Spring has arrived in Nizh. For the last week, temperatures have been above zero and my thermal underwear has stayed in its drawer. Outside, the sun is shining and a few birds are tweeting away in the distance.

Spring is a treacherous time in Siberia. The snow on the ground can take weeks to melt, and will, more often than not, re-freeze overnight, leaving the dreaded, perilous black ice to bewitch the ankles. More hazardous is the prospect of falling ice, which – its grip loosened by the heat which escapes from inefficiently-designed concrete roofs – plunges at near-terminal velocity, in chunks the size of a paving stone, from eight to ten storey buildings. This is easily enough to kill a person; so, for the first weeks of Spring, the residents of Nizhnevartovsk tend to stay away from buildings as much as possible.

Meanwhile, I’ve been getting my teeth into teaching. Do I enjoy it? I haven’t decided yet, but it’s certainly an experience. I teach six separate groups – four of children (mostly between 13 and 17, although one group is 8-11) and two groups of adults. Teaching the adults is okay, but teaching the kids requires a discipline I just don’t have, and behind it all is the nagging suspicion that I’m just not very good at it. Still, two weeks is a bit of a quick judgement, so we’ll have to see how I feel after three months.

Society is different here. I haven’t quite gotten my head around the way that it works, but it’s very different. Russian women outnumber Russian men by a significant margin, but yet are as unequal as in parts of the Middle East; but that inequality seems to be consensual. I met a girl from Zim who worked fairly high-up in one of the oil companies, and she said that – as a foreign woman in a position of authority – he got a fair amount of hassle, but no more than she would have gotten anywhere else outside of western Europe and the US. Russian women in positions of power are rare, but they don’t seem to attract the same social opprobrium that enfranchised women elsewhere do. I can discern no social pressure that prevents women from working and succeeding, should they wish to, which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist – in inarguably does. The social levers of oppression here are either extremely subtle, or the female population is being co-opted in some other way – either through residual conditioning or something even more obtuse. I’m not sure what yet. That this is a grossly unequal society is not in question; the manner of the inequality is of a certain academic interest, though, and will certainly bear further thought.

Meanwhile, getting used to the surrounds continues apace. One of the sad things about the school in Nizhnevartovsk is that it doesn’t seem to have the same tradition of adventurous group activities as the school in Tyumen exhibited. There is some talk of another banya trip, which could be jolly, but I’d like to get out of Nizhnevartovsk and see what there is to be seen in the remote Siberian taiga; hopefully I’ll get an opportunity before long.