Yekaterinburg, Russia

Back at the train station with time to spare, and buoyed with confidence after a few days successfully navigating Russia without coming to a sticky end, I decided to run the gauntlet with the imposing line of ticket windows to purchase another onward leg of my journey.

The windows were apparently very specific depending on your circumstances; some were for individuals in the military, or veterans; others for the disabled, or elderly. Being able to read the Cyrillic above each window didn’t get me very far, not knowing what the Russian words meant, so I took the path of certainty and joined the longest queue.

I had everything prepared on a slip of paper, carefully written in Cyrillic: the number, time and date of train, departure station and destination, and preferred sleeping class. Nothing could go wrong.

Except, er, if the mardy-faced battleaxe behind the plexiglass started to speak Russian to me after punching in the details, signalling a problem with my booking, which is of course what happened. Perplexed, I assumed the train was fully booked, and so asked her in pigeon Russian for “next day train”. She continued to flick R’s at me and I had no hope of understanding, so I shook my head helplessly, thanked her and walked away.

I am nothing if not stubborn, and so I was back to rejoin the queue minutes later with a new slip of paper with a new destination and different train. On reaching the front of the queue again, I received a withering look from the bat behind the counter, but undeterred, I passed my new slip of info to her. Success! It seemed to be OK, and I caught her asking for x-amount of rubli. Asking her in Russian to write it down please – a highly useful phrase – the price seemed OK, so I slid my VISA card under the counter.

This caused her to become quite irate: “Nyet Karta!”, or something similar, amongst a terse torrent of Russian. Annoyed, I raised my hand up to the glass and slowly and deliberately tapped my finger on the VISA symbol prominently displayed on the glass, which had the desired effect to aggravate her even further.

Thinking I had better not push my luck too far, I slid the required number of rubles under the counter and a minute later I was walking away from the hag in possession of my very own, personally-acquired Russian train ticket.

Never again…

My overnight journey to Yekaterinburg was the worst so far, with the carriage samovar, a water heater that looked to be out of the 70′s – the 1870′s, that is – putting out brown water. The carriage was also like a furnace – the thermometer read a crazy thirty degrees – making it very difficult to sleep. My compartment buddies looked to be young students, but they didn’t even talk to each other, let alone me. Around lunchtime the next day the Provodnitsa, a little man this time who looked just like Joe Pesci, entered our compartment and started speaking Russian. My compartment buddies all shook their heads to his querying, so he turned to me.

“Sverdlovsk?” he asked.

Perplexed, I went into apologetic Russian mode. “Excuse me, sorry. I don’t understand. English.”

This caused him to rudely make a comment to the other passengers, at which one of them laughed. Clearly he had a short man complex. But the penny had dropped with me in the meantime; I knew what he was on about.

“Yekaterinburg?” I asked him, jabbing a finger at the buildings out the window.

“Da”, he interspersed with more baffling and seemingly rude Russian. He had come in to tell me it was my stop, one of the Provodnitsa’s duties. What had confused me was that he had used the Soviet-era name for the town, Sverdlovsk. Despite to being renamed to Yekaterinburg in ’91, some people – including all railway timetables – still refer to it by its Bolshevik name. I’m convinced there are people in this country who don’t realise the Soviet Union ever collapsed.

Saddling up, I followed Joe Pesci to the end of the carriage and waited for the train to slow. As he shovelled coal to keep the carriage burning at over thirty degrees Centigrade he continued to talk at me in Russian, which by his tone and face I could tell was none-too complimentary. Incensed at his rudeness, when it came to disembark, I gave him the widest possible foreigner grin I could, and loudly and clearly said to him “F**k you very much”, which made me feel a whole lot better. To Hell with Anglo-Russian relations today.

A thousand miles east of Moscow, Yekaterinburg straddled the border between Europe and Asia, marked by the north-south ridge of the Ural mountains. I had around six hours there to see the sights, freshen up and stock up on supplies. Yekaterinburg was the hometown of popular alcoholic and general all-round hero Boris Yeltsin, and more gruesomely, the place where Tsar Nicolas II and his Romanov family met their makers – murdered by the Bolsheviks – in the basement of a house. It was to this location I first headed.

The house had been ripped down decades ago, by order of Yeltsin himself when he was a local governor here, and a memorial Church on the Blood and monument had been built on the spot to commemorate the Tsar and his family.

Yekaterinburg seemed a more international place than Nizhny Novogorod or Kazan; there were far more options for food, including a Japanese ramen restaurant which despite living off instant noodles for days I couldn’t pass by. I discovered a huge supermarket and stocked up on goodies for the onwards trek. In the brief time I spent there, I got the impression of a more dynamic and modern place than either of my two previous destinations, and felt it would be one of the more interesting places in Russia to live outside of Moscow and St. Pete.

As night fell I marched back to the railway station past the elegant buildings of the city, stocked up with plenty of food and drink and prepared for a jaunt away from the big cities to experience a smaller Russian town… and hopefully a shower too.