g&k

Today we left Asia. But not before we had a few hours to kill. We went for a repeat meander of downtown Ekaterinburg. It seemed a good day for an ice cream but yesterday we learnt that everybody tends to drink a beer in public, so we went looking for a beer. All we could find were ice-cream stands. No thank you, that's so Western. Instead we headed somewhere more foreign - a Scottish Pub. A Scottish pub is a curious thing, there's no globally famous beer like Guinness, and the decor is very 'British'. There is Scotch, but that's not really a pub drink. Instead there are just random St Andrew's crosses about the place. And the dozen or so dwarf-sized mannequins dressed in kilts & sporrans in all the window fronts.

After a lunch of Russo-Scotch food we headed to the supermarket. We had learnt our lesson regarding the absence of platform food and the goodness of Zakoosaka on the last train. As such we stocked up on finger food and vodka. Picking vodka is not easy.

There are about 20-30 to choose from, they all cost about the same and have no readily distinguishing characteristics. So we bought some 'pretty' ones. With supplies in hand we spent our last hour or so in the hotel lobby before taxiing back to Ekaterinburg Vokzal.


It was all very familiar on the train by this stage. We were even in the same carriage, compartment and seat numbers. A complete facsimilie of our last trip two days ago. The train stop times were the same as last time. Almost everything was just like 48 hours ago. It was like we had slipped out of the time-space continuum for 48 hours and reemerged now, smelling a little better. And with more vodka. One thing that remained exactly the same was the impact point on Gavin's head of the all too solid head rests.

They are seemingly positioned to deter people from sitting too close to the window. So when you suddenly lurch over, having seen something of interest beside the train, you will connect, headways, with a very solid object. Having walked around for two days with a constant headache from a few such blows to the head on the previous trip Gavin was not keen to repeat the effect. Unfortunately the neurological sequelae of these head traumas was an ironic amnesia. And so he immediately launched head first into the head clunker as soon as the train started to pull away from the station. If any readers know Gavin's Visa card PIN or favourite colour could you please leave a comment - he subsequently has forgotten them. He did not, however, forget a large number of excellent swear words.

If things on the train were pretty much the same, things off the train were changing. A little. The birch/larch/pine forest was a little more diverse with rivers and clearings here and there. There were more settlements including some quite pretty villages but also more industrial areas.

The increasing number of rivers were crossed by numerous bridges. As the day drew to an end we wondered if we would recommend this trip to others. If the long time spent on the trains and difficult visas and challenging communication was all worth it. In short, was travelling the Trans-Siberian worth it? I dunno. We'll tell you tomorrow.

Mmm, buffet breakfast. Then we were off to our first sight. We cross now to our correspondent on the scene...



After uniting the continents through the power of the High Five we drove back into Ekaterinburg. Along the way Kathryn discovered a monument of much greater cultural significance. To her anyway. Another IKEA, complete with backward 'N' to add to the one spotted in Ulaanbaatar. However once returned to town we decided to take a walking tour of Ekaterinburg, being that it is so walkable and the weather so nice.



Ekaterinburg is a pretty city, in the middle at least, with a central canal-cum-river derived from a weir that holds back the rather inauspiciously named 'City Pond'. It looks altogether more European than Irkutsk in Siberia despite being technically still in Asia. However, like Siberia before it but perhaps more noticeably here, it is crumbling around the edges. Literally. Concrete gutter dissolves into rock & dust. Roadway edges are rough & rocky. The motorway on ramp was just about a dirt road.



But the city does have a number of small but fetching monuments. Most are devoted to the periods before and during the soviet era. Unfortunately for Russia it seems that since Glastnost & Peristroika, no new major works seem to have been built. Nor anything cleaned. But there were less Russian stereotypes here than in Siberia. More western. Although when considering what it is that gives a standard, 'boring' soviet background a western look it's advertising. The neon streets in Beijing and Shanghai are excellent examples. This is the familiar Western 'sheen' that we are used to. And that is disappointing.



But things here were exotic too. For both of us trams are always exotic. Trains that drive on the road? That's just mental. It all seems so industrial revolution and foreign. The electric busses with overhead cables even more so. They seem synonymous with bread queues and communism. There was a sculpture that was a huge concrete keyboard laid out besides the river. It is, according to the tourist map, the largest in the world. Now there's a claim to fame.



Similar exoticism was also seen, although perhaps less poignantly so, in the Russian aversion to facial hair and the alleged stories of police corruption towards tourists. In fact the Police were so biased against us they didn't even care we were there at all. Just as well we would soon flee this oppression. Damn you KGB!! There was, however, a bridge of love. Couples had attached padlocks adorned with their names to the bridge's railings. Some were even heart shaped locks. We liked to think the keys were thrown into the river. One, however, had an end date: 2002-2011. Guess he'll need the bolt cutters.



The other site of note visited today was 'the Romanov Death Site'. This spot marks where the Romanovs, including Anastasia, were killed in the basement of an engineer's house in 1918. Subsequently the Soviet's built a Museum of Atheism in the house above. What do you put in a museum like this? A bunch of empty displays with captions saying 'Here isn't a god'? A list of things God didn't create? Dioramas of events where nothing supernatural occurred? It would be great! But instead, there's a church. Or more correctly "The Church on the Blood".



After a certain Boris Yeltsin, an Ekaterinburg governor, had the original house demolished in 1977 in case it became a shrine for Monarchists, a massive church was built. And more than become a rallying point for monarchists the Russians posthumously exalted the Romanov's the rank of Saints. From bourgeois oppressors to miracle workers in one life-time. At this rate drunko Yeltsin will become a God. Today it is surprisingly difficult to find exactly where the spot is. The guidebooks describe a number of markers that no longer exist. We satisfied ourselves that we were 'close enough'. That night we crossed town to find an actual Russian restaurant. The sign isn't in english but fortunately our Cyrillic reading is so awesome now we could find it. Despite being in a basement the interior is series of rooms each done up like a different country Russian dining room. When taking your order the waiter asks where you are from and plants the relevant flag on your table to let everyone know.



