"Passing by" /village of Topki/

____ On the way to the city of the same name, the village of # Topki, I passed a thousand times in my life. I always wanted to take a walk on it, looking out of the bus windows the landscapes surrounded by an old birch forest. Recently, I was finally honored.
____ The settlement grew out of the Tatar ulus and Cossack settlements on the Topka River in the early 17th century at the confluence of three small rivers: Kamenka, Topkoy and Kamyshnaya. This is all the historical information that I could find on the Internet before the trip. It is located on the federal highway Novosibirsk - Irkutsk, about 13 kilometers from Kemerovo. The section of the road is one of the most dangerous along the Topkinsky route. This immediately becomes clear when, at the entrance, you see a series of monuments along the roadside. A busy highway divides the settlement exactly in the middle, introducing certain inconveniences for the inhabitants, because the entire administrative and significant part is located on the right, while on the left there is a more interesting residential private sector for me.
The population today is about one and a half thousand. School, village council, district, post office, paramedic station, satellite Internet, car service, several gas stations, two-story Khrushchev houses, shops and even a pelmeni located right along the highway - quite decent conditions for living in the fresh air, given the ridiculous distance to the regional center of Kuzbass and a large number of intercity buses running here at intervals of 15 minutes. There is everything you need for life and even a large fish processing workshop, which surprised me extremely. It would seem ... where are we and where are the fish ?!
___ I liked the village. It smells of life, I recommend it!
There is even a gas pipeline, but only those who live on the central streets are lucky. I was surprised by the abundance of hay and machinery present in almost every yard. I thought that he was being mowed exclusively for sale, but my conclusions were dispelled by the shepherd, who drove the flock down the street, saying that almost everyone here keeps some kind of animal.
___ Not without chance meetings. The truth this time alone was extremely unpleasant and left a negative aftertaste in my vulnerable soul. The owner of another estate, the landscapes of which I filmed from a neighboring street bordering his garden, ran out to meet me shouting: “What XYI ... do you walk here and take pictures of everything? This is my private territory! " All my exculpatory arguments about the unintentional encroachment on property and appeals to the common sense of a man did not lead to anything good. I almost swore that I was not a secret agent of foreign intelligence and certainly not some collector, a representative of the tax or land service. Gradually, the peasant's eyes were filled with blood, the salivation during screaming became more abundant, and his palms really clenched into quite sickly fists. After twenty minutes of debate, I made a curtsy and quietly left. The situation once again made me understand that I still need to buy a gas canister and restore the lost press card in order to poke it into the eyes of those who fear the camera lens more than the barrel of a pistol.
___ And yet, from this trip, I received a lot of positive and pleasure. I regret one thing - I was afraid to take a picture of that nasty guy!