Through the Gobi Desert

Our final leg of the train journey (sob) was from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing, a journey which took us through the heart of the Gobi desert. About five hours after leaving UB, the snowy wastes finally petered out, only to be replaced almost immediately by this:



Most of the Gobi isn't officially true desert, so the sandy wastes were mixed with a lot of scrubby grassland, but it was certainly large and empty enough to see why Outer Mongolia is pretty much used as international shorthand for 'the middle of nowehere.' It is quite surprising just how much of the Eurasian steppe is simply empty and desolate waste or one kind or another.

There were, however, a surprising amount of camels. According to our trans-Siberian guidebook, which was written by a complete train geek and is usually correct on anything train-related, there are only about 500 camels left in the Gobi. As such, we weren't expecting that we would see any at all. I now suspect, however, that whoever did this survey may have adopted the scientifically dubious method of counting camels from the train window, as I'd say we saw about half of the Gobi's supposed camel population within about 12 hours. Either that or the camels just really like playing chicken with the train. Don't suppose there's much else to do.
Anyway, if you squint really hard you might be able to identify these humped creatures as camels:



Until the Chinese border, the train also boasted the most blinged-out restaurant car in the world, ever. Our little faces lit up with sheer delight when we saw the tack-tasticness of this:



Sadly, our belief that we had a lot of Mongolian togrogs left to spend was misplaced - the huge wad of notes we had was actually composed of notes worth about 0.5p - so we weren't able to fully sample the delights of this magical world. But although the cups of coffee we were able to afford certainly did not afford us with too much joy, the surroundings more than made up for it.

After a long stint in the bogie-changing shed at the Mongolian-Chinese border (I dread to think how many listless hours we have spent on sidings and in sheds during the trip) we finally made it to China. The guidebook had told us that the Chinese border post was decked out in fairy lights and that the Vienna Waltz was played to greet each incoming train, but sadly this proved not to be true. There were, however, soldiers hiding out in the undergrowth, which always makes you feel very very wanted and welcome indeed.

The Chinese province of Inner Mongolia looked remarkably similar to its Outer neighbour (viz: desert), but when we woke up in the morning the desert had been replaced by some rather tall mountains and.....a rather large and famous wall. Sadly my camera ran out of batteries just before wall sightage, but northern China looked generally like this:



Before too many hours the train finally trundled into Beijing and we stepped off, knowing we'd made it through the desolate wastes and arrived at a part of the world that is people-friendly enough for lots of people to actually live in. For the first time in weeks, the temperature was not prefixed with a big fat minus sign, meaning that it felt positively balmy.

And so (blub), that was the end of our trans-Siberian journey. The blog has now finally also made it to China, and so there will be no more posts about vodka, or pelmeni, or mutton, or instant noodles, or, unfortunately, about frozen wee. I hope I've managed to convey a little of the literal and figurative uber-coolness of the trans-Siberian trip to you guys, but if not, suffice it to say that I've had an ace time, and would recommend this trip to anyone. Except people who can't stand cold.

Ulaanbaatar

So, the slow blog to China, unlike the train, creeps on, and we are now up to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. I'm blaming 'leaves on the line.' Anyway, the city was a very interesting place; the heir to the ancient nomadic culture of the steppes, it’s also at a crossroads between Russia and Asia, and – increasingly - between traditional culture and modernity. The place is at the moment a curious hybrid, with felt gers nestling between half-finished skyscrapers, and an in-progress Hilton Hotel perched on the edge of your typical industrial wasteland. On one corner you see monumental Soviet-inspired statement architecture, on another the gleaming towers of an Asian megacity, and on yet another, perhaps on a back street, a community of traditional gers encamped behind a small Buddhist temple. Add in some wonderful monasteries and neglected old palaces, a good few cosmopolitan touches such as the existence of a Czech restaurant, and a backdrop of magnificent mountains almost within walking distance, and you’ve got UB. Oh and yes, everything really is named after Chinggis Khan, as he is known here.





During our stay in UB, we visited some really interesting places, but unfortunately for various reasons I am underserved with photos of them. The first was the Gandan Monastery, which is the home of a 32 metre tall statue of the Buddha. Unfortunately, taking photos of temple interiors is frowned upon, so you’ll have to content yourselves with the following pictures. The temple was quite majestic, and was clearly still active as a religious site: monks and nuns were everywhere, and we even saw a group of small trainee monk boys standing outside a school. Unfortunately they were engaing in rather un-monklike behaviour by kicking each other and a small dog, but hey, even little monklet kids will be kids. The place was also filled with enormously fat pigeons (Buddhist monks' and nuns' generosity to them being, from what we could see, considerable), as you can see in the following:









We also visited the Bogd Khan Palace, a wonderful old complex a couple of miles out of town that felt as if it had been in a state of benign neglect for the last seventy years. It was the home of the last Bogd Khan – the Buddhist spiritual leader of the Mongol people - who in 1911 also declared himself Emperor of Mongolia when the country became independent from China. Because it is a little out of the way, the palace seems to be seldom visited, and so we were able to poke around the fascinating complex of temples completely undisturbed. There was also a museum – again, completely deserted excluding a couple of pleasantly bookish-looking staff - housing some amazing artefacts that the Bogd Khan and his wife had ordered from around the globe for their pleasure. These included beautiful four-poster beds, the most blinged-up ger I’ve ever seen, and a whole menagerie of stuffed exotic animals prepared for and shipped to the Khan by a company in Hamburg. The couple clearly had interesting tastes.





