Arshan

In the Cafe Fiesta, where when I ordered tea, and was given what I guess were several choices of tea variety, I just said “hot, please.” The waitress here has been long convinced of my insanity, so nothing really was lost. But I did get an especially good exasperated look from her today.

I don’t really know what to say about the weekend. It sort of defies description. It also resists my attempts to connect it with my usual expectations of reality and logical procession of events. I several times suspected that I had jumped through one of those sidewalk paintings in Mary Poppins, but into some odd surrealist experiment rather than a cheery bucolic landscape with the only the odd singing barnyard animal to indicate departure from the workaday world. Maybe it sort of followed the classic plot line of a fairy tale: it began with the most familiar elements imaginable, rooted firmly in the ordinary, and then dove further and further into oddness. Our equivalent of the woodman’s hut or the three sons living on a farm or whatever was the bus station in Irkutsk, and the entire bus ride departed only slightly from whatever our expectations of it probably were. We (Ivan, Natasha, Eddie, Joseph, Elisa and I) staked out the back of the bus, which is a cool elevated bench running along the back wall with an especially good view. And the world passing along the bus window was indeed bucolic, with villages of brightly painted wooden dachas and izbas, and vegetable patches with kerchiefed woman pooling potatoes out of them, and forests between the villages. We stopped for lunch on a mountain looking out over Baikal, with women selling obol (Baikal fish) and vegetables. As we moved into Burkatia the mountains got higher and villages had fewer and fewer painted shutters and gingerbread trim, and there were fewer vegetable patches and more livestock. And proud-looking Buryat farmers got on and off at the stops, and I thought about how the Buryats claim to be direct descendents of the aristocratic line of Ghengis Khan, and how I would not be one to argue. Thoughts were lofty and pseudo-poetic, and the bus windows kept us firmly in an observational relationship with reality.

Then there was the part where we were following some random babushka through the dirt streets to her house and agreeing to stay there, and the part where the streets were full of cows and dogs and, in the case of ‘our’ street, a river. And the part where we were in a marshrutka, the price of which was haggled with the town’s professional marshrutka-haggler, a blue-eyed Russian named Ivan who wandered the streets looking like a card-sharp, with three crazy Buryats who talked to us at great length about Columbus and his place in the Buddhist concept of the circular nature of time, and the morals of Hollywood, and how Jews formed the most intelligent nation but were very materialistic, and astrophysics, and how George Bush has a good sense of humor and Putin is totally unimportant to the stoic, far-sighted Buryat mind, and how the great Buryat/Mongolian people founded the Korean, Mongolian, Russian, Western European, and North/ South American civilizations, as we would know if we had studied history in our supposedly-so-great American schools. And there was the part where we were in a murky, concrete pool full of large Russians in speedos, with unbearably hot mineral water spraying out at us, and we were in a thunderstorm in this sort of grimy Buryat dude ranch with young men racing about the streets on horseback and getting in fistfights, and elderly Russians walking around in bathrobes, and bright pagodas sticking up out of the mud at odd intervals. And there was the part where we were dashing about in the rain in Arshan again, looking for somewhere to eat, and ending up in this “cafe” with a disco ball and picnic tables and drunken Buryats producing vodka bottles and drinking with us and making us say various curse words in Buryat, and claiming at various times in the conversation to be lamas and translators and various other things. And we would look out the window and the rain pouring over the dirt cow-filled streets was a snowstorm on the tops of the mountains sticking up right at the edge of town. And the next day the craziness only increased, and I don’t really know what to say about it... I’m not really conveying the oddness of it all properly. Insert into any mental picture of this all millions of discarded cigarette boxes and beer cans and vodka bottles everywhere, and lots of cows and mud, and lots of Buryat accents. We wandered around looking for these waterfalls for which the town was famous, and after a lot of dead ends involving climbing unnecessary mountains while carrying all the stuff we had brought for the weekend (including huge, huge amounts of food provided by the babushkas in Irkutsk- insert into this narrative lots of times where we pulled entire loaves of bread and packages of sausage and blocks of cheese and bags of potatoes and boiled eggs and apples and such out of sacks and ate without making a dent in it all), we found the very long, rain-drenched, vodka-bottle-littered trail, ending in the old, dangerous stairs of which Elizabeth warned us. The waterfalls, frankly, paled in comparison to those of Vermont, but the mountains were very pretty. And we added our mark to the graffiti-covered pavilion at the top, with my trusty Swiss-army knife. The rest of the day involved... I don’t know, a very creepy Soviet sanitarium (apparently these sanitariums were the government-provided vacation spots for workers- I don’t know what this one was like in Soviet times, but currently is half-abandoned and very odd – I kept expecting a white-coated doctor to pull me behind a door and perform a brain operation, and the light was a depressing blue), standing around drinking vodka in a trash-filled former ice-skating rink of a sort of art-deco aesthetic while waiting for “women’s shower time” to end at the odd sauna we found so we could use it, and hour in the said sauna involving a probably-filthy pool out of which we apparently splashed too much water, as we were informed by a shrill attendant with a thick accent. And more haggling with Ivan the marshrutka-manager to find a ride home, stuffed in the back of a very crowded marshrutka.