Yekaterinburg July 1-3, 2019
The train trip from Novosibirsk to Yekaterinburg is the second-longest of the trip at 18 hours, but it’s an overnight trip so there is lots of time for rubber-necking at the start and end of the trip, plus another excellent night’s sleep on a hard 18″ bed in a rocking, rolling train that stops at every town on the way. This is our only overnight 2nd-class compartment, as we were unable to secure a 1st-class one. So what they did is give us all 4 seats in the 2nd-class compartment and charge us for 2 seats in 1st class! And it turns out the compartments are basically identical; we still have air-con and plugins for our chargers, the only big difference is the backrests on the seats don’t swing up to become beds. Which of course we don’t use, but swinging them up at night is a good idea anyway as they use up 4″ of our bed space. So the carriage is more or less identical but the Providnista (the lady attendant for that car only) is definitely a bit less zealous about keeping everything clean, and the free meal provided has descended from just barely acceptable to absolutely vile. Steve basically eats anything that can’t outrun him, but this meal stopped him in his tracks.
I’m pretty sure this is a potato cooked with a clothes-iron (note the tell-tale flat top) and then set adrift in a sea of boiled buckwheat.
No thanks, I couldn’t possibly eat another potato. Our second-class compartment.
So we’re thinking we’ll spend more time in the dining car lingering over beers. Steve heads back to check out the dining car, which is always just one car away from our 1st-class carriage, and- it’s not there. This is a 2nd-class carriage, and for some inscrutable reason, they have put 4 3rd-class carriages between us and the dining car. 3rd-class carriages are reminiscent of 1960s logging camps, or perhaps the higher-end billets in a Great Patriotic War concentration camp. Do not travel 3rd-class,.. just walking through them takes practice as they are VERY cramped and the washrooms are unspeakable. The beds were a mere 18 inches or so apart, and everyone brings their own food. The medley of all these foods was pretty overwhelming. Needless to say, we severely depleted the wine, cheese, and noodle pack inventory in our compartment.
The countryside is becoming much more settled in a Russian sort of way. It’s still predominantly ,forest dominated by quite beautiful stands of birch with grasses and forbs (herbaceous annuals) underneath, but now there are many more cities and towns, and they are closer together, and farms are becoming more frequent. We are still east of the Urals, hence in Asia, but this is no longer the wild country of the Far East.
To view a photo full-size, left-click on the image.
Yekaterinburg is a large, beautiful city. It would take a week of visiting to do it any kind of justice. Yekaterinburg – or Ekaterinburg – straddles two parts of the world – Europe and Asia. It’s the 4th largest city in Russia, with 1.5 million people, and it’s the administrative capital of the Urals. It is a major transportation hub on the Trans Siberian Railway. Every hour, 78 trains cross the border here between the two parts of the world.
Leaving the train station.
We only have 1 full and 2 part-days, so we’re going to focus on the city center and the walkable sights from our apartment. Which is very nice, by the way! We are in a modern tower, and the apartment has all the necessary bits and pieces, and there is a 24-hour lobby with two extremely helpful young ladies, and there is a convenience store inside the building that has all of the things we need. And it’s 1/2 block from the Arbat and surrounded by many attractions within 1-2 kilometers.
Deb saw the roll-out dish-racks and said ‘Want!’
The light bar slides back in when it’s not being used.
It’s not raining (!) and one of the ladies at the front desk told us that there is an observation deck on a high-rise just a kilometer or so from here, so this evening seems like a good time for a walkabout. It’s only a block from the apartment to Lenina Prospect, then turn right and walk 2 blocks, and there is a beautiful lake to the right and a river with fountains to the left! The lake is Gorodskoy Pond, which was made by damming the Iset River. It is completely constructed (stone walls, broad walkways all around), and stretches for a couple of kilometers upstream through historic buildings and parkland as well as new developments like Dynamo Stadium, Yeltsin Centre, and a couple of universities. One of the outstanding buildings, right where the pond meets Lenina Prospect, is Plotinka, which is an excellent example of properly restored pre-revolutionary architecture.
Plotinka, a properly restored pre-Revolutionary ‘home’.
The photo doesn’t do it justice. Gorodskoy Pond.
A little gazebo on the walkway around Gorodsky Pond.
The Iset is a rather pathetic creature as Russian rivers go, but you go with what you got and the good folks of Yekaterinburg have used it to make a number of lakes within the city, and in this stretch they have walkways on both sides and a number of fountains in the middle of the river. As we are right beside the Ural Branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art, there are also funky little attractions along the riverbank such as the Monument to a Keyboard and Monument to the Beatles. Makes for an interesting walk.