Another exciting place was UB ‘black market’ – named, of course, in the country’s Communist days – a sprawling free-for-all quite a way out of town. They stocked vast quantities of everything your visiting Mongolian semi-nomad or hip UB-dweller alike could ever need; fur hats, leather boots, silver daggers, fake Adidas trainers, reams of cloth, mobile phone charms; all, of course, at knock-down prices. It was almost endless, and amidst the large swathes of junk there were some really interesting finds, including the cutest children’s boots. If anyone fancies importing Mongolian leather children’s shoes, believe me, they would go down a storm in Crouch End. Unfortunately I have absolutely no photos of this market, as getting one’s camera out in the middle of this place would have been tantamount to writing ‘rob me, I’m a complete twat’ on my head in Mongolian Cyrillic.

Oh, but before I forget, there is also one feature of which UB should be less than proud. After considering this matter carefully - for, like the award for terrible policing, there are a plethora of contenders for this crown – I have decided that UB is home to the most aggressive and downright maniacal drivers that I have seen in any world city. Yep, ever. Unlike other places, the problem doesn’t appear to be caused by faulty vehicles or a general lack of roads: UB has traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, basically everything that you would expect of a sizeable city in terms of basic road infrastructure. The problem, however, is that all these accoutrements are completely disregarded by the road users themselves, who seem to believe, to a driver, that they are competitors in a computer game where one gets points for every item you crash into or small child that you mercilessly plough over. Red lights are routinely ignored, and cars will happily charge at pedestrians as they cross the street. It is basically complete anarchy, set to a noxious cacophony of honking, and each crossing the road inspired terror in our hearts. At the biggest junction, the situation is so bad that they have resorted to employing a ‘traffic director,’ who basically stands on a box in the middle of a six lanes of traffic and by means of a loud horn attempts to strike fear into the hearts of UB’s drivers. It didn’t appear to be having much effect.

Goulash - In Outer Mongolia?

I’d like you to think, for a moment, of Ulaanbaatar’s restaurant scene. If you are conjuring up images of stringy pieces of mutton served on a bed of mouldy yak’s milk, then you’re about where I was before I visited. Two weeks ago, if someone had asked me to guess where outside of Central Europe one might happen upon a Czech restaurant, Ulanbaatar would not, it is fair to say, have been my first pick. In fact, it would probably have ranked near Kisii in my internal probability stakes, which as those of you who have suffered me going on about Kenya will understand, is equivalent to ‘absolutely no way in god-forsaken hell.’ But then, what should we spy about two minutes from our hostel in UB but this:



Of course, we had to go. Whilst I wanted to find out quite why there was a Czech restaurant in the middle of UB – with the menu outside rendered in Mongolian, English and Czech -, sadly none of the (Mongolian) waiters or waitresses spoke sufficient English for any progress to be made in solving this mystery. We did, however, have a pretty authentic Czech goulash with bread dumplings, which was, frankly, heaven after two weeks of noodles and frozen pelmenny………………..

Teddy McRubbish

And now the long post about some place we visited is done, so to another random aside in which I demonstrate why when Jon reads these posts his head is filled with an image of my gurning features. As context, Listvyanka - the lovely village on Baikal - is full of barking dogs; as you walk down the street, each successive garden yields a big slobberin beast that will energetically let you know not to even dare think about crossing the threshold of its territory. One also appeared to laugh at Katie when she fell over, but that is beside the point.

Amidst this canine chorus, there was one particular hairy mutt that I for some reason particularly liked; he was trying so,so hard to appear fearsome and threatening and yet completely failed to do so due to the fact that he was essentially a cute, tubby ball of fur. For some reason I dubbed him ‘Teddy McRubbish,’ and for some even more inexplicable reason this name came out to the tune of ‘Beauty School Dropout.’ Unfortunately this particular breed of dog turned out to be very common in Siberia and Mongolia, meaning that I spent a significant amount of time driving Katie – and myself - mad by breaking into ‘Teddy McRubbish’ every time one came into my line of sight. The tune also prompted the reappearance in my head of the song we once composed about the Balliol quasi-pirate librarian to the same tune (lyrics unfortunately completely unfit to print on a blog my mother reads), meaning that I drove myself slowly mad for days.

Whilst I unfortunately didn’t get a picture of the original and the best, here are some stray McRubbishes that were snapped in Ulan Bator. Anyone who knows what breed they are, please do tell me, because I feel the need to have one in my life.

