Arrival

There's a trope in cinema where the roar and bustle of a raucous crowd are instantly diffused by the power of a single, awe-inspiring phenomenon. If that particular phenomenon is dramatically understated, the contrast makes the scene all the more powerful. And if the film is really cheesy, the crowd might gradually join in with the action that has stopped their clamour, transforming from a symbol of chaos and discord into one of total unity. Think Tangled, and the brawl in the tavern before Rapunzel asks 'Haven't any of you ever had a dream?' Or Happy Feet, where Mumble's dancing placates a colony of hungry penguins and stops the approaching humans in their tracks. And obviously there are all those examples from the really macho war films that I always watch too... (*coughs in a really low bass voice and punches something*).

My first Siberian sunrise was like that. The flight was going about as well as could be expected of a flight covering 3500km for just £60. The airline was taking budget to a whole new level, with no seat pockets, broken air conditioning, a completely full aircraft bristling with babies, and absolutely no service. Actually, that's a lie. A member of staff did interact with us once: when the bus which was going to take us to the plane was so overcrowded that people were being pressed up against the window, their faces squished against the glass in contorted expressions of terror, a steward in a high-vis jacket stuck his head between the open doors and yelled 'come on everyone, move up. You've got tons of room!' after that, the amount of people on the bus doubled.

Between us, the passengers on the flight were probably generating a very considerable volume of sweat, and drinking water was nowhere to be seen. Ten minutes in, the baby in front of me started crying, and his poor mum watched, wide-eyed and powerless, as a terrible chain reaction of screaming began. It spread through the plane like wildfire, until every row had its own tiny human alarm clock stuck on full volume, with no snooze button. The cacophony would periodically stop and then start again, louder than before, until it became a kind of apocalyptic roar. Also, fun fact. Turns out Krasnoyarsk is further from Moscow than London is! It actually counts as Eastern Siberia, which I think sounds rather cool. But on the other hand, this also meant that the flight, which was beginning to feel a lot like the Seventh Circle of Dante's Hell (you know, what with the heat. And the babies) was going to go on for another four and a half hours. And sleep was proving as elusive as my suitcases, which appear still to be in Mr Pence's secret lair in Warsaw at the time of writing.

But four hours later, when burning orange sunlight began to spill over the horizon, illuminating the rich blue sky and painting a brilliant fiery strip across the rolling carpet of clouds, all the hubbub of an unimaginably horrific flight simply died away. Now you might accuse me of amplifying the truth here, but it was just like something from a movie. Squabbling spouses fell silent, children who had been at each other's throats slowly moved apart and held hands, and I swear one woman was so stunned she just dropped her baby.

When the plane finally dipped through the clouds, I saw a huge expanse of... sea. Which is weird, because we're about as far from the sea as it's possible to be anywhere in the world. I wondered whether this was a massive lake, or a really big boi dam. But of course, it wasn't water. It was the taiga, a belt of forest that stretches from Karelia in the West to the Pacific in the East, the largest expanse of forest in the world (although this depends how you define forest). What appeared to be waves were actually row upon row of pale blue-green pines, their outline made hazy by a dawn mist.

Krasnoyarsk airport is an hour from the city, and other than a couple of burned-out Soviet cargo planes rusting by the runway, there wasn't much to see. I swaggered straight through baggage reclaim, feeling sorry for the poor schmucks so tied down to their material possessions that they had to take them on long-distance trips and then wait for them to be conveyed conveniently to them on carousels. Pfft.

At arrivals, I met Olga, my mentor from INTERRA (the NGO where I'll be working). She was about my age, and surprisingly smiley. A book reassuringly entitled 'Russian Survival Guide' which my friend Katie got me (big up Katie!) had assured me that Russians don't smile. If you smile, it claimed, that suggests that you have something to smile about. Life isn't funny, so smiling is suspicious. But Olga was patently smiley. We got a taxi into town and chatted. She's lived in Krasnoyarsk her whole life. She did Biology at university here, and is still mad about it, even though she doesn't get to use it much any more. She told me that there were no other foreign interns at INTERRA at the moment - I'm the only one. But she mentored a girl from France last year, and INTERRA got such good feedback that they asked her to mentor me too. She liked partying, reading and languages. She's just started learning German, which she insists on calling Deutsch. Her English, depressingly, is better than my Russian.

After about forty minutes of trees and fields, we got to the city. It's not like London or Moscow. Most of the cars are from the nineties at the latest. In the centre are three wide boulevards running East to West, Karl Marx Street is the furthest South, on the wide River Yenisei. Prospekt Mira is one block north, and Lenin Street is one north again. The boulevards are lined with grey concrete buildings which have three floors; the bottom floor is normally a shop of some description. Interspersed with these concrete buildings are the beautiful, crumbling facades of prosperous houses from the time of the tsars, always brightly coloured, and normally rocking a shabby chic look. In the outskirts, like in most Russian cities (I imagine), are high-rise grey tower blocks, where most of the population actually lives. It's by one of these that the taxi stopped and we got out. The building where I'm going to live is a large L-shaped block, with one edge of the L running along a dual carriageway. My flat's in the edge that sticks out away from the road. In the space between the two wings of the block there's a little playground which looks unsafe for adults and a basketball court in disrepair.

