“Amadeus” at London’s National Theatre: Toxic Masculinity at its Finestby Randi / April 26, 2018
Arriving in Kyiv (that’s the proper way to say Kiev, Ukraine; remember?), I was nervous about the food since my travels as a vegan through other parts of Eastern Europe have been less than thrilling. Luckily, that’s all in the past, it seems, because Kyiv’s vegan game was off the chizzy! Okay no it isn’t off the chizzy – wait till we get to Warsaw and Berlin! THOSE are off the chizzy – but Kyiv at least made a convincing argument that it knows the chizzy exists. It is fully aware of and in close proximity to the chizzy! (Chizzy means chain.) We had a good amount of time to explore the vegan options and traverse the whole range from delicious to disappointing and back again.
The first order of business was to go to Bessarabsky Market. This is a centrally located indoor market full of stalls, farmers stands, and larger restaurant constructions all in a tidy square space (not to be confused with Square Space, the company who has recently acquired this here blogging platform!). There are several vegan options in this market, and so, considering how hangry I was on arrival (remember we were waiting for our room to be ready after getting off another overnight train ughhh) I figured going to this one-stop shop for all things food would be my best bet. It was still early in the morning when we got there and lots of stuff wasn’t open. In fact, we had to wait for the two all-vegan spots in the Bessarabsky Market to get cracking. But it wasn’t a bad wait – because we saw the best sign known to (non-celiac) man:
Georgian bread may be the best on earth, and we are obsessed. So obsessed that just last week we returned from a trip to Georgia, I don’t want to say entirely planned because we wanted that good bread but it kind of was. This stall in the Bessarabsky Market lived up to its dern good name. We watched the bakers ease balls of dough into the giant stone cauldron-like oven, perfect for this witchcraft, and just a few minutes later retrieve gorgeous loaves ready for me to attack.
The handles on these loaves make it easy to hold and fun to pull apart. #breadfacts
So delicious! We ate our amazing bread and explored the just-waking-up market as we waited for the vegan places to open so I could look upon their treasures and see which I wanted. There’s also a natural shoppe in this building, called Eco Chic, which has organic produce and a small selection of supplies. It was closed of course but the vegan options abound here!
Finally the two places I came for opened – Green 13 Vegan Kitchen and Sumasbrod. These two all vegan joints were RIGHT NEXT to each other in the market! It was like the vegan sandwich showdown or something equally awesome. I felt a little awkward going back and forth between the two in order to investigate the menus and make informed decisions, like I would feel bad for whoever’s wares I didn’t purchase first. They don’t care. They’re used to it. I tried Green 13 first but we ended up going back to Bessarabsky several times over our stay so we tried both places several times. Let’s talk about errthang.
As you can see in the picture above, the two vegan places were kind of like buildings within the larger building. You order and get your food inside and then there is general shared seating in the open market space. The seating was actually nice, with cute pillows tossed hither and thither. Save for when we arrived that first day before it opened, the whole place was always crowded with vegan food lovers, which is awesome, and if I wasn’t so socially awkward and/or tired at this point in our trip (not to mention without a word of Ukrainian to my name) maybe I would have talked to some of them. But honestly come on there was eating to do, not talking! We tried a good deal of what Green 13 had to offer, including wraps and burgers – what it primarily does and does well – as well as salads because of my salad obsession.
English menu yassssss
On my first visit, I had to try the grilled tofu wrap. It was AMAZING. Like really amazing. Maybe I just had gone so long without proper delicious vegan food or maybe I had been soyless since China or maybe I was just so magoo from the overnight train and the lack of shower yet that day but man alive this wrap was so good I might cry because I want it now. (I may also just be remembering it in such high esteem because I am hungry.) First of all the wrapping seemed gigantic and poufy so that was fun, and the grilled tofu was nice. Filled with cabbage and parsley and carrot and tomato, the wrap would have checked all my boxes as is, but the sauce on it took it to another level. They call it ‘tartar sauce’ on the menu but that does not do it justice. It was a really delicious white sauce that was like…really good. I might not know what tartar sauce is. Anyway it was fantastic and probably my favorite thing I ate in Kyiv.
