Moskovskaya Gorka Hotel Yekaterinburg

... the city scream Gucci! Dior! Fendi! YSL! The GUM building - an incredible glass-roofed shopping arcade (particularly breath-taking to see illustrated in fairy lights at night) which was once a covered market then torn down as a health hazard, reconstructed and nationalised after the revolution - is now a place for the worship of obscenely over-priced western fashion labels and the most extreme extravagance.<br><br>In stark contrast, metro subways ...

... depositing my pack in left luggage till my 22.55 departure, I shuffled into the welcoming waiting room, planning on a couple more hours of sleep, only to find out that use of the room is charged at 1.50 euro an hour! It wasn't that I couldn't afford it, it was the principle of the matter that bothered me, but having breifly stepped back out into the gusty main hall, I opted to cough-up and then spread myself out for some shut-eye.<br><br ...

... The city is known by its Soviet name for rail purposes: Sverdlovsk, named for the local Bolshevik responsible for orchestrating the Romanov massacre.<br> <br><br>We took a taxi out to a monument on the side of the motorway that marks the bona fide geological line where the European and Asian continents meet. Good for a photo but not much else to do there so we went to Ekaterinburg's Central Park and enjoyed a walk through ...

... the minute he entered the compartment, there was sadness. I don't know how somebody could live carrying this feeling with them everywhere. It was actually palpable, and made me want to pull an Anna Karenina-style ending. After talking to him for a while, I later drew the conclusion that he was somebody who is desperate to understand his lot in life and be understood by others. He told me he prefers to take the train rather than fly, because it gives ...

... and as the birth place of Boris Yeltsin. Today, Yekaterinburg is Russia's 5th largest city and there is clearly a lot of money and development here and there were lots of impressive new building around, with many more parts under construction. The feel was quite young and optimistic and the city itself was quite quirky - some of the sights included a monument to the invisible man and an 'inspiration bench' which is supposed to inspire you to write poetry. As well as a general ...

... is an artist who has had her work shown across the world and we got to see some for free right in her house. It was very good and she has a unique style and paints some interesting thing like children's dreams about getting a cat, people dreaming about flying and some Russian mythological characters and animals. Lunch was excellent as I think Andrei used to be a professional chef (or at least that's what we think they told us); we had cold Russian vegetable soup, Russian tuna salad ...

... a controversial 148 million roubles. We went inside, after Louise first had to don a head scarf and ghastly flowery skirt. The church was full of golden icons and its internal decoration may have cost as much as the construction. We first went to the lower part of the church where there was a small alcove, representing the basement and execution site. The alcove had a crucifix and high roof from which came the beautiful sounds of a choir - as there was a service ...

... me straddling the borderline (Alex refused to straddle and is instead photographed merely standing on the line). Thus at one time I had my right gonad in Asia and my Left in Europe. It sounds painful, but it really was alright. We were lucky enough to receive a certificate confirming our straddling of the continents which will take pride-of-place under some newspapers or the back of a toilet door or somewhere like that. Next stop Irkutsk.

... point where Boris Yeltsin - then the mayor of Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg's Soviet-era name) - had the house demolished in order to prevent any royalist sympathizers from popping up in the area. As the world now knows though, the bodies have since been located, exhumed and reburied in St. Petersburg. On top of that, the Russian Orthodox has gone on to actually canonize the whole family as saints, thus officially recognizing their holy martrydom under ...

... were curled up at the edges, the rooms were furnished with a small assortment of furniture that probably dated back to the mid 60's. In our room there were two choices of bed. The first had a wooden frame with a mattress about an inch thick. It was as hard as a rock. The second bed, and the one I was destined for, had a sturdy wooden frame where a metal mesh material, accompanied by a slightly thicker mattress, attached at either ends of the ...