I Am a Polar Bear

Welcome to my first Russia blog! Over the next couple of months, I’ll take you along on my journey, which I’ve been calling #JulietsRussianOdyssey on Instagram. In this post, I’m going to cover a few of the themes from the trip: where I went, the language barrier, the weather and what it was like being in Russia as a solo female traveller. Oh, and apples.

I started in Moscow, took the train to St Petersburg, flew up to Murmansk, the largest city in the Arctic, flew out to Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains as far east as Pakistan, took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Perm 381km away and then finished by flying back to Moscow to get the plane home.

Of course, that’s the tiniest of tiny parts of Russia but I think it’s more than a lot of tourists see. It was particularly important to me, especially when I’d paid £130 just for the visa, to see more than just Moscow and St Petersburg. I wanted to go to Murmansk because… well, I am a polar bear and I like the Arctic but also because it’s where the Arctic parts of Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident are set. I genuinely don’t know why I chose Ekaterinburg and Perm. I remember seeing “has a lovely little Kremlin” or words to that effect but when I went back to start doing the reading properly, those words applied to neither of those cities and I still haven’t figured out where that was. As it turns out, Ekaterinburg was a smart choice and Perm was a delight so I’m glad I landed on them, even if it was totally unintentional.

Before I went, one of the big things holding me back was the language barrier. I’m reasonably comfortable with not speaking much of whatever language is relevant but in Russia I’d be up against an unfamiliar language, an unfamiliar language family and an unfamiliar alphabet so I genuinely tried. And Russian would not sink in. I spent maybe two weeks learning some basic Ukrainian last year and that went in. However, over the last couple of years of failed Russian lessons I have at least learned to read Cyrillic. I read it pretty slowly, spelling it out like a five-year-old but that’s fine.

As it turns out, I don’t desperately need to speak Russian. Not because Russian people speak English – outside of hotel receptionists, they just don’t – but because it’s amazing how much you can convey with hands and faces and occasionally with a landlady, Google Translate. I sat on a train and listened to two Russian ladies being very nice about the fact that I don’t speak their language and I’m pretty sure they then discussed their own language educations in their school days.

However – on my second or third evening, I was stopped in the metro and asked for directions to the mainline station, in Russian, and able to answer. I admit, my answer was to say “Oh, over there!” and to point to the other side of the road and then make a steam train noise to check that I’d understood correctly (I had.) but I was hugely impressed with myself that I’d been asked a question in Russian by a stranger with zero context and had understood. #LikeALocal, as Tom said.

I’d had no idea about the weather. I figured Moscow and St Petersburg would be similar but then I’d be going right up 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle and then I’d be out to the Ural Mountains. Three totally different climates from late August to mid September. It was hot. I took a hoodie and wore it a few times. I took a big thick ski jacket and I carried that thing halfway around Russia for nearly three weeks without ever even thinking about putting it on. I took sun cream just in case and I applied that stuff every day without fail in Moscow and St Petersburg and I still came home pink around the edges most days.

I’d expected it to be a bit scary. We all know Russia doesn’t have the cute and fluffy reputation. I chose not to take a backpack because I thought a cross-body bag would be more secure (and how much did my shoulders hurt carrying that thing around?). I thought it would be the sort of place where I’d be conspicuous.

I felt absolutely safe in Moscow. I arrived in Ekaterinburg in the dark and refused to do so again, to the point where I was willing to risk missing my early morning train, but I was very happy to go out in Moscow in the dark. My mum would say I’m “not streetwise” and I take too many risks but I trust my instincts and they said Moscow was ok. They shouted loudly enough that Ekaterinburg wasn’t! I wasn’t hugely keen on St Petersburg by night. I chilled in Murmansk, of course, what else would you do in the Arctic?, so I didn’t go out in the dark and in Perm, the hotel was a bus ride out of town so I didn’t bother going out at night there. I kept my bag close by and patted it regularly and kept my passport and phone in my secret pockets but honestly, Moscow felt safer than London.

And I didn’t look conspicuous at all. Just off the north-east corner of Red Square, where it meets Nikolskaya Street, I sat on a bench and watched people in costume – Soviet generals, Imperial princes & princesses and such like – trying to catch tourists for photos and extortionate payment for this and they didn’t even look at me. I didn’t object but I couldn’t figure out why it was. What was I doing different? And then I realised. I was on my own. Tourists don’t go around on their own in Russia. Mostly they go round in huge groups following a tour guide with a flag and mostly they wear audioguides on lanyards round their neck. As a single female without a lanyard and a backpack, I think I just didn’t register as a tourist. That said, when I’d explained to my Ekaterinburg landlady that I’d been to Moscow, St Petersburg and Murmansk, yes, on my own, she made horrified faces and voices.

And finally, for this all-over-the-place intro post, I tried collecting a list provisionally titled “Ten Things Trevor Doesn’t Know About Russia” but I only got to seven. Still, here they are for you – things you probably won’t find in guidebooks.

1. Russians really like small fluffy Pomeranian-style dogs. I saw a couple of huskies but everything else was a tiny fluffy dog. I assumed that was just the sort of dog that’s practical in a big city like Moscow but they had them everywhere.
2. There’s always a local favourite crisp flavour that barely exists elsewhere. In the UK I think that’s salt & vinegar. Austria favours ketchup. In Russia, that flavour is crab.
3. Buses have conductors. You get on and a woman (it’s always a woman) wearing a ticket machine will put her phone in her pocket and come and stand next to you until you give her your fare, at which point she’ll hand you a paper ticket and return to her seat until we get to the next stop. This is something I’ve never experienced elsewhere.
4. Plane seatbelts! My flight from St Petersburg to Murmansk was an Aeroflot flight operated by Rossiya. Rossiya has red seatbelts. Murmansk to Ekaterinburg was two Aeroflot flights and they both had orange seatbelts. I was very disappointed when my green S7 Airlines plane from Perm to Moscow had ordinary grey ones instead of green ones.
5. People spit in the streets and in bins and make disgusting noises all. the time. I was glad to get home and never have to listen to that noise ever again.
6. On the metro in Moscow, the front carriage is generally the quietest. In Ekaterinburg, it’s generally the back one. The Ekaterinburg uses the old Moscow metro tokens, since it was built around the time Moscow must have moved from tokens to tickets.
7. Tickets to the Hermitage are ludicrously cheap.  I mean, you will find this fact in guidebooks but I’m going to include it here anyway because I keep asking people “how much would you expect to pay for a massive world-class museum like the Hermitage?” and I get £25-30 usually. It’s 800 roubles, which is about £10/US$12.50

Maybe you’re wondering about the apples? Well, when I started learning Russian, Duolingo gives you lots of nonsense sentences for a really long time to get you used to the new alphabet and the first phrase I ever learned was “Where is my apple?” (or maybe “where are my apples?” – I was very new to Russian and the letters meant nothing to me). I was pleased to find apple juice at breakfast my first morning because that was a word I knew. And then I was delighted to spot someone on the metro carrying an actual overflowing basket of apples like it was the 18th century. And it just continued. Russians carry apples around. Bags, baskets, loose in their hands. Everywhere I looked, apples. Apples were a motif.