Towards the country that doesn't exist.

Eduard combines the esthetics of a nobleman of the Carpathians with accent for English in the style of Bart Simpson’s. Two months had passed since last time we had met, in the Rainbow Gathering in Dividalen, Norway. He was played now as local, in his native Sinaia, nicknamed “Pearl of the Carpathians” by the first king of Romania Carol the First. The first Romanian monarch was actually German, from the house of Hohenzollern, and as judged by the way he decorated his castle he never felt a down-to-earth conexion with the world around him (Romania). On the contrary, Peles Castle is an ode to a negative world, to all that Romania is not. Entire rooms are replicas after originals in other Eurpean palaces and castles, from Granada’s Alhambra to Florentine and Venetian palaces. Eduard loves Romania as much as Carol I did: often he says how much he hate it. Eduard’s enthusiasm for all things slightly alternative is only matched by his enthusiasm for big businesses that may help him to finnance his trips. So you can see him on the phone as he tries t convince a Canadian partner to start a company selling air purifiers in Bucarest, with hipothetic earnings of up to a millon dollars a year. Next, he hangs down the phone and explains me how to get to Bucarest with three euros.

Tiraspol is the capital of a country that doesn’t exist: the Republic of Trans Nistria. In Sinaia I started to make enquires about getting there. In 1990, as Moldava was spliting from Romania, Trans Nistria declared independence (never recognized) from Moldova. As one Eastern European country after another were turning to market economies, trans Nistria explicitly supported the soviet communist system, and becoming the European last bastion of it, with logistic support from the 14th Russian Army, a tender bunch that Moscow forgot (could not) relocate. The winds of change Scorpions sang about seem have been blocked by the Carpathians.

Getting to a country that doesn’t exist is, by itself, difficult. Add to that the burocracies. Officialy part of Moldova, a Moldovan visa is required to entry Trans Nistria. Being a complex paperwork, I decided to head straight to it, visaless, and try to enter Tgrans Nistria at a point where central Moldovan customs had no representation. That meant travelling to Odessa, in Ukraine, in giving it a try from there, directly to Tiraspol without getting trough Chisinau.

The trip was long, with notable assistance received from people working in petrol stations. If hitchhikers had a God’s Pantheon, the petrol station employees would defenitely had a space on the shelf. When night had isolated me in a small petrol station in Bacau, it was the young lad filling the tanks who found for me a car going to Suceava, 50 kms before Ukrainian border. Morover, he had no need to hand me a bottle of mineral water before I left. The driver’s name was Robert, and he run his own publicity business. When we arrived in Suceava, around 11 pm, he could then afford to put me up in a hotel. He later confessed that when he was 20 he dreamt of a money-less world, where everybody would take only enough for his needs. A system based on trust we are defenitely not ready for. But he considered that me challenge had to do with his dream and that he was substantially helping me to accomplish his dream.

Walking Transivanya: between identity and nihilism.

I arrived to Sighisoara (Schassburg for the Saxon community) with the double hope of fulfilling both my intelectual curiosity for the Transilvanyan Case and my sensibility for walled medieval citadel. Declared UNESCO World Heritage Site, the citadel hosted, until 1897, the different guilds of Ssaxon craftmen, blacksmiths, tailors or carpenters, to whom the city owes its past prosperity. Heading for the 1648 Clock Tower I stumbled upon the house where Vlad Tepes was reportedely born, now a café. On the street, a natural size Dracula, kitsch beyond the point of repulsion, invites passers-by to the tourist-trap. I suddenly realized that the walls could not protect the citadel from the risk of self prostitution coming from within.

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I would have left with a bitter sensation (and I would have slept in the Piata Cetati) if I hadn’t met the people at “Sustainable Sighisoara”, an NGO that aims to inforce, in the local level, the accomplishment of the Rio and Kyoto protocoles, signed and forgotten by Rumania. When the authorities themselves take destructive measures regarding the communities under their custody, it’s not advisable, but mandatory, for the people to self organize. In this context, on September 22nd, declared as International Day without Cars, I joined the several volunteers that walked the streets handing in trilingual leaflets inviting people to, at least once in the year, take the bus or the bike. Big was our surprise when, back in the Citadel Square, we found a classic cars exhibition, aproved by the local Council, or even its official response to the world wide crussade against pollution…

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It’s little known fact by general public abroard that Transilvanya holds three big cultural traditions. The Romanian is the dominant and official. The Hungarian took roots in the 10th century, and then on, until 1918, the whole region was associated with Hungary. The German culture arrived with the Saxons invited in the 11th century by the Hungarian king to protect his kingdom’s southeastern flank. More interested than the soberanity issue is the identity one. Besides the absolutist positions that aim to reduce this diversity to only one of its contents, there are those who defend the singularity of transilvanyan identity, as land with triple heritage, Romanian, Hungarian and Saxon. These regard the official Romanian attitude as a reductionism, illustrated by the statue of Romulo and Remo that ornates one of the boulevards, with the leyend: “To Sighisoara, from Mother Rome”. Offenses to identity are, in deed, less explicit than those addressed to soberanity.

