The next 14 days, following our little tour of the city, we would spend in the same routine of going to the office at about 8 AM and leaving at 8 PM, trying to get ourselves in the rhythm of the 12 hour shifts we’ll be working on the rigs. Every day it was dark when we walked to work, and it was dark when we left. Discounting the lack of vitamin D, the routine is actually pretty easy once you stop taking the weekends off. No dreading waking up on Monday, and no sleeping in on the weekends to throw off the daily routine. It’s not like we didn’t have plenty to do. There is still an insane amount of coursework we have to get through in a limited time, and 12 hours a day is barely enough time to do it. We managed pretty well. The most difficult thing was just seeing friends’ updates on Facebook about how great their weekends were. That’s something I’ll have to get over throughout the next however-many years I’ll be working this job.
I shall now give a photo tour of semi-significant items from throughout the two weeks working in the Krasnoyarsk office.
The Office:
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| Our office was in one of the taller buildings in the area (top center) |
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| One of the views from the office |
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| Another view from the office |
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| I think we took a wrong turn at Omsk and ended up in Paris.... Either that or this had to be a really high-quality French restaurant. We never ate there, but if they can afford to put up a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower, they must be doing ok. |
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| Planeta: the largest mall east of the Urals. We heard there was a KFC in there, so we went. The KFC (and most of the other food court restaurants) sold beer. Some things about this country are just too great to pass up. |
Ok, so I don't really have much in the way of any other photos dealing with Krasnoyarsk. Like I said, our routine was pretty much all about working. Wake up at around 7. Eat breakfast. Walk to work by 8. Work until at least 8. Walk home. Work out. Eat Dinner. Sleep. Repeat. This routine was only disturbed on the first night when we went looking for KFC for dinner and on nights we had to get groceries. Otherwise, it was EXACTLY THE SAME. We did meet an American family of missionaries at KFC. While chatting with Jeff in line, this little blonde girl in a purple dress kept trying to get her dad's attention: "Daddy! Daddy! Americans!" The man's name was Kevin and he works at a church down the road. He had been there for 15 years, and three of his five kids had been born in Russia. He gave me his card and it turns out they also provide English speaking lessons to Russians. Makes me kind of wish he could have also given me some decent Russian lessons for my two weeks there. I just didn't have any time for that.
Jeff and I were the only Americans in the office. Most there are Russians, with only a small few exceptions. The operations manager for East Siberia is Egyptian, but he's fluent in English and thus we count him as one of "our own," because he's not speaking another language to other people all the time. It does really help for focus to not be able to understand the majority of conversations around you. I'm a person who can easily be distracted by some eavesdropping, so this was great for me.
A note about the Russian language. It is semi-impossible to get a good handle on it with Rosetta Stone. I stopped using Rosetta stone early on back in Tyumen (mostly because I didn't have time) and it just cannot get you the things you really want to know when you most need them, unless you've completed at least multiple levels of the course prior to arriving in your country. I have taken to just memorizing key vocabulary and sentences from a phrasebook, and I try to learn a new chunk of these every day. But it is still difficult to learn because the Russians who do know English will speak it and help us along. Someday, I'll be able to feel proficient. This is one of the reasons Angola would have been pretty cool--I already had a good handle on Portuguese, and my past experience with French and Spanish had strengthened that. I'm really excited to go to a romance language-speaking country, though, because after this I'm going to be full of confidence for the easier languages!
Next stop, Vankor Field!
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