Spring(?) in Siberia

Pick of the day: Café Berlin, Omsk

Though nothing exceptional to look at, this loo smelt like a meadow of strawberries. The added bonus of fantastic aromas and a positively clean environment made this a great loo to sit and ponder life’s great questions. Could be improved with some light music perhaps.

Style: Western Sit

Atmosphere: Welcoming

Extras: An odd urinal with a snappy lid thing and great aromas

26/02/13 to 02/03/13: Omsk to Tomsk

It has been some time since the last update and in that time has, thankfully, seen a much more positive twist to our Russian experience.

On the train from Perm to Omsk we finally passed into geographic Asia over the Urals.

We had only really ended up staying at Omsk as we needed to change trains to get to the town of Tomsk, famous for its wooden architecture, so it was odd that we had 2 nights in Omsk and 1 in Tomsk. But hey, that’s Russia.

As Omsk is very much a business city the accommodation was expensive and we only managed to find a hostel thanks to the hostel staff in Perm. As our Omsk hostel was not in a ‘convenient’ location we had arranged for the guy at the hostel to meet us at the station. After an hours wait at the station we decided it would be best to make our own way to the hostel. Not a great start. Having walked over an hour with the bags (bloody heavy bags), I was sure of two things. Firstly the hostel was truly inconvenient and secondly we had brought too much stuff. We arrived to find the hostel locked with only a telephone number in the window for guidance. Not much use considering we had told the guy we had no phone. It seemed to make sense to sit tight and wait for his return, if he hadn’t met us at the station surely he would return to the hostel to see if we had made it alone…

An hour and a half later and the -9°^C combined with a brutal Siberian wind was taking its toll despite a homemade bag fort and wearing all the layers we had. Near hypothermic Vi sought sanctuary in some sort of local government office from where we had the bright idea to use the governmental phone to ring the number from the hostel window.

Vi huddling from the cold

The guy turned up 20mins later with us trying our best not to be pissed off. The ‘hostel’ was essentially a one bed apartment with two bunk beds in the bedroom. It was occupied by the young guy who ran it and his middle aged cleaning lady/girlfriend. The guy in charge seemed pretty weird in most of the ways that it is possible to be weird. We definitely felt like we had come to spend a couple of nights in his flat and he did nothing to dispel this. He gave us a key to lock our room since our bags were in there but gave us a telling off for having locked our room when we went out. There were lots of questions about our jobs which ended in a pretty awkward conversation about what antidepressant I would recommend for depression. We told him our train out was at 7pm but he just said that check out was at 12pm and that we had better be gone by then.

Omsk, full of statues

This guy was working in the sewers but froze on his way out. Tragic really.

Walking down by the river in Omsk

Basically in Omsk we had a mooch around a few interesting statues, found a nice café that did decent food and spent as much time as possible there whilst trying not to look like we were actually homeless.

Omsk can be seen in about 6hrs, the rest of our time was spent in this awesome cafe. Great coffee and russian food!

We had an uneventful overnight train journey to Tomsk where the hostel was thankfully actually very hostelly with lots of Russian PhD students staying there. Finding the hostel was a little difficult again though. We had an address that was 55/56 Lenin St. We found Lenin St but the buildings went from 54 to 60 with no intervening numbers- it was also pretty confusing that a building could have both an odd and even number since they are generally on opposite sides of the street. We trudged down a back street and found a group of apartment buildings, one of which was labelled 56. No sign of 55, no hostel sign and no idea where the hostel was. All the apartment buildings were accessed by a key door code and we didn’t know any codes. Eventually ben hit upon the genius idea of tapping ‘55’ into the door code of the second access door for building 56. ‘Da, Hostel 8?’ was the answer. 8 floors of carrying 30 kilos of stuff each and we were finally safe from the cold!

Miss a days snow clearing and its bye bye car for winter

Photos can't show you the wind. Strong!

Tomsk is a beautiful town with loads of traditional ‘lacy’ wooden architecture. Essentially in Siberia until the middle of the 20^th Century (yes, I do mean way after 1900) buildings were gable roofed block buildings made of interwoven massive logs. These were embellished by adding beautiful wooden carvings all around the windows, gutters and gable ends- some of which are truly spectacular. We had a lovely day wandering around and then went back home for a chill out. We were sharing a 4 bed dorm with a Russian brother and sister who were both students at the Tomsk University. Turns out the brother found out that day that he had passed his viva for his PhD in Siberian Aboriginal history and was in the mood to celebrate. There were no shot glasses to be had so we were all given half a teacupful of cognac for starters which rapidly progressed to vodka. Many toasts to PhDs, international friendship, Russian vodka and other things that we didn’t know what we were toasting but toasted anyway were had. Ben and I tried to eat between toasts. We tried to drink water between toasts. All to no avail. Drinking half teacupfuls of vodka at 15 minute intervals was only ever going to have one outcome. We woke up some time later feeling a little fragile.

Pretty wooden church on the hill in centre of Tomsk

Peacock house, Tomsk. Great example of Siberian wooden Lace architecture.

Wooden buildings seem prone to fire and collapse if Tomsk is anything to go by.

Luckily for us that night we were getting an overnight 3^rd class train to Krasnoyarsk. This was unfortunately possibly the worst train ride yet and purely because of one passenger in particular. We thought we were in luck when we got on and found that we were sharing our compartment with an elderly lady, her relative (?daughter) and some other random woman. We thought that she would just settle down, go to sleep and we would have a peaceful night. Turns out that particular babushka can talk for Russia. We were treated to a monologue which started at 11pm and lasted a full 45 minutes with no interruptions during which her relative fell asleep sat upright and the other passenger stared fixedly out of the window. She then tied a plastic bag around each foot and wrapped a tea towel around her head, bandanna style (no idea why) and settled for the night. Or so we thought. Roughly every 30 minutes she would sit up, hawk up a gob of phlegm loudly enough to wake you up despite earplugs and spit it into a tissue on the table next to our water and breakfast. We didn’t really sleep, or want breakfast. Arrived in Krasnoyarsk in a decidedly bad mood- which was a shame since we had had such a lovely time in Tomsk.

Prime example of russian racism. Get it??