It’s a carnival for fans, by fans! New Nizhny: Cup makes gun city a tourist spot
FOOTBALL FESTIVAL The food is cheap, weather’s good, Russia have started well and the ‘Championat’ has come alive
At a small café near the Kremlin, a queue had formed outside the washroom. It was close to 5am on a Sunday but the café was overflowing. Welcome to the World Cup.
In the days leading up to the opener between Russia and Saudi Arabia, fans from around the globe had arrived in Moscow but it was really on the first Saturday of the competition that the idea of the World Cup really coalesced. And it was at the city centre in Moscow that it did.
Even the weather gods have been kind to Russia. It was expected to rain in the first week but Moscow has been warm and sunny during the day followed by cool, breezy nights. Two weeks into the World Cup, it has made the carnival more enjoyable.
“I thought it would be like a festival. It’s not ‘like a festival’; it is a festival,” said a Tunisian fan, laying added stress on ‘is’, as we spoke ahead of their game against England.
A few minutes later, a man draped in a Russian flag came over. “Which country?” he asked in English barely comprehensible.
“India.”
“Oh! Jimmy Jimmy!” he replied. Mithun da (Mithun Chakraborty) continues to be a rage in this part of the world and the reference was to the eponymous song from his 1982 blockbuster ‘Disco Dancer’. It is a reply almost every Indian journalist at the World Cup has heard in Russia. Chakraborty’s popularity in this country cannot be properly understood till you meet a few middleaged Russians. He has danced into their hearts in the way Raj Kapoor ‘tramped’ into that of their parents.
Middle-aged or not, Russia were a little wary of how their team, at 70 ranked lowest among the 32 here, would fare in the World Cup. Their build-up had been anything but buoyant so when Stanislav Cherchesov’s team beat Saudi Arabia 5-0, it deserved a party. And if they needed a mood enhancer, the defeat of the Mo Salah fronted Egypt provided just that.
In Moscow, coordinated chants of ‘Russ-e-ya! Russ-e-ya!’ reverberated through the streets. But the most strik- ing part of the celebrations was its spontaneity. The roads in the city centre had been almost empty at the time of the game; it was the pubs that were overflowing. Then within 15 minutes after it ended, the roads filled up with cars blaring horns and waving Russian flags.
The World Cup had truly arrived in Russia.
OF ONLINE TRANSLATORS
On the day of Argentina’s 3-0 loss to Croatia, when this reporter asked for an order to be placed at a restaurant here in Nizhny Novgorod for lunch, the waitress held up her phone.
“It will take some time for preparation,” flashed on the screen, the translation provided by an online app.
This was a restaurant that served traditional Russian, Tatar, Central Asian and your typical western world fast food. After surviving on the likes of stroganoff, pelmeni (Russian traditional dumplings) and fast food, I couldn’t resist ordering a plate of pilaf (rice cooked in broth) here.
The cost, as at any other average Russian restaurant, was reasonably low: for 150 roubles you can get a plate of pilaf. Food is cheap even at Fifa’s media centres, say scribes with experience of being at multiple editions of the World Cup.
Nevertheless, a few seconds later, the waitress showed another message on her translator, “We don’t know English. We learn.”
As much as it has been about the football, this has also been a World Cup of online translation apps and websites. Yes, some of the conversation may be lost in translation but without these, you would be seriously hobbled.
‘LIKE A UN MEETING’
“I have never seen so many people from so many countries here. This is special,” said cab driver Andrey in near-flawless English as we drove to the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow earlier this week. “Thanks to the Championat (World Cup).”
“Today, I have driven around Mexicans, Argentines and you from India. Last week, I met people from Peru, Morocco, Portugal, Germany and many others. “It’s like a big United Nations meeting,” he laughed.
According to different estimates, more than 2 million fans are expected to be in Russia for the World Cup. But what makes it different from a United Nations meeting is that at the UN, they don’t party into the morning. “We are usually a very quiet city. We wake up, go to work, return home and go to sleep,” said Sveta as she and her partner Aleksandr drove this reporter from the Strigino airport on Thursday morning to their guesthouse in Vavilova where they have been hosting visitors during the World Cup.
Till the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nizhny Novgorod didn’t permit foreign visitors to help maintain the secrecy of its weapon-producing units.
With the start of the World Cup, business has been more hectic than usual in Russia’s fifth largest city. There is renewed hope that being a host venue will help drive the economy beyond the more dominant sectors of automobiles, information technology and weapon-making. The hospitality sector has been the biggest beneficiary as thousands of fans keep pouring into the city that will host its last game of the competition on July 6, a quarter-final. “We have never seen as many people as we have in the last one week. Business has been good for the last few days and we expect the number of customers to keep rising till the first week of July,” said Andreyeva, who runs a restaurant a couple of kilometers away from the Nizhny Novgorod Stadium.
As per various estimates, more than $1 billion has been invested in preparing Nizhny for the tournament. A new stadium, a renovated airport, a renovated railway station and new roads are among the most prominent infrastructural additions to the city.
Igor Norenkov, the local minister of economic development and investment, predicted before the World Cup that the tournament would generate ‘six to seven billion rubles of extra income’ for the region.
“That is one percent of the Gross Regional Product. We will be able to review the results in the first quarter of next year,” Norenkov claimed.
It remains to be seen how true Norenkov’s figures turn out to be but questions remain over the long-term implications on the city’s economy. The new 45,000-capacity stadium, hosting six World Cup games, cost an estimated $300 million. The stadium, built on the confluence of the Oka and Volga rivers, has also led to a rise in river cruises.
With the stadium set to host FC Olimpiyets — an outfit struggling in the second tier of the national league pyramid — later, questions remain about its utility once the tournament is over. That said, the enthusiasm among locals remain high over the impact of the tournament on the economy.
“The city looks so different today from what it was 10 years back. Yes, we may not be in a position to say how much we are going to benefit economically but if you are talking about long-term profits for us, the new infrastructure will not collapse once the World Cup ends. The airport, the railway stations won’t become smaller like they were a few years back,” said Dimitry, a local resident who had arrived at the stadium three hours prior to Argentina’s game against Croatia.