To Siberia

After leaving Elista on Monday, I traveled by bus back to Volgograd. I wanted to see the memorial to the Battle of Stalingrad, which includes a complex about three kilometers to the north of the central downtown area, as well as a set of memorials along the Volga River. I ended the day with dinner at Yelki-Palki, which is kind of like the Russian version of Sizzler, if Sizzler served Russian food. I’m in the process of creating another tour of the city, though the internet functionalities I have access to right now are a little limited.

After returning to Moscow early Tuesday, I flew out early Wednesday morning to Krasnoyarsk. Krasnoyarsk is a vibrant, youthful city located on the Yenisey River (one of the great Siberian Rivers, which Khrushchev had visions of reversing/diverting). It has a couple of main streets, named after Lenin and Marx respectively, and sandwiched between is Prospect Mir (which means peace), the main shopping strip for the city. The weather was improving (it has been a brutal winter even for Siberians, with temperature consistently at -40, leading to an increase in global warming doubters out here) and there were a number of people out during the day Wednesday. That night, I met Vadim, who lives in Krasnoyarsk and works at the local branch of Sberbank (Russia’s oldest, since 1841) and is a friend of a friend in Boulder.

Thursday night, I got my first taste of a long-distance Russian train trip, riding the rails from Krasnoyarsk to the historic city of Irkutsk. I traveled platskart (third-, or ‘hard’, class), and rode with a soldier returning home from western Siberia for his mother’s funeral (Sergey) and a university student from the city of Perm, in European Russia (Maxim). Sergey was particularly interested that I was an American, I think because he had never met one. I traded him a tee-shirt from a local burrito joint in Boulder, Santiago’s, for a belt and a military scarf. The shirt was a couple sizes too big, but he wasn’t deterred. Max spoke some English, and had worked as a life guard in Atlantic City on the Jersey Shore. He is going back this summer with his girlfriend. He is a big fan of Zenit, which is based in St. Petersburg and is one of Russia’s premier soccer teams; they won the UEFA Cup in 2008.

After a good 18 hours on the train, we arrived in Irkutsk. I snapped a photo of the sunrise from our compartment.