We also tried the burger with vegan bacon. If you look at the menu pictured above, you’ll see that the first detail about that burger is ‘loaf with barn’ and I will tell you that nonsense group of words is 80% responsible for why we ordered it. We had to see what loaf with barn meant. We still don’t know what they were going for but the burger was wonderful. Soy cutlet check, soy bacon check, tomato onion cucumber mayo sweet & sour sauce check checkity check check check. Such a great, classic burger! No wonder it has HIT written next to it on the menu. Less impressive was the Green 13 Burger, which obviously I ordered because it says it’s on a green spinach bun and I will never turn down wrongly colored breads. It sounds like it should have been aces with that grilled tofu and tartar sauce that I loved in the wrap but with added pesto and mushrooms and it was good, but not as great as the bacon burger. Not bad but it is third on the list.
As I said, I also tried the tofu ball salad because it’s a salad. It was okay, but I wish the balls were bigger and that there were more of them. Hehe balls. It was fine. I’m fine. Best of all, the staff at Green 13 was uniformly friendly and so helpful, even at my first visit when I was like ‘hey you’re not open but I’m here also what should I order???’ they were still all very nice. And you can see in the picture there’s a little fridge out front that says ‘molochko’ – they make their own nut milks and sell them in glass bottles. I had an almond milk that was pretty good for being unsweetened and not being used in cereal. All around, everything about Green 13 was great and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
You’re probably wondering at this point ‘hey where are all the pictures of the amazing food’. Sorries, but at Green 13 and Sumasbrod the food is packed to go as default (since there’s no seating inside their actual storefront) so everything was ugly with the expected takeaway smush. Even I have limits to what photos I share.
or do I
Moving on to Sumasbrod, a foot away from Green 13. I’ve mentioned their proximity several times now and I think it’s because my god man, if you are there, there’s no reason not to go to Green 13. I’m sorry Sumasbrod but you were disappointing in most aspects. The food was fine – when they had it. Every time I went to their counter, the (quite rude) staff would tell me that they only had this one wrap or this one soup available that day – even though the wraps are made hot for each order so I’m pretty sure they had most of the ingredients (considering they were all very similar). The salads were even more upsetting. See the above picture, how they have salads in plastic cups? Dude, it is NOT EASY to eat salad out of a plastic cup. First of all, that means the dressing (when it existed) fell on like, one piece of spinach and did not reach any of the other ingredients. And you couldn’t mix anything together. It is not a smart idea. And you’d think that if you were serving salad in a tall cup that maybe you should cut the ingredients up small so it would be easier to eat but instead the ingredients were like, extra larger than normal. One stupid long and thick strip of carrot took up half the cup. Also, the cup display salad situation meant that they only offered what was already made and displayed. When I first ordered a salad on the menu, the girl said they only had what was in the case – one option. It was right at lunchtime too but they didn’t have any plans to make anything more that day. I could see the rest of the staff was laughing and joking and eating back in the tiny kitchen instead of making more food for the big crowds but I guess they don’t care.
So the salad was too hard to eat and impossible to dress properly. As for the wraps, our conversation literally went like this: Can I have the tofu wrap? No we don’t have it. (They had tofu and the same veggies as everything else…so…) Can I have the Fishless wrap? No we don’t have it. What wraps do you have? The seitan sausage wrap. That’s it? Yes. Man aliiiive. Honestly considering that everything has basically the same ingredients, they make the wraps fresh for each order, and there was always staff just chilling and not working, I think it’s just down to lazy workers. Anyway, I had the seitan sausage wrap, and it was neither seitan nor sausage but more like pink ham half moons. It was decent, but small and with tiny amounts of fillings, so if you have the choice (and you do), always always get your food from next door. Green 13’s food is much better and the people are much more accommodating, even though on paper the Sumasbrod menu feels much more my style.
The only thing you should go to Sumasbrod for is the dessert.
In that display pictured above, Sumasbrod has those poorly conceived salad cups, but also chia pudding cups and mousses. The best thing they make is this Chocolate Cake Trifle and it was AMAZING. Truly. True I hadn’t had a proper dessert in many moons but Z agreed that this was fantastic and we got it several times. The chocolate cake was probably dry, as most places’ chocolate cake is (it’s not hard guys!) but it didn’t matter because it was covered and moisturized by chocolate mousse that was pretty damn fantastic. So definitely go next door for everything except dessert, and be sure to grab this. We got one for our train out of Kyiv too, and honestly nothing helps elevate an overnight train experience than a cup of chocolate cake trifle. Well except clean sheets and maybe a non-flooded bathroom but we aren’t talking pipe dreams here!
