ABOUT YEKATERINBURG
Buying the train ticket
to get to Yekaterinburg it's not that easy, since somehow you must guess the name of its
train station is Sverdlovsk and by the serious woman beyond the window don't expect any
answer (in russian of course) different that: "There's no station named
Yekaterinburg! I can't issue any ticket". But surely you'll have experienced the same
if are coming from Nizhny Novgorod, whose train station is named Gor'kij, so it won't get
you so unprepared.
I got a little bit disappointed by this big city,
where the centre is not so defined as it's in N.Novgorod, Kazan or Samara; so even if
there're nice places in the town, wandering around can turn out quite disorienting, or
maybe just because it was the only town I visited not on the bank of a big river like the
Volga, that in the others for me became a sort of charming reference. From a certain point
of view I found Yekaterinburg less russian than I expected, despite being so far eastwards
from Moscow. On the opposite the town is quite european and even in the people there's not
that much of asiatic.
Nevertheless there was one the funniest attraction I
saw in this travel: it was a kind of entertainment park for kids where by
huge ice bricks were built slides (a big one 7-8 meters high),
a labyrinth, a small theatre, statues. maybe some years ago I would have spent days
sliding down, but now I'm too lazy to freeze my bum, so I enjoyed just watching :-)
As concerns the accommodation in Yekaterinburg I
don't have so nice memories; in fact we arrived by train in the heart of a cold and windy
night and we asked for a room in the hotel right in front of the station (800 rubls, 24
euro for a double). A man took us to see the room of this big abandoned-like concrete
building, walking in the semi-darkness of the long desolated corridors full of old beds,
sinks, toilets, pieces of cupboards. that seemed have been tossed there several years
before. The room was even gloomier than the corridor, that we preferred to face the
coldness and the wind of night.
We started walking to the centre through the empty
city looking for another accommodation till the 8.30 am, when we found a sort of
mini-apartment for 1600 rubls in a soviet style hotel (read the story).
Unfortunately I must say I got very disappointed by
the attitude of the people I met in Yekaterinburg. I hardly remember about somebody who
has not been impolite or rough with us: from the woman of the ticket office at the train
station and the employers of the hotel to the young girl waiting for the bus. Once we
wanted to buy a ticket at the bus station and while I was trying to understand why the
woman beyond the glass was yelling, the people in line behind started aggressively
teasing me aloud and at the end I had to quit. Maybe we have been just unlucky, but in
three days we met a lot of people. On the opposite in Samara Russians appeared to have a
really better attitude towards us, in fact in two days I never argued with anybody; I know
generalising is meaningless, but these were the facts!
Anyway getting to
Yekaterinburg turned out to be worthwhile, especially because it let us to do a very
interesting day trip in a cute small town 50 km northwards called Revda, where I fell in love for the
russian colourful wooden houses covered of
snow with their smoking chimneys.
PHOTO
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The
town is characterised by the open spaces and by the large "prospiekt"
(boulevards) |
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Authoritative
signs of a recent past. |
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Entertainment
park made by ice in the main square, it was a heaven for the kids |
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View
of one of the many boulevards in the downtown |
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Ice
slide looked fun, but I wasn't so keen to wet my butt |
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Ice
sculptures in the park |
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Do
you like spun sugar? |
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The
new year eve in the main square. Since there were just Turkish and drunks, I guess
Russians are not used to celebrate it outdoor. |
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