17 April 2024~ Craft Garage Kaliningrad a Pit Stop for Good Beer
On the same evening that we happened upon the Beer Bar on Prospect Mira and Bar Sovetov, we stumbled upon and into Craft Garage. You’ve guessed it! Whereas it could be argued that my MOT was long overdue, that I was urgently in need of a rebore and my big ends had gone, Craft Garage is not that sort of place.
In spite of the name, the service that Craft Garage provides is strictly beer related. Why else would I beer there? (Ho! Ho!) The clue lies in the ‘Craft’ part of the name. Craft standing for ‘Craft Beer Bar’ ~ crafty, ay!
Craft Garage Kaliningrad
The trend for this type of bar, as opposed to a fully fledged traditional pub, gained popularity in the UK in response to the micro-brewery boom and the inherent advantages of low start-up and maintenance costs together with ~ as the bars are usually small ~ a means of avoiding or at least diminishing the outrageously iniquitous business rates ~ a robber baron tax, which, not unlike death duties, is totally unjustified and is the current primary cause (bar one🙊) of the decay of Britain’s high streets.
The trend for such bars in Kaliningrad, whilst not motivated by the same factors, has gathered pace in recent years, as the taste and therefore the market for beer in general shows an exponential increase, decreasing the sales gap of old between Russia’s flagship vodka.
With my fan belt slipping and my radiator running dry, I was pleased to learn that not only was stumbling into Craft Garage an excellent idea, but that the bar dispensary was in stumbling distance itself, ie just inside the door.
Behind the bar, a youngish chap presided over a chalkboard containing beers of sufficient quantity and with enough interesting names to verily make one’s moustache curl. I’d left mine at home, but the barman’s made up for it. He had one of those Salvador Dali jobs, and the beer was certainly working.
As Salvador Dali was not listed among the range of beers on offer, and I didn’t know how to say in Russian ‘Which beer should I drink to grow a moustache like yours?’, I decided to play it safe, plumping for a beer recently tried and tested at bar Forma, which goes by the name of Kristoffel. It’s a nice name and a nice beer.
Craft Garage is not full of old engine parts, grease monkeys and the smell of spilt fuel and tyres; it is a well-oiled hip joint, suitably decorated and furnished around the novel theme that it has adopted. Its name and image lend themselves admirably to the continued restaurant and bar interest in the nuts and bolts ‘industrial look’, of which there are two categories. Both are shabby chic, but one is more shabby than chic, and Craft Garage occupies the top-drawer end of the chic curve. Excuse me, I am going to use the word ‘plush’.
For example, there is nothing shabby about the brick-effect walls, the cutaway oil drum chairs, the framed exploded vehicle-engine diagrams, the polished tables and bar area. In fact, polished is another good word, as everything in Craft Garage is as clean and sparkling as the pampered plugs of your favourite Rolls Royce’ engine. And whilst the floor is designer distressed, it is completely free of skidmarks.
The vintage accoutrements are, of course, less believable than a black Dr Who, but the willing suspension of disbelief works better for me in this case than my analogous reference. Moreover, Craft Garage has the advantage of allowing you to travel back in time with the company of your choosing, and whilst you can and must fault woke, you cannot fault Craft Garage.
A complete oil change (which you will need if you have spent half a lifetime drinking Watney’s) starts from 300 roubles.
There’s regular and premium, thus every engine is catered for, even the high-performance kind, and as every beer comes complete with a not-to-be-sneezed-at octane rating, when you finally reach the finishing line you can be sure of feeling well tuned up.
Craft Garage, the place to go when you want a night on the pistons!
Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad Retro with a Heart of Gold
It’s a venue which immortalises the House of Soviets, serves good beer, hosts music evenings and likes you, the customer.
13 April 2024 ~ Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad Retro in the House of Soviets
Do you believe in coincidences? In my most recent post I wrote about the gradual disappearance of Kaliningrad’s most infamous and controversial landmark, the House of Soviets. Less than a week later, I find myself in a subterranean bar dedicated to that very building.
Bar Sovetov is located in what once was, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the residential quarter of choice for Königsberg’s affluent citizens.
On foot, it is something of a trek from the city centre to this still sought-after district, but it is one I made on numerous occasions in the days when a bar, long since gone, the enigmatically named Twelve Chairs, exercised a consistent influence and justified the effort.
Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad
Whilst in the character of its rooms, Bar Sovetov does not possess the intricacy or the old-world charm that gave Twelve Chairs its je ne sais quoi, it is no less thought-provoking in the nature of its decoration and appurtenances of thematic quirk.
The two-roomed bar, with its truncated corridor leading to the lavs, is very much a pop art haven. Victor Ryabinin, former artist and local historian, would have adored it! Symbolism abounds: ‘Look Out!’ the slogan reads. ‘Big Brother is Watching you!’ You see it above the full-sized wall mirror in which you are watching yourself.
A white face mask framed between two suspended lamps exudes from the wall. Wearing a baseball cap in such a way that it partly conceals its features, it holds to its lips an admonitory finger attached to a long white arm. As with the face above it, the arm emerges from solid brickwork as it would through the fold of a curtain. Both face and arm are whimsical, especially in the matter of their relative dislocation, but irony and surrealism are the uniting forces that bring them together.
These are just two of many examples of Bar Sovetov’s camp milieu. Wherever you look, be it high or low, another element of the quaint and fanciful leaps out to greet and surprise you.
With the obvious exception of Aleks Smirnov’s Badger Club, lovers of the out-of-the-ordinary will be hard pushed to find even among Kaliningrad’s most unconventional watering holes anything that surpasses Bar Sovetov’s quaint burlesque. But for all that it camps it up, the nostalgia has a genuine ring; it springs from a source of real affection. And the humour the props elicit, be it aimed at you and me or tailored to the refined perception of the discerning intellectual, leaves plenty of form intact for the inquisitive mind of the history buff.
The genesis, erection, completion and the long-standing but idle years of the House of Soviets’ occupation are captured step by step in a series of timelined photographs. The images of the building in its promising phase of construction, with cranes on either side, are particularly poignant memories, given that in its obliteration almost identical cranes in almost identical places stand either side of the shrinking structure.
On the opposite side of actuality, a wall in the bar’s first room is a bold painted visual replica, close up and in your face, of the House of Soviet’s exterior. The effect is profoundly Gotham City, gaudy, haunting, claustrophobic but seminally cartoon, a perfect piece of ‘dark deco’ kitsch. Further urbanisation occurs not in the question itself, which is off the wall whilst on the wall, but in the way it is daubed across the wall, which reflects the mind of graffiti man stretched to its utmost limit: “Who,” it asks, “killed the House of Soviets?” If we didn’t laugh, we’d cry.
More real photos of the fated hulk that over its 53-year existence dominated Kaliningrad’s skyline, exciting in its awesome prospect, ambivalent and contentious in what it actually stood for and why it stood for so long, can be found in the bar’s back room.
It is here that the structure’s rightful place in the socio-political era into which it was given a sort of life or maybe a life of sorts is given historical context. Framed copies of Soviet art, amusing, powerful and all iconic, visually break up the hard brick-wall to which they are attached, whilst in one corner of the room a little shrine pays tribute to the final days of Sovietism.
There, upon a shelf, rubbing shoulders with the printed word and a quaint assortment of nick-nacks, sits a large portrait photograph of if not the architect of perestroika then the man who is widely considered to be its chief executive officer, former General Secretary Gorbachev, twinned in the opposite corner with a replica set of traffic lights, which, for some exotic reason or perhaps no reason at all beyond their anomalous presence and illuminative oddity, cast a lurid reddish glow across the whitewashed brickwork.
