What is your impression of Siberia?
An endless landscape of permafrost and taiga forests? The long Trans-Siberian ride from Moscow to Beijing? Or perhaps, the memorable DHL advertisement where a cat slyly sent the house parrot (by DHL, of course) to Siberia.
My first impression of Siberia is .... green and sunny. For here I am in Novosibirsk (literally, 'new Siberia'), the largest city in Siberia (1.3 mil pop) and major stop on the Trans-Siberian rail - and it is as hot as Singapore! High summer in Siberia clocks 30 deg C.
As I collected my backpack from the luggage belt, a tall skinny Russian man sitting nearby looked me up and down, and started talking to me in Russian. I could just barely pick out some words that sounded like "mushina? (man)", "zhenshina? (woman)". Erm right, is he asking me if I am male or female? I decided to ignore him and he moved off after a while. Well! This is a reminder of how different I look in this place. Perhaps when Europeans first appeared in China centuries ago, my ancestors asked the same questions.
Outside Tolmalchevo airport, I stood irresolutely in front of 2 buses, which looked 50 years old, and there were a number of equally old Russians sitting on them. I was looking for bus 111e to bring me to the city. A Russian man walked up and started shouting a bunch of Russian words to me. Among them, I picked up the word "voksal? (train station)". I go "Da! (yes) Da! (yes)", and he waved me to join a burgeoning group of people forming a line in front of the domestic terminal (which for some reason looks gleaming new, while the international terminal looked run-down.)
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| queueing up for city bus 111e outside the airport |
There were two queues - one for bus 111e, another one for "marshrutka (small shared taxi vans)". Perhaps I will take marshrutkas some day, but today I stick to the big city bus.
As we waited for the bus to leave, a young Russian backpacker in the next seat started chatting with me. He was from a small town near Novosibrsk; he had just done 2 weeks of backpacking in China; he had taken hard sleeper train seats and they were very uncomfortable; he had gone to Shaolin to see the kungfu monks. As we drew nearer the city, he alerted me when the voksal was the next stop, the fare was 30 roubles, and bade me to be careful while travelling in Russia. What a nice boy! This was the first of many good Russian people I would meet.
I hopped off the bus, excited to finally reach my destination. Almost forgot to collect my backpack from the bus!
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| Novosibirsk train station |
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