Tastes of Saint Petersburg and Moscow

Hospitality in Saint Petersburg
Dispatches from the East suggest that the goodly folk of Saint Petersburg are friendly and hospitable. The River Neva flows, despite some icy patches; snow flurries quickly turn to slush and vodka top-ups and generous afternoon tea treats keep the cockles warm.

Destination Saint Petersburg....

Peter’s legacy 
So Sally and Maggie arrived safely and admired the sights of Saint Petersburg, formerly named Petrograd and Leningrad at points in the 20th Century. Peter the Great (all 6 foot 8 inches of him) founded the city to prove his global, Enlightenment credentials and tourist highlights now include the Hermitage Museum, St Isaac’s Cathedral and the Mariinsky Theatre.

Highlights of Saint Petersburg...

Birthday in Moscow {Москва}
Somewhere between St Petersburg and Moscow Maggie celebrated her birthday and St Basil’s Cathedral (Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed) and Red Square had to be visited by the English travellers….

Happy Red Square Birthday to Maggie....

Underground Overground
Sally and Maggie then took a guided tour of the extravagant architecture and urban art of the Moscow underground. Translation might be difficult, but the top left image below shows a young Colombian: “our guide Mario touching the rooster…” I expect a more detailed explanation when Sally returns. The bottom right image, of course, shows the moment of destiny: Train 4 Moscow-Beijing 23:55…. Signals and networks will be patchy over the next seven days but the map in the previous blog shows the route: Nizhni Novgorod – Kazan – Perm –  Yekaterinburg – Omsk – Novosibirsk – Krasnoyarsk – Irkutsk and the extraordinary Lake Baikal and Ulan-Ude before heading south into Mongolia….

Travelling East

The travellers depart

Sally left me (for a while)
In February 2019 Sally set off to travel almost 2,000 miles away from Saltaire to Saint Petersburg in Russia. Then she’ll go a further 440 miles to Moscow, not to mention a further 3,790 milles to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia and finally a further 725 miles to Beijing in China. Almost 5,000 miles in total….mostly by train…. All being well she’ll fly back home after her adventure of a lifetime, inspired by her pal Maggie’s dream to travel on the Trans-Siberian railway. Sometimes dreams come true. I’m holding the fort and experiencing the adventure by proxy via WhatsApp and texts.

To the East and back.... Amy's Japanese adventure, savoured by proxy

Big world, small world
In some ways the world is a small place, given that pictures and voices can travel almost instantaneously via cyber-routes. But in other ways, the distances between countries are still very great and geographical features still have to be traversed by foot, bicycle, car, train, boat, plane…. Maggie’s daughter, Amy, recently worked in Japan and brought back recipes (and prezzies) to expand my palate and tell tales that illuminated Japanese culture. The last time I experienced Sally leaving me for so many nights was when she completed her medical elective in Mysore, South India – that was about 5,000 miles away, as well….

Carpe Diem
But seizing the day is what it’s all about, I suppose. Birthdays, Easter, Bonfire Night, Armistice Day, Christmas, New Year, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, St George’s Day (aka Shakespeare’s birthday….) If an opportunity presents itself, as E M Forster declared in A Room with a View:

By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes – a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.

Memories are made of this.

The everlasting Yes
Sally said Yes to Maggie’s madcap dream and there they are, on the banks of the River Neva, visiting St Isaac’s cathedral and the Nevsky Prospect, attending the ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre and downing several shots of vodka….

One element of this year's "birthday season" for Amy.... carpe diem! Declare the Everlasting YES!

What's in a name?

Me, cousin Ann, Sally, Dan, Ellisa, Logan. god-daughter, Lisa

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet
A recent Christening in Ossett saw Ellisa Anna Clara christened in the magnificent but freezing Trinity Church, Ossett. An early question about each new life on Earth is what to call the new baby. Ellisa Anna Clara was blessed with a trio of names paying tribute to important members of her ancestral tribe. Celebrities often make the news with their decisions, like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Apple and Angie Bowie’s Zowie – I’m assuming the Mums had more say than Chris Martin and David Bowie in those cases – but they have to take a bow before the choices of Adelaide Zappa (and her husband Frank) with their offspring’s names: Moon Unit, Dweezil and Diva Thin Muffin.

Ellisa's family and godparents, Mum and daughter, niece Jess and Chris. "How far that little candle throws its beams - So shines a good deed in a naughty world." (Shakespeare in Merchant of Venice)

What’s in a name?
It’s strange that, after a day or two, the baby (the child, the teenager, the adult….) become(s) the name they’ve been given. So my own children quickly became Emily and Harriet (though particular variations occur regularly…. Em, Emilia, Haz, HarrietRose….) and no doubt Ellisa will now forever be Ellisa, as her brother Logan is impeccably Logan, until either of them suddenly start wanting to be called a variation. Somewhere in America, no doubt Mrs Zappa found it unremarkable to shout “Moon Unit, come and get your tea! Dweezil, tidy your bedroom! Diva Thin Muffin, what time do you call this?!” Perhaps, like Zowie Bowie (who now prefers to be known as successful film-maker, Duncan Jones) Moon Unit, Dweezil and Diva Thin Muffin go by more ordinary names these days…. The most exotic (real-life, non-celebrity) name I ever heard about was Allegra Star Hoopengarner-Blaha; and a favourite name on one of my registers as a teacher was Fraser Rumble which, to me, sounds like someone who will one day be a hero.