Even if in the Eastern European case the regional identities are neccesary consequence of the collpase of its empires, for some moments it seems to me that Transilvanya is to Romania what the Pampas region in Argentina is to the rest of the Republic: heterogenic and cosmopolitan. A Peruvian friend once complaint to me: when you Argentinians travel to Peru, you say that you go to Latin America, as if you were something else. He was right, morover, he doesn’t suspect that these trips normaly begin in the Argentinian provinces of Salta or Jujuy, fact that unmasks the insular identity of Buenos Aires people. The limit where the cultural otherness begins lies within.

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From Sighisoara I moved on to Sibiu, marching some of the way on foot, along minor roads, through small idillyc Saxon villages famous for their fortified churches. In Bierthalm I missed the main road and ended up in the middle of a wineyard. I was rescued by two guys with binoculars that were monitoring the property. Their names are Dan and Norbert. Robert is a Saxon, and agrees with ex German president Herzog on tha fact that you cannot pack your homeland and take it with you to Germany. He proudly stayed in Toblsdorf, one of the 4 or 5 families that did so. Whay tatars and turks didn’t achieve was done by the difference in salaries. Again, the walls show themselves futile. In tiny towns I am received by 80 year old people who open the gates of their churches with enormous keys, beautifuly anachronic in times of magnetic cards. Herr Krauss, in Hosman, shows me proudly the place he has occupied every Sunday in mass for the last 30 years. In Toblsdorf, half a dozen of men loading tiles in a truck interrupt my pace with a: Sprechen Sie Deutsch? I have already lived that, in the villages of Spatzenkutter and Villa María, in the Argentinian province of Entre Ríos, settled by Volgadeutschen. The continents will be one again before the Germans loose their langauge…

In Sibiu, European Cultural Capital for 2007, I hastened to visit Rasinari, a near by village where Emil Cioran was born in 1911. The philoshopher that once said: “What an invitation to laughing loud, hearing the word goal after attending a funerary service. In the town, a street bears his name, and there is even a statue, that every afternoon witnesses the prosession of cows, goats and shephards that fight for a place in the cobbled stone street with kart, people and Dacias. Women that conceal their haird underneath colourful bandanas cross themselves as they pass in front of the philosopher who referred to Nietzsche as a “moderate” (there is an Ortodox church on the other side of the street). The monument is made of clay, one would say donde by a student. No far from it there is a proper bronze replica of Romanian patriotic poet Goga. It seems it’s too much a load for a rural Ortodox village to have the duty of celebrating the most skeptic of philosophers. The proud that villagers feel for Cioran is the same any of us would feel for a famous footballer born around the corner of our house. In any case, he did never mind glory.

HOW TO ATTEND A WEDDING BY MISTAKE IN TRANSYLVANIA.

A view of Cluj Napoca, the main city in the region known as Transilvania in the West, but called Ardeal by Romanians. The region complex cultural heritage responds to the presence of a Saxon (German), Hungarian and Romanian community, each with its language still spoken.

After Cluj Napoca I directed my steps towards Maramures, the hilly region in the northern border with Ukraine. There I sojourned in different tiny villages. While hitch-hiking, I stopped a bus full of men and women in folcloric dresses.

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As I didn`t have a destination, I just jumped in. When I asked the driver, he cheerfully said they were all going to a wedding in Breb, a near by village, and that I was invited. It was that kind of wedding, where the bachelor knocks at the bride`s door sorrounded by his orchestra of sax, violins and drums, before ging together to the church. At church there were few poeple. Most waited outside and showed more interest in the bottles of ziuca being passed around than in the wedding. Even inside the church a woman could hardly do the sign of the cross while holding a bottle under her arm...

So there I was... in a wedding in Transilvania. Those people didn`t stop drinking before the following morning, so I just slipped into my tent around 3 a.m.

Some images of rural life, in a place where the concept of economic efficency is eclipsed by reality: women of all ages working hard, ploughing and dragging their karts.

