Shopping

It was the 30^th December, and Krasnoyarsk had fallen into an expectant hush. It was like that eerie silence as you strengthen your fortifications and go buy a ray gun before a wave of undead soldiers comes crashing through the walls of your hidey-hole in Call of Duty: World at War (Nazi Zombies, obvs). This was the day that everyone had warned me about. ‘Whatever you do’ they said, ‘do NOT go into any shops from sunrise on the 30^th December until midnight on the 31^st. In fact, don’t go NEAR any shops. No, don’t LOOK at any shops. Actually, you know what? Best thing to do is just not leave your flat. Ok? Don’t leave the flat until the 1^st January alright? I mean it, Theo. They will merk you.’ This inspiring speech was generally accompanied by a long, chilling stare. Most people stopped short of wiggling their fingers in my face and going ‘OOOOOOOOOOOH!’, but they did a pretty good job of communicating that going shopping on the 30^th December was a no-no.

My plan for the day was to go shopping.

Thug. Life.

As I slowly made a list of all the things I needed, I wondered what all the fuss could possibly be about. I mean, shops in England aren’t thaaaaaaat bad just before Christmas, are they? If anything, it’s about a week before Christmas that you want to steer clear of the shops, because that’s when most people finish their shopping. This was two days before New Year’s Eve for goodness’ sake, surely everyone hadn’t left their shopping as late as I had?

They had. Every. Single. Person. And. Some. People. From. Nearby. Villages. Too.

My list was finished, and I was just beginning the painstaking process of putting on five layers of clothing in preparation for going outside, when I got a call from Masha.

‘Theo, hi. We need to talk about what food we’re going to cook for New Year’s Eve tomorrow. There will be about eight people at your flat I guess, so we’re going to need to make a lot of food. We should start now.’

The very best Russian tradition holds that, on New Year’s Eve, everyone eats an absolute crapload of food. It was a tradition I fully intended to honour. Russian tradition also holds that most of that food should be salads. Well, I say salads, they’re more like piles of different kinds of thing really. With no particular organising principle or discernment for what food might go well with another. Just big ol’ mounds of stuff. The most famous one is the ‘Olivier’, rather deceptively named after the distinguished Belgian cook Lucien Olivier, whose sophisticated signature salad had SOD ALL in common with the monstrosity which the Russians have named after him. It contains (in no particular order, in fact, the less order the better) diced boiled potatoes, carrots, onions, dill pickles, tinned peas, eggs, apples, tinned ham (although I’m told you could replace this with hot dog and it would be calm), and, crucially, lashings of mayonnaise, which is used like a bit of a glue to hold it all together. Mayonnaise seems to be the staple (and majority component) of most Russian ‘salads’.

So back to my phone call with Masha. She proposed that we make three ‘salads’. My favourite suggestion, just for its ludicrousness, was the tinned ham, cheese, tinned pineapple, and mayonnaise salad. She asked if I had any thoughts on what else to make. Figuring that if you could put apples and hot dogs in the same dish, nothing was off limits on New Year’s Eve, I proposed making homemade pizza. There was silence on the other end of the line. ‘Ooh, and maybe I can make a lemon drizzle cake too!’ More silence from Masha. Fearing that my attempts to enrich Russian new year culture were not being met with equal enthusiasm, I decided to try and appease Masha with something that sounded vaguely Russian: ‘maybe I could make pancakes with mushrooms and sour cream?’ There was a slight noise of approval from the other end of the line, and Masha said ‘ok, I’ll send Kirill over in the car to pick you up and you can buy the ingredients together. Be careful. Don’t leave the house until he calls.’

Kirill didn’t park and come to the flat to meet me. He waited in his car with the engine on right outside the entrance to my block of flats, like he was a getaway driver and I’d just robbed a bank. I got in, somewhat confused. He looked in the rear-view mirror as he turned out of the main courtyard and onto the street. ‘There’s a big crowd of stray dogs waiting next to my parking spot.’ He said, shuddering. Then, turning onto the main road, he said ‘prepare yourself.’

Traffic. One huuuuge road crammed full of cars as far as you could see in either direction. Kirill gave me a resigned, sarcastic look. ‘We’d have been better off walking.’

