Weather cloudy and mild with heavy rain in the early evening. Spent the morning walking around the sights of Yekaterinburg with our personal guide Anna, a 20 year-old undergraduate who is doing a 5-year degree in tourism. Not many sights to see here, so after lunch we spent the afternoon exploring the city centre and picking up a few items of shopping. Yekaterinburg is an industrial city situated in a mining area and is infamous (in Russia at least) as the place where the Romanov royal family were murdered by the communists in 1918.
Today is our first full day in Yekaterinburg. Our guide, Anna, spoke very good English but her guiding skills needed a bit of fine tuning as we got the impression she struggled to fill the 3 hours that were allotted to our orientation walking tour. Although I suspect that there are not a huge number of sights to see here apart from the church that was build seven years ago to commemorate the murder of the royal family, the university, the local government building, main shopping area and a few museums. We visited one of the latter – the rock museum – which is a collection of crystals, polish stones, fossils and shells and is much more interesting than it sounds.
This is a pleasant city of 1.5m people. It is clean with a mix of historic, Soviet and post-Soviet architecture and very wide streets. It has a huge lake in the very heart of the city created during the time of Peter the Great when the river was dammed to provide power for the hammers used to extract iron ore. As in St Petersburg and Moscow there is much work going on to renovate neglected buildings as well as the building of new apartment blocks.
We spent the afternoon wandering around the shopping area picking up a few bits and pieces. Many shops display goods in glass cabinets labelled with a description and price. To make a purchase you go the service till and request the item from stock. Difficult for us without any Russian. We have had to resort to copying out the description on a piece of paper and handing it to the sales assistant.
We’ve found that Russians don’t often smile when they greet or serve you, which makes them seem unapproachable and morose. Today we discovered from from our guide, that the reason for this is that they consider it foolish to smile without reason. This may explain some of the blank responses we receive when we smile at people.
Going back to the difficulty of ordering in bars and restaurants (see earlier post) we tried ordering two beers off the Russian menu in a rather trendy bar in St Petersburg. We found the beer section on the menu and pointed to two different beers – or so we thought. It wasn’t until the order arrived that we discovered that we had actually ordered one beer and a bowl of peanuts!