this will be the one non-food related picture in this post so enjoy
Another mixed bag experience awaited us at Tri, an upscale restaurant definitely catering to the Gwynnie types of Kyiv. This place had rave reviews on HappyCow so I made sure it was at the top of our list. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the HappyCow reviewers just haven’t had good food before so they were like ‘oh I guess this is what good food is because it looks cute and is expensive so I’ll just give it five stars so I don’t look bad.’ No. Or maybe we went on a bad day for them, but it’s still unacceptable. The restaurant is lovely inside and clearly gives off a more fancy vibe than anywhere else in town. Some of the food was generally interesting but the service was horrendous. It literally took hours. A family who came a half hour after we did got their food first. I don’t want to hear that nonsense about ‘but you don’t know how long the kitchen needs for each dish!’ because we were the only patrons there and I ordered a salad. It would take AGES to find someone just to ask what was going on with our food – and like I said, there were only two tables in the giant room. It shouldn’t be that hard to find staff. What is this, the National Theatre?
Tartlets? Tartlets? Tartlets?
We started with the raw tarts with cashew hummus and microgreens. It was pretty good, but it was not hummus so much as a definite cashew cheese., tasting like like any other raw cafe’s dollop of raw cashew cheese. Fine, though, whatevers.
Then an hour went by.
Then my salad came. This was supposed to be a ‘guacamole, kale, and hemp seed’ salad.
Ahem. Does that look like kale to you? It is not. It is merely green curly lettuce. Plus sprouts and tomatoes instead of hemp seeds, which I really don’t understand as a substitution so it has to just be a mistake. There was indeed a lump of ‘guacamole’ in there – a very lemony mush of avocado – but come on, this is not what the menu says. It is a green salad though and it was fine tasting so I wasn’t going to send it back (also it took an hour??) but still, what’s going on in the Tri kitchen??
Then we ordered the polenta with grilled vegetables. This one took an extra hour after the incorrect salad. I wanted to leave and really almost did but we were in so deep and I was trying to be optimistic about my beloved polenta. Polenta is sooo good and I was picturing this lovely pile of it with all kinds of vegetables in like a sauce or something amazing.
I got this tiny little tower of terror instead. The polenta rounds were good because it is hard to screw up polenta but yes you’re right, those are discs of eggplant and tomato with it. JFC. I should have known it was going to be grilled eggplant. Even at a vegetarian restaurant I have no other choice! There was nothing else to it, no sauce or anything, just grilled Vegetable of the Summer and two 50p-coins-worths of polenta. Bahhhhh. I wish we could have dined and dashed, I really do for the first time ever, but by the time this came we were alone in that big white fancy room and they would have caught us. Maybe. Actually, maybe we could have slipped away considering how hard it was to find a waiter. Darn. Next time! Just kidding we’re not going back there. I really don’t understand all the glowing reviews, unless everything else is really that much better (doubtful) or maybe I’ve just been lucky enough to have something better to compare it to (literally every restaurant seems more functional).
Next we tried Nebos, the famous raw restaurant. Raw foodists (omg is there a worse word than foodist to describe a person? oh yeah foodie) all over the globe rave about this place, so after our trip to Chernobyl we checked it out. I figured eating a big meal of raw vegetables would undo some of the negative effects of radiation or something? No it’s just right at Independence Square where the tour left us. Anyway, like with Tri, the reviews online were almost embarrassingly effusive. People were going on and on about how this is the best raw restaurant in the world and ‘trust me I’ve tried them all’. Bitch please. I’ve tried them all. This is not the best. But it is fine. Too much of the food had that vibe that is common in raw restaurants of being too…warm and sludgy, like it had been sitting out. Raw restaurants should be better at that but alas. But a lot of the food was really good, so overall Nebos is a positive for me, with caveats on things to avoid.
I started with the Olivier salad. They had a really impressive salad section (I mean every raw restaurant should come on but this is one of the few) and it was hard to pass up things with broccoli and arugula, but Oliviers are so common in this part of the world that it’s required to try them when you have the chance. I had a vegan one before, I think at a Mongolian Loving Hut, I want to say? and it was great so I had to try again. Also, this was the one salad that the Nebos menu had starred as a customer favorite so I trusted the public at large even though you should never really do that about anything really. Luckily it was really good! It was a mix of carrot, cucumber, avocado, peas, peas, zucchini, microgreens, and of course ‘Olivier sauce’ and it was very enjoyable. I also adore how they always come in the same weird shape.
