Saturday, February 6, 2010

Siberia 1st Stop : Yekaterinburg

Yekaterinburg .Capital of the Urals region.
Our first step into Siberia.Arrived at the station at nearly 4am in the morning when everything was pitch dark and the streets were empty.

Selma ,being the only one who had more experience in anything related to Russian language than THerese and I ,had to entertain a very talkative and lonely russian man who was keen on talking to foreigners on the train and he was so kind to share his knowledge on what to do in Yekaterinburg.I believe the Man was praising panasonic products at one point of time..:)

After a short break at the train station drinking up some tea, we headed down for a walk into the darkness of the city.The main street was pretty well lit. Unfortunately , the stopover in the city was a let down and by 10am, we were really bored.Yekaterinburg is a modern city,which came as a shock to all of us.Everything was new and clean but It was so modern that it became somewhat of a disappointment.Our train out of Yekaterinburg to Krasnoyarsk leaves at 5pm.Which means , we had 6 hours to kill...Not a good sign.We were just waiting for lunch time so that it gives us an excuse to kill more time.

We started walking into random stretches of road and chanced upon Plekhanov Russian Academy, Yekaterinburg!It came as a huge surprise!Another branch of our school from Moscow!

Finding food in the city centre was a pain.There did not seem to be anything to eat!We wanted to try a georgian restaurant recommended in Lonely Planet.But after walking up and down that street twice , we realized that not only was the restaurant not there , the building that the restaurant used to be on was demolished.And what we saw was rubble on that square piece of land.Goodbye Georgian Food.

After much walking , we settled with pizza at a Pizzaria , not quite the thing we hoped to eat in Siberia.But we didn't have much of a choice.Hopped on to a local bus to have a ride to nowhere.Unfortunately, having woken up early in the morning , Therese and I were just complete gone cases and we fell asleep ...much to the disgust of Selma who was alert awake and quite enthusiastic.We couldn't help it.It was warm on the bus...

The Timberland boots wasn't a good fit for my tortured feet and I ended up with blisters making walking a huge pain.And to top it off , Therese and Selma had pretty long legs which carried them fast and far .Therese has a habit of walking really fast....I didn't understand why she had to walk sp fast.We had alot of time to kill and walking fast reduces the enjoyment of absorbing in the scenery around us.But as i found out later on,it is part of her nature to walk fast, and that apparently upsetted her boyfriend in Sweden a great deal as well.

Having spent 2days in the train ..without showering , I was obviously feeling quite tortured.Hair was oily ...and when my hair is oily , i can assure you that my mood swings down a hell lot.But hey, still a tough chick.I can deal with this.With some time left , I decided to give my hair a little rinse at the sink in the toilet at the train station.There was a sign somewhere nearby saying that i had to pay some money to take a shower somewhere , but why pay when i can just rinse at the sink for free?

After the final rinse , the toilet lady came in and started screaming at me about obviously paying up for rinsing my hair at the sink.And the phrase ,"Я не понимаю порусскии" was uttered.The lady started saying не понимаю ,не понимаю ..something.obviously quite pissed that there was no way of making me pay up since she is not able to make me understand what she was saying,she went off looking for someone to come deal with me.And taking this opportunity , I fled the toilet.

And that was how the trip to Yekaterinburg ended.If I had done more research and found out more about the churches in the outskirts or about the history, Yekaterinburg wouldn't have appeared to be as boring as it looked.

http://s934.photobucket.com/user/bastardees/slideshow/Yekaterinburg

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