This post is about the city where i live for this time with Julia. Julia lives here for 8 years so for her there is not much new here, but for me ...

The city lies along the main transport routes from Moscow to the far east, including the Trans-Siberian railroad, the Baikal-Amur Railroad and highways. For this two main railway lines this is the biggest junction. Railway trainsport is very popular in Russia, flights are expensive and roads are relatively poor compared to Europe. So Yekaterinburg is 1700kms away from Moscow and 4000-5000 from the far east of Russia. It is the capital of Sverdlovsk region. sverdlovsk region (oblast) is twice bigger then Hungary, and has a population of 4.3 million. It is considered to be one of the most industrial regions on the world, there is a lot of heavy industry here (Metallurgy, car and truck manufacture, railroad and wagon manufacture, mining machine manufacture, power plants, etc.).

Yekaterinburg is quite old, it was founded in the 18th century. Now it is the 4th largest city in Russia, and the largest in the Urals region. Of course it earned most of it's population during the soviet times, most people in the city live in panel buildings called "Khrushchyovka" after the party leader in whose times most of these were built. Of course there are also panel buildings built later, but small houses with garden are very uncommon sight here.

Sinie kamni, the small district where we live with Julia, also features only high panel buildings, mostly 10-storey ones. It is actually called "micro-district", not district, because it is small, it only has four bus stations, no tram no trolleybus. I could say everything is walking distance from everything, but actually there is nothing ...

Next to the post you can see some pictures what I took in and around sinie kamni. You can see the trans siberian railroad passing next to the micro-district. Also, some parts of the buildings are supposed to be blue, that's why it is called "blue stones", but it's not that visible even "live" :)

Yesterday finally we got internet at home, but it seems that these buildings are not designed for having network in them (which is a bit surprising, coz telephone was invented in 1876 already ... so the cables are everywhere, not just in the flats but in the corridor as well. And next to the elevator in comfortable shoulder-height, our cable has an extension, so anyone bored while waiting for the elevator can easily unplug our internet ... or what is even worse: take the extension cable ... hopefully they won't. Today it moved a little bit in the morning, and internet stopped until i moved  the extension back to normal position, somebody might touch it with shoulder ...

Later this week I will write a bit about winter and sports and wintersports.