The US economy is generally collapsing more quickly than other economies. So it’s really a perfect time, exchange-wise, to visit New York City and indulge in what is the centre of the food universe. However it does help having a food-obsessed host to point the way. And with some luck, you can also squeeze in some more traditional sightseeing.

It’s smoking
Char No. 4 is a bar-restaurant with a passion for bourbon. Its interior is appropriately amber-hued and woody. The 19^th-century row house location in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn might make it potentially pretentious. But it’s not. They serve ‘American fare with a focus on smoked meat’. And anyway, I have long trusted my food-obsessed host to regularly reward me for knowing him. He is the man who earlier introduced me to such global culinary touchstones as the ‘herring in a fur coat’ at Petrovich and the rainbow of innards that they concoct at St John.

Char No. 4 can indeed provide complementing bourbons to accompany each of their morsels of comfort food.  The fried jambalaya rice balls with Andouille aioli had me feeling like I was back home in the land of Dutch kroketten and bitterballen – and I mean that in a good way and not a bad. But I am an emotional eater and I only really started to get weepy when I tasted the house-cured lamb pastrami with coriander aioli, pickled onions and grilled rye-caraway bread. By the time we were served the roasted salmon with black kale, roasted garlic and smoked pistachio-preserved lemon vinaigrette, my eyes had turned into waterfalls. It was all top nosh. On our way out, we bumped into the chef who said it was his last night before heading to California. Now it was my food-obsessed host’s turn to get overly emotional.

Borscht memories
After visiting the stacked silver boxes of the excellent and appropriately named New Museum, I was standing on the corner of 2nd and 9th in East Village waiting to meet friends for lunch at the famed Ukrainian eatery Veselka (read a great profile here). I used to eat here regularly years ago as a displaced teen and remember it always being filled with one half Ukrainian locals and the other half proto-hipsters (this was in the late 1980s before the neo-hipsters found succour in Williamsburg).

While watching the traffic going by I leaned back on a newspaper box for Village Voice and started to wonder why this weekly seems to halve in size each time I visit. Certainly Craig’s List took a big bite out of their classifieds business. But did Chowhound take a bite out of their reviewing business?

Suddenly my food-obsessed host bikes by. I experience the moment of recognition as a small stroke as he lives in Brooklyn and this just seemed like too much of a coincidence. But he just happened to be having lunch with his own food-obsessed friend a few blocks up. After I recover, he reassured me that while the rest of the hood has gentrified, Veselka remains a prime choice for lunch. (Later I would bump into him again a couple of times nearer his home while he was out getting Montreal bagels or sourcing fresh sardines from one of the excellent food shops along Court Street. This is just how it flows in a megapolis.)

Veselka’s borscht proved to be perfect and the varenyky dumplings divine. My first urge when confronted with the cabbage rolls was to just slap my face down hard on top of them and just start truffling down like a hog in heat. But to avoid burning my nose and eyes in the rich mushroom sauce, I tried to slow down by telling the story about my best friend growing up. His mother was Ukrainian. Whenever we were overly-energetic little boys, she would yell: ‘Boys please calm up; you are making me climb the ceiling.’ Oh, we would laugh. And then the next day we would point and laugh at my Dutch mother whenever she got all freestyle with the expressions of her new country – ah, the lot of the immigrant. Actually now that I think back, my friend and I were not actually to blame for our excessive energy levels. We were just still buzzing from the beet sugar in the borscht his mother had fed us for lunch.

Veselka’s borsht gave me the drive to walk very, very quickly across Manhattan towards Chelsea and finally check out the much-hyped ‘green’ (read: ridiculously over-designed but nice) High Line walkway that used to be the elevated train track that brought all the meat in and out of the Meat Packing District. Food history: it’s everywhere in New York.

The bread of Georgia
It was assumed by my food-obsessed host that we would stop off at Georgian Bread on our epic bike ride to Jacob Riis Park. Riis (1849-1914) was not a foodie but a journalist-reformer who used his camera to document slum life and invented flash photography on the way. So in a way, he can be considered a father of food photography.

As we cycled through Brighton Beach, not far from Coney Island, I was triggered by sense memories from years past: the sweat of a Russian bath house, the gentle squeak of a Nathan’s hotdog, being hypnotised by an old man slowly baking mighty pies in a pizza joint called Di Fara. This imperturbable Italian would pull out each pizza during the long baking process to give the bubbling mass a few massaging pokes with his fingers. He would then slice out some more fresh mozzarella here, and ladle out some more sauce there. Then he would put the pizza back into the oven for a few more minutes before repeating the whole process again. Meanwhile the line of saliva puddles would extend around the block. When I asked my food-obsessed host about the current state of Di Fara, he answered: ‘Now it’s just completely Disneyland.’

The Georgian bakers were however keeping it very real. In a small, hot room with a single clay oven, two men made two types of bread: a baguette-like shotipuri and a cheesy khachapuri. We opted for the cheesy to go. The older baker bagged it and passed it over a narrow counter. A small fridge was filled with a few dips and the intensely-mineral Borjomi mineral water. (And just to be clear: we are not talking about Georgia the state of pulled pork, but about Georgia the country in the Caucasus, much celebrated for their culinary skills, winemaking traditions, and being the birthplace of Stalin.)

Later on the empty and windswept beach of Jacob Riis Park with its abandoned art deco pavilion, we pulled out the crispy Frisbee-sized disk filled with salty, pudding-textured cheese. As it melted in our mouths, we all stared at each other with disbelief. Can something made by humans actually taste this good? We aided digestion by contemplating the sea, until someone tells us that this is the point where Hurricane Irene entered the city a few weeks earlier. ‘NYC has become a tropical climate, don’t you know?

