Never Smile

It’s honestly a mystery to me what happens with my mornings. Maybe I’m still adjusting to Krasnoyarsk time. I’ve never been into work earlier than 13:00, and it’s not like I’m going out for runs or anything. Every day I just lie in, and then I guess I must always just get bogged down reading stuff or watching YouTube videos about how to cook borscht or something. Or maybe I just eat loads. Yeah that must be it. I reckon I get up at 09:00 every morning and spend three and a half whole hours ploughing through grechka. Because the next most likely explanation is that I have short-term memory loss, and I’ve actually been training to wrestle bears every morning, which doesn’t seem very likely. The third most likely explanation is that I’m not in Krasnoyarsk at all, I’m actually inside a huge simulated reality, and the computers which invented it to distract me while my body is being used as an energy source haven’t got round to making a morning in this reality. I really hope that last one isn’t true, because that might mean that I don’t have 30 chocolate wafers in my cupboard waiting to be eaten, and that would be a real bummer.

The first thing that I remember doing on Sunday was leaving the flat at a very leisurely 15:00 and getting a bus into town. I didn’t have work that day, but everyone warned me that autumn was coming the next day, and that temperatures would hit freezing later in the week, so I was keen to soak up the last bit of sun that I'm likely to get until I go back to England in some outrageously distant month like May. When I got off the bus, I headed for Tatishev Island, sat on a tree trunk, and read a book about the Caucasus. The Caucasus is a mountainous region between Europe and Asia, and it has this mystical quality in my imagination. I think that’s because of a novel I read called A Hero of Our Time which is about a sweepy Romantic type on leave from the Russian army travelling through the Caucasus and being a bit of a jerk to everyone he meets. It contains lots of folklore and expresses the idea that you can experience the sublime through proximity to nature. I’m not selling it very well, but it’s actually one of my favourite books. It managed to capture my imagination in a way that bleak Russian novels like Crime and Punishment never did. When I tell Russians that I like A Hero of Our Time, or that I want to go to the Caucasus one day, they tend to give me a suspicious look. Lots of people think that it’s lowbrow literature (with good reason), and I think the Caucasus is probably considered a fairly dangerous destination. Again, that might well be entirely justified. The book I’m reading now is called Days in the Caucasus, and it’s the autobiography of a woman who grew up in Baku just as the Soviet Union was clanking into gear. It’s only just been translated into English, which makes it feel like a hidden treasure, and adds even more to the appeal of the beauty and mystery of the region it describes.

As I sat on my log, (which also had a great view of the wide River Yenisei), families rode past me on mountain bikes, people set up fishing rods, and old women with headscarves hobbled by with bulging bags full of mushrooms that they’d been collecting. It all felt thoroughly outdoorsy. And to make this moment all the more scenic, the leaves of the birch trees around me were beginning to turn an anaemic yellow, the first herald of autumn.

Tatishev Island

Then my phone rang. It was Olga. We’d been planning on having a go at skateboarding some time, and now we both had a free evening, so we were going to give it a shot. When she turned up, Olga not only had a skateboard, but was wearing an incredibly skatery outfit. Denim jeans, a red hoodie underneath a denim jacket, and one of those hats that looks like a cap from the back but a woolly hat from the front. I was wearing a purple striped half zip jumper from Crew, which is probably the preppiest item of clothing I own. I like to think I was compensating for her being too suitably dressed. She also offered me some chewing gum made from tree sap, which wins the prize for the most Siberian thing I’ve come across so far. It’s weird. It doesn’t taste nice, as such, but it’s chewable, which is the main thing I guess.

Skating was really successful. We both got the hang of it within a couple of minutes, and by our fifth attempt we were doing some pretty convincing 360 inward double heelflips.

Joking, we were both rubbish. Those things are lethal. I swear they have some sensor in them which knows when you’ve taken your back foot off the board, and makes it accelerate out from below you at just the right time. You can be trundling along at 0.001 mile per hour one moment, and the next thing you know, you’re in mid-air, and the skateboard is stuck in a tree somewhere on the other side of town. Somehow, I managed not to break anything, so the Russian hospital system is one joy which still awaits me.

Woah, no hands!

