Indian Summer

We’re having an Indian summer here in Krasnoyarsk! The thermometer I’ve found outside the kitchen window is registering a balmy 14 degrees Celsius, and people are out in the street wearing just their underwear.

The thermometer is unlike any I’ve ever seen. It’s weathered and yellowing, the plastic casing has been gnawed away by frost and pigeons. But most striking of all is the fact that it goes down as far as it goes up. The highest temperature it can register is 50 degrees C, and in the minuses, it plummets to an ominous -50. It’s unlikely that the weather here will ever get near the maximum temperature, but I’m expecting it to get very near the minimum!

I get the idea that in some tropical areas, you can predict more or less to the day when it’s going to start raining. That’s not the case here. I’ve been told that, while it will definitely be really really chilly from October or November, there’s no guarantee that it will be snowy all winter. Apparently, last year was a fairly dry winter. There was snow, but not consistently. This is particularly ironic, because last year was also the year that Krasnoyarsk hosted the Winter Universiade, an international winter sports competition for university students. Krasnoyarsk doesn’t get very much attention normally, and this was a big deal. Someone told me today that around forty billion roubles (around £500 000 000) were spent in preparation for the event. I’d like not to believe that. The nice old houses in the centre were refurbished, they bought new buses, and they resurfaced lots of roads. Basically they gave Krasnoyarsk a makeover. For half a billion quid. And whatever they did with all that money, the end result was that they got sod all snow. I live for that kind of irony, but I reckon the organisers probably weren’t so entertained. The same person told me they thought that there was foul play involved in the games themselves. I think that’s really unfair, and that such accusations should be made only very cautiously. The results certainly show no trace of funny business: Russia narrowly won with a commendable one hundred and twelve medals, South Korea were just edged out of pole position, finishing in second place with a very worthy fourteen medals.

The lack of snow at the Universiade was one of those cruel tricks which the weather here seems to delight in playing. It’s less funny when you’re on the receiving end, though. All of last week, when it was so cold that your breath steamed up, the heating wasn’t on in our flat. In Russian housing blocks, everything is designed for mass use. Everyone’s full bin bags go down a rubbish chute in the stairway, for example, and a single, very narrow service lift is the only alternative to the concrete steps which go up something like fifteen levels. This is all very commendable and pragmatic. Less cool, though, is the fact that the heating is all interconnected. So last week Aygul and I were shivering in our flat, waiting for someone to take pity on us, turn on the whole block’s heating system and defrost our toes. Instead, the heating was turned on today. The weather tomorrow is expected to hit a freak high of 24 degrees. Of course, there’s no option of turning this heating off once it’s on. Nice touch.

Work finally got busy yesterday! I had some corrections to do, some photos to look through and make an album out of, some social media posts to do, and the planning for the ecology festival seems to have taken off (although I can’t take much credit for that). The horoscope on the bus today told me to pay extra attention to my finances this week. I think I’m safe though, having just checked my banking app. Dinner yesterday cost £3.75. Today, it cost £3.08.

Yeah some would call me the Cat Whisperer. It's no biggie, you know, just trained a kitten to brush my teeth