The seats in this comic-strip memory, when not authentic 70s’ vintage, are made from wooden pallets, painted to look distressed, put together as benches and kindly equipped with padded seats. However, recalling the slatted wood benches with which Kaliningrad’s trains were furnished twenty-three years ago, such convenient cushioned luxury may be but the useful product of indulgent historical revisionism. Whilst the past is unrelenting in its prescribed but often unforgiving and impractical perpetuity, concessions ought to be made, don’t you think, to our poor post-Soviet posteriors. Historical accuracy has its virtues, but is it worth corns and blisters?
Bar Sovetov Kaliningrad
The bar itself, that is the thing on which when you buy your beer it temporarily rests on top and the area to the rear of it, is a content-managed zone, where normal things normally sold behind bars share more than their fair share of shelving space with the weird, the wild and the whimsically whacky. Note the hollow concrete blocks shown in the photo below that have been used to comprise the wall of the bar. Is that or is it not a passing nod to the House of Soviets?
A conforming principle of all such bars, that is to say craft-beer bars, is that the beer selection is written in chalk on good old-fashioned blackboards. What is it, I ask myself, and I suppose you ask yourself too, about this rudimentary practice that makes it so applicable, so pleasingly, conventionally and fundamentally right and so well received in its prime objective, which is to call to our eager attention the dispensation of quality brews? When you’ve found the answer to that one, you might go on to answer the question ‘Who killed the House of Soviets?’ I have a hunch that in both cases we will discover the hand of Old Father Time.
From the six or so beers on offer, I ordered myself a ‘Milk of …?’ Er, a ‘Milk of …?’ What was the name of that beer? Ah yes, now I remember, I bought myself a ‘Milk of Amnesia’. How could you not drink a beer like that, with a name so unforgettable?
In summing up the Bar Sovetov experience, the beer is good. The atmosphere is atmospheric. The people who run the bar are real; in other words, they are genuinely friendly and they are also good at what they do. They effortlessly embody and earnestly convey the qualities prerequisite for fulfilling the role they have given themselves, that of convivial mine host, in an age when many are either not up to it or simply not fit for purpose.
Those who earn their living in the hospitality trade at customer-facing level, would do well to bookmark this truth, that the bar or pub in which they perform is as much a stage as any other and their customers are their audience. Once the curtain goes up, if you cannot manage authenticity, you must put yourself out there, put on a smile and remember that it’s show time! If the act is one the punters like or at least is one that they can believe in, and the beer is good and well kept, they’ll keep on coming back. Loyalty is everything, and that applies to the service industry as it does to everything else, and I cannot think of a better bar more deserving of it than Sovetov.
What goes up must come down, but it took 50 years to do so
29 March 2024 ~ Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past
I go away for four weeks, and this is what happens! In my absence, someone has nipped off with three-quarters of the House of Soviets!
I must confess (no, it wasn’t me), as I sat on a bench with my coffee and sandwich, looking across the Lower Pond, that the sight of the House of Soviets dwindling into nothing plucked in my nostalgic heart a sentimental chord.
Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past
Like it or not, the great concrete monolith has dominated Kaliningrad’s skyline for more than 50 years. Photographed arguably more times and from every conceivable angle than any other structure in Kaliningrad, in spite of itself and for all the wrong reasons, the towering, bulky edifice, with its plethora of empty windows achieved cult status, most notably, ironically and cynically, as a prime example of the best in Soviet architecture, and with its unfortunate reputation for being the house that never was occupied, haunted itself and the city with the cost of taking it down.
Its huge rectangular cross-bridged frame, which had incongruously, but none the less defiantly, replaced the splendour of Königsberg Castle in all its baroque and historical glory, had idled away the years as an unlikely city-centre successor to the 13th century Teutonic castle, later residence of choice for the region’s Prussian rulers, which eventually became the point of convergence for the city’s cultural and spiritual life.
Conversely, the House of Soviets never became anything more than an object of curiosity and a convenient hook for western media on which to hang derogatory.
In my 23 years of visiting and of living in Kaliningrad, I have to say I have never heard anyone admit to loving the House of Soviets, and yet, to balance that out, likewise, nobody ever committed themselves to hating it
In its lifetime ~ fairly long lifetime ~ I suppose we can conclude that the inhabitants of Kaliningrad neither revered nor reviled the building. It was simply there and where it was, and very soon it won’t be.
Published 2021: It is official: 51 years after its construction and the same number of years of non-occupation, arguably one of Kaliningrad’s most iconic buildings, and ironically one of its most lambasted, especially by the western press, is about to be demolished. I am, of course, referring to the House of Soviets, ninety per cent of which was completed in 1985 on a site close to where once stood the magnificent Königsberg Castle, the East Prussian city’s jewel in the crown, which was extensively damaged in the Second World War and then, in 1967, dynamited into oblivion.
Fisherman’s House Museum Zalivino: a must for social history buffs
27 March 2024 ~ Fisherman’s House Museum Zalivino Kaliningrad region
If you are planning on visiting Zalivino lighthouse or taking a day trip to Zalivino, you should take the time to stop off at Zalivino marine and maritime museum, aka Fisherman’s House. Although it is tucked away, if you head to the sandy cove at the far end of the village, a short walk from the village’s second bus stop, and follow the road to the left, you will find you are almost there. Now, just look for a white building with a painted seascape mural on its wall.
Zalivino’s museum is dedicated to the village’s fishing heritage. It provides an unforgettable insight into the working lives of the people who lived there across successive eras and subsequent generations from when it was German Labagienen, then Haffwinkel, throughout its Soviet years.
The museum, or rather how it came to be a museum, has an interesting history of its own. During the perestroika years, Zalivino, a once thriving community, which relied on the water for its livelihood, had declined so substantially that even access to the lagoon had been rendered virtually impossible. Left to its own devices, the coastline had clogged itself with vegetation, turning the erstwhile open shore into a dense and impenetrable forest, choked with invasive reeds, wetland plants and willows.
In 2015, local residents, some of whom personally remembered the coastline’s former glory from their childhood days, got together to form a group to action the shoreline’s reclamation.
Calling themselves ‘Clean Coast’, the group’s hard work won them recognition in a fund-raising competition. The proceeds from this competition enabled the group to launch an assault on the stifling shoreline foliage. They trimmed back trees and bushes, removed strewn rubbish and, when the clearing job was done, used its remaining funds to purchase planks with which to make public benches.
Inspired by their success, the group’s next venture was to establish a museum, which would tell Zalivino’s story as a working fishing village. The property in which the museum is now housed came to fruition following the Clean Coast’s group successful application for a charitable foundation grant, which once obtained was used to develop both the building and the site.
Research suggests that in German times the renovated building was less likely to have been a private dwelling than a warehouse or stable. Personal recollections from the Soviet period see it as a sawmill and a wood-working shop, turning out an array of goods from oars and boat boards to coffins, and later, in the 1990s, when the sawmill was relocated, as the village’s communal bathhouse.
From bathhouse to social history museum, the first exhibit to mark the transition was a sleigh of German origin dragged from the lagoon. According to those in the know, such sleighs in Soviet times were given a new lease of life. Come winter, they were attached to and drawn by horses to trawl the ice-bound waters across the bay for fish.
Zalivino’s museum may be small, but it is also neat and compact, every space having been carefully utilised to bring the story of the settlement’s past to life. Photographs, display boards and documents intermesh successfully with the exposition’s tell-tale artefacts ~ the fishing lines, nets, floats, waders, kerosene lamps and household items ~ all of which have a part to play in the biography of the village.
