Russia impressions during a morning before going out of the hotel

1) At the end of the breakfast we leave the bill with the payment over the table and leave. A waiter comes behind asking if we did not forgot to take the receipt with us. Ok, this could be the case. Anyway, we took 3 times the breakfast there,the waiter that takes the orders never could get it completely right (once gives tea with lemon instead of milk, other time a different type of kasha, today only one tvorak instead of the two we asked).

2) We meet the guy from travel agency who is selling us the tickets for tomorrow's boat to Sakhalin. First time we use a travel agency for something, but we do not want to make 10-hour queue not speaking russian that every travel blog talks about for those who tried. He wants to know the wagon of the train where we will arrive to Vanino. Eva says she will pick up from the room. He says he will come with us. Ok. Arriving to the room, Eva opens the door and immediatly he gets into the room as if it was his also. Lack of private space is common everywhere in Russia.

3) After doing the check-out from the room - which in Russia includes to ask the lady from the floor to check that we did not broke or steal anything -, we ask in the reception where we can leave the luggage. "What?, leave luggage?,  maybe the security guy knows...". The security guy seemed a bit more used to this practise which I tought it was universal. Except here.

Komsomolsk-na-Amure

We are in Komsomolsk, in very eastern Siberia. It's a so-called "BAM-town". The BAM is the "Baikal-Amur-Mainline", a railway line that goes further north than the transsiberian, built during soviet times, mostly by Gulag workers doing very hard work. Before this, there was not much here, so all the towns along the line have been founded in the 1930s, and most of them are correspondingly ugly and uninteresting. Komsomolsk was founded by the Komsomol, the Soviet youth organisation (you can see that Russia is still clinging to its Soviet past - not only Lenin statues, but also town names have not changed since). It's a surprisingly nice town, with wide streets, a not-so-ugly city center and a riverside with a few terraces where we've been sitting and eating shashlik and drinking beer. There's a tram going from our hotel to the river, although waiting for the tram at the stops is putting our lives in danger, as one has to wait in the middle of the road between the cars (see photo).

We also visited its municipal museum, which tells the history of the town from its previous inhabitants (the original people here are asian, Evenki and Nanai and many more... but nowhere in the museum do they tell what actually happened to them....) to the modern town. Well, as already said, nothing seems to have changed much since the fall of the Soviet Republic. We still pay 3 times more than Russians for our ticket. The workers who built the BAM and the town are glorified, but it's never mentioned that many of them were forced labourers from Gulag camps. When talking about war, the language goes pretty much like "the horrible Japanese tried to invade us but we went there and defeated them" and so on (by the way, this reminds me of a young Russian woman we met some time ago who told us that at school they still learn that Russia was "THE winner" of the Second World War and that the USA were the losers).

Well, the museum still showed some interesting photographs but not much explanation even in russian. At the end, there was a room with stuffed animals from this region, including a beautiful Amur Tiger (I think they are close to being extinct now).

Close to the museum we found our favourite cafe (which was unfortunately closed the day after, for "technical reasons") where they served a big and cheap lunch meal, the waitress actually smiled to us and said words like "please" and "thank you". After 2 months in Russia, we are happy with very simple things! :-)

Last night the food situation was more difficult, some cafes were closed which gave us the choice of a fast food (where we had already been the day before and eaten cold hamburgers), an expensive Japanese cafe with sushi (which we will hopefully eat next week in Japan so no need to go there) and the cafe of our hotel. We decided for the latter one but when we arrived there it was quite full and only one person taking orders and serving. I started to queue at the counter (that's usually how you order here) while Miguel kept a table, but there were other people in front of me and things were incredibly slow. After 20 minutes or so of waiting, we decided to leave and went to the supermarket instead to buy fish and vegetable dumplings, salads and drinks, which was just as good as the cafe.

Tonight we will take the night train (our last train in Russia!) to Vanino where we will (hopefully) be met by a travel agent called Nataly, who (hopefully) will have tickets for us for the ferry leaving (hopefully) sometime during the day for the island of Sakhalin. Whereas taking a train in Russia is usually straightforward (the train network is the biggest in the world, and it's about the only thing in this country that seems to work most of the time... we never had a major delay), taking a russian ferry seems to be another kind of adventure, with long queues, delays, cancellations, blond manicured ladies sitting behind counters and refusing to sell tickets and nobody knowing what's going on. So we decided to so this via a travel agency, which was not cheap at all but we hope that we will be spared the stress and hassle. So, if everything goes right, we should be in Sakhalin on Sunday, and go to Japan from there.

Siberian Food

Typical Siberian (or rather, Buryat) food: Pozy (kind of stewed meat ravioli) and beer.

Channels availableon our black-and-white TV of the Tynda hotel room

1 - Russian Channel 1 - they are making fun of someone
2 - Channel Russia - series
3 - REN
4 - NTV - "crime"/"police" type program
5 - Sport - Ragueby (today was synchronized swimming)
6 - DTV - russian movie
7 - TNT - "crime" type program
8 - Sport "flash back" - old american sports channel (from the 70s?) dubbed in Russian
9 - MTV dubbed in Russian
10 - Cultura - travels program from BBC dubbed in Russian
11 - Explorer - american dubbed in Russian
12 - Russian Cinema channel
13 - Children channel
14 - Cartoons channel
15 - Drive channel - some car series dubbed in Russian
16 - Hunt and Fishing channel
17 - there were adversisements
18 - Retro channel - old russian movie
19 - National Geographic - dubbed from the american
20 - Train TV - only about the Russian trains!!
21 - Illusion channel - some movie
22 - Computer games channel
23 - Cartoons channel
24 - Style TV - copy of the Fashion TV in Russian

