Swing Square

This morning I went to a French society in a cafe in town. It seems I was a bit of a guest of honour, because I got a glowing introduction, and then I was asked to stand up and introduce myself to the group in French. Only now, standing before a group of professional French tutors, teachers, and translators, did I realise that trying to speak Russian for a month kinda pushes French out of your head. I can’t honestly say that nothing came out of my mouth, but I’m confident that whatever did wasn’t French. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but every now and again I’d catch myself mid-sentence speaking Russian, try to revert to French, and end up spluttering out some scraps of English. This was concerning partly because French has always been my ego-boost language, the one I remind myself I can sort of speak when I feel like a fool spending ten minutes trying to communicate to someone that I like dogs in Russian. But more worrying still was the fact that the introduction of French into my muddled brain seemed to make it give up on all three languages entirely.

Nothing coherent emerged from my lips during that awful introduction. My face kept on earnestly making animated expressions, willing my audience to understand, my head would nod to underscore the important points, but everyone in the room who had put so much time and love into the French language watched with silent horror as I slowly trampled on its beautiful corpse. The French and Russian filler words ‘donc’ and ‘ну’ (nu) merged into a dopey ‘duuu’; sinuous, musical French terms of motion like ‘je suis allé’ would invariably turn into horribly pronounced and exaggeratedly guttural Russian equivalents like ‘yyyyyyya yEkkhhhal’. And any attempts to play it safe and go back to my mother tongue, the language that I have been speaking for the best part of twenty years, would end in a whimpered ‘attendez… that’s not правильно is it¿’

In the end I reverted to a pantomime of hand gestures, ‘pfffft’ noises and shrugging, which the crowd seemed to accept as conversational French.

Then the ‘activities’ began. There was a conversation corner, a photograph spot (where a professional photographer was taking photos of members for some reason), and even an introduction to watercolour painting. I opted for the watercolours. We painted a coffee cup. Even this was a pretty big challenge for me – my artistic capabilities are limited, to say the least. Fortunately, I chose a seat right next to the teacher, who spent most of her time leaning over my shoulder and finessing my ‘art’. The finished product isn’t great, but I think it’s discernibly a coffee cup, so I’m chuffed.

I think it's one of those ones which looks decent for about three seconds and then you actually look at it and your heart sinks

Then I went to the Krasnoyarsk Regional Museum with some friends. The exterior is ridiculous. Like some parody of an Egyptian palace in a theme park where the themes are ‘wildly caricatured empires of the ancient world’. It had fussily painted columns, was an earthy orange colour, and was adorned by Egyptian-style paintings of men labouring and a humongous Egyptian winged sun. Inside, the museum was dedicated to the history of the Krasnoyarsk Region (obvs), which is not just the city, but about 900,000 square miles around it too, stretching from near the Mongolian border in the South to the Arctic in the North. One section which illustrated the scale of the region well was the room full of stuffed animals which can be found there. There were all sorts of squirrels and small rodents, as well as lots of magnificent deer, a moose, and various types of mountain goat. The most interesting thing of all, was that they also had both a brown bear and a polar bear. It’s strange to think that two such different climates can exist in one administrative region. They also had a room which detailed the history of the people who lived in this region before settlers from west of the Urals arrived. They lived in yurts and huts lined with fur, wore animal skin boots, and rowed in very sleek canoes. It’s amazing that people lived here before central heating or electricity. Makes me want to go out and explore the wilderness, but I don’t think the ability to do really cool-looking jumps out of low trees while making the sound ‘hiiiiiiiyah’ would get me very far in the Siberian winter L.

When we were looking round the museum, one of my friends pointed out that her great grandmother got a medal from the Soviet regime for having twelve children during the war, and had donated it to the museum. Sadly, we couldn’t find it on display anywhere.

But we did find this. In old Russian houses, you used to sleep on top of the oven to keep warm. #hardcore

And then I walked to east side of town and met another group of friends who were setting off to walk around Tatishev Island, the enormous island in the middle of the River Yenisei. I’ve described the Yenisei as ‘big’ or ‘huge’ or ‘wide’ quite a lot in this blog, but I feel like I need to put it into perspective. It takes forty minutes to walk from one end of central Krasnoyarsk to the other. The Yenisei is so wide that you could comfortably fit the whole of that area into it and it wouldn’t touch the banks. It’s no surprise, then, that the island is also an impressive size. We were there on the perfect day, too. A clear, sunny, comfortably chilly day, when thousands of others had come out to the island and were skating or cycling past us, or throwing frisbees for their dogs. It felt idyllic, and we were all in very high spirits. There were meant to be six of us, but one got ill and another dropped out, so it was just me, Olga, Masha, and Mitya. We had leaf fights, picked wild apples and oblepikha berries, made a list of things we want to do as a group in the future, and, of course, found a shawarma stall. Nobody lives on the island, so it was quite a surprise when we stumbled across a cutesy little chalet/shed just big enough to house one salesperson who was selling shawarma wraps. I was taken aback, but Masha strolled straight up to the cabin to make her order, saying only ‘shawarma is everywhere’. Of the four shawarmas I’ve had here (one for every week!), this was the worst. It started badly with the fact that the wrap was dyed a hideously bright orange, and got worse from there. The chicken connoisseur would not be impressed.

One chonky river

When we were back on the left bank, we strolled to one of the city’s main squares, which is full of… swings… for adults. It has twenty-seven heavy-duty swings under a huge canopy which stretches in a circle around the square’s benches and flower beds. Even more strangely, almost every single swing was occupied when we arrived, at 8:30 on a cold Sunday evening. The city itself felt somewhat empty, but it seems that’s because everyone was here, in what shall henceforth be known as Swing Square. I swung higher than all those suckers though, so it’s all good.

But the highlight of my day was when I came home, scrolled through some Quora questions, and came across this (seemingly serious) bad boy: ‘Why doesn’t Russia join Europe or Asia rather than lingering between the two continents?’

Nothing to see here. Just some Soviet-era vans chilling on a train