Church upon the Blood rises over Yekaterinburg’s City Pond

Frolicking around the lovely and lively City Pond

After a long day (and night) of travel we landed in Yekaterinburg yesterday. That means we have left Siberia and are now in the Ural region, which straddles the continents of Asia and Europe. Yekaterinburg is on the Asian side of the Ural mountains, making this our last stop before we cross into Europe.

Yekaterinburg was truly the last stop for the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family. After our arrival here yesterday afternoon,  we visited the Church upon the Blood, which was built to commemorate the spot where the family was massacred with rifles and bayonets in a basement in 1918. We also visited an exhibition of watercolors by Nicholas’ sister, the Grand Duchess Olga, who escaped just before the revolution and spent most of her life in Denmark. Her work was prolific and quite impressive.

Then we spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the lovely City Pond (seems more like a lake) at the center of the city. What a pleasant city! Today we plan to visit a spot on the European/Asian ‘border’ and get some kind of an awesome ‘standing on two continents’ kind of photo.

Church upon the Blood

Yesterday was another train day — a 13-hour run from Krasnoyarsk to Novosibirsk. Because it was another non-overnight stretch, we opted again for second-class and once again got lucky with a cabin to ourselves.

Now seems like a good time to mention the train ‘conductor,’ who plays a big role in your daily life aboard the Trans Siberian. Each car has its own conductor, a ‘provodnitsa’ in Russian, who keeps things moving along. She is typically a robust woman, past middle age, with a stern countenance. She opens and closes the doors at stops, checks your tickets, issues blankets and sheets, keeps the toilets (relatively) clean, and keeps her eye on everything. We are generally afraid of her.

You can also get a male ‘provodnets,’ but that s rare. Yesterday’s surprise was that most of the conductors on this train were surprisingly young women who did not fit the mold at all. They actually smiled a bit and seemed more approachable. Initially, I foolishly thought this seemed like a good thing.

Our last couple stops were off the beaten path a bit.  While most non-Russian tourists stop at Lake Baikal and a couple other places, not so many stop in Krasnoyarsk or Novosibirsk. On this train between those two stops, we in fact never encountered a single person who was discernibly not Russian. Our car was also very family-oriented. By that I mean there were a half dozen children who greatly enjoyed running up and down the hallway and making lots of noise. The only time I saw children start to get so rambunctious on a previous train, the provodnitsa materialized instantly and shut it down fast. I missed her today.

From Novosibirsk we are going to take a side trip to Tomsk, traveling there today by minibus. Meanwhile, here are a couple quick shots from Novosibirsk in Western Siberia, Russia’s third largest city.

Interesting architecture mix in Novosibirsk

Lilacs are just coming into full bloom in mid June

Nobody does Big Sculpture like the Communists did

Our hotel, the Novosibirsk, is actually nicer than its outward Soviet-style appearance would suggest

We have landed in the East Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk after another 18-hour haul on the Trans Siberian. We boarded the train in Irkutsk at 6:30 a.m. and stayed on until our arrival here at 11:07 p.m. I hate arriving places at night, so it helped that in these long Siberian June days there is still a little light around 11 p.m.

The highlight of the day’s journey was meeting our next-door cabin neighbors, Tiffany and Damien. They are doing some traveling after living in Beijing for seven years, though she is from the San Francisco Bay area and he is from Antibes, France. Damien does mostly field work in anthropology and archeology, while Tiffany has her own practice in art acquisition, increasingly focused on contemporary Chinese art. They will be returning to China later this summer. By bizarre coincidence Tiffany has recently applied for a job at the M+ museum in Hong Kong, where she met our friend Lars, who is the director. Sometimes, even on a train in Eastern Siberia, it is a strangely small world.

They taught us to play a fun French card game called “Tarot,” which uses a deck of cards that includes all the regular cards (with French names like “roi” for “king”) plus an additional face card in each suit (the “valet”), plus 21 special Tarot cards, numbered 1 through 21, and something like a joker that is called “l’excuse.” We spent a good few hours learning and playing. Tiffany won the first game, really crushing Jim and me. I was actually leading the second game when we decided to call it quits for the evening.

Tiffany, Jim, and Damien after hours of playing “Tarot”

On previous stretches of the Trans Siberian railway, we have opted to spring for the first class car, meaning that we have a private cabin for two, which is pretty nice for sleeping at night. Since this wasn’t an overnight stretch we decided to save some dinero and take a chance in a second class car, meaning you are in a cabin for four people. On the plus side, you save money, and there is always a chance you’ll meet interesting people. On the minus side, you lose some comfort, you might worry about your stuff if you sleep, and of course you never know who you’ll get as coach mates, or what kind of mess they’ll make, snoring they’ll do, or smelly food they’ll eat.

We hit the jackpot, since our two extra seats (like many on the train that day) remained unoccupied the whole day. In the next-door cabin Damien and Tiffany weren’t so lucky. They roomed with a middle-age local guy, who, frankly, had some serious B.O. issues. (I’d heard about this problem, but did not fully appreciate it until I passed by him once in the hallway. It was bad.) And he lay across one side on the cabin sleeping for vast stretches of the day. No wonder they were so eager to hang out in our cabin and teach novices to play Tarot!

After spending a day as tourists in Krasnoyarsk today, we’ll do another, somewhat shorter, full day ride tomorrow to Novosibirsk. We’ll board early in the morning again, but this time we’ll arrive in the early evening after only 13 hours. Once again, we’re gambling on the second class compartment. Let’s hope for the best.