A perfect Mexican. Dammit!
Perhaps my food-obsessed host had climate change in mind, when we later went to the Mexican restaurant Fonda in Park Slope. After cycling away cheese bread calories, it proved to be the perfect spot to unwind over a couple of spicy michelada beer cocktails. And dammit, the food was excellent again. But I was enjoying it less now because I was beginning to resent not living fulltime in a culinary capital. There were a few moments, for instance when picking at a huge wooden bowl filled with perfect guacamole, that I got distracted and started to unconsciously hum a happy tune. But otherwise I just complained about how Amsterdam has little range when it comes to cheap eats – Suri-Indo-Chin and, klaar, that’s it. Give me cheap Mexican! Give me cheap Vietnamese! Give me cheap sushi! Hell, I’d even be happy with a mid-range Serbian!

Finally, something real to complain about
Welcome to Williamsburg. My food-obsessed host warned us against going to Diner on a weekend, but we did not listen. We were stupid. But we had to be in the neighbourhood anyway and who can resist an authentically rundown diner in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge serving locally-sourced dishes? But while wedged in among the hipsters, we ended up waiting an hour for a table and then an hour for our food.

Except for a signature burger, Diner’s specials change daily – to the point that the amazingly chilled wait-staff sit down with you to write down all the specials on the paper table cloth. But in the end we were too hungry to care. We inhaled once, maybe twice, and our plates were empty. But the meals were obviously straight-up fine. It could have been quite possibly perfect on a week day. But I would never rebel against my food-obsessed host again.

Holy duck
My food-obsessed host remembered that I come from generations of duck harvesters. So it was sweet of him to take me for our last lunch to the corner of 2^nd and 13^th to Momofuku Ssam Bar, owned by the acclaimed Korean-American chef David Chang (a man known for his swearing and his love for offal). Their duck lunch is definitely of a whole fresh other feather. First a duck-and-pork sausage is embedded under the duck’s skin. This mutant hybridogenesis is then roasted on a rotisserie before being cut up and served with rice (which absorbed the melange of fats), duck confit (which adds yet greater depth to the melange of fats), chive pancakes (also handy to absorb the melange of fats), Bibb lettuce for wrapping (which help keep your fingers less sticky from the melange of fats), and a quartet of freaky sauces (which each combine in their own exotic way with the melange of fats).

As we made quacking and snorting sounds of delight at the bar, a brown-roasted pig buttock – a rather cute, rounded one – is served to the table across from us. It comes with a dozen oysters and rows of bowls with different kinds of fermented kimchi. Meanwhile in the open kitchen a guy is handling tripe that looks as if it came from a water buffalo. Serious stuff. A few weeks after our lunch, NY Times food critic Sam Sifton cited Momofuku Ssam Bar as his top choice for ‘For Blowing the Mind of an Out-of-Town Guest’.

I totally agreed. My mind was blown. And certainly my belly felt pretty blown on the airplane back home.

Guardian Travel playlist for Amsterdam by De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig by Guardiantravel on Mixcloud

The Guardian just published their online guide to Amsterdam. It’s quite fine indeed and features some fine local contributers — including the folks behind Unfold Amsterdam. My contribution involved asking the Dutch gibberish-hop collective De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig about their favorite Amster-songs. The interview was both hilarious and exhausting. Sadly much of what they said proved to be too racy for a family newspaper. My favorite part was when they claimed that volkszanger Andre Hazes was the nation’s Tupac and was actually black — ‘but you know how the history books always change everything.’ ]]> http://www.stevekorver.com/2011/06/guardians-amsterdam-city-guide/feed/ 1 http://www.stevekorver.com/2011/06/mladic-found/ http://www.stevekorver.com/2011/06/mladic-found/#comments Thu, 02 Jun 2011 11:57:10 +0000 stevekor http://www.stevekorver.com/?p=2651 While Yuri Gagarin was my heroic rocket into Russia, General Ratko Mladic was my runaway genocidal horse cart into Serbia. I would never compare the two men. I’m just saying it’s sometimes handy to have a focus when entering new territory. And actually my original entry into Serbia in the late 1990s was via the crazy kinetic music of gypsy brass bands. Guca! But I soon got confused by the discovery that this music – developed and played by Rromani musicians – had evolved into becoming the nationalist soundtrack to the idea of a ‘greater Serbia’. How did that happen? Yes, the war in former Yugoslavia proved to be very confusing. For a while I retreated into being a tourist: enjoying the food, the drink, the dance, the people and the non-war stories. I also enjoyed being asked: ‘Um, you do know that lately we don’t actually get a lot of tourists around here?’ Regardless, ignorance was bliss and I even ended up discovering some lovely and largely forgotten wine regions in Bosnia and Croatia… Yes, it’s vital to remember what happened in Vukovar, but it’s also important to visit a place like nearby Ilok. People are people – and the nice ones are often best enjoyed with a glass of fine wine.  

Later, almost 10 years ago, I spent a few months living in Belgrade with my ex-Yugo ex-girlfriend who was working on NIOD’s Srebrenica Report. She was there for Mladic and I was along for the ride. Milosevic had just been arrested two months earlier and so it was hoped that Mladic was soon to follow – or at least that he would want to tell his side of the story of what happened in Srebrenica when the Bosnian Serb troops under his command rounded up and methodically massacred 8000 Moslem men and boys. We ended up staying in Belgrade through 11 September 2001 – witnessing the dawn of the emerging apocalypse in a post-apocalyptic city. It made a deep impression.

