Siberian Flashback

Omsk to Tomsk

On Rosh Hashanah Ivan took a great interest in our books: the Russian Revolution and Soviet Short Stories. “You know, we don’t like that way any more,” he told us, and we explained that we were interested in the historical perspective.

He was 17 and fresh-faced back from three months in Jersey with a compounded love of America. “Americans drink more than Russians,” he told us in stark disagreement with our own experiences.

In the midst of his hometown’s Soviet bloc apartments and fuming ladas, I could see America’s appeal despite the exotica that charmed us. What a thrill it was to ride in our first Lada taxi back to the train that night at only slightly more than the agreed price with a savvy driver who sat stone-faced while we debated tipping or bargaining and then wished us a safe journey in perfect English.

The 2:00 AM train to Omsk was dead on time and woke Miia from train station slumber. The provodnista took an instant liking to me and tucked me in after tossing a pile of linen on Miia’s half-slumbering body.

We awoke at crack AM to the sound of a recognizable military man with an unshakeable discipline even off duty. Miia worked him over with smiles until we hit Western Siberia’s rolling autumn hills and he almost smiled back when I started taking pictures. Soon enough his photo album was out and we were having one-word dictionary-mediated conversation about family, home, and nature.

Unfortunately for us he had long-since alighted by the time we hit Omsk the enxt day, and there was no one to ward off the taxi scammers. “Taxi?”

Miia answered too quickly and eagerly, asked the price. “Chkk, chkk, chkk,” he said, rolling his hand to indicate a metre system, which turned out to be his odometre rigged at about 5 km to 1, with a per km price inflated by a similar ratio. You can fool Miia but don’t expect her to pay 60 bucks for a 5 km cab ride. There were two bulky men in the front and us in the back; Miia haggled and argued and refused and accused the price down to 20 and we walked away in one piece.

Our large room was cold and stank of fresh paint, but it had Russian television – including a soap about boys in military school – and a Russian sauna, called a Banya. We spent an hour sweating and cooling in a clear pool, re-living summer paradise and fighting off our colds. Siberian fall had hit us like a Canadian winter: hat and mitts time!

We stayed in Omsk only one night but it was a pretty town, plenty of yellow and red leaves and pretty young people eye-mauling the dirty hippes. There was even a sushi joint run by Russians who may or may not have been trained in the Japanese art, which got us longing to see Big Brother in the Pacific. The Russians happily obliged our departure to Tomsk; a busful of babushkas escorted us to the train station lest we miss it.

We had second class seats on the train, which placed us in a room with a shishi couple who had fancy clothes hung in plastic for the duration of the trip. They spoke good English but had few words to exchange. Instead we shared coughs and cough-drops, Kleenex and candy; cold season had hit our car hard.

I slept poorly in the only bed long enough for me on any train to date, and awoke too close to the station to be allowed to pee, despite my moaning at the provodnista. The door was slammed shut on my full bladder, which I carried all the way to our 6th floor (no elevator) hostel. It was the best one we stayed in in Russia. After gaining the necessary relief we explored the town’s numerous colourful parks and wooden lace architecture. They had a café with reasonable facsimiles of western food. Tomsk is a university town with hip crowds and it’s a comfortable joint for a three-day layover.

The next day we decided to take a day trip to Kolorova, a very small Siberian village where little happens besides multiple weddings on weekends at the pretty church on the hill. Getting there was facilitated by an allied babushka who shoved us to the front of a queue to find out what time and from where our bus departed. She explained the results of her barking to us by resetting her watch to the time we wanted and walking us to the right stop while tourists and students scattered to make way, further convincing us that middle aged women rule the world.

Kolorova itself has two dirt roads, a corner store, church, and the highway running through the middle of it. We dragged our exploration out as long as possible and made our way to the church, where the organist and bell-ringer invited us into the bell tower to get an astounding view of autumn colours everywhere and the ladies selling cheese made from the milk of their cows across the highway. If only we had known then what that cheese would do to us. When we came down from the bell-tower waving goodbye to the latest in the parade of wedding parties donning their golden crowns, we made small-talk with the cheese ladies until the bus came, bought some of their wares, and took their picture, for which they refused to smile – too many missing teeth. Back in town were more weddings at the mother and soldier war memorial, from which there was a sprawling vista of taiga, taiga, a hang-glider, and more taiga.

In our room we discovered the joys of cheese-eating to Russian pop music awards, a great takeoff of the same on MTV, with well-mimed computerized melodies sung by beautifully sculpted mannequins with expressive faces. Our favourite was a song in English with memorable lines like “it’s like thunder without rain, it’s like book without last page, we’re running without sneakers.” The sound of the television was soon replaced with the sound of rumbles in our tummies.

Russian Pleasures

There is much to be done in Tomsk besides the usual tours of Dracula churches, and the food there was the best we had in Russia (which puts it almost on par with what they serve in a Finnish jail). One of the best offerings are street crepes, which may also have been a source of food poisoning, but a tasty one at least, and vegetarian to boot. The worst food I remember having in Russia, and that is really saying something, was a pre-made Smack-burger, which was essentially a pile of brown mush on wonder-bread under three layers of packaging. There is a fortune to be made for the entrepreneurial gourmet who introduces fine dining in Siberia.

Despite food poisoning of various sorts, and other pretty good dining at the western-style student joint called Foodmasters, I remember Tomsk mainly a place of leisurely walks through crisp autumn air and pretty sites abounding: pretty architecture, pretty parks, pretty monuments, pretty people. We had three fine days there and reluctantly hopped a train to Krasnoyarsk on the first night of October.

That train was a quick overnight, the first few hours of which were passed sharing beer with Aleksei, who with much effort we ascertained is a maker of TV satellite dishes, and roman, a student. In our efforts to communicate we received occasional support from a Mr. Universe contender and his girlfriend, who sat across the isle. We didn’t get very far with those abstract occupational questions, but we did make our way through a few beers and slept beautifully.

Our day in Krasnoyarsk, after taking a hit of Subway sandwich, was spent searching for a certain travel agent known for booking cultural tours of Tuva, made famous to me by the great movie Gengis Blues, about a blind old American bluesman who hears throat singing on his Ham radio and teaches himself the art before travelling to Tuva for an international competition – a true story. We finally found our agency after a few wrong turns just before they closed shop for the day. When the kind young agent started talking of booking us a shaman with her computer we became a bit queasy. Who books a shaman on her computer? Not us. Instead we booked a tour-guide to show us around Kyzyl, Tuva’s capital city, and a couple nights in a cheap hotel there. This agency even had a service where someone would meet you where the train ends in a town called Abakan and show you to the bus-stop. They didn’t mention that the bus-stop is about 200 metres from the train station. We passed on that one too.

On the train to Abakan we met a great trio: Galena and Viktor, who are stenographers at the same company, and Zhenia, a Christian missionary who saves lost souls at the penitentiary, which some might call easy pickins. Young Viktor spoke better than average English and we were able to share some basic details about ourselves – like us he had recently married and went camping on his honeymoon, not far from his hometown, like me. They had honeymooned in the national park near Krasnoyarsk, which I had wanted to visit myself but the train waits for no daydreamers. Anyway we really felt a good connection from Viktor, and he helped us explain to Zhenia why writing English letters to Russian prisoners is not really a good use of our time. We promised to post the addresses on our blog for her instead for our Russian-speaking readers, of which there are a couple, for whatever it’s worth, and we did that. Writing to prisoners is in fact a grand thing to do, but really what’s the point of doing it in a language they can’t read? It’s like poking their eyes out and then telling them there’s a naked lady dancing around the room.