Although Yekaterinburg does not have many tourist attractions, they do have a war museum. That sounded really interesting to me, but not so much to the girls so we parted our ways. I went to play with guns and they with Barbies so to speak. :)
The war museum primarily deals with the second world war and is a classical war museum, especially similar to other such museums built under totalitarian regimes. Why? Well if I knew nothing about WWII before, I would assume it started with the entire Russia somewhere behind the Urals. From there they orchestrated a brilliant victory and soon overtook Berlin, naturally with plenty of suffering and heroism on their side. I’m not disputing the latter, but there’s no mention of e.g. Molotov-Ribbentropf pact, Warsaw massacre, with the early German victories only mentioned in passing from the perspective of hero-cities. “Gorod heroj” is a title given to cities that suffered the most, like Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kiev… While that bias was to be expected, the museum is still a decent display of weaponry and other equipment, including some armoured vehicles and mobile rocket launchers parked outside the rapidly decaying and with Soviet symbols ornamented building. But as always in Russia, only a naive fool on crack would expect any explanations to be written in a language other than Russian.
There’s a square accross the street where I witnessed a wedding celebration on bicycles. The bride and the groom were sitting on a bike, as well as most of the entourage. Judging by a local news camera crew and an interview just going on with the happy couple, I assumed that’s not a common type of wedding in Russia. I certainly hope on-bike childbirth isn’t an emerging trend as well.
Just behind them was a monument with a much more somber tone. A monument of a broken down soldier, sitting on the grond in despair with a rifle on his side. It’s a reminder of the ten year war and the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. Parallels with the current situation there draw themselves. Once again history repeats itself as farse.
Passing by a local photo shop to inquire about a camera, I headed towards the lake to see what the girls were up to. They tend to get their share of admirers and they were talking to two young Russians when I arrived. Though a bit inebriated, they were great fun and very interesting interlocutors. Together they were a MC/DJ team, or so they claimed, in local night clubs. We even got a freestyle rap performance which I plan to put on YouTube later. One of them was wearing a sailor’s cap and shirt, which I assumed was a joke. But that was just my prejudice, since I come from Slovenia, where sailors on the street are not a common occurrence. He really was a sailor in the Black sea fleet of the Russian military and told some personal accounts of the war with Georgia. Due to the language barrier the stories were sadly a bit short on details. With some of my prodding I did manage to get some political views out of them. Basically they were very patriotic, even nationalistic, while taking great pride in Russia’s army and size. Not unusual, but disheartening to me, a fervent globalist. They knew little of other geopolitical factors and largely based their opinion of countries on those two factors. When I told them Slovenia has one really small war ship and a 35 meter one now on order from Russia, they couldn’t believe me. “How can such a country be in NATO?” they wondered. When we told them about our 2 million population, they immediately assumed we were under the complete control of the USA, which they still perceive as their arch nemesis. European Union, they never heard of. We later returned to more casual conversations and exchanged Skype usernames at the end.
With stomachs growling we dreamt of Serbian meat deliciousness. Luckily, just such a restaurant wasn’t far. Serbskii Dvorik is a lovely traditionally Serbian decorated restaurant. A bit on the expensive side, but the owner quickly offer us the “business lunch” option (about 6€ for a 3 course meal) when he saw we were of more student pocket depth. The owner was really friendly and it felt good to speak in the much more familiar Serbian instead of performing linguistic acrobatics in Russian. When we saw quite a collection of Slovenian wines on sale and Arsen Dedić and Tereza Kesovija started playing from the speakers the Yugo-nostalgic atmosphere was complete. We even got a delicious free desert and tea on the account of it. For me, the beef tongue with radish and the home made ice cream were most memorable. We were also surprised to hear that there were 8 Serbian restaurants operating in the city, some even importing all their fish from the Adriatic. Serbian fish restaurants, a bit ironic, but anyway…
As I went for some more rare camera hunting, this time successful, the hour of departure was fast approaching. Soon we were frantically searching for our wagon when we heard a familiar sound. “Slovenci?” was the question and it turned out a young Slovenian couple was in the coupe right next to ours. We got along quickly with Peter and Lana and had a lively debate over beers in the train restaurant. When that closed we moved back to the hall to wait for our cranky Russian roommate to move out at the next station. Just then a really wasted, but enormously fun Scotsman came past and we started a series of absurd conversations that would take a literary genius to describe properly. Our cranky roommate did move out at the next station and some booze we bought moved in. We also got a much nicer Russian for a roommate. Pyotr was a middle aged gentleman, didn’t speak any English but he didn’t mind our partying at all, even though it was in full swing by then. He got on with the flow as more and more people came, Scottish kilts were on display, explained and much was debated in a total language mish-mash. Soon more Russians, a Polish guy came and even our incredibly patient young Siberian stewardess finished her shift and joined us, out of uniform this time. All was undoubtedly accompanied by plenty of chicken and vodka. When we arrived at the station in Omsk in the morning we were exhausted since we haven’t slept a wink and emmm… didn’t throw our money in the wind. We said our goodbyes since most, including the Slovenians, continued their journey onwards with the train.
In Omsk Pyotr again turned out to be an extremely nice guy and he and his friend escorted us on the tram to a really budget-friendly place to sleep. The place officially didn’t accept foreigners, but he negotiated that for us, before leaving to do his work in Omsk as a horse race supervisor.
The hotel really was something else, but we couldn’t find the words for it until we got some much needed sleep.