Perhaps there is some loop-hole in the way the judicial system has been constructed. Nor could I find out just what powers the Constitutional Court has. For example the Constitutional Court appeared unable to countermand the presidential decree which centralised the appointment of regional governors into Putin's hands, although this decree was specifically outside the language of the Constitution. Is it a Constitution which can be altered in the same way as a mere Act of the Duma, i.e. no manner and form provision? I didn't even attempt to ask that question, given my inability to get answers for much less touchy subjects. The apparent obfuscation may have been a result of the translation process, or just a fudge. Some things were clearly not going to be spelt out, although the candour of some of our speakers was surprising.

Below the superior courts is an array of appellate courts which are drawn from courts of first instance, magistracies and other initiating bodies, pretty much like ours I think.

The end of the Soviet era : old laws for new

There was a lot of fascinating discussion about the emergence of the new legal system, and the injustices relating to some of the changes away from the old Soviet style of government where property was state owned, and health and education were state provided. Rights of residence issues resulted in people being turfed out of their apartments by clever crooks, and these laws have been considerably tightened, but not without a lot of suffering. These days 'insurance' systems and fee based education, closely based on Western models, are the way forward. I heard on the news that the Russian government within 10 years has emerged from its status as a bankrupted country and now is cleared of its debts. Clearly this has been done at some cost to the old and the undereducated. I was told by one of my colleagues that a hospital doctor approached her while she was sight-seeing in St Petersburg, and asked to publicise the dire state of the Hospital system within the Federation. Of course in Australia, our health situation is not always world's best practice either. There has been much tightening of the laws of inheritance and private property, in a series of change to the Civil Codes, and there are new Intellectual Property laws coming into being within weeks (the Bill Gates Act?)

Russia is starting to tighten up its technical safety regulations, now adopting the International Standards system relating to building, food etc which we all know and love. The State is disengaging itself more and more from participating in the market place (Telstra shares anyone?)

I think I probably ended up with more questions than answers, but hey, that's the life of a Reference Librarian anyway. It was all incredibly interesting in spite of the impenetrability of some of the simultaneous translation. And my fascination with Constitutional law remains undiminished.

The night train to Moscow : 15/09/06

2006-09-15T06:25:00.000-11:00

Getting out of St Petersburg turned out to have about the same level of intimidation and Cold War menace as getting in. There was the same lock down of the train carriage and the WCs, the unsmiling guards and military police checking our passports, and the counting and checking of each pair of persons in adjacent seats or beds. This was serious George Smiley territory and it was all deeply enjoyable. But instead of Orson Welles lurking in the shadows, there were train crooks, people who haunt the night trains and creep into your compartment when you're asleep so they can rob you.

Rumours flew around that the current favoured method was gas. You wake up with a headache, the doors are open and everything's gone. Luckily we had our wardress, the unsmiling functionary who stood to attention by the carriage door as we loaded ourselves in, in pairs. How she reminded one of The Freak, the favourite Nurse Ratchett of every Prisoner devotee. We giggled obediently when ordered back into our compartments to sit on our bunk beds until the train departed. But her tender side was soon on display when she carried a small bag of tiny alcoholic bottles along the corridor and allowed us each to choose one for our night cap. After that she commanded us to treble lock our doors, and finally turned off the awful Russian muzak. I think I slept, although when my 'bunkie's' efforts to untreble the locks woke me I was convinced the 'gypsies' had somehow got inside the compartment. And yes, perhaps I did have a dream that one of them might come in black-face to drag me away and be his bride (thank you for pointing that out darl).

At daybreak the lights all came on again, the muzak returned and so did the wardress but this time with glass mugs of shining water decanted from a samovar.

I threw in a sugar cube and tea-bag, ate up my 'dry' breakfast (the caviar was quite good) and loafed around to admire the Muscovite suburbs as they rolled by in an unending identical mass.

It was some time after we arrived that we realized we had to get off the train. It was hardly the Grand Central Station of a great metropolis. But there was the sign.

