Tag Archives: Khanty-Mansiysk

Jun 10 2017
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Daily Post, Friend, Portrait

Airport bus (is it tomorrow yet?)

Friday 9th June 2017, 3.55am (day 2,115)

Early bus, 9/6/17

I’m sure we all love 3.15am alarm calls, especially after the conference closing party the evening before — when the phone went off, I had very little idea where I was or what I was doing. At least the sun was up — it’s flare encouraging a move to monochrome for this shot featuring fellow attendees Susannah and Coetzee presumably wondering what they were doing up as well, at a time equivalent to 11.15pm at home, thus meaning it was before midnight on the previous day when I started my journey home — to where I  arrived 21 hours later. At least the early start let me keep up with the news from the Election.

Farewell to Siberia then — I saw a very small part of it though mainly it was just sitting in a room. Pleasant weather though. But let’s not talk about the mosquitoes.

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Jun 09 2017
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Daily Post, Friend, Portrait

Daria the translator

Thursday 8th June 2017, 1.35pm (day 2,114)

Daria, 8/6/17

Election day of course — but I’m still in Russia, this being the last day of the conference here in Khanty-Mansiysk. Daria here was one of the two simultaneous translators who worked throughout the two and a half days. I cannot help but be amazed by the talent of translators generally, but to do it simultaneously — like a Babel fish — now that really is astonishing. Will machines ever be able to do this? I seriously doubt it. Imagine a computer that can translate a joke from one language to another on the spot.

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Jun 07 2017
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Daily Post, Interior

United Nations (sort of)

Wednesday 7th June 2017, 11.45am (day 2,113)

United Nations, 7/6/17

The conference I’m attending here has been organised by UNESCO (as was the one I went to four years ago in Moscow) so we get to feel like the United Nations with our own little flags marking our place on the table: spot my Union Jack, there on the left… Cynics might also say that the general absence of activity is also redolent of the real UN, but hey, even they need refreshment breaks now and again I am sure.

If there are any chess fans out there you might like to know that in this room the Chess Olympiad was held in 2010 and will be again, in 2020.

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Jun 06 2017
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Daily Post, Portrait, Stranger

The Ugra TV presenter gets ready

Tuesday 6th June 2017, 9.40am (day 2,112)

Ugra TV, 6/6/17

Khanty-Mansiysk lies in the Ugra (pronounced Yoo-Grah) region, the centre of the Russian oil industry — the money generated from same being the reason why a relatively small (100,000 people) and isolated city can sustain a few major conference centres, a national league ice hockey team, an airport, and indeed a life in a region where winter temperatures fall to -50ºC on a regular basis. Linguists may recognise the placename as contributing to the name of the Finno-Ugric group of languages, so if you speak Hungarian, Estonian or Finnish, this is where your ancestors came from.

Ugra TV seemed to think it worth covering the IT Forum that we attended this morning: no idea what is happening with the guy’s hands behind the presenter here, either it was something highly significant to her on-screen appearance, or he was just copping a feel.

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Jun 05 2017
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Baba Yaga’s storehouse

Monday 5th June 2017, 5.15pm (day 2,111)

Baba Yaga hut, 5/6/17

In the near six years that I have been doing this blog, my spreadsheet reveals I have been to Russia on twelve separate occasions, and I know I went there at least four times before August 2011. And in all those sixteen occasions I have never been outside Moscow or its immediate environs (airports mainly).

This time is an exception. I currently reside in Khanty-Mansiysk, at 61ºN, 69ºE approximately: thus firmly behind the Urals, and in Siberia. (If Siberia, even by its most conservative definition, was a separate country it would still be the biggest one in the world.) What did I expect this place to look like — in the summer at least? Well, this pretty much sums it up. This is not out in the genuine taiga — this being a Russian academic conference they can never resist the ‘cultural programme’ so we were taken out this afternoon to the local open air ethnographic museum to see a bunch of log cabins in the woods (and the associated mosquito population). It was interesting though, and I was rather taken with this storehouse, built on stilts to keep the contents away from bears and other scavengers, but I can quite picture it as the legendary hut of the witch Baba Yaga, which could sprout chicken legs and chase after naughty children.

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