Monday 21^st April

The BA flight actually lands 10 minutes early, I float through passport and visa control, they really seem to have improved things at Domodedovo recently and I’m stood by the carousel waiting for the bag to appear.

AND IT DOES!!!  Yee! Haa! T5, I love you, my day is set up now, a few hours wait then a flight at 9 out to Lipetsk and we’re back on track.

Of course it couldn’t last.

There is thick fog in Moscow and despite being able to check my bag straight in which saves me lumping it all around the airport for a few hours, all flights to and from the airport are delayed for an unspecified period.

After a brief update that there will be an update at 9:10 (and it’s only 6:30 now), I decide to lash out and buy a pass for the business lounge where at least I can grab a “complimentary” coffee, bit brekkie and get my head down for a bit in relatively safe surroundings.

Of course, the whole buying a pass, checking into the lounge is unnecessarily bureaucratic, but I soon have a glass of juice, a double espresso and some snacks to keep me going, and I manage to grab around an hours kip before the lounge fills up and the updates start to come through.  An update promising another update and so on until I get news that my 9:00 flight will be at 11:25, so I settle down and update this piece de resistance for the past few days.  (You don’t honestly think I type it each day, surely?) bureaucracy – ah! That’s how you spell it.

The good news is that just as we land, Irina from the office pulls up outside the airport so it’s not long before we are hurtling through the streets of Lipetsk at breakneck speed, with Irina telling me how she likes to drive fast.  VERY fast!!!

Irina also informs me that we have a “little problem”.  The little problem turns out to be that we will have no electricity until 4pm.  I can see how that could be just a wee bit tricky so I ask Irina to take me to the hotel where I have a much needed shower (I stank) and then we head off for some food and hope the leccy is back on soon.

It is, but this day keeps going from bad to worse after such good early promise from the T5 experience and I spend the remaining time in the office trying to talk the ISP through what we need, and indeed should have had for the past 2 months in the way of an internet connection so that we can set up the VPN to the corporate network.  I fail miserably and leave the office very tired and dejected.  It’s not been a good day, so I go back to the hotel and just crash through sheer exhaustion.

And there's a mossie buzzing around in my room.

Ha! I just killed it, things are looking back up again!

Sunday 20^th April

Another lie-in.  I nip over to PC World to buy a backpack for my laptop and it’s associated clobber as I don’t need to carry as much gubbins as on previous trips, then we meet with Mark who has been working on the pile of stones in France which is slowly, slowly turning into a house.  He cracks us up with stories of their time out there, and the French builder they were working with, then I get the dinner on, pack and am soon back on the road to Heathrow again, heading back to Moscow. 

I’m just glad we didn’t have a game today, it would have put me in a real bad mood to watch the Mags completely outplay us while we flap around like fairies at the back, and show bugger all ambition to get into them, I mean it’s not like it’s a derby match or owt.

I’d booked with BA this time, completely oblivious to the fact that I’d be leaving from the notorious Terminal 5 (cue Jaws type music).

The car hire drop off is even easier than the pick-up and I laugh to myself at how complicated the Russians could make it, then it’s into the shuttle bus and onto Terminal 5.  The bag drop (yeah BA and their web check-in!), security and whole terminal experience are all superb, despite the scare stories of the previous few weeks, and I am actually impressed with the setup.

The flight leaves on-time, now all I need are the bags to arrive in Moscow with me and I will be BA / BAA’s number one fan.

Saturday 19^th April

It’s wet and grey outside, but luckily my wife has had people in to do the garden so I can have a great lie-in, before heading out to the supermarket.  I still don’t know how they conned me into buying shed loads of food that I won’t be around to eat, but I’m just happy to be sauntering around in Sainsburys where I recognise most of the stuff on the shelves, although the prices are a bit steep compared to Russian prices.  Ah yes – I love good old rip-off Britain!

I also notice that everytime I come home, petrol seems to have creeped up another few pence per gallon, it really is getting stupid now, just how we're been taken to the cleaners by every man Jack these days.

Sunderland don’t play until tomorrow so the football today is more a case of sussing out how the other teams in and around the bottom of the league are doing.  The results are mixed, but not disastrous for us.

We all then spend most of the rest of the day sorting out paperwork, invoices, post, etc.  The lovely things in life.

Friday 18^th April

I’m up bright and early cos I went to bed last night without packing – sometimes I just can’t face it, but I manage to cram everything in and I’m even a few minutes early down in reception waiting for the taxi.

The taxi driver is a mad but great woman who speaks a tad more English than I speak Russian, but we manage to hold a fantastic conversation about everything and nothing the whole way to the airport.  We do actually talk about the traffic, the roadworks, Yuri Gagarin, police corrruption, football, her house, Volga cars and my journey across Russia, which is quite impressive, I think.  She tries to strangle me a few times for some reason I have yet to fathom, and teaches me not only the words, but also the gestures for telling the traffic police to eff off, so all in all, it’s a productive trip.

I manage to get a decent seat on the plane and kip sporadically between food and drink most of the way back to Heathrow.

I’d booked a hire car ON-LINE yesterday and the whole process of registering, transferring to the car park, picking a car and leaving is all so smooth.  We really must try to export our service culture out east one of these days.  Before long I’m in the car, heading for Kingston and the office to meet the troops for the first time in over 6 weeks.

I get stuck in a few roadworks but make half decent time and run into a reception committee waiting outside the office.  It’s all handshakes and hail traveller well met stuff, and quite nice to see familiar faces again after so long.  We grab a pizza then I do the rounds back in the office, have a couple of catch up meetings on the stuff I’ll be working on when I finally finish in Russia, then head off home.

