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Not in Kansas Anymore


My bus ride into town this morning brought some abrupt reminders that I’m not in London. I decided to take a different bus today for the lols. I chose the 91, which turned out to be my favourite so far. The bus itself was a spacious old Mercedes with wood panelling on the inside, and no separate compartment for the driver. It was clearly an older bus than most of the others, but it was very up and together. Unlike the uniform, shiny buses in London, each different number of bus here has its own distinct character. The reliable 63 and 83 can be identified by their green paintwork; the 85 is always a new, supersized, white vehicle. The 91 had a kind of retro feel to me. But it’s not just the bus numbers which are different, it’s also the individual vehicles. Each driver is responsible for their own bus, so some of them have bunting along the windows, charms hanging from the lights, or flags in the windows. Some have air fresheners in the driver’s cabin, and others have icons on the dashboard. This one had no decoration, but that made it stand out even more in comparison with all the others. It felt like the lack of bunting was a statement of confidence in the class of the vehicle itself.

When we were stationary in a traffic jam, I made the mistake of looking out the window. There, sprawled on the grass by the pavement was an unmoving man. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but there was something very wrong about him being there. One of the remarkable things about the centre of Krasnoyarsk is that there are absolutely no homeless people there. Apparently they get moved by the police, and end up in the peripheries instead. So his presence there was already very incongruous. The other thing was that he wasn’t in a doorway or anything. He was on a patch of grass on a very busy street, and he was totally unmoving. it was 10:30 a.m. and the city was already wide awake.  People were looking at him with alarm and giving him a very wide berth. I can only hope he was just sleeping. At least it isn’t winter I suppose.

That was unsettling, but the next surprise was more puzzling. Another block along, there was a buzzing noise on the pavement next to the bus. It grew into a kind of very loud purring-farting sound. Then I saw pedestrians looking over their shoulders with horrified expressions and jumping out of the way. It was just a bicycle. A rusty orange road bike with narrow tyres and a low saddle. But mounted below the crossbar was a pretty sizeable motor. The rider didn’t look entirely in control of his ridiculous invention, and he was dragging his heels along the ground and slaloming along the pavement. He had taken the pedals off, so I don’t really see how it was any different to a motorbike except for being much, much worse. Whatever vehicle he’d created, it was very noisy and very fast, and he definitely shouldn’t have been driving it along a busy pavement.

Work was a bit calmer today. I stayed until 8 so I could lock up the library which INTERRA runs. I decided to walk home, and on the way back I saw the lights of what looked like a helicopter in the sky. Suddenly, they went off. Surely that means it can’t have been a helicopter, right? You can’t just turn off your navigation lights when you’re in the air, can you? So what was it? Ooooooh. Spooky. Maybe it was a UFO.

It had already been a strange day, but it got a little bit stranger when I was walking over the bridge to get back to my flat. Halfway across, two big huskies appeared on the path behind me and started sprinting towards me full tilt, barking their heads off. On my right was a dual carriageway. On my left was a fifteen-metre drop onto a railway track. I thought about kicking them away, but then I thought ‘what if they just want to play and you kick one of them in the face. They’d never trust you then would they?’ I considered throwing the half cheese sandwich in my bag at them, but they were running really fast, and I felt like they weren’t in the mood for a snack. Then one of them must have barked a little bit too loud, because the other one looked over its shoulder and gave it a ‘do you mind?’ kind of look. The first one gave the other one a playful bite on the bum, but the second one took it badly, and full-on body checked the other. They seemed to forget about me after that, and just had a little wrestling match with each other instead. I guess I’ll never know if they were angry or just wanted to play. Probably just as well.
Didn't quite manage to get a picture of the huskies sprinting at me, so here are some photos of the views from the INTERRA office instead












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