Then we got shawarma, which the Russians call shaurma. Or shaverma. Or shavukha. Pretty much anything but shawarma really. I think it’s designed to confuse unsuspecting students on their years abroad. Whatever they call it, though, it’s damn tasty. I’ve decided that it’s the perfect student food. Just as satisfying as a greasy burger, but less greasy, and with some green stuff mixed in, just in case you were starting to feel guilty about eating something that tasted so good. You have it in a big wrap, and you can also throw some chips in there if, like me, you feel that a carbohydrate isn’t really a carbohydrate unless stuffed with a second carbohydrate. We just sat on a bench and ate for a good half hour. We didn’t talk, we just ate. It was too good for talking. As far as food in Krasnoyarsk goes, borscht has won my heart, but schaurma/shaverma/shavukha has very much won my stomach. The only annoying thing about it is that the company that makes it is called ‘Chicken Dёner’, which is like a cross between the term ‘chicken dinner’ and the word ‘doner’, but both of them are wrong. It’s just twice as wrong.

Chicken what now?

The main bridge across the Yenisei

As we were wandering through town, I got my phone out to make a note of something, and Olga saw the words ‘Never Settle’ at the top of my phone’s notes app.

‘Does your phone say never smile?’ She said, with a mixture of confusion and delight on her face, like a mother who’s just found her toddler with an A Level Further Maths certificate.

‘No it says “Never Settle”. It’s the slogan of the company that made the phone.’

Olga looked crestfallen. ‘Oh. Never smile would be better.’

After fiddling with the phone’s settings for a few minutes, we worked out how to change the slogan so that my phone screen says ‘Never Smile’ every time I make a note of something.

 It had been a very Siberian day so far, what with the skating, the sap gum, the shawarma, and the new anti-public-displays-of-weakness/happiness personal slogan. We decided to round it off with a lesson in how to be a good Siberian man, taught by Olga. We resolved first of all that I needed a tracksuit. It needed to be a tracksuit with stripes down the sleeves, and preferably have the colours of the Russian flag on it. Olga promised that we’d go and get me one sometime soon.

We stumbled across a very flashy carnival, but the entire city seemed to have turned out to watch it, and we couldn't get close, so we turned off in the opposite direction at the next junction. 

The carnival ft. massive crowd

Just then, we bumped into Olga, one of Olga’s friends. I’m beginning to think that the Russians aren’t very imaginative with names… Anyway, Olga was lovely. Olga explained that her friend hardly spoke any English. The Olga who didn’t speak English smiled at me and said, in a near-perfect accent

‘If you haven’t already done so, please stow your carry-on luggage underneath the seat in front of you or in an overhead compartment.’

I was a bit baffled. That sounded like English to me.

‘Olga’s training to become an air steward, so she has to learn the rubric.’ Olga explained.

‘If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to ask me or another member of the cabin crew.’ Said Olga, kindly.

‘Aha, but if I asked you any further questions in English, would you be able to answer them?’ I asked.

Olga stared at me blankly. It would seem the answer is no.

But in spite of my dire Russian and her limited English, we managed to communicate a fair bit. We bonded over our joint love of How I Met Your Mother. Then the Olgas showed me a beautiful old building called the Organ Hall, which was a Catholic Church until the time of the USSR, when it became a performance venue.

When we explained to Olga that I was in the middle of a lesson on how to become a good Siberian man, she eagerly joined in with some suggestions.

‘WELL. You have to get a tracksuit with stripes down the sleeves.’

‘Yep, we’ve covered that.’

‘Hmm, and you have to squat down like this.’ Both Olgas squatted down on their haunches with their heels flat on the ground. I had a go, but it was profoundly uncomfortable, and I can’t see why anyone would voluntarily inflict that feeling on their thighs.

‘Ooh and you have to smoke cigarettes with your fingers like this.’ Both Olgas mimed holding a cigarette with the tips of their fingers and thumbs, the palms of their hands pointing away from their faces.

‘Then what else? Well. You need a hunting dog. And vodka.’

‘Oh and the slang.’

‘Oh yeah the slang!’

‘Ok Theo write this down…’

I got out my phone.

The list of words which I’ve accumulated includes:

‘girl with a difficult face’,

‘to laze around’

‘to sleep’/’to go faster’ (how they can possibly mean the same thing baffles me),

‘to bloody well do nothing’,

‘thug’,

and

‘Young person who doesn’t care how they look’.

In English, this all sounds pretty harmless to me, but apparently you translate it into colloquial Russian and it becomes totally vulgar. I like the idea of trying to slip as many as I can into a normal English conversation and imagining that if I were speaking in Russian the addressee would be smashing my head against some shelves for being so rude. So beware, next time you hear me saying ‘young person who doesn’t care how they look’, it’s probably my way of giving you the finger.