Fyodor on Tour

Getting back to Krasnoyarsk was a bit of an ordeal. The flights went smoothly, but as soon as I got into the shiny (tiny) arrivals hall in Krasnoyarsk airport, things started getting a bit tricky. The woman selling bus tickets back into town was very grumpy indeed. After ten minutes of queuing, my interaction with her went like this: ‘Hello!’ … *Stares sternly* ‘I’d like a ticket to Krasnoyarsk please. And I’ve got luggage too, so I guess I have to pay a bit extra for that, right?’ *Growls incomprehensibly* on’hundrtwannysi rubles* ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.’ *Yells* 'IT’S ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SIX RUBLES!!' ‘Right. Thanks. Here you go.’ … ‘No change.’ ‘Ah, I’m sorry. I’ve just arrived in the country. I mean. This is an airport.’ *Stares angrily* ‘I’ll pay by card.’ …’Nope.’ ‘So what, I just can’t get a ticket because you don’t have any change?’ … *points at extortionately-priced café across the hall* ‘I see. Thank you so much.’ Then...

My last three days in Yerevan were meant to be spent preparing for another three months of work in Krasnoyarsk. I had a decent amount of admin, packing, and planning to do. The first half of my time in Siberia had flown by, and I wanted to go into the second half with a game plan. But I didn’t, of course. I never do. As I got out my laptop and prepared for an admin backlog, my German friend Heiko (disappointingly he doesn’t actually spell his name Haiku) was going out to re-visit a history museum, and he asked if I wanted to join. Heiko is something of a specialist in Armenian history, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity, so I gratefully closed my laptop and we headed out to the museum. It was built on the site of an old fortress. A very old fortress. A fortress that was built in 780 BC. It was called Arin Berd, or Erebuni, and Yerevan was named after it. The fortress was built to protect the northern border of the Urartian kingdom, which pre-dated the arrival of both the Rom...

I was slightly lost after Tim left. He headed for Georgia, where he was presumably going to continue his campaign to ask as many strangers as possible for directions. But I was so enthused by his indefatigable Insta tourism, that I decided to follow his lead and go somewhere interesting. At the glowing recommendation of the staff in my hostel, I planned a trip to Geghard Monastery and Garni Temple in the mountains outside of Yerevan. They sound like destinations from a Tintin book, right? Well that’s pretty much what they were. This was far and away the most gap yah day of my life so far… The good old internet told me that, to get there, I needed to walk to the junction between two roads near my hostel, get a bus from there to ‘Mercedes Bus Station’, and then get a coach to Geghard. Ta-dah! I’m sure you’ve guessed it already, but it wasn’t that easy. Writing this now, when – even eight thousand kilometres from the UK, everything is overshadowed by Thursday's election –...

It was clear from the outset that Tim from Tomsk was an aggressively enthusiastic traveller. He’d already been to about half of the countries from the former USSR and was methodically ticking them off his list. Straight after his week in Armenia, he was heading to Georgia on a minibus. The morning after he arrived, we decided to look around some monuments in the centre of town. He was so keen to see Yerevan that he was already awake, packed, and sitting in the living room in the morning when I rolled out of my bunk. He gave me a generous five minutes to pack my stuff and brush my teeth, and then we were out the door and speed walking in the direction of the Cascade (a giant stairway made of limestone). The Cascade was cool – lined with little sculptures and art installations on the way up. The view from the top was very expansive, but would have been better without the smog. In the distance, you could just make out a snow-capped mountain which looked totally computer generated. It w...

Yerevan is a safe city. But the airport here makes Johannesburg airport look like a puppy salon. As soon as you get through to arrivals, you’re mobbed by taxi drivers touting for trade, old men armed with religious symbols trying to swindle you out of money, people trying to sell you flowers. I bought an Armenian SIM card and made a dash for the closest minibus I could find. I lucked out – it was going to Republic Square, just a block from my hostel. There was a smiley woman at the hostel’s reception desk, who spoke Armenian, Russian, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. I pretty much had my pick of language. I was tempted to opt for Portuguese, but I expect knowing how to say ‘thank you’ and nothing else wouldn’t have got me very far. But I was determined not to be that guy who’s too lazy to speak in any language other than his own, so I tried to speak Russian. Beyond the reception desk was a busy little lounge lined with sofas and with a little coffee table in the centre, where...

Earlier this year, my college wife (it’s a long story, my uni’s weird) almost missed a flight to Lisbon. She got off the Stanstead Express eight minutes before the gate closed. With hindsight, she seems pretty chill about it. In her words, she ‘just had to parkour through security’. Competitive soul that I am, I decided to take Katie on. Check-in for my flight to Yerevan closed at 0830 last Friday. So as my taxi pulled up to Yemelyanovo airport at 0831, I was a little bit terrified that I’d just simultaneously won the game of ‘danger flight’ that we all know is an ongoing unspoken competition between all travellers and lost £120. I know, I know. You’re dying to know why I’ve come to Armenia. Well the truth is… drumroll please… *pauses for suspense*… *inhales slowly*… *pauses some more*… I’m just renewing my visa. Armenia was probably the cheapest, coolest place to come to do that. You’d have thought that after my recent awful experiences with Yandex Taxi (see Disaster Day fo...

Spoilers: it does start to snow in the end A month and a bit ago, I very prematurely predicted snow. As did the rest of the city. Everyone changed their normal tyres for snow tyres, which made loud crunching sounds at every slight rotation of the wheel, and a cataclysmic death-is-coming-for-you whooshing sound when the cars were in motion. The excessively bulky winter coats were gradually phased out, and began to be replaced by coats so comically padded that everyone looked like a walking snowball, as if they were anticipating the coming snow, which, by all accounts, was going to be fast, dense, and heavy. Then, on the fated day when we were all braced for the apocalyptic snowfall, we got a couple of inches, which melted before the week was out. In spite of this underwhelming performance by the heavens, Siberians clung stoically to the hope of their beloved snow coming imminently. The snow tyres were not changed back for normal tyres, so the whole city began to rumble with ...

When you go to live in Siberia, you expect a ton of snow, reindeer steak, and bears in the streets. You expect a totally different culture and complete isolation from the rest of the world. Now I can’t argue with the fact that there is a lot of snow here. Lots of snow Nor can I deny that reindeer steak is a thing (quite a tasty thing). And I have seen bears while I’ve been here, although thankfully in the zoo, and not in the street. But my expectations of isolation and provincialism have been foiled time and again. A couple of weeks ago, for example, after helping out at a friend’s kids club, that friend offered me a ticket to a Leo Abrahams gig that her husband was organising. Leo Abrahams. The London-born guitarist. From London. And he was performing here in Krasnoyarsk. In fact, he was performing in the building right in front of the bus stop where I wait for my bus home from work. And yet, on my way into the concert, just as I was considering how connected a city Krasn...