Krasnoyarsk - Siberia

---

Hello all,

We've arrived in Krasnoyarsk yesterday. Having spent the night in a very dodgy location, we have relocated to a nice hotel today and explored town. We are leaving for Yekaterinburg tomorrow.

As some of you will know I lived in Moscow for 5 months back in 1995 and have been to Russia twice before that spending three weeks at a time in Kirov (Vyatka as it is now known) to do a summer course. The stories are coming back slowly and am managing to bore Vicky to death with them.

My Russian is very rusty - during our trip to Krasnoyarsk we shared our cabin with a Russian; to his credit he kept trying and we managed a conversation between my Russian, his rusty English and sign language from all three of us.

Having learnt from our previous train journeys, this time we made sure we were stocked up properly and on something else than pot noodles (they get boring after a while) for our journey. We were having our dinner of bread and cheese when Sergey joined us. He must have had private giggle or two about our supplies - he had brought home cooked and fresh food - whereas our food was mostly manufactured. In the end the only thing of ours he excepted was coffee (from a jar) in return we ate quite a few of his black currants.

In a way both Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk remind me very much of Kirov and Moscow back in the 90s - dilapidated buildings and roads, lots of high rises (mainly in Krasnoyarsk), old wooding buildings etc - but in other ways they don't. Back in the 90s most of the cars on the road would be Ladas (you know the ones that look like a child has drawn them); now the majority of cars is foreign built - most seem to be Japanese. Another thing which surprised me was that in Irkutsk some of the street signs are bilingual.

What hasn't changed much is the way service is provided - only occasionally a smile or a thank you. Even when I've tried very hard to make myself understood, most of the time the Russians just do not want to even try and help.
The only thing you can do in that case is stand your ground and look like you are prepared to stay there for as long as it takes for them to get some help - this seems to work in most cases.

I'll report back from Yekatarinburg.

Speak soon, Titia

---