Out of the frying pan and into the fire...

Pick of the day: Spar ‘Gourmet’, Nizhny Novgorod

Ok so this is clearly not the sort of place one plans or envisions needing the loo when one starts the day. This is the type of venue you visit out of pure necessity not choice. When wandering around becomes difficult and your gait is beginning to draw attention.

Style: Metallic western sit

Atmosphere: Chromy

Extras: Hassling little prick outside who couldn’t grasp why the door might be locked

18/02/13 to 25/02/13: Nizhny Novgorod and Perm

We have been in Russia for just over two weeks and have had shifting opinions on the place day by day. Let us start with this. Budget travel in Russia is not a holiday in the same sense that travel is say South East Asia maybe (fingers crossed...).The Russians do ostentatious well, aside from a soviet sized gap in time, keener than anyone else to have the latest phones, cars and clothes and you are expected to flaunt wealth. Travelling through Russia is a fantastic experience but it is constantly a challenge both in the cost of living and attitudes. 

Initially we had found Russians to be blunt and aggressive and this made for depressing days and a wish to move on quickly.However, as we have discussed the past couple of weeks between us we have realised that in fact the vast majority of Russians have been welcoming, friendly and supportive. For every occasion where we have stumbled, particularly when purchasing tickets from staff who move beyond unhelpful to plain obstructive there has always been a local who has helped us to bypass this difficult transaction. This is not a case of not speaking Russian, though our inability is clearly the driver for such problems. The locals who have helped us have never spoken any English, just like those serving us and yet they have clearly had to battle with staff to help us. We have never expected people to speak a word of English, but we can communicate effectively with pointing and a couple of words of Russian if people are willing to spend a little longer communicating. Incidents like this are clearly not rare as the guide book even mentions it. Such events do cloud your experience of a place, but I hope in future we can treat foreigners at home with a little more compassion.

Nizhny, clinging to the past

*Rant over*

We had somehow ended up with 4 days and nights in Nizhny, which was odd seeing as the only reason we had for stopping there was a day river boat trip up the Volga to the town of Gorodets. In hindsight we should perhaps have realised that the river would have been ice bound in February! Never the less we found it was accessible by bus so decided to make it our activity for Nizhny day 2.

We arrived in Nizhny at 2300hr after a 5hr train from Moscow and wandered the short distance to the hostel, which was in the guise of a parole centre/OAP home. We were shown to a 6 bed dorm which to our delight only had a single other occupant, a young girl. Assuming she would be less likely to snore or play computer games all night we thought we had struck lucky. We were wrong. Out of the pan and into the fire. Over the next 4 nights this girl would show us just how creepy a roommate can be. I got off relatively lightly as she seemed to take a shining to Vi, touching her feet when we were on the bed, cooing at her and generally staring longingly. This experience meant the hostel was a no go area aside from sleeping, unfortunately despite being Russia’s ‘third’ city it was remarkably thin on things to do.

Smoke stacks. A common feature of Russia cities. Looking across the river to Nizhny.

On our first day it became obvious that while our hostel was very convenient for the station its 6km distance from the centre of town was less than ideal. Fortunately it proved a pleasant walk and we had the time to kill. We spent the day walking through the old town climbing the hill to the Kremlin and taking in the sights of the frozen River Volga. That evening we treated ourselves to the lonely planet recommended eatery which proved classically intimidating as we were remarkably under dressed! For a smart £25 Ben got 3 tiny pancakes and a sliver of salmon and I got a fistful of rice and a portion of beef stroganoff that took approximately 5 mouthfuls to eat. However the surroundings were very nice with a classically Victorian feel about it and we got a whole dining room to ourselves (I suspect we were hidden from the other guests to shelter them from our hobo-esque appearance).

Team shot from Nizhny's kremlin with the Volga behind

Night one passed fairly uneventfully as we sat in the common area and attempted to converse with the other inmates via the medium of the Russian sailor who occasionally docked in british ports and google translate. Conversations were (as they have always been in Russia) variations on ‘where you from?’ ‘Manchester’ ‘ah, Manchester united!’ ‘yeah, we don’t really watch football’.

A Gorodet street. Pretty Wooden architecture.