Lake Baikal

Whilst Irkutsk was surprisingly nice (and I'm sure its pelmeni festival was even better), the whole point of the stop there was to use the city as a base to see Lake Baikal, the deepest, oldest and clearest freshwater lake in the world. We took the bus down to Listvyanka - a village beside the lake - which was a 90 minute journey on a freezing old boneshaker barely warmer than outside. Admittedly, it probably didn't help that I chose to sit next to the window that was broken, but as that was the only window you could actually see through I decided that early-stage hypothermia was a small price to pay in order to see the pretty Siberian hills and forests.

Basically, Lake Baikal was huge, breezy and frozen. Unfortunately due to lack of monies (on my part, of course) we did not go dog-sledding or snowmobiling, but we spent the day wondering around the lakeside and around the pretty village of Listvyanka, which is where my glasses met their aforementioned doom. I did try to persuade Katie that she really wanted to go for a little hike in the snow up the hills around Listvyanka (and there are some photos of me looking like a demented guide leader going 'tally ho,' but at -25 she for some reason didn’t seem particularly keen on the idea.

Here are some pictures of the frozen north:







Lake Baikal would also be absolutely wonderful in the summer; it’s surrounded by mountains and in July and August is apparently even warm enough for what the guide book calls, I suspect rather euphemistically, an ‘invigorating dip.’ I now, of course, I have a lovely idea for a future summer trip – in the mythical future time when I finally get some money – crystallizing in my brain. I think it would be rather fabulous to fly to Beijing, take the train to UB and spend a few weeks in Mongolia horse-trekking and wandering around with nomads, head up to Baikal for some hiking in the pretty alpine scenery around the lake, then take the Baikal-Amur Mainline (a line that goes north of the main trans-Siberian that few people and hardly any travellers ever take) to the Pacific Coast, or even – if the line’s reached there by the time I go – to Yakutsk, where you can catch a boat down the Lena River all the way to the Arctic Ocean. One day this shall be done, and perhaps too, shall be blogged….

The Margate of Siberia

Okay, so due to the fact that we didn't have internet in our (very lovely) apartment until two days ago, the promised blogorrhoea never materialised. This meant that despite the fact that I'd already written a fair few posts on MS Word, I couldn't post any of them, respond to anyone on facebook, or even defend myself against the lovely GIF animation that miraculously appeared in the last post's comments section. But now I am back with a vengeance, and so a certain vonmonkey should await revenge of some as yet undecided kind...

Anyway, for the sake of thoroughness (and because I'm sure as hell not deleting what I've already written) my amazing time-travelling blog shall continue to write as if it is still sometime in mid-to-late February, with England still all snowy and me still somewhere in the Siberian tundra. Although I had planned to start with Mongolia, I then realised that whilst there had been a mention of its bone-chiilling freezingness, Irkutsk itself had not received any blog love. And it does deserve some, for it was a surprisingly pleasant little city.



Before I arrived, I had a mental picture of Irkutsk as a grim industrial pile, worth visiting only as a gateway to Lake Baikal, but instead I found a place with what can best be described as the atmosphere of a seaside town in the off-season. Instead of grimy old pipes, there were traditional wooden houses, some pretty art nouveau buildings, a laid-back atmosphere, and yes, even bunting and people selling candy floss and ice cream. This last delicacy may sound a bizarre choice in temperatures as low as -50, but I have been informed that Siberians actually eat ice cream in winter for warmth, the ice cream being about twice the heat of the surrounding air. I still think a warm drink would perchance be a more effective heating mechanism, but then I am not a hardy Siberian, so I know little about such matters.



Anyway, despite the obligatory ‘Lenina’ and ‘Karla Marxa’ streets and statues of communist luminaries, the centre of Irkutsk appeared to have been largely spared the delights of Soviet town planning, and even the obligatory pollution from across the frozen river appeared strangely picturesque. Apparently Irkutsk was once dubbed the ‘Paris of Siberia,’ and whilst this may be a slight overstatement of its charms, it certainly was a pleasant place to while away a couple of days. We visited the house of the nineteenth century exiles Sergei and Maria Volkonsky, members of a group of aristocrats who were sent to Irkutsk in 1825 after supporting the Decembrist plot against Tsar Nicholas I (not the one on my Romanov necklace). They had, shall we say, rather better living conditions than the majority of exiles in Siberia, and the museum contained some rather cool antiques from their house, which the kindly assistant attempted to tell us about in Russian. We didn’t understand everything, but we got the main gist and anyway, everything looked very pretty. We did then rather amuse the staff by failing to read the one sign in English in the whole museum (tour continues this way), and promptly walking through the side door that took us straight outside into the -25 cold. Yes folks, we smart.

It was also in Irkutsk that I understood my first Russian pun, and was so proud of myself that I had to take a photo, and now have to explain the joke (sorry). This sign reads ‘Las Knigas,’ which, as ‘kniga’ is a book, means that this is a bookshop making a lame pun on ‘Las Vegas.’ I was a little bit too happy when I understood this.

