Exiled to Siberia

Last week, we had a guest in our office. That was one of our favorite clients, Charles, that has several his projects developed by us. We asked Charles to describe his impressions of his second visit to Siberia. Here they are.

I live in New York. People in New York are used to seeing and hearing everything. So when I told people of my plans to spend a week visiting with Sibers in Novosibirsk, they were generally unfazed. However, once I mentioned that Novosibirsk is in Siberia, they turned wide eyed.

“You’re going to Siberia? By choice?” “Yes,” I responded. “I heard it’s daylight all the time during the summer and night all the time in the winter”. “No,” I reply. “Aren’t there tigers there?” “I don’t think there are many left.” “Is it like a prison there?”

“I hope not,” I say with some confidence, but not total. “Keep in mind this is western Siberia,” I continue. But I think the geography is lost on them. Siberia is Siberia to them.

Getting to Siberia is not as hard as one might imagine. I took a direct flight on Aeroflot from New York to Moscow and then transferred in Moscow to the domestic terminal to another Aeroflot flight to Novosibirsk. Even though the airport in Moscow is called “Shermentevo 1” and “Shermentevo 2”, these terminals are not close at all. It’s at least a 20 minute taxi ride between them. When I went to the information booth at the international terminal to find out how to get from one to the other, the attendant informed me in English that she, “does not speak English”, despite the fact that the counter says “Information” in English. The food on Aeroflot didn’t really pass for food in my book so I was quite happy that I brought several balance bars with me.

Once I got to Novosibirsk, I was greeted by some of the team from Sibers. I knew that I was staying at a hotel without internet access and for a junky like myself, that would not be ok. So we decided beforehand that I would buy a Russian cell phone and connect to the internet on my computer through a Russian cell. I bought a phone and SIM card at the airport. The connection speed says 115kbs, but I’m not sure I believe it (it seems more like 33 kbs). It costs about $.25 / mb of data transferred. This creates an interesting max / min problem for me. I want to surf the web, but I hate spending money. It makes me think twice before I watch the latest youtube video being sent around.

At the hotel, same as the phone store, they don’t take credit cards. There are plenty of cash machines around so it’s not such a big deal but I guess Russians walk around with piles of cash in their pockets.

My days at Sibers start up by being picked up by a “taxi” around 10am from the hotel. The taxi in this case seems to be a privately owned car by a guy who speaks English (sort of). After a 20 minute drive, I arrive at the office and usually go to the coffee shop to eat some breakfast and study Russian. I ask the waitress for the “menu” but she looks at me in confusion. I say “menu” again and still a blank look. “Menu?” I say a third time and this time, there is recognition. “Ah, menu!” she says. I think, of course “menu”, that’s what I’ve been saying the whole time. But when she quickly returns with the menu, I only say “Spaciba.” After the first day of confusion at the coffee shop, Anya from customer service wrote out what I want to order. Now, I just hand the paper to the waitress.

At 11, Vika comes to tutor me in Russian for an hour. The vocab is hard, the grammar is harder and the pronunciation is nearly impossible. “Ti” and “Tea” pretty much sound the same to me but apparently one means you and the other means tea.

After class I go to the office around noon and sometimes have a meeting with the development team I’m working with. The meetings are usually translated by someone with strong English skills but I have a sneaking suspicion the developers understand English and are just embarrassed to speak it to me. That suspicion is augmented when I enter things into bugzilla in English and the tasks are completed quickly and accurately without any apparent intervention by the project manager.

There is “high speed” internet access at the office but while the connection to Russian servers is pretty fast, the connection to US based computers is slow. I guess Akamai doesn’t have a Siberian outpost yet.

Sometimes I grab a quick bit to eat in the afternoon. And around 7pm or so, I get dinner with some people from Sibers. I’ve gone to various types of dinner places ranging from “NY Pizza” to a dinner with traditional Russian music. At NY Pizza, while what they serve is certainly pizza, I would never confuse it with anything I’ve had in NY. And, by the way, ketchup here is not good. Any time there is a dinner with Serge, vodka is involved. I wonder if they are just pretending to like vodka because they think they have a stereotype to live up to, or if Russians really drink vodka at each dinner.

After dinner, sometimes I’m too tired to go out. Other times, I’ve tagged along and played pool or gone bowling or watched hockey (which they seem to take pretty seriously).

Despite all the things that make Siberia so different, I can’t help but be struck by all the similarities. The IT guy has a pony tail. The engineers dress funny. People take their work seriously. There are smart people here and not so smart people. Happy people and pissed off people. Office cliques and politics. Basically, except for the Russian lettering and endless forests surrounding the office, I could very well be in NY. Well, ok, maybe not NY, but certainly Minnesota.