Syktyvkar

December 8–11, 2004

A very pleasant northern city. After a couple of hours of wandering around you start seeing familiar places at every turn. Aside from the main streets, this is what it looks like.

Basically, the airport is two bus stops away from the centre. There are lots of freshly built houses in the city, which look particularly nice. There aren’t any air conditioners on the facades — so what if it’s only because of the climate? It makes the streets look immeasurably more dignified. There’s also very little advertising in the streets — so what if it’s only because money is tight?

Centre.

In some parts you can see Komi national motifs — on a concrete panel apartment building, a fence, or a flagpole holder:

Lots of messages are duplicated in the Komi language.

Although some aren’t.

Dick

But others are.

Cookery Cookery

Payphone.

A popular dinner conversation topic is what’s stinkier: pickled Pechora fish (a local specialty) or French cheese.

Snow is everywhere. After all, it is winter. Some buildings have specially designed architectural shelves for the snow.

There are very realistic cave drawing- style depictions of pedestrians on the traffic lights. If you shift your gaze just a little you’ll see that that’s exactly what people waiting for the green man actually look like.

I’m not making this up.

The town of Ezhva is a 20 minutes drive away. The mayor’s office is brainwashing the locals using the means available to it.

Ezhva has a bright future ahead of it! Hurrah!

But let’s go back to Syktyvkar. On the local academy of science building there’s a wonderful panel entitled “Scientific advances for mankind”. A group of people has gathered below — a female lab technician with a microscope, an eagle-eyed guy hiding an AK-47 under a sheet of paper, and a scientist who looks like Shurik, the engineering student from Soviet movies, who is triumphantly holding up a graduated cylinder-retort, which resembles a kerosene heater lab flask. This, it would seem, is from whence the Big White Woman (in the background) will be born. She should really have her arms torn off as punishment for the way she’s holding that book. Like the text says, she’s intended for man.

The square with the eternal flame on it is next to this panel. The locals call them like they see seem, so this sculpture composition is known as “women roasting a crocodile”.

Owing to convoluted linguistic and bureaucratic reshuffles many Russian cities are now referred to as municipal formations, the Russian acronym for which is MO. This is why instead of “Syktyvkar Mayor’s Office” you see this structure:

“City of Syktyvkar” MO Administration

I might be wrong. But they still should’ve put in the proper Russian quotation marks instead of this advertising abomination.

* * *

The flight from Syktyvkar landed in Vnukovo airport. The air hostess, who hasn’t yet gotten used to the fact that airlines are constantly buying each other up, said:

— Thank you for choosing to fly with “Komiinteravia”, whoops, I mean, “Utair”.