what is siberia like?
imagine the north pole with buildings lurching from the permafrost like icebergs, and trees blasted and disfigured by a cruel wind and you are half way there. this side of the urals there is nothing to impede the wind for thousands of miles and when it blows it stings your face like cold nettles, curdling vast dunes of snow into a desert of bright white candle wax.
what is the weather like?
it's much like a slightly chillier britain really – on the milder days it’s only cold enough to freeze the corneal fluid in your eyes, temporarily leaving you able to look in just one direction; on other days, however, it’s so unbearably cold you can actually see the frost begin to crystallise around words as they leave your mouth, forming little ice sculptures in the shape of sound waves that tinkle like bells when they break on the ground. creating long and complex 'word-bergs', as the locals call them, is a form of art here and ice-poets are prized for their ability to mouth expansive words like 'inconsolable' before their tongues snap off in the liquid oxygen-like conditions. sadly, following glasnost, a fad for welsh place names in the 1990s left a whole generation of dumb siberian poets in its wake and the new wave has reacted by turning to so-called abstract poetry which largely amounts to short screams or sighs.
where do you live?
i live in a one-room wooden shack on the edge of the quilted taiga. at night i have 5.1 surround sound and hi-res dirty moon graphics, with howling wolves to the back of me and trees trailing fingers in the wind on either side. often, i sit by the fire drinking lemon tea from my samovar before going to bed beneath a bear rug.
what is the transport like?
siberian light is much like a cat and is asleep most of the time, so i go to work and come home in the dark. i travel mainly by troika lit by torches made from kerosene-soaked rags wrapped around gnarled branches. these torches have the added benefit of warding off bears and packs of wolves, both of whom are beginning to feel the winter hunger. if it is very cold, the driver gives me some of the kerosene to smear over my face in order to prevent frostbite as it has a lower freezing point than the water you expel while breathing. i have to remember not to smoke on these days, but invariably some people forget and it is not unusual to see people in the street with their faces suddenly lit by flames throw themselves head first into the snow to put them out.
what do you do?
i teach english, mainly to cossacks. i use an approach called task based learning. this involves putting students into role-playing situations, like imagining being in a shop or restaurant, where they have to use all their available vocabulary. when they find they haven’t got enough, it creates a desire to learn more. the other day, for example, i tried them with a scenario where they had to plan a raid on the tatars and it proved most useful for teaching collocations (‘complete massacre’), phrasal verbs (‘slicing someone’s head off’), vocabulary (‘guts’ ‘glory’) and grammar (‘we will kill them all’ not ‘we kill them all’). it is traditional here to finish each lesson with a shot of vodka and so, by the end of the day, i often feel quite tired and emotional.
what is the food like?
siberia is blessed with a rich, black soil that is perfect for growing almost anything, as long as it’s beetroot. in order to keep it fresh for the rest of the year, siberians pickle all the beetroot they grow. the pickle is made from fermented lichen which is available all the time, albeit a few feet beneath the snow in winter. for breakfast, then, i will usually have pickled beetroot cornflakes, for lunch pickled beetroot and chips, and for dinner pickled beetroot soup or borsch. naturally, years of such a diet has an effect on the locals and they generally live longer but look slightly more shriveled and somewhat more angry than their contemporaries elsewhere in the world.
what do they think of the english?
as their main source of information about
