PERM - YEKATERINENBURG

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14.10.08

Km travelled 6464

The night has been absolutely horrible like every one that precedes an early departure. We arranged for a taxi the night before to pick us up, so few minutes after 6.00 am a young lady was waiting for us outside the hotel door. The sun comes out late here and it was still completely dark. It started raining as we arrived to the station. For some reason unknown to us, we had first class tickets. It was good actually, we had table, room for all our bags, comfortable seats, and TV! Still, it's been very tiring. Michael managed to sleep leaning on the window, at least for a while. We had some breakfast bought the night before at the supermarket. On the screen they showed first a Steve Martin movie, but not sure what it was and didn't pay much attention to it. Then Pirates of the Caribbean At World's End. Obviously both doubled in Russian, but at least when it's a movie you already watched you know what's going on! Around lunch time we got to Yekaterinenburg. As usual we wasted some time to find out the trolleybus stop and then where to buy the tickets. When we'd finally been told to get the tickets on the bus, we jumped on the 11. A fat sloppy lady that looked not very happy, was there in charge of the tickets. I tried to ask if the trolleybus was stopping where we needed and she replied with a grunt, so I went back to sit in front of Mike and we waited. After maybe half an hour the ugly lady called us because it was our stop. At least she wasn't so bad as she looked! The hostel was literary extremely close to the bus stop but still not exactly easy to find. It was basicly a huge residential block and on one of the numerous entrance doors to different part of the building, there's a sign that says Europe-Asia. We rang the bell. Someone answered and after a while a young guy in shorts and singlet, that didn't look at all Russian and in fact was Turkish, appeared and took us to the 7th floor. We passed a combination of three doors in 1 square meter and we entered a very tiny hall of a flat. That was our hostel. The Turkish guy, that we found out was just living in the hostel for a not well determined time, showed us the room with 6 beds and an old sofa, where we left all our staff. The whole flat was very tiny, with a small corridor going around the room leading to very small shower room, toilet, and kitchen. In the kitchen we met Jonathan, an English nerd of an indefinite age that could have probably been younger than us but looked like a granpa! Despite the aspect and the weird way he was looking at his laptop screen, that could make you think he would probably be blind in a few years, he appeared to be a nice guy, so we sat there and spent some time chatting about life and travel. He is travelling east to west from Vladivostock to Bratislava where he actually lives, and will stop somewhere for a nerdy lecture along the way.
At some point ... showed up, the actual owner of the hostel/flat. He offered to take us for a small price to the obelisk on the border between Europe and Asia where he was about to go with John, but we had a few things to sort out and needed some rest, not to mention the lack of attraction of this place. So we declined the offer and agreed with John to catch up later for dinner before he was going to leave. And also he's been for us a light in the dark night, an English speaking person in the middle of Russia! We end up eating in a restaurant down the road with a buffet sign but had nothing of it. It wasn't bad anyway and we had a cooked meal for a cheap price. The night we updated the blog which takes us always quite a lot of time so thanks for reading it!

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