all the siberians are clapping...

…so i am clapping too. i feel i am blending in rather well. when the siberians kiss their neighbours, i kiss my neighbour. when they eat, i eat. when they drink, i drink. when they tinkle their little bells, i tinkle my little bell. when they throw rice in the air, i throw it. when they start chanting something at the bride and groom, i start chanting too, even though i do not know what i am saying. i am just one more guest at the wedding, as clear about what is going on as everyone else, even though i have absolutely no idea what is being said by the man in the middle of the big horseshoe of tables with the microphone.

it has been an energetic event so far. the actual wedding ceremony took about three minutes, if that. as far as i could make out, an official at the town hall said to the couple, you are married. they said, yes we are. and they were. it seemed a very civilised way of doing it and everyone clapped loudly while the couple danced around the room to their favourite song. there was a brief pause while they played the theme to ‘the godfather’ and signed some papers, and then we all drank champagne and ate chocolates, before piling into cars and mini-buses. i had seen wedding processions hurtle around the city before with people leaning out of the windows whooping with joy and honking horns and i was all ready to do this but sadly it was deemed too cold so i just had to make do with the hurtling bit.

this involves driving for 10 minutes, stopping, getting out, eating some bread and meat, drinking champagne or vodka, taking pictures, and then getting back in again before heading off to a new place to do the same. it goes on for 2-3 hours and is a lot of fun and a great way to see the city. many of the places we stopped at were memorials to the great patriotic war – the second world war. it is traditional for newlyweds to go to these fantastic monuments (giant candles and flames) to give thanks for the enormous sacrifices made by the 20 000 000 who died defending the motherland.

from there we headed to the reception where i am busy clapping and blending in. suddenly, however, i notice that everyone is looking at a point behind me while they are applauding. i turn round to see what it is and find that the people behind me are looking at a point in front of me. it takes a while, but sherlock-like i eventually put two and two together and realise my cover is blown. they are all actually looking at me. the strange noise i hear coming from the man with the microphone begins to take on a semi-familiar ring too – it is my name with russian vowel sounds. i begin to wonder, have i done something wrong? maybe i didn’t tinkle my bell hard enough or i didn’t kiss my neighbour when i was supposed to. at which point the mc breaks into english – we are honoured today to have a great guest from england…

he continues with this elaborate build-up and i have to stand up and take a bow. he goes on, as if leading up to something. i begin to suspect i will have to make a speech. i am gripped by linguistic paralysis. ever since i came here, my response to russian is to speak italian – it is involuntary and pointless. half of my brain is calculating how many people in the room speak english – i estimate 4 at the most. the other half is compiling this fabulous italian encomium using both the passato prossimo and the passato remoto. i think of my italian teacher, she would have been so proud. and then i remember where i am. think in english, i urge myself. i run through other speeches i have heard. there aren’t any. my head is empty. i wonder, what is a speech? the mc finishes his – i am vaguely aware that it has been magnificent. he has built me up to be some kind of literary great, a master of english prose and verse equalled only by shakespeare. i am a giant, a legend. my words will be beluga for the brain, people will talk about it for years to come, it will be the greatest moment of their lives… he pushes the microphone into my hand. i cough. it will be alright i tell myself, you always think of something. i ponder idly what it might be while the mc gestures for me to speak. everyone is staring at me. er, i say, all the best from england…

and sit back down. i am struck straightaway by the sheer awfulness of the speech. it is worse than anything i have ever heard. if i had stood up, dropped my trousers and farted for 30 seconds it would have been better. i am stunned by myself. these lovely people have invited me to one the great moments in their life and this is how i repay them? naturally, all the siberians are clapping, and, to compound my own ineptitude, as a reflex i start clapping too. i console myself with the thought that only 4 people will have understood it and that even those who did will not grasp how inappropriate it was. at the earliest opportunity i nip out to the foyer for a fag. there is a crowd out there smoking too. immediately they all start speaking english to me – great speech, the mc said it was an example of the british art of brevity as beauty, well done, etc… i am simultaneously mortified that so many people understood what i said and overwhelmed with their generosity of spirit. at which point everything moves on and they begin to show me how to dance siberian-style. it is one of my life’s ambitions and, as five of us fall on the floor in a heap of uncoordinated limbs, i stop caring that i can’t speak english anymore.

every day brings a new low...