The journey is good by Friday night M25 / M3 / M4 standards.  The one noticeable thing about coming home is always how green our countryside is, and this time is no exception.  The lambs are all out gambolling in the fields, one even put a tenner on us to win at the weekend.  It's a decent enough journey and I’m eventually back home eating chip shop chips and with the girls again for the 1^st time in nearly 3 weeks.

Thursday 17^th April

I trek halfway across Moscow looking for number 81 Crass-Spassky street or something like that to find the airline office so I can change my flight from Saturday to tomorrow.  The main reason for the trek is that there is no number 81, in fact the highest number I can find after looking up and down, backwards and forwards, over the Irish Sea is number 28.  By process of elimination, I backtrack and find the ticket office at number 18.  This after hanging on the telephone à la Debbie Harry for hours yesterday to find that I can’t just change the ticket online or even over the phone, oh no, remember where you are, young man!  If a simple task can possibly be made more complicated, you can be sure that it will be.

Eventually, I find the office, wait in a queue (of course) and get the flight changed for tomorrow morning, then head back to the office via the metro.

I like the metro in Moscow, although it does require the ability to read Cyrillic.  Once you can do that, it is fast, cheap, clean and efficient.

Once in the office, I confirm with Polina that we will go for a drink / meal after work as a way of saying spasibo for her great efforts.

I then try to dot all the I’s and cross all the t’s for the following week.  There are yet more flights and hotels to be booked, and I also have to coincide with a visit from Melissa from the UK the week after next.  If all I had to do was the techy bits, this job would be a doddle.

The day drags but eventually Polina takes me via the metro (she’s surprised I actually have my own ticket already) to a nice bar / café place where we grab a few drinks and a bit of food while a band play.  The place is full of European and American business people, most of them well on their way to being pissed, so is lively enough, and Polina gives me more insight into life in Russia and more specifically Moscow.  She promises that she will come up with a non-touristy guide to Moscow, to see the real city.  Deal!

Wednesday 16^th April

Just another day in the office.  I was hoping to move onto another branch this week in the Moscow area, but they aren’t ready yet so I’m just working from the Moscow office.  I take this opportunity to catch up with Pavel, the Russia IT manager and give him feedback from the project to date. 

I also take the opportunity to thank Polina for her magnificent efforts in arranging all our travel and hotel details.

The rest of the day is spent doing a mixture of documentation, and fact-finding about various networking issues we have in the Moscow sites.

I take the metro home and surprise myself by being able to read the signs so I end up leaving by the exit right by the street where my hotel is.  Woo! Hoo! I can actually READ Russian, even if I can’t speak it.

There you go, KT, a nice short one ;-)

Happy 40^th Maureen, if you’re reading this, although, it’s probably not even your Birthday back home yet.

I made a decision last night to not pack until this morning and surprise myself by actually getting up, showering, having a proper Russian breakfast of porridge, pancakes and fruit and packing all before Tanya texts to say she would be along soon to pick me up.  I check out, picking up my registration documents (oh yes, I’m on the ball now) and wait outside in the cool drizzle for a few minutes till Tanya turns up in a taxi.  She’d left her car at the Bavarian joint last night and the plan is to go there, pick up the car and head off to the ticket agency, then be at the office by 9:30 – 10:00.

Well that was Plan A, anyway.  Plan B quickly came along when we get stuck for ages in traffic, and when we eventually get to the pub we find the world’s largest Land Cruiser has blocked Tanya’s car in, and it takes a full 30 minutes to track down the owner and get it moved.  I’m not panicking yet, but am conscious that time is ticking by, the traffic is still heavy and the airport is a good 40km from the city, something not uncommon in most Russian cities.  The ticket agency take a little while to print the tickets, but at least this time all my details are in English so we don’t have the situation I’ve had in other places where there have been the mistranslations between the English characters and Cyrillic characters in my name.  Tanya has to go to the bank and we eventually get to the office at just after 11:00.

The people in the office have some gifts for me, a decorative plate from Vladivostok, a souvenir from the railway station, being the end of the line, and some more Russian titbits which we’d discussed last night and they’d decided that I must try.  I am once more amazed at their generosity and thank them for the kindness and hospitality they have shown me during my all too brief time in their city.

My taxi is waiting, so it really is just a quick into the office, collect my stuff, say my goodbyes and I’m off again heading for the 9 hour flight back to Moscow. 

I can honestly say that I really enjoyed Vladivostok.  In the same way as St Petersburg at the one end of this vast country has a very Western European feel to it, there is something about Vladivostok which stands it apart from the other central Russian cities I have visited.  I had been told that it was very Asian, and they drove on the left, all kinds of things.  To me, it  is still a very Russian place.  The majority of the people there are typically Russian in appearance, most of the buildings are soviet concrete monstrosities and they drive on the right, albeit in right-hand drive Japanese cars.

Whether it is having the Pacific Ocean to look out to, or the fact that it is bordering Asian countries and most of the business is Pan-Asian, but there is a definite uniqueness to Vladivostok.  In the same way as I would encourage anyone who has the opportunity to visit St Petersburg, I think I would say the same for Vladivostok.  Certainly the people I met there were generous to a fault, recognising that I was alone in a country where I could now just about read a few words, and speak even fewer.  I’ve marked it down in my list of places I would definitely like to visit again.

The airport is very clean and efficient, I manage to get through without any excess baggage and even grab a window emergency exit seat which, with a 9 hour flight ahead of me I’m pleased about.

I’m actually flying with Aeroflot, which may bring sniggers to some, but trust me, are the Virgin Atlantic / Emirates of the Russian fleet.  The weather is much clearer than on the way here and as we fly back over frozen Siberia, there are some stunning views out over thousands of miles of snow-covered nothingness, frozen lakes and rivers.  We always say when there’s a cold snap back home that the wind is blowing in from Siberia and it never meant a great deal until now.