But whilst they aid the visitor to reconstruct a picture of what life was like in the village many years ago, the museum’s greatest assets are by far its guides, who, because of their palpable love for their subject, enthuse and infuse in equal measure, turning the pieces the past has left for us into a thought-provoking dynamic.
In days of old a fisherman’s life was hard ~ some would say, still is. Relying for your livelihood on the quantity and quality of fish caught in the surrounding waters, and fishing those waters come rain or shine, day in, day out, and often at ungodly hours, was no faint-hearted occupation. The photographs in the museum’s collection underscore this hardship. But they also reveal expressively in the gnarled and weathered faces, in the look of determination, in the brightness of the villager’s eyes and the smiles upon their lips, a satisfaction almost bucolic, deriving from sometimes aligning with, sometimes doing battle with but always being respectful of the laws and forces of nature. After all, to coin a phrase, every villager was in the same boat.
Overall, there is nothing in the Fisherman’s House museum that fails to captivate. But if I was asked to select from the many exhibits one that hits the unusual spot, then the one I would be inclined to choose would be the weathervane.
I am not talking about a wrought iron something that typically spins in the wind high above a chimney pot but of an intricately carved and brightly painted sign-board made of wood which, whilst effectively showing the wind’s direction as any weathervane should, had as its primary function to identify the sailing ship to which it was attached together with the details of its owner. All Curonian sailing ships would be marked by such a device, and those who were acquainted with the lexicon of their symbols would be able to decipher them without a second glance.
Museum Fisherman’s House, Zalivino, is not just a venue for examining relics from a sepia-coloured bygone age, as entrancing as they are, it is a meeting place for the past and present, which will take you into a world and introduce you to a way of life made obsolete by the tides of time and the undercurrents of ‘progress’.
The world it preserves was different then and life in its way much harder, but, as the exposition depicts, it was strong in kinship and fellowship ties. Visiting this museum will help you to understand that it is also Zalivino’s social history as much as its natural landscape that infuses it with allurement and awakens the senses to timeless mystery.
The main thing
Fisherman’s House Zalivino, Kaliningrad region, 238633
Tel: 8 (962) 266 44 57
Opening times Monday to Friday 3pm to 5pm Saturday and Sunday 11am to 4pm
24 March 2024 ~ Kaliningrad Victory Square Flowers of Condolence
Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared 24 March to be a national day of mourning.
As the death toll from Russia’s worst terrorist attack for almost two decades reaches 137, moving scenes in Kaliningrad today see residents of the Kaliningrad region lay flowers, light candles and place toys at the base of the monument in Victory Square.
I share the grief and sorrow of my Russian friends.
13 March 2024 ~ Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad
Those of us in the UK who are firm believers in the importance of preserving traditions and the history of our country, and who do their bit in this regard by paying homage to, and overpaying for the beer in, one of the oldest legacies of our country’s heritage, I am talking about the British pub, will be well acquainted with such familiar pub names as the King’s Arms, Nag’s Head, Fox and Hounds etc, and had you been around in the 1980s and 90s the fad of renaming pubs with silly names, such as the Slug and Lettuce and Goose and Firkin, but in all your days of pub frequenting you may never have come across any drinking establishment, be it a pub or a bar, that goes by the name of Form.
Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad
Form is a malleable word with manifold definitions, as any search through online dictionaries testify. One of the simpler meanings is that of a hard, plain bench, the more complicated reserved for the exotic world of aesthetics. Then there’s ‘he’s got form’, which is, in police parlance, another way of saying he’s done time, which is another way of saying he’s been in the nick, which is another way of saying that he has been in prison. But whether ‘form’ has to do with a hard-arsed bench or is recognition of a criminal record, one thing we know for certain is that Form is the name of a Kaliningrad bar that sits next door to the Yeltsin.
In short, the Yeltsin and Form are geographical neighbours, located either in the same building or one that is joined and adjacent. I have not quite made up my mind which of the two it is, as usually when I visit them I have downed a pint or two, which seems to a certain extent to demagnetise my compass. Suffice it to say, for arguments sake, that the space between the two establishments is less than a stone’s throw away.
This convenience of vicinity does not automatically mean that once you have found the Yeltsin, you have also found Form. The Yeltsin has a belter of a sign and sits prominently on the cusp of a junction which, at certain times of the day, is fairly heaving with traffic. So, if you are looking out for bars, the Yeltsin is hard to miss, and those that say it isn’t should hurry along to SpecSavers.
Conversely, its bedfellow, Form, has no such startling signage, at least not one that is visible from the busy vehicular street, and as the entrance is off the pavement, down some steps and tucked at the back of a forecourt, getting to know that the bar is there either involves a pedestrian element or relies upon word of mouth.
Take us, for example, me and my fellow pub crawlers. It was the bar staff at the Yeltsin who apprised us of Form’s whereabouts in answer to our question where is the next nearest bar?
Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad
Vicinity, and close proximity, are not the only things that the two bars have in common. Both bars cater predominantly for a young clientele. Both, in fact, are student hangouts. Both bars have an appealing basic look. Both have a vintage approach to décor, and some of their customers, not all, but some, have a bit of vintage about them. Both bars cater to the craft beer penchant for the names of beers and their respective strengths to be written in chalk on boards. And, last but by no means least, both bars have a reputation for keeping and serving premium beers on a selective, rotating basis.
Where the two differ is that the Yeltsin is more alpha male and Form more feminine. Now, don’t get excited and don’t go all western liberal gender woke on me, I do not mean it like that. My definition divides the two bars into one which seems geared to young male drinkers who equate craft beers with male camaraderie, and the other that seems to attract a more mixed crowd. Or, to put it another way, go to the Yeltsin for good beer, to listen to tracks on a classic juke box and a game of table football ~ you can also admire the urbanised bogs, with their lashings of bold graffiti ~ but go to Form if you want to sit in a group around tables you’ve pushed together to discuss the grades you got for your essays.
Neither of the two bars are better than the other, not in the strict comparative sense, but nuances in composition lend to each a slightly different feel.
From an architectural standpoint, Form has less form than Yeltsin. Yes, yes, I know: he was a larger-than-life man, with a lived-in and craggy face … Form, on the other hand, is little more than a room ~ little more than a large room, granted ~ hived off down one end by the inclusion of a shelving unit filled with intriguing vintage stuff, which acts as a screen for a makeshift cloakroom.
Form is not exactly spartan, but neither is it cluttered. It contains a number of antithetical but, even so, well-planned pieces that might not or ought not work together, but in Form they actually do. And Form is very comfortable. The floor may be plain old concrete, but it is patched with vintage mats — real, proper, woven mats, agog with interesting patterns. The retro furniture is hotch-potch, but all the more engaging for it. The wall mirrors look in shape as if they once belonged to, and are now on loan from, a 1970s’ lava lamp, and up there on the ceiling some strange artistic drawing is going on: lots of dark black swirling lines, some being tightly compressed, others apart and free flowing, which would not look less at home superimposed on a TV weather chart.
As for the lighting ~ how could I possibly not mention the lighting! ~ the ambient light is dimmed exactly to the right level, and the wall lights are of that special kind that direct illumination in an accommodating intensity only to where it needs to be and just as much as there needs to be, thus creating the sort of mellow cloistered moon-filled shadows in which a canoodling couple could easily fall in love or a single man could fall in love with his beer.