So we dragged our luggage through the puddles, down a ramp and into the start of what is clearly the world's first meta traffic jam. I feel sure the same trucks, buses, 4WDs and taxis were still there on Arbat tonight when we walked back from the National Library. One thing that has been instantly noticeable after St Petersburg. It is really really cold.

Beware of the Gypsies : 11/09/06

2006-09-11T19:58:00.000-11:00

I didn't read the Survival Guide for St Petersburg (of course) and drank water from my bathroom. Ooops - apparently I've now consumed kilos of heavy metal. I also caught the subway alone both to and from the Nevsky Prospect, anotherno-no, and inevitably hired a dodgy fake 'taxi' on my arrival. But unlike one of my unfortunate colleagues I haven't yet been mugged. She and her husband were 'swarmed' on the Metro, and EVERYTHING was taken from them including of course passports, airline tickets, money and the ability to get any more money.

I'm attributing my good fortune to the Llama, which I like to think lends its wearer a useful East European invisibility. When I did finally read the 'Survival guide' I noted these words: There are many GYPSIES, who prey on foreigners. As disadvantaged as they may seem, beware the impulse to help out. Keep a firm grip on your valuables, keep walking, and .. if you are surrounded by a group of them don't be shy about making a scene : shout, run, and generally attract attention while keeping track of your valuables. Equal opportunity and anti-discrimination laws are clearly not an issue in the Russian Legal system.

St Petersburg is huge, and once away from the beautiful canals and long French styled palaces, is populated by immense block like buildings of no architectural distinction. There's very little street lighting or signage on buildings and the effect is one of menace, as though every vast concrete facade shields waiting rooms of overcoated interrogators. On the street corners, even late at night, watermelon men sit in the gloom beside their caged fruit, I suppose on the sad off- chance of making one final sale. Most of St Petersburg is not stable enough for underground railways so has lengthy tram and bus routes. You see people clustering apparently at random, waiting in the wind and rain without any shelter for the next bus or tram. It isn't fully a 'car' city, in spite of the very wide boulevards. Instead everyone walks. And observed alongside the huge scale of the buildings the humans look very very small.

Our Hotel is right on the Gulf of Finland, with a beach front, and kite-flyers on its foreshore. This morning when I looked out of my 10th storey window long flocks of migrating birds were heading away. I suppose that's an indication of winter approaching. In both directions there are apartment blocks. Stalinist apartment buildings are better to live in we were told, and preferable to the Khrushchev 'shoe-box' as these have bedrooms only 6 metres by 6 metres.

Yesterday out on a walk I emerged beneath a building of quite alarming decrepitude, chunks of concrete had fallen from it and onto the ground and its doors and windows appeared to be rusting from their hinges. It was suggested that this particular building was 'communal' i.e. kitchens and bathrooms are shared. Basically no-one bothers with keeping anything in order. Numbers of young men were hanging around in the doorways as I trudged over the random tufts of grass. The whole place had the air of a refuse tip. I struggled against the wind to get back onto the esplanade where the Pribaltiyskaya gleamed with promises of fresh fruit for breakfast, BBC TV and bath-plugs:

Every minute has been filled for us, with papers to hear, followed by excursions and enormous dinners at night. Yesterday we went to Peterhof, today we were at the Hermitage, tomorrow we go to Novgorod. It's been fantastic. But the very best occasion altogether was on the night the conference began. We toured the canals on a barge-like restaurant, palaces on all sides, and as the night drew in drifted past immense naval vessels in silhouette. I didn't take photographs, but the whole occasion was quite magical, with an almost full moon and the water slightly choppy as we neared the gulf.

You will hear thunder : 10/09/06

2006-09-10T20:15:00.000-11:00

It was wonderful finally to get to the Sheremetyov Palace where Akhmatova lived for so many years, and to stand in her room, and look at some of the things there that she had lived with, and think about the words she wrote while sitting at this desk. I re-read Lydia Chukoskaya's description of her first visit to Akhmatova when I came back to my hotel room: "I climbed the tricky back staircase that belonged to another century, each step as deep as three.. beyond the kitchen, a little corridor, and to the left, a door leading to her room.. its general appearance one of neglect, chaos" and of course the match was only exact in outline. But there was no mistaking the place.

