sunset at the state opera and ballet theatre
Saturday night wasn’t a particularly cold night, so I sat outside in the same square I sat in on Thursday and watched the sunset. I was upset about the fact that I had no one to hang out with (my roommates were all either at work or at home watching Breaking Bad), but I wasn’t actually craving company (does this make me a selfish person? maybe). I watched the sky turn dark blue and then black, and the streetlights painted the plain sidewalk an orangish-yellow. Couples embraced and even danced in this unromantic glow as young people with cameras trained their lenses on the remaining light in the sky behind the buildings and mountains in the distance.
Later, I wound up meeting up with one of my roommates and his friends: two Russian women who thankfully speak English worse than I speak Russian. At first I was somewhat reluctant to hang out with so many people, but I was grateful for the Russian practice — and eventually I even became grateful for the company. The temperature dropped but my roommate insisted we buy champagne and sip it clumsily straight from the large bottles in a park. The women laughed incessantly at my roommate’s earnest but somewhat overly ambitious use of Russian, but the conversations we had were nice.
My roommate befriended a cab driver a few weeks ago, so when we decided to go home he gave this friend a call and we all piled in his tiny car. When we got to one of the women’s houses to drop her off, the cab driver, who must have been bored, suggested we all go for a walk somewhere. Everyone agreed, and we drove off to Paraskeva Pyatnitsa Chapel, which I visited a few weeks ago. The views were even more incredible at night. The darkness of the night obscured the river and the mountains that I noted on my last visit, but the lights of the city carved downtown majestically out of the shadows of the valley and gave it a life it lacked during the day.
We got back into the cab and in the few moments I stopped focusing on the Russian conversation someone must have decided we should keep driving, because the next thing I knew we were tearing down a deserted highway, straight out of Krasnoyarsk and into the darkness (thanks, Delta Spirit) of the flat countryside I could almost see if I strained my eyes. The horizon was nearly visible to my left, a smudged line separating the pitch-black ground and the slightly lighter sky, illuminated by some light somewhere in the distance. I felt very much surrounded by Siberia.
At this point it was well after 2 AM, so even though the cab driver was playing very loud thumping music (is there some sort of universal rule that all cab drivers must play very loud thumping music?) I drifted in and out of sleep for what was probably fifteen minutes, at which point we stopped in front of a small store, bought chocolate, turned around, and went back to Krasnoyarsk. Streetlights popped up closer and closer together and apartment buildings filled the darkness outside the car. Suddenly I knew where we were, on a street not far from home. The cab driver refused to take any money for driving us home when we parted ways.
KJA 