Kazan: friday.

---

The sky was blue today also, with a few more grey clouds, and it was as warm as yesterday. I even spent the morning without my coat on.

We strolled around town for a couple of hours to find some more places. Kazan isn't just beautiful due to the architecture, the people are beautiful too. The boys dress from the MTV Moskva guide-book in expensive jackets and ripped jeans; for the girls ulitsa Baumana is a catwalk, to show off their new hairstyles and spring collection miniskirts. the Tatar girls dress a bit more modestly, but are just as stunning.

The town speaks both Russian and Tatar. About every third person is of Mongol descent, with higher cheekbones and ever-so slightly darker, oriental skin. It is impossible to judge what language a person speaks from how they look or how old they are, as many of the Tatars speak Russian and vice versa.

We found Ploschad' Lenina, which is a left turn near the end of ulitsa Kremlevskaya and then a right turn after two hundred yards. There is a large statue of the man in the centre. In one of the corners stands a building with a plaque on the outside, where it is written that he used to spend his nights playing cards there when he was younger, before he grew his beard and changed his name from Ulyanov. I have already seen as much of the town as I did in three days last time.

Lunch wasn't nearly as good as yesterday's. My chicken pizza had one piece of chicken on it, and about two fistfulls of dill to compensate. Importing and exporting dill from Russia should be as illegal as any other intoxicating herb.

The necessity to work caught hold of me and I had to split up from the group for a couple of hours. My essay deadline is in six weeks and, to be honest, I don't have a clue what I'm writing about. I found the Lenin statue again and sat cross-legged on top of the four foot high marble base, opened my book (Mikhail Gorbachev'a memoirs, with the cover taken off for obvious reasons) and started to read and underline the points relating to post-perestroika attitudes towards money with a pencil. The area is noisy but I felt at ease on my own with my thoughts. After half an hour a soldier broke my concentration and shouted at me angrily from the edge of the road "young man, that isn't a bench...". I grumpily walked away.

Kazan's ice-hockey team, 'AK-BARS', have made it to the final of the Russian championship (beating Yaroslavl Lokomotiv in the semi-finals) and are already 1-0 up against Omsk Avangard in the best of 5 play-off. They have become so good because of the money invested in Kazan sport to celebrate the town's 1000th anniversary last year, and have attracted a lot of players from the national team. Ella, a really big hockey fan, spent the afternoon queuing for tickets for tonight's match but didn't succeed. Instead we found a sports' bar, americanised and expensive, to watch the game on television. They won 3-1, which no-one apart from Ella seemed to even notice.

My energy ran out at about 11 but I had another sleepless night in the hotel, reading the memoirs until 5.30 in the morning. There isn't too much information to help with my essay, but something I read really caught my attention. Gorbachev tells of an experiment on Soviet people in the 1990s. It was found that if they read or heard something that contradicts their own ideology their bodies would physically reject it.

I eventually slept for two hours.

---

Photos

A street that leads to the river.
'Kazan'.

Near the university.
Where Chris J studies.