Up North

Apparently, this is our 100th post! Yay us! Or, you. Or someone.

Anyway, I (Jesse) have been gone for a good while, traveling to a place even colder than here. What could be colder than central Siberia, you ask? Well, northern Siberia, of course! I was amused when we arrived and got into a taxi to go to our friends' home. It was -32, which seemed chilly to me for early November. I asked the taxi driver if it was always that cold. "Well, winter got here last week," he replied. "Soon it will be cold." Hmmmmmmm...

If you recall from our last email, along with coworker David, I was asked to be trained as a consultant for those in language and culture acquisition. This means that, eventually, we will occasionally travel around the country to other teams, checking on their progress in culture and language and offering help in how to improve their studies.

Of course, most of the training for this involves traveling to the teams with the current consultant and watching how she works. It's actually a fascinating process. How would you go about testing determining what level someone is at in a language you don't speak? Well, this is something that we need to know how to do if we're to help people improve, and our org has developed a whole set of guidelines for how to do this. It was the first time I'd seen it done since we went through the training, and I found it fascinating. But on to the pictures, as they'll help explain the whole thing ...

Here we're going through the first check with one of the men on the Y-land team. From left to right it's Shawna (the current consultant), myself, A (the one being checked), David, and the language helper.

The one being checked first has a series of tasks to do with his helper, and then the consultant goes over the recording with the helper to determine what he said and whether he said it correctly or not. As you can imagine, this involves a lot of work. In fact, between the checks and the meetings between the three of us consultant and consultants-in-training, we worked pretty much all day every day! It really is a long process, but I was so interested to see the way that you can actually tell how well someone speaks a language without speaking it yourself.

Here A's wife is also being checked with her language helper. Shawna's wearing a mask due to her illness, which slowed her down the first few days she was there. She didn't want any of us to come down with it, and I don't think any of us did.

I didn't take a lot of pictures of our actual consulting work, since that would have made for a really boring set of photos. The rest of them are just from life in a place this cold. If you've ever complained about your commute, then just think of the G family above; this is how they get to Sunday meeting in -30 weather.

In fact, it's so cold in Y-land that people double their windshield. The car here has an extra windshield taped on (if you look closely you can see the tape) to protect it from shattering. You might not know this, but if it gets too cold your windshield can actually shatter simply due to temperature. I didn't get a picture of all the things they do to the front of cars to keep the engine block from cooling too far, or to prevent the extremely cold air from entering the intake directly.

I sympathized with these guys as soon as I saw them. If you think your job is bad, just remember there are people who work full-time in construction outside in Siberia. Brrrr!

Permafrost is an interesting thing. If you build directly onto the ground, with a building higher than about 3 floors, the heat will melt the ground and the building will sink into it. Thus, all the taller buildings are built on "stilts," which allow the ground to remain frozen below them.

I'm not exactly sure of the reasoning, but the hot-water pipes are apparently better off above ground as well (I suppose -45 air takes less heat away than the permanently frozen ground or something). This pipe has a slow leak, which is dripping down and forming a pretty solid pillar of ice in the middle of the road. The cars were having to find alternate routes due to the solidity of this thing:

This pipe is leaking much quicker (in fact they fixed it the next day) and the hot water is forming quite an icicle as it comes down.

Another interesting thing in extremely cold climates is the way to run cables. They have to rig up this sort of support to run an electrical wire.

Y-land is not totally without its comforts, however. It's actually a fairly wealthy area of Russia, with all the gold and oil located there. On the last day of our visit, when all the meetings were done, the team took David and I (Shawna flew out in the morning) out for bowling. I am not the world's most gifted bowler, but it was still a good time.

P had an interesting technique with no run-up (making him far and away the easiest of us to photograph), but it was undeniably effective, as he won our last game.

The way home was a story in an of itself. It takes almost three days to get to Y-land from here, and David and I spent one of them in a big city waiting for a train. We decided to go to the local mall, since we have nothing even approaching it in T-land. In between buying luxuries like peanut butter and a fixture to hang mirrors (not available anywhere in T-land, in case you are ever on the hunt for one), we sat down to check out the ice skating rink. There was some sort of promotional thing for the mall going on, so we watched a figure skating show, complete with sparks coming out of a guy's skates:

And, another bonus - they had a KFC! Well, a Rostiks, but it's owned by the same people.

I enjoyed my Twister, although it wasn't quite the same as the Stateside one:


I'm thinking of writing a sequel to Dr. Seuss' book Oh, the Places You'll Go! Except mine will be Oh, the Places You'll Sleep!, and particularly targeted for people in this line of work.

I've already drafted the opening lines:

It is rare that you'll sleep on your very own bed
For the sleep that you crave, when you sleep like the dead.

But couches at friends' or cold floors at the airport
Or train station seating, where you await transport

You'll wish and you'll wish for a really good nap
But instead, all you'll find, is a bench with a gap

...

And, just to wrap this up, I'll close with a cute picture of one of the kids on the Y-land team, this is Jasmine, getting ready to go outside. She has to be among the cutest little girls ever!

So thanks, Y-land team, for your hospitality in hosting us at your place. We enjoyed it and learned a lot.

Check back next week for pictures of Steven's birthday party (he turned 3 yesterday) and other, yet to be determined interesting things.