Day 07 - 4th September 2010 - Tyumen

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Tyumen

Woke up and departed our train at Tyumen. We cautiously jumped into a taxi and gave the driver our hotel name. We agreed on a price and he took us to the hotel. The staff at the Olympic-5 hotel were very friendly. None of them spoke a word of English but they saw the language barrier as funny, as did we. We had to answer a series of pointless questions like the ones we answered when applying for Russian visas, which due to the languages, took about an hour.

After check in was complete, we headed into Tyumen town centre. We went straight to the park in the centre of town, which had lots of fair ground rides and music on. It was a Saturday, which was probably why it was fairly lively. The atmosphere was great.

We wandered around the town, which was very flat with coloured buildings. It was quite picturesque, like a little American town. Everyone was very smiley and helpful, which was very different to Moscow. We walked around for a few hours, stopping for coffee and looking in some of the shops. I think we were the only tourists there! We saw about three wedding groups during the day. We stocked up on food for the next leg of the train journey and went back to the hotel.

We had earlier informed the staff at the hotel that there was no hot water in our room. So, on arriving back to the hotel, the staff greeted us with smiles and showed us to our new room - a large two room apartment with dinning room and sauna. We were obviously very pleased with this!

Overall, I felt that Tyumen was a great place to stop for the day, to break up the journey from Moscow to Irkutsk.

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Photos

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This lady was on a poster in a street we passed. She reminded us of the ladies serving in the restaurant carriages on the Russian trains (except they dont smile)