Muddy waters of Omsk
This blog has been a bit stagnant lately, as the travails of travel have prevented me from updating it. As you can imagine, charging a phone can be difficult in a nomadic ger (large circular tent) nested in the vast Mongolian expanses. Now, on a train from Ulanbataar to the Chinese city of Jinan I can once more continue where I have left off.
24., 25. July, Omsk
The hotel we have awoken in that early afternoon was special. Special not in a way you would find an especially beautiful sunset special, not even in a way a drooling mentally retared person is special, but special like a greenish and occasionally wiggling infection of your genitals is special. The latter was probably readily available in the bathrooms of the aformentioned institution. These were a rusty and peculiar affair. For example, the toilet was quite a large room with poor outside insulation, which must be especially fun in the harsh Siberian winter. It contained two toilet bowls placed next to each other without any kind of separation. Good for bonding and toilet humour.
Walls of the hotel were last painted when Nikita Khruscev was still in power and it showed. Furniture was old and squiggly. When I tried to pick up a chair my fingers and brains where overwhelmed by a sticky sensation, memory of which I cannot lose to this day, though not for lack of trying.
Still we have always expected to end up in a place like this somewhere along the way, so the hotel really had a nice adventureous feeling to it and we accepted the conditions in good humour. Everything wasn’t that bad as well. On the flipside, sheets were reasonably clean, the receptionists were friendly and we had our own room for about 10€ per night, which is incredibly cheap for Russian circumstances. There was also a shower with hot water, even though there was only one for all the four floors of the hotel.
Half rested and a bit hungover we went on to explore the city of Omsk. The neighbourhood really wasn’t glamourous, although it did contain the building of a permanently built circus, around which children were constantly riding horses. Permanently built circuses might not be common where I come from, but they can be found in every major city in Russia and Mongolia.
Omsk itself was nothing special. The odd Lenin statue, Hare Khrishna chanting group by the muddy river, a pleasant sandy beach by the muddy river, people sometimes less pleasantly bathing in the muddy polluted river. People dying of cancer, wondering why it happened to them. Probably near the muddy river as well. The river is called Om, if you wondered. Get it? Om->Omsk. Pure genius.
There was also the street of Josip Broz Tito, next to it a cinema/shopping mall monstrosity that made me think of establishing an International Criminal Court for Architects for crimes against usability and good taste.
There was also a curious statue of a man climbing from a sewer, I curiously witnessed a Russian wedding, where the bride and the groom curiously wear crowns and curiously, there was even some good coffee to be found. Coffee in Russia is mostly a sad “just add water” instant thing going by the name of “tri u jednom”. When you do find proper coffee it’s mostly really good and the coffee shops are full of posters describing the origins of the coffee you’re drinking along with diplomas from baristas competitions. It’s priced appropriately, or inappropriately, depending on how you look at it. An average cup of Joe at a place like that will set you back between 80 руб and 120 руб. Keep in mind that 80 руб is about 2 €.
The history of the town is a bit more interesting, it was closed to foreigners in the time of the Soviet Union due to it’s weapon factories and the related secrecy and paranoia. Even before it was a capital of Russia, but another Russia, White Russia. When the Bolsheviks took over in 1918, a Siberian general with a bunch of troops stood up to them and founded an independent White Russia loyal to the czarist principles. To their aid came Czechoslovakian troops who were helping in the first World War effort, but were unfavorable to the Bolsheviks and unable to return home. They ruled over Siberia until 1920 when they were decisively beaten. Interesting story though, look it up on Wikipedia.
We gave up on Omsk earlier than general Kolchevik though and having thoroughly exhausted the “minimalist” sightseeing resources of Omsk, we decided that adding an extra letter to the city name might do the trick and headed on to Tomsk.
Prelude to sleeplessness
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.
Yekaterinburg – From Romanovs, past Lenin to beer
22. July, Yekaterinburg – Some of you may have heard of Yekaterinburg under it’s previous name, Svedrlovsk. Svderlovsk was a renowned Bolshevik and after the October revolution the city got to bear his name. After the 1991 transition, it was again swiftly changed back in honor of Catherine the Great. Pick your preferences yourself.
The first sight we visited there has a similar historical significance, it was the place where the Romanov family where shot. If the Romanov name seems unfamiliar, Nikolaj Romanov, tsar of Russia, might ring more bells. His bells rang out long ago though, in a local engineer’s house after the 1918 revolution. The house is long gone, replaced by a cathedral built in 2000. The church and tsarist sympathies go hand in hand in Russia for obvious historical reasons. I wouldn’t loose much sleep over the demise of the Russian monarchy, but it would be hard to argue that the Bolsheviks that came after were any better. It’s one failed ideology after another for the Russians and their apetite for them does not seem to be drying out lately. One party rule seems quite a popular concept here, and I’m not thinking of the kind of party you would find in uvala Zrče. They both seem to inspire drunkeness though, one with power, the other with alcohol. Or is it both? Jelcin springs to mind…
Nevertheless, Russia still seems quite different today, with new, glass clad skyscrapers rising up in the tidy center of Yekaterinburg. 1.3 million of inhabitants is no small number either and is bound to grow as it seems.
