To Office, To Office, To Learn about Drilling! 6 – 20 Nov 2011

Our first night in Krasnoyarsk, I slept like a baby. You know…waking up at all hours of the night and disturbing others. My “bed” was a fold-down futon-like apparatus with a major crack right down the middle. It would be a week before I realized there were linens in one of the living room cabinets. But hey, at least I had my own bedroom. Jeff was on the couch in the living room, which, he didn’t realize until two weeks later, was a hide-a-bed. Obviously, we weren’t really given too much info to work with, other than, “here are the keys to your apartment.” But that’s a good thing, right? It forces us to re-learn how to fend for ourselves after being provided for at the training center. This is the “real world,” after all.

Typical residential block. Apartments galore!

After I finally pulled myself out of bed at about noon on Sunday—the latest I had awakened since leaving the US—we took advantage of our one day off and decided to explore Krasnoyarsk. The lack of apartment internet spurred us to find an internet café. Jeff’s Lonely Planet Russia guide recommended a couple places, one of which was described us, “below the Playboy Club,” so we obviously we figured we would try that first. The map in the book had little to no real detail, so we asked a cab driver we found on the street. The place supposedly didn’t exist, according to his maps, so we chose the next place on the list, with a far less intriguing location. The driver dropped us off at the address on Mira Street, but there was no immediate indication of an internet club. I was trying to figure out where we were on the crappy guidebook map, so we walked awhile to reach a landmark (a stadium) to get our bearings. We ended up on Lenin Street, parallel to Mira, and decided just to walk down it and see what we might find.

We came across a downstairs café, called “English School,” and we rejoiced in the possibility that the employees might actually know English there (not to mention it advertised free Wi-fi). Sometimes, stumbling through poor Russian ordering can be mentally and emotionally taxing. Luckily, the cute waitresses usually just smile and giggle, and I pretend they think I’m a cute struggling foreigner and not just some bumbling fool. I’m an optimist. In the café foyer was a bulletin board with English advertisements for different tours and day trips, indicating that this place really does try to cater to an international crowd. The waitress did speak English, which actually made me more inclined to want to try some Russian with her (although she would still respond with English). I did my good deed for the day by teaching her the word “non-carbonated” for water with no gas. I ordered a steak, and it actually came out more steak-looking than any other thing called “steak” I’d seen so far. It was still pretty small, compared to American steaks, but it also was cheaper, so it’s ok. Good steaks in America are overpriced, anyway. The café also had a very well-done medieval theme. I’ve come to realize that they take theming very seriously here.

We got our fill of the internet, and we went on our merry way to find the big city park. Jeff had wanted to get a picture of a Lenin statue since arriving in the country. We didn’t see one in Moscow (though we saw his tomb), and we only ever drove past the one in Tyumen. But the one in Krasnoyarsk was supposed to be quite nice. So, off we went to find ol’ Vladimir. Sure enough, he was exactly where the map said he was (once we realized where we were on the map (a lot of cross streets just aren’t labeled and can throw you off for a few blocks)), in a large square in front of a big government building and adjacent to the city park.

Vlad and me

Next we explored the park. It is apparently common to have carnivals in the city parks. Our day in Moscow, they were just dismantling a portable roller coaster (it looked like the EuroStar, a portable inverted coaster), and in the city center of Tyumen, there was also a carnival area. That’s something pretty cool about Russia. Of course, the ride season is probably pretty short, but I wonder if they have any sort of good winter carnival celebrations. Ice slides come to mind. They were the 16^th and 17^th century Russian ancestors of the modern roller coaster—Russian Mountains, as they were called outside the country. In fact, the word for “roller coaster” in several languages is, literally, “Russian Mountain.” But I digress (thank you, Russia, by the way, for your probably-insane-at-the-time thrill-seeking efforts that led to such great developments in amusement attractions). But yes, there was a little roller coaster in this city park, but to my dismay it was already closed for the season. Eventually, I will ride a roller coaster in Russia, celebrating the roots of one of my original life obsessions and the reason why I chose to be a mechanical engineer.

There wasn’t much else of interest in the park besides a haunted house kind of attraction that may or may not have been open and had a hell of a statue out front.

In the US, this would probably scare the children. But in Russia, children scare statue!!

We then headed down Karl Marx Street. We decided to buy SIM cards for our phones that worked in the Krasnoyarsk region, and we went to the MTS store to attempt to buy the exact same plan we did in Tyumen, but apparently plans are different even across adjacent regions in this country, and as far as we could gather in our very comprehension-lacking conversation was that the card plan we bought in Tyumen wasn’t available here. I chose another plan I had read about on their website, and after laboriously figuring out what we were trying to achieve (much more giggling by the cute female employees) we paid for our plans and got the hell out of there. We would later find out that there was something wrong with our SIM card activations and we couldn’t make any calls with our Krasnoyarsk plans, despite having minutes available. Where’s Paul, with his more advanced Russian bartering skills, when you need him? The answer is Irkutsk.

After those difficulties, we decided to just get some food and find our way home. We figured we could walk back instead of taking a taxi. This city, despite its population of nearly a million, is relatively compact. And now that we actually knew where our apartment was in relation to the rest of the city, no longer a just a similar-looking building surrounded by other matching blocks of buildings, it would be pretty easy for us.

We walked into a mall, looking for a food court and a bathroom, and we found what we were looking for. The gender labels on the bathroom can be somewhat confusing. Same places merely have an upward pointing triangle or a downward pointing triangle. The upward one symbolizes a female (kind of dress-like) and the downward one symbolizes a male (big lat muscles). This goes against my previous symbological beliefs I gained from The Da Vinci Code, in which the female can be symbolized by a downward triangle (the womb, or the challis) and the man by an upward triangle. Don’t make this mistake! It also seems that passersby have a tendency to look at us and giggle, which happened multiple times in this one mall. It might be the matching laptop backpacks we both sported, along with the slight look of bewilderment of someone not entirely acquainted with his surroundings, which may have suggested silly missionaries or something. It may also be attributed to the fact that I almost walked into the women’s bathroom on accident, even after a woman walked out, thinking that she was actually in the wrong. But luckily I realized my error before crossing the threshold entirely. I don’t think anyone actually saw, nor do I think that led to the giggles we later received, but whatever. I’m just really growing accustomed to the Russian girl giggle.

We ate pizza in the food court. Again, there was mayonnaise on it. Still, it is unacceptable.

We left the mall and proceeded to walk the length of Lenin Street to get back en route to our apartment. We passed some museums dedicated to authors that came from Krasnoyarsk. The city was actually very arts-friendly back in the day. Anton Chekhov was also so bold as to declare it “the most beautiful city in Siberia.” Many of these museums used to be old log mansions of the former aristocrats of old. We also passed the Krasnoyarsk Philharmonic Concert Hall, which was a nice modern building (forgot to take a picture… oops). The rest of the walk back wasn’t all that eventful. There were some downed power lines just chilling on the sidewalk as we passed, which was a bit unnerving, but I’ve grown accustomed to things that seem slightly, um…. Off.

A park we walked through on the way home.

To be continued….