Still Alive

Okay, so due to a combination of a lack of internet access, two small American-Mongolian children with a fondness for playing 'jail,' a long late-night conversation about poisonous animals with a guy in UB and a session of beer and Pulp Fiction in Beijing, I have singularly failed to update the blog in a whole week. This means, of course, that I will now go into turbo-speed blogging overdrive and there will be eleventy gazillion posts in a single day. Apologies again for the rather schizophrenic update pattern.

Anyway, the slow train has now finally reached its destination (although as I'm lazy, the blog name will remain the same for the next six months), and after traipsing across the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, a bit more Russia, Mongolia and China, we're now finally in Chongqing, where the last two days have been spent relaxing in our frankly luxurious apartment, eating terrifyingly large amounts of food, having comprehensive 'medical tests' to check that we're not a threat to the Chinese nation and enjoying our first visit to a Chinese karaoke bar.

Whilst it's very tempting to dive straight into writing about Chongqing, I shall resist the temptation to create blog chaos and instead ask you to pretend whilst reading the subsequent posts that the last week is a figment of our collective imagination. As such, it is now in fact Saturday, February 21st and I have just arrived in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia....

Siberia

We're now in Ulan Bator, Outer Mongolia, but before we get to that I realise that despite talking about toilets, multiple fallings over and breakages, I haven't really actually at all described where we've been over the last week. So, brace yourselves for three quick posts, illustrated with pretty pictures, about the lands across which we have recently traversed.

After leaving Yekaterinburg, we made our way by train across Siberia to Irkustk, where we spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Having finally seen it, I can confirm that Siberia is big. Very big. And cold. And pretty empty. But - around the train line at least - not necessarily as empty as you might believe; on the three day journey we passed industrial, smoggy cities, tiny villages with traditional wooden buildings, lots of cargo trains transporting coal and gas, miles and miles of forest, and a 500km area near Novosibirsk called the Baraba Swamp, which looked about as welcoming as the name suggests. But - until near Irkustk at least - not hills, for Siberia is flat as can be.

I'll avoid rambling on too much, as the pictures hopefully speak for themselves, but suffice to say that the whole scale of Siberia is epic and majestic, and it's the sort of place that you can happily spend all day gazing at of the train window. It is hostile, certainly, and seeing it one can understand why it is the land of exile par excellence; even excluding the terrors of the gulags, the miles and miles of frozen nothingness extending as far as the eye can see would itself induce despair; unless granted a pardon and allowed to return, exiles would have little hope of ever making it home.

Perhaps because it is just so far away from anywhere and everywhere, Siberia also seems the sort of place where the magical could quite easily happen without too much disruption to the rest of the world; I would not have been too suprised to have seen ice bears come thundering across the plain, the stars turn into flying troikas, or some many-limbed, steamy monster emerge from the smoke and ice of the Yenisey River. Such imaginings are what three days on a train does to you.

Anyway, I'm very glad that I got the opportunity to come here and see it at its wintry and majestic best, and here are some (slightly blurry) pictures:










(This last one was taken through the window of the unheated area between each two carriages. These were freezing and the windows made very pretty ice patterns.)

Irkutsk 40 million - Jenny 0

Lest anyone think I was being smug by pointing out Katie's drubbing at the hands of Siberia, I should mention that I too failed to get the better of the frozen wasteland. In fact, it wreaked destruction upon my possessions.

Oh, I thought I was doing well, too well. Not only did my beautiful sheepskin boots mean that my tootsies were well insulated against the Siberian cold but they also came with grip, so I did not have to adopt Katie's 'five year old with rickets' walk to save myself from constantly falling over. These boots are so absolutely wonderful that I have been comtemplating writing an ode to them, but so far I haven't, which means that you don't have to suffer through my doggerel.

Anyways, Siberia was not willing to let me get away scot free, oh no. I slipped, slightly, once, coming down a steep, icy hill in Listvyanka, and whilst I was absolutely fine, sadly my glasses were not.

Voici:



Given that the temperature was somewhere between -22 and -30 at the time, my glasses were just a little chilly, and as such were not really best placed to withstand the pressure of being squashed under my hand (I was cleaning the lenses - which had completely frozen over - at the time of my little tumble).

The glasses have been temporarily fixed with a plaster, which I hope you will agree looks very cool ideed. I did get a few strange looks back at the hostel, so decided that it was perhaps best not to venture into town with these babies on. Plus, every time I look down they fall off, which is quite annoying.

So, for now I am a little bit blind. I do have a spare pair of glasses, but alas these are not quite as strong as the broken ones, meaning that I might have six months of squinting ahead. I'm trying to think that it makes me look curious and interested, but really it just makes me look stupid. Ah well.

The Stalactite of Doom....

Sorry for the generally lavatorial nature of recent posts - I have now found my level and I am resolutely sticking to it. Here, therefore, are some interesting things that happen when you have a wee on a trans-Siberian train.