Day 2 we decided to head to a town/village upriver called Gorodets. It’s supposed to be accessible via a lovely river cruise in summer but as the Volga was frozen over we got the bus. We had a lovely, sunny wander round this sleepy old town, the old part of which is made up of traditional painted wooden houses which are beautiful. We mooched along the river front and in and out of a few bizarre antique shops before deciding it was time to head back. And so our problems started. We thought we would try and wait for the same bus that we had arrived on but after a while of waiting, no sign of it and getting a bit freaked out by a couple of teenagers walking out of a shop attempting to conceal a handgun decided to find the ticket office. The woman there shouted at us in Russian, wrote 17:30 on a scrap of paper and refused to sell us a ticket. We tried asking a bus driver outside and he pointed to the main road. We went there and waited for a while and then eventually asked a friendly looking woman at a bus stop. By this time we had been trying to get home for over an hour, it was getting dark and very cold and we were very aware that there were no hotels in this town. Thankfully the woman turned out to be a blessing; she took us back to the bus depot, argued with the ticket lady til she sold us tickets home, stood us at the correct bus stop and instructed another lady to make sure we got on the bus to Nizhny and then with a goodbye handshake and smile left us more grateful than we had been in a very long time, and all this without a common word between us.

Where we would have landed had we got the boat.

Gorodets

Night three and crazy girl ran up to us asking ‘where have you been? I have missed you!’ We left here to her own devices.

Day 3 and we re-investigated the Kremlin, spent a very long time in a coffee shop and found an amazing restaurant above a bookshop that did delicious homemade pasta and really good mulled wine. Walking home that night the water froze inside my Nalgene bottle, pretty chilly.

View from Nizhny kremlin with the confluence of the Volga and Oka beyond.

That night we were sat on the bottom bunk (my bed) watching a film and crazy girl repeatedly grabbed and rubbed my feet for a prolonged period of time. I tried tucking them under me but she would inevitably get me again when I stretched out. She then sat on the bed opposite and stared at us for a while. Then she resorted to playing the Titanic theme tune very loudly while staring at us. Thankfully at this point one of the other inmates came in and seemed to point out she was being weird and took her away for a cigarette. Later on as I was going to sleep I rolled over to see her sat on the edge of her bed, in the dark, staring at me. Didn’t sleep after that.

We took the 3^rd class overnight train to Perm which was not bad as trains go. There were a couple of friendly middle aged women on the bunk above us and the journey was pretty chilled apart from a 5am wake up call when just about everyone seemed to get off the train.

Vi chilling 3rd class enroute to Perm

Our hostel in Perm was pretty nice with a decent kitchen and living area although we were in a 16 bed dorm. The only slightly annoying dorm mate we had was a boy next to us who appeared to be nocturnal (2am computering again) and didn’t get out of bed at any point in the 3 days we were there. He smelled a fair bit as a result.

We arrived in the afternoon and had enough time for a quick wander around town where we found that an ice festival was on. There were pretty amazing ice sculptures including life sized ships in full sail, a Toyota car that you could sit in, an ice sculpture competition, a mock life sized ice town and an enormous amphitheatre with 10ft ice slides coming off it. It was aimed mostly at children so we had no qualms about getting involved. Especially funny was the tiny toddler who was too light to make it down the slide and got stuck, limbs waving like a starfish, out of reach of either parent at the top and bottom.

The ice ship captain!

This was a huge ice caved terraced street. Every house had a slide.

No idea what this was, but the local scallies liked punching them.

Orbs. Loved in russia!

Ice clog. Harder to get out than get into...

Life size Toyota land cruiser

The next day we took the bus to the Kungur Ice Caves. Or rather took 3 buses over the course of 3 hours. Having made it we booked onto the next tour and wandered down into the deep. Unfortunately ‘Ice Caves’ is a bit of an overstatement. Only a couple of caves actually have any ice in them. The rest of the caves were apparently geologically fascinating as our guide kept on using her torch to point out different rock formations, though Ben didn’t agree. Since it was entirely in Russian we had no idea what she was talking about and alternatively pretended to be trolls, imagined finding fossilised polar bears or planned escape routes in case the cave turned out to be inhabited by creatures from ‘The Descent’.

Demon ice rabbit in the Kungur ice caves. Or maybe, couldn't tell what the guide was going on about.

After a long train ride home we got a bit of rest and re-supplied in preparation of the 24 hour train ride to Omsk.

Perm station. Next stop Omsk!

From Russia with love....

Pick of the day: Carriage 7 WC, St. Petersburg – Moscow train 056.

This seemed a popular place on the train. Our beds being the closest to the loo we noticed that they were occupied for almost the whole 9hr journey.

Style: Western sit/basin/dog bowl combo

Atmosphere: damp

Extras: The lack of a movable seat in this one was a hindrance to those wishing to sit. For those of us comfortable with standing the motion of the train didn’t help the already damp feel of the loo and compartment. The addition of the drain in the floor is a nice touch, almost admitting that “yes you are going to miss and no, we don’t mind”.

