It rained all night and was still raining this morning when we got up for breakfast at 10am. How nice to have a lie in for a change! Today we have a free day – nothing to do but please ourselves. So we are catching up on our blog in the local hotel. Today we had our second banyah of the stay. A banyah is a sauna and is housed in a log cabin in the garden of the homestay. Our host stokes up the wood fire that heats the stove ready for our banyah at 7pm. Many homes apparently only have a banyah for washing, unlike ours which has a shower as well. After enjoying the sauna we wash in an adjacent room, drawing hot water from the stove and mixing it with cold water in a tin bowls to douse ourselves. The water runs off through holes in the wooden floor. All good fun and a very invigorating, if novel, way to get clean. Eggs again for dinner!
We have found that the there is wi-fi in the local hotel at 150 roubles for an hour but in fact once logged on it’s possible to use it indefinitely. So we spend about three hours loading pictures and bringing our posts up to date. After dinner we go back to the hotel for a drink and to load the remaining pictures (it takes a long time!) and bump into two Peters who we’d come across briefly on the train from Yekaterinburg. It turns out that one is Irish and works in the Irish Consulate in Moscow and the other is from Sunderland, ex-BBC Radio Cornwall and also based in Moscow working for the English language TV programme ‘Russia Today’. We sit drinking vodka with them until 3 in the morning.