There was the window out into the trees that she loved so much.

And next door was the room of Nikolai Punin, her common law husband, taken away from this apartment and executed. His overcoat still hung on the hall stand, along with his hat.

On the morning I planned my excursion I woke up early and looked out. Rain spattered the windows. I thought of the poem she wrote towards the end of her life:

You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms.
The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

That day in Moscow, it will all come true,
when, for the last time, I take my leave,
And hasten to the heights that I have longed for,
Leaving my shadow still to be with you.

Goodbye to Helsinki : 09/09/06

2006-09-09T07:59:00.000-11:00

So it's goodbye to Helsinki. In the end it was hard to escape the sneaking notion that Helsinki was really Melbourne. There's the weather, the trams, the bicycles, and the drunks. But there are two observable differences. The street signs are strangely, both in Finnish and Swedish (two official languages - why is it so?); and there's a large population of blonde people.

So I shall post some pictures, say arrivaderci to Finland, to sanity and to my blog, and heave my 'ports' onto the Sibelius to see what awaits.

The Tempelliakio Church : carved into a cave near the heart of the city

Cobbles : where would Europe be without them?

And water. Water is everywhere, although I still found myself carefully measuring the amount I used. Finland is beautiful. It has the world's best education system (interestingly the children have the lowest 'contact' time in all of Europe); it also has a feeling of connecteness, people speak to strangers, they laugh a lot, they're often very beautiful. I've enjoyed myself enormously.

Estonia with love : 08/09/06

2006-09-08T05:47:00.000-11:00

Having the constitution of a 900 pound weakling I managed to get horribly sea-sick on the Ferry to Estonia this morning, foolishly vacating my post on the upper deck in order to wander nonchalantly downstairs among the cool people, yes, the people who were eating greasy pizza, drinking warm beer and tilting their chairs back to watch TV sets bolted to the ceiling.

How I longed to be one of these, while quickly finding myself locked into a cubicle alongside a number of other unknown persons crying 'ruth'with gusto over our porcelain buses. That rather sad lament from Bohemian Rhapsody began drifting into and out of my consciousness.. I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all.. carry on.. carry on...

But eventually the whole horror ended, I sprang onto the peer and onto a city tour bus of Talinn, a very bedraggled kind of red double-decker which looked as if it might have been superannuated in 1952 by the London Bus Company. Of course as an Australian, nay a Queenslander, I think I can boast of having very well developed Dag Antennae, so I was enchanted by the tour, especially when the head-phoned tour stops went slightly out of sync with the physical presence of the bus. Our heads swivelled to the left as the muddiest lake in Estonia was pointed out (how like a dirt car park it looked), then to the right where a man invented a particular kind of potato in a special building (the one that seemed to have been replaced by a hundred and fifty year old tree). We even passed a huge advertisement which feature three blonde lasses peering winsomely over their shoulders while advertising something boldly known as SLOGGI. I tried so hard to get a picture, but the bus clattered remorsely past.

It was possible by listening carefully to observe a way in which history was being told by omission e.g. "on our left was once the car manufacturing company owned by Mr Behr and his family, who left Estonia in 1939". Did Mr Behr and his family go to the US? Or did they, to use Primo Levi's mordant turn of phrase "go up the chimney". Mostly the bus tour concerned itself with mud and potatoes. They were safer topics.

But I really loved what I saw, wandered about the Old Town, bought some Chinese Tatt from the Markets, visited a beautiful old Church (that was for you, Arvo), and prepared myself for the journey back to Helsinki. This time I resolved to stick with my failsafe anti-seasick method, stay on the upper deck, sea-spray and freezing winds nothwithstanding, fix my eyes to the horizon and to the occasional gull drifting over us in the updrafts and abandon myself to the elements. It worked a treat. I even ate some bread and cheese while sitting there, shivering in my woolly hat, and my Llama coat... but smiling..