We enjoyed the day more leisurely this time, laying on the grass right next to the lake occupying the centre of the city, observing passers by and generally not giving a shit about the lack of more classical tourist attractions. The usual batch of photos of the everpresent Lenin statues sufficed, along with some unlenin-like cruises through the shopping mall. All your ideology, all in one place, now with 20% discount for members of the communist party. 
One needs a good sip of beer after all those idiosyncracies and the Tinkoff brewery was the place to do just that. Unfiltered white beer, exactly what the doctor perscribed. Sadly, we couldn’t get the beer on perscription alone. Russia might need a health reform as well. 
Gone with the wind
20., 21. July – Moscow was fun, but it was time to move on, go east. We took the metro to the Jaroslawski train station, had our breakfast at a local buffet and purchased some food for the long ride ahead. One of the benefits of Russia is cheap caviar, so I stocked up with a full jar of its black variety for not much more than an euro. While waiting at the shop an akward chat developed with a customer and the security guard. At first they were unsure about the whereabouts of Slovenia, but they soon remembered the football match with Russia and briskly left, somewhat dismayed.
The next 31 hours were spent on a train from Moscow to Yekaterinburg. One would think this is where the story ends, that there wouldn’t be much to write about. One would be wrong. One has much to learn about Russian train travel. Who is this rethoric one I speak of? I don’t know. Ask him, or her. Whatever.
First, we came to the train on the platform, gave the stewardess (yes, they’re called the same on trains) our tickets and she blurted out our seat numbers. We muddled along to our coupe, where there was already a middle aged and, due to the heat, topless gentleman. He spoke only Russian, but seemed rather nice. We proceeded to unpack our belongings, make our beds. After a few minutes, another three topless gentleman came, politely asking if we were all going to stay here and asking for our tickets. They said they were all traveling together and that this was their coupe. After another glance at our tickets we realised our, and the stewardesses’ mistake, then moved two coupes forward.
We repeated the settling process and mentally prepared for a day and a half of relative boredom. But it was not to be. Our previous acquaintances soon invited us over to their coupe for some drinks. It turned out to not be only drinks, as an entire corpse of a baked chicken lay on the train table. The table was almost comicly small when put in perspective with the chicken and accompaniyng vegetables. We tried it reservedly, but the main focus of the feast was elswhere. Vodka. Their Praznichnaya variety went down really easy, as if it did not contain all that alcohol. Naturally we still had to seal the deal with a few sips of beer. As the often repeated and useful Russian saying goes: “Drinking vodka without beer is like throwing money into the wind.” And we couldn’t act so wastefully, could we?
A debate soon developed, although a bit hampered by differing languages. Jasmina’s and Maja’s knowledge of Russian came in handy, as ususal I struggled through with the few words I know and my improvised Serbo-Croatian with Dolenjska accent which, when put together, can sound surprisingly like Russian.
As you might have gathered by now, the guys were really friendly and talkative, a fact in no doubt emphasised by the dashingness of my female cotravelers. During the small talk we found out that they were construction workers from Belgrad, a Russian town near the border with Ukraine on their way to Perm for a month-long job. When, much later, our limited vocabulaires left us with little more to disscus, we retired to our quarters for a few rounds of cards and observing of the shanty lumber towns and berch forests we were passing by.
Surprisingly time went by quickly. Before we knew it, it was already the evening of our second day on the train and we’ve arrived at our destination – Yekaterinburg. It was quite late, we didn’t have a place booked, so we took a taxi to a nearby hotel that was in the Lonely Planet guide. It turned out to cost a lot more than we would have liked it to and the energetic and business savy taxi driver offered to call around for other offers while he kept repeating he has a brilliant memory. That extra service of course increased the price of our taxi ride to about 10€. When I tried to haggle my response was met with a non-threatening “I called hotel, I now control situation”, the ususal “I have a brilliant memory, you know” and the slightly racist “I work for good price, I am no nigro”. In the end he came through, quickly got us a good and much cheaper hotel and even waited to see that we got our room keys. So I suppose he well earned his fee.
Afterwards we did a quick midnight walk around our part of the city of Yekaterinburg, which used to be known as Svedrlovsk. What more it had to offer would have to wait until the following day.
Moscow of leaders and artists
Moscow, 19. July – Got up, got the train tickets to Yekaterinburg, got food at Subway (plenty of those in Russia). Checked out an interestingly and uniquely Soviet styled skyscraper, housing a Hilton hotel these days, decided what we already knew, too expensive.
