The last city on my itinerary was Perm. Why? I can’t remember.
One thing I really like about Iceland’s Snæfellsnes peninsula is that it’s a chilled day, away from the worst of the tourists, seeing the scenery and not having to worry about any particular Major Must-See Site. That’s what Perm is like.
In Moscow and St Petersburg there’s a list of can’t-misses longer than your arm. Murmansk is an industrial wilderness no-one-goes-there-so-I-did city and Ekaterinburg is creaking under the weight of the Church on the Blood. But Perm? There’s nothing in particular in Perm.
I do remember why I chose it! Kungur ice caves! I didn’t go to the caves. I didn’t want to faff around getting to the station again, trundling back down the line for four hours to find myself several kilometres from my destination with no idea how to get the bus or where to get off the bus or where to go if I did manage to get off in the right place, to say nothing of getting back again.
But it was fine. I spent two days in Perm instead.
I got horribly lost trying to get to my hotel. I found a small park full of friendly but feral goats. I found a war graveyard and a monastery but no way through, so I yelled and raged in fury and exhaustion in those woods. I sweated so much under the baking Permian sun that when I finally reached the hotel – yes, a hotel after two cities in apartments – that when I took off my t-shirt it was wet. Not damp. I squeezed it and liquid oozed out. I did some washing in Perm.
Perm was the first place where I needed a metro system to get around and there wasn’t one. I had to figure out buses. 20r, hand them to the woman with the ticket machine slung around her neck, who will get up and come to you most disinterestedly when you board. Great way to use up the little silver bits. 20r, by the way, is about 24p.
I started at Gorkogo Park, which conceals the cutest little theme park – and I don’t readily use “cute” for intangible things like theme parks or cities. It all looked a bit old-fashioned but none of it looked crumbly or worn-out and everything was in use. It must have been Wednesday 11th September but there were plenty of kids around, even of the school-age variety. It also provides plenty of shady benches to sit on while you make a plastic cheese sandwich for lunch.
On Thursday I had a go at following the green tourist line. There are two lines, a green and a red, painted on the ground and you follow them to signposts pointing out things of interest. The green one is more historical & important sites of interest and the red one is romantic occurrences. You can get an English-language guide to the lines at the tourist information office but I went there and the address is abandoned.
To be honest, most of the historical and important sites aren’t that interesting. “This slightly mouldering building used to be a teacher training facility for teenage girls” is all well and good but it’s not going to attract people from four time zones away.
I popped into the zoo. Don’t bother. I’m sure they mean well but it’s one of these old zoos that barely has the funding to keep the holes from the walls. I go to Longleat a lot. Longleat’s lions roam free in the woods with plenty of toys and plenty of keepers. Perm’s lions really do live in a cage. The polar bear looked utterly miserable and the bears worse. It’s a small place in a small city and it’s everything that zoo-haters hate. It’s time to give up on it. There are plenty of zoos that provide a good life for captive animals and they’d be far better off… anywhere else, really. I tend to think, whenever anyone says anything against zoos, “zoos aren’t like that these days, they’re conservation centres, they do good stuff for animals” but Perm Zoo – no.
What I really liked was the river. I have a tendency to seek out and stare at water. I’m an Earth spirit, a cave person, a rock person, a dwarf, an oread, not a water baby, but I do have a history of staring at lakes, seas and streams. They do something good to my soul.
I suppose there’s nothing particularly special about Perm’s river. It doesn’t feel like part of the city’s soul like the Thames or the Seine do. Maybe that’s it. Nothing special, just calm and pleasant. Perm doesn’t seem to be a huge or particularly vibrant city but a city it is and yet right on the other side, just a couple of hundred metres away is a kind of rural scene. Summerhouses, those would be in Iceland. Colourful wooden houses, small-scale agriculture, plenty of trees and separated from the city by an average river.
But what I really enjoyed were the Russian fighter jets. It turns out Perm’s local airport is a combined commercial airport and military airbase. Fighter jets do circuits from there and they were circling over the river. I have no idea how many because it took a while to realise they were doing circles. I’ve not really seen fighter jets before, let alone Russian ones, and I spent a long time watching the sky. Mostly I was trying to figure out what was going on. I didn’t find out about the airport until I arrived there on Friday and saw them taking off so back on Wednesday I began to wonder if there was a war about to break out. I was in no position to find, let alone follow, the local news. Anything could have been happening. I’d been putting off this Russian odyssey due to increased military tensions over the last few years. Stuff is going on between Putin and Trump and maybe Boris Johnson, I don’t know. So are fighter jets a fun thing to watch or my first introduction to World War III? At the time, I had no idea.
The other thing I took from Perm was the leaves. Actually, I literally did collect a few leaves. In Kyiv, any fallen leaf was swept up. None of this squidgy mulchy mess like we’ve got all over the work car park at the moment. I was dimly aware that Moscow and St Petersburg has been very clean. I’d seen a sack of leaves under the Kremlin wall. But it was in Perm that the penny finally dropped – keeping the city leaf-free is important to them. Same thing in Gdansk, it would later turn out. So when I found some golden fallen leaves, I scooped them up for my scrapbook.
So that was Perm. Nothing in particular to do except chill in a park, look at a river and collect leaves. I’m fond of Perm. (Well, until it came to Friday morning and I had to get to the airport but let’s not speak of that.)