Okay deciding on the Olivier wasn’t as hard as I made it out to be because we also got a Caesar salad! Double salad what a life! I was intrigued by the promise of cashew cheese sticks covered with pitta sauce in the Caesaw. It didn’t sound like a Caesar and it didn’t taste like one, but I really enjoyed it. Those cashew cheese croutony things are legit! They were so plentiful (look at that plate it is positively covered with them) and had a great sharp cheeziness with a z. It could have used more lettuce but it was pretty interesting. And really filling. Cashew cheeze is filling! I just jump back and forth between spelling raw vegan cheese like a normal person and an ass so don’t mind it.
Next was the tasting plate, with flax breaded cutlets (I don’t know either), falafel cutlets, and vegetable balls. I don’t know what the difference between all the different cutlets or balls were – they’re all made of the same nuts and vegetables – but they were all pretty good, and the three sauces they came with added some nice flavors. Approved!
Lastly was the thing I urge you not to order, even though like everything else I chose it is listed on the menu with a little thumbs up to show it’s a customer favorite. Well, the public is wrong so often so I was bound to get screwed listening to other people. Don’t listen to other people. (Well except me of course.)
The Dragon Roll. I’m actually starting to gag just remembering trying to eat this. I was soo excited for some raw vegan sushi – I hadn’t had sushi in ages, and it was even longer since I had good sushi. Well it would be a lot longer, I learned. The Dragon Roll promised epic tales of nori, avocado, cauliflower, cucumber, cheeze, something called ‘false flax seeds’ that I am sure is just lost in translation, sunflower mayo, and more ingredients that sound good but when you stop to really think about it you should think ‘wait how is all of this going to make a sushi roll’? Remember it’s raw, so without the structural integrity afforded by sticky rice, they were going to rely on minced cauliflower to hold all the gloppiness together. It didn’t. Forget Gwynnie’s website (how many times will this post mention her, I wonder), THIS is the real goop. The toppings blended in with the middle and it all mushed into one beige bland blob of oozing warm sludge and I tried to eat one and had that immediate reaction where if you eat any more of the thing you are going to be sick. Shaaaaaame. The consistency was so off-putting and so wrong, like when I try to eat mochi but 100x more. Sushi should not need to be eaten with a spoon! Bleh what a soft slimy mess. Bleh!
The rest of Nebos was decent though. Just never get the sushi.
The last of the vegan food I’m going to share might be my favorite in Kyiv. It’s not a restaurant, it’s more like a counter service. And the place is not vegan, or even vegetarian, but it has a few options. Now, what’s my favorite thing? If you follow my instagram (see link at top corner of page!) you probably know I make soup for dinner 90% of the time. Yes it’s because it’s a one-pot thing and that’s best for me but also because soup is amazing! Well, lords and ladies, Kyiv has a soup counter around town called Soup Culture! And best of all, they serve it in a BREAD CUP. Not a bread bowl, not those things that you don’t know really how to attack and you’re like wait so do i eat all the soup and then this bread but I want bread with the soup I’ll just take a little piece and ahhhh now there’s soup spilling everywhere! No, Soup Culture has perfected the bread container method by putting the soup in a much sturdier carbolicious cup, and so you drink the soup (I hate using the word ‘drink’ when discussing soup because it’s FOOD but here you kind of must because it’s a cup and you drink from a cup anyway) and chew the cup as you go down. It’s splendid.
They always have one or two vegan soups on the daily menu. We tried the lentil, which was delicious. And the bread cup is SO fun. Like I said, it’s sturdy so it retains its integrity as you take bites of it. SO FUN! There are a few locations around town so it’s a wonderful little lunch stop as you explore town.
Kyiv has a lot of vegan options – we barely scratched the surface! Even when we weren’t looking, we would chance upon vegan friendly places, like this place in a major underground food court/mall under Independence Square.
Hopefully, this roundup will help you make decisions about what to prioritize (go to Green 13; skip Tri; bring me back a bread cup). I have heard that even in the past few months, even more vegan food has popped up in Kyiv. I think the scene there is going to get better and better and it’s definitely a city to keep your eye on.
