Day #31: A difficult journey, and the Sochi Olympics

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According to people you ask here, Novosibirsk and Tomsk are very near one another, but in Russia "near" means a 5-hour coach journey. The weather was awful - pouring down all day - and the bus was an old, rackety, draughty contraption, so it was soon steamed up and damp inside. I couldn't see a thing out of the windows and on top of that had the misfortune to be seated next to a larger lady who took up at least two-thirds of the two seats we had between us. It wasn't the fastest 5 hours of my life.

Fortunately I happened to be sitting in front of a very kind Russian lady, who, when we got to Tomsk - still in pouring rain - put my on the right bus from the auto-vokzal to the centre of town. Even more fortunately, the hostel was lovely and warm, and it turned out I was the only non-Russian there - every other bed was taken by a large group of (mostly young) volunteers for the Sochi Olympics, in Tomsk for training. Several spoke excellent English and were keen to practice their language skills (which are particularly valued by the Olympic authorities, and these volunteers expected to be working in the airport) so I was not short of company.

It was interesting to compare their experience so far with that of the London 2012 volunteers that I know. Mostly it seems pretty standardised and their training so far had mostly been equalities training. However, while equalities training is something most English people feel they have done to death, to the Russians I met it was quite new (in fact, a couple spent quite a bit of time telling me very seriously about how they had learnt "the correct way to refer to people who are not white" and how "it is okay to say "you see" to a person who is blind"). Still, I was impressed that they seemed genuinely keen to learn from their training and also that they are very enthusiastic about the Olympics, which is not universal in Russia (the same complaints people had in London, around the cost and the fear that things will not be ready on time, being the common objections). The most significant difference from London is that Sochi does not have an enormous population, so most volunteers will have to come from other places, often very long distances away, so the authorities are willing to provide accommodation and there is even talk of a contribution to travel costs from home towns to Sochi, which will usually involve a flight and will be very expensive at Olympics time. I spent the evening playing Uno with the volunteers, which is a game that requires no shared language skills.

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