Colours of the Wind

It’s been snowing for days; Nizhny Novgorod is being reborn. Snow clothes the landscape in a layer of froth that glistens as you trudge along- slipping and sliding, hobbling like an old woman. Everything is cleaner and brighter, the mornings are fresh and crisp, and hills in the distance covered in white. Streams freeze and are being buried. And when you drive along the bridges or up the hill that overlooks the city, it’s like everything has been put to sleep. The city seems hushed in all the mistiness. People around you seem somehow more relaxed and calmer. The snow is really the saving grace of this ugly, industrial city. It floats down in heavenly drops, so ceaselessly it could almost drive you crazy.

Russians love the snow, they whined and whined until it arrived
and now that it has anticipate skiing, snowboarding, ice skating and are more collected about the natural order of things. They reminiscence about -30 and days when they couldn’t leave their buildings because it was so cold. It’s beautiful but indigestible. There are the cars and the factories and the towering Soviet structures, and then there is the snow.

And as temperatures continue to drop a special breed of Russian desperation begins to catch. As you stand alone at the bus stop, waiting in the cold, your pulse slows down until finally you fall into this strange daze. Limbs turning to lead you stop thinking reasonably and start acting desperately.

When a bus is so full that the doors won’t shut really you can wait for the next. But not in this cold! Not when drivers operate according to no known timetable. People shove and snatch at seats, or are left tinned like pickles with smelly hair in their face and legs between their own. And then the conductor snarls and throws change at you, exerting her power. She will similarly seize eleven roubles from the next passenger, who in turn, will flash a deathly look and shove someone else.

But yesterday as bodies slammed to and fro and I laughed silently, a stranger smiled back. For the first time in three months.