Ilansky

The blog! The beautiful blog! I’ve neglected my blog, so bogged down am I in boring bureaucracy.

Sorry about that... And also for neglecting the blog.

I’ve got a lot to update you on. I mean I’m writing this in Armenia. How did I end up here? Well…

… you’ll find out in like five blogs’ time but for now here’s some unrelated stuff.

In theory, Krasnoyarsk is the ideal city to be based in if you want to travel around Russia a bit. Situated bang in the middle of the country, it’s only a couple of thousand kilometres from Novosibirsk, Lake Baikal, and the Altai mountains. And if you want to venture all the way to Vladivostok or St Petersburg, well, you’re already halfway there. But a thousand kilometres is actually rather a long way (whatever the Russians say), and getting to any of those places on the train would take you at least two days. Zuzana and I were fortunate enough to kick off our travels beyond Krasnoyarsk with a manageable, expenses-paid trip to the small town of Ilansky.

We got there on the elektrichka, an electric train which the Russians describe as ‘suburban’. This one was going a meagre four hundred kilometres, which took the best part of five hours. This was my first trip to a town outside of Krasnoyarsk, and I was a little apprehensive. What if we got on the wrong train and ended up in Moscow? What if we got there and they didn’t understand a word of English, and we had to rely on my shoddy Russian? What if we missed the train back (there’s only one train per day), and didn’t get back in time for a party that we’d promised to organise for the participants of an INTERRA project on Friday night?

               

This would probably be a much better read if any of my fears were justified, but they weren’t, so you’ll have to settle for some mundane observations about Ilansky instead.

The trip was beautiful. It was mostly birch trees, but I happen to like birch trees, so we all good. We went through Kansk, which, not going to lie, looked like a bit of a dump. Our friend Vlad is from Kansk, and has recommended in the strongest possible terms that we don’t visit.

This is the beautiful bit by the way, not Kansk

When we arrived at Ilansky’s station (confusingly named ‘Ilanskaya’), we were greeted by a sizeable group of schoolkids and their genial teacher Margarita. Although she seemed pleased to see us, Margarita was also in quite the hurry. She’d compiled a schedule for our two days in the town, and there wasn’t a minute to lose. She positively dragged us across the railway bridge, introducing the flock of kids behind her simply as ‘oh yeah I’ve brought some of the schoolkids with me. Talk to the nice people, children!’

We stopped at the exit to the station, where there was a big model steam train in front of a very aesthetic tower/house thing. Margarita started the tour: ‘our town is very small. There are only about 14,000 people here. But if it weren’t for the railway, Ilansky wouldn’t exist at all. So the first thing you see when you arrive is a model of one of the earliest trains that went through this town on the Trans-Siberian Railway. She nodded to one of the kids in the group that was accompanying us. She stepped forwards and said ‘my grandfather wrote those words that are written on the train.’ Then she proceeded to read them out to us… which was confusing, because if we couldn’t read Russian then would we really be able to understand it when spoken? Sadly, I can’t remember the exact words, but I think they were praising the railway industry. Next up was the tower, which was the site of a massacre of Reds during the Civil War. Then we headed to the train factory.

Ilansky's main street. Hoppin'

We were given a tour by one of the bosses in the factory, which is the biggest employer in the town. It’s where lots of the trains on the trans-Siberian route are repaired, re-painted, and given general checks. We were taken from one huge, high-roofed room stuffed with heavy machinery to the next. Every now and again, there would be a train suspended above a track without its wheels, or a crane lowering a huge bit of train into some machine or another. Sorry I can’t be more technical in my descriptions…

On the top floor, they asked us whether we knew what a ‘fdasklfsdajk’ was… Ok I don’t remember what the term they asked us about was. ‘Nope.’ I said, completely honestly. ‘Never heard of a fdasklfsdajk’. The boss man who was leading the tour took us to one desk, where a man in spectacles was focusing intensely on what looked like little silver rollers. He’d polish them a bit and then put them down. ‘This is a fdasklfsdajk’, he said, with a flourish and a proud grin. Margarita walked over and picked one of the little rollers up. She handed it to me. ‘Go on, take it home and show it to your friends in England.’ She said. ‘Tell them that these are what the trans-Siberian trains run on!’ I looked uncertainly at the boss, who shrugged and said ‘go on then.’ Margarita, who, it seemed, was very keen that we had the best time possible here in Ilansky, picked up a larger one and handed it to Zuzana. ‘And you can show this to your friends in Slovakia!’ She said, proprietorially. The boss’s face fell, and he led us out of the factory before we could steal any more train parts.

A brief tour of the railway museum followed. The guide had only just started working there, and her catchphrase seemed to be ‘well I don’t remember exactly when this was made, but it’s important.’ Margarita, coming out of her shell now, picked up various exhibits and handed them to me and Zuzana, saying ‘this is hundreds of years old!’ Or ‘this uniform was actually worn by soldiers during World War Two – go on, put it on!’ At one point she asked me, seemingly at random, whether I played the saxophone. I was taken aback. ‘Yes! I do play the saxophone! How did you kn…’

But before I could finish my sentence, Margarita had thrust an old rusty saxophone at me. She’d found it on a shelf displaying instruments used by the old military marching band in Ilansky during WWII. ‘Go on! Give it a blow!’ She urged. ‘It doesn’t have a reed’ I tried to explain. Except that, me being the sophisticated linguist I am, that sentence I opted for directly translated as ‘It doesn’t have that little bit of wood thing that you’re meant to put at the top of the thing.’ She got what I meant, though, and that’s the main thing.

