It happened one night

Communist demonstration in Kirov square

Today, as I was walking towards the university, I cam across a communist rally - unmissable, red flags flying everywhere, and even a large poster of Stalin, which I couldn't help but take a picture of (I wanted to get hold of one of the communist flags as a souvenir, but I don't know how they would have taken that, especially from  someone from the capitalist west... Everyone on our corridor, save for Corinne and myself have gone off to Arshan for the weekend, so in their absence, I've decided to become better acquainted with some of the other foreign students at the State University which Emily attends (there are a lot of universities in Irkutsk, and just today I found out that Russian students don't have to pay to study at the Linguistic university - something similar to Scottish universities, but its probably debatable whether they receive more money from the government or from foreign students who come to study here (I may be biased when I say that I suspect that it is the latter...). Today our lessons included a bit of an interview with Elizabeta, where we were asking her were we can find certain things or what we can do here in Irkutsk, which was quite useful. She also collected up money of us (150 roubles each) in order to go and see the puppet theatre next Tuesday after lessons. Afterwards, I met Dasha and Vika, and spoke with them for a while about what they would be doing next weekend, and telling them that we should meet up and go ice-skating at some point.

Joe Stalin

Old map of South-West Baikal, including the Circum-Baikal

Corinne and I went back to the residence (Corinne got off earlier to go postcard-hunting) and, once in the residence, after a brief discussion with the babushka (she was upset that I went in, dropped off all my stuff and went out again, making her get up to take back the key - seriously, I think there are worse things in the world...), headed out. On the way to the bus stop, I dropped by the office where they organise excursions - some sort of tourist venue, and asked about the Circum-Baikal railway, and when it would be possible to get an excursion there - the excursion would take us to one end of the railway, then pick us up and return us to Irkutsk from the other end (either Port Baikal or Sludyanka). There are no trips this weekend, as I mentioned already, but there will be one on the following Friday, which I think that I at least am going to try to get, although I doubt many other people will be keen to do this (the people from Emily's university are possibly going to Arshan). I also discovered that it costs 2300 roubles to organise this excursion (per person), which is no small amount, but I'd like to go on it, as it may be closing down next year. There are probably ways to do this excursion on the cheap, maybe going to Listvianka and there getting the ferry, then buying train tickets, and then getting train tickets at the other end, but I'm not really sure how to do this...

On skates: The picture didn't look as blurry in the imager!

Once I'd finished in the travel agency office, I got on the bus for a long drive to the other side of the river. As we went past the university, Abigail, Ingrid and Rose also got on the bus, so I went over to have a chat to them and to ask them if they knew which stop I was meant to get off at. Fortunately Ingrid lives not far from the stop I was heading to (Universitetski), and so she was able to tell me where to get off. After a bit of a wait around, Guillaume appeared to take me over to meet the rest of the IGU crew - they're quite a nice bunch - a lot of them are Austrian, French or German, but, most interestingly, they do, on a general basis speak only in Russian. I found this quite interesting, but very refreshing too, it was nice to finally get a chance to talk to several new people in Russian and very rewarding to feel I was being understood, particularly when I was talking to Marina, a Russian girl studying English and Spanish at the Linguistic University. As a group, we went to a small hut, where we rented some ice skates and handed over some ID for safe-keeping. I got an ancient set of ice-skates and after struggling to put them on, we all hobbled down to the ice rink. I don't think I've ice skated in five years at least, so it was hardly surprising that I was terrible - still, it was nice to spin around the ice rink (katatsa na kankahj) and talk to some new people, even if it was outdoors at -14ºC... We also bonded over a thermos flask of mulled wine, which someone had dredged up (I suspect this was the Austrians' doing - first time I've tried it in Russia).

Eventually, we decided we were too cold to carry on, so went back to hand in our ice skates and get our shoes back. I have to admit to freaking out a bit at this point. There was no system at all to how the boots were stored - ID was all stored alphabetically by surname, which worked fairly well (I gave them my student card, although some of the others handed over their passports), but when it came to the boots, they had just put them somewhere, so when I came to ask for them back, he just asked me which ones were mine, and almost gave me the wrong pair of shoes! Anybody could have walked off with any of the shoes, but, as Corinne said when I told her, people here have a phobia of other people's germs... I bid adieu to everybody else there, and then Guillaume showed me where the bus stop was, and stayed and chatted with me until eventually a 16 turned up and I managed to get a place on it. However, this 16 was coming to my stop from the opposite direction, which was very confusing, and I only notice when I was meant to get off when I saw the Jolly Rodger club/restaurant on the left. The crowd on the bus at that time of night were fairly strange - there was one woman who was clearly drunk, who appeared to be flirting (she was casting some very dirty looks around) with thin air in her vicinity - I'm not sure what the old lady in front of her made of that!!