FROM AMSTERDAM TO ROMANIA ON 1 EURO (A BANKNOTE'S KARMA)

I had hitched from Gdansk, in Poland, to Amsterdam, with the only duty of collecting my italian passport. Three days of road just to arrive to the Consulate, scribble down a couple of signatures, and hit the road back, direction Romania. My Dutch friend Stephen, to ease my soul, presented me a mate, a bombilla, and 200 grams of yerba (Argentinian national drink). So brutally distracted from my itinerary by a burocracy, proportionally brutal had to be the reincorporation, with Holland, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to be crossed before reaching Rumania. And a 5 euro note in the pocket as dedicated budget. This is also the story of that banknote’s karma.

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After a first ride of 40 kms, my coordinates met Arkadius’ ones. Arkadius was Polish, had bought his Hyundai van second hand in Belgium, and was heading home. Home was in Lublin, in the East of Poland, 1600 kms away from the petrol station where I approached him. So togheter we left behind the Netherlands and slept in the van in a Rastplatz in Braunscweig, Germany. Next morning we headed for Lublin. The seat of the Hyundai was uncomfortable, but we were so sleepy that instead of entertaining my driver, as ecpected, I entered the sublime realm of Dream rather quick.

On Friday in Lublin I changed my 5 euro note for local zlotys, I used the equivalent of 1 euro in an internet café, and reconverted the rest into slovakian money. The woman in the exchange office handed me politely half a dozen of multicolor poets, whose mission would be to resist the trip trough Slovakia and Hungary, as asteroids dodging atmospheres. Slovakia delayed me a day (Icamped in a footbal pitch near a small village).

A car on Sunday drove straight from that village to Budapest, so there I changed the slovakian poets for two solemn magyar kings, whit nominal value of 700 florints. An old Trabant stopped for me after that. I was so happy (it was my first Trabbie) that I jumped in regardless destination. The guy was carrying a box with two dogs over the roof, and was in fact going 10 kms from the Romanian border. Just that he deviated me from the E60 that goes straight to Oradea. So I was left in a tiny road that also crossed to Romania, but into a real backwater. Excelent! In the road I even saw a kind of carriage, also moving slowly towards the border!

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With the last light of Sunday I made it to the border. I walked respectfully that no man land between the two countries customs, and received my stamp in the passport. I was in Romania, the country of Nadia Comaneci and Emil Cioran. On the spot I changed the magyar kings for Romanian money. I had done it: from Amsterdam to Romania with one euro. Can EasyJet top that up? The Romanian poets and polititians on the banknotes fought for space with the zeros in the banknotes: the smaller one was of 10,000. The first local I speak to is a street vendor who sell regional products in the gas station. We understand each other, no need to translate. Romanian os a latin tongue, which is even closer to classical latin than italian. The language took root here with the Roman conquest. Romania was incorporated in the Roman empire under the name of Dacia. In the 50s, in an attempt to deny the latin roots of th country, the communist government modified the ortography, slavazing some words. Only with the 1989 Revolution did the language recovered its integrity.

In the gas station, a hungarian woman was so shocked that I was trying to hitch hike in Romania that she offered herself to take me to Romania and put me up in a hotel. Everybody seemed to be sure that I was gonna be robbed in the fisrt town, and they succeed in sharing their fear a bit. When I find a truck that forwards me, it’s already night. As I don’t want to arriv to a big city bi night, I request to be dropped off in any village. He acceeds, warning first that a gang of gypses will eat me alive.In the village there are no lights by the road. Its seems to be composed of barking dogs and Dacias. Only light comes from a small restaurant. I order some food and when I say I come from Argentina the owner brings a couple of beers to the table and takes seat to drink with me. In that moment a Border police to whom I had previously asked where to camp “al naturale” comes in. He says something to the owner. As a consequence of this cconversation the owner invites me to his house.

When the following day I hitted the road towards Oradea, I still didn’t know what to expect. The rule in Romania is to pay for the rides a part of the oil expenses. 1o0 minutes later I was sitted in Alin’s car, he is a sales manager who takes me to Oradea an finds a free hotel room for me in a hotel that he frequents.

Before leaving he gives me 400,000 Lei (12 euros), and commends me to Christian. Christian is a student of architecture who works In a café outside the hotel. He offeres me beer and food. I cant believe his hospitality. He is a student and works 15 hours every other day, and still feels like taking care of me. I will personaly knock down the next person that tells me that Romania is dangerous.

From Gdansk to Amsterdam just to pick up a passport. The people at Pniewo (PL) declares me a waiza. Guildehaus (D): “Excuse me, do you need help? We have an Englishman here!”