It took us the best part of an hour to get to the local shops, which I can run to in fifteen minutes. It was a shopping complex, with a supermarket in the middle. Around the shopping complex was a parking complex: thousands and thousands of parking spaces. They were all full. It took us another forty minutes just to find a spot, which was a ten-minute walk from the supermarket we were heading to. Going into the shop, I began to understand why everyone was so opposed to New Year’s shopping. The supermarket was massive, but every inch of it was filled by angry humans. If the supermarket didn’t have a roof, I’m pretty sure you could have seen us from space. Kirill and I headed for the fruit and veg section, and I started filling a bag with tomatoes.

In Russian supermarkets, you need to weigh your fruit or veg yourself and receive a sticker with the price tag on it. There was a massive queue to use the scales, so I got in line, tomatoes in hand, while Kirill scouted out the other fruit and veg that we needed. Except that Russians do not care about queues. The attitude is something like ‘ok you losers can form a queue if you want but don’t expect me to observe it.’ The queue moved incredibly slowly, and every now and then someone would just jump in and squeeze themselves between two people a couple of places ahead of me, as if they’d only noticed the first fifth of the queue and then their vision had suddenly failed them. After about ten minutes, I was at the front of the queue, and waiting for the woman at the scales to weigh an entire trolley-load of various fruits and vegetables. She did it ever so slowly. And then, suddenly, dropping a bunch of grapes into her trolley, she unceremoniously pulled it away and the scales were free. As I shuffled forward, my tomatoes held over the plate of the scales, an old woman ambled up from the OPPOSITE side of the scales to where the huge queue was and casually plonked down a bag of cucumbers on the scales. I looked at her, nonchalantly using MY scales. Then I looked at the queue behind me, which still had at least twenty people in it, but which this old woman had elected not to see.

‘Umm’ I said.

She didn’t even bat an eyelid.

‘Excuse me.’ I said, practically into her ear.

She didn’t reply. Just sighed loudly and continued looking for ‘cucumbers’ on the screen.

‘Hmmm. Interesting.’

I was about to scream ‘HOLY SHIT THERE’S A TARANTULA ON YOUR ARM’ when she slowly (and without even looking in the direction of the enormous queue) hobbled off back into the crush of people from whence she came.

I shrugged and started weighing the things Kirill and I had picked out. Tomatoes, mandarins, cucumbers, onions. As soon as I lifted the last bag of vegetables from the scales, the woman behind me in the queue hurled a bag of mushrooms into the space very recently vacated by my onions. Then I looked back at the massive queue snaking through the fruit stalls with utter horror. ‘Ah jeez Kirill. We forgot to get mushrooms’.

I was waking up to the horrors of New Year shopping. But – to continue the Nazi Zombies analogy – that was only the first wave.

When we had got everything on the list, Kirill and I were drained, bruised, and distressed. We fought our way out of the shop, and began the long trek back to the car. It’s so cold here that you can’t just start a car and drive off in it, you need to run the engine for five or ten minutes first, so, as Kirill warmed up the car, we sat shivering and contemplating our next move. Kirill didn’t want to drive all the way back to my flat through traffic, and I needed to buy presents. We agreed that we’d go and find something to eat, then Kirill would drop me off at a different part of the shopping complex and drive back to his house.

‘So all we need to decide now is what we’re getting for lunch.’

We both laughed.

The shawarma gave us both a good boost, and made the next twenty minutes of traffic feel almost bearable. Then I hopped out of the car and barged my way through the crowd of zombie-like shoppers back into the shopping complex, glancing down at my list of present ideas.

Kirill – sports bottle.

Max – snowboard boots.

Eldar – personalised T-shirt.

Lena – mug.

Fortunately, I’d already bought presents for everyone else – these were the very last things. I was proud of all my present ideas, because they were all unique to the person receiving them (except Lena’s mug, which was just a mug). I’d also bought Olga chamomile tea, because she told me that was what she drank when she was ill, and I’d bought a frying pan for Kirill and Masha, because the first time I met them we all tried to make pancakes (with very little success) in their old pan. I elbowed my way through the crowd until I found a massive shop promisingly named ‘Crockery World’. Surely this place would have something like a sports bottle.

I’ll save you the pain I had to endure. This place didn’t have something like a sports bottle.

Then I searched every other shop in the complex. No sports bottles. My last hope was the shop called ‘SportMaster’. Surely. Surely a shop with a name like that would have some kind of bottle which could be used while running… No.

So I turned my attention to snowboarding boots. SportMaster had a big touchscreen catalogue. I searched for snowboarding boots and scrolled through until I found a pair which looked sturdy, were an affordable price, and were available in the right size. It seemed too good to be true. It was.

Only available in our store at Planeta.

