Yekaterinburg

Yekaterinburg was ruled by some mafia bosses in the 90’s according to Wiki entries. Today the town is booming and does well in preparing for the Worldexpo in 2020. Lots of companies have set up their offices here and it looks like money is beeing invested to improve the quality of life considerably. Yekaterinburg is the city that appeared on my trip from London to Singapore by train after a long stretch of nothing and disappears after Siberian Taiga. A city in the middle of nowhere. Nevertheless it has various sights to offer for tourists and certainly provides jobs for Russians. It will also host some football World Cup Games in 2018.

I arrived early morning by train. Pavel and I went to have breakfast near the station. After that he wanted to show me the Church on the blood. This church is dedicated to the murdered Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Soon after we had arrived a church service commenced. We stayed for a while before making our way to my hostel called Domino Hostel. The hostel was situated close to the train station and the closest metro station is Dynamo. The location of the hostel isn’t great as it is situated outside of the center and is set in an estate flat. So when we arrived there both of us were slightly surprised. Despite the location I had a great time there and the host was very friendly.

In the morning I went on foot to explore the town. If you don’t want to visit any museums a full day is enough to see all the important sights and to get a quick glimpse of the town. Well I had two more days as I was hoping to book a tour to the Ural Mountains, which has proven to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a tour. I was lucky to meet Nina, who was staying in the hostel for the same two nights. She was the first Russian person I have met that speaks perfect English. She was visiting Ekaterinburg to see a concert by a Swiss band – what a coincidence. We spent some time together exploring the city and had great fun doing so.

There is not that much to write about thecity itself. It has a monument dedicated to the computer keyboard, a very tall office building with an observation desk, a metro with only a single line, a nice frozen lake in the middle of the city and probably the highest density of statues. At this point it might be worth mentioning some general thoughts about my experience in Russia so far:

• Friendly people
• Only very few people speak English
• Some people speak a little German and/or French
• People love to communicate. For example on the train, despite the language barrier I always got talking to some locals
• All or nothing – some people in Russia explained that it might be not allowed to do certain things so they don’t. But if it is okay to do it they go all out and most of the time too far. (not sure if this makes sense)
• Love to smoke, it is still ok to smoke indoors for example in a restaurant
• Lots of people are from former Soviet countries, for example Ukraine, Kasachstan,..
• Don’t smile on pictures but they enjoy the odd jokes and fun
• Krasnojarsk has a public unsupervised book exchange on the street. Bring a book – take a book. Pretty cool.

The above list is definitely not complete and represents some random thoughts I came up with. I had a good experience so far. Lots of people including Russians told me about the dangerous cities in Russia, which I have fortunately not experienced yet.

From Yekaterinburg to Krasnojarsk by train takes about 37 hours. Of which Nina travelled 22 hours with me. The journey was entertaining and I learnt that the English vocabulary has more words starting with ,Y’ than I’d expected.