The JaYmes Escape

“Sibir daragoy!”, I protest angrily. I don’t understand all of the abuse I’ve just received from the hotel receptionist but I’ve grasped the general idea: You’re foreign, I don’t want you here, go to the Hotel Sibir. The Sibir being the expensive (daragoy) monolithic concrete slab down the road.? Unsure where to try next, I linger in the lobby with my bags, desperately scanning my guide book. A passing guest, having heard the exchange, catches my eye with a look of utter sympathy and shame.

“Hello, how long do you want to stay?”, calls the other receptionist, in English. Surprised,? I shuffle my bags back over? to the desk and her? xenophobic colleague glares disapprovingly at us as she checks me in.

The phone in my room starts ringing. It’s a classic 1970s model that looks like it’s straight out of a cold war? spy film; it probably comes complete with integrated ‘listening device’.? Having negotiated the now familiar clanky lift and been greeted enthusiastically by the attendant on the sixth floor, I’m sitting in my pokey room flicking through the channels on the TV, which predictably are all in Russian, and wondering what to put in the fridge this time. There’s always a fridge. There’s also? usually a phone, and often a TV but? a bathroom, no;? the? mildly unpleasanrt? shared facilities are down the hallway. There’s a sign on the door of the showers saying that they’re closed? from 11pm to 7am and the mens’? lavatory? smells like it’s? used as an informal smoking room.

“Allo?”, I say into the handset, trying to intonate it? like the? man who’d answered his phone on the bus this morning. After a day seeing Novosibirsk, photographing the opera house and the cathedrals, and getting a personalised tour of the Siberian railway museum, entirely in Russian, the phone has just rung a second time. When I answer there is once again no-one at the other end, just? the same? bizarre tone pattern.