For those of you who haven’t been closely following my far off adventures and haven’t had the time to look up exactly where I am, as they are far too busy reading and writing even more unnecessary, uninteresting and useless rubbish elsewhere on FB, I have actually attached a map. Look for the red circle on the right!

It is a small town called Birobidzhan in the Far East of Russia, even further East than Seoul and ‘relatively’ close to the Pacific Ocean. And to get here you first fly to Moscow, then get a 9 hour flight to the closest city called Khabarovsk and then you take a 3 to 4 hour road trip. But believe it or not the story doesn’t end there. Maria’s actual birth place is a small village even more remote and isolated, exactly on the River Amur, which marks the border between Russian and China, called Amurzet.

Now in spite of my rather brash and gritty exterior, I am really and truly a big romantic at heart, really I am. And for me such stories hold a certain irresistible magic and charm. Imagine my dear wife, the person I love most on Earth, coming from a tiny place at the end of the world, lying right on the banks of what is the world’s 10th longest river, on the border to two great countries Russia and China. I mean how cool and wild and unimaginable is that. I realise that many have foreign spouses from say Catania, London and Rome. But mine is from Amurzet! Where? Amurzet. Eh? Now where did I put that world map…

The last time I came here was in the month of January, when temperatures hovered between an astounding -30C to -37C, which according to them was the mildest Winter they had in about 40 years! Oh yippee, lucky me! As expected the entire place was a frozen wilderness with the only colour available anywhere being white. You really never saw anything else except for white, white and white. So besides not wanting to spend over an hour to find my willie again each time I need a pee, I also wanted to experience the place in Summer, when an entirely difference perspective to the place may be had. And lo and behold now all the white has been astoundingly turned into green. That’s all you see everywhere green, green and more green, making the whole experience virtually as monotone as before, but now all in different shades of green. But keeping in mind that in a couple of days we will be flying to Tokyo, followed by Dubai and then back to Malta, I really don’t think I should be complaining about green!

During our previous Winter visit I was asked whether I was interested in going to Amurzet, which is the true origin of Maria’s family and naturally I had jumped to the occasion of such an intriguing trip. So five of us including Maria’s brother had huddled up into a tiny car and journeyed for hours on end until we finally got there, when we happily jumped out of the car into the deep freeze outside to stretch our legs. Now let me try to find the right words for this next part as Maria will obviously be reading this… Her mother is errr, let us just say not at all the easiest person on Earth! And I mean not at all as in NOT AT ALL!! Ok let me stop there as who knows, I might be wanting some nooky later on tonight and really don’t want to spoil my chances!

I cannot remember the exact number of uncomfortable hours we sat cramped up in that damn car, but it was half an entire day sort of jobbie and now believe me when I tell you that we were there in Amurzet for no more than 15 minutes – yes 15 minutes, before the mum snapped at all of us to get back into the car and drive home. I am not kidding you my friends and while I was looking desperately at the others to come to an agreement on the best and easiest way of slaughtering my gorgeous and lovely wife’s mum, they just put their head down and stumbled back into the car. I admit that our options might have been rather limited. Death by drowning wasn’t an option as every bit of water was frozen solid for many metres in depth and the landscape being rather flat there is a marked absence of cliffs, but hey there was so much motivation there that believe me I would have come up with something! But no, everyone rightly understood that getting back into the freaky car and regaling ourselves to another half day journey after 15 minutes of totally pointless nothingness and why on Earth did we bloody bother in the first placiness, was infinitely better than having a fire breathing terrifying dragon at our throats for perhaps the 3, 4 or even 5 days to come. Naturally I had no other choice than to get back into the car and spend the rest of the day secretly planning all the painful deaths I could one day bestow upon my perfect and luscious wife’s mum. And just in case you’re asking why on Earth she insisted on returning after 15 minutes flat, we simply don’t know and never will. It falls amongst those unfathomable female mysteries shrouded in bitchiness, bitterness and all round bloody badness.

Ok. Now that was last time! Wanna hear about this time hahaha! Having been through such a harrowing experience, which I must admit has somehow over the years still remained stuck right up there amongst my top ten or so pet hates, it was something I felt I must one day find closure to. So as we are here in Summer this time and the scenery is very different and the majesty of such a splendid river is more akin to its liquid form rather than a solid block of ice and lastly as there is absolutely fuck all else to do – yes, I asked for another effing day of full punishment! Now as you all know I often admit to being a bit of a jackass but on this one occasion oh my, was I a total miserable sod!

Before the ominous day we sat there planning to ensure that we would not repeat our Winter disaster. We even somehow rummaged up enough courage to confirm with the m-i-l that she would allow us as much time as we wanted to generally enjoy the place. So we planned out a lovely day starting with the nice drive and now green scenery, then a nice relaxing and civilised lunch at a restaurant there, followed by a few lovely walks along the mighty and impressive Amur River and perhaps finishing off with a general stroll around town, then and only then, shall we give the green light to start the long journey home.

