Grand Avenue Hotel Yekaterinburg

... I should have mentioned one other highlight in Moscow: the metro stations. They are veritable treasure houses with marble floors, ornate wall panels and cornicing and imposing statues dotted at strategic points. All impeccably clean!<br><br>Overnight on a train is a bit like a night in a rolling hotel but you might think that a day or two could seem like a life sentence. However, the time really does fly past and you are not ...

... she had to queue at length to try and buy the meagre rations in stock in the shops. While corruption is endemic and public money mismanaged, at least she gets paid a reasonable wage now, allowing her to live in a comfortable home with her daughter and to choose what to eat knowing she has the means to buy it.<br><br>I could have stayed and talked much longer but I had another train to catch... this time for three nights until my next day stop in Irkutsk.

... so not far. It is also partly due to Nikolai's style of driving. We roar down the streets of Ekaterinburg listening to Russian house music, which Nikolai insists on telling me about. "Do you listen to Russian music?" he asks. I say we don't have it in Canada, and I send up a quick prayer. Please let me survive this day, I think as we speed past slower-moving Ladas and zip around corners. Most of the time, I don't expect us to make ...

... am?" he asks wearily. I hate this question. If you answer too low, people get offended. If you answer too high, they think you're rude. I'm terrible at guessing ages at the best of times, and we've been sitting in the dark for most of our conversation. I honestly have no idea, and tell him as much, although, judging from everything he told me, I would say somewhere a little older than myself. His startling green eyes lock with mine. "Twenty."<br><br ...

... but this time Damian offered to help - I'm so glad because it was a nightmare! We queued for ages to be told that we had to put a senders address on there. We explained that we didn't live here but they insisted so I put the details of the hostel. Then we queued again to be told that overseas mail was in a different building (she had already been told it was going to the UK but obviously didn't care about the first time. While we queued tow other had a screaming match at ...

... German slant to his English he got to us before we Left! Maybe he is himself a relic of Soviet Russia, brewed his whole life to be slotted inside the German Military. Now with the Soviet breakup, his only opportunity is as a German and English speaking guide. Another one of his favorite lines was, "by the vay, did you like that?" I was scared to answer in case he replied, 'good, now I vill kill you'. To his credit, he gave a very thorough information, incorporating facts and ...

... the pit is a covered boardwalk. Other churches are dedicated to key family icons or relics and there are some stories of miracles that have occurred at this Monastery since its construction. Thousands of pilgrims come to the Monastery but while we were there it was almost empty, except for parishioners at a service occurring in one of the churches. Later we headed through the city again to get to the Western Highway. We stopped at a run-down memorial that looked ...

... Europe border and see some very dodgy Russian Wedding Parties at the Aisa-Europe Border Line and various other locations around the city! We also discovered the unique taxi system in Y'Burg - you can literally flag down any car on the road and agree a price with the driver. Some stop, others don't! We ended up in some dodgy ladas with even ...

... get some sleep. The first trick was to find our carriage (wagon). It was #2 and it was either going to be at the front or the back of the train. As luck would have it, the first carriage we came to was #16. Damn, we were in for a long walk down the platform. Here's an absolutely unscientific opinion/observation on my part, Russian passenger trains are exceeded in length only by American freight trains. By the time we reached ...

... building armoury for Tsar Peter the Great. The Tsar's good friend, Nikita Demidov, owned the factory and is known as the founder of the mining and metallurgical industry in the Urals. When his son took over the reins twenty years later he ordered a church and a musical bell tower to be built next to the factory. Unfortunately the tower's foundations weren't laid correctly and the tower was destined to lean to one side, creating Russia's own ...