…in temperatures. the temperature is an obsession here and every other building has an electronic thermometer on it telling you quite how unimaginably cold it is. apparently, it even affects property prices because the north of the city averages 5 degrees less than the south. earlier this week it got down as far as minus 28 and even the siberians think it’s cold below minus 25 and they shut the schools for the under-12s. bizarrely, this actually felt warmer than later in the day when it rose to the dizzying heights of minus 19. it is the wind that makes the difference. imagine pressing your face against the inside of a freezer, scraping your skin against the ice and repeatedly slamming the door against your head – well, it is much worse than that. i was only outside for 15 minutes and could feel the epidermis blackening and dying on the tiny bits of exposed skin on my face.

naturally, none of this impresses the siberians. many of them are like old people in their 80s who add a few years to their age and pretend to be in their 90s, as if they weren’t old enough. minus 28? this isn’t cold – last winter it was minus 45. you should have seen it – now that, my foreign friend, that is cold. i even did a little experiment with my students, getting them to assign temperatures to the scale - freezing, very cold, cold, cool, mild, warm, very warm, hot. warm came in at 0 degrees and mild at minus 5. obviously, i thought this was ridiculous, but then when the temperature rose to minus 10 the next day it actually seemed like a mini-heatwave and i was too hot. i think this is what they mean by going native.

i knew something was strange...

…even before i opened my eyes. it was darker than it should have been, like the earth had drifted away from the sun during the night and the daylight was thinner. i wondered idly about this scenario for a couple of minutes (the end of civilisation, mass extinction, no more кафе с молоком chocolate bars) before deciding to open my eyes to see if it was true. it wasn’t. it was much more frightening than that: the view from my windows was almost entirely obscured by snow. i had gone to sleep in a flat and woken up in an igloo. wow, i thought, that’s a lot of snow. i can see why siberians don’t bother with curtains. and then i remembered – i live on the second floor.

because i am five i thought this was very exciting and had to get outside as soon as possible, assuming it was actually possible. to honour the occasion, i decided to wear my hat. the way people talk about hats here, endlessly discussing their importance in reverential tones, i have come to think of them as magical objects granting their wearers almost supernatural powers that make you immune to radiation, bear attacks, coverage of the tomkat wedding, and even the cold. while the first three are true, the last one is true only up to a point – that point being some five seconds after stepping outside into a blizzard where the temperature is minus 12 without the wind factor (you will see, i have been told, minus 40 without the wind is a lot better than minus 25 with it – can’t wait).

however, the ferocity of the cold took second place for once to the stupendous scene before me. i had never seen this much snow before. most of the known world had disappeared – cars, trees, buildings and any sense of place. and still it was snowing. but this is siberia and they have their own forces of nature to deal with anything the winter can throw at them – they are called babooshkas. these old women, with snow shovels seemingly twice their size, were out clearing doorways and sculpting defiles through which the rest of us could plough our way to the bus stop.

nothing stops the buses either – literally. you see them come looming out of the violent fog of flakes about 50 metres away, two unsteady lights hovering in the air above where the road used to be. from 25 metres it begins to take on a shape and you see the driver pressed hard against his seat, everyone else crammed at the back of the bus, desperate to slow it down. it skids into touching distance and you notice that the road is several feet lower than it used to be. the doors fling open but still it hasn’t completely stopped. as it edges by, you realise it isn’t going to stop either. people inside the bus hold out their hands and you grab on and jump before the bus picks up speed again and heads into the city. commuting was never so much fun.