So we all got early, got ready and off we go. Ok so let me start by describing the road, cause I have to start somewhere and there really is a lot to say! And when I say road this is mainly for want of a better word. In such cases I was told, strange at is may sound, driving in Winter is actually easier. Basically because the truly enormous potholes are all full of frozen water and therefore perfectly smoothened out. Much of the way there is made up of totally destroyed surfacing with massive and extremely deep potholes which would literally break the car in two if you drive through them at anything more than a crawling pace. In many cases we had to drive down into, then slowly across their bottom and then finally back up the other side, the potholes being so massive. So much of the trip was braking suddenly lurching us all forward. I really and truly hit my head on the windscreen and the roof of the car countless times (really!). Swerving widely onto oncoming cars to miss potholes and to miss oncoming cars swerving widely to miss potholes… get it!

And as if these harrowing experiences were not enough, like many people here they have a second hand car form Japan, where funnily enough they drive on the left as we do in Malta and the the steering wheel is on the right, which is the wrong side for Russia. So poor, terrified, shitting me is the the front bleeding death seat hanging out in the effing middle of the road while the driving dad in law is happily tucked away on the other side of the car!!! I kid you not it was really much more like watching a frigging video game than a real life drive. And I don’t mean the ones you simply play on a monitor but the ones in an amusement arcade where you sit tightly in those simulator contraptions and you are wildly jerked from side to side and also occasionally hit across the head with a baseball bat from behind by one of the staff for added effect.

Luckily and again very strangely sounding, there were entire sections of totally unsurfaced dirt roads, which were actually much smoother and offered infinitely better conditions than the supposedly asphalted ones. Of course all of this in Winter is so perfectly concealed and covered with so much snow and ice that the experience is a very different one. What we did in hair-raising skidding and sliding last time round we did in swerving, banging, crashing and braking this time – pure and utter bliss. These conditions ensured that what would be possibly a 2 hour journey on a proper motorway in most other places on Earth, takes you more than double here to accomplish, and that’s if you’re driving like a maniac in such conditions.

Ok now that’s just the road bit, but as you can imagine there’s more, much more… Let’s now focus on mum. And to go straight to the point imagine tuning in the radio onto an incessant chatty talk show which simply never ever stops, not for commercials, no pauses, no breaks, nope, niet, nada, just pure unabating, interminable, perpetual, persistent, unrelenting, useless talk. Fine, now multiply that by the power of 100, and there you have the amount of suicide inducing constant and mind-numbing verbal diarrhea we got all the way there and all the way back compliments of my loving mother in law!!! What she was talking about was totally irrelevant and held absolutely no interest at all to anyone. She is just a compulsive constant talker. There are extremely few more annoying situations on this planet than having to endure such psychological torture for hours on end. And the monster was a headmistress (yes, scary!) so she even knows the trick of constantly lowering and upping both volume and intonation ensuring that no matter how hard you try to ignore here your bleeding attention snaps back on to her wretched voice.

So our mind was totally numbed by the relentless droning of the mum in law and our body was entirely battered by the atrocious roads, so let us now speak about the total destruction of our spirit.

Firstly it is fitting to point out that my intricately planned itinerary was rudely tampered with by the unauthorized introduction of various unexpected stops. The first was shortly after our departure when we left the road to Amurzet and veered of to their dacha. This is a makeshift structure surrounded by fields where much of their spare time and energy is spent in countryside surroundings. Sort is the equivalent of a summer boathouses for many of the Maltese. I was then informed that we had to pick up some tools to clear the graves of relatives during our forthcoming unplanned cemetery visits. Maria’s ancestors being mainly from Amurzet and the surrounding villages, no trip there is complete without a grand tour of every cemetery in a 100 kilometer radius. So this also explained why all of the flowers Maria received for her birthday were lying in the boot along with sweets and packets of juice, all ready as offerings for the dead.

Yes you read right. In this part of the world it is an ancient ritual to leave sweets and biscuits as well as small cups of fruit juice on each grave. Now I do consider myself to be very respectful and tolerant of others’ beliefs, but then again there are certain traditions which I do find rather odd and also perhaps ott, not to say verging on the ridiculous. But what really sent me into uncontrollable cough dissimulating laughing fits, compelling me to quickly distance myself from my mourning in laws, was the juice they were pouring into the cups before placing them on the graves. In a hilarious stroke of unfathomable fate it was multivitamin juice they had brought along!!! Now how ironic is that! You couldn’t invent these things no matter how hard you try haha. Dunno, was this perhaps the greatest possible definition of optimism?

So thanks to the dacha detour, plus two ensuing multivitamin serving trips to two very very distant cemeteries, not to mention the various pee stops in a variety of precarious places, we finally arrive in Amurzet a full five hours after our departure. By then I as dreaming of treating myself to a nice civilized lunch not only because I was famished but also as palliative therapy after the last traumatic five hours of my life.

