To Russia With Love

It’s a?????????????????, this web design design lark. Who’d have thought that learning a bit of code would’ve meant I got travel around the world and to places I never thought I’d see?

This week, CSS is taking me to Russia for the first time, for a CSS training course in Chelyabinsk. I’m leaving London on Monday morning on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow where I’ll at last be able to pay my respects to Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.

On Tuesday morning, Mark (my client, friend and guide) and I fly on to Chelyabinsk, just east of the Ural mountains and a yak turd’s throw from the border with Kazakhstan. I’ve never flown Aeroflot and can’t quite get the thought of goats and chickens as travelling companions out of my head.

Chelyabinsk the birthplace of Mikhail Koklyaev (six-time Russian weightlifting champion), space station engineer Maksim Viktorovich Surayev and Eugene Roshal, the chap behind RAR and WinRAR.

Chelyabinsk is also famously the most (radioactively) contaminated spot on the planet, thanks to its proximity to Mayak, one of the Soviet Union’s atomic weapons plants. In the 1940’s and ’50’s, the Mayak complex poured radioactive waste into the nearby Techa River and Lake Karachay exposing around half a million people to radiation levels twenty-times those of Chernobyl victims. You can watch a scary film about Mayak’s legacy on YouTube.

Me? I’ll be busy pulling on my new thermal underwear and hoping it keeps out the -20degree temperatures. I’ll also be practicing the few Russian words I remember from a Linguaphone Russian course.

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I’m sure they’ll come in very handy.