The bar within the bar, ie the actual bar itself, is straight out of DIY Ville. Wooden, too high for comfort, so that when you try to lean upon it, you look as if you’re begging, which, when the bar is full, I imagine you very well might be, all behind it is on display ~ buckets, pipes, barrels, glasses ~ whatever they use behind the bar you see it. It’s a wonderfully basic bar and that’s basic with a capital ‘Б’.
As the seating is notably mismatch, finding a chair to suit you should not be a crucial issue, but in the unlikely event it becomes one, there is plenty of scope for musical chairs.
Craft Beers on Form at Forma Bar Kaliningrad
My most recent visit to Form was a strictly Jack Jones affair: I was going it alone. Having purchased for myself a half-litre of Kristoffel Blond, six percent in strength and 400 roubles a pop, I took up temporary residence in a low-slung, wooden-framed fully cushioned chair, which, in my professional opinion as an always-on-duty vintage dealer, had travelled into the 21st century from way back in the 1970s. The chair and I were perfectly matched. Within a few minutes of sitting there, a couple, on whom I had never laid eyes before, opted for the seats opposite and joined me at my table.
In broken Russian and beery English Me, and in beery Russian and broken English Them, we conversed quite satisfactorily. What the gentleman of the two did not know about craft beers you could write on a half-torn beer mat. Thus, we spent in our comfortable vintage chairs a pleasant 60 minutes talking the kind of talk that only beer drinkers are able to talk whilst they are drinking beer.
Definitively and succinctly put, Kaliningrad’s Form is a comfortable, laid-back place. It has a lighting system to sing about, a convincing vintage feel and beers you can fall in love with. It caters inexclusively, but let us hint predominantly, for those who are young and intelligent enough to know what it means to drink sensibly, but nevertheless probably don’t, and strange old English fellows who certainly do but don’t, never have and in all likelihood never will be able to, but who are skilled in waxing lyrical about beers of outstanding quality — which is something that Form has — and also about good bars — which is something that Form is.
If it was up to me, I would say that Form is always on form, but I’ll leave it up to you to form your own opinion.
Updated 5 March 2024 | First published: 16 September 2021 ~ Death of the House of Culture
Remembering Zalivino’s House of Culture. The space once occupied by the House of Culture is now just a bed of hardcore and thistles. Here is what it was like before they made a ghost of it. [First written in 2022; revised 2024]
We first noticed that there was more traffic than usual whilst we were sitting in the garden drinking tea. Although the road through the village goes nowhere, in other words the village is the end of the road, there is some light industry here, and so the odd truck or two passing by is understandable.
It was not until we walked to one of the two village shops, the one that is furthest away from us, that the reason for more trucks became startingly apparent. They were knocking down the House of Culture!
Death of the House of Culture
News had been leaked to us some time ago that the days of the House of Culture were numbered and that a demolition team was waiting in the wings. But it is one thing to know and another to see.
Where once had stood the concrete behemoth ~ aged, stained, neglected, pitifully dilapidated and inconsolably boarded-up ~ there was just a pile of rubble.
Death of the House of Culture
Some people say that my whole life has been built on demolition. I worked in demolition in my youth, demolishing airfields from the Second World War. Of course, being me, obsessed with the past and history, tearing up the runways and pulling down the buildings was a truly heart-breaking task, and yet, to coin a phrase, someone had to do it.
Besides, doing it gave me the opportunity to daydream of the lives and times of those who had lived on the airfields and all that had gone before, and yet, whilst I fully acknowledged this privilege, I could not quite elude the nagging thought that I was committing an act of cultural vandalism, which, of course, I was. Guilty as charged, as they say: guilty of destroying history, of wiping out the past, of erasing the nostalgic flags from the charts of people’s memories, the charts they would use in later life to navigate back to the days of their youth, and all I could say in my defence: “I was only following orders”. Now, who does that remind you of!
For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to derelict buildings: the pathos and melancholy, the silent history, the ghosts of their past inhabitants. And the House of Culture was no exception. In the short time I had known it, I had developed an affection for this victim of the concrete age.
And why not? What it was and where it was, was no fault of its own. It had no more claim to responsibility than we have on the bodies we inhabit and no more say on location than we have when we are thrown, without consultation or mercy, into a world we cannot disown.
Even so, the architecture of the 1960s is not easy to love. It is concrete dominated and imaginatively challenged, no matter where in the world it is, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the Soviet Union, where both reinforced and pre-cast concrete were the darlings of the day.
The House of Culture was a progeny of its time: conceived, gestated and born into concrete. For a diminutive backwater village, built on bricks and wood and consisting of humble dwellings, this new community hall was both far too big and remarkably out of place, and all that it had to say for itself in answer to aesthetics was that it had some height and angular difference built into it at roof level.
What the House of Culture certainly was not was the rural equivalent of Kaliningrad’s House of Soviets. Indeed, not. For whilst both structures had concrete in common, in so far as each epitomised the architectural limitations that would later define an era, one was redundant before completed, whilst the other played a dynamic, indeed a vital, cultural and social role at the heart of the small community for which it had been expressly built.
Back in its day, in the 1960s, the House of Culture had literally been the cultural centre of the village. We heard tell of myriad uses, of concerts, parties, important civic meetings, dances, educational classes, theatrical and film performances; even the Moscow Ballet Company had played at the House of Culture!
But by the time we arrived on the scene, all of this was little more than a rapidly fading memory. The biography of the House of Culture was already out of print; all that was left was the cover.
‘Never judge a book by its cover’ is a fortunate proverb for the House of Culture, since its cover was ruined beyond redemption ~ scarred, torn, split, coming apart at the seams, ruined by time and human indifference.
And yet to judge it from its exterior would be to do it a great disservice. In its later, neglected years, it would be easy to confuse it with the building that it wasn’t, the House that Knew No Culture, but what remained of its spent interior told an entirely different story, as I shall now reveal.
Gaining access to the House of Culture was the proverbial piece of cake. The windows had been boarded over, but where there’s a will there’s a way, and wilful people on gaining access had hardly bothered to put the boarding back. Inside it was discovered that in spite of the natural decay and the inevitable wanton damage inflicted by the corrosive action of the human virus vandalism, remnants of the House of Culture’s former interior glory were all too poignantly evident.
Many of its original three-quarter-glazed wooden doors were for the most part still intact, including the grand, tall double doors that opened into the building’s central hall. They were even in full possession of their brass and fluted handles. The embossed Art Deco plasterwork, rising from floor to ceiling on the walls of the main auditorium, had retained the splendour of its sweeping curves. And many of the building’s functional attributes had survived degradation: original light fittings, lampshades, seats, benches and other abandoned items from the forgotten realm of everyday use had somehow weathered the storm that neglect and dereliction slowly but surely unleash.
Doors passed through & passed over in the House of Culture
But these items, as remarkable as their longevity was, palled into insignificance with the discovery of the grand artwork and bold embellishments bestowed on the House of Culture, partly in recognition of its importance to the community but more so as emblematic reminders that the village owed its existence to its long marine and maritime heritage.
I have already mentioned that the walls in the auditorium were decorated in relief curves of an Art Deco nature, that the doors stood tall and strong, their brass handles large and fluted, but now came the pièce de résistance. In the rear of the building, away from the road, it looked when viewed from a distance as though the windows had been fitted with stained glass. Only on closer inspection did it become apparent that the starfish, whale, octopus and other sea-dwelling creatures had been lovingly painted by hand onto each of the separate panes.