Now it’s me who is blowing in from Siberia, slowly but surely heading home.

Monday 14^th April

A friend of Katia and Viktor who we had met at the restaurant last night had asked me when I was leaving Vladivostok and was surprised when I said that I didn’t know, and that I hadn’t yet bought a ticket to return to Moscow.  That’s the nature of the job.  Sometimes what should be a 15 minute task takes a whole morning, sometimes what you think may take an afternoon is done and dusted within an hour.  There are so many known unknowns and unknown unknowns, to quote Mr Rumsfeld, that it would be folly to do anything other than have a guess at how long it will take.

Having said that, by midday, I know that I am making really good progress, and that while there is  still a lot to do, they are all relatively on the known side of the unknown spectrum, and barring a disaster, I should be done by the end of the day.  I make the decision to ask Polina to investigate flights back to Moscow for either tomorrow or Wednesday, and am more than pleasantly surprised to find that there is actually a flight tomorrow leaving at a really sensible time of the day, 1:30 pm so quickly ask her to book me a place.

Buoyed on by the fact that I don’t have to get up before I’ve gone to bed, I dot as many I’s and cross as many T’s as I can, tidy the place up, even do a lot of the documentation, take some photos and am done by just after 7pm.

Tanya takes Yelena, Julia and me back to the Bavarian place where we meet up with Artem, and again I eat far too much fish, sausages, soup, cabbage, and slosh back a few more house beers while watching another band do 2 sets, 1 of mainly Beatles and other English 60’s covers, the 2^nd set a more upbeat eclectic mix of James Brown, La Bamba, and a load of songs from Pulp Fiction.  All the way through I’m getting bombarded by questions asking about life in England, my travels, my shoe size, everything, but I don’t mind because I can see how intrigued they are by it all, and they are really great company.  Once more the beer wins the battle over my natural shyness and I am forced to dance the night away with 3 lovely girls.  Luckily, I’m fairly sure there are no pictures of me dancing so I can say that I was, once more, Fred Astaire meets John Travolta-esque in my efforts, and no one will know any different.

I get dropped off at the hotel, arranging to meet Tanya in the morning to go and collect my flight tickets before heading to the office for the last time.

I think I only get woken about 6 times during the night by phone calls, texts and emails, so that’s quite good, all things considered.

Sunday 13^th April

The football results from back home don’t come in until 3am and are not good.  Sunderland lost to a late goal at home to Man City while some of the other teams around us gained points.  Texts and phone calls continue through the wee small hours into the quite big hours, but somehow I don’t mind being called by some of the lads from back home at 5:30 am my time, and eventually get some sleep.

I decide that sleep is definitely a better choice than breakfast so have a good rest before heading by foot into town.  I like to wander on my own (in fact I think I said so in an earlier entry), to get a feel for a place.  The hotel is a decent walk away from the city centre, past some typically unattractive tower blocks and the dockyards where thousands upon thousands of Japanese cars are unloaded and stored. 

I get to the main bus and train station.  The train station is the end of the line for the infamous Trans-Siberian railroad along whose length I have travelled a fair old distance, though I gave up on the idea of the full 7 day trip a while back, mainly due to lack of time, it must be said.  It seems a poignant moment somehow, after being stood in the station at St Petersburg a full 5 weeks earlier, that I am now at the other end of the line.  It was intended that this was also the end of the project, but due to ever changing plans, I still have to head back to the Moscow area after I’m done in Vladivostok to complete 2 branches where the network wasn’t ready while we were over that neck of the woods.  It still feels to me, however, to be the end of the road and in some ways I actually feel a tinge of sadness, but I digress.

I randomly pick a street to walk along and somehow or other end up on the sea front where I’d walked with Tanya the day before.  I take a few pictures but have to carefully ration them as, stupidly, I’d run the batteries on the camera right down so you’ll just have to imagine the sight of me, socks and shoes off, jeans pulled up around my knees, plodging in the Pacific.  Well it would have been rude not to.  There is an "attraction" which is a floatng rusty iron + wooden affair with some dolphins in.  I don't usually like this kind of thing but I pay my £1.50 and spend ages just watching these great creatures swim around in a cramped compartment.

As I head off to try and track down the office, I come across the football stadium and notice that there is a game on tonight at 6pm.  Hmmm, could be interesting so I text Tania, who I know is out of town visiting her grandmother, then head in what I believe to be the general direction of the offices.  It is quite a walk to the office, well it is the way I went anyway, which I now know is the long way, but is the only route I know as that’s the way we went in the taxi the day before, with a taxi driver who also didn’t know where the offices were.

As I near the offices my phone rings.  It’s branch manager Katia who says that the jungle drums have been beating and that she and her husband are going to stop whatever they were doing on this fine Sunday afternoon, make the trek from well out of town to the football ground and buy tickets.  I’m gobsmacked and chuffed at the same time and head into work to run a few more updates on the systems.

With 30 minutes to kick off, and a 45 minute walk away from the stadium (my way, don’t forget), Katia rings to say that they have the tickets and asks where I am.  A bit of a surreal conversation follow when I say I am at the business centre, which business centre? Your business centre, and a very confused Katia explains that the traffic is very heavy so a taxi is not a good option and that I should walk to the football ground.  We hatch a plan where I stop a person in the street and she asks them to point me in the right direction, which is a good plan.  Except the only person I can see is a bloke with gold teeth and a black leather jacket who looks like he’ll run off with my phone, but nothing ventured, nothing gained so I walk up to him.  Now you have to imagine the scenario reversed where a strange bloke walks up to you, pointing at his mobile phone, yabbering away in a foreign lingo and handing it to you.  This bloke obviously thinks I’m the nutter, and says Nyet a few times before I somehow manage to convince him to speak with Katia.