My ex-Yugo Ex never did get to talk to Mladic even though he was still being spotted enjoying football matches and restaurants around town (and apparently living – bizarrely – on Yuri Gagarin Boulevard). But we did get to share mixed grill with one of Mladic’s best friends. And while I don’t have the balls to name him by name, I can say with all confidence that this general was a scary little shit – a true mini Mladic, but one who had cut a deal with the International War Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to cover his ass.

Sadly, there is no justice for all. But at least today I can finally update the introduction to my Welcome to Yugoville archive which asked ‘Where’s Mladic?’ The runaway genocidal horse cart is now behind bars a few kilometres up the road in The Hague. Perhaps his presence there will help remind many of the governments of Europe – in particular the Dutch one – that flirting with nationalism/populism is as a dangerous game as it’s always been. Sorry to preach in clichés, but it can really still happen anywhere. That’s what I learned in Serbia – and the rest of former Yugoslavia. People are people. Politicians are politicians. And the damaged are damaged and often dangerous – Mladic being the perfect example. There are always those who are willing to turn the rhetoric of politicians into something bloody. But meanwhile I think I might finally plan a return trip for some crazy ass brass at Guca. Hopefully the people are closer to completely liberating the music back from the politicians. Then we can really eat, drink and dance.

As it turned out, the road to Gagarin was one of the better highways we ever drove down in Russia. In 2002, it was very new. Our driver Alexei, meanwhile, was very old school. He was a boy in Moscow when Yuri’s First Flight was announced. Like all his friends, Alexei skipped classes to be part of the masses that flowed to Red Square to celebrate. ‘But we were not punished because it was a great, great day. Our country had nothing, yet we were the first to enter the cosmos. From then on, every boy wanted to be a cosmonaut and every girl his wife.’ But times changed. Alexei doubts that his 15-year-old daughter has even heard of Gagarin. ‘She just wants dance and debt.’

Alexei’s views of the universe have only seemed to have darkened in the decades since the bright and glorious days of the First Flight. ‘By the time Gagarin died, everyone was tired of him. Within a year he was fat from vodka but still he became a general. The later cosmonauts were actually much cleverer since they were real scientists. Yuri was just an animal for an experiment.’ Alexei also claimed that Yuri wasn’t even first: that it was some Vladimir Ilyushin, son of a famous aircraft designer, who was the first to enter space. And in fact, most people now believe that Yuri himself was responsible for the still-mysterious training flight crash that killed him in 1968.

Suddenly our ambitions to make the ultimate coffee table book about Gagarin seemed a bit under-considered. Alexei tried to cheer us up. ‘But Gagarin will still always be remembered as the first. And he did still risk his life…’ To distract us, Alexei pointed out a wealthy residential area where government officials apparently managed to buy half-a-million dollar houses while only making five hundred dollars a month. When a Mercedes careened past us, Alexei started grumbling about how ‘traffic lights are only for the poor’.

Yuri was born in the tiny village of Klushino near the town of Gzhatsk, now called Gagarin. While most Russian towns named after Soviet figureheads have long reverted to their pre-Revolution names, it’s safe to assume Gagarin will never become Gzhatsk again.
….
After picking up Tanya, a local guide, we went off-highway in the direction of Klushino. When we passed a destroyed 19th-century estate, Tanya said: ‘No memories, no history’. When we passed the former location of the Pushkin Collective Farm, Alexei said: ‘I think it was Pushkin who said “I love Russia but it’s a very strange love”.’ Tanya and Alexei had only met 20 minutes earlier but these two comrades were already working in existential tandem.

We pull over and take pictures of the sign for Gagarin State Farm: it’s of a sci-fi Yuri rusting in his space helmet.

At Yuri’s first home, the ‘Gagarin Cabin’, we got introduced to the guys next door tinkering on what could possibly be cars. Alexei joked with them, ‘Don’t worry, they are journalists, not spies.’ They don’t look particularly worried as they shake our hands and ask us to buy them beer. Meanwhile, Alexei drives off in search of the caretaker who has the keys to the cabin. Apparently he’s milking cows somewhere.

Tanya told us that the original Gagarin Cabin was built in 1933 and was taken plank by plank and rebuilt in Gagarin soon after Gagarin’s death. The copied replica we were standing in front of was built in 1971 and had its reed roof replaced in 1994 because ‘the birds had stolen it for their own homes.’ Continuing the tour, we are taken out back to the underground turf house where Yuri lived during Nazi occupation. While his older brother and sister were sent to work camps in Germany, Yuri lived here for almost two years with three other children, his parents and his grandmother in six square metres of cold, cold dirt. In his ghost-written memoir, Road to the Stars, Gagarin described the mind games he played with the Nazis as a boy saboteur. And he wrote of the joy of seeing his first planes and meeting his first pilots.

The replica cabin is very pioneering. The front porch is a carpentry workshop and inside there are grain-milling devices, cotton looms and root cellars. A side room is a shed for pigs, cows and chickens. ‘But before the Bolsheviks, it was used for horses,’ Tanya told us. Before leaving, we stopped to drink from the Gagarin Well, an act which is said to ensure one’s safe return from the cosmos. The water was cold and refreshing but came with a few splinters.

On our way back to Gagarin, I started asking Tanya gentle questions around Alexei’s outrageous rewriting of space history and Gagarin’s role in it. She just brushed it aside as useless gossip: ‘For me, these are not questions.’ I gave up and concentrated on making her like me again.