Basic errands thus accomplished we followed the Moskvaaa, doooown to Gorky paaaark, listening to the wiiiinds of chaaaange… Sorry, I got carried away by The Scorpions… Parents reading this, DO NOT BE ALARMED! Scorpions are a band.
In the northern part of Gorky park are a bunch of satues of Soviet leaders, deposited here after 1990 when people of Moscow didn’t want their former oppresors/leaders displayed publicly anyomore. Nice, but not as many of them as I expected. There are also some satues of a more artistic nature and a reeeeaaaly giant one of Peter the Great, setting sail on the shores of Moskva river.
The rest of Gorky park is full of amusements such as roller coasters, dodge cars, trains for children, suffering deer… Yep, you read that right. Suffering deer. They had a stand set up, where people could get a photo of themselves with two deer. But with flaming 34 degrees Celsius and deer’s coats made to rough out the harsh winters of Syberia it was really more of a sad affair. The animals huffed and puffed, just lay on the ground hyperventilating while a family was actually petting them and getting their pictures taken just behind them. I don’t see how that would make a nice family photo. Maybe for the Pot family. As in Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge.
A warm beer later we were on our way again, over the bridge, past the gigantic Ministry of Defence. It really is a monumental piece of fearspect inspiring Soviet architecture. Huge block of concrete, all in straight lines, so tall the windows seem tiny while they are in fact quite abnormaly large. Soviet symbolsm on top, two howitzers parked in front. We could easily stroll by it, even climb the stairs to the entrance, take as many photos as we could. Two decades ago we would probably be arrested and anally probed for just thinking about pulling such a stunt. Accross the Moskva river, just opposite of the ministry, rests a real-sized model of the Buran, the Soviet space shuttle. A project so expensive and mismanaged it contribuited to the downfall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. In the end, it never flew. So the employees of the ministry go to work each day, seeing the great failure. It must be grounding.
One last tourist trap remained for the day. The Arbat street. It used to be the home of many of struggling artists such as poets, writers and street performes. The latter are plentiful to this day. There’s lots of portrait and caricature drawing, juggling, singing, even a mostly pathetic mime. Apart from that there are a lot of souvenir shops and restaurants. Perhaps the most useful part of the Arbat street is a fountain where you can chill out and observe the locals being their weird selves. It’s thoroughly entertaining and since it doesn’t involve much phisycal activity, it was just the remedy for our soring feet and a pleasant occupation for the remainder of the evening.
Camels in Moscow
Moscow 18. July – Hot. The degrees rose higher than Jesus’ age, meaning upper thirties at times. Moscowites complained, deer groaned, the homeless left for more livable climates.
Luckily Moscow has a good metro system which saved us the trouble of Segwaying there. No, we didn’t have Segways, but wouldn’t that be cool, huh?
The metro forms a ring around the centre of Moscow (just like the roads) and there are plenty of other connecting lines. Tickets cost 26 rub if memory serves me right. The stations deserve their reputation as a piece of art, they’re definitively the most interesting ones I’ve seen in any city. The Dostojevskaja station, for example, is clad in marble, lights are decorated, and at the end of the platform is a portrait of Dostojevski, a mosaic made of stone. There’s plenty of coloured glass, metal ornaments, lights are almost always decorated differently. Not all stations are that special, of course. Some of the older stations show the wear and tear of time and are lighter on decoration. But what they lack in polish, they make up in genuiness, displaying old communist symbolysm like the hammer & sickle, bushels of wheat, young revolutionaries… Even the steel air vents are all adorned with the letter “M” logo of the metro. It also works well into the night which came in handy later.
Moscow is quite safe everyone says and it’s true from our limited experience. But who are we to say, our hostel was right behind the interior ministry. The Godzilla hostel was modern, clean, friendly, great service. The Godzilla did not eat anyone, but I assume they mostly prey on the Japanese. Human sushi. Which is really popular everywhere in Russia by the way. Fish sushi though, not the human kind.
Back to the hostel. A shower or two more couldn’t hurt, but hey, it’s not always that you’re all sweaty again even before you’ve left the shower room.
But alas, we had to leave the room at some point and go sweat elsewhere in the city. On our way to the Kremlin I did my usual routine and stopped cute girls passing by to take photos of them. Last year I was in Moldova, praised the beauty of Moldovan women when I got home and was chastised by my coworkers since I didn’t bring many photos. I took it to heart, this time, they’re getting a bunch.
We soon made our way to the Kremlin, the epicentre of Moscow. It was enclosed by a city race of formulas, street cars, lorries, you name it. It was there and loud.
Naturally sponsors had their stands, displaying cars and… dancers. Female dancers, moving mildly on a stage, like somewhat dosed dancers from a dance club. Their sporty suits were tight, revealed some cleavage, but the main “feature” of the suit was that it was so tied up into their vaginas they revealed a “camel toe” that would make a camel blush. I’m no moralist, but that seemed quite degrading even to me.