It turns out that he is in a hurry as HE is heading to the football, and he agrees to take me with him, so we head off at a bit of a lick, through a load of back streets, past queues of cars snarled up in the jams.  We stride on in silence and before long I recognise where we are, quite near to the stadium.  He asks for my phone, calls Katia and we meet up.  Katia remarks how lucky I was to have met the man, and I agree.  I don’t know how or why, but things like that always seem to happen to me.  I think I was born lucky.  In true fashion, I get into the ground just as the teams kick off.

The match is a turgid affair, played on a pitch which looks like it doubles up as a potato field, but the experience is great, and I’ve seen worse matches in my time. The crowd try their best to lift the home team and make a fair bit of noise at times in such a small stadium.  The opposition are from the Moscow region.  I look for away fans, I’m sure there were some, but I couldn’t see them from where we were sat.  Now that’s what I call true support, for anyone making that trip to watch their team.

As the sun sets, the wind blows in from the sea with a chilling cut to it.  Katia and Viktor have suffered enough, it’s obviously not going to turn into match of the century, so with a few minutes left, we opt to head off for some food and beers before they drop me off at the hotel, thanking them again for dropping everything just to take this strange English football fan to a game between 2 clubs he had no interest in.

Saturday 12^th April

I take a taxi to the office and meet Katia.  It takes only a few minutes to fathom out the network and call in the awaiting support back in the UK.  It’s 1am back home so I am conscious to minimise the time taken – a simple IP address change, a few tests, and we’re up and running.  The end of the previous day in the UK, the start of a long day for me in Vladivostok.  It’s quite strange really. 

Katia heads out to town leaving me with the key to the offices and I just get my head down and get on with configuring the network and server while copying data from the PCs.  It looks like 4 of the 5 systems are in good shape and just need the usual configuration changes and tedious updates, whilst Katia’s laptop will need a rebuild.

First Julia, then Artem and finally Tatiana (Tanya) put in appearances – I get the feeling I’m a bit of a novelty, and after a long session, I decide to leave another batch of updates running and head out for another brief city tour, and a stroll along the Pacific shore with Tanya.  She explains, as Katia had the previous evening, how Vladivostok is only a small city, in Russian terms, of around 700,000 population. 

I am beginning to get a feel for the place already.  The Japanese cars, the typical soviet architecture, some terrible roads due, I am told, to the fact that Vladivostok actually has no city government at the moment.  It had been in mafia control for some time and apparently one ex-official who had been caught with his hands in the till was now spending some time in the “monkey house”.  A term which I believe to be similar to spending some time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

We meet up with Tanya’s friend, another Ekaterina (Katia) and head off to a Bavarian type place where we have a good mixture of fish dishes, salads and sausages all washed down with some house beers and settle in to watch a local rock band put on a good show consisting of fairly mainstream covers. There is a bit of a boogie session afterwards and I am dragged up to strut my stuff and show these Russians how your typical English male can trip the light fandango.  I think they’re either impressed, or just incredibly polite.

We spend a good few hours just eating, drinking and chatting about our respective lives, the similarities and the differences.

Friday 11^th April

I think I’ve done a pretty good job of this little old write-ip so far, but all the best shows have a bit of audience participation.  As the only alternative is to register and post comments, instead I think I’ll let YOU, oh glorious reader write today’s entry.  Ready? Eyes down here we go.

Today I

a)      get to have a lovely rest in a goose down bed with silk sheets waited on hand and foot by a dozen nymphets, my every wish being their command

b)      awake in a bath of treacle to discover a German shepherd dog playing Vivaldi’s 4 Seasons on an early 16^th century harpsichord

c)      get up early yet again and take a taxi to the airport

The airport at Krasnoyarsk

a)      is made of pure gold with polished diamond windows and each passenger has a dedicated manservant to carry bags and tend to their every whim.

b)      is in the lost city of Atlantis, 20,000 leagues below the Blue Square conference

c)      is a typical Russian provincial flea-pit where I again get stung to the eyeballs for excess baggage, and passed from pillar to post with people shouting at me the whole time in Russian

The people at the airport

a)      are, to a man, woman and child, impeccably mannered, intelligent, multilingual and polite

b)      are the actual tortoises who starred in the last David Attenborough series

c)      are the usual cold, rude, unhelpful types so typical of these places throughout Russia

The flight

a)      is how I always dreamed Concorde must have been.  Sumptuous luxury, acres of space, with caviar and champagne all the way

b)      takes in a trip to Venus before plunging through pools of scarab beetles, all hell bent on getting to the newsagents before the next lottery draw

c)      takes 5 hours, is cramped, the food is barely edible, but at least I get an aerial view of the frozen Siberian rivers and forests.

How did you do?

Mostly a’s – erm … no

Mostly b’s – I’ll have a pint of whatever you’re on, while we wait for the men in white coats to arrive

Mostly c’s – you’ve either been cheating or have clearly been paying attention to the previous however many entries

The taxi meets me at the airport, and before long I see a glimpse of the Pacific as I head to the hotel for a quick shower and then I’m met by Ekaterina (Katia), the branch manager for Vladivostok.

Katia is lovely and we eat at a Korean restaurant while she takes me through how it is to live life in Russia yet be 7 hours and several thousand miles from Moscow, while your neighbours are Korea (North), China and Japan.  I noticed that 9 out of 10 cars are Japanese and are right hand drive, despite them driving on the right, which leads to some fairly chaotic driving, something which I see again and again while I am in Vladivostok.

After the meal we go for a small tour of the city, taking in some great views of the Pacific and the river where there are still many shipyards.  We take a short stroll but the icy wind soon drives us back to the warmth of the car and Katia drops me back at the hotel.