The naïve artistry exhibited in this work, which, please do not misinterpret me, was priceless to behold, transcended into excellence in a full-scale bas relief that occupied an entire wall, and which had as its choice of composition emblematic motifs intended as celebrations of the concept of harmonic unity between the resources of the natural world and the ordained and natural order of traditional family life.
Within this tableaux of interdependence is the mother tending to her child and the fisherman at work. The sea, a mythical figure rising out of itself, is drawing a bow across a stringed instrument, thus invoking art and culture, and in the act of doing so completes an ideological circuit that has nature in its purest sense, proletariat toil, family and spiritual harmony symbiotically unified. The fisherman, not merely rewarded for his hard and honest graft but moreover for his familial devotion, trawls a net that is symbolically more than a commonplace tool of labour. It is integral and organic to the supportive world to which he is wed in his role as natural provider.
The artistic oeuvre almost reached its apotheosis in the bas relief of Poseidon, who, in spite of his fall from grace and imminent doom, winked wryly and philosophically like the silent sentinel he surely was.
As evocative as these compositions were, it was the ceiling in the auditorium that brought home the full extent of the impending tragedy about to unfold, namely that in a very short time from now more than sixty years of talent, inspiration and history would be lost to the world forever, would irreversibly cease to exist.
And embodied within that tragedy was the loss of the sea itself, since they, the architects of the House of Culture, had turned the ceiling into the sea.
In looking up to the ceiling, you looked as one would have looked, were it humanly possible, from the bottom of the ocean, gazing up from the briny depths below to the bright blue waves and foam above. The ceiling was a masterpiece, an indisputable triumph. Even without the presence of the other artistic accomplishments, all of which in their own right verged on cultural splendour, the ceiling alone possessed the power to transform this chunk of non-descript concrete into a monumental cathedral, a place to come and give heartfelt thanks to the life-sustaining godsend that was the sea, upon whose heavenly beneficence the small community, which the House of Culture had faithfully served, had depended for its livelihood for centuries.
In the 1960s, and for many years thereafter, the House of Culture had been a place where people came to give thanks for all that they had been given, for all that they had worked for and for the community in which they lived, and really, although it all devolved to the sea, or, to be more precise, to the sustenance that the sea provided, the House of Culture was, in the last analysis, according to Soviet thinking, a proletariat’s palace.
24 February 2024 ~ Patisson Markt Restaurant Kaliningrad Good Value
It’s one of two buildings that flank the entrance to what was once Königsberg Zoo, now the Kaliningrad Zoopark. Once upon a time, it was an old eatery with a distinctly Soviet feel. In 2004, I nicknamed it the Restaurant of Many Menus, for just that reason. In one would go and out would come the menus, several at least, weighty tomes, impressively, if not dauntingly, cram-packed with a plethora of traditional Russian dishes, all for one and one for all unashamedly non-vegetarian.
Not so today. Gone are the leatherette bound-in-brown gastronomical bibles, replaced by simple card menus that are pretty and neat by design and eclectic in their choice of nosh. Attractive in themselves, they are by no means incipiently necessary, since Patisson Markt operates on the self-service principal. All you have to do is skim your pre-selected tray along the polished metallic surface of the long zig-zagging shelf and construct a meal of your choosing from the many and varied selections of food displayed in the glass-fronted cabinets.
Above: The long serving counter cuts a dash of its own; a glass and metal complement to the unadorned concrete ceiling, all agog with pipes and wires, as if plaster board and trunking have yet to be invented.
The long zig-zag cafeteria counter offers a mouth-watering selection of savoury dishes, with more than enough vegetarian options to placate the non-meat palate. As a lover of simple food, it is not often that I can say that I was impressed with what was on offer, but here I most assuredly was.
That’s me saying that …
As might be supposed, meat and fish are everywhere, but Kaliningrad has at last come of age, and there are easily more than enough food variants not containing animal parts to placate and delight the fragile sensibilities of the staunchest vegetarian. As far as I am aware, this is as true of the sweets as it is of the savoury dishes. To my knowledge, none of the ice creams, tartlets, cakes, pastries and anything delicatessen are made with pork or beef, so if sweet-toothed things turn you on, Patisson Markt should flick your switch.
The carousel below provides a tantalising exposition of the delicious variety of food on offer at Kaliningrad’s Patisson Markt.
Patisson Markt Restaurant
This welcoming restaurant next to the zoo has come a long way since it was something entirely different. Various tweaks over the years, followed by a redefining makeover, have transformed a restaurant which was perfect for its time, including its bulky menus and traditional Russian grub, into bright and breezy, hip and buffet, thanks mainly to a design initiative that cunningly unites the naturalistic world around an alfresco dining experience.
I spy whilst eating apple pie (yum), an unusual-looking roof roundel. Whatever it is and whatever it may have been, it visually consolidates the foliate theme, that of nature’s outside in.
The naturalistic elements feeding this idea are simple but effective. Take open-ended, cubicle-type, high-standing shelving units, some made of wood others from ebonised steel, fill the compartments with logs cut to order, add convincing imitation ferns, plants and jars of pickles and arrange them in such a way so that each distils its own space from the generic space it occupies.
In any other interior context, the long and angular servery would focalise the content of the room, but hived off behind a light-blue-painted screen with pockets of shelving modules and open louvre window shades, it melts into the background, letting the props and various artifices manage mood and atmosphere.
Above: Louvre screen and windows … I’ve seen this done in the Kavkaz Restaurant: the knowing that you are inside but the feeling you could be outside. The blinds and trellised glass windows add an imaginative touch.
The open plan but cleverly screened nature of the long room together with its floor to ceiling windows, pleasantly partner to give a sense of bright and airy that is just seclusive enough to create the illusion of private dining without the feeling of being hemmed in. I don’t have to tell you how well it works, as I have told you that already.
The immediate room from the entrance lobby is the one where the former restaurant plied its trade. However, its ‘old-fashioned dine in secret whilst feeling uneasily bourgeoise’ has since been consigned to history, and I am perhaps the only one who remembers its enclosure and secretly mourns the loss of its War and Peace style menus, which have faded into obscurity long ago with my youth.
Nevertheless, of the two dining areas it is still the least ethereal. The luxury of light and bright resides in the long extension or knocked-through room on the other side of the building, which, through the conceits that I have described, bring the outdoors indoors, making the restaurant summer in summer and keeping it summer in winter.
Patisson Markt Restaurant
Patisson Markt is light on your senses and also light on your pocket. It is a ‘something for everyone’ place, even for a plain-and-simple-food man like myself, and for those with more discerning tastebuds there is plenty more besides, all with taste and quality but not at the price of a trip to the moon.
Opening times Friday & Saturday 9am to 12am Sunday to Thursday 9am to 11pm
And you should try these whilst you’re at it?
Mama Mia Restaurant There are pre-set lunches at a very good price. I had Greek salad, soup and pizza accompanied by cranberry juice. Café Seagull by the Lake Café Seagull is an excellent place for simply relaxing. The terrace and the restaurant windows look out over Kaliningrad’s ‘pond’. The cuisine, both in terms of presentation and taste, received top marks and the service could not be faulted. Balt Restaurant (Zelenogradsk) Recommend the Balt? I’d buy it if I could! Soul Garden (café garden complex) If you don’t go there, you’ll never know what you’ve missed! It’s unusual, and the view is well worth viewing.