The week started in the old city of Gdansk. There, Kinga was my host. Kinga and Chopin are a couple who traveled around the world by hitch hiking from 1999 to 2003. After that they wrote a book titled “Led by Destiny”, that you can find find an order in the internet. Naturaly, I was all ears, altough soon realized that their philosophy was, as mine, that of letting the road biuld itself, without caring to much for complications that haven’t yet arrived. In the outside, Gdansk. The city shares features with many other hanseatic cities, like Lubeck or Amsterdam, and likewise the luxurious buildings of the commercial guilds of the time can be seen, true brotherhoods of sinlge yuppies, alma matter of the “pizza and champagne” (Argentinian slogan to refer to the new rich). You can tell they were single, from the state of sexual alert of the stone lion that holds the city coat d’arms. As my hosts were going on a weekend trip (Chopin was taking a weekend off from the Center of Buddhist Studies he attends near Warsaw) I passed to Michal’s house, another member of Hospitality Club.
Michal is 30. Her is a programmer. He belongs to the new class of young professionals that stills holds memories of the communist times. The second night coincided with the birth of the son of one of his friends, and I saw myself invited to a traditional Polish event for the ocassion: while the mother of the new born child stays at home the father and his friends down vodka bottles… Michal friends found it scandalous, before the fall of the Wall, waiting for a month to receive a TV, after queuing a full morning to apply for it by presenting cupons. Everything has changed now: they are not asked for cupons, but for money. Half Poland still don’t know what is that about, some say the fruit of a tree that grows in London.
With my Italian passport waiting for me in Amsterdam, and my contact in Amsterdam traveling in Italy, I had to collect the passport myself. So I had to hitch some 1,000 kms. On the first day of the trip, a town called Pniewo, tempted me from the window of the car I was traveling to Szcezin, and decided to stay. (I didn’t want to arrive to Szcezin by night). Each of the houses of the town seemed to have a farm, either derelict or working, in the back. European towns bear a realism that western towns hae lost. Even the most rural bastion in the Netherlands is a display of Barbie houses, with a tidiness and a perfection that are beyond the toleration point. People water their gardens and hardly look their neighbors Seems more like 3D graphics than real world. In Pniewo it was different. I entered a store, 5 drunks monitored my movements, I pointed a piece of bread (I couldn’t name it, I don’t speak polish or russian) and showed the 20 cents coin I had left. The man laughed, obviously it wasn not enough, but he gave me the bread the same. (I had changed my last zlotys to euros already). I said thanks in Russian and exited.
In a near by house 4 men discuss inside a car about the best way of reaparing a stereo. In a small town like Pniewo, a broken stereo is a good excuse to socialize. The women talked in the front garden and drunk tea. It’s the right moment to unveil my magic tea cup. I was soon sitting under a tree whose fruits were falling irregularly as a chaotic clock. When the stereo ws fnally repaired, conversation started. “So you don’t work? What do your parents think about that?” In a country where surviving is the issue, the concept of wandering in a professional way doesn’t take grip. The declare me “waiza” (God knows what it means in Polish) and the let me go the following morning.
In the german border I was delayed around 10 minutes. The custom officer there had never seen a passport with fingerprints. He finally laughed and said: “So fat is your thumb?” and gave the document to me with a new stamp on it. Coming from the Polish roads, the meeting with the Autobahn was a shock, so, with the whole weekend to kill time before the Italian Consulate would open on Monday, I decided to take some minor road, with no specific detination. A car stops, from the mirror hangs a dreamcatcher. His name is Stephen and is a farmer. He invites to join his family for the night. In five minutes, after loading provisions from a Getrenkenmarkt we are enetering his lands, in the town of Schmolln. His house defers a lot from the that of the text books farmers. It is an old warehouse recicled into a 2 storeys loft. Super. His wife Inga prepeares the dinner while the two girls (Luna and Billie) paint in their very own tiny table. In TV I see for the first time images from the disaster in New Orleans: people is killing for a glass of water. You only need a storm and all the bases of civilizations are swept aside. Inga sugests that it is part of human nature. I disagree, I explain her a few years ago a similar thing happened in Santa Fe province in Argentina and nobody was killing their neighbors But I undesrtand that, when the consume-dam is removed, some citizens of big american cities will canalize its competence instincts through agression. We talk about happiness. What makes us happy? Our family? The last Mercedes? Stephen says that in times of the DDR people were more friendly, they would greet each other in the streets. I remember the young professionals at Gdansk, so worried about being able to buy a TV set in less than a month. This is the sund of a different bell. Stephen also says that due to the low prices of property in Uckermark area, many young people from Berlin are arriving to found communities, and he is happy about that fact.
The journey followed with a very lucky ride in a VW Passat whose driver was traveling from Berlin to the Dutch border. That was perfect! Eventough he drove at 90 km/s, my driver regularly checked the timing of the trip consulting his wristwatch, after which he would say:”Gut!”, as if he were the captain of a steamliner. To be honest, the Passat wasn’t much faster than the Titanic, but the nautic gestures of the driver gave charm to a journey that otherwise would have been plainly boring. In the town of Guildehaus, 5 kms from the Dutch border, I was looking for a place to pitch the tent where a woman comes out of a balcony overlooking me and screms: “Sorry, do you need help? We have an Englishman here?!”. The woman was referrig to his fiancee as a torch or a forst aid kit! The Englishman, Martin, climbed down the stairs and invited me to stay the night with them. He had been a soldier at a nearby English base, met her herfriend there, and stayed. They were extremely hospitable and had lots of tea and my first shephards pie since I left England!. The following day I made it to Amersfoort in Holland. It was Sunday, and with the Italian Embassy opening only on Monday I decided to camp. Looking for a place I found a mobile phone, with credit. So I didn’t hesitate to phone my friend Steven. To my surprise he was in Delft. The beers were in the fridge. On Monday I was succesfuly collecting my Italian passport in Amsterdam. End of the story.