Passing the giant 4 storey shopping mall hidden just beneath the entrance to the Kremlin, we finally made our way to the Red square. We just missed the tomb of the world’s second favourite dead revolutionary, Lenin, since it closes at 13.00 sharp.
Next, the candy cathedral AKA St. Basil’s. Great & positively lickable on the outside, not much to see on the inside. There’s a small space (mini church) under each dome, nothing spectacular. The tsar (Ivan, if I’m not mistaken), had it built, as he promised, after winning the battle for Kazan in the 17th century. I’ve read before that the tsar then had the eyes of the arhitect torn out, so he could never build something this beautiful elsewhere. But they didn’t write down this tale anywhere in the church. I guess it’s for Russian eyes only. Pun oh so intended.
Afterwards we visited the inside of the Kremlin walls, housing a bunch of chatedrals, palace of the patriarchy (head of the Russian orthodox church), Russian senate and a part of government. All these being in one place is very symptomatic of everything that was wrong with the ruling of Russia in much of its past. All hail Raspoutin!
We then visited the armoury, but they only let visitors in at certain times and in limited numbers. So you have to buy the ticket 45 minutes in advance if you don’t want to be left without. Armoury houses the famous Fabergé eggs, other royal jewles, weaponry, cutlery, carriages, clothes and such. All of them priceless, clad in tons of gold and otherwise utterly useless today. What really stuck in my mind was a mini carriage for children, drawn by ponies instead of normal horses and accompanied by midgets, eeerm.. dwarfs, eermm.. little people. All in the purpose of creating a mini procession.
Exhausted, we went to the hostel, showered for the n-th time, debated in the park over some beer and returned to our crowded communitary quarters in the hostel for some sweaty sleep.
Russia, the Beginnings of Sankt Petersburg
Who: Me and my friends Jasmina and Maja, backpacking.
Where: Starting in Sankt Petersburg, then traveling by train through Moscow, then taking the Trans-Siberian railway to Mongolia and later Beijing, China.
When: Started on 15th July 2010, planned flight back from Beijing on the 25th of August, same year – hopefully a different mindset.
Well, now that you know the jist of our plans I can start unraveling the story of our adventures in a bit more literary manner. We have subtitled the trip as “Pustolovščine Pikija in muc” as a friend of ours jokingly reffered to it, non-Slovenian readers and metaphore seekers fear not, you’re not missing much but an opportunity for some oversugared nicknimes. But I digress…
The first leg of our journey started by flying from Ljubljana to Prague, in a propeller plane of all things, and then switching to a flight to Sankt Petersburg the same morning. Apart from some partly early beer inspired tomfoolery and forming of internal jokes it was largely uneventful. For those considering a similar trip, the flight from Ljubljana to Sankt Petersburg via Prague cost 218 € including a quite generous student discount from Czech Airlines.
The Pulkovo airport in St. Petersburg still has quite a socialist feel to it, mostly due to architecture, but also due to proverbially unenthusiastic customs officers and the usability nightmare of the immigration form. First they don’t tell you that the form exists and that it’s required before you reach the end of the line, then you have to fill it out and start all over again. Naturally the spaces for writing are so small a clock maker would suffer a nervous breakdown before filling them out. To add insult to injury, you have to put down the same data twice. Luckily, it seems, I am quite a stoic clock maker. Rant over.
On the bright side, the minibus AKA Miško, going our way was just around the corner and we were on route to our hostel before you could say: “Is the weather causing all the hotness or are the ladies here quite dazzling?”
At the Crazy Duck hostel (which is nowhere near where the Lonely Planet says it is) we were welcomed by an incredibly spacious dorm room right in the centre of the city. After a much needed shower, what followed of course was a stroll around Piter, as the locals affectionately call their city. It has a really nice vibe to it with well planned, spacious streets, water canals, illustrious churches and islands. The city was started in 1703 by Peter the Great as a part of his effort to modernise and Europenise the country which really shows. In the beginning it was largely built by Swedish prisoners of war which might explain the prevalence of Ikea furniture.
We marvelled at the architectural wonders, sat down for a beer next to the Winter palace (The Hermitage) and later for a refreshing bowl of cold Borsch. Tired from a full day of travel we half-dragged ourselves back to our hostel, somewhat time confused since there was still daylight at 23.30.
The game was afoot, the plains of Russia laid bare before us.
I’ll try to update the post with more photosh when I get the opportunity to upload them from my camera. Since I’m a few days behind reality with my blogging I’ll catch up later on the train.
Maja and Jasmina in front of our small propeller plane.
Sometimes even an airline passanger must adopt the heat preservation techniques of homeless people.
This is how light it is in Piter at midnight.