Early November

A trip to the gulag

Sillies that we are, Rosie, Anna, Lucy and I agreed to spend last weekend in a gulag. It was actually an English language immersion course, but it was in a "holiday camp" which retained a strong Soviet influence. I would never have imagined that 30 Russians would be so delighted to spend a weekend in a mock-up of a labour camp, simply because there were 4 native English speakers in their midst. Ok I give in, we must be pretty exciting and exotic.

We started by being picked up at 7am, while it was still dark, and were driven 20 minutes outside the city (to the South of the Yenisei, for any keen geographers). At the camp entrance, we had to wait for a scary uniformed woman to open the giant and rather military-looking mechanised gates, and were then greeted by a large and undeniably Soviet mural of goodness-knows-what. Strong, beautiful and courageous people doing strong, beautiful and courageous things for the benefit of the Motherland, no doubt.

Our two days there were divided up into (badly planned and organised) lessons, sometimes teaching by ourselves, and sometimes in pairs. The students were aged from 16-52, although the majority were 18-22. Approximately two-thirds of them were girls, and they were divided into groups of 4 or 5 according to their ability. There were 6 six groups in total, and the first afternoon, I had to play language-based snakes and ladders six lessons in a row, so about four hours. Trust me, there is no better way to put someone off a game they once enjoyed.

There were also four Russians on the staff - two girls aged 20, a boy of 22, and a girl of 29. They were all lovely, and they boy was married to one of the 20 year olds.

The toilets are worth a mention in their own right. Perhaps I should first point out that our group had hired the ground floor of one of 12 or so 1-storeyed accomodation blocks. The rooms slept four people each, and doubled up as classrooms (no chairs or tables, just beds and a bedside table). There was one shower between all 33 of us, and two toilets. Well, I say two, because there were technically two of them, but... they were long-drop squat toilets, and they were both in the same room. Admittedly there was a wall between them, but only just - Lucy and I generally went in together because it saved that extra bit of queueing, and the wall barely served its purpose. We liked to give each other a little wave as we squatted.

Our meals were in the complex's "stolovaya" (which seems to mean "table-place"), which was decorated like a Victorian swimming pool - spacious and airy, with pale blue tiles on the walls, floors and ceiling. The place was purely functional - we were allocated a row of tables in one corner, had to be there at a very particular time for each meal, and we got what we were given. Most of the time, the food was unobjectionable (to me, anyway - the other three kicked up such a fuss as I have never seen) - it was very Russian, balanced, the meals were of fair size, they even mostly consisted of three courses, but it was absolutely nothing special. My only complaints were that there was no water to drink, just one cup of very sweet tea each, there were no knives, and the lunch on the last day was what I imagine you would get if you fed a horse to a cat, made the cat sick, and then turned the sick into a kind of giant meatloaf. Gross description, but it was a gross meal. My apologies to the weak-stomached reading this, I feel it my duty to give an accurate representation of events.

I realise I have given a very gloomy account of the experience so far - we actually had a whale of a time, although we had a fair few times when we wondered what on earth we were doing there. Both nights we were up till 3 or 4am (despite my delightful tummy bug) doing various structured activities (even at that time, they were all still enthusiastic about only speaking English all the time, we were very impressed). The 8 staff did a take of of a film called EuroTrip (some of you Westerners may even have seen it), which involved Lucy and I being a London double decker bus (hands and knees, with me on Lucy's back) driving down the wrong side of a French motorway, as I swore my mouth of in an imitation of one of the more vulgar fans of Manchester United. The second night, we did a dramatised collage of the best, worst and funniest moments of the weekend. These included: Lucy and I waving to each other while squatting; Lucy and I getting the giggles in a lesson for absolutely no reason and leaving the students utterly bemused; me falling asleep while teaching a lesson; me eating everyone else's buckwheat kasha; one of the 16 year old boys accidentally walking back into the wrong room in the middle of the night, and trying to get into my bed; the 4 Brits insisting everyone stand for a loyal toast, and singing the National Anthem, and much more; I left the stage with a pair of plastic boobs stuck to my earring. One of the student groups did an excellent take off of Lucy and I (we seem to get into more scrapes than everyone else put together) chattering nine to the dozen, and occasionally stopping to ask if they understood, at which point they nodded obediently. In the "awards ceremony", muggins here, for some incomprehensible reason, was voted "most organised and responsible". Between the four of us, we got the prettiest smile, the nicest smile, the friendliest smile and the smiliest smile.

Overall, we enjoyed our gulag experience, in spite of the place being a communist dump, in spite of the fact that it was touch and go if I would make it through the sketches without being sick (clearly the others had the right idea when they refused to eat the food), in spite of the graffiti all over the bedsheets, and in spite of getting no more than five hours sleep each night. We were actually sad to leave. We honestly don't know what all those history books are making such a fuss about, the gulag is a wonderful place. They even play determinedly cheery music out of lamp posts at you all day.