As on English trains, trans-Siberian train toilets deposit their contents directly onto the track. Unlike English trains, however, this is not done discreetly; instead of a pause followed by a strange suction noise, the bottom of the toilet bowl simply flips open and you can thus see your offering deposited at speed onto what must by now be a very sewagey train track.

Now this is fine in theory, but given that Siberia in February is at night twice as cold as your average home freezer, it does not work very well in practice. Understandably, the natural reaction of water or watery liquids in Siberia is to freeze, which, as the picture a couple of posts ago illustrates, means that the collective wee forms a giant pissy stalactite below the train. This makes going to the loo frankly rather interesting.

After you gingerly place your bum onto the freezing metal seat and begin to wee, the first thing you feel is your behind being bathed in a pleasant hug of warm steam. This, we think, happens because your warm wee temporarily melts the frozen dribbe of water in the bottom of the toilet bowl, but we cannot discount the possibility that the top of the 'wee column' has also been melted, and that steamy wee comes back up the toilet bowl to meet you. Which is not a very pleasant thought.

The excitment continues when you then insert toilet paper into the bowl. As the ice (and wee) at the bottom of the loo bowl have by this point refrozen, the loo roll sticks to the ice. And as the now expanding column of wee means that the toilet bowl does not fully close, a stream of Siberian air rushes in, meaning that the part of the toilet paper not glued to the bottom of the metal toilet bowl bounces around like a Mexican jumping bean on speed. It is rather hard to make it go away.

And that, I promise, is the end of all loo-related posts. At least until I eat some Sichuan hotpot....

Final Scores

Ekaterinburg 5 0 Katie

Irkutsk 5 2 Katie

As well as not really being best suited to freezing conditions, Katie has had, shall we say, a few problems remaining upright whilst in Siberia. The combination of dead Doc Martens with no grip, Katie's woeful balance and packed down ice all over the streets has meant that she has managed some pretty spectacular wipeouts. After the first two, which took place in Ekaterinburg with her rucksack attached, I came up with a points system. The city concerned gets a point whenever Katie falls over, and Katie gets a point whenever she breaks something in the city. The final scores are above, and I think you will agree that it was basically a drubbing. I asked Katie if she would like to comment, and her comment is merely 'ow.'

Yesterday we went to Lake Baikal, and after two falls and one incident in which she karate-chopped me in the back of my neck in an attempt too save herself, we resorted to hand-holding. Combined with the fact that Katie is wearing approximately seventy-five layers of clothes, this basically means that she looks like a little five-year old all bundled up for winter.



My mysterious unknown Slavonic ancestor (I have been told many times -again - on this trip that I look Czech/Russian/generally Eastern Europe and not in fact English) has perhaps bestowed upon me a useful gene, for I've been finding the Siberian temperatures quite invigorating and actually not too painful. The coldest we've had so far is -32, although I'm hoping for -40 just so I can find out what that feels like. And yes, mother, I have been doing Siberia in my H & M coat....

Things That Freeze at -30 Degrees

Your eyelashes......




Your hair.......




Gunther......




Urine from the train (credit to Jesse for this picture, which I have shamelessly stolen. One of the train guards' responsibilities is to hack the column of frozen wee off when the train stops.)....

An Interesting Cultural Observation

Russian toilet paper has no hole in the middle. Just thought you’d like to know.

Of course we all dress like Britney...

Last night, Katie, Sophia and I decided to go out for a drink. This is not as easy as it seems, as in Russia there aren’t really pubs –it’s either a restaurant or a nightclub, the latter of which means strict dress codes, inflated prices and ‘face control.’ As this is about as far from our scene as you can get, going out in the evening in Russia has been limited – certainly in central Moscow it is difficult to find anything that isn’t an incredibly up-itself swanky nightclub for Moscow’s nouveau-riche. After initially drinking mojits in what was essentially a coffee shop, we resorted on the second night to drinking beer in the hostel, which was where the extended conversation with the Indian-Malaysians that disrupted the blogging came into it all.

Given this, we were quite excited when Katia recommended to us a Beatles-themed café and bar called Yellow Submarine, which has food, beer and live music. The bar itself was fun (and very sixties/seventies- themed, with prog-style airbrushed portraits of bands on the walls and every item on the menu named after a Beatles song), but unfortunately Katie, Sophia and I were then cornered by a young Russian guy, who despite having quite limited English claimed to work as an English-Russian translator and interpreter (if he does, it would explain a lot about the quality of English translations in these parts). In the course of the evening he berated Sophia for the crime of being German, sang loudly and terribly to ‘accompany’ the singer who was playing, claimed that when he met Italians they’d all flashed him to show that they had ‘big balls,’ and, most bizzarely of all, repeatedly insisted on wanting to touch Katie’s nose. When, after about two hours of interesting ‘conversation’ he eventually decided to go to the toilet, we quickly paid for our food and beers and made a hasty getaway for fear of another two hours in his company.

