Tomsk Hotels - Reviews and Rates

On the evening of January the 4th, a disastrous one for me, I'd worked to show my guest a good time. After all, she'd called ME, saying she wanted to come over to translate into Russian one of my stories about Tomsk, because she'd liked it so much. But, with her new relationship with Pavel secretly in the works, she closed herself off to me in e...

Siberians like to converse an awful lot. Too much, if you ask me. It's a relief when they just sing and dance. In mid-December, they and I danced the Moscovian "kadril", a pretty cool dance. At the "Bal Puteshestnikov" (Travelers' Ball), on the second floor of the train station (above the trains), elegantly-dressed people looked out the window d...

Although singing isn't one of my favorite things to do (at this time), I was looking forward to the "Enjoy English Songs" competition on December 18th. Tomskunkian high schoolers would be singing; not I, thank god. I would be the "zure" (a judge). And, since we've already established that I'm a statistics-loving dork, and I love competitions, I ...

The last story should've been called, "Two More Walks and a Hop around Tomsk." Now that I'm living in a spacious, wooden house in the center of town, I walk almost everywhere I go. I try to dress sufficiently warmly. A week ago, in fact, I walked for forty minutes home from basketball, with wet hair, and I was perfectly warm. I'd put my hair in ...

Sitting happily in my dark, wooden house last week, in the room that reminds me of a kitchen, at a desk, I finished Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot." This old book has drawings of 19th Century Peterburgians on its thick spine, and the square letters of the Russian alphabet are convenient for a serious and straight-forward story-telling. The nove...

While residing in my scary, wooden house, I hear two of DDT's Russian rock songs ringing in my mind. They're off the band's creative 1992 album, "Eto Vse". (The album's title song is probably my new favorite song.) In the third song, "Chetire Okna" (Four Windows), Yuri Shevchuk sings deeply, darkly, with a hollow-souled tone. In such a way, he r...

Exactly one week after deciding to prolong my stay in Tomsk, I was in the underground rock bar kissed by the sun. My tall, mildly-hunched body and the small, sly body of clever Nastia pranced elegantly together. The innocent lead singer of "Mega Mix Blues", wearing the multi-colored shirt of a Tennessee cowboy, grimaced as he recited psychedelic...

(alternatively titled: "Absolute chaos") Having a good place to work is important. So ... I was already working in a university in September, when I walked into a high school, trying to add a less-serious teaching job to my schedule. "Nam nuzno nastrannats," they said. (We need a foreigner.) It seemed like a strange thing to say. ... I had a new...

Although some of "you", the readers, my beloved queens and princes for whom I'd do anything you wanted, even give you the stars to wear -- although some of you didn't like it when I wrote, not long ago, that "you" had decided to hitchhike to Siberia (when, in actuality, it was I), I'm going to once again write using the second-person narrative. ...

I only had a day in Tomsk - I hopped off one train in the morning, and had another to catch that evening, so only had time for a quick look around. Tomsk is an old Siberian town, off the main Trans-Siberian line. The main thing that attracts travellers is the architecture - most of the town is still made up of traditional wooden houses. I'd seen...