Planeta is a truly gargantuan mall on the opposite end of the left bank. It would take over an hour to get there, and that was on a normal day. Today was not a normal day. I clicked ‘reserve at store’, and a sign popped up saying ‘this item is reserved. You can collect it instore any time from 02.01.2020.’

‘THE SECOND OF JANUARY!? No! I can’t give him his New Year present after New Year’s Eve!’ I found a phone number for the SportMaster at Planeta and called it. It took me through to the brand’s national helpline.

After five minutes of listening to potential departments, five minutes of muzak, and five minutes of trying to help the operator work out which city I was in, we finally got to the nub of the matter.

‘Oh, so you want to reserve the boots?’

‘Yes, but only if I can pick them up from the store TODAY OR TOMORROW.’

‘I see. Tell me your telephone number and I’ll send through the reservation confirmation.’

‘Does that mean I can pick them up today or tomorrow?’

‘I’m not sure, but the confirmation text will tell you.’

‘Won’t that be too late? I’ll already have booked them!’

‘Eh, up to you.’

‘Fine.’

Ten minutes later, I still didn’t have a confirmation text, and my phone was beginning to run out of battery. The intelligent thing to do would have been to go home. I didn’t go home. I got on a bus which took me in the direction of Planeta.

There were no seats on the bus, and I was beginning to fall asleep standing when my phone vibrated. It was the confirmation text.

‘Your boots are reserved. You can collect them instore any time from 02.01.2020.’

I called the same number again.

‘Hi, I want to cancel a reservation. I was told I’d be able to pick my order up today or tomorrow, but the confirmation text said I couldn’t.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Theo Normanton.’

‘Ok…. Wait. You’ve already made your reservation! You just made it an hour ago.’

‘Yep.’

‘So… is that all?’

‘No! I want to cancel it!’

‘You want to cancel your reservation?’

‘YES!’

‘Which you made an hour ago?’

‘YES!’

She vocally rolled her eyes.

‘Ok. It’s cancelled.’

And now I was on a bus to a shop where they didn’t have my boots in the middle of a city overflowing with traffic. Then I remembered another sports shop that Kirill had told me about. One which he said might sell even cheaper snowboarding boots. I looked it up on my phone, and found out that it was just another half hour on the bus and then fifteen minutes on foot from where I was. Result.

It was closed. Two hours early. Due to ‘technical difficulties’, whatever that means.

My phone was on five percent battery. It was seven o’clock already, and it was freezing cold outside. At this point, feeling defeated by the notorious 30^th December, I decided to walk aimlessly. This, as it transpires, was the best idea I’d had all day.

I was losing hope of ever feeling my toes again when I saw a hulking orange-panelled monster bearing down on me from the horizon. It was Planeta. Without even knowing where I was, I’d managed to find it. You can never escape Planeta. Some say it’s the second most popular mall in the whole of Russia. And I can see why. It’s soul-destroying, hollow, occasionally painful. It’s a great test of endurance. In short, it’s exactly the sort of place that would appeal to the sort of people who opt to live in temperatures of -45. I began running towards it. I wasn’t sure quite what good it would do me, but at least I could warm up a bit and check my extremities for frostbite.

The heat was glorious. It almost compensated for the horde of New Year shoppers who swept me away as soon as I set foot inside. I was absorbed into the mall’s bloodstream, unable to swim against the flow. And I kept on being dragged along until the crowd chose to spit me back out in front of a shop with a big blue and red sign: ‘SportMaster’. I rolled my eyes. ‘Nice work guys.’

I inspected their snowboarding boots section carefully. It didn’t have the ones I needed. I checked with an attendant. ‘Hmm we do have them in that size, but for me to get things out of storage, you need to have booked them in advance. Do you have a booking number for those boots in size 43?’

‘Umm. I do actually. But it won’t work. I’ve cancelled the booking.’

‘What’s the number?’

I fished out my confirmation text and the attendant wrote down the number.

Five minutes later, he was back with the boots. My order hadn’t been cancelled. I’ve never been more grateful for administrative ineptitude. In Russia, administrative ineptitude in any form feels like something of a miracle, but this particular mistake had just saved my day. AND I found a sports bottle for Kirill on my way to the till. AND I was able to transfer money onto my international card just before the charge ran out on my phone, so I could buy the boots there and then. I was clearly feeling too smug at this point, so the shop decided to bring me down a peg by setting the alarms off as I went through the barriers. Then my phone ran out of battery. But it’s ok, I just guessed which bus to get home from Planeta, and it worked. Don’t try this at home kids!