There was plenty of Yuri to see in Gagarin. Seven museums and galleries are dedicated to the town’s favourite son. It is hoped that an improved infrastructure will motivate more pilgrims to take the 180-kilometre ride from Moscow than just cosmonauts and astronauts looking for luck, the countless buses of school children and the stray terrestrial space tourist. Gagarin Town was no Graceland. Yet. And at least Alexei approved: ‘Have you noticed that there are few Mercedes here? That means it’s an honest place.’ 

 
…
Victor Porohnya and Yuri Gagarin became best friends in 1951 as first year students at the Industrial-Pedagogical College in Saratov, a once-closed military-industrial city located 800 kilometres south of Moscow down the Volga River. The two spent four years there together and remained close until Gagarin’s death 17 years later. Porohnya cherishes the memories of their friendship and also credits Gagarin — and his premature death — with influencing his life’s varied course. Not only did Yuri’s tutoring help him excel at school but his friend’s death made him realise he really wanted to do more with the Cosmos.

Porohnya now lives with his wife of 53 years, Valentina, and their cat Mussipussi in a Moscow apartment. Our first meeting with him had been postponed because he was ill, but now he felt better: ‘higher than a floor but still lower than a roof ’. When he picked us up at the metro station to lead us through a maze of alleys to get to his home, he pointed at a newspaper headline that evidently said that the government in our homeland of the Netherlands had fallen. This was news to us. ‘Now you also know what it feels like going to Leningrad only to discover that it is called St Petersburg again.’ Porohnya laughed when we gave him a present of cheese from ‘a country that may, unfortunately, no longer exist.’

Porohnya is an important man. His name googles like crazy in Cyrillic and a carpet with his image hangs on the wall of his living/dining room. He was a success story during Soviet times and remains a success story today. Almost 80, he is currently director of the Centre for History Education overseeing all technical universities across Russia and is head of the historical department of the Moscow Aviation Institute. He has countless titles and is author of more than 100 scientific papers about technology, history, metallurgy and aerospace. He also wrote a book about his friend, The Road to the Baykonur (1977), which was published in 20 countries. We hoped he could set us straight on the slanders against Yuri we had originally heard expressed many years earlier by our ‘man on the street’ driver Alexei.

Porohnya is obviously as nice and open as Yuri was reputed to be. Born in Voroshilovgrad of what was then Soviet Ukraine, Porohnya is a true ‘man of science’. He tells his stories by building up his facts, methodically and in chronological order, but then always returning to the big recurring theme of his life: football. He played it on his few off-hours as a child miner during WWII, as a student with Yuri in Saratov (though Yuri, short as he was, preferred basketball), as a factory worker in Leningrad, and as government bureaucrat organising the development of agricultural land in Kazakhstan. ‘But with all that wild nature there, it was very difficult…’ 

He was working as a football trainer in 1968 when a player ran up to tell him Gagarin had died. ‘You will never understand what I felt at that moment.’

As his wife spread food in front of us, Victor looked at her and her handiwork lovingly. ‘You know she’s the one who got the medal, not me, for when she was in charge of the Culture House.’ Valentina ignored her husband and claimed she was just doing what she has always done. ‘This house has always been very busy. During Soviet times, we’d have at least 150 people a year from all around the world. Many of them I think were just football fans of Victor.’ She was teasing her husband who responded with a feigned innocent who, me?-look. ‘But when we travel, we also always stay with friends. But the morning after, we never look as good as we did the night before.’ We all laughed, ate and felt very much at home.

Like Gagarin, Porohnya’s childhood was marked by WWII (otherwise known as the Great Patriotic War). In 1943, while Yuri was hunkered down in an underground turf house, 12-year-old Victor, after the death of his father and three brothers, started work with his mother in a grain mill and later in mining. Victor and Yuri were two very different people: ‘I am very emotional, but Yuri was always very ordered.’ They did not actually meet during their first weeks in the school’s iron casting department. ‘We were just 17 so at first we were both much more interested in the older students who were married with kids and had experienced the war. I remember one from Stalingrad who had been able to negotiate with both Russians and Germans for food. A very smart man.’

Porohnya only noticed Yuri — then just as ‘being like everyone else’ — when they were assigned to the same dorm. For the next two years, they would live two bunks apart, crammed together with 13 other people. ‘When we studied, some of us sat on the table and others on the floor. It was that small.’ Yuri ended up tutoring those, like Victor, who lagged academically due to interrupted schooling. ‘Yuri had a fresh mind and a good knowledge of math and chemistry from his time in Moscow at the Lubertsky Academy.’ By the end of the first year, the whole dorm had excellent marks. 

After school they did sports or worked. Ships docking along the Volga would hire students to help unload the boats. ‘With this first money we bought clothes, and me, Yuri and another friend would get them in a size that fit us all.’ This way they could exchange clothes and keep looking fresh and interesting when chasing girls. ‘At one point Yura and I even had girlfriends from the same region. This annoyed some local Tartar guys who began beating us up. But we took off our belts and fought back. The school heard about it but our director said we were good boys and just fighting out of self-defence.’ When I asked if it had perhaps been their innocent smiles that helped save them from punishment, Victor flashed a very convincing innocent smile.

‘Once we worked all night unloading a ship and only got to bed at six but had to get up at eight,’ Victor sighed deeply. ‘So of course we slept in. When none of us came to class, our head teacher came to find us. But instead of waking us she sat by the door and told those passing to be quiet. This very tough woman became the guardian of our dreams!’ The next day however, she gave a test based on the assigned lesson no one had done. ‘Everyone got a two out of five but Yuri due to his memory and attentiveness got a five.