He was absolutely desperate to impress, and talking about Sophia about her experiences in Tomsk and to Katia about modern Russia, it seems that most young Russians are, like him desperate to be ‘western’ (although few are strange freaks like he was). However, as few have had the opportunity to travel outside the country, most of the information Russians have about western fashions and culture comes from the songs, films, and TV. This has led to some interesting misconceptions –our friend last night was mightily confused as to why the few foreign travellers he has encountered do not try to dress like Britney Spears, who is apparently the pinnacle of style among young Russians. We tried to explain that basing your fashion choices on the decisions of a woman who has a history of failing to wear underwear, shaving her head and hitting a photographer’s car with an umbrella might not be the wisest policy, but he continued to insist that young Russian girls (rightly in his view) aspire to look like Britney. Apparently Sex and the City is also very popular here, which explains why so many Russian women insist on teetering about in four inch heels despite the fact that the ground is covered in ice. According to Sophia, the female students in Tomsk all dress like this despite the -40C temperatures, and bulimia and anorexia are big problems.

This obsession with image, fashion and style may also explain why Russian clubs, even outside of Moscow, try so hard to be ‘cosmopolitan,’ Although it did have the Yellow Submarine, Ekaterinburg also boasts the most ridiculously try-hard concept for a club that I have ever seen; a club cum car park. At Park King, you pay to drive your car – provided, of course, that it passes the desirability test - into what is essentially a car park. The ‘music’ is then provided by the assembled cars (resulting, I imagine, in a hideous cacophony of techno and bad house), and drinks are served at inflated prices. This seems not only stupid, but a surefire way of ensuring that your formerly desirable car will end the night scratched and covered in sick. Right.

At the moment, being young and Russian thus appears to be a labour-intensive and rather thankless business – being freezing and tottering around in -30 temperatures to try and look like a TV star doesn’t really sound like a particularly fulfilling way to go about life. Possibly if more actual opportunities become available to young Russians, and if they ever get the chance to see a bit more of the world, this try-hard desperation will lessen, but at the moment I do feel a bit sorry for them. Except for our friend last night. He'd be weird anywhere.

I Love "Sverdlovesk"

Sverdlovsk/Ekaterinburg is a very nice town; spacious and calm, with nice wide streets and a big lake (now frozen) right in the centre. It does, however, have the dubious fame of being the place where the deposed Tsar Nicholas and his entire family were shot and bayoneted to death in 1919 after the Communist government decided that they were too great a threat. The same year, Nicholas’ sister Elizabeth was thrown down a well, and after they realised she was still alive they buried her alive and set her on fire. In honour of these achievements, the city, which was originally named Ekaterinburg after Empress Catherine the Great (who did not in fact die having sex with a horse, but did, apparently, have a room devoted to bizarre sex objects), Lenin decided to rename the city Sverdlovsk after the commander (Sverdlov) whose idea it was to do the Romanovs in.

Since 1992, the city has reverted to the old name of Ekaterinburg, and now Romanov-iana is back in a big way; the church has not only constructed the huge and ostentatious Church of the Blood on the site where the Romanovs were killed, but indeed has made the entire Romanov family (Tsar Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra, their four daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, their haemophiliac son Alexei, and Nicholas’ sister Elizabeth) official Orthodox saints. The Church of the Blood is thus mega-blinged up, and houses the most expensive icon in all of Russia. Seeing twentieth century historical figures (and not particularly bright ones in the case of Nicholas and Alexandra) decked out in the full regalia of Orthodox saints was certainly one of the many surreal experiences I’ve had in Russia. Unfortunately you’re not allowed to take pictures in the church, but you are (of course) allowed to buy tourist tat, meaning that I am now the proud owner of this rather glorious Romanov necklace.



What adds to the strangeness of the whole experience is that despite the official renaming the town is still often known by its old name of Sverdlovsk (and there is a sign saying 'I Love Sverdlovesk, the picture of which I was hoping to put up but which forgot to put on the flash drive). The name Sverdlovsk proudly stands above the railway station and the statue of Sverdlov continues to stand prominently in the town square. Only in post-Communist Russia could a city have both a big fat cathedral to the Romanov ‘saints,’ and a big fat statue of the guy who decided to do them in – and only in post-Communist Russia could both still be venerated by large groups of the population.

Meeting Point

After we refused Sergei’s entreaties to start drinking again at 2pm, we left the train at Ekaterinburg at about 7.45pm local time. For some unknown reason, despite the fact that Russia spans about a gazillion time zones every single train in Russia operates according to Moscow time. This means that not only do you have to remember to keep adding on hours as you pass through all of the time zones, but you also have to keep Moscow time straight in your head so you don't end up missing your next train. It is really quite stupid.