along the route there are hundreds of workers with shovels, snow blowers, and tractors trying to clear paths along the roads and pavements. even with all that manpower, however, the snow is still winning and the city is gradually sinking into drift, like a giant wedding cake. as the bus slides through my stop i jump out and land up to my knees in snow. i am helped out by two men in enormous fur hats while, bizarrely, the theme from ‘the third man’ plays over the bus stop tannoy. i turn left because that is what i normally do but i have little sense of direction because the snow is even heavier now, blinding me. i see lowrie-like black blurs moving in the flickering whiteness ahead of me and decide to follow them. coming to a junction, i find that crossing the road is now a matter of life and death. the drivers cannot see, the cars cannot stop and the difference between the road and the pavement is over a metre and a half in places and it is like scrambling up a sand dune.

finally reaching the office, i feel quite heroic. i expect medals. холодно? my friend asks me with a triumphant look on her face – are you cold? i tell her i am and wonder at the glint in her eye. looking around i notice that she is not alone and that, as it turns out, everyone is in a terrific mood. eventually it is explained to me: this is what they have been waiting for. we have had snow and cold for a while now, but this is the real deal and they can finally relax. winter has arrived and siberia is in its element. knee-deep, in fact.

taunting sick foreigners...

...is what passes for fun round these parts.

russian tv...

…god alone knows what that’s about. i say this because no-one i know watches it, except me, and that’s because i am sick and have nothing else to do except smear raspberry jam across my fevered brow. obviously, i don’t understand most of what’s said. it does have great range though. there is one channel seemingly devoted to replaying obscure english football games from about 10 years ago. there is another channel which shows nothing but models walking down the catwalk complete with the most head-sickening camera movements known to tv. my favourite though is probably the russian version of nickelodeon. russian cartoons are dark and flickering, the colours always charred. and the subjects are equally grim – a puppy with cheeky, joyful eyes hides in a dark alley while a crippled old woman gets off a night bus into the snowy, deserted street. the puppy then launches itself from the shadows and viciously attacks the woman, dragging her screaming to the floor before scampering off with her handbag. another one showed a dappled doe frolicking in the snow, the winter sun casting bleak shadows over the animal’s joy before a hunter emerges from hiding and shoots the deer square in the head. touchingly, the animators lovingly detail the powder burn around the entry wound, as if searching for the mystery of the doe’s lost soul in the blackened fur.

i have been given a copy of winnie the pooh to watch when i get round to fixing up my vcr. it is not the disney version. by the look of the cover, winnie is a dark and mournful bear with cruel teeth and claws, while eeyore is a shabby drunk close to death by cirrhosis. if there is a tigger i suspect he will savage winnie in some kind of terrible cartoon cock-fight. the whole thing looks like it was directed by bergman deep in a ten-pill-a-day depression. this is what makes russian tv so very uplifting. there is a programme called ‘calm down’ which, in between shots of a presenter as happy as the sun, shows nothing but people drowning, houses burning, animals with two heads dead in a barn and other brutal stuff like that. i could not understand the title at first, but having watched the cartoons, all is clear: you are going to die, it will be terrible, but so what – get over it.

(as if to prove the point… i have been watching a russian version of ‘the 3 musketeers’ while typing this. they do not buckle much swash, it has to be said. instead, there has just been a 10 minute scene where one of the musketeers toys with shooting himself in the head. he keeps crying about something and symbolically blowing out candles until the room is almost pitch black. eat some jam, i shout at the screen. doubtless i will not find out what happens as this is on a channel which keeps strictly to a 2-hours-per-film schedule and if a film happens to over-run this because of adverts or because it was made by kubrick, then they simply lop the end off. just like life.)

russian illnesses...