The week before I came out to Russia, we had worked on a branch in Kiev as a pilot site.  Overnight there had been a power cut in Kiev and now the network is down, so a lot of today is spent n dozens of phone calls and emails trying to establish exactly where the fault lies.  It is a perfect example of putting troubleshooting methodologies into practice and we eventually isolate the fault, call in the local ISP and the networking company to resolve the problems and all is back tickety-boo again.  What this did raise is just how important the horrible job of documentation is, and that no matter how much information you record, it’s never enough.  In a moment of weakness or stupidity, I agree to revisit all the documentation I have already completed for the branches and fill in the additional information.  What joy!

In between it all, I manage to take in a Russian sauna experience, and what an experience.  I have been well educated in the whole sauna philosophy by aiFo, Tafka and the Estonian and Finnish mates I’ve made over the years, and even had the dubious “pleasure” of being subjected to an unforgettable Finnish and Russian sauna saga last summer while I was in Estonia.  It mainly consisted of drinking lots of beer and chilli vodka straight from the freezer, eating half a pig in various guises as the hosts were pig farmers, and being beaten to a pulp with an assortment of flora from the forests including birch twigs, juniper branches and stinging nettles by a bull of a man, stark naked with a massive moustache who spoke no English but we shared about 6 words of German, then jumping into a lake.  It was great actually, I’d do it again at the drop of a hat.

Sadly this was not a “proper” Russian sauna where huge stones are heated for hours beforehand, the heat is unbearable and you come out black, but more the Swedish / Finnish style that you get in health clubs back home.  The sauna, however, is only a part of the package here, and for around £20 for an hour I have an entire suite to myself complete with the sauna, a small swimming pool, toilet and shower.  There’s more …  There is also a lounge area with chairs and settees, a TV and a sound system with menus for the bar to order in food and drinks.  Looking around the walls, the posters are all classic Soviet stuff along with a montage of Russian presidents through the years.  There is even a lectern in the corner with the hammer and sickle on it and it’s only then that I notice a lap dancing pole to boot.  In a room off the main one there is even a double bed, and when I ask for a towel, they also supply me with sheets! I crack up laughing at the thought of the kinds of private parties that must go on in here,  I feel I’m letting the side down a bit by just spending some “me” time all alone, swimming, going in the sauna, showering and generally just recharging my batteries. I enjoyed my bit self and came out feeling great. 

The sun is shining, even though it is still cool so I walk into town, stopping on the way to go into a well dodgy electronics market to buy an Ethernet switch as I’d used mine for the office installation and you never know when they come in handy.  The place was crawling with short, darker skinned blokes, all dressed head to toe in black, gobbing all over the place and hassling the passers-by to flog them their mobile phones.  I’ve developed a method of walking through areas like this over the years to come out unscathed and put it into action, and sure enough before long I’m out and into town.  I wander up and  down the streets, buying odds and sods from the street selling women, daft things like shoe cleaning pads as my shoes are still getting wrecked with all the dust on the streets.

I’m still feeling fit and fine from the sauna, and as it’s still sunny, but getting colder by the minute, I walk briskly back to dodgy town across the river bridge.  By the bus station where we’d caught the taxi yesterday I even decide that my hair has passed the point of no return and bravely wander into a hairdressers and manage to communicate enough to get a half decent tidy up.

I spend the evening writing the postcards I’d promised to send when I made it to Siberia and the hotel promise me they’ll post them for me so if you didn’t get one, my excuse is to blame the hotel (either that or you weren’t on the list, but never mind, eh?)

A lie in – what bliss!! I will be working in Vladivostok on Saturday and Sunday so this is my weekend, you’ve got to take these little snippets while they’re on offer, you know.  A lazy breakfast and I even treat myself to a second cup of tea (which the gits charge me an extra 30p for), then we head out to go to the forests and the dam which adorns the 10 rouble note in Russia.  Bbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrass Monkeys!!!! It had fallen to -20 overnight and was still around -13 now.  It’s so cold that even Nik gives in and finally buys himself a hat.  I think he’s gone demob happy.

We have the option of an extremely cheap but extremely long bus trip or a protracted negotiation session with a taxi driver to take us on our way.  Given how cold it is, we wuss out and for a remarkably cheap 1000 roubles, Mr Taxi man agrees to take us to the dam and back – result. 

The trip through the outskirts of Krasnoyarsk does nothing to make me think any better of the place, but soon we are out of the city and heading up a river valley on an icy road cutting through thick birch and pine forests.  It’s actually really nice.  We stop off en-route to the dam at a local beauty spot which is where married couples from the city come to have their photos taken.  It’s really nice there with the views of the river and the forests.  All along the railings I notice hundreds of padlocks and ask what it’s all about.  I’m told that this is a Siberian tradition where as long as the lock remains locked, the bond between the couples will remain.  A number of the locks have inscriptions bearing the happy couple’s names.  Quite sweet really.

We head back into the taxi further up the valley to the dam.  Now after the major plus of the earlier beauty spot, Russian reality kicks back in full swing.  We can see the dam and the hydroelectric power station but we can go no further as we are now entering a “closed zone” and the young looking Russian policemen (you know you’re getting old when even foreign policemen look young) let us know in no uncertain terms that we can take a few quick pictures then must make tracks.  It’s freezing anyway and the wind chill makes it seem even colder so we head back to the lovely city. 

Polina has sent us details of where to collect our flight tickets so we decide to go to the travel agents to pick them up then do a tour of the city.

As ever, nothing is straightforward with these things and there have been errors while converting my name from our alphabet to theirs, or the other way round, whatever, we have to wait for it to get sorted so decide to do our tour and come back later.