Olga gave me the key as we walked six floors up. The staircase was all concrete and it smelled damp, but I've stayed a block like this in Kiev before, and I knew that was no indication of what my flat would be like. When we got to the door of the flat where I'm staying, Olga called Aygul, the woman who I'm going to share a flat with. Aygul was in, but she wanted me to open the door so that I got an idea of how the lock works. How the lock works is it doesn't. Or maybe I'm just clumsy. I was scraping and scratching away for about five minutes before I got the door to open.

Aygul is lovely. As is her flat. It's small - just a toilet, a kitchen, a shower and two bedrooms. But I have a wardrobe, a big bed, and even a desk. There's a good view over the playground from my bedroom, which I'm gonna take some edgy af photos from. Aygul is an English teacher, and she speaks English perfectly. Per. fect. ly. She hasn't even lived abroad, she's just studied really hard, with 'professors who work you off your feet'. This bodes well for students of my university, I mused, where the Russian faculty is genius in a militaristic, merciless kind of way. Aygul also gave me some chocolate and some freshly baked muffins, shrewdly securing my undying love from day one.

Olga and I wasted no time in hitting da town. We got me a sim card, so I could keep up with all of the two friends I'd made in Krasnoyarsk. Then she showed me how to use a bus. You know Oyster cards? How about contactless travel using your credit card? Paying on the bus here is nothing like either of them. You jump on board and wait for a frantic person wearing a bum bag to run up to you, hold out their hand, and receive 26 troubles (about 32p). A couple of stops later, they sometimes forget that they've already charged you, in which case, they'll probably start speaking at you in rapid and accusatory Russian, and you will do what you always do when the Russian becomes too difficult: open your eyes super wide like Bambi and go 'da'? Note for second years - the dumb foreigner card works on your Year Abroad, but really don't do it in your 1B Russian oral exam. Trust.

First, Olga took me to a bookshop. Tucked away behind a block of flats, this shop was in a basement, and not advertised on the street. Like so many of the great places we went later that day, I would never have even seen it without Olga's expert guidance. It was, as Olga promised, a rather special bookshop. Rows of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev on one side were juxtaposed with Krasnoyarsk-themed literature on the other, with hand-written reviews of all the best sellers, and a distinctly homemade vibe dominating the tiny room. I didn't get a book, but instead headed for the quirky Krasnoyarsk postcards on the other side of the room and bought a modest armful. Olga bought me a badge - a painted metal pin of the chapel on a hill overlooking Krasnoyarsk.

As it turned out, it was a good thing that I didn't buy a book. As we walked towards the centre of town, an old man swayed across our path with a mountain of books in his arms, dumped them in a cabinet attached to a lamp post, and then walked briskly off. Olga told me that there were five cabinets like that in town, and people were encouraged to give and take books there for free. I walked up to it gingerly, expecting a trap. Surely one of the pedestrians around me was waiting to sprint up to me, whipping out the bum bag underneath their hoodie with malicious glee, and charge me twice for anything I touched. Or perhaps the books were just absolute crap? I anticipated an entire case of 'How to Get a Girl', a Russian pamphlet that my homestay host had given me as a parting gift in Kiev (thanks for the vote of confidence, Oksana). But instead I saw The Government Inspector, And Quiet Flows the Don, and even Crime and Punishment, which I took even though I didn't much enjoy reading it in English. Because that's the book hoe that I am.

How to Get a Girl. Thank you, Oksana!

Just ya boi Lenin doing a candid

We had lunch in a veggie place - emphasis on 'edgy'. Someone had found one of those peelers which makes cool shapes and gone to town on a pile of unsuspecting and unlikely vegetables. And also some beef. Which looked very cool, but might have defeated the object just a bit.

The highlight of the day for me was exploring Tatishev Island, a beautiful park in the middle of the Yenisei River. Olga showed me a pebble beach off the path, where we spent a good hour finding cool stones and skimming them. She also told me I could eat the orange berries growing in bunches by the river. They're called Oblepikha, and they're delicious. In fact, they make really nice juice out of them here, called mors. On the opposite riverbank, we sat down to talk about my ambitions for my time here, and I fell asleep. That probably says something about the extent of my ambition...

On top of all her other great qualities, it has to be said that Olga comes out with some cracking one-liners. When we were looking for somewhere to eat, she told me she didn't like liver. 'Why?' I asked. 'Because it tastes like shit.' she said simply, shrugging. When we were about to cross a road to catch the bus, she told me matter-of-factly that you mustn’t always put your seatbelt on in taxis, and that you need to cross the road before the traffic light turns green occasionally. She calls these acts 'safety protests'. And when I told her that I liked Krasnoyarsk, she chortled and said 'the snow will change your mind.'

On the way back to Aygul's flat, I saw a woman dragging a donkey across a motorway bridge. It did a poo and she got out a massive poo bag and picked it all up. Go figure.