Russia. For me personally (ben), being a bit of a coward, the thought of crossing the Former Soviet Union was/is something I have been a bit apprehensive about. With that in mind we decided to make our Russian introduction as stress free as possible with a day time bus from Tallinn, forgoing our usual overnighter.

Our first Russian encounter seems to have set a trend with the border guard’s main line of interrogation revolving around why Vi didn’t speak Russian. They didn’t even bother with me after that. Retrospectively this may have been less of a ‘how dare you disrespect my country by coming here without speaking the language’ kind of question and more of a ‘you don’t speak Russian? You are totally screwed’ kind of statement. He was right. So far we have found Russia and the Russians to resemble a small (welsh?) mining town struggling with the shackles of its glorious past while moving forward. They know they need to embrace the rest of the world and for the most part can be the most friendly people, but an undercurrent of xenophobia is evident within certain sectors of society. Not unlike home I guess, just interesting to be on the receiving end.

Arriving at the bus station we made for the metro, jumping on the escalator down to the platform. We found out late St. Petersburg’s metro is the world’s deepest, which explained the feeling of descending into a mine and why people got their books out to read once getting on the escalator.

Ok so we said that EastSeven hostel in Berlin was nice, perhaps the best we had stayed in? In St. Petersburg we stayed at Soul Kitchen Junior, which is the highest rated hostel on hostelworld.com and deservedly so. If it hadn’t been for me being kept awake by the Dutch guy with his Russian conquest in the next bed this hostel would have been the best thing about St. Petersburg. Built in an old soviet communal apartment, walking in you are greeted with what I can only describe as a hipsters New York ‘loft’. A big kitchen and the most helpful staff possible made our first Russian city stay very pleasant.

The church of the spilled blood, with a frozen canal

After a quick sit down we decided to have a wander around the city and see what there was to see. We began with Nevsky Prospect which is just about the most famous street in Russia which is lined with huge beautiful buildings that are now mostly department stores intermingled with enormous statues of Catherine the Great (Empress of Russia back in the day). We discovered early on that Russian streets are a deathtrap for all pedestrians and most motorists. You don’t dare cross unless the little man goes green (as cars generally travel at some multiple of the actual speed limit and are so massive that you wouldn’t be seen unless you were 7ft tall or spattered across the windscreen) and even then take your life in your hands as the lights will only be red for cars travelling in one direction. We had dinner in a great place called Zoom with served up delicious potato pancakes and smoked salmon which was only slightly marred by the fact that there is no smoking ban in Russia so all food is bound to taste a little of cigarette ash.

Caviar crisps. Yep, they also do crab flavor.

The next day we mooched further down Nevsky Prospect and then popped along to the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood (so called because Tsar Alexander II was mortally wounded there, apparently). From the outside its impressive enough with those asymmetrical brightly enamelled or gilded onion shaped domes but the inside is truly something else. The interior is completely covered in extremely intricate mosaic from floor to ceiling and then there are alters carved in the most amazing details from pink rhodonite and jasper. Its easily the most impressive thing Ben and I have seen in a fair few years- on a par with the Taj Mahal, I would say.

Inside the spilled blood church. No painting here. All mosaic baby.

Since it was pancake day we went to the supermarket to get pancake supplies. Easier said than done when you don’t know the Russian for flour or milk (thankfully eggs are fairly self-evident). We were terrified of accidentally buying sour milk and bought cat brand milk in the end which  we were seriously hoping was not actual cat milk (by this point, anything was possible). Pancakes turned out well and for lack of other meal ideas were served for breakfast and dinner for the next two days.

The next day we decided to spend the day at the Hermitage. Really the Hermitage (also known as the Tsar’s winter palace) needs more than just one day but we were short on time and did a super quick tour. It’s essentially the old imperial apartments, preserved in their original splendour and a load of other rooms which consist of a sort of museum-cum-art gallery. The imperial apartments were certainly impressive- as Ben said ‘I’m not surprised the peasants were pissed off if they saw their royal family living like this’. The winter palace makes Buckingham Palace look like some sort of quaint country cottage. Every room has intricately carved and inlaid wooden floor, every wall has gilt or silk paper, there are marble columns everywhere, multiple crystal chandeliers in every room and even the door handles are carved, gilded and inlaid with precious stones. The art collection is impressive to say the least. Not just one or two by famous artists but a couple of rooms (ie 10-15 paintings) of Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh, and just about every famous artist from the last couple of centuries you are to think of.