The tea cup makes wonders in rural Lithuania...

Next morning I said goodbye to my Rasta friends in Uzupis and hit the road with Gdansk as a target, on the Baltic Coast, in Poland. I had to go around the border of Kaliningrad, a Russian province in the middle of the Baltic Coast, which is to Russia what French Guyana is to France. In Vilnius there were another four hitch-hikers. One of them emitted such desperate signals that he seemed to be trying to land dome invisible airplane. I walked two kilometers along the highway and asked directions in a gas station to a guy in a Yamaha YZF600. Nathaniel spoke perfect English because he lived in Dublin. The Irish experience linked us, and he acceded to take me some 100 kms to Kaunas. The work exile of Lithuanian population takes to this situations, almost all my drivers speak some foreign language, even Portuguese in an occasion.

Today, however, I am going to meet a person for whom exile has meant something different. It’s night already, and I have decided to camp in the first village I stumble upon, not far from a town caled Pilviskiai. I see people around a house, who are listening to some music. It seems a party is going on. So I try the “tea cup” contact method. I am soon invited to join Saulius birthday celebration. In the garden there is a BBQ, and a table with sandwiches and vodka bottles. But that family celebrated something else: Saulius is professional soldier, and three days ago he came back from Basora, Iraq, where he had stayed for six months. With a scratch after having completed infinity of demining missions along with the Danish Legion, his family has reasons to feel glad. But not everything is joy. Saulius shows me his tattoo, a dragon with 13 crests, one for each Danish friend who died in combat. Lithuanians didn’t suffer casualties. We toast, I am happy my expectations were again surprised: I was waiting to camp under a tree and I found a birthday party instead. For Sauliuis, an uninvited guest that comes straight out of the road speaking English, a language narrowly linked with his particular foreign experience, is also a meaningful event.

I crossed the Polish border without complications. I leave behind rural Lithuania with its monoblock villages. I need two rides to make it to Gdansk. The first is a man who earns his living from exporting fertilizers. The second is a trumpet player and his family, rushing to a presentation in occasion of the 25th anniversary of Solidarity, the movement founded by Lech Walesa. Gdansk has a pride past of autonomy and prosperity. It was in fact Free City with the background of colossal Prussia and Poland. It was hanseatic city, and it afforded the sad luxury of triggering WWII and the extravagance of cauterize its wounds, when Walesa organized the first free Trade Union. It was night when I got there, with a 2 zloty coin that was actually a pocket leftover from a friend's trip to the country. A train ticket to the meeting place with Kinga was 2,72. The woman in the ticket office was nice; I jumped on board, and met my new hosts.

Postacards from Uzupis

Uzupis at daylight.

Night walks.

Uzupis - Arts Incubator. Nice metaphor.

Lina and Pukala, my hosts. They appear out of the blue, on the very same night I happened to become homeless in Vilnius.

Interesting framing.

Natural composition.

Bridge-bound in Vilnius, saved by the great people of Uzupis...

I had already understood that travelling implies a constant dislocation of expectations when destiny proposed a memory exercise. Vladas, mi host and founder of Vilnius Hitch Hiking Club, let me know he expected me to leave the house as soon as possible as a result, presumably, of cultural differences. “You are behaving like in a hotel!” he had said. Well, I had taken two eggs from the fridge and have them boiled, and also a piece of cake, since there was nobody in the house and I was starving. I had assumed that the mentioned items did not constitute a hard financial setback for my hosts, but I could have been wrong. My host later explained in an e-mail that you are not supposed to use your host’s resources without permission. By resources, he was not referring to a credit card but apparently to the couple of eggs. In Latin America we don’t complete forms to receive or give hospitality, or phone people to their jobs to ask permission for such things. The host would feel humiliated. A pity, since I otherwise appreciate Vladas very much for his commitment with building a hitch-hiking community.