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Dunhuang, China: The Mogao Caves and the Start of Our Silk Road Journey
It’s unclear when exactly we should say we began our exploration of the ancient Silk Road, not one road so much as a cross-continental network of trade routes and passes from China, across most of central Asia, and possibly all the way to Rome. (Sea routes stretching from Indonesia to Africa were also part of it, but we didn’t do any watersports; it’s all desert from here on out.) Xi’an was considered a terminus of it, but today it’s such a modern busy city that it didn’t seem very ‘Silk Road-y’ to us when we were there; we were still in ‘China’ mindset and not ‘incredible desert history’ mindset. But there’s no question that once we landed in Dunhuang, our journey through the Silk Road had begun. Dunhuang was one of the most important historical sites of the Silk Road both then and now, and it has provided tons of insight into the dealings and relationships among people, religious groups, and states from ancient times. If you go to Dunhuang, you are unquestionably there to go back in time and learn about its role in the Silk Road.
So, like I said, the Silk Road was not a road, and not even just because of mountains! It was formed by local traders determining which routes they could travel without dying of thirst, pretty much, and mainly went from one oasis to another. It also included the least deadly mountain passes, though you had to be careful of the season (snow!). Also, contrary to the idea that individual traders ventured from China all the way to Europe, most evidence shows that traders stuck to their local routes, like a very extended game of telephone but for trading. Or I guess a more appropriate comparison would be to the track and field race where you pass the baton. At camp we called it the…I wanna say Fenchurch Street but that’s just because I miss my tube line. Um…steeple chase! That’s it! (Those are similar phrases, right.) Is that a thing people say or is it just passing the baton? Whatever. It was like that where you go just a bit of the way yourself and then pass your crap to an associate or new trader friend. So the romantic notion of traders with endless caravans crossing the desert with innumerable treasures to bring to western Europe is not very accurate.
But actually, the idea of the Telephone game works too, because these traders shared information of all sorts with each other that blended into new cultures, traversing the continent and beyond along with the silk, but also with all kinds of other goods, animals, cultural and religious ideas, and Yom Kippur breath. The most important item passed throughout the lands was not silk but paper – documents, books, and even scattered personal notes are what teach us the most about this history and how people traded and what spread successfully and how far it went. And while there are many famous Silk Road sites that have provided immense knowledge through excavations, we’ve learned the most about this spread of communication and ideas (and goods) from one place – Dunhuang, and its Library Cave.
Dunhuang is an oasis town in Gansu province, squeezed in between the Gobi Desert (yes we made our way allll the way back around) and the Taklamakan Desert (fuck it was SO DRY my eyes hurt in my head). An important early Silk Road city, it’s now known for its outstanding Mogao Caves, an extensive cave system that served as Buddhist temples and housed (and still house) incredible examples of religious Buddhist art – in fact, the largest collection of Buddhist art in the world (painted on the cave walls, mostly). Constructed for meditation spaces in the 4th century, the caves were not well preserved (and still aren’t very) so what there is to see is pretty miraculous. No pictures are allowed inside the tiny dark caves – great idea to try to preserve what’s there, although some caves were closed due to ‘excessive carbon dioxide’ (meaning they aren’t regulating the number of visitors well enough. Also, smoking is allowed. If you have a problem with air quality and too many people affecting the condition of the cave preservation, maybe don’t allow smoking in there FFS, CHINA).
In addition to the art, the Mogao caves gave the world its most important contribution to history with the Library Cave, a hidden room in the caves which was walled up to hide thousands and thousands of documents – in fact, over 50,000 documents, including over 15,000 books and over 1000 scrolls. Some scrolls date from as early as the 5th century and all dated from before the cave was sealed in the 11th century. The earliest complete printed book was found here, The Diamond Sutra, from 868. The documents are in at least 17 languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, Uigur, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Sogdian, proving how far peoples and ideas travelled.
