Enzo's BLOG -

Day 6 and 7: Omsk

The train track between Yekaterinburg and Omsk was not very spectacular. Siberia is very flat, there is no hill, no valley nothing. When you look out of the train window, you all most get excised when you see something else than trees and grass and trees and grass and… Oh look over there are some birds!!!! Anyway, we made half of the track at night and had a good sleep.

Omsk is the second largest city in Siberia with app. 1.5 million….. ask wiki pedia.

I found Omsk very nice. It cannot compete with Yekaterinburg but it has its own charm. To walk along the river on an amazing hot autumn day (28°C) made us feel like, walking along the beaches at the Riviera in Italy at autumn. Have a rest in one of the two nice restaurants along the river trail and enjoy a delicious Cappuccino. Do some sightseeing in the late afternoon and having dinner at the best restaurant of the city along the river coast. Yes I would like to say Omsk made me a nice day.

Unfortunately the next day should not be so splendid. We were trying to find a museum for two hours. We walked the streets up and town, around the block and all the small backstreets in between but finally we had to confess our self that we had failed the mission. So we decided to forget the stupid museum and spend our self an award for the long senseless searching. So we went in to the next nice café called Tinto and had a cheese cake and a café.

Day 5: Yekaterinburg

Those who think that Russian cities are full of cold gray block buildings will be disappointed of Yekaterinburg. The city has a rich heritage and leaves the impression of an upcoming metropolis.  We had a nice day there and now I’m tiered so this blog will end here.

Day 4: Moscow-Yekaterinburg

To be 24 hours on the train is not as boring as it sounds. When you travel you always have something to do; read the guidebook, sort out the photos and rename them after the places they were made, or write a blog. And besides, sometimes the train stops and you can get off the train and take some pictures. The landscape along the track is not always very interesting. Sometimes you drive for hours through deep woods ranged with swamp and steppe. The villages we past look very poor and many of the houses seemed to be derelict.

I was very disappointed when we crossed the Ural range. I always thought the Ural would be a big mountain range like the Alps in Europe but I was wrong. The Ural is a wide range but not very high. The highest point is below 2000m and the train track reaches only 500m above sea level. The landscape doesn’t change too much; you don’t see summits or gorges. So you don’t have much of a feeling crossing the mountain.

Day 3: Moscow and the Train

For our last day we did have lot to-dos on our list. So we decided to visit the second hand market at the Ismailowski Vernisage. We toke the metro and it was again a grad pleasure to see the nice metro stations of Moscow. The market was now very crowdie, but it was nice to see all the interesting things they sell there. My mother had a funny negotiation with one of the market seller there. The old lady couldn’t speak a word English so my mother turned to speak Italian. She said to have the negotiation in Italian reminds here at the market seller in Italy.

Afterward we toke our luggage from the hotel and walked to the train station. We were one hour earlier there to make sure that we find the right platform. To be honest it wasn’t a big deal, things are the same in Russia then everywhere else in the world. You enter the station hall, there is a big panel where all trains are listed with departure time and platform. So you just have to walk to the right platform. To get on the right wagon was the same easy. All the wagons have boards in one of the windows on which the number of the wagon is. Our conductor was not that easy, she was not in a good mood and I’d like to say good mood is something that woman doesn’t know. But that couldn’t bring us down. We had booked business class, so we even got the dinner deserved in the cabin.

Day 2: The Kremlin

After a good breakfast we were ready for a city walk. We toke the Metro to the Kremlin, from where we walked the few meters to the Puschkin Theater. No question, that white building with its big pillars is really stunning. Afterward we were heading to the red square. Unfortunately more than half of the red square was barred and a big stands were blocking the nice view on the Kremlin.

Finally it was time to visit the main attraction of Moscow, the Kremlin. And to be honest, it was a little bit of a challenge to get in the Kremlin. Our guide book mentioned it not with a single word that there is a main entrance at the Alexanders Park. So we were struggling around for more than an hour until we found the gate. But it wasn’t done yet, we had to buy a ticket for the Kremlin. Thanks god the ticked office was close by and easy to find. Now the Kremlin inside has some very nice churches and it was great to have a walk around.

The last attraction of that day was the Arbat, a nice road with street cafes and a wide range of different street artists. We enjoyed the flair and had a relaxing café and cake with some doves at the Starbucks.