Murmansk is in northeastern Russia. It’s a seaport with a population of 300,000. It’s the largest city north of the Arctic circle. There’s a football team and a hockey club. The Murman hockey club plays in the Russian Bandy league and is the most northerly club in the world. The port is active year round because it never ices up and was used by the Russian navy for its submarine fleet.
But enough about Murmansk. You see, I live in Winnipeg. A city in the southeast corner of the Canadian prairies. Not very special, but I think of it as my Murmansk.
Why am I writing this? Well, I have to do a report on a major city for my social class. People have picked cities like New York or Paris or Tokyo. But I picked Murmansk. Huh? My teacher said, puzzled. Why Murmansk? She said. Why not? I replied. No one’s doing Winnipeg. In a class of 30 students, no one picked their home town. And my teacher was okay with that — enthusiastic about all the foreign cities — until I came up with Murmansk. And then she fell silent.
Winnipeg’s not that bad, really. Sometimes I think of what it’d be like to meet a girl from Murmansk and show her around. We could hold hands while standing on the famous corner of Portage and Main. She’d push down an earflap of her furry Russian hat and nestle closer to me, and suddenly I’d love her. Truly. Madly. Deeply.