‘He was always the first. Even at a very young age Yuri always knew what time it was.’
…
At the time of the First Flight, the Porohnyas were in an outlying republic where Victor’s football team was training. Suddenly, while they were taking a quiet walk around town, all the radios suddenly turned on to announce that ‘this is the day that the citizen of the USSR, Major Yuri Alexseievich Gagarin, went into space.’ The city’s men started to throw their hats in the air—‘as is the tradition there’. At first, Victor did not comprehend that this was his school friend. ‘Yuri was still very young and had just graduated from the flight academy.’ Before going to his football practice, Victor asked his wife to sit by the radio and write down all the details she heard. When he returned in the evening, Valentina greeted him by yelling:  ‘Yes! Yes! He is your Yuri!’

Victor felt compelled to rush out to the post office and send a telegram to Saratov College to tell them that this achievement belonged to a former student, and another to the Minister of Military Affairs in Moscow in an attempt to send his congratulations to his friend. This last telegram was probably the reason for the four men arriving the next day to ask Victor questions about Yuri and their college days in Saratov. These men likely were the true authors of Gagarin’s soon-to-be published memoir Road to the Stars.

A couple of months later, on 13 June 1961, the school chums were reunited in Kaluga as part of the official opening of the Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics. Victor and Yuri only had a five- or ten- minute ‘public greeting’ where they talked about their recent world travels (Yuri as a space icon and Victor as a terrestrial footballer). Before being taken away by his official entourage, Gagarin managed to slip Victor his address and telephone number. They would begin to see each other again during their vacations.

When asked whether he noticed if Gagarin had changed much with his new status, Victor behaved as if he could still tease his old friend. ‘In school we were exactly the same small size, but when he became a big man, he became a BIG man,’ referring to Gagarin’s later weight gain that was due to all the endless toasts he had to endure as a Soviet space superstar. But then Victor got serious. ‘Have you ever met his mother? No? She was a simple, good and straightforward woman. I will tell you this: Yuri absolutely didn’t change. He understood that he wasn’t special and that it was just a twist of fate that he had been selected to be first. That’s why he stayed normal without any pretensions. I’ve had the opportunity to observe many powerful people of the USSR who also came from poor families and became famous public figures. Compared to them, Yuri did not change – absolutely not.’ 

Victor paused. ‘Speaking of which, do you have Absolut Vodka in Holland? I like that brand very much.’ He got up to look for a bottle. His wife joined him, knowing she was going to have to help him find it.

‘The first toast is to Moscow because none of us are from Moscow, yet we are all here right now.’ Victor is reminded of a night when he was hosting a party and Yuri dropped by. ‘There was food and drink on the table, but not enough, and Yuri could tell I was unable to buy more. So he put his jacket on me and told me to go downstairs to the shop, while winking towards the right pocket. In it I found some money.

‘The second toast is to the health of our guests. And I wish you luck. There are not many people in the West who want to show Russia from a good side. It’s a good subject, especially now the Americans say they were the first ones in space after all and that it was them who won the war. In this way, no matter how much you deny it, your position is political.’ We all laughed. By now none of us were feeling the least bit political.

Valentina tells us of her first meeting with Yuri. It was 31 December 1965 at a New Year’s party in Moscow. ‘I was worrying about how to address him: as a friend or more formally. We were the same age but he was very famous so I didn’t know what to do. When we knocked on the door of his apartment, he opened and immediately began to hug me and throw me around. After that I stopped worrying.’

The only thing that bothered Valentina about Yuri’s life was that it was always being interrupted. ‘You would just have some fresh vodka in your glass and then at the door there’d be some journalist from some newspaper. This would happen again and again. But still he was a very normal person. You didn’t feel like you were with Yuri Alexeivich. You felt like you were with Yuri.’

Victor and Valentina were naturally upset by the stories around Yuri that later appeared in newspapers. ‘In Soviet times we did not have yellow newspapers. In the Soviet Union the hero was always the hero and it was told without any witnesses. It was ideology. All rumours about Gagarin only appeared after the breakdown of the USSR. And everything I read and heard in that time were lies…’

We stuck around for more stories and hospitality. Those old Russians knew how to party. Eventually we left, feeling as if we had just celebrated a New Year’s Eve in Moscow with friends at the dawn of the space age. Yuri’s ghost was close…

…
To be a cosmonaut, one must be able to deal with both excruciating pain and excruciating boredom—and be smart. And even if you make it through the insanely rigorous selection process and training programme, there’s a good chance you will never make it into space. You must therefore be ready to live out the rest of your life ‘unfulfilled’. But then again, if you do make it into space you can end up suffocating alone in the void or getting pancaked upon re-entry.

…
For the past 48 years, Dr Rostislav Bogdashevsky has been the doctor/psychologist to all the cosmonauts, astronauts and space tourists trained at Star City’s Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre. He readies space travellers for the psychic hardships of space as well as for the weirdness that awaits them upon their return to spaceship Earth. And not only does he have a goatee, penetrating eyes and a devilish sense of humour, he was also a close friend of Yuri Gagarin.

Dr Bogdashevsky has loved his job since arriving here as a young doctor in 1962 less than a year after Gagarin’s flight and just as the second division of cosmonauts was being selected. He had originally specialised as a surgeon, but since he’d ‘always been interested in human souls’, he decided to qualify as a psychologist. Star City proved to be his perfect human laboratory. ‘It is filled with my favourite working material: people. And I can confidently say that I know the characters of all the cosmonauts.

‘Cosmonauts are really the elite of all the human beings. They are very unlike politicians, who are too busy with attaining worldly power to fully understand how to take advantage of all the talents and skills of cosmonauts,’ opined Dr Bogdashevsky. I liked the doctor’s vision: that the world was no longer divided between East and West, but between savvy cosmonauts and peckerwood politicians…

‘Back in those early days, cosmonauts were overprotected and everything was a secret. One of the big things I realised back then was that there are two different persons in each human: one formal, the other informal. And a person’s behaviour will be absolutely different in these different situations. If you feel free, you behave absolutely differently than when you don’t.’

