Zodiac

I decided to give a talk on Brexit at this week’s English Club. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I just thought it was an interesting, quintessentially British topic, and that maybe people in Krasnoyarsk might want to hear a Brit’s opinion on the whole thing. Two weeks ago, we discussed sports, and twenty-two people came. So this time, I made sure to put out extra chairs beforehand, anticipating being inundated by curious Siberians.

Three people turned up. One girl just stared at me blankly the whole way through, as I tried to succinctly outline British politics over the past four years. The other two made a good effort at seeming politely interested. By the time we arrived at Theresa May, I was starting to lose interest myself, by the first Brexit deadline, I understood just why nobody in Russia is remotely bothered about the whole thing, and by the time Boris had tried to prorogue parliament, I was losing the will to live.

After the club, Eldar, Elena (a newcomer to the club), and I went for a walk, and we discussed how weird the English language was (a conversation that I’m getting very used to having). After a couple of minutes, we started thinking about getting dinner, and Elena came out with possibly the best one-liner I’ve ever heard, without a hint of irony.

‘Are you hungry?’ Eldar asked me.

‘I’m always hungry.’ Was my reply, to which Elena, with a totally straight face, responded ‘Why? Are you a vegetarian?’

The next day, I got up early and walked to a local school to give a presentation. I’d been asked to talk to Year Eleven students about life and education in Britain. The school was pretty much what you’d expect – a couple of fairly drab buildings, corridors lined with classrooms and an assembly hall. On the way in, there were metal detectors, turnstiles, and a dude wearing khaki. That was less expected. Another thing that struck me as weird was that, when it wasn’t lesson time, they blasted out pop music from the enormous speaker system on the bottom floor, so that the corridors of the entire building were filled with British chart fodder.

In the big assembly hall, I got my laptop connected to the projector and the students started filing in. Once all three classes were in the hall, and we were about to start my presentation, a teacher from the primary school stormed in and said ‘we just want to use the stage to run through a number for the talent show tomorrow. You don’t mind do you?’ It looked like we didn’t really have much choice, so all the students and teachers, waiting for a presentation about Britain, started by watching a dungareed girl who couldn’t be much older than four bouncing around the stage and singing ‘let’s twist again’.

Once she’d run through her number, we moved onto the presentation. What surprised me most was that, when I said ‘feel free to ask any questions’, lots of students actually did. I got plenty of comments, questions, and opinions throughout the presentation, so that it became more of a discussion than a lecture, which was great. I was trying to picture the students in my year at school engaging in a discussion with someone in an assembly, and I just couldn’t imagine anyone caring enough to suffer the embarrassment of expressing their interest. I reckon that there was less stigma around actively being interested in education in this school than in most, because even the cool kids at the back would ask me a question now and again. Someone even asked me about Brexit, which was a surprise following the English Club the previous day.

At lunchtime on Thursday, a new volunteer arrived at INTERRA – Zuzana from Slovakia. I’d already been in contact with her by email when I had to compose social media posts about her to try and find her a homestay host and mentor, so it was nice to properly meet her. She’s very smiley (conspicuously so here in Russia), and she speaks near-perfect English. She also understands a lot of Russian, because Slovak is also a Slavic language, so they’re vaguely related. I find this wildly unfair. After two years of study and a month living in Siberia, my passive skills are good enough that I can work out a lot of what’s being said if I slowly repeat the words that I’ve heard and take a minute or two to parse the sentence. She hasn’t studied much Russian, but she just, y’know, gets it. Just hears similar words and infers the case endings and hey presto, here’s exactly what that sentence means…. I’m happy for her.

That afternoon, her mentor (another Elena) came to the office and offered us guided tours of the modern art museum next door. Her and her friend Yulia are volunteer guides at the museum, and they wanted to show us around. It was very cool. There were so many hidden nooks and crannies that I wouldn’t have found without Yulia’s guidance. She also showed me a couple of exhibits which were preserved from the museum which used to be on the same spot – the Lenin Museum. The most interesting bits for me were a corridor filled with red coloured stones and wall paintings to commemorate the Soviet-Afghan war, and a room filled with Soviet clutter, from baubles to telephones. Yulia explained everything very clearly in Russian, so there was very little that I didn’t understand. She’s clearly used to showing round foreigners! There were also some wonderful paintings on the top floor. Perhaps the biggest of these was a huge depiction of twelve very ugly faces. They looked like Doctor Who monsters or something – human faces crossed with animal ones. The woman who was on duty in that room had been sitting in the corner, but walked over to me when she saw that I was 'interested' in the painting. Clearly she misread my look of disgust and my horrified double-take as an expression of fascination. It seems she wanted to share her love of the painting, and tell me a bit about it, because she strode up to me and said ‘what zodiac year were you born in?’

‘Errr. Um. I.. I think it was. It was either pig or rabbit. Or maybe mouse. Is there a mouse year?’

Her shoulders slumped in disappointment. Her facial expression said ‘wtf you don’t even remember what zodiac year you were born in?’ But she just stayed silent, gave me a withering look, and returned to her stool in the corner to stare accusatorily at me.

In other news, Syoma has just started a reckless campaign to crawl into my mouth. He seems determined to find out what's in there