Mr Taxi man does himself huge credit and takes us to all the sights of Krasnoyarsk.  My earlier impressions of the place are reversed as we go to a Catholic church in the middle of Orthodox Siberia, an old steam paddle boat, up the hills to an Orthodox chapel which again is on the 10 rouble note, I snap away, amazed that I could ever have thought bad things about this place.  We have some great local fish from the river in a nice place where President Putin had once dined, then decide to walk back through town, across the river and to the hotel.

It’s still cold, but the sun is shining and my spirits are lifted.  We even go “extreme” and have an ice cream as I feel sorry for the people in the dozens of ice cream booths dotted around the place, despite it being so blooming cold all round.

We see the final night of our joint venture out with yet more top notch Bloody Marys, say our farewells, arranging to meet again in good old Laandaan town and retire for the evening.

Tuesday 8^th April

Another day, another delay.  I guess the taxi drivers have sense and don’t really want to come across to this side of town, but eventually one turns up and we head back into the main part of town to the offices. 

The lads in the UK had done a sterling job on the one PC, and had cleared all but one lurking little Trojan which I identified and destroyed like the bug killer that I am.  Back to the plot then, I get the updates loading on the system while scanning it with just about every bug hunting tool known to mankind just to confirm that the system is indeed clean, and not in need of  a rebuild.  The laptop in the office seems to be running too slowly for our liking so just as we think we can wrap up things, we take a last minute decision to rebuild the system from scratch which means a delay of a couple of hours, but time for more tea and some birthday cake from Natasha whose birthday it was yesterday.

We use the waiting time to arrange the next leg of the project, right across the rest of the continent to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast.  We go through various scenarios as travel from where we are to where we need to go is not an easy matter and decide to get the direct flight which means hanging around Krasnoyarsk till Friday.  I’m not enamoured by the prospect, but grit my teeth and prepare to give it a fair crack of the whip.

Eventually we finish, take the usual photographs of the router and the server – David Bailey has got nothing on me, I’m telling you.  A couple of snaps of the people in the office and we make our goodbyes to head back to the delights of the hotel.

Nik wants to grab a quick meal in the hotel then head for bed but I really feel quite depressed about having another meal there unnecessarily (breakfast we have no choice really), so I make the bold decision to risk walking the mean streets of downtown Krasnoyarsk to a Peoples Bar & Grill, similar to the one in Novosibirsk where I’d had the Russian Flag cocktail.

I had noticed that the forecast had said it was going to get colder but wasn’t prepared for just how cold.  It was already -12 and falling rapidly and a raw wind was cutting me to the bone as I strode on through the wind and snow to the restaurant.

Once inside, I impressed myself by ordering the whole meal in Russian (well it sounded Russian-ish to me anyway) and had a nice time tucking in to good food in decent surroundings.  Life was good again.

I spoke too soon. Or thought too soon as I was on my own and speaking would have been a bit daft really.  The phone rings and it’s Polina in Moscow who tells me that there is only a single seat available on the flight to Vladivostok. Ah! A quick few phone calls and emails later and it is decided that I should go alone to Vladivostok while Nik returns to Moscow on Thursday then home.  It’s a scary prospect, but circumstances dictate it will be thus so that’s the way it is.

I leave the restaurant and it’s got even colder so I wimp out of walking back to the hotel, and with the confidence of having ordered my meal in Russian, and a couple of beers inside me, I feel that I must now rise to the challenge of working alone in Russia and manage to convince a well dodgy looking taxi driver to take me back to Fawlty Towers.

I’d brought some bottles of Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce out as a small gift to Nik when I came back from the UK last week so we have a few really good Bloody Marys while playing back the journey we had made together, and regretting that we couldn’t sign off together on the shores of the Pacific.

So our last day together will be tomorrow and we decide to go on a sightseeing tour of the Krasnoyarsk area.  It has got to be better than what we have seen so far, surely?

Monday 7^th April

Up bright and early, ready for a good start to the new branch.  Or at least I was until we had to wait over an hour for a taxi which ten took us every which way but to the office, so it was nearly 11 by the time we made it in.  No worries though, I could get straight on with connecting up the router.  Ah! I could if the router wasn’t in a locked comms room out in the corridor, and the IT people for the building won’t be around for a while yet.

Time for a nice cuppa chai then.

Eventually the IT guy turns up and within about 5-10 minutes I’ve traced the necessary cables back through the spaghetti mess which most comms racks inevitably resemble and got the VPN connection back to the UK over all those thousands of miles.  It’s quite fascinating really if you’re that way inclined.  Nik cracks on with checking the workstations while I configure the server, and we’re back on track.

Again, the people inside the office are sweet as can be, offering tea, chocolates and a selection of dried fruit and nuts to keep us going.

We stay as late as we can to make up for the lost time this morning  but one of the systems has got a nasty set of viruses on it, which is stopping us from applying the latest updates on it.  I get rid of a few, but the people in the branch need to go home so I use the +7 hour time difference to my advantage and ask the lads in the UK to look at it while we lock up for the night.  We call it a day and take the taxi ride back over the river to Grotsville, a quick meal in the hotel “restaurant” then hit the sack to try to catch a decent night’s sleep.

Sunday 6^th April

We’ve moved ahead yet another timezone ,so it’s gone midnight, 5pm back home.  The whole nation knows the results yet not one of them has had the decency to think, “hold on, Flicky’s out in Siberia, he’s bound to be waiting on a text”.  Even my wife and daughter who have been primed week after week on these things – nothing.  I begin to fear the worst.  We’ve lost away to Fulham and no-one want to break the bad news.  We’re back in the danger zone of being relegated.

Then a text from ReaL Madras which simply says “Get in ye bassa!” which cheers me up no end.  A quick flurry of texts and emails (thanks KT but footie IS more important than playing the sax, especially when you’re on a train in Siberia heading towards Mongolia, trust me) now start to arrive and the story is good, we won 1-3, some good goals, we are now 13^th and looking good for survival, 10 points clear with only 5 games of the season left to play, and we’ve now won 3 on the trot.

