A few days in Yekaterinburg

Arriving as usual in the early morning, we continued the theme of heading roughly toward the city center. We were told by the hostel not to check in until noon. Given that we had no idea where it was, it was generally accepted that we should wander for a while to kill time and then maybe take a taxi once we were tired.

Again we saw the night turn into early sunrise, and again we were mystified that absolutely nothing was open around six in the morning. No 24-hour cafes, diners, grocery stores, anything. It was clear that this city was much larger and richer than Irkutsk, with a small collection of actual skyscrapers creating a skyline over the river.

Eventually we found a little pastry shop that had just opened. Quite hungry by now, we became early and valuable customers, staying and resting perhaps a bit more than necessary. I was excited by the presence of a particular Georgian cheese pastry known as khachapuri. I went to a wonderful Georgian restaurant last summer in Budapest, and I've wanted to visit the country for years. Sadly the pastries in the shop were too cold and too salty to remind me of the ones I'd had before.

Our hostel was a bit hard to find, but once there we got into our shared 12-person dorm and dropped our luggage next to the very creaky bunk beds. There was a woman in the staircase later who was very skillfully painting someone's portrait. Seeing our interest, her friends told her спроси! спроси! - ask! ask! She hesitantly posed the question: would we like to sit for oil portraits so she could practice for art school? Would we! We made plans to meet the next morning.

I didn't realize how hard it was to be a model. I got pretty chilly in the shade and regretted choosing an awkward, twisting three-quarter angle. We talked about art and artists, and how the low rent in Yekaterinburg made it easier than other Russian cities to live and paint. She enjoyed portraits and had even hitched around Russia with a friend to do portraits of strangers in other places. Soon she switched to Auberon's painting and I was happy to stretch my legs, wander and explore.

The city was, as expected, much larger than Irkutsk. It had a younger energy too, with lots of young students seen walking around or working in cafes. Many sculptures in a sort of caricature style, mostly unlabeled, dotted the streets. There was a big pedestrian walkway near a super-sized mall and shopping center, where street performers pounded acoustic guitars to Russian pop melodies.

Breaking with our tradition of wandering through malls and buying nothing, I got myself some new shoes and a lovely shirt. My shoes were new around April, but walking hundreds of miles over the previous two months had taken its toll and they were now toast. In Asia I saw many great shirts capitalizing on the popularity of English, with no regard at all paid to the actual content of the words. Nonsense was common, and near-nonsense veered into hilarity. In Russia these were less common but I think the shirt I got fits the theme well: "University & National Sport Team."

I used to be much more into photography, especially older film methods. Back home I have twenty or so older cameras and a small library of photography books. I was thus glad to find a little museum of photography with art gallery on the second floor. I always get a little bit more inspired when I see works by other artists. The main exhibit seemed to be about Central Asian villages in the Soviet Union, though the captions were all in Russian. Auberon identified with a note written in Spanish in the visitor's book: "Nice pictures. I don't understand any Russian at all. It's very hard to get by."

In my solo wanderings I found a great library. They gave me a Russian ID card, which I will certainly use to pretend to be a foreign student in the future, and let me loose in the languages section. Auberon and I had been contemplating the physics of a central fountain in a square, and as he put it, that conversation scratched an intellectual itch but only made it worse. So we bought notebooks and went back to the library together, where I read about languages and teaching theories and he read about physics and computer science. It was a great library and we both shared with the other what we'd learned after it closed.

Then we went to Moscow.

When we stay in hostels I'm much more likely to take my actual camera with me, so not too much ends up easily postable from the phone. Thus all I can offer is the inside of the library and me in my new shirt next to an array of plastic-wrapped shopping carts.