Yekaterinburg and the Yellow Submarine Bar!

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We awake to the usual low dim of traffic and on T's persistence we get up early for breakfast - with the slight optimism that full English with proper coffee was waiting for him downstairs, we venture down. Yet again we are disappointed breakfast at the Yekaterinburg train station hotel - whose proper name I have forgotten, consisted of a square lump of unscrambled egg, cold sausage, potatoes and weird red additive/radioactive enhanced 'fruit ' juice.

We check out and advance down to our pre-booked hostel Hostel Yekaterinburg (this is the correct name) 30 minutes later and still yomping and we mean yomping in 30 odd degree Siberian sun we arrive at home for the next 2 nights and check into the dorm. On arrival we meet up with a couple of Irish lads we shared a beer with in Moscow and 3 French chaps. The hostel was all dorm's and was an apartment layout with the two 6 bed dorm rooms at once side, the kitchen, living towards the front. There was a homely feel to this place and the girl who runs it made us feel at home and spoke really good English and German! Again we felt embarrassed at our linguistically skills in the presence of fellow Europeans who can mostly speak another language! The hostel had free internet which is standard among these hostels but also had free eggs and toast for breakfast!!!!! (This cost 1,180 roubles for the 2 of us)

We set about sorting our onward travel towards Irkutsk straight away as bitter experience has taught us too and the whole experience was relatively painless. We set about touring Yekaterinburg, this is a smallish town, with a mixture of old fashioned Soviet buildings and more modern building and some tsarist era churches, incidentally, it was here that Nicholas the 2nd and his family (Romanovs) were murdered in the October revolution which brought the communists to power. In the centre of Yekaterinburg there is a massive war memorial for the Afghan war that began in 1979 and lasted till 1989, which is one of the most impressive memorials we have ever seen. Across the road was the Soviet military museum, of all the crappy art galleries and ancient museums we have had to endure (sorry to art lovers etc), the one T was interested in was closed until Tuesday the day we left.

We ventured into an old fire station which had been turned into a pub, an old fire engine has been guttered out and turned into a bar and old water hydrants were made into bar stools. We had the phrase book out trying to decipher the Russian menu when after 15 minutes of hard work the chap comes over and asks if we want the English menu - yes!!!

After eating a lovely lunch we ventured down to the city pond, and hunt out the Beatles memorial which was rather hideous after a scout around we head back to the hostel.

After some vodka and loads of beer we all venture out at about 1 am to the Yellow Submarine bar a Beatles kind of bar, where a band sing numbers songs out of tune, but the atmosphere was brilliant the small bar was full with a mixture of local Russians, French, English and Irish. We left the bar at about 4am and headed back to the hostel stopping only for a photo and a wrestle on the bridge.

We awake late and enjoy eggs for breakfast/lunch then hire a local taxi to drive us and the Irish lads (Dave and Steve) first to the Europe/Asia land boarder, we stood and watched the bizarre poses the Russians were doing, this particular show involved a young couple, the girl bent over seductively over the monument whistle her boyfriend alighted his crouch and gyrated her arse for the snap! Then an Asian chap stood on the European side and each of us stood on the Asian side and posed for photos with him.

We then headed off through rural Yekaterinburg towards Ganina Yama it was here that the Russian Orthodox church build a monastery on the site where the bodies of the Romanov family where disposed, burnt in petrol and then acid in October 1917 by the communists, this has become a shrine in their memory.

After arriving back to the town, we went about heading for dinner until we notice the arse of G's shorts missing and embarrassingly scurried back to the hostel to change.

Yekaterinburg is a must stop as is the hostel we stayed in!!!!

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