Soaking up Siberia - Kvass

I made my first acquaintance with popular Russian soft drink kvass in Moscow after the first night spent in the train from Finland. The Trans Siberian trip was about to continue in the evening so we had a good opportunity to sightsee some of the Russian capital city. The day was boiling hot, but luckily there was a matryoshka selling cold kvass on draught in the park next to Kremlin. The nice and cold beverage was perfect to go with some lazy park bench-sitting (until a guard came out of nowhere and told the park is getting closed and we have to leave. Closed? In the middle of the day?) Kvass is traditional fermented low-alcohol drink made by fermenting grain or bread. The Russian brands I had during my trip were a bit different, e.g. sweeter than its Finnish equivalent kotikalja, still really good.

Kvass sold from a tank at the market place

As a matter of fact it was so good that later on the trip I bought a 1,5 litre bottle of kvass from a small kiosk on Novosibirsk station platform. The beverage was tad warm for my taste from the beginning and the flavour was somehow more artificial than those couple of pints I had drunk earlier in Moscow. Nevertheless I drank it all, the last drops maybe 30-35 hours later when the train pulled to Irkutsk station where we jumped off for couple of days. Big mistake! Little did I think of the fact that I had kept this fermented drink in warm train carriage conditions for a day and a half. If it wasn't already spoiled at the moment of purchase, it probably was by the time I gulped down what was on the bottle bottom before leaving the train. In few hours after finishing the bottle my stomach chanted diarrhoea cha cha cha. I survived the gastric dysfunctions by feeling merely under the weather for couple of days, so at least I didn't have to lie in bed for days. But it was quite an accomplishment to spoil one's own beverage and then drink it!

Next: Vodka (and Wine)

Previous chapter of Soaking up Siberia:
- Tea and Coffee

Fine Titz

Got a genuine old-skool snail mail letter from Germany couple of days ago. Uh oh, these things have never meant anything good, I thought. It was a speeding ticket from couple of weeks ago from a trip to Ruhr area and Benelux. Looks like it is possible to exceed the speed limit even in Germany! Fortunately the twenty euro fine I have to pay is considerably less than the 750 € that I was dunned for in the case explained behind the previous link. Moreover, the car rental company charged me an additional fee for passing my information to the authorities, but I guess that's only fair.

The felony took place in a town called Titz. No wonder your driving was so hasty and excited, said wife. 

Soaking up Siberia - Tea & Coffee

Nice cups of tea sold by provodnika.

When traveling around, one of the most interesting and fun things is often paying attention to cultural differences in eating and drinking products, habits and customs. Like I have mentioned in this blog earlier, I try to taste local products, drinks, cheeses, specialities wherever I go. Usually the experience is fascinating, sometimes it's nothing special to remember, some other times it's not necessarily something you would like to go through again, but nevertheless, you're one experience richer anyway. During my Trans Siberian trip I had an opportunity to observe some details of foreign drinking habits and especially the beverages themselves. I decided to write a small series on the topic. So let's soak it up and start with tea and coffee.

Perm station vendors

Before leaving Finland for the Trans Siberian trip, I heard a supposedly useful advice on having coffee and tea in Russia: If you're a coffee drinker, better learn to like tea. The advice hinted that tea works generally better as tea in Russia than coffee works as coffee. Fair enough, since I am definitely more of a coffee drinker, my cunning plan was to take some instant coffee with me, so I would at least be able to get my morning fix. Of course, in the end I forgot that unfortunate jar of instant coffee home.

Looking for tea bags.

There is always hot water available from a samovar in Russian trains you'll be able to brew your own tea or coffee on the rail. Of course, provodniki (the train stewardesses) can sell you whatever beverages you want, but in the long run (and Trans Siberian is long) it's more inexpensive to bring your own stuff with you or buy it at the stations during the stops. I tried to purchase tea bags from the station platform vendors on the first few stops by asking for чай (or rather: chai), but I was always offered ice tea bottled by multinational corporations. Even my weird tea bag bobbing hand mimics accompanied with my chai-chanting  didn't lead to a purchase. Finally a good woman on the platform of Perm station dug up a package of Russian tea bags from her booth.

Samovar. Get your hot water here.

As for coffee, I mentally prepared to have my last good tasting cup of coffee at a way overpriced coffee shop on Moscow's more touristy area, the pedestrian Arbat street during the second day of our voyage. And an excellent cup it was. But those couple of times I had some coffee elsewhere on the trip, like in the hotels at Irkutsk and Beijing, weren't totally bad. I've gotten used to that coffee just tastes different in other countries than what it's like at home. While some people might think it's bad coffee and get a cold turkey on caffeine during their vacation, I will just settle for another, typically unfamiliar and strange flavour. It's a simple take it or leave it situation, and being a coffee junkie, I like to take it.

Next: Soaking up Siberia - Kvass

A-maze-ing Borderlands

A boy in Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands

Borders between countries have always interested me. At most places you need to jump through a ton of bureaucratic hoops to cross one. Some places need you to assure with your signature that you are not lunatic, genocidal or a Nazi. The thing I like in the current Europe is that you can cross the borders in most countries by merely stepping over them. No grim faced guards with their guns, no endless car queues, no visa fuzz accomppanied by silly questions. Just go there.

There's also often a change of the language when you go to the other side of a border. However, in border areas the population often mixes with the population on the other side. They share the same culture and often the surrounding languages are spoken fluently in the area. Often also a certain laid-back atmosphere can be detected; people are used to visitors and cultural differences and strangers are not looked upon as weird freaks.

So close, yet so far away.

Those were the lines of our thoughts when we were having breakfast in a local pastry shop in a small Dutch town of Vaals, bordering nearby Belgium and Germany. An elderly couple at the next table were apparently keenly listening to our foreign chatting and when I dug up a map to study, the man saw the opportunity to start a conversation with us asking in very good English if they could help us with the directions. After telling us the way to the nearby three lands point he asked the question that had obviously bugged them since the beginning: What is the language we are speaking? After revealing it's Finnish the woman raised her thumbs up as in a sign of victory. It remained unclear what the man thought our language was. The couple was one of those borderland 'mixed' people, the man being Dutch and and the woman German. They said their common language was mostly German. After the nice chat they left, but soon the man came suddenly back, handing us a little bag of Aachener Printen, local traditional cookie delicacy, as a present and a wish for safe travels. I'd like to think we just encountered some real borderland hospitality!

Wait...                                             ...go!

We went on to see the Drielandenpunt where the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium collide. The place is made into a tourist attraction with sightseeing towers, parking lots, restaurants, gift shops and playgrounds. You can run around the border stone as many times as you want entering from one country to another in seconds, or even be in all the three countries at the same time by sitting on the stone. The highest point of the Netherlands is also here: You can't get higher than 322,5 metres in Holland. 

One way to find a way.

The most fun thing here, however, is The Labyrinth. There is a supercool hedge maze here, where the goal is to reach the platform in the very center of the labyrinth. It's difficult enough as it is already but they have added some 'stone' gates there with built-in water fountains that will wet you badly if you walked through. You have to find a hidden sensor nearby and waving your foot or hand next to it will stop the water for a moment  of unknown length. Better walk through the gate quickly. It gets only more interesting when you spot the sensor on the other side of the gate... There are also three lesser platforms built along the way where you can plan your route towards the center of the maze and watch the other people running into dead ends. On average it takes 30-45 minutes for the visitors to reach the goal and I think that's about what it took us too.