A room in the Hermitage. The most ornate museum in the world.

One of many stair cases.

As there was a couple of upcoming birthdays (you know who you are) we decided to brave the central post office to attempt to post some presents home. Big fail. To get near a clerk you need a ticket obtained from the touch-screen machine which is entirely in Russian. Having bypassed this via a security guard we were given 6 copies of the same form and told to fill them all out identically. Having achieved hand cramp the form was actually looked at, laughed at, passed around the office and then the vodka I had attempted to post removed from the box with a firm ‘nyet’. The box was finally posted but we are yet to discover if the contents have been ‘nyet’ed without our knowledge.

On our last day in ‘Peter’ we decided to go to the Peter and Paul fortress which is across the river of ice on a sort of peninsula all of its own. It’s an outdoor excursion and was bloody freezing that day so we didn’t really spend that long having a look round, sorry to say. However as we took a little tour round the battlements we found a little outdoor swimming pool carved out of the ice and, to our horror, three middle aged men came wandering along, stripped off and went for a butt-naked swim (having used a stick to scoop the ice away from the steps first of course). Russian people are mental!

The local swimming pool. This bloke is about to get his willy out.

Looking across the frozen river with the Peter and Paul fortress on the right, Hermitage off to the left.

We took an overnight train from St Petersburg, having got the hostel to book our tickets. First task, convert our E-ticket to a paper ticket. Not being able to decipher the machines we went to the counter, where the irritable woman was once again pissed off that we didn’t speak Russian.

The train ride passed largely without incident and we arrived in Moscow in time for morning rush hour. Seeing as we were staying a short walk from Red square, in the district of Kitay Gorod, we spent the morning napping, before heading out for a wander and the collection of our other train tickets.

Britains first embassy in Moscow, c.middle ages

Moscow was a big change from the very European feeling St. Petersburg. Suddenly things felt more like the Asian cities we have been to with the driving shifting more in that direction too. What initially appear to be 10 lane roads are actually a single very wide lane where anything goes! Day 2 in Moscow and we hit Red Square, a wander round the Kremlin and St Basils Cathedral. You’ll pay a foreign tourist price for most exhibits/sights in Russia which is not something I am against in principal, but without even a translation of information inside you get decidedly less than the locals from the visit. This once again reinforced the idea that Russia doesn’t like outsiders! Red square is indeed massive and red, although the effect is spoiled slightly by the enormous ice rink set up in the middle of it. Lenin’s embalmed body is apparently normally on show there but it seems when we popped by he was being re-pickled or whatever so we lost out. St Basil’s Cathedral is actually called something entirely different in Russian but being british we somehow converted ‘Vasily’ to ‘Basil’. Its pretty cool from the outside and inside is a warren of little rooms with saintly paintings and carving all kept at a balmy -2C. Pretty interesting nevertheless. Our day in red square was topped off with a MacDonald’s from the Red Square outlet out of desperation for calories that didn’t cost the earth. This as expected of the international standard ‘restaurant’ was crap, but we loved the irony of it.

The team in red square

The walls of the Kremlin

The following day was taken up with a return to the Kremlin to see the state collection in the Armoury followed by a visit to the Pushkin collection of Russian art and European sculpture, capping off what has been a significant number of museums and galleries in the last few weeks. The armoury does contain armour but more impressively also the imperial crown jewels from times long ago and heavily decorated religious artefacts. They have bibles decorated with emeralds and rubies as big as your eyeball. They also have several thrones- one made entirely of carved ivory and another decorated with 4000 diamonds. They seem pretty blasé about the whole thing. That night was an attempt at cooking dauphinoise potatoes (given that potatoes were the cheapest and best quality vegetable we could find), which proved tricky when we were told back at the hostel at instead of milk and cream we had purchased soured milk and soured cream! Not the best meal.

St Basils/Vasily's Cathedral

In truth we were not at all enamoured with Moscow in the way that we were with St Petersburg. We had met a number of lovely, friendly people in Moscow despite a couple of fairly antisocial dorm-mates. One Belarusian who it seems had come on holiday to Russia to play games 14hrs a day on the communal computer a foot away from our bed (weird), and a Russian who decided that the best time to pop the lights on and do his ironing was midnight. Our final day in the capital was spent venturing out on the metro to a souvenir market, which was deathly quiet, thus proving winter is not tourist season! Couple of bargains achieved tho.