In that way I meet again with Vilnius in a new way: homeless, bridgebound. I will always ask myself why the bridge has become such an icon of homelessness. In Argentina one thinks first in a petrol station if you don’t have a place to sleep. In Vilnius, after double checking that my friend Sigita’s mobile had disappeared from the universe, I headed for the center. Under the cathedral tower, point of reference of all appointments, a lot of people awaited other their dates. The joy of those who found contrasted with the frustration of those who didn’t. In the same place where Sigita and I had met in our first date, nobody waited for me this time. So I walked to mythic Uzupis, the art district. If a miracle was to happen it had to happen there.

I think it’s clear that Rasta is my protective urbane tribe. In Vilnius they underlined their status. I was soon befriended by a nice bunch of new Rasta friends. They all smoked Russian cigarettes of 7 eurocents a pack. What a delicatessen. Lina and her boyfriend Pukala invited me home. Ona, a friend of Lina, formulated the most specific question about Argentinean culture I was ever asked: what is the chupacabras? I am so surprised I can hardly answer. From their place I explore the decadent glamour of Uzupis...

The Baltic countries: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

When the slow ferry left in Tallinn, the Estonian Capital, I hastened my pace trough the intrincated network of alleys of the medieval town. I was technically in Eastern Europe. Talking about the ex Socialist Republics gets complicated. To most of us these countries are indistinguishable.

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Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The three countries share in a high degree its cultural background. In medieval times the area was under strong germanic influence. The Teutonic Knights, a religious – militar order retreating from Holy Land, found in the paganism of Lithuania (last european country to convert to Christianism) an excuse to invade the neighborhood. Part of the Russian Empire, the three countries were passed on into the USSR after a short breath independence in the 20s. They regained their soberanity in 1990. In 2004 the three all togheter joined the European Union, as witnessed by 200,000 Lithuanians living and working in London.

The three countries share, as natural consequence of all prohibition, the phenomena of unmeasured growth. This growth can never be equal for everyone, giving place to weird condensations, last model Mercedes parked among Ladas loaded with peasants and babushkas. In Tallinn, the Estonian capital, glass towers grow like mushrooms, the same to be obsreved in Riga and Vilnius. But set your foot out the city centre and you will find an army of unmantained soviet era appartment blocks, not to talk about great looking and gracefully crumbling 19th century buildings, its stairs arched by uncounted bolchevik and perestroikan paces.. There, in any moment, it seems we are gonna find Raskolnikov flying down the stairs after killing the old woman...


I made it to Riga in the car of a man whose case illustrates the “Baltic proximity”. He was a Lithuanian that was warehouse manager for Coca Cola in Riga and was coming from a business meeting in Estonia... Who better than him to give me a picture of what the people think of themselves. After 300 kms it turned out that the Estonians are the slow going lads, for what they are the target of all jokes, altough their the economy is the one that best resembles a western european one in the area. Average salary here is around 200 euros... Lithuanians (and here the driver talks about himslef) selfportrait themselves as warm (“italians of the north”) ans somewhat unproductive by Estonian standards. In sports, Lithuanian is basketball country, Latvia dies for ice hockey while Estonians are to slow for any ball sport. Other issue that come to light is the independence process. It was not an easy process for everybody. While in Lithuania everybody got the citizenship of the new country right away, in Latvia the goverment denied citizenship to all the population of Russian ascendance, no less than 40% of the pie. Thus, in Latvia, there is a subworld of second class citizens...

On my way to Vilnius I decided to take distance from highways and proceed on minor roads. The change was greater than I had forecasted. Automaticvally i found myself in unpaved roads, where cars were a couple of decades older than the european average. Cool. The towns, ringed by a mist of abbandonment, didn’t qualify to be picturesque. Ocassionaly horse drawn karts mixed with cars. And there i shed a tear. Everything was Argentinian enough to spark my homesickness. A German that gave me a lift put it this way: “It is a pitty that these countries are slowly loosing their culture (he meant poverty). In 10 years everybody is gonna have a new car and everything will look just like any other European country.” He doesn’t know that the people here want to live like in an average European country.

Afterwards, a man stoppped me as I was walking a minor road swearing me that a friend of him could take me to next town. 10 minutes later his friend showed up in a scooter... Mi backpack caused the scooter’s suspension to bend in a way that the men changed their minds. It is getting dark. I see two kids who were back from fishing in the river, and were holding a bucket full of small fish. They are cute and I take a picture of them. When their mother appears I show her the picture of her kids. She is moved, and proud, says that I can camp in their garden, under some apple trees. Next day I made it to Vilnius, and got to know that mi italian passport is delayed because the Consulate in Argentina hasn’t sent the approval, confirming that I am not Bin Laden. Ragazzi, my steps have found an anchor in you. The passport...that chassis of the soul...