…are different from ours. they are more soulful. magnetism from the sun’s rays, for example, is a popular cause of illness here, leading to madness at one extreme and a general dispiritedness at the other. several of my students have also been ill due to the prevalence of a low pressure system. when i ask them what treatment they take for it, they reply dolefully that nothing can be done. because of this the weather forecast has a whole different meaning, and i often check it to see whether certain of my students will be talking the next day or just quietly weeping through the whole lesson.

if russian illnesses are different, then so are the treatments. i know this because i am sick. yesterday i woke up with a throat full of nails. concerned that i would be too hoarse to speak properly i texted one of my colleagues to ask if she could get me some throat lozenges for when i arrived. (this is not laziness on my part, by the way, rather that i have no idea what i am buying – c.f. the story about the mouthwash which turned out to be russian false teeth solution). half way through the first lesson, two of my colleagues asked me to step out into the corridor where one of them had what looked like a small plastic fire extinguisher. try this, she said, it’s better than that western chemical stuff. what is it? i whispered, wondering where my packet of tunes was. eucalyptus, i was informed. desperate, i sprayed it into my mouth, but apparently i was doing it wrong.
- not on your tongue, on your throat.
- (spray) eeugh?
- no, further back.
- (spray) eugh eeugh?
- no, no, no. put your tongue down.
- he’s not putting his tongue down.
- i know.
- (spray) eeugh?
- no.
- here, let me do it. stick your tongue out. no! not that far! there… (spray)
- no, his tongue was still up. let me have a go.

the corridor is a busy place and soon a small crowd had gathered to watch, offer advice, and generally eat picnics. however, with one of them more or less holding my tongue on the floor with her foot, and the other forcing my upper palate against the ceiling with her elbow, my two colleagues were finally convinced they had found the right angle with which to douse the fire in my throat and set about liberally spraying me in eucalyptus. had there been a stray gang of koala bears roaming the area at the time, no doubt my demise would have figured on the ‘unusual crimes’ section of ‘crimewatch’, but, as it was, i merely ended up with the unnerving feeling that i could smell the australian jungle somewhere close by.

of course, it didn’t work, so this morning when i woke up with every joint in my body wracked with pain, i was very clear in my text about the need to supply me with industrial strength lemsip. i want to sweat paracetamol, i said, nothing else will do. however, my boss decided that she wouldn’t let me come to work in case i developed ‘angina’ (pronounced ‘angeena’) which is some terrible russian throat disease which can kill you if it rains, or something like that, and so she promised to bring the medicine to my flat. two hours later, with my head pounding and my limbs aching and my nose running, my boss turned up at the door. i have your medicine, she said. we decided that that western stuff is no good for you so i got you this instead, she went on, holding out a fancy paper bag. please not more eucalyptus, i inwardly prayed, but no – it was half a cup of raspberry jam and a small container of baby food.
- that looks like half a cup of raspberry jam and some baby food.
- yes. raspberry jam contains the same chemicals as aspirin. you put it in your tea.
- i put jam in my tea?
- yes.
- you are a hippy.
- i am not a hippy. 150 million russians know this.
- and the baby food?
- i wanted some. it’s very good for you. i will leave you half.
- thank you.
- you are welcome.

needless to say, i am now fully cured and am currently working on a paper for the lancet about how to cure gout by putting marmalade in your coffee.

andre has a gun...

…in fact, now i look carefully, he has two guns. they are handguns and he keeps them in the glove compartment. luckily, andre and me have an understanding: he won’t shoot me as long as i pay for my ride in his cab and don’t mention the fact that he is the worst driver in siberia. or the fact that he had to stop several times before he found where i lived. i don’t blame him for this because i don’t know where i live either. people ask me and i say я не знаю – i don’t know. this is unfortunate because one of the few topics i have mastered in russian is giving directions. people seem to know this because i have been stopped several times in the street by people asking me for directions. i don’t know if they are armed or not but andre is and he knows where i live now, which is more than i do. he is ecstatic that i don’t mind he is overcharging me by 50 roubles and almost swoons when i give him a 10 rouble tip. this is when he opens the glove box and gives me his card, writing his name and personal number down so that i can call him direct, like we are friends. i imagine him ringing me:
- hey sputnik, want to come play wild west?
- love to andre, but i’m fresh out of semi-automatic pistols.
- that’s ok sputnik, i have two: one for me and one for you.
- great, can we use hollow points this time?
- for sure, who will stop us?