The cynic’s guide to speaking Russian fluently even if no one understands you … least of all yourself
10 February 2024 ~ Learn to Speak Russian in 1000 years
Whenever anybody hears about my associations with Russia, once they have voiced the usual prejudices and have stopped tutting and shaking their heads or staring at me in abject astonishment, I am often asked “Can you speak Russian?” They obviously don’t expect or want an affirmative answer, so I oblige them with, “Don’t be ridiculous! Russian is such a complicated language even the Russians can’t speak it!” Most Brits tend to take the answer at face value and, instead of having a chuckle, look at me with solemn sincerity and nod their heads in a sanguine way. Ahh, now it all makes sense.
That having been said, I remember remarking to our late friend Stas that in attempting to learn the Russian language, I was having difficulty following and even determining some of the rules. To this, he replied cynically, “Well, what do you expect? This is Russia not England. Which rules are you referring to?”
So, what is it that is so difficult about being English when it comes to speaking Russian? The quick, but insoluble, answer lies in the juxtaposition, English-Russian. Historically, the ‘West’s understanding of Russia, all things Russian and Russians themselves has been mired in myth, misconception, intentional and unintentional myopias and homespun mystery. Consider Winston Churchill’s cryptic comment: “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. By accepting his definition, Stas’s “Which rules are you referring to?” is meaningfully abstruse.
Nevertheless, if you take politics and the latent desire not to understand out of the equation, the fact remains that linguistically, grammatically, syntactically and the rest, the inherent dissimilarities that exist between the Russian and English languages are so obvious that gradually not being able to speak or understand it makes infinite more sense than otherwise.
In the course of my studies, I have arrived at the near paradoxical point where I can speak Russian, basic Russian, better than understanding it. Patience on the part of the second party helps, since patience is a confidence-builder. (Please be gentle with me; I am but a language virgin …) But patience is a virtue which, like decency and common courtesy, is fast going out of fashion.
In the real world (and that’s a scary place, isn’t it!), whenever I listen to, or listen in, on other people’s conversations, I very often catch enough of their words and phrases to get the gist of what they are talking about, and as I am constantly working hard on expanding my vocabulary, I’m getting slowly but progressively better. Besides, the way I see it, the effort and mental concentration involved in attempting to learn a second language, irrelevant of success, has to be good ooprasnernia (exercise) for my starry oom (old brain).
Did you know? Russian is the third most difficult language in the world to learn, superseded only by Mandarin and Arabic!
I am not sure how many different ways, scientifically proven or hearsayed, exist for learning languages. By all authoritative accounts, the one that rates most highly for success is being born into the culture of the language taught at birth, which, the experts tell us, is the language one will most likely master. However, exceptions to that rule exist. In Britain ~ especially in Britain ~ not everyone speaks their native tongue and many of those that do, either speak a different language or just speak gibberish (especially Liberals).
Conversational language courses
An all-time and back-dating favourite of year-dot language learners has to be the learn-from-recordings method. As an antiques junkie, I have often turned up old 78rpm record sets called ‘Conversational Courses’ that promised the would-be linguist that all it takes to learn the language of their choice is to drop the needle into the groove and listen yourself proficient. The fact that so many of these cased record sets have survived, and a disproportionate number with the disks in better condition than the protective cases themselves, would seem to suggest that the eager students’ initial enthusiasm quickly fizzled out on making the discovery that whilst sales talk may sell records it doesn’t necessarily a fluent speaker make.
Nevertheless, since the dawn of this methodology, which first saw light in the early 1900s, learning how to speak sales has never been less problematic. Every generation has been faithfully supplied with its version of the shellac-based miracle language-learning recording, along with the proven art and science that by combining the spoken and written word vintage dealers such as myself are destined to uncover in virtually every house clearance throughout the land a boxed set of language recordings and the booklets that accompanied them.
Thus, over the decades, we have seen vinyl ‘conversational courses’ supported by written work, books adorned with reel-to-reel tapes, partwork publications married to cassettes and, since the advent of the good old internet, a veritable explosion of visual aids, podcasts, YouTube videos and interactive learning programmes all purporting that they can provide a fast-track lane for learning languages. Not that this approach is resoundingly futile for everyone, it’s just the ‘fast and easy’ that you need take with a pinch of salt.
Four easy steps to learning Russian
To be frank, I have not the slightest idea which of the many language-learning techniques flaunted as the most effective has the edge on the other, but what I have gleaned from discussions on the subject, and from my own experience, is that in the world of learning per se, there are two preferred often separate approaches, the one being auditory, the other visual.
Take me, for example, at the risk of sounding voyeuristic, I can categorically state that I am a visually dominant learner. In other words, I memorise what I see better than what I hear. Whilst this propensity doubtlessly has its advantages, ie there’s a lot to learn from peeping through keyholes, I cannot help suspecting that when it comes to learning the spoken language any advantage attributed to a photographic memory is relegated to second place.
Illustrative of this could be when someone shouts F..k Off! Assuming you are a visual learner and the recipient of this imperative, if at the time the instruction was given you happened to have no visual contact, learnability could be gravely compromised, depriving you of the resolve to act, whereas a learner in the auditory class would get the message loud and clear, quicker than you could see Jack Robinson, and presumably without hesitation would swiftly arrive at the understanding that he or she is longer required.
Learn to speak Russian the visual way
To learn a language by the visual method, it is necessary to write out the phonetic spelling of each and every particular word and commit them to memory. Writing them repetitively after the fashion of writing lines at school for having been caught doing something you should never have been caught for, eg “I must not whinge when I am made to write lines at school, because that is what woke people do”, is a good way of hammering home the words you are trying to learn. You can also mimic your auditory peers by saying the words out loud.
Sometimes, on those occasions when I am secretly being big headed, I will take the words that I have photographed cerebrally and think the pictures through until they form and move in streams of language, thus creating sentences in my mind which I can ‘speak’ at the pace I would normally utter them. In this way, I am learning language according to my visual penchant and also listening to myself in an auditory fashion, although the only one who knows this, and the only one who can hear me doing it, is nobody else but me [a peel of fiendish laughter!]
Whoever we are and however we do it, when we come to speaking a second language, that is speaking language out loud, mistakes inevitably happen. It is only natural and also unnatural, for example think of Biden. The sounds of our own language, our native language, are familiarly attributable, whereas the sounds of a second language are, particularly during the early days of learning, mere alien substitutions, seemingly made to trip you up. Sometimes, when I am actually speaking Russian, that is speaking Russian to Russian people and know I have made a mistake, I simply think ‘Good moaning’. It always brings a smile to my face. To paraphrase the great bard, “To err is to be stupid”. And he really does have a point.
The numeric problem
Numerically challenged, and there are few so numerically challenged as I, (I got a grade 9 CSE in maths), getting my head around Russian numerals is like trying to comprehend why inadequate people need lots of friends on their social media page.
On a day-to-day basis, my latent numerical deficiency exposes itself at worst when I go to the supermarket. It’s all well and good to boast that I can count to one hundred in Russian, but as the Russian currency routinely extends into thousands and multiples thereof, I can find myself at the checkout till in a right old two and eight (and they said he couldn’t count!).
Luckily for me, the local supermarket checkout ladies are willing to make allowances. They see this silly old bugger, an Englishman, heading their way with his burgeoning basket of produce the cost of which he cannot add up let alone put into words, and they know it’s back to primary school.
There is one till in the local shop the payment screen of which is a close-guarded secret to customers. Without this visual aid, all I hear is a ‘grr, grr, grr’ as the shop assistant asks for payment. How I get around this problem is to think myself Squint Westwood, hand the lady a fistful of roubles and then on receiving the change, along with my receipt, walk away looking tall as if I have done something clever.
But enough of this idle waffling. Let’s consider some of the inherent difficulties the English person will encounter in his or her attempt to master spoken Russian.