After his flight, Gagarin had a very formal role to play with the rest of the world, and that was where, according to Dr Bogdashevsky, his problems started. ‘There were political problems, ideological problems and big problems between civilian and military elements. And Yuri was in the middle of it all. He was a very smart person and he knew a lot. But he was also young and it was difficult to survive in this informational stream. But by nature he was a very direct and truthful man with a good sense of humour. Thanks to this basic character, he was able to stay human. When you see those films of how people interacted with him and celebrated the event and by looking at his face, you realise he was really a very good person. And to be good is a natural thing—it’s like coming from God. You were born with it. It’s nature.’

But of course the many pressures must have had an effect on his essential goodness? ‘Yes, of course, we are all weak. As Stalin said: “If there is a human, there is a problem. No human, no problem’’.’  Dr Bogdashevsky paused to enjoy my Stalin-said-what?! -reaction before continuing. ‘Unfortunately, we did not have time to get more details about his character, because he died very young. And since he disappeared, he’s become a legend. I certainly cannot imagine my friend as old as I am [laughs]. I will always remember him as young and handsome.’

But wasn’t Gagarin also a victim of the State? Didn’t he just want to fly again? ‘Of course he always dreamt of returning to space. He did everything to fly again. And he was absolutely prepared for it. But the politicians and chiefs understood the worth of his phenomenon and kept him away from all dangerous situations.’

Gagarin’s frustration is a common feature in the lives of cosmonauts that followed him. Describing it as the ‘tragedy of being a non-fulfilled person,’ Dr Bogdashevsky said that there are many cosmonauts in Star City who have been here for 25 years but have never made it to space. ‘They just want to realise their goal of flying into space. So of course sometimes they try to cover up their true psychological condition…’

…
Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalyov (1958) is a cosmonaut and rocket scientist. He would happily hop on the first rocket out of here. He is open about not being totally fulfilled with his current job as director of Star City’s Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre. He has lived the life of a science fiction character. And it must be said: ears aside, Krikalyov’s physical resemblance to Spock is downright eerie.

As a cosmonaut, Krikalyov has spent more time in space than any other human being on the planet: 803 days, 9 hours, 39 minutes. He is perhaps most famous as ‘the last citizen of the USSR’, because in 1991/92, he spent almost a year maintaining the MIR space station after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As seen in the documentary Out of the Present, he wondered ‘if anyone down there remembered I was up here,’ while making 16 orbits a day alone in the void.

After his return to Earth, he went on to break many records and receive many medals. He flew on the American space shuttle and was the first resident of the International Space Station. While action man is now administration man, he remains precise. When I asked what he remembered from his first 108 minutes in space, in order to get a feel for Gagarin’s orbit around the earth, he began with a correction. ‘Actually, the actual orbit took 90 minutes. Gagarin’s 108 minutes was the time from take-off to landing.’

‘Your first space flight is something you will remember for the rest of your life. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve been to space. First there’s the long-term weightlessness. On Earth, you can only  recreate weightlessness for about 25-30 seconds in flying laboratories. And second, there’s the opportunity to see the earth through the window and witness the horizon’s ellipse…’
…
And how different is being a cosmonaut today and in Gagarin’s time? ‘Well, Gagarin was the first. And at that time, people had no idea if we could survive in space or even breathe out there. It was all completely new. His flight was the first step. And in this way, even though his flight was quite short, it was very heroic.’ Krikalyov then agreed that cosmic fame comes at a price. ‘Some stories about your life can start living a life of their own. You can no longer influence them…’

…
Today, if you drive to Gagarin’s landing location near the village of Smelovka, coincidentally just a few kilometres from his old college in Saratov, the route is lined with space-themed flags and endless children’s murals depicting spacey alien visions. After turning down a road lined with tree trunks painted white, it quickly becomes clear that it doesn’t really matter much where exactly Gagarin landed. If you’ve seen one field here, you’ve seen them all. If you wanted to interview a potential witness, you would have to learn cow. There is only the whistling of birds and the rustling of garbage left behind from a recent Cosmonautics Day celebration.

The ‘official’ landing spot is marked by a refreshingly low-tech statue of Yuri happily strutting with his headset in his left hand and waving an eternal greeting with his right. Instead of the prerequisite titanium used in all the over-the-top space monuments in Moscow, his figure has been fashioned out of concrete. The celestial swoop behind him is of aluminum. Still, when his mother saw it, it is said she said ‘He looks so alive!’

…
Vitaly Georgievich Volovich is a famous Soviet doctor/paratrooper and specialist of human survival in extreme natural conditions. As the first doctor to give Gagarin a medical examination after his flight, he is perhaps one of the few living people who can rate as an eyewitness of sorts to the landing.

In many ways, Volovich resembles Gagarin if he had lived: an amiable, tiny-statured and retired Hero of the Soviet Union living in a cramped apartment in Moscow, surrounded by countless artefacts from world travels — and armed with incredible stories. On 9 May 1949, Volovich achieved his own dramatic ‘first’ when together with his friend AP Medvedev, he became the first to parachute jump into the North Pole. 