Around Lake Baikal

There's only time for a short post between trains for now. We've just spent 2 days on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal, staying in an old-fashioned "sanatorium" hotel, enjoying lazy time by the beautiful beach (as shown on the photo) and watching a wonderful sunset. We got back to Ulan-Ude in a minibus on a horrible road, then got on a night train to Irkutsk where we just spent a day which was rich in positive shopping experiences (I finally found a Salewa travel pant to replace my old pant which is completely torn at the legs, as well as 2 english books for travel literature). In 2 hours we will board a train which will take us to the northern tip of Lake Baikal - in 36 hours. It's long because there's no direct connection along the shores of the lake, so the train has to go in a huge loop. Hopefully this will give us some time to relax, sleep and read (especially in our 2nd class compartments - 3rd class was sold out).
More news - and photos - in a few days, hopefully.

Ulan-Ude

This must be one of the cities where we've stayed the longest. We arrived on the 18th June, in order to prepare and relax before going to our volunteering "project" in the deep countryside (we will leave tomorrow early morning). So we've had quite a lot of time to spend here. The weather has been everything you can imagine - from 5 degrees rainy almost snowing to over 20 degrees sunny. We have spent quite some time on the Internet (you might have noted a few new posts and photos...), sleeping incredibly late every morning, wandering around the town.... and trying to survive the Russian restaurant- and cafe-food. Our breakfast was different every morning, prepared by our violet-haired landlady, and included fried eggs, hard bread with misterious meat spread and tomatoes, kasha (some kind of Russian cooked cereal - we had the version with about 200g of butter each...), blini (pancakes) and omelette. In cafes it's usually meat with or without something else. Salads are some cooked vegetable with a lot of mayonnaise. Soups are nice but with a lot of grease on top. So, not surprisingly, my stomach started to strike after this mornings 2 portions of omelette (2 portions because I ate Miguel's) and only started digesting several hours later, after a mini-sandwich of herring and a big cup of muesli and yogourt (bought in the supermarket). Let's see how this goes in the deep countryside...
Otherwise, it has been a bit boring but very relaxing to spend a few days here, often not doing much. We still have visited a big buddhist Datsan, a very colorful heap of painted temples and wooden siberian houses. Afterwards we walked a bit in the village, and seeing an interesting-shaped hill we wanted to hike there, but we were stopped by 3 men in a car. We finally understood that we could not go there because it seemed to be a place reserved for men and women were not allowed! So, we went back to the bus stop, on the way passing a drunk guy who apparently wanted to change some Rubles for "Deutsche Mark"....
One day we also decided to visit the History Museum. It was raining and cold, and our landlady really wanted us to go there. So we paid for 2 of the exhibitions, one about Buddhism, the other about Buryat history. Well, some of the exhibits were quite entertaining (especially the ones about Tibetan medicine), but otherwise it was the usual Russian museum experience: underlit rooms, water dripping from the ceiling into buckets, all kinds of objects shown in the same showcase (but there were english descriptions!). Not such a bad place to spend an hour or so.
Tomorrow we'll be off into the "Russian Wild" until the 7th of July. I'm sure we will have stories to tell and pictures to show!

Ulan Ude market

SSCN0086
Originally uploaded by eva_p

This is our first day in Ulan Ude. Raining, cold, windy (it could almost be snowing). This picture was taken at the end of the day, when the market sellers were already preparing to pack up and go.

Train ride with Buddhists

In order to complete our "train marathon" to get to Ulan-Ude in time, we took another 24-hour train trip from Krasnoyarsk to Ulan-Ude. I was already very tired from two bad nights on an uncomfortable couch in a dirty flat and somehow regretted having bought 3rd class tickets again. During one of our last trips we were seated close to a group of young men drinking beer, one of them completely drunk... I was not keen to repeat the experience.
When we entered our wagon, we noticed a bit number of couples and families with children who seemed to know each other. Later we learned that they were all Buddhists travelling from Tomsk to Irkutsk, where an important buddhist meeting was going to take place. We learned this from a man that we had already noticed because he was smiling more than the average russian. He came towards us asking whether he could just talk to us a bit. Of course! So he talked about Buddhism and we about our trip and our impressions about Russia, he thanked us and went back to his group.
I don't know much about Buddhism but I just noticed that hardly anyone in the wagon was drinking alcohol, and nobody had beer for breakfast (and also, the smell was not as bad as usually).
Later in the afternoon, somebody took out a guitar and started singing russian songs. It was very nice and looking out of the window at the Siberian countryside with its green fields, low hills and birch trees while listening to the music was undescribably beautiful.
Close to us was a family with a small blond boy of about 3, who pretended to be driving a car with an imaginary steering wheel every time he walked down the corridor to go to the bathroom. Later on the corridor was transformed into an imaginary motorway for toy cars with his older brother and another small boy.
In the compartment directly next to us, two pre-adolescent brothers occupied mostly by peaceful card games, interrupted about every 2 hours by a friendly but noisy fight.
During this trip we received an sms message saying a hotel room had been reserved for us in Ulan-Ude (arranged by Ayuna, our Moscow friend). When we arrived there, the owner (a lady with violet hair) was already waiting for us at the door. The room is cozy, there's a private bathroom and hot water, and this morning we got each 3 fried eggs for breakfast (poor Miguel...).
So, even if our last train ride was nice, we're taking a break here for a few days before leaving for our Summer School in Buryatia.