Novokuznetsk

After being here for a month, we figure it's about time to tell you about Novokuznetsk.

First of all, we may be in Siberia, but unlike Salt Lake we haven't had snow yet. However, once winter hits, it will be here until spring--no January thaws around here. Right now we're about ready to trade colder weather for the mosquitoes. Russians don't have screens on the windows.

As we arrived in Novokuznetsk, we felt a softer feel to the city--don't know of any better way to describe it other than a softer feel. We like it here. One of the new elders went to Barnaul for splits last week and he noticed the same thing. His first comment to us was that Barnaul has a different feel to it.

The church is a nice walk from our apartment, 15-20 minutes depending on which route we take. We keep trying out different ways to get there and think now we've found the easiest, most direct route, and it's mostly on paved roads. We can take the bus and get there in about 10 minutes, but still end up walking almost as far because there are no buses running on the street where the church is and the building is in the middle of a l-o-n-g block.

The people in the branch are nice and we felt welcomed very quickly. The Huffakers, a senior couple who visited Novokuznetsk periodically in the past, did a great job of preparing the way for us. They're warm, outgoing, and flat out refuse to try to learn Russian, so the pressure is off of us for that. The branch members came to love them, and hence they love us and we love them. We average around 20 people at church each week and hope to increase that so we can get a bigger building soon. Right now we're meeting in a place that used to be a beauty salon. There's one big room with a smaller room behind a set of sliding plastic doors, a hallway that is the branch library and a single restroom (with a shower!). The restroom is about half the size of the second room. Fortunately the only non adult in the branch is a 12-year-old boy, so we don't have to try to hold Primary and YW in addition to RS and Priesthood. YM is in the hallway. It's hard to hold three groups of English Club in this building and sometimes we have trouble hearing, so we're really hoping for that bigger place soon.

A lot of the apartment buildings look awful on the outside and the entrances are rather scary too. For ours we walk in to a small dark hallway. When the outside door closes behind us with a loud clang, things get very dark and we walk cautiously across the uneven floor to the stairs. On the first landing there's a switch to turn on lights for the stairwell. We're on the third floor. Since there are only three floors in our building, there's no elevator. We were so glad to have the elders help us move our things in! Once we get inside the apartment things are better.

By Russian standards our apartment is big and the kitchen is medium sized.

We have two bedrooms with BIG closets and lots of storage space

The wide "hallway" between the bedrooms where we have our computers set up

Our single bathroom (they took out the wall between the rooms for the toilet and shower and turned it into one big American-type bathroom), including the requisite washer

The kitchen/living room area--that's a ceramic cooktop!
The flowers are Dave's housewarming gift to Arline

We expect to have some branch activities here such as firesides, Family Home Evenings and the occasional party, so we got a bigger apartment than most Russians have, even those with families. It's a little older than the apartment we were used to, but it's nice to have more room.

Most apartments in Russia come with a balcony. Some are enclosed (but not heated or insulated and often used only for storage and/or hanging laundry). Ours is not only enclosed, it's been turned into a nice room with wallpapered walls, right off our bedroom. It would be fun to turn it into a cozy reading nook. It has a light, but no outlets, so right now we use it for drying laundry.There's a small area with some playground equipment below us. However, we're not situated so we can see that very well. But we do have some interesting sights. This guy sweeps up the leaves on the "road" around the front side of the apartment every day. Sometimes he has a broom like this one--leafy branches held together with duct tape, sometimes a broom with just the branches, and sometimes an old broom with very worn stiff plastic bristles. From the other side of our apartment we can see traffic in several directions because we have a corner apartment with great views. There are five windows on that side. There's a school down a side street so we see kids coming and going every day and a small park-like area on an island between two streets.

Soon after we moved in Dave was concerned about the temperature because he said he could see the white puffs of breath from people crossing the street below. Then he realized they were all smoking.

This week's Russianism is a follow up to last week:
Thursday there was an accident right below us on the street. A taxi hit another car. We didn't see it happen, but watched right after. The taxi driver took off his taxi sign (here they're just a magnetized removable sign on the roof of the car) and his big antenna and disgustedly threw them in his trunk. The electric bus couldn't get around them, so all the passengers had to get off. A few minutes later another electric bus pulled up behind that one and also had to let off passengers. At least 3 police cars drove by but didn't stop. A drunk standing on the side of the road offered up quite a bit of amusement. Cars kept stopping to let him cross, but he wanted to gawk at the accident. Finally he crossed over and looked at it up close and then slowly continued on his way across the street. When cars honked at him to tell him to move, he drunkenly pointed to his eyes with two fingers and then the cars, meaning he was looking at the accident. He didn't care than traffic was backing up for him as well as for the accident.

The police actually responded pretty quickly this time--they arrived less than 25 minutes after the accident! After taking pictures and all sorts of weird measurements that didn't seem to have any relevance, they had the taxi driver move his car a few feet so they could look at the damage done to the two cars. That took another few minutes and then the police drove off. Fortunately in this case, both cars were drivable and they didn't have to block more traffic with a tow truck. Once the cars were moved, the traffic cleared up in 2-3 minutes, although it had been backed up farther than we could see out of our windows. It's amazing what a difference two lanes of traffic and no rubbernecking can make. The whole thing lasted about 45 minutes.