Back to Ekatarinburg

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Hello,

As Vicky indicated, we've had some trouble at the start of this week which we will tell you about later. This caused us to cut our stay in Nizhny Novogorod rather short and we ended up travelling to Moscow a lot sooner than we'd anticipated.

On our last day in Ekatarinburg - amazingly almost a week ago, we wanted to go and visit the border between Europe and Asia. As we are slowly turning into experienced trans-sib travellers we decided to try our luck with the tour companies advertising at the station with trips to the border, Ganina Jama or Ekatarinburg town. This mainly to save some money as any tours for foreigners are very expensive.
The first we tried said no, but amazingly the second said yes - come along on our town tour and we will see what we can do. We were skeptical about this but the tour didn't cost much and so we decided to go with the flow. Although my Russian is improving by the day, trying to keep up with a tour guide was too much and most of the tour was lost on me. But we got to visit the cathedral built on the site where the Romanovs were killed - on our walks the day before we'd decided not to go in as you are not allowed to go in bare headed.
Meanwhile the tour company was trying to get some more people interested in going to the Europe / Asia border and to my astonishment they decided to go ahead with three people going to the border and one other person being dropped off at Ganina Jama - this is the site where the bodies of the Romanovs were disposed off.

The trip to the Europe / Asia border takes you to two border sites, the first the geological border, the second a border built for tourism. Both these borders are also major points for wedding pictures to be taken so we ended up trying to get our pictures taken in between the various photo shoots.

On our way back to town we had to pick up the guy we'd dropped off at Ganina Jama and our tour guide managed to get the three of us in for free for 15 minutes to take some pictures. I am not at all sure what to think of Ganina Jama and the big cathedral built in honour of the Romanovs. Is this real hero worshipping or just another way to lure tourists to town?

My time is running out to more about Moscow next time.

Cheers, Titia

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