The Margate of Siberia

Okay, so due to the fact that we didn't have internet in our (very lovely) apartment until two days ago, the promised blogorrhoea never materialised. This meant that despite the fact that I'd already written a fair few posts on MS Word, I couldn't post any of them, respond to anyone on facebook, or even defend myself against the lovely GIF animation that miraculously appeared in the last post's comments section. But now I am back with a vengeance, and so a certain vonmonkey should await revenge of some as yet undecided kind...

Anyway, for the sake of thoroughness (and because I'm sure as hell not deleting what I've already written) my amazing time-travelling blog shall continue to write as if it is still sometime in mid-to-late February, with England still all snowy and me still somewhere in the Siberian tundra. Although I had planned to start with Mongolia, I then realised that whilst there had been a mention of its bone-chiilling freezingness, Irkutsk itself had not received any blog love. And it does deserve some, for it was a surprisingly pleasant little city.



Before I arrived, I had a mental picture of Irkutsk as a grim industrial pile, worth visiting only as a gateway to Lake Baikal, but instead I found a place with what can best be described as the atmosphere of a seaside town in the off-season. Instead of grimy old pipes, there were traditional wooden houses, some pretty art nouveau buildings, a laid-back atmosphere, and yes, even bunting and people selling candy floss and ice cream. This last delicacy may sound a bizarre choice in temperatures as low as -50, but I have been informed that Siberians actually eat ice cream in winter for warmth, the ice cream being about twice the heat of the surrounding air. I still think a warm drink would perchance be a more effective heating mechanism, but then I am not a hardy Siberian, so I know little about such matters.



Anyway, despite the obligatory ‘Lenina’ and ‘Karla Marxa’ streets and statues of communist luminaries, the centre of Irkutsk appeared to have been largely spared the delights of Soviet town planning, and even the obligatory pollution from across the frozen river appeared strangely picturesque. Apparently Irkutsk was once dubbed the ‘Paris of Siberia,’ and whilst this may be a slight overstatement of its charms, it certainly was a pleasant place to while away a couple of days. We visited the house of the nineteenth century exiles Sergei and Maria Volkonsky, members of a group of aristocrats who were sent to Irkutsk in 1825 after supporting the Decembrist plot against Tsar Nicholas I (not the one on my Romanov necklace). They had, shall we say, rather better living conditions than the majority of exiles in Siberia, and the museum contained some rather cool antiques from their house, which the kindly assistant attempted to tell us about in Russian. We didn’t understand everything, but we got the main gist and anyway, everything looked very pretty. We did then rather amuse the staff by failing to read the one sign in English in the whole museum (tour continues this way), and promptly walking through the side door that took us straight outside into the -25 cold. Yes folks, we smart.

It was also in Irkutsk that I understood my first Russian pun, and was so proud of myself that I had to take a photo, and now have to explain the joke (sorry). This sign reads ‘Las Knigas,’ which, as ‘kniga’ is a book, means that this is a bookshop making a lame pun on ‘Las Vegas.’ I was a little bit too happy when I understood this.