I sleep for a while until the Match of the Day reports come in at 6am but don’t care about being woken up.

We pull into Krasnoyarsk and the lady train attendant emerges with an ice pick in her hand.  I have visons of her doing a Trotsky on me, but thankfully, she just climbs underneath the train and chips away at some huge lumps of ice which have built up during the journey.

Krasnoyarsk looks pretty much like most of the cities we’ve been to so far.  Grotty tower blocks on the outskirts, smarter business centres in the heart of the city.  It is 11am and -5 so we head for a taxi which takes us out of the relatively nice business sector, across the river to our “hotel” on the side of a run down industrial area.  I don’t care, we check in, grab a coffee while our rooms are cleaned, then I have a quick “bath” in the shower basin and spend the rest of the afternoon trying and failing to connect to the internet, so doing bits of catch up work and hacking into other machines on the hotel network.  I was tired and bored.  Some of that skiing where they cross country ski around a circuit and pop rifles is on, and I recognise a lot of the regions represented, Krasnoyarskiy Kray, where I currently am, come 2^nd so I spend another hour or so just idly browsing a map of the Russian Federation on my laptop.  It is the same time here as it is in Beijing, and I’m more hours on from Moscow than Moscow is from home.  I think it’s safe to say that by the time we’re done here, I will honestly be able to say that I’ve “done” Russia.

Nik comes back from meeting a friend and tells me its perishingly cold outside and is going to go down to “-17, I think”.  The weather forecast comes on and says -9.  Who knows?  It’s cold again after the brief warm spell of last week.  I get messages from the UK saying  they’ve had a bit of snow and that it’s about +6 degrees and worry for them, wondering how they’ll cope.

Saturday 5^th April

We’d booked the train yesterday if you remember and I seem to remember having quickly scanned the rail website and the average journey time between Novosibirsk and our next destination, Krasnoyarsk was around 11-12 hours.  So it kind of threw me a bit when Nik told me the train would be at 7:30 this evening and we would be getting to Krasnoyarsk at around 11am the following day.  As Krasnoyarsk is another hour ahead of here, I calculate that at being around 14 ½ hours so I ask Nik “are you sure that’s the time in local time?” The reason for asking is I remember when we were in Perm, the station clock showed Moscow time, 2 hours behind and it kind of threw me a bit.  When I asked, I was told that all national trains run at Moscow time, throughout the Russian Federation.

I asked Nik to check but was told “everything alright” so I had to assume he knew what he was doing.

The temperature has plummeted today.  When I woke up it was 4 degrees, now it was heading to 0 degrees at a rate of knots and the sky is looking laden with snow clouds.  We have to check out of the hotel at noon, and as sure as eggs is eggs, no sooner are we out on the streets than it begins to sleet, then snow. 

Nik needs socks as he has deemed it not worthy of his efforts to wash any, and he reckons he can buy them for the same price the hotel would launder them for.  Fair enough, so we head for the shops.  Now call me old fashioned if you like, but the last place I’d think of looking for cheap socks would be somewhere like the House of Fraser.  So off we head to the nearest department store and Nik seems genuinely surprised that the socks are around the equivalent of £5 a pair.  I am genuinely surprised that he seems genuinely surprised and tell him we need a cheap stall or supermarket.  The snow is quite heavy by now and I come up with a Plan B, we buy some washing stuff and he can wash a few socks.  So we wander into a supermarket, past all the cleaning stuff without as much as a pause, so I opt to buy a small bottle of vodka for the train journey and we head out into the snow once more.  Nik is now whinging like a pup about being cold and wet but I have things I want to do so arrange to meet him later in the hotel.

I mentioned earlier that Novosibirsk was defined as being the geographical central point of Russia.  This is not the modern day Russia as we know it, but the old Russian empire which included a few more of the ‘Stans and there is a tiny little orthodox church slap bang in the middle of the main road going through the town.  I head there and take some photos then go inside where there is a small chapel, complete with burning candles.  It takes me back to my youth and I light a candle and even say a prayer for the first time in many a year.

To get to the church, I had to take an underpass which, in typical Russian fashion is crammed with hundreds of tiny stalls selling anything from CDs to cigarettes, bras and hats to … yes, could it be …? mens socks!!!  So I buy 5 pairs for the Boy Blunder and head back to the hotel to miss Nik by about a minute.  No matter, I need a rest and doze off in reception for a while, ticking the time down to 7:30. 

At around 5 I decide to head out for some food, and having just sat down and ordered, Nik’s free meal radar kicks in and he texts and ask me to order him a coffee.  And soup.  Quite moderate by his usual standards but he is coughing all over my seafood linguine and complaining about having a bad chest.  So he orders a pack of cigarettes, what else?  On my bill.  Now I had quite cutely sat in no smoking for about the first and only time since I’ve been here as I was initially on my own, and to date, everyone I have eaten with has smoked like chimneys.  At the dinner table.  They all do around here, and it makes me really appreciate the smoking ban in restaurants at home.  Pubs, I can take or leave smoke, but when you’re eating food, I prefer to eat it without someone else smoke heading towards me.  And it always heads for the non-smoker, it’s the law.  Fags over here are cheap as anything, but stink like cheap fags so I’m really happy to eat one meal smoke free, it’s bliss.

We head out into the cool air and the first thing Nik does after coughing his guts up is to light a fag.  I give up.

We collect our bags and head to the station.  We scan the board for our train, nothing showing.  But there’s a 2nd board with later trains, and … I don’t need to say do I?