Anyway, on leaving the train we were supposed to take the tram to the hostel but this proved to be significantly more difficult than we anticipated. Firstly, we could not for the life of us figure out where to buy tram tickets – although the little office was staffed, the curtain was down and my repeated entreaties of ‘dobry vyecher’ were met with the unhelpful response of the cloaked official turning the light in the booth off. We decided to ask the surrounding passengers, but the first person I asked (the Russian is getting a little better) directed me back to the station, and the second person at said station directed me straight back to the tram stop. We eventually decided to get the tram and risk another fine courtesy of mean Commie-era officials, but then said tram decided not to turn up for half an hour, during which Katie’s feet began to freeze. Discarding the possibility of a taxi after the driver we asked quoted us an astronomical fee, we thus decided to walk the two miles; Katie with her backpack and me with my big fat red case, which whilst enabling me to pack my computer and have enough clothes to live for six months in China, is not designed to be wheeled around a snow-covered city in the middle of winter.

The walk seemed to take an age; the wheels of my case got completely stuck in the snow and refused to turn, meaning that I was essentially dragging a 25-30 kilo weight for about two miles. The situation was not helped by Katie singing ‘the wheels on the bag go round and round.’ Then again, she didn’t do too well either – not being particularly good at remaining upright at the best of times and hampered further by the combination of heavy bag and slippy ice, she managed two complete wipeouts in two miles. One looked horrid and both myself and some Russian women standing outside the philharmonia feared she’d broken herself, but fortunately she was okay apart from a bruised knee, so the trudge continued with us nearing giggling hysterics.


(A cool ice wall with graffiti we saw along the way)

Fortunately, once we finally found the hostel (by this time it was way after 10pm), it was worth it. Called ‘Meeting Point,’ the hostel has only been operational since the beginning of January, and is quite unlike anywhere else I’ve ever stayed. It’s been opened by Katia, a young Russian who having travelled abroad herself and stayed in backpackers’ hostels, decided to quit her job last year and turn an old apartment owed by her family into the third hostel in Ekaterinburg. Although the hostel is at the moment mostly airbeds in an apartment, Katia’s put in internet, and provides free tea, coffee, breakfast etc. She’s also incredibly friendly and welcoming with excellent English, and is still so excited about having hostel guests that she keeps coming round to chat and caters to your every need. We’ve had a really nice couple of days exploring Ekaterinburg and just chilling out in what essentially feels like your own flat. There’s some amazing old Soviet furniture here that would probably be worth a fair bit back home, and Ekaterinburg itself just feels like a nice, relaxed place to be. Given that there are only two other hostels in Ekaterinburg, I think Katia’s new business will do well – she’s got herself on all the internet hostel list sites and we’re all going to write nice reviews about her to entice the travellers here.


(An amazing Soviet lamp in Katia's hostel)

Although the hostel is very new, it’s already busy; in addition to Katie and I on the first night there were Natasha, Christina and Emerald (three English friends on a pre-university gap year), and Sophia, a German economics undergraduate who volunteered to be an exchange student and was unfortunate enough to be reluctantly sent to Tomsk, Siberia. She had spent her three week winter break in Moscow as a refuge from the -48 C temperatures in her temporary home town, and was stopping in Ekaterinburg for a couple of days on her way back east. All of them are very nice, and crucially, after an incident in Napoleon Hostel, Moscow in which I came very close to murdering a hapless sleep disturber named Marcus, not one of them snored.

A Cautionary Note on the Perils of Drinking Vodka With Russians

At some point between Vladimir and Nizhny Novgorod, Katie and I decided to go and explore the train and to try and see what the quality of the food was like in the restaurant car. Walking down through the endless carriages we were stopped in surprise by a young gingerish bloke who heard us squealing nonsensically in English. This ginger fellow turned out to be Mike, a British former soldier and current wanderer who, strangely enough, had done his TEFL course with Oxford TEFL in Barcelona last year. After initial discussion of travel plans, unknown language journals and learner profiles, the three of us ventured down to the café car, where we made friends with the staff - two brothers from Irkutsk named Sergei and Alexei and a girl named Anna. Through a combination of bad Russian, mime and drawings, we managed to hold a conversation, and were then of course introduced to the most Russian of all customs; that of downing alarming amounts of vodka. Now, a single shot in Britain (and most other places) is 25ml, but a single shot in Russia is at least the equivalent of an English double. As we downed them in the traditional Russian fashion, Sergei kept bringing more (all for free), and despite our protests of ‘nyet, nyet,’ it was not really possible to refuse. The following picture shows the result of too much vodka:



Fortunately we eventually did manage to convince Sergei that we really didn’t need any more vdka, and so whilst we were fairly drunk fortunately Katie and I weren’t hung over in the morning (though we do have the accolade of being harder drinkers than a former soldier as Mike didn’t emerge until quite late the next morning). Being hung over on a hot, moving train is not an experience I’m keen to have – I’ve been hung over on a plane and that was truly horrible. Anyway, Katie now also has an admirer in the form of young Alexei, who despite being only 22 is lacking quite a few teeth (vodka is bad, kids), but who hopes that Katie can be prevailed upon to move to Irkutsk and have little Siberian babies. I fear he may be disappointed, but one never knows…..