Berry-picking in Katajamaki community in Finland.

Katajamaki is only one of the more than hundred sustainable communities described in the 2005 edition of Eurotopia, a volume that each year compiles on going social experiments in the Old World, including info as its population, number of acres, decision making system, and property status. I had heard of Katajamaki in the Rainbow Gathering in the Polar Circle, from Touco, Katrii and Aleksi, three finnish guys whom I later visited in Jyvaskyla, their home town, on the way to the Community. In those days the guys were conspiring how to make money out of the sell of electric mandolines made with biscuits tins. Between line and line they realised the telephone number of the community.

Katajamaki is in the middle of a conifer forest, altoguh the same can be said just about every place in Finland. The main house where its 10 inhabitants gather for each meal dates back to 1905 and was the main buiding of a mental sanatory that functioned until 1917 and that used alternative (and controversial for the time) therapies as taking the inmates to tree houses for some days and colortherapy. Kiutso, one of the 3 survivors of the original experiment team, narrates this with pride, while the sun, childish, plays among the threads of his beard. Self sufficiency is the idea behind any community, and according to the degree it is achieved they can be categorized. Self sufficienccy as a contestation to the divion of work, in which the worker that operates the TV making machine changes his salary for cucumbers and the one operating the cucumber making machine changes his salary for TVs. The idea is to recover the lost conexion with the food we serve on our table, but they also thrust against the idea of private property, everything is owned colectively, the land, the animals, the money. The salary, in case a community sell part of their products in the market, is distributed according to necessity. The model is similar in some points to a kibbutz. Gathered all the members, decision are taken only with total consensus. In this context, I felt honoured when Kiutso asked me if direct trade in Argentina was still flourishing.

But one cannot visit this places and pretend to be an anthropologist and set to scribble lines in a copybook. During the mornings, with a bucket fixed to the body by a belt, we would sit by the berry plants to pick individually those mature, which were later kept in a freezer for the long winter coming. There was job there for an army, it seems we were milking an infinite cow. Somebody in the house was listening to a Mozart vinyl, human sophistication to accompany the most basic of tasks, receiving the fruits of the land. By afternoond we would walk in the forest to collect mushrooms, we would collect potatoes from the garden and prepare a nice meal for the group. In the house (that smells of wood and herbs because they have a large drying room) is always with some visitant. 

The community encourages visitors, curious leave not only a few euros or their work in exchange of their board and food but they also substitute the connectivity of the abbandoned and criticized city, at the same time propagating the communitarian values outwards. In the whole, Katajamaki seemed to me underdeveloped in relation to their potential. Which is good. There is lot to do, but finding people with long term commitment is no easy. Now, Kiutso and Ossi plan to extend the garden to the forset respecting the principles of permaculture, a discipline in vogue among contemporary organic farmers, and which aims to make agriculture and nature coexist.

To Helsinki I arived using the same sign that, attempting to say “Around the world” it merely stammered a “The world, around you”. I had already discovered the mistake, but I had learned from vendors in the streets of Buenos Aires that ortography mistakes are eye catching. My fisrt impression of Helsinki had nothing to do with helsinki itself, and it was happiness, or better stated, melancholy. After so many rural experience and hipie meetings I was I a capital city. That melancholy dennounced an umbilical stigma with urbanism I still suffer. Automatically I started to musitate some tango, the esthetic vibes, that impredictable radio, had tunned with the other capital: Buenos Aires. I awaked from the hallucination and walked trough the city, modern and scandinavianly boring. I had arrived to attend in time th star of the marathon of the Athetics World Championship… Masses of people in the Esplanaadi, that danddy boulevard, fisrtly made me shy to sell my poetry books to people sitting in benches, but then I was turned on by the absurd of the poet Neruda who I was reading and said “it would be nice to roam the streets with a green knife and shouting until freezing to death”. I stayed two days in Siljia’s and jani’s appartment. Siljia was the daughter of the driver that had taken me to Oulu, she had kindly offered me accomodation. With her and her two german friends, Annika and Laura we strolled around the city. Two days later I ferried it to Tallinn, Estonia. On the board, the Baltic States….