Queen of the Llami : 07/09/06

2006-09-06T21:11:00.000-11:00

This joke is for Merle and Prue, but anyone else.. feel free to laugh. Merle your coat has been MUCH admired.

The background to this picture is a tawdry Santa 'World', Muzak Carols booming louder than the Myer Centre on Christmas Eve and quantities of 'souvenir' shops (how many reindeer have to die!) housed in fake Sami teepees and heroic log cabins. I suppose these are meant to represent the mystical Finnish past when men were men and got around in versions of the faux military or woodsman clothing they wear even now. I came across some photographs of hairy log cabined types, missus in the background, sheathed dagger at the ready. The Arctic Circle truck stop blokes across the main road seemed a lot more real. There were gathered the bristled, hung-over, beer-gutted, and just plain bored. I was among my people.

Strange trains : 06/09/06

2006-09-06T19:02:00.000-11:00

My childhood love of long distance train travel is still intact even after the overnighter to Lapland, naked pot bellies encountered in the corridors at 3:00 am, WCs that only work when the lid is closed and don't when it hasn't been, delays in the pitch black night for loud-voiced Finns to throw their suitcases and their voices into the compartments.Is everyone in Finland a heavy smoker, or is theirs the voice of evolution, generations of smoked herring 'curing' the throat to make those clumps of consonants.

Baltic Herrings Aida! (Yum. I ate heaps):

I wasn't surprised to learn that Lordi came from Rovaniemi, my destination city. In fact I was escorted to Mr Lord's downtown shop, just in case I might want a tee shirt bearing Lordi's beastly image. My serendipitous companion of the journey was Irma a woman in the next compartment, returning to her childhood home after a family death. She gave me all sorts of invaluable advice, and took me to the best Lapis souvenir stores. I resisted the Sami court jester like caps and coats, but did buy a splendid woolly beanie with a coloured plait which I think will be the headgear du jour next Winter on the East Ipswich platform. The Finns have a sorry history of army invasions and bombing campaigns (strangely, Finlandisation is the word that springs to mind!) although much of it has been white-washed in order to retain the Russian tourist rouble.

Where Irma now lives, close to the Russian border, she told me that a bear had been shot but had got away, unkilled. News bulletins have been warning that children must be sent to school in taxis, as the bear is still in the forest, now wounded and dangerous. I liked this story of the bear (such a change from discussions of sharks, venomous spiders and poor Steve Irwin's awful encounter with a sting ray). How like a metaphor for Russia itself I thought, not very originally. She described Russia to me herself as "rotting from the insides"and refused to go there, having memories of the bombing campaign which completely wiped the old Rovaniemi off the map. (Sorry Marina)

Travelling across Finland by train has at times seemed like an extended trip to Noosa, forests of conifers looming both sides of the track and broken only occasionally by pathways and sometimes even tiny cyclists pedalling somewhere in the shaded gloom. Looking out at such a scene my thoughts turned to woodcutters, nasty step mothers and helpless children. My second more Australian thought was of Belanglo, several people having told me of seeing "Wolf Creek". The rogue Aussie killer is always a favoured cliche alongside the venomous spider terror and shark menace. How to explain our rather bland lives in the 'burbs?

But the weather has been good, actually quite hot. Is Jenny Woodward moonlighting in Helsinki?

Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle : 04/09/02

2006-09-04T21:07:00.000-11:00

In the spirit of my newly discovered understanding of travel as an experience not of countries but of the Terminus one arrives in, I was quite excited to ALMOST conquer Charles De Gaulle. How beautiful it looked in the late afternoon, tubes of glass and steel gleaming in the sunlight, like the Centre Pompidou but flat. Escalators had flattened to 'travelators', Correspondance from floor to floor was now laid side by side, Sortie et Direction signs all clearly pointed just about the right way, but with just that little touch of Gallic intuition still required. I did fail at the final hurdle however, perhaps from fatigue, and consulted a snooty French Officielle who barked something unsmilingly. Yes, they haven't forgotten that piquant dose of French 'attitude' just to add to the allure of Paris. Like a demanding mistress Aeroport Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle beckons, aircraft of the world jostling above her spreadeagled beauty (oops I started chanelling Francois Sagan there for a second). But the plane was late, there weren't enough places to sit and crowds of tall Finns, and at least one tall Australian, huddled stoically at Gate Nine while all existing seats remained occupied by the same handful of early arrivers. Overhead the Harrison Birtwistle refrain echoed whenever an indecipherable message was to be announced. The man next to me carved slabs of runny camembert onto a fresh baguette. How European it all seemed, how Kieslowski. Why did I feel we'd met before, and in some earlier, less happy circumstance..

Narita : City of Transient Souls : 02/09/06

2006-09-02T13:21:00.000-11:00

Hours to kill, unconquerable queues on all sides, the pervading smell of Starbucks - I must be in Transit Land. Actually the considerable pleasures of the Nikko Hotel, which include actually being able to recline horizontally, eat food on a plate and watch CNN while reading 'Last Drinks', began to pall by 8:00 am this morning so I hightailed it back to Narita Airport, like a cat scooting up the back steps when the fridge door opens. But now that I've emerged from the giant snakes of persons and accompanied baggage, briefly, and having toured the Duty Free esplanade unable to convert thousands of Yen in my head in order to understand whether I can afford to buy anything, my blogging duties have beckoned, although as anyone who knows me well will know that duties is a most inaccurate description. I did have a dream of myself, wireless laptop open to the universe, a citoyenne du monde if ever there was one. But it was not to be; I couldn't find the wireless areas, short of roaming the corridors in a most uncool fashion, holding my laptop aloft like a geiger counter. I have some photographs, largely of yobbish Americans in the Immigration Area last night, wearing clothes that even an Australian traveller would be mortified to appear in. But that will no doubt be only a matter of time, the FTA taking hold with even more frightening speed than global warming. If they can shamelessly pollute our TV ads with images plainly filmed in the Hollywood Hills, they can also Trailer Trash our dress sense better than we can ourselves. So I'm unable to add pictures, yet. In an hour or so my gruelling trek over the top of the Himalayas begins, in the meantime, arrivaderci mes amis, your polyglot companion, friend, relation, even mother.. Barbara

PS Please speak back to me, it's always fun to read Comments, even rude and insulting ones (Sonya - that could be an invitation to you)

THE REST ROOM AT NARITA NIKKO - isn't it exquisite

Akhmatova : 28/08/06

2006-08-27T12:34:00.000-11:00

One byproduct of my misspent youth as a UQ Arts student has been a lifelong love for the works of the great poet Anna Akhmatova:

She lived in St Petersburg for a great part of her life and the current Akhmatova Museum is in the apartment where she lived from 1924 to 1952, The Fountain House, (Fontanny Dom) Naberezhnaya Reki Fontanki, 34, St. Petersburg. Naturally I intend to visit it now that I have a Visa (only took 3 months) and can work out how navigate the underground while lacking any ability to read cyrillic.

Akhmatova lived and wrote through the frightening events of the terror, the death by execution of her husband and many of her friends, the seige of Leningrad and the imprisonment of her son. Her most famous sequence of poems is Requiem. I'll quote just a little bit here, which I think alludes to her son Lev:

THE SENTENCE
And the stone word fell then
On to my still living breast
Never mind - I was ready,
Somehow I'll stand the test

Today I am very busy;
I must see that my memory is quite dead,
And that my soul has turned to granite.
Learn once more to live ahead,

But that's not it.. as for some celebration
Outside my window summer rustles warm.
Long ago, somehow, I foresaw all this,
The bright clear day, the empty room.

Perhaps when I'm actually in her room these words will seem even more wonderful.