One Year in Moscow: A Tropical Soul in a Winter City
My journey to Moscow, and HSE University in particular began on September 18, 2024. It was with a heart full of warmth with a muggy aroma, and a mind alive with the buzzing pulses of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. Then, last September, the last rains were still a daily routine, that would climax into the dry season. I was leaving behind the crooning sounds of the bustling city for the thrumming soundscapes of Moscow, which initially seemed like a complex system constructed out of steel and gold and a sky full of a coldness that my body had not yet adjusted to.
I entered a Moscow that still lingered in the last sparks of “bab’ye leto,” the “woman's summer.” It was gentle, very deceptive. People gathered outside cafes. The leaves were turning. I thought, perhaps arrogantly “I can take this.” The idea of cold remained a concept and not yet a fact. Then the First Snow arrived. It was no gentle sprinkling you see in the movies. For me, the First Snow brought a kind of cosmic silence. I stood in awe as a world I had known only on a screen came rushing into being. I remember my first instinct was not to marvel, but to panic, buy the largest, puffiest jacket I could find, a comical cocoon against a cold that seeps into your bones and politely, but firmly, reminds you that you are a guest in a powerful climate.
And the snow? It started with a grey, pregnant silence. At home, such heaviness promised a torrential orchestra-thunder, the hissing rain on corrugated roofs, the smell of earthy petrichor. Here, all that was testament to was hushed expectation. Then, it came. Not with sound but with a slow, dizzying dance. Flakes, each tiny, intricate star, swirling in a silent frenzy. I stood there, a man who could smell oncoming train from a mile's distance, completely disarmed. I reached out, and this perfect geometry melted on my warm palm into a bead of nothing. That was the first magic: this substance that transformed from art to water at the touch of my inherited heat.
The effect was one of quiet turmoil. The world was muffled, all sharp edges smoothed over with a blanket of white. The incessant, comforting thrum of life was swallowed whole. It was a beautiful thing, yes, but it was also a very isolating one. It was definitely not my environment. I missed my body craving the warm hug of the sun, my soul yearning for the loud, green splash of home. I felt like I was trapped inside a black and white movie, my colours drained.
Coping came in layers, just like the sweaters that I learned to wear. There were lessons to teach my body a different rhythm. There were things that helped me learn a different liturgy of winter: scraping windshields, spreading salt on my steps, but most of all a different kind of warmth that came from a different place. The warmth that came in mugs of tea, with my hands holding them as well, with windows shining with lamps against darkness, and laughter from new friends.
Snow, it turned out, was a teacher, and it was teaching me resilience. It’s a delicate business; it requires that you slow right down, that you are deliberate. It shows you that beauty can be found in emptiness, that it’s not just something that’s profuse and abundant, that it can be spare and barren and white.
But now that snow falls on my city once again, I find I no longer see only the cold. I see the holding of the breath of the earth. I see the blank page. And somewhere in my tropical being, I have found a small place for the small miracle of this hush. I have not become a winter girl, no. Instead, I have learned to hold my own sunshine within me and to feel the warmth of memory when I witness the delicate and silent painting that falls.
This particular negotiation with the environment is where my education in immersion truly began. Culture is more than language or cuisine; it is the adjustment the body makes to a new planet. It is the "tapochki" ritual at every entrance, slippers for the floors. It is the artful donning of clothing. It is the understanding that a hot "chai" is more than a break after a -20°C journey through a winter heaven. It is a particular warmth that exists in the frigidity itself, and of a community that may have helped you up a slippery sidewalk without saying a word or a communal wince in recognition as you battle a biting blast that is just for you.
Then there was the conquest of the palate. Nigerian cuisine is a concert of brashness adorned with pepper, spice, and audaciously demanding flavours. Russian cuisine, at least initially, was what a still life of beige and cream might resemble. I tackled “pelmeni” with interest, “borscht” with trepidation (beetroot in a soup? The notion was absurd!) and “salo” with outright fear. But still, my experiment never ended. Like an adventurist, I understand that food is more than satisfying hunger, it is an art in itself, an expression, a duty and a classical appeal to a community. I looked forward to every bit of the unfolding culture with a list of the cuisines I would be trying out in the days that followed.
Academia at HSE provided its own cultural architecture. Coming from a system where hierarchy is often pronounced and rote learning has its place, the fiercely dialogic, critical, and self-directed style here was a shock. Professors were not distant figures of authority but rather debate partners. My first seminar, where I cautiously ventured an opinion and waited for the gentle correction, was met instead with, “Interesting point”, and a further expatiation that was hence revelatory. The workload felt less like a mountain to be climbed, more like a dense, fascinating forest to be negotiated, sometimes bemusing, often demanding, but alive on every level with intellectual energy. I learned to find my way around the system, the online portals, and that beautiful, terrifying practice of speaking up, of thinking out loud in a language still foreign on my tongue, in every corner of the city.
And what of the rest of life? I discovered the power of Russian friendship. It is a fortress that requires time to build, with walls of stiff courtesy very high. However, when you are behind those walls, the devotion is endless and passionate, warmed by “chainiki” of tea and endless conversation, of sharing gifts and chocolates.
“So, have I immersed myself?”
Immersion, I now understand, is not about exchanging one skin for the other. It is certainly not about becoming Russian. It’s about finding a way to live in the spaces between the cracks, and between the cultures. My immersion is about trying the littlest of the Russian words I pick daily on the streets, weaving them into short sentences that could make sense, irrespective of how ridiculously hilarious it could sound. My immersion is also finding peace in the open cold winter that greets your nose on the door to your home daily on your way to class or “Rabota”. My immersion is also about totally forgetting the way to the African food market that would offer me a feel of home, no matter the price it cost, but rather I munch on any food I get hold of and try to escape the unnecessary time wasted on commuting long distances to get food.
I am a mosaic today: Nigerian in my heart, Muscovite in my regular patterns of life. I still feel astonished by the snow, but I also sense the mystical quietness of the white sun rising in the frosty morning. I still feel the longing in my belly for the burning fire of chillies, but I also feel the deep warmth of the humble potato. My path from the tropical warmth to the depths of a Russian winter is neither one of change, nor one of assimilation; it is one of integration. I have not reduced myself in the process of immersing. I have found myself in an entirely different, more intricate form, somewhere in the breathtakingly beautiful, painful, and inimitably eclectic overlap between two worlds. The frost, it so turns out, will neither kill nor stifle the tropical bloom; it will merely instruct it in an alternative way to unfurl.
Shared by
Denen Donatus Iorkegh
