Surviving the Siberian Winter

(Courtesy of Josh)

So, I’m not quite sure for how long I’ve neglected this blog, well over a month I’m guessing. Guess I’d better crack on.

January 17th was Epiphany Day here in Russia, and this means only one thing here…People cutting out holes in the ice and dunking themselves in the freezing water (around -40) three times, all in the name of religion. Honestly it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever seen, though this didn’t stop some of the foreigners giving it a go! I, on the other hand, chose to keep myself dry and hold people’s towels..Seemed like the most sane option.

After this event, I found out that Nadya wouldn’t be transferring to my university (i.e. Novosibirsk State), due to the uni suddenly doing a u-turn. This basically means that I’m trying to go to Tomsk as often as I can, whilst she will try to come here as often as she can. It’s not the greatest set-up in the world, but we do talk on vkontakte most of the time. That’s all going fine, by the way.

So, next up on the agenda is the Russian youth’s obsession with British culture. This caught me by surprise, because I didn’t quite realise the extent of it.

In Russia, they have a ‘student’s day’, celebrated on every January 25th. Anyway, to celebrate their own day, they chose to have a ‘Sherlock Holmes’ themed night, which basically broadened out to a generally UK night. This was great for me and Josh, as free entry was practically guaranteed. I’ll be honest, with the clock counting down to heading back home, I’ve suddenly realised that I’ve got to get my head down and learn as much Russian as possible before heading back to England. This means that going out has become a rarity here. Anyway, the night was full of loads of gimmicky features of London and goodness knows how many spelling mistakes and misconceptions, though I’ll admit that the Beatles tribute band was not actually that bad.

Continuing along the ‘British’ theme, the leader of International Club requested that Josh and I should create a presentation about the UK. We were never really sure what to do for this presentation, so ended up trying to dispel myths and misconceptions about the British people. I wasn’t really expecting many people at all to be honest, the usual turnout for this kind of thing averages around 6-12 people. However, when we got there, there were no less than 25 people there, some kind of record…Although I think some people considered it to be some form of English lesson (we didn’t yield and kept on battling away in Russian for the duration of the presentation), and there was this one guy who claimed, having been to the UK ‘more than ten times’ (he probably repeated this fact more than ten times), he therefore knew everything that there was to know about the UK, and even queried some of our views about the UK, and gave us a stern telling off for not including the ‘beautiful mountains of Wales’, despite the fact that the topic of the presentation has sweet FA to do with bumpy landscapes. Incidentally, we saw this guy coming out the post office a couple of weeks later, and did our best to avoid him, so as not to get into this discussion again. He looks about 50, so god knows what he was doing at a University society in the first place beggars belief.

In other news, Josh and I have started a new, healthy regime, where we go to the gym almost every day, and are eating healthily at the same time, so hopefully that’ll help out the chances of being selected for the Grosse Mannschaft 4th year 5-a-side team next year.

What else?

I’ve been doing some translations for the environmental agency here, and now have an accreditation in a published magazine as a translator! I’ll stick the link somewhere in the post, though I must warn you, it’s not exactly a light read (though if you do have an opinion as to how birds should be classified, then feel free to have a butcher’s).

The last thing I shall add is the weather. Since the last post, we’ve got down to -40 here, and frankly, no one gave a crap. In comparison to last year, it’s been a pretty mild winter, and people just carried on their daily routine. Obviously it’s helpful to have thermals and a decent coat in those conditions, but I think it just puts into perspective that, when the UK gets a centimetre of snow, everyone panics and the country comes to a standstill, and when it goes down to -6 in the UK, everyone decides that it’s not safe to walk on the street, whereas here life goes on without the bat of an eyelid. Though, I think now it’s safe to say that I’m rather looking forward to the middle of next month when the snow starts to melt and I can see grass again. I need a bit of colour back in my life!

So that’s it. Hopefully it won’t be as long until I do another one of these, but depends how busy I am, now that we’re coming to the business end of the year abroad. Over and out.

