That same day, after only a few hours’ rest, we left for the city centre to see the Christmas decorations. The central avenue, Prospekt Mira, was fantastically decorated with lights in the trees, lights between all the buildings, and lights running up the street lamps. Every fountain had also been switched off because all the water had been replaced with light displays. I felt like I was alive inside a Christmas card, one of those pop-up cards that also play music. It may sound garish, but it didn’t look or feel that way at all. It was a very different experience from the Christmas feeling I had known in Wales, and it was easy to become excited by it. There were no shoppers running around like headless chickens, instead I saw couples arm-in-arm – sometimes with a child wrapped up in fur – stopping to admire carousels in toyshop windows.
The central square located between Ulitsa Bograda and Ulitsa Dubrovinskogo becomes the gathering point for locals and tourists alike. This is because Krasnoyarsk has the largest Christmas tree in all of Russia, which stands at 46 metres. Surrounding this tree are dozens of intricate ice sculptures, ranging from 6 to 12 feet in height. There are many obvious subjects for the statues such as frozen people dancing, ice ships and wolves balancing balls on their noses but they also carve a few things you wouldn’t expect such as giant sewing machines, penny farthings and ice telescopes. To keep the children amused they even make playgrounds – fortresses, labyrinths, and palaces – complete with staircases and slides that both children and adults play on. Beneath the Christmas tree was a large painting of Grandfather Frost, the Russian equivalent of Father Christmas. He is the same as Father Christmas in most ways except that he apparently brings children presents in person, instead of when they are sleeping. As well as a long white beard, big black boots and a long red coat, he is often depicted as carrying a magical staff and is always accompanied by his granddaughter, Snegurochka, dressed in long silver-blue robes and a furry shapka.
The Russian winter attire is exactly as you would imagine. Thick coats and warm snow boots, though many people who work in offices wear fur-lined smart black shoes and woollen office coats over smart suits. Russian women, for the most part, wear full-length coats of various shapes and materials, and only those with large incomes, or rich husbands, wear black mink. I saw many of these wealthier women floating around with mink hoods obscuring their faces from view. There are an unusual number of tall women in Russia, and when they have their mink coats and high-heeled boots on, they look like goddesses, similar to the smartly dressed women I have seen floating about in Paris. The majority of these women are, as my mates would say, ‘smokin’ hot’ with high cheekbones and perfectly-sculpted eyebrows. The men are less attractive – they are either tall and skinny or short and stocky. Men’s haircuts are also less appealing, they often have very short fringes and mullet style locks at the back of short-cropped hair. Nastya and I would often comment when we saw a Siberian goddess float by with a small Russian man on her arm. It just didn’t seem right. I think this is because old-fashioned gender roles are still common in Russia. Women are expected to look flawless, while men are expected to be very hard and very strong, which they are.
Being a Welshman I’m not afraid of much, but I do have a small list of things I wouldn’t like to meet down a dark alley; Siberian men are on that list, along with Charles Bronson, and the scary robot-lady from Superman 3. Not only do Siberian men have a harder life, what with the weather and the dacha lifestyle, but the majority of them have to do compulsory military service before the age of twenty seven. By the time they are thirty they are tough as bears. The only reasons a man is exempt from military service are having two or more children, having a medical certificate declaring them unfit, or studying at university. All full-time students are free from conscription, but they can be drafted for one year after graduation. Those who continue full-time postgraduate education are not drafted. This, I suspect, is why Russia produces an inordinate number of great scientists and why their technology, especially their military technology is scarily advanced.
Although I had brought my own fake-fur ushanka from the UK, and I had a large woollen cardigan under my coat, it was insufficient to keep out the driving wind. My shapka let out too much heat and my coat, which was heavy and weather proof by British standards, felt thin as paper. Boris, who has a wardrobe full of spare hunting clothes lent me an old black winter coat that was two sizes too big for me, but very warm, and a real black mink ushanka. Because my British shapka was so thin, Boris asked me to give it to him. When he was climbing mountains in the taiga, while fighting off bears and stalking deer, his head would sweat too much under real fur, so a poorly-made British ushanka was perfect. With my huge black coat, black furry shapka and black snow boots I looked the part, and as I was now disguised as a Russian, Nastya and I were free to enjoy walks throughout the city and along the banks of the Yenisei without me freezing to death. One of the winter pleasures we often indulged in was buying shashliks from street stalls near the giant Christmas tree. From the middle of December to the first week of January a fleet of street merchants stand around the tree with mobile barbeques, selling a range of chicken, pork and beef shashliks on skewers. Despite the snow, the meat is always well cooked and very hot, although a bit pricey at times. Still I didn’t mind paying over-the-odds for hot food, because it is so much better than anything available at the cafés.
Like the UK, Russia has a variety of cafés that differ in style and standard. The worst of them, which are mostly chains, offer lukewarm food that is often dry and boring. Instead of getting a full meal on one plate, like you can in any British café, you have to order things separately, which are then served on plastic disposable plates. There is normally a queue system in these cafés. They are designed so that you pick up a tray as you enter, collecting little dishes from counters as you shuffle along towards the till point. When you reach the till, the already lukewarm food is cold as British seawater. Known as stolovaya, this type of café was created during Soviet times and based on the school dinners system. Some of the other cafés are different in that they don’t have a tray system and you only get your food when you pay for it at the counter or it is brought by a waiter. I preferred these places as they were the closest I could get to proper independent British cafés that serve proper hot grubbage, plus they were usually well decorated with wooden beams and soft lighting. I didn’t often get to see them, however, as Nastya preferred to visit the cheapy-cheapy stolovaya she had grown up with. Although some of them were a modern take on the Soviet style, they were all quite similar in that they housed very tired and uncomfortable furniture. There is always a noticeable difference in clientele also. While the better cafés were usually full with people who knew how to smile, the stolovaya were crammed with the joyless faces, people who looked lost in thought and who I assumed weren’t able to bring themselves to break free from Soviet discomfort.
While the older generations always wrapped up warm, younger folk occasionally didn’t. I saw men wearing trainers, and women in their twenties wearing short skirts and thin pairs of tights. They must have been freezing. It seems wherever you go in the world there are always a few people who would rather sacrifice their health in order to look fashionable. Nastya told me about a friend of hers from Moscow who often went clubbing at night in a short skirt and busked in the street by day without gloves on. She contracted pneumonia and died in her mid-twenties; an early death for the sake of looking good on the dance floor.