A Visa to Mordor

BAM! Outside of Europe regulations stop you in your tracks. BAM! They hit you in the face like a bureaucrats paper weight. BAM!

 VISAs and passports are no better then taxes. Actually they are worse then taxes.. The prevention and hindrance of humans to travel across invisible imaginary lines is an affront to our very first freedoms, the liberty to wander. The creation and enforcement of these ficittious boundaries is a great, great tragedy.

So it should come as no surprise that the dregs of the Warsaw pact are the worst. In the countries in which almost everything from food to happiness was imagined, its becomes a paradoxical certainty that their imaginary lines are the realist. The Visas are pricey and about as hard to come buy as free speech was before glasnost. A transit VISA through Belarus. £60, Mongolia £40, China £82.88 that's £188.88 of the bat. That doesn't include Russia either. Churchill said Russia was "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" and he was best buddies with Stalin; I don't think its changed much from Churchill's time.

Its still damn difficult to understand Russia; and Putin's boys at the immigration Beauro fire shotgun barrels of flack at you as you try to get a Visa. Besides, the machinations of the Russian Visa process makes you think you're putting in an application for the the KGB itself.

And, If you do navigate your way through the process you still have to plan your trip as pedantically as a five year Pig Iron production schedule.  It took two hours to realize that to get a visa you need a tourist voucher and then two hours more to realize you only get a tourist voucher from a hotel. And then you then need a hotel booked for every night of your stay. Hassle. Unbelievable Russian hassle. It felt like I was queuing for bread.

My mistake was to start my investigations with the information provided by the Russian consulate. A surly difficult bunch of people from my deciphering of their web page. Its so difficult to use it takes a few moments to realize that it has actually been translated from Cyrillic to Englih.

In truth though, I forget myself. I do the Russians a disservice I am quite certain that if I had more money, or I was more adept at paper work a VISA would be far easier to obtain. Two solutions that I am also quite certain haven't changed much since Churchill's Russia either.

Since childhood, Ive always seen Russia in the same light as Mordor, always stirring up trouble at the edge of the map. I don't think its my fault either, The Kremlin comes across as so belligerent. Belligerent and bitter; I bet Putin is as sweet as lemon rind.

I read the Big Red train by Eric Newby. It was fantastic, it had that air of elegance and amateur adventure, that seemed to be the bread and butter of the early 20th century Englishman. Its one of the reason I want to ride the Trans Siberian. I want to visit Russia becasue of the words which have flown out of it.

Russia has had more than its share of great authors and great books. I read War and Peace, not just the blurb but all of it. From cover to cover, every word. Its was good, a real classic, it was so good, I read Anna Karenina afterwords. That tome was tremendous too. I had started in Spring and by the time I had finished one whole thaw and freeze had ripped by. Not only did it feel like I had already traveled to Russia, it looked like Russia outside.  The Trans-Siberian is such an evocative name; like the Orient express, it seems more romance than reality. Russia too, is such a curiosity, like Matryoshka dolls. To get stuck on something as mundane as a VISA really wouldn't do.

Retrospective: Singapore

Three years ago I lived in Singapore. It was great. Sometimes I worry it was easiest fun I ever had. I just wrote this retrospective for a writing comp about the city. As I want to milk all my writing for all the lactose its worth, I'm posting it here too:

 

Singaporeans say "The early bird catches the Hello Kitty." I'm not sure what this means, but I know Singapore. And, I know it better than the international departure lounge that its fast becoming. It is easy to treat this country as a dose of western comfort, before the dirt of adventure. But to do this does this, does this Great City-State a great-disservice.

If Singapore, to you is, Changi airport and Orchard Road; then Russia will only ever be Communists and Vodka or better still Thailand will be the "Beach" and a Full Moon party. If you can’t find  what you’re looking for in Singapore, you wont find it anywhere.

This place has the confidence of the British-Raj, the dash of a Tamil curry, the spice of the Malay, the sharp kick of the Fujian Chinese all topped off with a splash of the Middle East - a perfect cocktail. This is the REAL Singapore-sling.

From surfing on the West coast, to kicking back a few Singer beers in Clemente, to looking at thousand lights form a hundred ships at a beach side bar at Sentosa, this state really has it all. People might say, Belgium is a  like the Netherlands, but you’d never say Singapore is like anywhere else on earth.  You can run across the city in a day and it’s as varied as cruising from Sham-el Sheki to Shanghai. Of course the Singaporeans would inevitably disagree. Actually, they’d just say what I’m saying better, they'd cry  “No! No! Same, same but different-laa”.

Just listen to these train stations: At Dhoby Ghaut get your Haute couture, change at Buena Vista and get a great cheap eat, and slip on through to Haw Pa Villa, where you will see Bizarre of Singapore at its best. They're building a Mountbatten station too. Sensational.

Now I don’t want anyone to thing that Singapore is simply an fusion of cultures. It is. But it isn’t. In the same way that Picasso used Paint, you wouldn’t call his paintings an amalgamation of colours. This country is far more than its historical parts and its wave of settling people.

This country is the home of the contradiction. Fiercely proud individuals elect a democratic autocracy. Collective, Competition is a definition of Singapore. You’re on your own in Singapore, that is until a Singaporean will invite you home for Chiken-Rice. Don’t ask the time either they’ll respond with “Its Tiger time!” unless you do actually want a Beer.

Ive seen queues in Singapore form simply because a queue was forming. That’s another thing, Singaporeans don’t want to miss out on anything – they call it “Kiasi” its crazy-laa.  Now they say that English is the national Language, but its not really. Like everything in Singapore, its really Singaporean-laa. Laa’s Singlish. Like Hello Kitty, I don’t know what it means either.

Besides if you ever did bend your ear around to Singlish, you’ll be stumped by the constant abbreviations. PIE, MRT, SBS, ERP, SMS, IPPT, NCC, CTE. or to use another T.I.S baby. This.Is.Singapore.