If I were to say to you, and I am going to, ‘masculine, feminine, neuter’, you, being English, wouldn’t be too surprised, although you might feel inclined to ask, ‘Don’t you mean gender-neutral?’ and ‘Would it not be more inclusive to give equal preference to the non-binary?’ To which I would typically reply, “Don’t be so daft, you silly old leftie.”
In the context of the Russian language ‘masculine, feminine and neuter’ are the three categories of noun gender. So, how does one know which words in Russian belong to which gender? The ‘Learn Russian the Day Before You Thought of Learning It’ books, tell you that the secret lies in the last letter of the noun. Thus, masculine words end in a consonant or the letter ‘й’; feminine words in the letter ‘a’ or ‘я’; and neuter in an ‘o’ or ‘e’. However, if the last letter is a ‘soft sign’ ‘ь’, it might be masculine or it might be feminine. “Ah, so, the Russian language suffers from the same problem we have in the UK when it comes to gender identity!”
Not exactly, but one thing for certain is that my way of visual learning does not like it. To best enable my memory to flag which noun goes with which gender type, I have had to create a table and separate the different nouns into three vertical columns headed up by the three noun genders.
To give you some idea of the complications involved, let’s now take a look at the way in which possessive pronouns work with gender. For example, the seemingly innocent and simple word ‘my’.
In Russian, there are three permutations of the word ‘my’, each governed by gender association. Thus:
My (+ masculine noun) = Moy My (+ feminine noun) = Miya My (+ neuter noun) = Miyor
I see.
No, you don’t, because there is in fact a third form and that comes into play when the word ‘my’ is used in conjunction with plural nouns. The plural form of ‘my’ is ‘miyee’.
And, if that isn’t bad enough for native English speakers to get their heads around, each possessive variant changes according to who is doing the possessing, ie ‘my’, ‘your(s)’, ‘his’, ‘hers’, ‘its’ ‘ours’ ‘theirs’. Easy peasy, no it ‘aint, because there are two types of ‘your(s)’: the first used when you know somebody well and the second used when you don’t; in other words, type 1 is familiar and type 2 formal.
I cannot understand why nationals of the West have difficulty understanding their counterparts in the East, can you?
Unlike the Cold War of days gone by and the disavowed cold war of today, the language cold war has been going on for centuries and shows every sign of abating never.
Now let’s take a look at verb endings but, for the sake of brevity, in the present tense only. The endings of verbs, and indeed other words, in Russian tend to change faster than couples at a swingers’ party. That prompts the example ‘To love’.
‘To love’ in Russian is the same as ‘to like’. I’m not sure how you navigate the difference with a verb like this, when, for instance, you are talking about your history teacher. ‘I like/I love my (Moy? Miya? Miyor? Miyee?) history teacher’, but let’s not go there and press on with our verb-ending example.
The infinitive of ‘to love/to like’ in Russian is ‘Lubits’. And here are the variations:
I love = Ya lubloo You love = Tey lubish He/she loves = On/Ana lubit You (formal) loves = Vey lubitye We love = Mey lubim *They love = Anee lubyat
*Note that the ending here has a ‘yat’ sound, but don’t be fooled by this. Mysteriously, and for no apparent reason other than with some words it sounds phonetically better, the ending ‘yat’ can turn to ‘yoot’, as in ‘they sell’: ‘Anee pradayoot’. And don’t forget that here we are dealing with the present tense only. There are different forms and rules for the past and future tenses.
When making the comparative transference of English to Russian and vice versa, the two languages throw up all sorts of interesting and perplexing anomalies. The above are just two examples.
Here is another: ‘to have’.
Now, based on what has been said already, you might think that ‘I have’, ‘you have’ etc, would follow the same pattern as that already demonstrated, as in ‘Ya’, ‘Tey’, ‘On’ etc. But, as far as I can make out, not so.
My understanding of this usage goes something like this:
I have = oo minya yest You have = oo tebia yest He has = oo nevor yest She has = oo neyor yest You have (formal) = oo vas yest We have = oo nas yest They have = oo nihu yest
What was it my late friend Stas said, “Which rules are you talking about?”
The word for ‘what’ in Russian is ‘shtor’. So, you would naturally presume that the question, “What is your name?’ would begin with ‘shtor’, but that’s where you’d be wrong, because the word ‘shtor’ in this phrase is substituted with ‘kak’, which means, among other things, ‘how’. So, the question ‘What is your name?’ becomes ‘Kak tebia zavoot?’
It couldn’t be simpler if you wanted it to be.
So, let’s recap on what I stated earlier about the two fundamental and essential approaches to learning a second language (because after learning a second language, only child prodigies and masochists go on to learn a third and more).
There are two types of language learner and some of those are bi (It’s not what you think, I hope!) Some people are auditory learners, they learn not only language but almost everything around them by listening, or, as you might say in colloquial terms, ‘ear-oling’. Others are visual learners; they remember what they have clocked with their eyes. Often auditory learners and visual learners live in entirely different learning dimensions, but there are some, as in all walks of life, that are apt to swing both ways.
Unfortunately, where language is concerned and, by extension, in every other sphere of my life, I am a visual learner. In other words, I retain things through visual memory. This can be extremely useful in certain circumstances but a bugbear in others, and it is my belief that when it comes to learning languages the auditory learner has the edge. For a visual learner like me, a person who retains things better by sight than by ear, the only sure-fired way of retaining language, ie memorising vocabulary, is to write down the word in English and then visually, as well as audibly, memorise the phonetic version.
The visual language-learner at work
I have been told that I should listen to auditory recordings in Russian and watch more Russian films, films with subtitles, as an aid to learning, but so far, as well as eavesdropping on Russian conversations, I have attained little success.
Consequently, I now find myself in the peculiar position of being able to speak basic Russian better than I can understand basic Russian: ‘shtor?’ But one continues and perseveres.
One method of vocabulary expansion that is often ridiculed, but which in my case works, is to associate the sound of the Russian word I am learning with a word I know in English.
Here are some examples of words that I have learnt using the ‘association method’:
Ootoog (iron, as in clothes iron) think ‘YouTube’ Gavyadinner (meat), easy-peasy (Have yu dinner) ~ similar to Cockney rhyming slang Shootka (joke) (shoot yer) Paul (floor) I think of one of my favourite uncles Pay lee sauce (vacuum cleaner). I think ‘pay for your sauce’ and sometimes ‘Lea’ as in Lea and Perrins Simpatichnee (handsome). I pick up my smartarse phone, suck in my cheeks, angle my head, press the button and think “Me, Me, Me!” (In spite of the fact it’s not me at all.)
And then there is ‘morzhit bates’ (possibly). I’ll leave you to work out the word association for that one.
Learn to speak Russian using rude words
Go on, you are dying to ask: What about rude and impolite words?
According to language specialists, obscenities are the first words of any new language learnt. I bet you know all of those, Mick. Well, no, as it happens, I don’t. Although I have been told some of the mucky words in Russian, I haven’t taken enough interest in them to remember them with any degree of accuracy. This can only work in one’s favour, as by lacking usage confidence one is hardly likely to run the risk of bringing them into play.
All languages contain comparatively much longer words than the native language equivalents, and these can arrest the speed of learning: ‘Padbarroardock’ is a good example, the English equivalent of which is ‘chin’. Then there is ‘nearcartourrayear’, ‘some’; and ‘zharkvartayviushi’, which means ‘fascinating’, which is conveniently close to frustrating. The consolatory fact about long words is that once you have taken the trouble to learn them, they lodge themselves in your mind.
