Irkutsk - Snow!!!

Snow, snow everywhere!!! We woke up in Listvyanka to a winter wonderland.  Whilst this was a sight to behold it put paid to our plans to go on the hydrofoil because it was tricky enough to see the lake, let along see across it.  So we decided to head into Irkutsk a little earlier than planned.

This involved hiking our stuff down a steep, snowy, slippery slope to wait for a minibus which would hopefully take us into Irkutsk and we stood in the snow and waited . . and waited . . and waited . . and politely declined a lift from three Russian teenage men in a Lada . . . and eventually the minibus turned up and took us on what can only be described as a hair raising journey into Irkutsk.

It’s fair to say that spirits were a little low as we navigated from the bus station to the train station via different trams in the snow.  We were cold, not entirely sure where we were and the views of the city from the tram was not awe inspiring at all.  However once we had dropped off our bags at the station and defrosted our toes slightly we set off to discover the Paris of Siberia.

In light of our flagging spirits lunch was definitely in order and yet again we fell back on the guide book which took us to a lovely café in the centre of the town.  Whilst we were slightly perturbed by the lengthy Russian menu, our Rusglish got us through once more.  One of the things which has impressed us throughout this trip is just how helpful the Russian people can be, although this is often still with Scary Soviet Face!

We were now in the previously unseen centre of the town and were finally starting to get an appreciation of Irkutsk.  It’s got a really European feeling which apparently is a result of the European Russian royalty who were exiled here in the 1820s (the Decemberists).  There are many old wooden buildings which have beautiful wooden lace architrave and we saw several of these on our way to the Volkonsky House Museum – Volkonsky was a Decemberist.

As is key in cold climates, we developed the tack of not leaving a warm place before planning where we were going next and where the next warm stop would be . . . so we stopped for coffee in Lenin Street Coffee purely because of the irony of the blatant Starbucks rip off!

It also fitted in nicely with our next attempt at photographing ourselves with Lenin.  Please note that the snow, which had been falling all day, had decided to increase it’s speed and size of flakes at this point – didn’t give us a huge amount of trial and error time!

OK, so I know we didn't actually manage to get Lenin in this one but it was either this photo or a photo with Fern's forehead, Alice's eye and a Lenin smudge - did we mention that it was snowing heavily at this point?!!

After a quick walk to look at the theatre, we grabbed some canteen style dinner before heading back to the station to hopefully get some space in one of the resting rooms so that we could get some sleep before getting back on the train at 4:50. 

The resting rooms were apparently full. We gestured to the pay by the hour waiting room with large comfortable sofas. This was also apparently not possible, despite being empty. We attempted to ask why in our limited Russian. Another lady was asked to join in, our original one clearly having thrown her hands up in despair at these idiot tourists who can’t speak the language.  A small sofa was shown to us – better than nothing we thought and nodded. We were taken back downstairs.

A-ha we thought, this is where we have to pay (Russia not being short on unnecessary process), we promptly did so but we did not go back upstairs as expected, we were walked across the station, a random door was opened to a room that was striking in its greenness. Green walls, green carpet and green sofas (with integrated tables in the arms). In fact we had managed to negotiate our own private resting room, in another part of the station. We’ll never know how, but it meant we could get a few hours sleep before heading out into the snow once more to get our next train.