Krasnoyarsk

Finding a hostel in Krasnoyarsk proves to be difficult, "myest nyet" being the oft repeated refrain. No-one is sure why the budget hostels of the city are proving so popular on this weekend in particular. I was starting to get a little tired of wandering up and down the famous figures of communism, the snow starting to fall quite heavily. In a last ditch attempt I try a travel centre near where one of the hostels should have been and they sit me down with a cup of tea and start to ring around. They have no luck either, but I'm glad it has been their fingers rather than my legs doing the hard work. Victoria, who did most of the calling, kindly offers me a place at her apartment however and until this evening they organise a trip for me to Stolby, the nearby nature reserve.

Jana is a true Stolbist who truly loves the park we are now walking in. This group of climbers, who free climb the giant rock formations, are very commited, I only realise quite how much when Jana tells me that her best friend died doing this last year. I can see that this is still a painful revelation but at the same time she says her friend had believed this is how she would die, here in the park. Now the park does look beautiful, truly Siberian, pine trees covered in a thick new coating of snow. Only a couple of days ago the temperature was up around plus 20. Siberians are particularly noticing the strange weather of the past few years but deal with it as they always have dealt with the weather: stoically. I try to keep the same level of composure but the ice beneath the fresh white blanket is treacherous and several times I end up ungracefully sprawled. After about an hour we reach our destination, known as the first mountain. Just before it is another large rock. Jana asks me to guess what its name is. I go with boat but apparently it is actually an elephant. I count myself as a fairly imaginative guy but this is too great a leap for me, I do touch the rock and make a wish, one of many Stolbist traditions. Another is that if I reach the top of the first mountain Jana must hit me on the bottom with her shoe one time for every day of the month so far. It is the 27th but the ice means we are unlikely to get the chance to enact this particular ritual. We reach the starting point for the easiest route up, the one that Jana says Stolbists take their children up to give them a taste of the pillars. However it is covered in ice, and we've fallen several times between the "Elephant" Rock and here. I try to go some way and cautiously snap some photos, but the blizzard means the views are not brilliant and the ice means that my movements are somewhat tentative and a little restricted. As is often the case I must yet again give my assurance taht I will return at a time of year when it looks more beautiful. We make our way back down, dividing our descent about 70/30 between feet and backside. We're overtaken by a boisterous Russian-Chinese family who've just enjoyed a picnic, running full tilt between the trees and screaming all the way.

The ballet, Chipollino, is for children, vast numbers of them, accompanied by hassled looking teachers and some doting parents. As far as I could discern the plot was this: An onion and various other insects and vegetables are having a merry time of it until an egg king comes along and puts up a statue of himself in their village. They take it down to make a house for the carrot but then the king arrests the carrot and an old vegetable of indeterminate provenance. So the onion and a butterfly go to rescue them and end up getting locked up themselves. They are rescued by a sexy insect unafraid to use her feminine wiles and a bookish insect in glasses who is tormented by the egg kings two queens. It all ends happily with the vegetables winning a big fight against the eggs. There is also a treachorous slug who is punished at the end too.* The kids were lapping this up, their mothers and teachers seemed a little disinterested until the egg king suffered a rather large wardrobe malfunction in the second act. This had the older section of the theatre on the edge of their seats right up until the final curtain.

*I've since looked up the plot and it turns out I may have missed or misunderstood a few things. The carrot was a pumpkin, the egg king was a lemon prince and the evil slug was a tomato. The bookish insect was a cherry and the butterfly was a radish. I definitely did not see the lemon prince getting killed after being stuffed into his own cannon at the end (Not a euphemism). The reason it is so popular in Russia, despite having been written by an Italian, is because he was journalist for the Communist periodical L'Unità.