The walled-up cave was discovered in 1900 by a monk known as Daoist Wang, at least according to the book I’m reading (Z’s book calls him something a lot less fun). Daoist Wang was self-appointed as the caretaker of Dunhuang when it had long been falling into disrepair. One day he noticed something going on with the air in them there caves and knocked an inner wall down, and found a room positively crammed with piles of documents stretching 10 feet tall. Hoo boy, this was a big deal, and he knew it. He asked the Chinese government if they wanted to pay for him to have all the documents shipped – he knew how important these were to Chinese history – and the govvies were like nah we don’t have the money to pay for that. Big mistake. Big. Huge. An explorer named Aurel Stein soon heard about the discovery and made his way to Dunhuang to charm Wang into letting him buy some of the documents and take them out of China (to Britain and India). Stein gave Wang like a Benjamin, maybe two, and took TENS of thousands of documents. He is a controversial figure, for many reasons. One, he knew they were worth more, but like, so did Wang, and Wang could have charged more. Also what was Wang gonna do with that money he lived in caves. Two, people are mad at Whitey McSteinface for taking the documents away from their home (are you too good for your HOME?), but the Chinese government wasn’t interested at first so why not bring them to a place with better preservation methods and people and universities who actually want to study them? (NB, you’d think this string of me siding with colonialist kinds of thinking would mean I side with the British Museum on the Elgin Marbles controversy but I saw IN PERSON the whole f-ing modern advanced thing that Greece has since built for them so there’s no reason now! Shaaame!)
Aurel Stein was also the first person to describe in great detail everything he saw at the Dunhuang caves (see it’s historically necessary to describe everything you see and do in too much detail, for posterity!), and contributed most of what we know about how they were before the onslaught of other explorers, researchers, universities…and tourists. Today, foreigners can’t really book tickets. The website doesn’t have functional English, but also I think hotels and hostels and tour groups just do it for foreigners and there’s no discussion. But you do need to book tickets in advance, because they only let in 6000 tourists per day – and it REALLY should be less, considering the aforementioned CO2 problems harming various caves. We hired a guide and driver from VisitOurChina to get our tickets, pick us up and drop us off at our guesthouse, and provide a private tour of the caves. Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad, I guess. No, they are a bad company and I strongly urge you never to use them. The local guide they hired for us was great, but what they didn’t tell us (and I don’t think she realized we had paid (through the nose) for) was that private guides cannot lead anyone through the caves – you are put into large (LARGE) groups with other (AWFUL LOUD RUDE) tourists and led around by an official site guide. So we paid all that money for nothing. We were livid, and not just because the huge Italian tour group we were put with was full of rude awful people who snuck photos in the caves despite that being prohibited. I know, Italians betraying me, my own people.
I do not take that shit lightly and we got a partial refund of our money, but if we didn’t have to deal with the excruciatingly frustrating Chinese tendency to deny blame and never apologize and make things as hard as possible (and also, what contract law?!), I would have fought for all of it. YOU HEAR ME, SOPHY? YOU ARE A LYING LIAR WHO LIES AND YOU HAVE TAINTED THE NAME OF TOY GIRAFFES EVERYWHERE.
Despite my blood pressure being at red alert the whole visit, both at our being cheated and at my own people betraying me with insane rudeness, our visit to the Mogao Caves was pretty special. You start in a newly built visitor center and you watch two movies, one about the caves’ history and one about the visit. I mean at least I think that’s what they were about. It was dark and comfy and cool in there and I had a very nice nap.
After the movies, you get on a giant bus to the actual caves. We did not know about this. It’s a 15 minute bus ride away from the visitor center to the caves, down a freaking highway! WHY NOT BUILD YOUR NEW VISITOR CENTER A TINY BIT CLOSER TO THE ACTUAL THING WE ARE VISITING? FFS CHINA.
Then you find out your tour company is a bunch of lying liars and you fight but can’t do anything about it because the official site guides are the only ones with keys to the caves (they remain locked at all times except the few minutes you are in them) so you piss and moan like an impotent jerk and then you acquiesce and try to enjoy the damn thing. And it was indeed amazing. The paintings on the cave walls are of varying degrees of preservation, some barely visible, but some (a lot) are gorgeous and clearly visible still. It’s pretty awesome. It’s also very very hot (SANDWICHED BETWEEN TWO DESERTS I SAID) so bring water and a hat and whatever you have that might reflect the sun away from you. My hands have aged so much I can hear them saying “Muriel? Muriel hasn’t lived here for 50 yeeeeears…”
We spent probably 3 hours between both the sites of the cave complex. After we got back to our guesthouse, we wanted to go into the desert to see the enormous dunes and the famous oasis of Crescent Lake, about a 30 minute walk away. Unfortunately, my dry eye syndrome has been exacerbated, to say the least, in this climate, resulting in ocular migraines like I’ve never had before, so I had to take my contacts out and lay in the dark for a while while Z explored what he said (so meanly) was the most amazing place. He took good pictures but I’m so mad I had to miss this. Stupid dry climate.