Moscow - Ekaterinburg

The one task we had to accomplish in Moscow was seemingly simple: to pick up our train tickets from Real Russia's office. It of course turned out, however, to be a bit of an odyssey; having misunderstood the address, we ended up spending about 2 hours wandering round a random Moscow suburb in an attempt to find a building that did not exist. Getting out of the centre and into one of what I imagine neighbourhoods full of Communist tower blocks was interesting, but by the time we realised what our mistake had been we'd grown rather tired of Novoaleksandreevskaya Street and its environs. This, however, is what most of the real, non-touristy Moscow looks like:



Anyway, we did eventually manage to take possession of our grand-looking trans-Siberian railway tickets. They have little golden trains on them and are very pretty, which makes me quite excited. And so, tickets in hand, we boarded the train at Moscow Kazanskaya station on Tuesday afternoon. The first leg of our proper trans-Siberian journey was from Moscow to Ekaterinburg, a journey of about 26 hours through the traditional European centre of the Russian nation.

Each compartment in second class houses four people, and we were sharing with a very nice Russian chemistry professor who now works in the Netherlands but was heading back to Ekaterinburg to visit his parents. He spoke excellent English, which meant that we could have an interesting conversation that included more than the very limited phrases I have picked up from my 1991 Soviet era phrasebook (lovingly adopted from Haringey library). Our other companion rotated as the journey went on; when we woke up in the morning, the young man with terrible gelled hair who had initially been in the fourth berth had been replaced by an elderly gentleman with a wonderful briefcase and fur hat combo that made him look straight out of the fifties. He departed at Perm, and was replaced by Olga, a bubbly lady who I used my limited Russian to hold a basic conversation with and who gave us what might have been the nicest pear I have ever had.

Although this journey did not take us into Siberia, western Russia still looks pretty winter-tastic - everything is covered in snow and there are rows and rows of little dachas where Russians retire to escape from the city and pick berries. There were, of course, also some interesting commie factories and industrial cities, but for the majority of the journey the landscape was enticingly pretty, with. Although we spent a lot of time talking to our cabin-mates and most of the evening in the restaurant car (see next post), it was easy to kill time just looking out of the window at the winter wonderland outside. None of the Ukrainian slush here. Unfortunately fact that the train was moving and that there was quite a bit of dirt on the windows mean that the pictures don’t fully capture the landscape, but hopefully these will give with some indication of how pretty it is.

Graveyard of the Fallen (plus a cat)

(This picture has nothing to do with the post, it's just here because I like it).

Having tried and failed to get into the Kremlin (owing to, we later discovered, a failure to find the entrance), we ended up going on a long and chilly wander down the Moskva River to Gorky Park, the largest and most famous of Moscow’s outdoor spaces. For once, we had a goal, which was the sculpture park outside the modern art museum, which now houses a bizarre ‘graveyard’ of all the Communist statues that Russia didn’t quite know what to do with after 1992. The seldom-visited park was covered in knee-deep snow and as we visited at twilight, the place had quite an eerie air, with dead Communist heroes (with the obligatory strong jaws and best-fist forward poses) peeking out from behind skinny little trees.

As you can see in the following picture, I managed to befriend one particular statue (no idea who this dude is – we think from his pensive pose that he might be a poet or a writer rather than a politician), and also a cat. Lord knows where this cat appeared from or why it was wondering round a sculpture park, but it was very sweet and quite happy to sit on my knee while we took the pictures. Don’t you think we make the perfect little Communist family?

Basil the Simpleton

Once we got to Moscow, we checked into the hostel, and then wandered down to Red Square, where the first thing we did was to explore St Basil's Cathedral. St Basil’s is, as cathedrals go, absolutely crackers. It is in reality far smaller than it appears in the photographs, and looks as if it is made essentially out of lathe and plaster (or gingerbread) and belongs in some Russian-themed of Disneyland. I’m sure the fact that it has existed for 450 years indicates that it was well constructed, but to see it one just gets the impression that Ivan the Terrible, the rather unpleasant first Russian Tsar who commissioned the thing, was on some really strong hallucinogenic drugs. For some reason the cathedral was named after a sixteenth century oddball called Basil the Simpleton, who spent his days wandering around Moscow as a generally idiotic hermit. That seems to me appropriate given the general slightly insane feel of the place.

Inside, of course, the cathedral is blinged out to the max; every wall is painted, every altar is covered in gold, every corner is stuffed with icons. Visually Russian Orthodox Christianity is basically Catholicism writ large; more candles, more incense, compulsory long, Rasputin-like beards for priests, and never-ending services that mostly consist of the priest chanting whilst a revolving congregation bow their heads and make the sign of the cross at every available opportunity. Whilst the church was heavily restricted in its operations during the Communist period, since 1991 it has made something of a comeback; although plenty of Russians still aren't keen, others are re-embracing orthodoxy. I of course have bought a couple of the tackiest icons available - it would seem a shame to go to these places and not come back with a couple of lovely Mary and 'Old Man Baby' pictures.