Honestly not sure why Margarita wanted us to have a picture with a key. Maybe it's a famous key.

 After giving a short presentation on volunteering at the town’s youth centre, we were treated to a slap-up Russian dinner in what I’d guess was the town hall. A flood of local schoolkids turned up, and we were treated to a wonderful meal which seemed to be entirely homemade/grown/reared. The highlight was some really tasty salo, which has grown on me a lot since the first time I tried it (or maybe that’s just because I’ve stopped thinking about where it comes from). Some pupils who studied English got the chance to practise with us. The highlight of the trip for me was when a boy who can’t have been more than eleven prodded me in the ribs and said ‘Have you heard of Stormzy?’ ‘I love Stormzy!’ I replied. He was ecstatic. He said that nobody else in Ilansky had even heard of Grime. It seems like a very easy way of making someone happy – just knowing who Stormzy is.

Then we went to the park en masse. The park was dark. I made out very little. I did see that there were some exercise bars, which a bunch of teenagers were doing very athletic looking flips and spins on. A little boy with a BMX bike who can’t have been more than about eight skidded to a halt in front of us, and one of the schoolkids who was accompanying us said in a loud voice ‘pfft. The little ones think getting tracksuits and BMXs makes them cool.’ Then he addressed the boy directly ‘you’re not cool you know.’ The boy didn’t seem to mind, and was soon absorbed in watching the teenagers do spins on the exercise bars, just like the rest of the crowd. Margarita was also watching the spectacle, and said over my shoulder ‘isn’t it great? They choose to do this all by themselves, just to keep fit.’ I tried to imagine any of my senior school teachers coming down to the park on a Thursday night to look on approvingly as my classmates did martial artsy flippy stuff, but had difficulty picturing it.

Just then I heard a scream from the back of the crowd. It was a long, shrill scream, that was joined by other screams, and grew into a cacophony that struck fear into my heart. I looked around, and saw everyone pointing up at the sky. They weren’t screams of terror, they were screams of excitement. A plane was flying over. The boy who’d been so dismissive of the BMX explained that this was a rare occurrence in Ilansky, and always caused a bit of excitement.

That night we stayed in a hotel for railway workers. The first question they asked when we arrived was ‘have you brought slippers with you?’, which caught me off guard a little. Turns out most guests bring slippers with them here… The hotel looked truly Soviet.

See?

The next morning, we ate shchi and bread in the canteen, which was bordering on comic. The staff were friendly, but looked a bit like Miss Trunchbull from Matilda. They managed somehow to be welcoming and terrifyingly stern at the same time. The food was wonderful – very hearty.

At the school, Zuzana and I did three consecutive presentations each. In Russian. Needless to say, we were pretty knackered by the end of it. But all our fatigue was forgotten when we were presented with cute little handmade pink teddy bears and stuffed full with absolutely delicious pies, tea, and various pickled vegetables. In the staff room, I asked one of the teachers whether they liked living in Ilansky. ‘Doesn’t it get boring?’ I asked. She laughed. ‘Your dinner yesterday, and your lunch today – almost all of that was homemade. We grow the vegetables, we bake the bread. Life is harder here, but because of that we find ways to stay entertained. It never gets boring. Then came the inevitable question ‘so what do you want to do when you graduate?’ This is one of two questions which it is actually scientifically impossible to answer. The other being ‘why did you choose to learn Russian?’ Recently, I’ve been playing a fun game called ‘never give the same answer twice’, just to hone my acting skills. ‘Ummmm.’ I’d already used up most imaginable professions in earlier responses to the question, but one idea did spring to mind, and it seemed to me a particularly appealing one. ‘A writer. I want to be a writer.’ Now I’m pretty sure that if you said that to a British audience, you’d get a tidal wave of laughter in response. But maybe Russians respect writers more, or maybe these people had no idea how hard it is to make money writing, because they simultaneously leaned back in a slightly over-egged pantomime of awe and respect. The history teacher smiled at me, passing me a cup of tea ‘well why not write your first novel about us?’ she said, indulgently.

We got a trans-Siberian train on the way back to Krasnoyarsk. It was an hour quicker than the electric one. We travelled in the least expensive class, which meant that we were in a carriage stuffed with beds. As we got on, I saw some people sleeping, some looked exhausted, presumably halfway on their trip to Moscow from Vladivostok, some were reading, and some people were having lunch. The carriage was just one corridor with a wall of beds to the right and little enclaves with four beds in them to the left. Zuzana and I sat on the lower beds in our enclave, and the higher ones were occupied by two people who had got on at Irkutsk. I started reading ‘A Room with a View’, and felt like the pastoral scenes of rolling Italian countryside couldn’t have been more different from the cold, windswept plateau that the train was taking us through. In the next enclave along from us, four kids sat down on one bed, their mum opposite them ‘conducting’ by waving her hands frantically, and started singing a Russian folk song about the beauty of the steppe. I felt quite emotional. I’d really like to go back to Ilansky sometime if I can. And if I’m ever lucky enough to become an acclaimed astrophysicist, my first rocket engine will certainly be named after the teachers in that school.