(Irkutsk - Yekaterinburg 3371km/2094 Miles)Total distance traveled = 9797 km/6087 Miles
So, it had to happen sometime. I got a bad hostel. I suppose when you're staying in cities which only seem to have one hostel, it's going to happen eventually. Arriving at 11pm it took 45 minutes to walk to the hostel. Not the greatest start, but there was little relief when we got inside. Again it was a converted flat, but this one wasn't even big.
The kitchen was tiny, and the 'bedrooms' were tiny with no connecting door. When we arrived, there were about 8-10 people drinking in the kitchen and bedroom. In itself not a problem, but the size and layout of the place meant that there was no way of going to sleep while it continued. It did continue though. Add to this the fact that there were only actually 4 beds (2 bunk beds) and the remaining people (including me) were on fold out camper beds, meant I got very little sleep. I got to sleep at about 3am and woke up at around 7am.
I'd somehow managed to only schedule one night in Ekaterinburg. I think it was due to the train schedules and needing to have more than one night in Perm. After my night in the 'hostel' this didn't seem such a bad thing. My next train was pretty early too, about 1pm. I wandered through the town, and tried to see as many of the sights as I could.
I also grabbed some breakfast. A mystery omlettte - I could work out Russian for omlette but not the ingredients. Amazingly, although i'm in the country for almost a month, I don't have a phrasebook. I learned to read the cyrillic alphabet fairly accurately during the ferry trip from Japan, and also got a few key phrases from an blog, but that's about it. So basically, I have veery limited Russian and no way of improving it!
The city centre was actually quite nice. There were a lot more shops, cafes, and bars than anywhere I'd been so far, and there were quite a few big squares, statues, and immense soviet buildings. The 'claim to fame' of the city, if you can call it that, was that the last Tsar was killed here. There's a momument at the actual site, as well as a church as a memorial for him and his family. There's actually another church in another site, as the bodies were moved to try and avoid people making martyrs out of them. It's out of the city though and I definitely didn't have time to go there. The church was nice, as were the surrounding buildings. I seem to have spent most of my time at churches so far, but surprisingly I'm not getting bored of them yet. Guess it's just a matter of time though.
After rushing through most of the city, I was a bit disappointed that I didn't have time to explore the city a little more, but I was also quite happy that I didn't have to suffer another night at that hostel!
The next stop would be Perm. At only 8 hours from Yekaterinburg, it was the shortest train journey so far. It was a slightly strange place to stop. No-one else I had met was planning on stopping there, and I couldn't find any hostels based in the city on the internet. I'd chosen to stop there on the basis of one museum. Perm 36. It's a former Soviet GULAG, and the only site of the whole GULAG system which had some original buildings standing.
More photos here (not many though)...
No comments:
Post a Comment