Fortunately there were no Americans in tonight to send troops to every other table. Kathryn's beef Stroganoff was very good. Gavin's four quarters pie less so. We could identify two quarters - onion and mushroom with cheese. The other quarters were less clear. Beef and rabbit? Not sure. Not good. But we left feeling like we had got to know Ekaterinburg.

We were happy to wake up in our clean, two bed berth this morning rather than the stink-filled cesspit that was last night’s party venue. Things out the window were pretty much the same. The landscape over thousands of kilometers is unbelievably similar. It seems to justify giving so much land just one title - Siberia. We were not getting off in Ekateringburg until the afternoon so fell back to our usual roles on respective laptops. However when it comes to today's blog entry there really isn't much to say. So I'd (Gavin) would like to take this opportunity to complain. And to anyone who has been reading this whole blog and is currently saying: "All you have done is complain!". Well...

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.

We were in the midst of the longest single leg of our journey. 3,369kms from Irkutsk to Ekaterinburg. Almost 48 hours with nothing to do but sit on the train. As such we didn't get up early, 11am was fine. At least we think it was 11am we were travelling through 3 different time zones so we were never really sure. More confusingly the train timetable, for stops etc., ran on Moscow time, some 5 hours behind. Or 4. Or 3, depending on where we were. But wake we did after a disappointingly poor sleep on these new, first class beds. Whilst beautifying these new compartments the designers had managed to find something quite difficult to achieve - a way of making the beds more uncomfortable. Harder and narrower. Well done.


After an hour of staring blankly we began to notice the slowly changing scenery. Most of what flashed by was large wood forest with small pockets of snow hanging on. But there were more settlements along with big, dirty industrial sites - very soviet. About this time we were offered lunch. This was tricky as a lot seemed lost in the translation from the menu to our order.


However a lot more was lost in the translation of the recipe into the food that was supposed to be our meal. Salmon with mashed potatoes became unidentified white substance with rice; beef with fried potato was brown bits with mushroom on pasta. Poor. And we'd really quite liked Russian food in Listvyanka. Fortunately we had brought a few supplies of our own to supplement our appetite. God bless Pringles & 2min noodles.


So we had to pass the rest of the day. Fortunately we were prepared to be amused. The power board was loaded with two laptops, iPad, iPhone, camera charger, MP3 player. Kathryn settled down to her laptop and a stoic resistance to ever use the toilet on board. This aversion was largely born of the last long trip where things were different - a stainless steel bowl with a foot pedal that opened the drain onto the tracks.


This could be suitably entertaining or even cathartic, if you were feeling vindictive against the country you were travelling over. Otherwise you could try (vainly, unfortunately) to photograph the results of your efforts as they flashed by the rear window of the train. Things on our current train were more modern. And boring. An aircraft like arrangement complete with ear-popping vacuum. Meanwhile Gavin sat down to write the blog. Somebody has to. Otherwise you'd have to do something else like make a cup of tea, peel a mango or scratch. Now don't go getting ideas, there's reading to be done.

The afternoon hours passed with a few unsatisfying interruptions - a man came selling books & magazines, for some reason they were all in Russian, even Cosmo!; we spent 20 minutes waited for an Obelisk that was described in our guidebook to be beside the tracks and marked the half-way point between Beijing & Moscow, an important milestone. It wasn't there; and perhaps the biggest let down was the absolute absence of 'platform food sellers'. Both our guidebooks made significant reference to the 'babushka mothers' and other hawkers that would, apparently, crowd the train sides at stations selling all & any manner of food stuffs. Both books suggested that you need not bring any food at all as you could support yourselves from these platform providers. Save for a few permanent station kiosks there were none. No 'fresh boiled potato with dill', no home pickled herring, no dangerous smoked sausage. Nothing. In fairness the book did say it could depend on the weather and season but if they're not coming out in 23 degrees blazing sunshine, what are they waiting for?

At the end of the day we did secure 4L beer, a bottle of vodka and a bag of skittles (Skittlebrau, anyone?) for Simon's birthday party. By the time we arrived at 7/8/9pm all in the 'Party Kompartment' were looking weary. They had seen the end of about 10 bottles of vodka in the 30 or so hours since boarding the train and were looking a little worse for it. Nonetheless they offered us a drink and the Russian/Ukrainian duo offered us a lesson in proper drinking. A round of vodka shots began with one local asking one of the British boys if there was something wrong with their hand; this was the cue to pour a round.


Once everyone had a drink a toast was offered. These were usually something international but the local favourite was a Russian expression I wish I could remember - shouldn't have had that vodka. The rough translation was 'Here's to us, and f**k the rest', although more literally "Us, penis the rest". The process of working out the literal translation was a highlight of the night. The other important lesson of the night was that a shot is always followed by 'zakooska', a little bit of food. Any food. But usually bread, meat, biscuits, cheese. This helped soothe the burn and settle the stomach. Any tapas/antipasto platter would serve the purpose perfectly. And so the process would repeat in 5 or 10 minutes. The rate of drinking was very different to what we were used to where you normally have a drink in hand that you sip from over a while. Instead each drink was shared and in between were periods of frivolity whilst the last drink had 'time to work'. It was good. It is to be emulated. We left the boys to it - they still had another night on the train. Tomorrow we get off, and shower, in the Urals, the dividing line of Europe & Asia. Ekaterinburg.