Random Festivities

Женя dressed up as Ded Moroz (Father Frost - Basically Russian Santa)

So, it’s been a while and I felt that it was about time that I gave you a dose of blog before you all suffered from withdrawal symptoms!

So, the Christmas period was one of the most random that I’ve experienced. It was the first time that I have spent Christmas and New Year away from my family and I spent it in the one country where the 25th December has practically zero significance.

I actually found myself on Christmas day morning having breakfast in KFC, having spent the entire night ‘raving’ in a nightclub, before heading back and talking to the family on Skype. Then Christmas dinner was a mixture of all of the cuisines that are traditional in the countries represented by our international dormitory. Therefore, we were treated to the usual traditional roast dinner, sausages and potato salad, as well as a side dish of noodles…(courtesy of South Korea). By the way, we did get a white Christmas (just to rub it in).

Then, not an awful lot happened until Новый Год (New Year), which I spent in the middle of nowhere at a recreational club in Iskitim with a few of my Russian friends (Nadya had come over from Tomsk to celebrate too). By the way, it needs to be said that, for a vegetarian, Nadya isn’t that set against meat. She ate chicken during the week she was here; twice.

One thing I did not particularly appreciate about New Year in Russia is that the celebrations did not start until AFTER midnight. This mean that we did not drink any alcohol until after the President (although it wasn’t even Medvedev giving the New Year message this year, some random old guy) gave the New Year message. However, once that had happened, food, drink, partying commenced and it’s fair to say that I enjoyed myself. On a side note, the place where we stayed had a tourist attraction of a sole bear in a cage. Was pretty random, I’ll be honest. Also, it was an exotic -3 degrees.

So, what else to talk about. Well, I’ve finally got myself a vocab learning regime sorted, which is good. And classes have started again, which is also good for getting me back into the swing of things.

Whilst on that topic, obviously I’ve known for a while now that Exeter Uni has forbidden Russian language students to spend a year abroad in Siberia from next year, which is an actual joke. The only reason I’m reminded of it is that the level of tuition here is great, location is great, and culturally it’s pretty fun. But the main thing is that the guys who are doing RLUS courses (the thing which is encouraged by Exeter) are in England at the moment and are not heading back until the end of February, which takes away a huge chunk of the year abroad away, whereas I’m spending all of my time here, which obviously gives more opportunity for Russian practice. It just seems a shame that others won’t have the same opportunity in the future. Even at the moment, I’m contemplating spending a summer here again, possibly after the end of uni, if I still think that my language skills need a bit of polishing.

To be honest, I don’t really know what else to talk about. Other than the festive celebrations, the holidays have been pretty dull. Russian Christmas (7th January) even went without anything major happening. There was a folk music concert I went to in the evening, but, apart from the contrabass balalaika, it passed me by. That’s also probably because Novosibirsk is the least festive place in the world. Even the New Year lights here looked like they were catapulted onto the trees and wherever they landed, that’s where they remained.

Weather is dull here, snowing a bit, temperature around -12/-13, though we should be getting down to around -30 next week. Standard.

Sorry for the lack of photos. Been too lax about that. Will make up for it next time.

Bye

Arrivals and Departures

In front of Tomsk State University

So hello again!

I know that, for those of you who like to spend half their lives on Facebook, there is probably something about my current life in Russia that is of interest to you, but we’ll come to that later…There’s other stuff we have to get through first, so bear with me….

Firstly, as part of my EVS program, I had to attend a training course the week before last in Suzdal, which meant that I had to make the long trip over to Moscow and take a train from there. I have to be honest, it was weird being back in Europe…the temperature was actually above freezing! This unfortunately meant that there was slushy snow, and the shoes I brought with me were not exactly water-tight. This equated to wet socks…I know, I’m an idiot for not taking decent shoes.

Anyway, it was a pretty standard affair. It included teambuilding exercises, problem solving, what to expect in Russia etc etc. A pretty cool part of it was that there were loads of Germans there, though, so I could practice my waning German at will! Also, I had my birthday there too, which resulted in way too much drink, and me having 2 hours of sleep in a billiards room (don’t ask questions, just accept that that was the way it was).

