In my way from Rodna to Ekaterimburg I discover how to travel between cities Russian style. In the bus stops there are some people ready to make some money taking people between cities for the same price the bus cost plus a small markup. As the bus never came (Nobody was surprised by this) we took a ride with a guy that drove like a maniac on the highway. Highway! This was the first real highway with two lanes per way I saw in Russia. The road network in this country is still seriously incomplete. For example there is no real highway between Saint Petersburg and Moscow!
Fortunately this crazy driver had no problem of stopping in the highway for some minutes on the Asia-Europe border. Ekaterimburg is the capital of the Ural Mountains which mark the limit between the European and Asian tecnonic plaques. At the beginning of the last century the scientients did so some work to decide where the limit was and they place a monolit in there. In fact there are two of them, one on the railway that I passed without notice around 30Km from Ekaterimburg and another in the highway around 20Km from Ekaterimburg. So we stopped in this one and we took some funny pictures between Europe and Asia. Now I’m Europe, Now I’m Asia. Now I’m in the middle. Now I’m jumping in between. Yes I know that it sounds like a stupid child game but it was a lof of fun!
Europe Asia Border
When I arrived at Ekaterimbug I meet Yuliya, my host in Ekaterimburg. She was hosting another person that night: It was the turkish man I met in Moscow at Marina’s place on my first week of the trip! These encounters are very common in the transiberian route. You are constantly meeting the same people because everybody is travelling in the same direction.
Lunch with couchsurfers
The next day I woke up before Yuliya and her roommate and I prepared breakfast for them. My idea was to visit Ekaterimburg in one day and then take the train to Omsk at night. Yuliya told me about Ekaterimburg and from the Russian region where she was born. She grow up far in the north, in the middle of nowhere in the Siberian Oblast where there is not railway yet and you definitively don’t want to live in.
One of the first things I did was to go to the train station buy the ticket for my next hop Ekaterimbug-Omsk. As always, there were massive queues in the ticketing offices in the train station.
There is a modern, beautiful website where you can check the train schedule and even buy tickets (Only in Russian). There are also electronic machines on the station where you can check the time schedules. However Russians are old school. Instead of checking the time schedule on the displays and then buy the ticket they prefer to wait in line for one hour and then discuss with the cashier what’s the most suitable ticket for them. Buying a ticket takes forever because these discussions and because all the tickets have the complete personal information so the cashier needs to introduce a lot of data on the computer.
So me and the Turkish travelbuddy were waiting in line when a Russian girl came to us and start speaking to us in perfect british accent. Are you tourists? Do you need help? This was really weird. The probability of finding a Russian that speaks perfect English is close to zero. The fact that she was actually interested in helping us was a surrealist experience. But she did and buying the tickets with her help was a easy as cake.
The Russian lady with British accent
Then we headed to visit the big chuch of Ekaterimburg. The church of Christ the Saviour is the place dedicated to the Romanov Family. Nicholas II, The last Tzar of Russia, was killed with his complete family in this city when the Bolzchevics decided that having the Tzar alive, even in Siberia, was too much of a risk for the revolution. The Bolzchevics killed him and his entire family and they hid the corpses with the hope that they would never be found. However somebody found them and after the fall of the URSS the Orthodox church decided to make the Romanov Family saints. And that’s why the last Tzar or Russia is a saint for Orthodox Christians and has a Cathedral in Ekaterimburg dedicated to him.
Jumping at the Church of Christ the savior at Ekaterimburg
It was in Ekaterimburg were I noticed that the postal service in Russia is the most anarchic thing ever. In Moscow I paid 75 rublos to send a postcard to Europe. In Saint Petesbourg I paid 50. In Ekaterimburg I paid 25 rublos. The farther you are from the destination the cheaper the international delivery is. My conclusion is that the people at the post offices charged me random prices. As a side note all the letters I sent arrived safely at destination independently of the stamp price.
Doing wicked things...
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