One of the big surprises of these days was that after asking 4 people on the street, a clear 3-1 result of the answered shown that we are in Asia, not in Europe. The one was probably drunk or not local. So Yekaterinburg is in Asia. Today we went to the border between Asia and Europe, which is 14kms from the city just not eastwards as we supposed, but westwards, on Moskovsky trakt. The monument is not so huge (surprisingly small given that we are in Russia), but - no surprise - they are planning an enormous one over the highway. So we should come back in '18 for the finishing of it.
I did my first - unsuccessful - intercontinental hitchhiking, from Asia to Europe, but nobody stopped. Anyway, i will remember for it :) (picture comes)
The lessons are not easy - the unilinguality makes them difficult, you (theoretically) cannot ask anything in english, which makes even asking something freaking difficult in some cases. But most people like this -modern- method, it's more interesting and it's probably fast (we will see at the end, how far we went).
I'm proceeding ok, just the word endings i almost never manage to find correctly, maybe later.
In the past days it was very difficult to get internet access, as in the university they don't give us access to computer rooms (the guy who is responsible for that is on holiday ... quite typical reason in Russia), and internet cafes are dying out as everybody has internet at home. There are only two internet cafes, but they are not on the way and they are expensive. Now we could get into a computer room with temporary accounts, hopefully this is not the only time for it.
In the weekend we will go on a trip to the countryside, it will probably be interesting. Also, probably there is going to be a football match between some locals and us, if we manage to organize it. As we are in Russia, we don't have many names to choose from: "Dinamo", "Zenit", "Spartak", "Lokomotiv", "CSKA", and approximately that's it :)
I also need internet to plan my way "home", which won't mean home in this case as (contrary to the original plans) i will go to Finland for an IT summer uni after this course. So the route will be Yekat-Moscow-Minsk-Vilnius-Tallinn-Helsinki-Vieruma:ki, not Yekat-Moscow-Minsk-Brest-Warsaw-Budapest. It needs a lot of planning as this route only exists in a form of a world map in my mind, not in form of timetables or even roads or rails. Also, i will have around 3 days to kill somewhere (if i don't want to stay in Moscow for so long, as i don't want), so if i find some cheap alternative (maybe Smolensk, or who knows).
We also wanted to go to do some hiking in the Urals, but there are two problems with it: the smaller is that it's an industrial region (Uralmash, ...), and it's not prepared for tourism. The bigger one is that despite the fact that Yekaterinburg is "the capital of Urals", the real mountains are (Russian say very near) very far from here, like 300-400kms. We can act like Russians and say that it's very near, but still we cannot go there for a day trip as we will sit more in the elektrichka then hike. So we have to find sthg out, probably for the next weekend, not this one.
Special section about distances:
In russia, the adjectives for distances are a bit different from what we use in Europe. In Europe, we say that Berlin is "far" from Budapest (1000kms). In Russia, Kazan is near Yekaterinburg (1100kms), it's just a train far (understand: the train does the trip in one night). In Europe, we say that Vienna is no so near to Budapest (240kms), and you can go by train or bus or car (or flight). In russia, Chelyabinsk is "very near" to Yekaterinburg (220kms), you don't even have to take a train ("just" elektrichka).
In Hungary, in Budapest if at 4pm you are thinking about what to do, you will most likely not find out to jump to Szolnok (100kms). In Russia, in Kazan at 4pm our host was thinking about where to drive, and finally we went to Siyazhsk, which was 90km from Kazan. And when we suggested to do it tomorrow, she said the magic "it's very near".
In Russia, Irkutsk is "far" from Kazan, you even need to pack food for the train ride (!) because it's 50 (!) hours. But it's ok to do it once a month (somebody said it who used to live there and is from Kazan, and sometimes visited back). In Europe, nobody takes the train for journeys longer then 24 hours.
In Russia, if you say you are going abroad, you will leave the CIS countries (RU, BY, UA, LV, LT, EE, ...). If somebody tells u that they have never been abroad (it can happen ...), then don't be surprised when they start talking about their holidays in Kiev or in Riga or even in Mongolia.
Similar with the sizes of settlements: according to the english terminology, they only call settlements "cities" if they are over 1 million. Under one million, it's town, and under 100 000 it's village. Really. (and of course from "villages", people commute to the nearest "city")
Next post is probably about the trip to countryside.
