Okulovka, BorovichiJuly 14–15, 2007 In the distant year of 1991 (before the putsch and the trip to Poland) my cousins (a boy and a girl) and I sat in this village and predicted each other’s futures. We put the sheets of paper in a bottle and buried it under a trusted landmark — a thin birch tree. We planned to read the predictions ten years later — in 2001. It goes without saying that ten years later we were all busy, we had better things to do, plus it didn’t even cross our minds. Fast forward to 2007. I came to the village to visit my female cousin. We hit the bottle until dawn, then picked up our shovels and went out to dig. Over the years the birch tree had grown to a whopping thirty metres, the trunk was now too thick to wrap your arms around. What did we dig up, you ask? Nothing at all. We wrestled with the roots and gave up.  * * * OkulovkaMapIt’s difficult to say why anyone would want to come here, except to do some groceries at the rural co-op store.  This railway station was, in some sense, lucky — this is where Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, the Russian explorer, once had his estate. That’s where the street gets its name:  M. Maclay St This also explains the Maclay Readings:  Town and district residents are invited to attend the Maclay Readings It also explains the monument (you can see the storm front that ruined my weekend near Moscow in the background):  Life runs its course in Okulovka. 
“The Okulovsky District Consumer Society” branch of Novoblpotrevsoyuz will purchase 0.7L “Port” bottles from individuals for 00 roubles 50 kopeks Capital city dwellers are used to seeing at the very least pelemeni, perhaps even ice cream, in these refrigerators. Here they contain bare pig’s legs.  Alcoholic beverages with impossible titles and tastes sit on the shelves.  The architecture in Okulovka is nothing to brag about. Although there’s one new building going up:  Also, they paint the windowpanes light blue here, just like in Byisk (in St Petersburg, just 200 kilometres away, they’ve already switched to black).  There’s also a transformer here masquerading as a building.  Spiderman’s successors getting ready to fill his shoes.  BorovichiMapThere’s a one-of-a-kind monument by the town entrance.  The town is cosy and adorable.  There are still details to feast your eyes on.  Item numbers on the houses.  The sign for a lunch break here (just like in St Petersburg) is a coffee cup. If they don’t close for lunch, the coffee cup is crossed out. I can’t remember the last time I saw an establishment close for lunch in Moscow, passport offices being the only exception.  The traffic light visors are painted silver — indescribably charming.  Our long-time acquaintance stands in the park — a monument to Kirov. He resembles the garden gnome from “Amélie” who’s travelled all over the world — our paths had crossed before, in Murmansk and Rostov-on-Don.  * * * It just so happens that I now have two navigation devices — one in English with a map of the Leningrad region, and another one in Russian (“on the Roads heading North”) with a map of the Moscow region. This is what the handover looks like.  Dorks sell terry cloth erotica in the village of Dorky.  A little farther down the road the valiant traffic police lay in wait behind a hillock. For the modest sum of 500 roubles they told us about the upcoming fixed traffic police checkpoint, as well as the second ambush just behind it. At least somebody managed to sneak a peek into the future this weekend. |
