My complaint is about Lonely Planet guidebooks. We are generally fans of Lonely Planet and own many of their books and apps. But their restaurant recommendations are just ridiculous. No matter where in the world you go it's the same old headings that have to be filled by LP. Every list of recommendations has two vegetarian places, a Thai place, a Japanese or Vietnamese place, a steakhouse, a pizza place and an Indian place. If any place serving the cuisine of the country you are actually in is mentioned it always utterly inaccessible, I quote directly from the Beijing guide: "there is no English menu, though, no English sign either, but it's opposite the building with a sign on its roof". Ridiculous. And so it was as we tried to plan somewhere to eat something RUSSIAN in Ekateringburg all we could find is something out in the suburbs. I'm sure a lot of Lonely Planet readers are of the hippie, vegetarian, 'the-harder-the-better' ilk who find it necessary to locate Bhutanese vegan food in a pork factory in the Ukraine because it's the only foodstuff that makes them feel connected to their wanderlust roots in Central Asia. After all travelling is all about showing off. So is blogging about it. But from the rest of us (fill in the blank). Us simple types just want some decent, local food, that we can actually order and afford. And preferably near the sights and attractions that we are going to be spending our time seeing. It may be sooooo mainstream, but if you wanted Thai then stay on King Street, hippie.
Ok, rant done. At some point during the day we officially left Siberia and entered the Ural Mountains region. In the afternoon we said farewell to the boys and their former Soviet travel-mates. By this time, 48 hours after leaving Irkutsk, they had gone through 14 bottles of vodka between the 4 of them. Impressive. We left them to their hangovers and got off in Ekaterinburg, the capital of the Urals.
Ekaterinburg lies just before the border of Asia and Europe, was where an American U2 spy plane was shot down at the height of the cold war and where the last of the Russian Royal Family were murdered during the Revolution. It also the proud owner of a metro with just one line and eight stations. In order to beef up apparent traffic on it they made us buy a token for ourselves, and one for our bags. To be fair some other European cities do this too but our bags were terrible at putting their tokens in the slots.
We walked from the metro to our hotel through more ridiculously good weather and then had the now customary race to the shower. Then, with Lonely Planet's pointless food recommendations disregarded, 2114. We copped out and ate dinner in the hotel. After this we retired to our room for an early night of delighting our blog audience and Kathryn delighting herself with the automatic shoe shine machine in the corridor. Final mention should go to the Russian game show host who looks a lot like a cross between Tony Martin (the Late Show) and Geoffrey Rush.