After spending several years working on the science stations North Pole 2 and the drifting North Pole 3, Volovich joined the Defence Department’s Institute of Aviation Medicine in 1952 to specialise in the survival of air, and later, space crews after a crash or wayward landing. As head of its Survival Lab, he led countless expeditions to jungles, tropics, the arctic, forests, taigas and deserts. He also spent a lot of time in India’s tropical zone, which is where he learned to speak English. As he warmed up his Russian-Hindi accent, he summarised a typical field trip from that time: ‘Near equator on rafts. Floating seven days with no help. Little breakfast. Little lunch. Little water. Much sun.’

Did he ever feel fear out in all these strange places? ‘I’ve only felt something like fear twice. But I would more describe it as difficult situations. There was once when I was a child, when I was separated from my parents and spent a night thinking they were dead. Yes, then I had much fear. The second time was when a parachute did not open during a night jump…’

What happened?! ‘I don’t know. But I survived!’
…
Volovich originally met Gagarin when Gagarin was still an air force pilot in training in the far north. ‘I gave him a medical examination when they were searching for cosmonaut candidates. It was top secret. I met him many times in the process. He was very interesting and had a sympathetic face. And like all the first cosmonauts, he could enjoy life, drink and women. They were all normal males.’

Volovich went on to create his own job: heading a group of doctor-paratroopers that were part of the search and rescue of cosmonauts, and as such, he was often on hand to examine the first cosmonauts after their landing. On the day of Yuri’s First Flight, Volovich was meant to parachute in to the landing site but for some unknown reason that was cancelled. He only got to examine Gagarin on a plane being flown the 30 kilometres to Kuibyshev where government officials, correspondents and the Head Designer were waiting to congratulate Yuri. ‘When I saw Gagarin, he was very good. Talking. Smiling. He spoke of his space flight and some of the details: the blue of the water, how a pencil floated in the cabin of the space capsule. When I checked him, all was good: blood, pulse and the rest. I made a joke: “Yura, maybe you did not fly at all!” Yura answered laughing: “Maybe you are right!”.’
…
In the years that followed, Volovich continued to bump into Gagarin around Star City and at clubs and theatres in Moscow. He didn’t observe any major changes. ‘It was very interesting. He was Yura before and after his flight. Whoever chose Yura to be first made the right decision.’

He then poured us a bit more cognac and offered his service as fact checker for any future Gagarin book. ‘Truth is crucial. Mistakes not good.’
…

© Steve Korver. Thanks to Sarah Gehrke and her editing skills.

The first human in space, Yuri Gagarin (1934-68), was our rocket into Russia. But it was usually a wintery Russia. So it was a refreshing change when last month he had us blast us off to a warmer place: Cuba. It was also a bit of a different planet. So thank you, Yuri. Thank you.

Gagarin will always be Cosmonaut Number One. But he also came to hold another title: president of the Soviet-Cuban Friendship Society.  As such, the tiny cosmonaut who had conquered the vastness of outer space also became a symbol for a tiny nation who had seemingly conquered the vastness of American business interests.

It was interesting times… Barely a week after Gagarin’s first flight on 12 April 1961, the US-backed invasion of Playa Giron (AKA Bay of Pigs) tried to overthrow Fidel Castro’s two-year-old revolutionary government. But the attack only worked to strengthen Castro’s position and ally Cuba more closely with the Soviet Union. The resulting increased tensions with the US would build up towards the Cuban Missile Crisis (AKA October Crisis) 18 months later. So what exactly was the role of the first off-world traveller in the events around what many consider the closest the world ever got to blowing itself up? In Havana, we not only got to ask the first black dude in space (who incidentally credited his dentist wife for his Yuri-competing grin), but also an old chess-playing buddy of Che…  Thanks Yuri!

We also went off-road in search of a school and a goose farm named after Gagarin. It was ‘ganso journalism’ at its best. Especially since due to unforeseen circumstances (stereotypically involving an unlicensed 1950s Chevy and a young lady of the Revolutionary Police), we went without an interpreter. But luckily the international language of Yuri got us far (as you can see in the above clip). However the fact that the Spanish word for goose, ganso, is also Cuban slang for gay, did lead to a few moments of deep confusion.

Thanks again Yuri!

Please join our ROAD TO GAGARIN Facebook group.

On 12 April 1961, Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934-68) yelled ‘Let’s Go!’ as he was launched for a 108-minute circuit around the earth to become the first human in space. For the last decade, photographer René Nuijens and I have been re-visiting Russia to document the major settings of Gagarin’s bizarre and dramatic life, and talking to people who were close to him. In the process, we are capturing the essence of both the man who is dead and his myth that is still very much alive. He remains the most popular 20th-century figure in Russia, where he has the legend status of a JFK or a Bruce Lee – inspiring love, art and conspiracy theories. We believe, like many others, Yuri should become more of a global icon again.

To be published in 2011, the book Road to Gagarin – In Search of the First Man in Space combines photography, travel writing, archival material and a tasty selection of cosmonautic kitsch. Yuri was our rocket into Russia. We recommend the ride to anyone.

I was one of around 10,000 journalists wandering endless kilometres to follow a story or interview an author. And like me, probably half of these journalists had a personal project to pitch. My favourite came from a guy who was pitching his book by going cubicle to cubicle in the press room. His dream project was called ‘Sulphur is your Friend’ which argued that this smelly element was in fact heroic because of all the worthy work it does within the wine industry. Another highlight of Buchmesse arrived around five or six each evening as the drinks and food began to flow. Rumours would quickly spread as to where the best freebies could be scored. Naturally, the French and Italian bookstands were the most highly regarded. Sadly I missed the big Dutch publishers’ event when they feed the 5000 with bottomless barrels of raw herring. Apparently the whole hall stinks up and there are always leftovers. Actually I guess in the book trade these fish would be called ’remainders’.