SAND EVERYWHERE
Once I could stand the pain, I realized it was like 9pm and I was hungry, so I went into our little fake adobe village to find food. Oh so we stayed at a place called the Silk Road Yododo Inn, a hostelish guesthouse with one nice woman and a very rude man working, nice rooms, but the common spaces were just enormous sandboxes. Not joking, the space in the middle of the guestrooms was all sandbox. Complete with little plastic shovel. It was insane. The room seemed nice but we saw later that it was dirtier than it first appeared, with sand in the sheets (blech) (but of course; it was a sandbox) and dirty walls and quilts. Outside, a bar played super loud music until midnight. And when that music finally stopped, a neighbor down the hall seemed to be hammering into the wall. I think he was moving furniture because Z saw a man carrying a vanity table or something absolutely ridiculous even disregarding the time of night. We can never get away from ridiculous. The guesthouse was on the second floor of a sandy adobe village looking place. So weird but cute.
the ground outside was sandbox too
I thought I might have good luck at the Western Restaurant (full name) but no, they did not speak English or understand my phone asking for no meat (what do you mean no meat! Okay I bring you chicken). I got them to bring me a bowl of rice covered in bok choy, which is better than nothing. The next day, we went to a little food shack hole in the wall place and got delicious noodles and veggies. Shacks are always better, we are learning.
yummiest shack food
Overall, despite my eyes and my head and my eyes in my head and the lying liars who lied to us, our short visit to Dunhuang was nice – very informative and interesting. We are lucky to have gotten to see some of the amazing caves and their art from so long ago, even if most of documents are back home in the British Museum (where we are members, lol). The history here is incredible and it was exciting to begin the real Silk Road section of our journey. Even if it mostly means dry air and burnt skin.
Nukus, Uzbekistan: I Finally Find Pretzels (And Also Interesting Art)
After our time in Khiva, we decided to stop in the tiny town of Nukus, Uzbekistan for one purpose: to see its art museum. Now, you might be wondering what kind of art a museum in the middle of nowhere might have to bring a person so out of their way. A rare Picasso? A beautiful Monet? (I know only the most famous artmakers apparently.) You crazy if you thought that; this is the middle of nowhere Uzbekistan. No, the Nukus Museum of Art houses the second largest collection of Russian avant-garde art in the world. I know it doesn’t sound great, but it’s a very cool thing and I’ll tell you why.
So once upon a time there was this man Igor Savitsky (“accordion genius, plays weddings at 7-years-old” anyone?), who was a Russian painter and archaeologist. Igor visited the Karakalpakstan region of Uzbekistan (where Nukus is located) in 1950, and somehow was like hey this place rocks/is dust I’m gonna stay. He moved to Nukus and started collecting all kinds of crap. After he amassed quite a collection of jewelry and artifacts and carpets and such, he convinced the place that they needed a museum to house all of it. They were like why don’t you keep all your crap in your attic like normal people and he was like just trust me on this and they were like I guess man. So the authorities established a museum and made Igor the curator, and once he had that sweet sweet position locked down, he started focusing on collecting the art of Central Asian artists and those whose work had been banned in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Igor specifically directed his efforts at finding these artists and displaying them in his museum in order to give them the representation and acclaim they never got to enjoy because Stalin was such a buzzkill at art too. Because the museum houses such politically important work, and so much of it (only St. Petersburg has a larger collection of Russian avant-garde), the Nukus Museum of Art – actually called “The State Art Museum of the Republic of Karakalpakstan, named after I.V. Savitsky” (yes the ‘named after’ is part of the full legit name omg) (and then also like is it named after him or not because it looks like the real name is The State Art Museum of the R of K right and if it was actually named after him it would be The Savitsky Museum am I right like you can’t just say ‘named after’ if it’s not actually named after??? how do words work) – has become a must-see attraction for tourists in Uzbekistan. And that is why we went.
the view from our car
To get there from Khiva, though, there’s not really good transit. We had to hire another car and driver through Sultan at Avantour tour company. He told us that the ride would take about 4-5 hours. So on our last morning in Khiva, we woke up at 6am, planning to leave about 7am, arrive in Nukus by noon, have lunch, and then have a few hours in the museum before our train that evening. Ahem. We left at 7am and got there at 9:45. JFC I could have slept for two more hours. JFC even more, we had to WAIT for the museum to open! Man alive. I guess it’s better than being in a car for longer but like come on guys get your facts straight. He didn’t even speed.
