It was freaking hard to get up to catch the elektrichka on Sunday morning (departed 4:30, getting up at 3:00 after pub-tour until 2:00). But i managed, the only thing i forgot is to piss when i am near the station to some tree, because the ride is over 5 hours long and on elektrichkas there is no toilet. But before leaving Jana's flat i did piss, so it was just very hard to keep it until Izhevsk, not impossible.
In Izhevsk i locked my bags and wanted to play the typical tourist. But it failed very fast: in the train station there is no map, the center is kilometres away, and the sights (which i supposed, exist) are not marked. So the only thing i could do was to take a tram which's driver babushka answered "da" for the one-world question "centr?". It would have been very hard to recognize when do we reach the center, if one station did not have it in its name. There is a small hill with 3-4 nice churches, but mostly nothing else. I went to the lake, that's nice just like every lake, but this one is sorrounded by factories. I don't say i can't appreciate industrial towns, but i have seen many nicer industrial towns so far.
I ate blin, that was good. But mostly just walking around a park and killing the time. But finally - can't remember why - i put Izhevsk on my imaginal list of towns worth having a fridge magnet of, and bought one at the train station. Maybe bacause they are our relatives, or because that girl on the train was so happy to meet a Hungarian. So, viva la Udmurt - Hungarian friendship! (hosting football world cup together, maybe …)
The train ride to Yekaterinburg started nicely (the train was almost empty so i could sleep on two seats, even if it was not a normal platskart train), continued badly (an annoying fat babushka had the place next to mine), then became ok (i exchanged my place when a relative of the babushka got on and had a remote place), and ended quite nicely (i slept a lot, and made 3 teas for myself in the morning).
Upon arrival, being 4 hours late (between Izhevsk and Yekat there is 2 hours time difference, but not in the direction what i thought …) i went directly to the university, where some welcome instructions were given us, payed the fee, did the placement text (there will be only two groups (coz only 12 students), so for me it was not a question in which group i will be), result is tomorrow. There are some people who can speak russian just they want to improve. So most probably they will make one group up.
For the lunch we haven't tried the student canteen, but tomorrow we should, because the alternatives' value-price ratio is not so good.
In the afternoon, we had 3 hours walking sightseeing tour, it was a but too long, but nice. Yekat is a nice city (maybe second after Kazan so far), but i will probably write about it later.
The other people in the course are approx. my age, and the following nationalities: hu, gr, it, at, fr, rs, us, tr. They are all nice poeple, some of them are even more kind then the others (not so surprisingly …).
Only one very strange thing remain for today: the student dormitory. Now i really feel like a journalist, to who the best is shown but his job is to write about the mean. So: our accommodation is in a student dormitory, but its amazing: euro windows, clean, tidy, modern rooms, no unwanted animals, new furniture, new doors. So, we are either very lucky (0% change) or Masha and Julia (organizers) did a great job to get the best places for us in town. And in appreciation for their job, and because i haven't seen other "regular" rooms so far, i don't write how most rooms look like. And discourage you reader from imagining it without proper information available!
Tomorrow the teaching starts, next post is about this probably and about Yekat.
Technical info: i have russian sim card from now on until i am in Yekat (it's relative to Sverdlovsk oblast, anywhere else it's same expensive as using the Hungarian one), i will be mostly accassabile via this, and not the Hungarian. You can see the number on the left sidebar.
