Day #23: Perm

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Yesterday's train journey felt like my first proper Trans-Siberian experience, the first journey where it had been possible to spend hours looking out of the train window at classic, unbroken Russian forest, lost in thought. It seemed a shame to arrive in Perm, especially as, like a lot of Russian cities, it looked unpromising from the train station, very grey, Soviet and confusing to navigate.

But Perm turned out to be fun, a modern, vibrant city very passionate about art, particularly modern art (and it's twinned with Oxford). Dotted around the city are various statues and installations, almost all from the past decade, that feature heavily on postcards and that the inhabitants of Perm seem very proud of. They include a huge Russian letter "P" (for Perm) made from logs, a bronze statue of a bear (stroke it's nose and ears and make a wish), and a group of bright red, cubist-style men at various different locations (red, apparently, because the designers felt the ciy to be too grey). There is an old town with a number of more traditional pastel-coloured buildings and onion-domed churches, and the city runs along another great brown river, the Kama. Overall, one of the most varied places I've been to so far in Russia.

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