Sally, Chris, brother-in-law Mick, sister Teresa and Jess

Meanings of names
I was named Antony (without an ‘h’ and I take pride in the lack of an ‘h’ since it was good enough for Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra.) My sister Teresa and I are godparents to Ellisa’s marvellous Mum, so it was a privilege to come full circle and witness our god-daughter having her own child named and celebrated in high style. And lovely to catch up with the extended family news. Names start to mean the people they are but there is a long tradition of trying to trace the origins of names, so I spent some time doing that for some of the guests at the Christening:

• Ann = “favour, grace” (Hebrew from Hannah)
• Terry = “ruler of the people” (Germanic from Theodoricus)
• Lisa/Ellisa = “my God is an oath/my God is bountiful/devoted to God” (Hebrew from Elizabeth)
• Dan = “God is my judge” (Hebrew from Daniel)
• Logan = “from the little hollow” (Scottish)
• Nick = “victory of the people” (Greek from Nikolaos)
• Daniela = “God is my judge” (Hebrew, feminine form of Daniela)
• Eliana = “Daughter of the sun” (Greek/Latin)
• Livio = from Livy (Titus Livius) who wrote a history of the city of Rome (Latin)

• Antony = from Roman family name Antonius, possibly meaning “priceless” (Latin)
• Sally = “lady, princess, noblewoman” (Hebrew from Sarah)
• Emily = “aiming to equal or excel” (Latin from Aemilius)
• Harriet = “rules the home” (Germanic from Heimirich to Henry to Harry to feminine form)

• Mick = “who is like God?” (Hebrew from Michael)
• Teresa = from Saint Teresa of Avila (16th century nun), possibly meaning “harvester” (Latin)
• Jess = first used as Jessica by Shakespeare in Merchant of Venice (probably based on Hebrew name Iscah from Bible meaning “rich”)
• Chris = “bearing Christ” (Greek from Christopher)

Siblings forever - Logan and Ellisa

Spirited Away

Changing, Moving, Travelling, Spiriting….
Time marches on. Things change. I’ve been out of sync with my blog and writing, partially as a result of radical changes to the structure of Rhenium Tales and Raydan’s story (see tags opposite) but also because of Christmas, New Year, my depression about Brexit and This and That. But my planning is up to date (again, for now….) and I can see the wood as well as the trees.

Chihiro (Sen) and Haku....

Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi
The subheading above translates roughly as Sen and Chihiro's Spiriting Away…. Sen is the name forcibly given to the heroine, Chihiro, in the Studio Ghibli film that English-speaking audiences know as Spirited Away. In the story Chihiro needs to remember and reclaim her own name before she forgets it and is trapped forever. We all need to remember and reclaim who we are. I recently re-watched Spirited Away with family and friends (in the "Harry Potter Film Club") and was reminded why it was a deserved winner of the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The director Hayao Miyazak has created a fantastically imaginative world with inventive landscapes and extraordinary attention to background details.

Characters and scenes from Spirited Away

Pig parents….
The central emotional journey is that of Chihiro’s growing understanding that she has to rely on her own resources to survive in the world, rather than expecting her parents to show her the way. She begins the films angrily and sulkily, grieving because she has been forced to leave all her friends behind as her uber-professional parents relocate the family to a new house in the provinces. Chihiro’s father drives recklessly down a short-cut, boasting about his four-wheel drive and the family are drawn, dream-like, into an abandoned amusement park where Chihiro’s parents cannot stop themselves gorging on food which turns them (literally) into pigs.

Thank you, Amy and Maggie, for our Saki set....

River spirits and dragons….
Chihiro meets Haku, a young man who persuades her that the only way to save her parents is to get a job in the bathhouse (populated by weird gods and spirits) ruled over by the powerful Yubaba. Chihiro has to navigate adventures in the Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz-like environment and she meets further strange characters like the spider-like boilerman, Kamaji, the down-to-earth Lin, the hard-working soot creatures, the Stinky slime-god (who turns out to be suffering from catastrophic environmental pollution), the Yu-bird and the giant baby boy, Boh. Not to mention Yubaba’s sister, Zeniba, who delivers my favourite line from the film: Once you do something, you never forget. Even if you can’t remember.

Delicious food to accompany the film: Gyoza dumplings and Katsu Chicken

Tears flow upwards….
What's it all about? Love? Family? Childhood fears? The need to belong? Loneliness and alienation? Endurance? The rat-race? The dangers of material wealth? Self-determination and courage? Asserting your own identity? Working hard? Accepting what cannot be changed? The horrors of enslavement and exploitation? Environmental pollution? It’s about all of these things, and no doubt many more. At one point, tears flow upwards…. hello, February.