AN ARGENTINEAN IN LAPLAND

 

In Gamvik, the fishing village in Northern Norway in which I had been mistaken for a migrant bird and ringed with the number BA20016, the continent had ended. To the north only the Spitzbergen islands and North Pole. Time to set thumbs, dreams and sails southwards, to Istambul, a trip of several months trough all Eastern Europe with the whole of Finland still ahead. In Lakselv I stayed a night in the house of Anna, a local teacher who spoke perfect spanish and whose contact had been given to me by Birgitte in Slettnes. Anna also allowed me to use the photocopying machine in the school to do 35 of my books, enough to keep me alive 35 days more! And the I set off, towards Finland.

An easy way to know Finland without moving from home is to imagine a pine: strong, tall and green. When we have this pine, we only have to multiply it for one billon. The we add an horizon line, some 40000 lakes and that’s Finland. These lands are not deserted: several millon reindeers and some finnish people live there. It’s still not clear how finnish culture has been able to develop in spite of the reeindeer. Some historians also point that even sauna, the finnish national pride, may be nothing but another way of the primitive finns to escape, for some minutes, the reindeer. In north of Finland, called Lappland, another race, pristine, native from these lands, has made the reindeer the center of their subsistence. I have met them before in Norway, they are the sami.

Inari, Ivalo and Vuotso are the three sami villages that I crossed in my way south. In Vuotso I decided to stay the night. From the road I had seen a family gathered around a fire behind their house. To make contact this time, I used a new technic, tea cup in hand I approached them and asked for some tea. Aki’s family understood that I was asking for much more than tea, mainly for company and some place to stay. After the vainilla twinings the beer arrived and then a terrible rain that made us move the fire into a tipee. Only inside the tipee I was asked my nationality, and even in this latitude when they listen Argentina they say Maradona and they do the mimic of “the hand of god”. We could plant bananos in the whole of our country and declare the skateboard only valid public transport, never mind, they will always know us for Maradona. I was asked what did I know about Finland, so I told them, that they had kicked stalinist troops out in an efficient way, almost using stones,that they invented sauna and that they had invaded the whole world with tiny Nokia phones. I was slow, I should have declined the offer kindly, but it was too late, Aki was standing, shouting “sauna, sauna!” and his family prepearing the sauna for me. Inside, Aki poored inmense spoonfuls of water over the heated stones. He seemed to be giving soup to a dragon. I thought I was gonna volatilize in the 10 minutes I joined Aki in this cruel finnish hobby. But I survived and that night I had a bed waiting for me.

 

After 4 hours, the following morning, a car stopped in Vuotso. It was a local sami girl called Saara. Saara split her time beetwen reindeer herding and studying International Relations at Rovaniemi University. Saara thought that using snowboards to work with the animals doesn’t imply a loss of traditional sami values, or the vanishing of their culture. On the contrary she thought that the problem were the southern finnish that still want to see the sami as primitive people who chase reindeer with skiies and live in tends. I am sure the sami are pretty sure of what they are, but in a touristic level, unfortunately, this is the image they give of themselves, converting themselves into their own stereotype, acquired reflexevely trough the expectations of the southern finnish in daytrip from Helsinki. The same happens in the Quebrada de Humahuaca since the mediatization of the Tilcara Carnival. Evverything seems to be about cactus, weaven things and llamas. This takes us to the question if it is possible to contact with corrupting. Can we talk even today about a natural line of development for native people around the world?

                                                     ¡Extraños vehículos que se ven en Laponia!

I stayed one night in Rovaniemi, I wanted to talk more with Saara. She explained me that the rheindeer was so important in her culture that when once a woman from her village married Finland’s second richest man, the townman who arrived with the news said that “the man is very good with computers but doesn’t have any reindeers”. I am still surprised that Saara didn’t earmark me as she does with her animals. Having been ringed in Norway as a bird, I was already afraid that I would arrive to Istambul bearing dozens of marks for different kind of cattle, rings, bar codes, etc.

To Oulu I arrived in one ride in Kari’s car, who lent me his laptop with wireless internet to contact on the spot members of Hospitality Club. Kari stopped for me also with the porpouse of educating his 12 year old son, who was also in the car. A really open minded person. So in Oulu I stayed in Passi’s flat. Passi had just arrived from a year in Ireland and spoke english with a funny western irish accent. These were rainy days, so I mainly stayed home to write.

From Oulu to Jyvaskyla I traveled with Esa. Esa had been in the UN peace corps before becoming a pacifist, and now was hoping to get a life in Lappland permanently. He took me to Katriina’s Touco’s and Aleksi’s house, a beautiful and relaxed place I really enjoyed. I had met them in the norwegina rainbow. When I visited them they were analysing the possibility of building home made electric mandolins with biscuits cans, in order to get some cash. Those days passed timeless, oppoertunity for inner travel.