You know us Maltese, if say we are going for lunch to Gozo, we first eat before we leave, then as we left early we stop somewhere on the way for a snack, we get to Cirkewwa and since there’s a few minutes to spare we pop into the kiosk there for a quick drink and a bite, then board the ferry for drinks, Twistees and a pastizz, before finally arriving in Gozo for lunch, all barely in the space of an hour or so. And then Julian Boffa and Tyrone Ellul complain!!

Suffice to say that during the five hours nothing was offered. No drinks, no water, no nibbles, nada. Five hours here is not considered worthy of anything more than fresh air, so shut up you city dwelling western capitalist softie asshole.

I on the other hand was dying of hunger, would have killed for a long cold drink and was craving something strong to calm my shattered nerves. So we head for the ‘centre’ and enquire where the closest good restaurant may be. We are directed down the road by a gruff individual, only to be told by an even gruffer one in this dubious establishment that they were closed. Upon insisting for a more intelligible answer than his initial ugh, we were informed that there is only one other eatery in town which was more of a grocery but which doubled up as a diner of sorts. By then my far fetched visions of Tarragon Restaurant in Amurzet had already long vanished and I was grudgingly settling for a beggars can’t be choosers most miserable attitude.

We finally find this extremely ‘elegant’ establishment which you could have aptly name shithole, but only if you were in a very complimentary sort of mood. And this is where and also why I totally adore my wife, cause it was her who joking referred to one of our favorite restaurants and with loving philosophy she told me that it might not be Tarragon but hey let’s take this as one of those funny extreme holiday experiences and rough it like the locals do. Having lived in Malta now for some 20 year, most of which she has been spoilt rotten by about as big a bon vivant as they come – in the form of moi, Maria now feels about as foreign to all this today as I do.
So we walk in gingerly and request a table for four, only to be gruffly informed that they were booked out for a wake, another post-multivitamin serving ceremony which is customary with the locals here. As it was evident that besides the long table readily set up for the group there was ample additional space, and based on our rising hunger and the daunting prospect of driving all the way back on an empty stomach, we politely asked whether he would be kind enough to set up a small table on the side and even feed us anything he liked, whatever was the easiest for him. At which point he didn’t even bother to reply and simply turned his back on us and left to wherever he came from, at which point I truly wished was the worse flea infested version of hell!

So there go our lunch plans out of the battered car window and as I grabbed my dad in law’s penknife and tended my wrists in utter desperation, I was somewhat dubiously reassured that we would go to the one local food store and buy some food for a picnic. In such situations when you simply have no choice, you just shut the fuck up and do what you have to do. So a couple of plastic bags later we head for the banks of the Amur River which is about the only location in town conducive to a picnic, unless you want to eat between two grey communist style apartment blocks, grabbed the provisions and headed down next to the water.

By then another hour was spent in the car uselessly toing and froing around town trying to eat, so a total of 6 hours of driving already. We are about to settle down by the river when a small garrison of seriously scary heavily armed soldiers appear out of nowhere and start shouting orders at the top of their voice sending us all scrambling for our lives back to the car. When everyone had caught their breath and calmed down enough to talk intelligibly I was duly informed that being right on the border and the very river marking the actual border, it was all out of bounds for civilians which probably explained why there wasn’t a soul to be seen.

In one final act of mad desperation I grabbed a beer and Maria’s arm and insisted on walking up and down the main road with her guzzling my beer in the street, and there you have it. I had been transformed into what most other men here have been reduced to. A hopelessly unstylish and unashamed street drinking alcoholic whose highest firm of entertainment boiled down to a five minute stroll down the street while desperately trying to get drunk.

So we returned to the car and decided to do the only thing possibly left to do. To return to the comfort of our home and picnic there where no soldiers and no flies and mosquitoes but only the ubiquitous mum in law will do her damn best to spoil our lives. Short of a quick assassination there was nothing we could do about her, the rest on the other hand we could choose to avoid.

So yes, after 6 hours of painful driving and let me copy paste the exact same words that I started with when describing the same moment during our previous winter visit. “everyone rightly understood that getting back into the freaky car and regaling ourselves to another half day journey after 15 minutes of totally pointless nothingness and why on Earth did we bloody bother in the first placiness” Oh and yes, yet again there was one last twist!! Dad realized that he lost his mobile and was sure that this happened at the furthest cemetery we had visited earlier that day. So in spite of my repeated reassurance that I would purchase another one for him so let’s get the fuck home, he insisted on returning there again, adding so much painful time to our return journey which lasted amongst the longest five hours of my life.
This finally brings me to the sad end of my even sadder story. In total we clocked over 600 kilometers and 11 hours of driving, which in those conditions are at least equivalent to twice as much. And all for a failed one hour visit.

This is definitely one story where the saying ‘never two without three’ will NEVER EVER apply!