A Delighful Bit of Trivia...

It snowed for the first time yesterday. I went to the archive around noon, and the sky was sunny and it was warm outside. By the time I finished work there and headed off to a meeting, the temperature had dropped 15 degrees, the wind was blowing, and fat flakes were starting to fall. Fellow American researcher Kate and I decided that we had to go out for a beer to celebrate/mourn the arrival of winter; we ended up at a fast food place named "Happy Land." I can't say that being in Happy Land did much to fix things, but the beer certainly did.

I figured that this would be a good point at which to introduce you all to Ulan-Ude. In many respects, it looks a lot like other Russian cities that I've spent time in. It's got that same lovely mix of brightly-painted (yellow and pink are favored above all) 19th and early 20th century buildings, appallingly ugly apartment blocks, enormous decaying industrial complexes, shiny new shopping cnter that upon closer examination are blighted by crooked staircases and leaking pipes, and neighborhoods dominated by quaint old wooden houses. It also has a very standard Russian central square, an enormous cement plaza that is surrounded by government buildings (inside one of which is my archive), a giant theater that is continually closed for remodeling, and Happy Land, comically enough. Like all standard Russian central squares, at the very center, on an elevated platform, is a Lenin sculpture. This, however, is not just any Lenin sculpture

Yes, Ulan-Ude is the proud home of the world's largest disembodied head of Lenin. As opposed to the hundreds and thousands of other Lenin statues around Russia, which capture poses such as "Lenin thinking" (hands behind the back, head looking slightly down), "Lenin giving a speech" (right foot forward, right hand in the air, mouth open), and "Lenin striding purposefully into the future" (self-explanatory), Ulan-Ude just has a giant Lenin head. It's about 25 to 30 feet tall, typically serious (I have yet to see a statue with Lenin smiling), and ends halfway down the neck. The eyes are drilled holes, which can be a little eerie at times. The crown is occasionally spotted with pigeon crap. All in all, it's quite a sight to behold. And I get to walk in front of it on my way to work every day. It also makes a very convenient meeting spot - say, 7:45 at Lenin's head?

Although I won't put the Lenin head on this list, there are some peculiarly beautiful things about Ulan-Ude. The local population is part Buryat, and the Buryats are closely related to the Mongols. Some architects who try to capture a local flavor in their designs pattern their buildings after yurts, or, oddly enough, what looks to me to be a sort of hat that I've seen in pictures of turn-of-the-century Buryat dignitaries. Take, for example, the local Mongolian consuate. It's octagonal, and after going up for a couple of stories, has a hat-shaped dome resting on top of the octagon. It's also painted several very pleasant shades of purple. The city is built on a rivery valley nestled among some low mountains. The lowest point in the city is also one of the oldest, a features a large Orthodox church with a couple of extremely shiny, recently-refinished gold and blue domes. Because of the way that the city has grown up the valley sides around this point, if you're looking downhill, you're nearly always looking down at the church. I learned the other day that Ulan-Ude claims to have more sunny days every year than the Crimea, Russia's version of souther California, and because of this, the church domes are nearly always shining.

All in all, it's a pretty nice place to be.