I find that the stress in most Russian words fall within the word exactly where in the English equivalent you would not expect it to be. For example, take the word ‘Bagati’ in Russian, meaning ‘rich’. My natural predilection is to place the stress on the first part of the word, ‘bag’, but in fact it should be at the end of the word, ‘ati’. Similarly with the word ‘savings’, ‘zbier rear zhen eeya’. Every part of my linguistic soul screams out to place the stress on ‘zbier’, but correct me if I am wrong, and I was, the stress occurs on ‘zhen’. Similar with the noun ‘woman’, ‘zhensheena’. Put the stress on ‘zhen’ and there’s nothing simpler, but shift it along to ‘sheena’, and the word becomes as difficult as the object that it references.
Learning to speak Russian, and to understand Russian when people (Ludi) speak to you, can be ‘troudnay’ (difficult/problematic) and very often ‘raz dra zha ushi’ (annoying) when the stress belies anticipation.
Given the assumed and more often than not justified complexity of language learning, it is not surprising that the language aids that people instinctively reach for are those which attach importance to the concepts of ‘fast’ and ‘easy’. The proliferation of technological language portals are still matched by a prodigious number of learn lingo fast books.
Forget them. Learn Russian in Five Minutes or Learn Russian Instantly Whilst Standing with Your Trousers Down on the Edge of the M25 may seem an appealing and credible way of doing it, but why would you, unless, of course, you happen to bear an uncanny resemblance to your worst best friend. For most people, excluding the most linguistically gifted, learning Russian is going to be hard graft. It takes perseverance, commitment and dedication. I haven’t a clue where these are coming from, perhaps they arrived in a boat at Dover, but I am grateful for their assistance.
Russian is a hard nut to crack (I’m talking about the language, but …). In fact, the only other language that might prove considerably more difficult for English people to learn has to be American. This is especially true whenever Democrats open their mouths. They just never seem to make sense. So, if you are English and off to America remember to take your translation app. And if you are English and off to Russia, remember what I have told you.
Craft, Imported and Specialty Beers: Kanapinis (dark)
Mick Hart’s difficult job of reviewing craft, imported and specialty beers in Kaliningrad
30 January 2024 ~ Kanapinis Dark in Kaliningrad How Good is It?
Leonard Cohen named his valedictory album You want it darker. Certainly, there were two periods in my own life when I wanted nothing more. The darkness of the two epochs were not exclusive to themselves, they commingled with each other, but the impulse to which they responded rose to prominence at separate times and the realm of human existence in which they dwelt could not be more distinct, or instinctively categorical, for one had to do with thought and feeling, the other with carnal desire.
As for the first, my predilections were helped not a little by the dulcet tones and soul-venting lyrics that Mr Cohen excelled in, but the inspirational spring that fed the river of melancholia arose from the deep and dark Romanticism of the celebrated American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The second instance I will leave unread, preferring for the moment to consign it to the incubation of your fetid and, I suspect, already bated penchant for perversion, and whilst you are trying to work it out, we will think of and also drink another outstanding beer, one that is dark but sweet not bitter.
Kanapinis Dark, easier to drink than to say!
The beer in question, and there is no question in my mind that in the land of beautiful beers it is the half-sister of Aphrodite (clue!), is the dark and dusky version of a Lithuanian beer whose unalloyed and succulent pleasures I sought to describe in my last review. I refer, of course, to that wonderful brew Kanapinis (light).
Kanapinis Dark in Kaliningrad How Good is It?
Santana Abraxas sang, “I’ve got a black magic woman” (clue!); Leslie Phillips, that smooth, saucy old English philanderer of the British silver screen, was forever forgetting the Black Tower (clue!) and forgetting to put his trousers on; the Rolling Stones told loyal fans they wanted to ‘paint it black’ (clue!); Deep Purple rocked ‘Black Night’ (clue!); Black Sabbath were black by name and also black by nature (clue!); and in the blackout during the war to numerous men-starved English women Americans came as Errol Flynn and left as Bertold Weisner (clue!).
Kanapinis dark is one of those brews that contains no additives. Water, caramel, barley malt, hops and beer yeast, that’s what’s in it. The brewers, Aukštaitijos Bravorai, have remained faithful to the traditional brewing method for many years, honouring the original recipe, open fermentation and a lengthy and assiduously monitored maturation process.
The Kanapinis siblings, the pale and the black, remind me of black and tan, not the one you can’t say in Ireland but the one you can make in a glass. They co-exist as though in the unification of innate quality, they are irredeemably colour blind, as though no one or the other vie to be thought of as anything more, and thought about together, as a lovely potable, quite inseparable, palate-tactile portable pair.
Taking the top off a Kanapinis ~ and remember, Kanapinis has one of those lightning toggle tops otherwise known as a Quillfeldt after the excellent chap who invented it ~ the air apparent is aerosoled with a sweet and musky smell, an enticing natural blend infused with heady caramels subtly tinctured with flavoursome malts, and when the beer pours into the glass it does so with a rich, a prepossessing chocolate head, the sort of thing that would be hard to sip if you had recently taken to wearing an RAF moustache and had as yet to learn proficiency in how to manoeuvre it properly.
“Please excuse my presumption, sir, but do you possess a licence for that hairy thing above your top lip?”
Without a Freddie Mercury or anything of the like to impede your drinking progress, the frothing foam incurs no danger, and once you have taken the plunge and dived headlong right in there, having sampled (and thus pre-judging) the quality of its paler version, the first sip is exactly as you know it should be, and had no doubt it would be. It is as promising as it smells, as seductive in taste as it looks and as satisfying from fart to stinish as any beer that you’ve ever made love to, and you can’t say darker than that!
Kanapinis Dark in Kaliningrad How Good is It?
Frank Sinatra, I’m sure, would be monotoned pleased to hear you say that Kanapinis goes ‘all the way’. Still, there’s little to choose between the two sisters, as both are full-bodied brews, and if ever colour was not an issue, then here is the perfect example: Sup! Sup! Sup! Ahhh!
If I had to choose between light or dark, the choice would be a difficult one, but should you care to bank roll me to a bottle of the dark stuff, I would thankee most kindly, sir, and do my best to get stuck in.
Old beer drinkers never shrink (except on the worst occasions) when it comes to revealing their true colours.
BOX TICKER’S CORNER Name of Beer: Kanapinis (Dark) Brewer: Aukštaitijos Bravorai Where it is brewed: Lithuania Bottle capacity: 1litre Strength: 5.3% Price: It cost me about 288 roubles (£2.62) Appearance: Dark and charcoally Aroma: Musky malts and burnt caramel Taste: Yum Yum Fizz amplitude: 3/10 Label/Marketing: Pop Art/Cartoon Would you buy it again? And again
Beer rating
About the beer: Aukštaitijos Bravorai | Kanapinis The brewer’s website has this to say about Kanapinis dark:
“CANNABIS unfiltered dark beer: This beer is brewed using only natural ingredients ~ water, malt, hops and yeast. The combination of caramel malts used in the production of this beer gives this beer a rich ruby colour and a light burnt caramel bitterness.”
Wot other’s say [Comments on Kanapinis (dark) beer from the internet, unedited] 😑Taste is close to aroma, but with harsh yeasty note. [Comment: Yeasty note, yes; harsh, no]
😐Kanapinis Dark is, frankly, so-so. If you can still feel the taste in the first half of the sip, then there is practically nothing left of it. [Comment: A man with a rather peculiar tongue!]
