Kazan: tuesday.

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The blue spring sky came back today, then turned to shades of grey in the afternoon. Both myself and Ella ordered the same 'sendvich dlya lancha' for lunch, and recieved half of the same one twenty minutes apart. Russian logic for you.

We spent the day between Kremlevskaya and Baumana, and the steep cobbled streets that link them. As we were sitting on a bench in the street 'Angels' by Robbie Williams started to play from one of the clothes shops. It reminded me of my class singing it in the Tatarstan wilderness when we stopped in the middle of our nightmare minibus journey in the autumn. Maybe the best memory. It wasn't the same today without Chris J playing it on his guitar.

In the evening myself and Liisa took a trip 'there and back' on Kazan's new metro, purely for the sake of it. The city only has about five stations so far, and they are all almost brand new and clean. The platforms have Tatar mosaics on the walls and the anouncements in the trains are in Tatar. It is much less crowded than Moscow - almost empty in fact - and plastic coins for the barriers work better than tickets.

The girls went out with Albina and Oleg again at night, and I stayed at the flat (their "secret Englishman" as the couple have taken to calling me) and read my homework and a new book of poetry. Musa Dzhalil was a Tatar who died in a German prison during the Second World War. Nothing was known about him until a letter he wrote was found amongst the debris in the prison courtyard after the war, and people started to research his poems. He was from the countryside but settled in Kazan and sometimes wrote in Russian. He writes about love, and also about a passion for his nation, and I really want to understand more.

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Photos

A compass on ulitsa Baumana.
722 kilometres to Moscow.