| ABOUT SAMARA
Being one of the military
production centre during the cold war, Samara was one of the cities closed to the
strangers till the 1990. Definitely it's not considered one of the main tourist highlight
in Russia, but maybe right for such reason it turned out really worthwhile to stop there a
bunch of days to visit this interesting slice of Russia.
Samara lies on the Volga that, like in Nizhny Novgorod
and Kazan, in winter becomes an endless
iced plateau. In certain points, signed by some wooden branches stuck in the ice, it's
even possible to cross all the Volga just walking on the frozen water. Running along the
Volga there's a beach and a nice promenade, where
Russian play football (even with -10 C!!!), cross country ski, bike (on the snow!!!), push
down hill the kids on the sledges or just drink, drink, drink.
As in Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod there were many
buildings being renewed, but what was quite peculiar were the abandoned wooden houses
spread everywhere also in the centre; it seems such houses were one of the last signs of
the recent far past in Samara.
One of the reasons that led me to enjoy the town was
the kindness of the Russians I found here. Coming from Yekaterinburg, where I'm really sorry to say that I met almost just
impolite and unhelpful people, here in Samara I got stroke by the normality, that to me
seemed abnormal kindness, in the approach of everybody, even at the ticket office of the
train station, the woman smiled to me; no way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It's right the super modern train station one of the
things that surprised me in Samara. It's a huge glass-aluminium structure with a sort of
tower ten floors high with every kind of service inside, rooms and showers included, but
nothing like an english ticket office, of course.
In addition if you love drinking lots of litres of
beer, the kiosk outside the Ziguli' beer factory in Samara is your place. In fact here you
can refill your tanks paying the beer 0.3 euro for litre. It was funny to see the Russians
filling the trunk with transparent tanks full of beer that at the first glance seemed
petrol.
The drawbacks of stopping in Samara is that
definitely it's not easy to find a cheap accommodation. The cheapest we found was a
central very crap place with a doubles for 1300 rubls (38 euro (12/03)), but it was so bad
we didn't sleep there.
Finally coming back to Moscow
we got a train from central Asia (Tashkent- Moscow), and this 21 hours travel, so
different from the others on national russian trains, turned out to be a real adventure.
First of all no more pravadnitsa (the efficient russian woman in charge of controlling the
sleeping car), but an indifferent and not-cleaning uzbek man, then we slept in the
compartment with two very nice Kazaks; they settled down playing BADDAMON all the day and
eating a whole chicken for breakfast. In addition the train was literally falling apart:
holes in the walls and burnt lights in the compartment. In short less cleaning, less
control, but more smiles: what we lived was a sample of central Asia or, even better, a
sample of another travel.
PHOTO
 |
The
lively long beach on the Volga riverbank, in summer of coure! |
 |
The
frozen Volga; summer is still far. |
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