24 hour day

---

We arrived in Ekaterinburg around midnight. Instead of getting a hotel room, we thought it would be cheaper just to sit in a cafe and read and eat and kill sometime before we started an early morning in the city. Our plan was to do Ekaterinburg in one day and then head to Moscow. We sat in the train station cafe for a couple of hours and then went to the sitting room where there are some comfy seats and slept for three hours. I was the cheapest hotel I have ever had! Although the security guard shorted us a couple of minutes we all awoke somewhat rested and ready to start our day. Ekaterinburg is a really nice place. The city is peaceful and pleasent. We walked to the Romanov tourist sites and looked around the Church of Blood. All of these places were really close to the train station and were very interesting. Once we were done we walked to a musuem that was the musuem of arms. Our guidebooks mentioned that sometimes the workers at this museum do not let foreigners in. We were lucky enough that the woman working not only let us in but we paid 5 rubles to take pictures of stuff inside. There are only three levels of the musuem, so it was pretty easy to get through in an hour. We even had one worker walk us around the World War II stuff and between her English/Russian and Corey's new skills in Russian, we were able to have a somewhat guided tour! It was really neat to see World War II from a different point of view and also to see how much pride the Soviets had of thier stance in the war. We were also allowed to try on some Nazi helmets that they had in the musuem. All in all this museum visit was a really cool experience and I am glad that we did it! After our visit we wrote a note in the museum book and one lady taught us how to spell our names in Russian. Xanna is my name.
Once done with the musuem, we wanted to go to the Europe and Asian border so we walked to a hotel that hopefully had tours to this point. They did not, but with a stroke of luck and Corey's earlier discovery on the train that his camera was broke, we managed to find a tour agency that got us a taxi to the point. Corey ended up buying a camera for the trip, but we went to a place that could fix it. (taking 4 days) so he bought a camera and right across the street we saw the agency. The very nice lady spoke english and we got our taxi to the border. We spent a couple of minutes at the Europe and Asia point, took tons of pictures and headed back to town. Once back in town, we decided on finding an internet cafe. After walking for a long ways, we got some sushi and decided to try another cafe. It was kind of intense looking for a cafe because in Ekaterinburg there are not many places that have internet. We finally arrived at a place, the only problem was that thier server was down for a couple of hours. We sat and waited and then finally got to use the internet. I managed to call Chase successful through skype on his birthday! We were also able to dump some photos on Mike external hard drive and call some parents. All in all it was a success! After our internet cafe visit we took a cab back to the train station and got on another train to Moscow at 3 am. Ekaterinburg was done in just over 24 hours and it was a blast!
I never thought that I would love to be on a train for a long period of time. But I really do. there is something about it that is relaxing in away. It is our joke that 22 hours on a train is just not enough time to get all the stuff done that we want to get done on the train. It was really sad to get to Moscow and realize that we were done with the Trans-Siberian route!

---