Unfortunately I didn’t get to see much of the city, as I was doing the training indoors most of the time, but when I did, I just thought that this place needed to sort its priorities out. Suzdal only has 11,000 citizens, but for some reason over 50 churches…Maybe it’s because I came from Novosibirsk, where the largest church is about the size of the one in my local village, but it just seemed like money wasted…But who I am to say?

So that was that trip, then I had about 4 days to recover from that, before heading off to Tomsk for the weekend to visit Nadya. As you may have already guessed, I had a pretty good weekend

I’ll start with the city. In comparison to Novosibirsk, it was paradise there was actually stuff to look at. There was this big rouble for starters:

And also this random load of locks stuck together on some railings:

And monuments, loads of monuments. The place was actually pretty interesting, but I was getting a bit cold outside, so probably didn’t spend enough time properly looking around the city to truly appreciate it. Would I go back to it again? I’d probably say yes, even though it took 5 hours on a bus to get there (though this can be considered to be next door, according to Russian distances).

Whilst I was in Tomsk, I stayed with Nadya in an apartment in the city. It was really quite nice. And I had a really great time with her there as well. Obviously I won’t go into much detail about what we did over the weekend, here’s not the place for it…but to cut a long story short, I arrived in Tomsk as a single man, and I left Tomsk in a relationship Everything going well, she should be transferring to my univeristy after New Year, which will be handy, but for now we can just wait and see.

Other things to have happened:

- Connor and Nikolai (the 100% Dane) have both gone back to their homelands. Shame but it does mean that my excuses to speak English have significantly decreased in number.

- United Russia have a significantly reduced majority in the parliamentary elections. At least this means that the next few months before the presidential elections should be very interesting indeed, especially to see whether Putin is put under pressure or not.

In other news, I’m staying put for christmas and new year, and there are 2 and a half weeks before we break up for holidays. It’s cold here, but life is good.

Let’s bring it up to date…

Hi everyone!,

It’s been a while since I posted, so it’s probably about time that I let you know what’s going on in my life.

Firstly, for those of you who regularly stalk me on Facebook, you’ll have noticed that the temperature here has been dipping steadily and we’ve got an average of -12 to -15 degrees and lots of snow. So that’s fun.

Anyway, activities. Well, I told you guys that I was going on a trip. I did. It seems to me like a while ago now, though I still remember loads of it. It was to the Altai mountains!!

However, I’ll admit that, although I generally had a fun time there, it was a really strange experience and not really one that I feel I can give justice to through a blog post. It’s probably better if I saved the stories for a pub session when I’m back in England, where I can fully explain everything that went on. Though if you do want a general overview, I think Josh is doing a blog post where he’s including a fair amount on the trip, so hop over to his post for more info. All I’ll say about the trip is, if you think of almost every Russian stereotype you have in your head, it most probably was proved that weekend.

Here’s a pic of the village where we stayed. More cows than people.

So, back to more recent events. I’ve recently started fully helping out with the SibEcoCentre now, and they’re making me do translations about Birds of Kazakhstan (something I’ve blatantly always been interested in), amongst other things. I’m also, as part of the organisation’s work, helping out at a local school to make the pupils there more environmentally aware…so now they want to help stray animals (though one of my friends on my floor, who got bitten by a stray dog, probably wishes for them all to die), and do some recycling. I’m also working with the teachers to try and gear their lessons towards environmental awareness, which they actually seem rather enthusiastic about (sometimes more so than me, it must be said).

So, that’s the work side out of the way. Lessons are fine, btw.

Moving onto last Saturday, I was out with Connor, and Nastya and Nadya (two Russian friends), when we got a call from Zhenia (head of International Club. Again, Russian), saying that our normal club we go to wasn’t letting anymore people in…Sooo, we ended up heading out to this place called ‘Madagascar’ (famous amongst our floor for its banner outside, claiming it does marriages for twenty quid). There was maybe about 20-30 people tops, and they were playing the most ridiculous remixes of half-decent English songs that I’ve ever heard.

