Train day 2 - Irkutsk to Yekaterinburg
Nothing much exciting happens on the train today. We're all packed pretty early so it's mostly a day of sitting, reading and waiting.
At one of the stops today I finally see a little old lady on the platform selling dried fish so I snag one of those. Matvie showed me a photo of a fresh one of those fish and it was bloody huge! The drying process reduces it by about 80% if it was that big! I give it a kiss like Rex Hunt then start gnawing away at it. It's not easy to eat (very tough to bite) but after a while I managed to tear some away then it becomes much easier.
I wouldn't say it's a particularly enjoyable flavour. It's extremely strong and it just sucks the moisture out of your mouth. I manage to eat about 75% of it before it just became too much and I didn't want to eat any more. I'm glad I tried it but it's not my favourite thing in the world.
The train finally arrives in Yekaterinburg and I say my farewells to my new family then take my leave.
Yekaterinburg is not a pretty city. The Yekaterinburg station is pretty big but it's not a grand building. Coming out the front you're presented with a giant square full of buses and surrounded by shops and shitty old buildings. In the centre of the square is a giant statue commemorating something. But really it's a bit of an eyesore. Add shitty weather to that and it's not the most welcoming looking place I've seen.
For some idiotic reason my mobile internet provider here in Russia (MTS) reckons I ran out of credit at some point during the train trip so I was without internet for the last couple of days. And of course my cards don't work with Russian websites so I can't add credit myself. This was going to make getting to my hostel fun because I didn't have an offline map or public transport directions. Lesson learnt.
Luckily there is an MTS shop on the way to the bus so I walk in, show the error to the lady, give her some cash and she does a manual top up for me. I'm still not sure how I ran out of credit but I think it might be something to do with an SMS confirmation I had to do to connect to the wifi somewhere. Anyway - internet working again and I'm flooded with notifications.
Instead of using the metro I decided to get a trolley bus so I could see a bit of the city. Traffic here is absolute balls. There are so many cars on the road following the Russian driving methodology (do whatever you want and ignore every road rule at the expensive of everyone else to get where you want to go quicker) and it just takes forever for the bus to get anywhere. Which is fine because it means I can play ingress quite successfully on the bus :)
I go past a bunch of fantastic looking old buidings and I can tell that while this place may not look pretty it's going to be an interesting town to walk around.
My hostel was not particularly easy to find. There was absolutely no signage anywhere but on the door at the bottom of the apartment block. I had to go down a driveway then turn the opposite way Google told me to, then go up 4 flights of stairs after being buzzed in through the intercom in a very shitty looking building.
Inside the hostel is OK. The dorm room is pretty huge and the bed is quite comfortable. The bathrooms however leave a lot to be desired. They are living in a middle ground between clean and dirty. There are no real locks on the doors - just little hooks to keep them from swinging open while you're inside. It's not my favourite place but it's OK for a couple of nights. It was extremely cheap. I think 250 rubles per night which is about $6 AUD.
I also don't get a key but every time I want to come in I just buzz the door on the ground floor and the lady opens it. She must own the whole building.
I headed out to have a look around. Yekaterinburg is another city with a line painted on the footpath for tourists to follow. It's very convenient that most of the major attractions are actually in the city centre.
So I followed the line for a while and walked past some beautiful old buildings, some nice public art, the city pond and a protest of some kind!
There was a group of people across the road from this lovely building waving Russian flags and doing some pretty boring chanting. They would chanting 1 word a few times then stop and cheer. Then their leaders would put their heads together, come up with another word, then start chanting that. Pretty sad effort at a protest if you ask me. But it got the attention of the local cops and they started to gather in numbers around the group with very serious faces on.
I'm not sure what they were protesting but when the cops reached a certain point I just sort of quietly left. I didn't want to get caught up in some mass arrest or something because they were calling Putin a douchebag.
I followed the line for a little longer but then it started to rain and it was pretty cold and shit so I found a pub to have a couple of drinks and some dinner. I went to Dr Scotch which is an English themed pub with what looks like a reasonable selection of whisky. I had a couple of local beers and some goulash but nothing interesting was happening there at all despite being a Saturday night so I took off. I ended up walking around for another couple of hours just checking the place out before I decided I was too wet and went back to dry off.
Showered, washed some clothes and hung them up to dry then went to sleep.
I'm really pretty boring when it comes to this nightlife thing. I don't think I've really gone out for a night out at a pub or club since I've been away. But I'm OK with that to be honest. It's not really my scene without people I know and with nobody to talk to. I seem to have largely avoided party groups in hostels as well. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing but I'm normally an early starter so I'm generally pretty wiped by about 9pm and ready to sleep.
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