A walkway down to the river.
The lake outlet with an interesting bas-relief.
And a big rock! Rhodonite, I believe…
Fountains on the river below the lake.
How could you call yourself a Russian city without a
“Monument to the Cheese Grater”?
Once we finally drag ourselves away from the river and the lake, it’s time to head for the observation deck, which we can see ahead of us about a kilometer away, and of course, all uphill, because, like in most sensible countries, Russian lakes and rivers are at the bottom of the hills. Sadly, it is starting to rain, and by the looks of the sky, it is threatening to really rain, so we ruefully decide to beat a fighting retreat back to the apartment for a dinner of scrambled eggs and red wine, which might also be our breakfast if it doesn’t stop raining.
KFC mammoth-burger only 69 rubles! ($1.39)
An electric streetcar with pantograph in front of
a pair of beautifully-restored buildings.
A nice little Georgian restaurant. Steve is dissecting his meal, looking for any little Georgians.
It tastes way better than it looks. The little chef-hat things are dumplings, and the innards are lamb, veggies, and spices.
No Georgians.
Morning dawns, and it’s not raining. Yay! Big walking day today. First, down the Isket River to the arboretum. For those of you troglodytes that don’t know what that is, it’s a place where they plant a zillion different kinds of trees and let them grow, and they put signs on them, and everyone can go and see them for the next 200 years. Steve was quite excited about this for some reason known only to foresters, but it turned out to be a bit of a bust as (according to him) they didn’t do a good job on the plantings to begin with and it’s been neglected for at least 20 years and pretty much all the signs are gone and it’s just generally a sad, decrepit place. It’s still a nice walkabout and a pretty good park, it’s just not much of an arboretum.
Off to the observation deck, which is located on the 52nd floor of the Novotel Yekaterinburg City Center. It’s quite a hike, actually, but a very good view of the city, and it has four posters showing all of the buildings with names.
A little courtyard beside a busy street.
A quick way to generate handicapped access.
The old mixed in with the new.
The lake in the downtown area, surrounded by both the historic and the new.
Looking across the city to another one of the large lakes, with parkland behind.
Then it was time for a stroll along Ulitsa Karla Libknehkta (don’t even try to pronounce that, you’ll just hurt yourself). It’s a nice walk past several historic buildings and nice little parks, and for us it ended at the “Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land.” With a name like that, you know it’s got to be a pretty big church just to fit the name on the door. And it’s beautiful indeed, stuffed full of stained glass and ornamentation and a number of large murals depicting the Tsars, patriarchs, etc. Also very much a working church, so if you ever have the opportunity to go there, try to be unobtrusive and Don’t Use The Flash On Your Camera!
A little streetside park, part of the “Hooray for Communism!” collection.
Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land.
Super-cool big high ceiling-thing. Everything that isn’t stone is stained glass.
Family tree of the Romanovs.
The Romanoffs, men and women, in WW1.
Coronation of Nicholas II, the last Tsar.
I’m thinking that we’re seeing a lot of stuff on the Romanovs here as this is where they were brought to be shot, hung, burned, fed into the wood chipper, etc. by the Bolsheviks after the Revolution.
Coincidentally we arrived at the church just when the heavens opened up and delivered much rain to the multitude, which meant that we were stuck in the church with many soggy Russians for about 20 minutes until we figured out that the taxi we had summoned us to rescue us wasn’t coming closer than the embankment a block below us because traffic is restricted around the church. (No obvious reason, but I’m thinking they don’t want some nutcase blowing up the church.) I got to see how fast Debbi can still run, as she hates rain; she can still cover a lot of ground if she has to! So, amid much grumbling, that was it for the day, except we did manage to sneak out for an excellent dinner nearby.
We still had a few hours to mooch around in the morning so we walked a block over to the Arbat, which is really quite nice. It’s about 4 blocks long, quite wide, and it’s full of statues, temporary art works, funky architecture, and is just generally a great place to hang out and have breakfast, coffee, lunch, whatever.
The Arbat.
Lots of quirky little statues.
Note the hand coming through the glass.
I have no idea, really.
They rub the nose for luck.
And sometimes the belly.
Then it was off to the train station, as the train pulls out for Moscow at 14:00, and it’s a 24-hour pull. We’re saying goodbye to Asia, as when we wake up on the train tomorrow morning, we’ll be in Europe!
This is not the train station, but a marvelous example of Soviet brutalist architecture.
We got our dining car back! Yippee!