Luckily Nik redeems himself to a degree by arranging for us to go around to the apartment of a woman he knows and we pass the time drinking coffee then Bacardi and tonic while watching the Russian equivalent of Cirque Celebre, or whatever it is.  I don’t care, it’s already -5 outside with a biting wind and the station is not the nicest place to kick your heels for the best part of 4 hours.

Friday 4^th April

It is possible to have too many beers and vodkas, as my head is now telling me.  Luckily I remembered and managed to swig a bottle of water before I crashed, so it’s not as bad as it could have been.

We nip into the office and find that there’s one niggly little problem with a database program on that narky little laptop, but after a while, even that is sorted so it’s photos, goodbyes and promise to be back for the solar eclipse in August.

We head down the train station and buy our tickets for Krasnoyarsk, the next stop.  I think it’s something like 15 or 16 hours, so only a short one this time.  I score a double whammy when I manage to pay by Visa for the tickets, and trust me this is cause in itself for a major celebration, it usually involves me looking around for a cash machine and trying at least 3 cards 5 or 6 times each before they dole out sufficient roubles to feed a small nation.  How the hell do they expect folk to walk around with that amount of cash on them?  I suppose it’s just a different way to do things.  The second and major part of the double whammy is I manage to get the woman in the ticket office to give a really warm and genuine smile when I say thank you and goodbye, despite her having the frostiest face going and abruptly snapping at Nik throughout the whole of the preceding transactions.  I’m getting there.  Or mebbes she just had wind.

We take the metro a few stops to watch the mighty River Ob, one of Siberia’s many rivers, throwing sheets of ice downstream at a bit of a lick, smashing into the moored boats.  It’s a nice quiet place, and is one of those moments where you don’t need to say anything, just take it in and relax for a brief moment.

Then it’s out to go bowling at which I am consistently inconsistent with the most perfect strike typically being followed by a double miss.  I manage to get over 100 only once in about 5 rounds, but I’m not as bad as Nik.  The girls we are with just get strike after strike, spare after spare but one of them even has her own bowling shoes so we console ourselves that they have probably played a bit, and anyway it’s not a proper man’s sport.  And we were being gentlemanly and letting them win.  OK we were crap 

Thursday 3^rd April

Looking out of the hotel window at the early morning pollution trapped in the layers of cold air, I’m reminded of the times we travel up and down the A19 past Teesside.  Novosibirsk could be twinned with Teesside with the chimneys belching out goodness knows what, and the river splitting the town in 2.  Novosibirsk is much bigger of course, but it was just a thought.

In fact there are a few more parallels with the way things are here and “home”, where home in this case is the North East.  I have always had 2 homes.  Home is where I live at any given moment in my life, but has been Worcester for a sizeable part of it now.  “Home, home” is and always has been the North East.  It’s where I’m from, and a massive part of who I am.  People here are very similar to those at “home,home” and it’s difficult to explain in words without offending folk and believe me that’s not the intention, but I’ll give it a stab.

There’s a kind of initial hardness to the people.  You rarely see them looking happy or even just content when they are walking in the streets.  Yet get them in a one on one situation and break open that shell and they are the most generous and warm people, the cold exterior shell is a bit of a self-protection mechanism.  I still laugh at the people in public places like the train stations and metros who do their damnedest to not even looking at you while serving you in the most offhand way possible.  I have my own personal little game where I flash them the biggest smile I can and see how many I can get to crack.  I think I’m no higher than about 10-15% so far, but I’m not going to give up.

In the offices, the people have all been so different, so friendly and polite. 

Oh talking of politeness, that’s the other thing that both Nik and I laugh at, things like how we always hold doors open for people, and how they invariably just walk through without even looking up, not a chance of a spasibo (thank you), or even a glimmer of a smile.  In older people who grew up during the soviet days, I can sort of understand it, but for the younger generation, they’ve grown up in far easier times.  They all acknowledge it’s like this when you talk to them about it and just laugh about it.  It’s obviously just going to take lots more cheesy smiles and door openings from me, but, slowly I will have them coming around to my way of thinking.

While I think of home, I decide to renew my season ticket for Sunderland which is an adventure in its own right and to be honest, I’m still not sure if I have actually done it, but I guess I’ll find out when I eventually get back to the UK.

We finish the last system, success.  The biggest branch of the project, with every single machine rebuilt and working like a good ‘un.  All we need to do is check in tomorrow to iron out any last remaining details, take some photos, and we can sign this off as another step on the way to Vladivostok and the Pacific Ocean

Wednesday 2^nd April

Dinner (lunch) is a strange affair.  We walk into a really grotty looking portacabin type place which is unbelievably even grottier on the inside than on the outside.  There is a small serving hatch with a decent size queue and just a few areas where small groups of blokes (this is another hang out for them, obviously as it’s almost exclusively blokes eating in here), stood around eating and smoking.  I’ve been told that this is going to be yet another “experience” for me, and first impressions don’t shatter that myth.  I am served up manti which is basically like a very big ravioli.  These are the infamous Siberian dumplings which Nik has been promising me.  Apparently the ones I’ve had to date are only pale imitations of these.  I have “hot sauce” on mine and, despite the grottiness of the place, they do actually taste very good, I’m suitably impressed.

We crack on with the systems, and apart from one narky little laptop which has to be done twice, everything goes smoothly.  It just takes so long to do each system, nothing tricky, just lots of small settings we need to change, updates to download and apply, that sort of thing.

We eat in the hotel again tonight and I have a very nice fish which neither of us know what it is.  My excuse is easy, I can’t speak Russian.  Nik’s is that he doesn’t know the English word for it.  We kind of agree that it’s definitely not salmon but is anything else from a rainbow trout to a pike as I just rattle off fish names and descriptions and Nik just says Yes to each and every one.  What’s more important is that it was tasty and filled a gap.