Because I did not book a room a year ahead, I had to stay in the spa and gambling town of Wiesbaden at the end of the S-Bahn. On the way to the hotel from the station, I asked the cab driver about what I should know about this town. After inquiring where I came from, he answered laughing: ‘I think we can compete with Amsterdam here. We have public clubs but we also have very many private clubs — if you know what I mean.’ I did. However I decided to seek my happy ending at my hotel with a shower. Unfortunately my hotel turned out to be the German version of Fawlty Towers. Luckily my Manuel spoke excellent English and we had a good laugh as the mishaps piled up. There was a leak over the bed (not exactly the shower I had imagined) so I was put into another room. As it turned out, that room did not come equipped with a functioning toilet, shower or lock. So in the end I mentioned the war and got away with it. They gave me a free night and a fancy room the next day. And since freebies and slapstick always put me in a good mood, I didn’t even mind later when a lit cigarette butt bounced off my head when I was unwinding with a beer on their patio. In fact it was like the cherry on top.

Actually I’d like to stress how much I love Germany. And my respect goes beyond just their rich culinary tradition in reconstituted meat products (for some thoughts on currywurst, click HERE and HERE). I might even consider moving there if Canadians end up getting stigmatised under the Dutch right wing government that is now being formed with the backing of the populist politician and amateur filmmaker Geert Wilders. I keep getting the feeling that Germany has done a much better job at dealing with its past. There are certainly a lot of books on the subject – it’s a topic right up there with cats.

Thanks Danny. This is quality!

A website charts out all that is weird and wonderful in the world.

By Steve Korver

Attention, jaded travellers who are convinced that everything exotic has long become familiar to them. The website Atlas Obscura — “a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica” — should get you all worked up enough to hit the road again. Their Canadian listings alone should give you a taste of what’s in store: the Diefenbunker nuclear shelter in Ontario, the Gopher Hole Museum in Alberta, and the Downtown Hotel that serves Sourtoe Cocktails (a combination of champagne and an amputated toe) in the Yukon.  

When it was launched last summer, the website seemed to tap into something that was still missing from the internet and went immediately viral and contributors lined up to donate their own desperately odd destination — ones that have not yet been co-opted by package tours or beer ads.

Atlas Obscura’s mission statement is a noble one: it’s the place to look for: “miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper.” And who isn’t looking?

Two 26 year-olds, the film-maker Dylan Thuras and the science journalist Joshua Foer, came together after discovering a shared passion for the desperately obscure. They met three years ago organising a society meeting for Athanasius Kircher, the 17^th century Jesuit scholar and “last renaissance man” who is listed as the inventor of both the “vomiting statue” and the “cat piano”.

But their taste for the wondrous began much earlier: with travels across that most obscure and wondrous of countries: their very own US of A. Dylan Thuras recalls: “I was twelve and my parents took me on a family vacation around the mid-west which is filled with all kinds of bizarre places: Wall Drug, the South Dakota Badlands, and the most amazing and unbelievable was ‘The House on The Rock’. It was like entering a fantastical universe someone else constructed for you.” And indeed, its Atlas Obscura write-up does make it sound enticing. It’s a sprawling construction in Wisconsin that houses a collection of automated orchestras and a 200-foot model of a sperm whale.

Joshua Foer’s coming of age came later: “I was 19 and I bought a beat-up minivan and spent two months driving around the country. At the time, I’m not sure I could have told you why I was doing it, except that I was curious to know what the rest of America was like. I spent a lot of time trying to find wondrous and curious places. It was a life-changing experience.”

Both quickly realised that was no single, great resource for travellers like themselves. Until they realised the power of the Internet and user-generated sites. But while all are welcome to contribute, the listings are edited and fact checked. “We love these places and want to respect and honour them,” says Thuras.

So yes, it turns out that our Earth is still, as Thuras describes it, “a very big and very weird and interesting place, and there are plenty of things left to be discovered by the traveller.” Isn’t that wonderfully reassuring?

The editors of Atlas Obscura Editors give their top wacky destination tips — as of September 2009 (since “our favourites are always changing”).

 Dylan Thuras:
1. “The Root Bridges of Cherrapungee in India take at least ten to fifteen years to build. Locals guide tree roots over a river and have them take root on the other side. Some of these living bridges are over a hundred feet long and strong enough to support fifty people. There’s even a double-decker one.”

2. “The Gates of Hell is a 328-foot wide hole in the desert that has been on fire for thirty-eight years after a Soviet drilling rig accidentally drilled into a massive underground natural gas cavern, causing the ground to collapse and poisonous fumes to be released. To head off a potential environmental catastrophe, they set it on fire.”

3. “The Relampago del Catatumbo is a near-constant lightning storm over a river in Venezuela. For almost half the nights of the year, for ten hours at a time, there’s almost constant lightning. Weirdly, it is silent because all the electrical activity happens way up in the air. It’s just insanely cool.”

Joshua Foer:
1. “The other day someone posted an absolutely frightening place that I have no interest in ever visiting: Snake Island off the coast of Sao Paulo, Brazil that is filled with venomous pit vipers: one snake per square meter. Try to picture that…”

2. “The Tempest Prognosticator (a.k.a. the ‘Leech Barometer’) is an ingenious weather-prediction device that debuted at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. Leeches get really worked up before a storm, so if you attach bells to them you’ve got yourself a pretty good barometer. A full-scale working model can be viewed at the Barometer World Museum in Devon, England.”

3. “I long to visit New Zealand to see the Electrum, the world’s largest Tesla coil, in action. It stands four stories tall and zaps out three million volts. It’s absolutely beautiful.”