Vi loving mudda russia

An evening train to Nizhny Novgorod later that day brought us to the start of our 4 day stint in Russia’s third most populated city. That has been an ‘interesting’ stay and will probably get an entry all of its own…….

A dog has the right to be a dog (part 2)

Ok so no bog to log just part deux of Eastern Europe. Sorry team.

Getting the view in from the castle over Vilnius (its not a great view so instead have one of us!)

Leaving Warsaw for another overnight ‘Ryan air’ esque journey was not one we relished, however, we were pleasantly surprised by this one. The coach proved roomy and the drivers actually seemed to give a shit. Not to mention each seat had a tv set with English films and Wifi. The modern world eh!

Arriving in Vilnius we passed out for a short while before heading out for a mooch around town. The next day we headed up to the castle for some awesome views across the city, after this it was a wander to the district of Uzupio. This is an artist’s haven which has decided to declare itself a state in it’s own right, issuing passports (or stamping yours), electing a president and writing their own constitution which included: point 12. A dog has the right to be a dog and point 13. A cat is not obliged to love its owner but must help in times of need. The final sight for the day was the ex KGB HQ. We have seen a lot of museums over past couple of weeks and you would expect overtime to become desensitised to the effects of war and genocide. However the padded cells, torture cells and execution chamber were still truly terrifying! Bullet holes in the wall of the execution chamber were particularly sobering. All I can say is thank god we didn’t go to see Auschwitz as we might have actually lost the plot by now. However, it has been a revelation to see WW2 from a variety of perspectives all subtly different.

Vi doing the snow jig

The constitution of Uzupio

That night we feasted at what would be a local gastro-pub, with fantastic beer and deep fried garlic bread and ‘dairylea’ type dip. Awesome. The menu choices included roast elk or beaver stew. Ben and I chickened out and went for the relatively safe rabbit stew and meat stuffed potato cakes. However at £20 for 2 mains, starter, 2 beer and 2 glasses of wine you can’t really go wrong!

Deep fried garlic bread and cheese dip. The weight is falling off us.

The next day we decided to escape from the city and head to a picturesque little town in the countryside called Trakai. It’s clearly a spot where city dwellers come in the summer to sun themselves on the shores of the lake and have a little play in the boats you can rent out. In the winter the lake is frozen and dominated by men who have the balls to walk out across the ice, drill a hole in it, drop a line in the hole and sit there for hours, waiting to freeze to death (or catch a fish, whichever comes first).

Ben tried to run away from the cutest little dachshund dog that was barking at him (apparently it had murder in it’s eyes) and we found another castle to go round. This one had been rebuilt in redbrick (??commie influence??) but was still pretty cool to look around, especially since Trakai had once apparently been a big centre for commerce before it sank into being a swampy little backwater.

Frozen lake.

When the soviets refurb something, they do it in red brick!

Its getting chilly now...

Yet another overnight bus journey which was probably the worst yet. This was entirely down to two Estonian women two rows behind us who were extremely pissed and spent half the night chatting drunkenly at maximum volume, the other half screaming for someone to give them some water (neat vodka not doing the trick any more, it seems) and then quite a long time vomiting loudly into a bag.

We cheated the Tallinn metro system out of a few euro (no idea how to pay) and then collapsed onto the sofa at the hostel for a much needed half hour snooze- interestingly this was about 10 mins after we downed a can of red bull each to avoid this very thing.

We had less than 24 hours in Tallinn but made the most of it as much as possible since it was a Sunday and the whole place was a foot deep in snow. We had a lovely potter around the old city walls and crept down various little cobbles street and into little cobbled courtyards. The whole place has a very medieval feel about it which is compounded by the shops and restaurants taking advantage of this and having people dress up in medieval garb and offer you grog or challenge you to mint your own penny with a piece of tin and a massive sledgehammer. Nearly had a culinary mishap early on as we popped into a café for breakfast. I ordered a croissant and then a pain au chocolat and as an afterthought just checked that it was actually filled with chocolate to be told it was actually a pain-au-cabbage. My croissant was cheese filled too. Grim.

Tallins, Orthodox Church

The overcast view across Tallinns old town.

Lots of little streets in the old town.

Best part of the day was when we were taking a tour of the walls and found some kids had sorted themselves a sweet slope for sledging down so we decided to strip off the down and join them in bumsliding down and getting facefulls of snow in the process. Awesome fun! Think we ruined the kids day though as they swiftly disappeared.

Bum slide!

Ruined some Europeans/americans at table football in the evening, watched a horror film and then off to bed before the bus to St Petersberg the following morning….