Fyodor on Tour

A train from Krasnoyarsk to Abakan travels 400km. A ticket costs £10.20. A train from London to Edinburgh also travels 400km. A ticket costs £74. Which ticket is better value? Show your working. My colleagues gave me a day off in return for working in the nursery in the mornings, so I decided to go to Abakan with Masha. Her and Max's grandparents live there. Her grandma had already come to visit me and Max back in December, and we got on well. She was an English teacher in the rather provincial neighbouring region of Khakassia back in the Soviet Union, but she'd managed to go through her life without ever meeting a native speaker, which made me feel very special. I promised to go out and visit her before I left, and this was my last opportunity. We had eleven hours to kill on the train, so Masha came up with some seriously profound questions like 'what's your biggest fear?' and 'what's your goal in life?' After just two hours of these, the co...

24.02.2020 Wow. This irony is scrumptious. I'm guessing I won't publish this on the blog unless my thirst for fame exceeds all sense of discretion and self-respect. 25.02.2020 I decided to publish it. If you think that turning medical emergencies into a self-pitying sensationalist blog article is distasteful and bordering on offensive, I don't care. They put a needle in my bottom. Siberia is full of surprises. And polluted air. My latest surprise coincided dramatically with a goodbye party.  I'd lured a bunch of friends over with the promise of homemade pizza. The actual pizza-making process didn't start until forty minutes before the friends were due to start arriving. Those of you who have made pizza before will know that it takes more than forty minutes to make it from scratch. But I didn't let the pressure get to me, because I wanted it to be a relaxed kind of party, and an uptight flustered Theo doesn't make for a good relaxed party-host...

I won’t lie to you Bryn, I was pretty pleased when I found out I was going to be working in a nursery part time. It’s not that I particularly want to work with children, or that I crave new experiences in the field of work (praying that my future employers aren’t reading this) – it’s just gold dust for the blog. Picture it: an inept and awkward Theo being mobbed by screaming three-year-olds. It’s the sort of stuff you can’t make up. What I hadn’t fully thought through was the actual experience of an inept and awkward Theo being mobbed by screaming three-year-olds. That was less fun. And, just in case the whole thing was to prove too easy for me, I was also not allowed to communicate with the children in Russian: I could only speak in English. We’re trying out a learning method called Eureka . There’s this theory that interacting with foreigners from an early age makes you braver when it comes to learning a second language, and more willing to practise it with native speaker...

One thing I'll never understand is how people just pop up in Krasnoyarsk. It makes me wonder what I did with my life for the twenty years before I came to Russia, because I can tell you exactly how I know pretty much all my friends in England. English friends are the sorts of friends whose relationship to you can be summed up in a single sentence. Friend from school. Friend from uni. Friend from choir. It's like English friendships are always formed on the ruthlessly logical basis of which institution you suffered through together. Yulia is not an English friend. She is a Russian friend. She is the co-worker of the mentor of my Interra colleague Zuzana, and she offered to give me a guided tour of the art museum adjacent to Interra's office back in November. Then I bumped into her in a supermarket near the flat where I used to live (but also pretty near the flat where I now live), and we worked out that we live(/d) in the same neighbourhood. Then she organised a skatin...

The few days after New Year are always mad in Russia, apparently. As soon as the national holiday ends, universities kick off their second semester, which begins with a month-long batch of exams. It’s only logical, therefore, that Russian students spend their week (and a bit) of holiday trying to do as many things as possible EXCEPT for revision. So, after a day of cleaning up following our New Year’s Eve party, we decided to rent a banya for the evening. We emptied the contents of our fridge into the boot of Kirill’s car and set off. About halfway to the banya, Masha decided that we hadn’t brought enough food with us, so we stopped at a supermarket and bought so much stuff that there wasn’t enough space in the boot, and we had to pack it into the back of the car with us. Kirill pulled up outside of a big spa complex. It looked rather fancy. It was in the centre of town, at the bottom of a towering glassy building. We loaded ourselves up with food and staggered towards the entran...