Our driver dropped us at the Nukus train station, where we stored our bags. The people looked at us like wtf are you guys doing here there is not a train until tonight (one train town) and we were like hayyy please don’t steal our stuffff. They didn’t give a receipt or anything for the bags but they said (without using words) ‘we’ll know this was yours, nerdy white people’. Then we went to the museum and it was pretty interesting. I thought it would be more political art, like on its face, but it was more regular art but by people who challenged authority. Or maybe it was challenging authority for its time, but nowadays we are used to much more blatant opposition and much more in-your-face offense so I couldn’t tell that these works were crossing a line since we are so far past where that line was 50 years ago. The line is a dot to you.
Pictures weren’t allowed in the museum and I don’t break worthwhile rules, so if you want to see some of the works on display you’ll have to go to Uzbekistan HA HA ARE YOU? There were guard ladies who were supes annoying, following us around the whole time. I didn’t notice if they followed others too but it was really uncomfortable. Maybe they chose us because we were the youngest and yoots usually cause trouble? There were lots of other visitors to the museum (a surprising fact, considering I thought we were the only people in the whole town) but they were all older and mostly in big tour groups. Anyway it was a pretty good museum, but oh my god we were so tired. This trip was catching up with us and we were getting a little delirious. We were still able to appreciate all the interesting art, but I was just laughing the entire time (not appropriate) as I do when I’m overtired.
The museum is actually in two buildings (second largest collection n the world and all that) and you have to check your bags, even wee purses, which is kind of lame. So much art!
After all the art, we walked around trying to find food. This was hard because Nukus is a tiny little desert town and there was not much happening. We passed a few important-looking buildings but no one was around for us to ask what they were, and I tried googling but to no avail. I’ll share the pictures of said buildings with you so you can also wonder forever what they are (or be better than I am at googling).
And yes I did try googling ‘jaslar awqami’ but it’s not helpful. you go look at all the stuff that comes up. I hope it just means public pool because awqami sounds like aqua-me. and also it would be hilarious if this super official nicest building for hundos of miles was just a pool with a capital p that rhymes with g that stands for go like let’s gooooo
Finally we found a place that sold non-fast food that was open. This very random Uzbek restaurant with a separate small Korean food menu (?) was called Sheraton but was unrelated to the hotel chain. It was full of those older tourists we saw earlier, I guess because it was ostensibly the only decent restaurant open. I was so excited to see that the menu had a variety of vegetable dishes! Also, one was translated as Pine Forest, which was the name of my camp, so that seemed like a good sign.
Unfortunately, most of the salads were dairy-based and/or covered in mayo, but I found one that seemed safe for vegans, translating roughly as garlic and greens. I was so excited to get what I expected was a plate of garlicky sauteed greens. I hadn’t had greens cooked like that in so long! I was so pumped.
My phone notes from this travel day literally just say ‘this country is complete bullshit’
Alas.
It was literally a plate of raw garlic, raw UNCUT spring onions, and lots of herbs. Oh and plus green bell pepper, the one vegetable I hate. COME ON UNIVERSE. I guess it was a companion piece to one of the Korean stews or something but like y’all should have SAID SOMETHING.
Sigh. What a disappointment. We had hours left before our train, to wander around and see all the sights (no more sights) and buy water for our 3 day train train (we’ll talk about that next post), so we wandered. It was very hot and dry and dusty, and the main road was destroyed with ongoing construction (as we expect everywhere in this country), so it was kind of harrowing to walk down it when like, suddenly there would be no more road and cars were coming. Luckily, there were lots of little convenience stores, and luckily, one had a nice babushka selling all kinds of baked goods in bulk – including hard pretzel sticks! I’d never seen pretzel sticks sold in bulk and I hadn’t seen pretzels in weeks so this was a dance dance dance moment. My pretzel babushka was the one nice person we came across in Nukus. Why is everyone there so mean? Is it because they are so bored and also had a real weird lunch?
So that was our day in Nukus! I know right. The Savitsky (I’m going for it) Museum was pretty cool and I’m glad we got to see such an important museum. But I was a little jealous of those old tourists who got off a big bus, saw the museum, and then got right back on the bus. If you go, make sure you don’t have too much time to spend wandering the town. After our too-much-time, we boarded our longest train in months – two nights from Nukus, Uzbekistan to Volgograd, Russia. It’s a doozy so look out for the next post!