After about 40 minutes or so, we were told to get off the dancefloor and they brought this guy and a chair onto the floor, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, came this scantily dressed girl, maybe about 18/19 years old, who then proceeded to give this guy a striptease!! Unfortunately they tried to get guys to do a striptease too, but fortunately that was stopped before it got out of hand!

Errrm, what else? Well we went to the Soviet train museum. It was Soviet like. It was outside in the freezing weather. There were trains. Enough said.

Then on wednesday we went to watch Don Quixote (it’s a ballet) at the theatre in Novosibirsk. It was actually pretty well done, but I was so tired that day (not quite sure why) that I slept through most of the 2nd Act and subsequently trying to figure out what was going on was nigh on impossible.

The theatre itself was pretty cool too.

And then there was last night. I was quite happily minding my own business, chatting to a few people around the floor, when I got a call inviting me up to the floor above for a Kazakh guy’s birthday. Duly I went up to see what it was like. Big mistake. They sat me down, told me to make a heartfelt speech to the guy whose birthday it was (don’t even know him) before telling me I needed to sing. Then ten minutes later they told me to sing again. It was lucky I had already had a couple of beers.

Right, I think that’s about it now. Next week I’m off to Vladimir for EVS training and wont be around for my birthday. I’ve also got a trip to Tomsk lined up soon. Should be fun.

Until next time, thanks for stopping by, world.

Ice Hockey, Russia’s got talent and the Chinese…

No decent pics, so this one off Google Images will have to do

So, here we are again, blog time….

Firstly, I’d like to start off by expressing my concern at the horrifying news that the owners of Arena, potentially my favourite nightclub in Exeter, has today gone into administration…I would like to offer my support to those in Exeter who frequently go there at what must be a very difficult time.

Anyway, back to me…I finally attended my first ice hockey match! It was between Sibir (our local team) and some rubbish side that nobody had really heard of…Getting there to watch it, however, was a bit of a nightmare, it started at 7pm, so we left at 5.45, hoping we’d have enough time. This wasn’t the case.

Josh recommended we took the bus direct to the stadium. Good idea in principle, but it stopped every 100 yards and there was only just enough room to stand, which wasn’t pleasant, especially when one guy stood next to you had clearly never heard of ‘deodorant’ before. So, we ended up getting off the bus, taking the metro and walking for a bit, getting there an hour late, but we still saw just under half of the game, and, as the ticket price was £4, it was still worth it. And we still got to see one goal in a 4-0 demolition. It was embarrassingly one-sided. Here are a few snaps:

So that was last Tuesday…then came the weekend. I was supposed to go on a bus tour through the city on Saturday, but didn’t really want to, as there is pretty much nothing to view there anyway. Conveniently I slept through it…Those who went told me that I didn’t miss much. I wasn’t surprised.

So, in order to make the day worth it, my Chinese friend suggested that he teach me some basic Mandarin in the evening, which he intended to do in Russian. I chose to prepare myself for this in the traditional Russian style…by drinking.
That led to me laughing pretty much all the way through it at the tones he used for different words..I’ll be honest, I’m not a great student after a few beers. I think he noticed. Nevertheless, I’m due a follow-up lesson soon, so I may try not to drink too much before that lesson, otherwise he may get offended…

The other noteworthy thing that happened since I last posted was last night, when we (Connor and me) were invited by a Russian friend of ours to go and watch a load of Russian bands do some cover songs. In theory, this seemed like a good idea. In practice, I needed to consume a fair amount of alcohol to survive the first few acts alone. It appears that Russian songs aren’t overly enthralling to listen to when sung by professionals, so when these guys sang them, it just sounded like the worst auditions you can imagine during The X Factor. Having said that, the majority of songs sung in English weren’t actually done that badly, especially the last band.

Oh, and some Russians were headbanging to a rendition of ABBA. Enough said, really. Don’t have any photos of it, but when Connor uploads his, I’ll put them on here if someone really really wants to see them.

