Kazan: wednesday.

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This afternoon as we did was walk around to say our goodbyes. The girls went to a museum that I had already been to, so I did some shopping and explored ulitsa Baumana for the last time.

In one corner two men had set up a 'stage', taken their shirts off and were singing Beatles songs in a punk fashion, one man breaking his guitar strings with the three chords he knew, the other tapping his tambourine when he felt like it. They stopped between tracks to sip cups of tea and, bizarrely, to tune their instruments. It took me until the last line of 'Sargeant Pepper' to work out which song they were paying tribute to.

Our last lunch was at Dom Chaya again, which for 18 roubles and 30 kopecks does a fantastic cup of coffee. It is only boiling water from an urn poured over instant coffee, but the whitewashed walls, hanging baskets full of plants and plastic garden furniture make it a good place to drink it. We all slumped in our chairs, more tired at the end of the holiday as we were at the start.

Mila came back to her flat at 5, to check that everything in order. She asked us if we liked Kazan and was very surprised to hear all four of us say 'very much'. She said that we were only saying it to be polite, but that we should come back in the summer when the river is "really something". I won't be able to, at least not this summer. We gave her back the key and said thankyou, then took our bags and left.

I finally met Albina and Oleg, if only for five minutes, when the met us to say goodbye to their new friends. Then we took a taxi to the station and only just made it to our compartment in time to leave at 6.40.

Opposite us were sitting a couple in their mid-thirties, who broke the ice with us by asking to open our window when it became too hot. We were all from Finland to start with - the boy quietly reading a newspaper - until someone said I was from England. It was flattering in a way, but also slightly insulting for the girls that from then until bed-time the conversation became entirely about me. The husband, who I found out sells fireplaces for a living but I never knew his name, asked me about the British army. People serve by contract, there is no national service as there is in Russia. I said that it is the same type of boys who take it on full-time in Britain as it is here, but there are many more of them in Russia. The wife, an attractive lady with blonde hair, wanted to know how I reacted to people looking so upset on the street; I said I am used to it, but don't agree with her reason why it is that way. When I make a good start to a conversation I talk faster than I can think, especially because for the first twenty questions about England that Russian people have asked me ten times before I have answers commited to memory. That said, they were very good people.

After a while another boy joined us, called Raif. He was about 20 like us, a bundle of energy who couldn't sleep. He was on his way to the American Embassy in Moscow, as he is going there this summer "to see what happens". His t-shirt had the members of Korn on it and he was wearing the Russian team's football shorts, so the conversation naturally turned to music and sport. He was loud, restless and flambouyant, the ideal person for the six of us to share a boring journey with. He chatted to all of us, even the couple, as if he had known us for years and it was a shame to say goodnight when we all really did need to sleep. He spoke Russian perfectly and you needed to look very closely to notice the Mongol features in his face, but all the same he corrected me very quickly when I called him 'a real Russian'; incidentally, for opening a bottle of beer with his hands!

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Photos

Our 'meeting point'.
The clock at the end of ulitsa Baumana.

The old and the new.
An old building that is now a mobile phone shop.

A Zemfira concert, on the 21st.
My favourite musician. She played in London three days before I arrived home in January, and will play in Kazan the day after I leave; I'm destined never to see her sing live.