So, that’s pretty much it. In other, future news, I’ll be heading off somewhere new for a bit next weekend, so I’ll let you know about that when I get back from it, and it seems that I’m away doing some volunteer training during my birthday, so I’m a bit gutted about that, to be honest. I’m gonna see whether I can change the dates, but it’s unlikely that they’ll budge.

Finally, tonight in Exeter sees the celebration of Stuart Jeffrey’s 21st birthday, so I wish you many happy returns, Stu. I’ve also been told to point out, that, due to a dubious penalty decision, Stu is now top of the FIFA rankings in his house. So well done to him (EDIT: Since publishing this, I’ve been told that Stuart is no longer number 1. So that was short-lived).*

*To those of you that really don’t care about Stuart Jeffrey’s birthday, I apologise for wasting your time with that last paragraph, but he is one of the few people I know who actually reads this thing religiously, so therefore deserves a mention on his birthday. So there.

That’s it for this week. Hope everyone is ok, wherever you are and, as a special one-off, if anyone has any shout-outs they want to have posted on the next blog entry, feel free to send them to me via Facebook or email. Though make sure they’re in good taste….

Over and out.

The reality of saying ‘yes’

Upside down MacDonald's....Just proving life is weird here

Soooo….hi again!

Sorry that this post’s been a long time coming, but to be honest, until recently it was just same old, same old, and I’m pretty sure that nobody really gives two craps about the intricacies of the Russian language and my dealings with it. I may lose my readers…

So as I was saying, life generally has been pretty standard since I last posted, but things suddenly changed this weekend, when invites to some pretty interesting stuff came around, and, considering that,

a) it’s Russia and the motherland loves to throw me some surprises when I’m most bored

and

b) if I say no to stuff, then I may as well not have a life,

I naturally said yes to everything. This being Russia, I wasn’t disappointed.

Friday night was my first ever trip to the Russian Banya (It’s a bit like a sauna, but almost not….oh sod it, just look it up yourself), so I packed my trunks and towel and headed off to the place, which was weirdly African themed, as one can see by this promotional photo of the place:

So, it was me, Josh and some random Russians in a sauna, listening to cheesy English music, talking about the life of Roman Abramovich, casually being whipped with some birch branches….apparently it’s supposed to being soothing as massages go, but I got an overall feeling of unnecessary pain, in a place that has unnecessary heat (in my opinion), and was hit by Josh of all people, creating a situation, which I’ll readily admit took me right out of my normal comfort zone…The word strange doesn’t do it justice, so I’ll just use my normal excuse: Russia!!

So, we got back from there at about 2.30am and probably fell asleep around 4am, leaving me to sleep really well until 2pm the following day (I know, I’m lazy at the best of times), when I was woken up by a certain American telling me that I have half an hour to get ready to go to a International Club picnic on the beach. It was nice, met some new people, played some football…not an awful lot to say about it.

On a side note, this weekend gone is reported to be the last warm one. Goes down to 5 degrees tomorrow (maximum) and we expect our first snow shower on Thursday (EDIT: First snow fell today!)
Siberia has finally woken up and realised that being warm just isn’t why people visit Siberia. So the 6 months of snow has started!

Anyway, that aside, the main attraction of the day was the Kazakh party on that night. They had promised us free beer in order to make us buy the tickets, but it appears it was just a ploy to sell tickets (Note to self: never believe anything that a Kazakh tells you).

So, getting to the party was the first obstacle, as the prearranged bus seemed to circle the city twice before figuring out where exactly it was, and then dropped us off at a cinema! This was really quite strange, as nowhere inside did the place scream party, until the time where we were lead upstairs to this large room with a bar. Although the whole thing so far seemed quite bizarre to me thus far, the beer was cheap so I wasn’t complaining…

Whilst we were there, we got chatting to this guy called Anton, who also decided that this party was rubbish and invited us (me and Connor) to go and visit these three Russian girls in their apartment…this next part is relatively longwinded if I said everything, but in a nutshell, one of them appeared to have a kid, they obviously lied about their age (one of them said she was 16!), Anton invited us to a gangbang, which I don’t think the girls really wanted at all, and then played strip card games, whilst drinking Bell’s whisky all the way through.

Anyway, we ended up back at Anton’s place in the city, where we slept overnight, and then, still really tired, headed back into town, where for some reason, loads of Russians were getting excited about a yo-yo competition (the place is at least 15 years behind western civilisation).

Then we hung around waiting for everyone else to come into town from their dorms in Akadem, before heading off to the Zoo, where we saw a Liger, Hugh Jackman (Ok, it was a Wolverine) and an orangutan casually enjoying himself (you can imagine what that means…I do have a video, but can’t directly upload it, so simply won’t bother with all the hassle of putting it on youtube…Sorry guys!).

Liger

Wolverine

So, that was one weekend, and I’ve got other interesting stuff lined up soon as well, so the wait for another post shouldn’t be quite as long next time.

Adios!

Only in Russia…

Ob Sea with Josh and Natalie

Hi all,

Time for another installment (cue feigned excitement)…

Firstly, I’d like to send a shout out and thanks to those of you in Exeter who are somehow finding a way to use the blog during prelash! Glad that someone found a good use for these posts….On a side note, guys, if you are playing Risk without me, I should hope that Greenland has a strong army at all times!

Anyway, onto the events of the past week.

First thing to worry about was the visa extension. For those of you not in the know, my visa initially would run out on 29th November (because Russians can’t understand why anyone would even want to stay longer..and they like their paperwork), so I had to get some new passport photos done.
Now, photo booths in England are pretty straightforward to use. You’re in and out within 2-3 minutes. Not so here. We were taken into a room, which was set up as if you were entering a photographer’s studio, and then a woman asked me to sit down, took out a camera, and started snapping away.
Having got that out of the way, she then proceeded to put the photos on her PC, then put them onto Photoshop. I hadn’t expected to be doing passport photos at the beginning of the day, so really hadn’t prepared myself for the occasion, and therefore looked quite scruffy. No matter though, as she went ahead and airbrushed my face and brushed my hair on the PC!! Nothing like Russian vanity….

Anyway, the new one should hopefully be sorted in the next 2-3 weeks or so.

This aside, I would say that the weekdays were pretty standard affairs, had my first test to do, which I got a very solid grade in, but other than that, nothing much happened until the weekend.

Saturday signalled the first meeting I had with the International Club at the university and it was actually pretty good. There’s naturally not many members, but they’re cool people and took us to a KBH show (basically a comedy sketch show in Russian), which was pretty fun, although I didn’t understand most of it, and was slightly taken aback when they whipped out a blatant Hitler joke, salute, moustache, the whole works…Only in Russia!!

Novosibirsk's bottle collection policy in action

But the Ob can be a nice place too...

Then on the Sunday, we had a picnic by the Ob Sea (not a sea, but man-made lake that they like to think is a sea). Pictures I think are already on Facebook. Then in the evening, Siberia played host to quite possibly the worst version of Oktoberfest I have ever seen! It was basically expensive Russian beers, followed by a weird Russian woman playing introductions of obscure Soviet songs to an audience of 60 year olds. It was like being at a Russian version of Butlins! We quickly left.

Now, this was supposed to be the entire post, but before I could click on publish, I was invited by a Russian to climb a 40 metre high steel tower via a creaky steel ladder attached to the side of it, without any safety. If you don’t hold on and you fall, you die. Simple. That’s probably why both Josh and Connor were probably sensible in keeping 2 feet firmly on the ground. However, that’s not how I operate, so without thinking too much about my potential death, I climbed the ladder. It was actually pretty cool when we got up there, but because it was dark I couldn’t see much, and pictures were difficult to take, though Nikolai (the Russian who invited me) managed to capture this rather unattractive photo of me at the top.

Needless to say, seeing as I’m able to still write this post, I am still alive…So Aston Villa still has its solitary fan!

So, in conclusion, hectic week, and with all these quirky things happening all the time, I think I’m beginning to rather like Russia.