Yekaterinburg

Two things I forgot to mention about the train. We passed frozen lakes where guys were still out there ice fishing! The other thing is, if you want tea in your compartment, you go to the conductor and pay for a tea bag (45 rubles) and sugar if you need it(5 rubles). You have to remember to ask for a glass. Then the conductor fills up your glass from a big kettle, similar to a samovar, of hot water and you go back to your compartment and drink it. You can save the tea bag and go back to get hot water as often as you want, without paying.
So, Sonia has a friend whose sister lives here. She met Us at the train station and took us to our hotel, right in the middle of the pedestrian zone. Even in nasty, rainy, windy weather, the pedestrian zone is FULL of people spending money on all the shops. Take note of this, Rochester. It is the future for viable city life! The hotel is a nice, quiet little hostel downstairs with private rooms upstairs. We have a small little room. We hear no traffic, we have two beds, WiFi and a TV. And a bathroom. What more could we want. The friend, Sveta , got us tickets for a jazz concert tomorrow night and then we headed to a place called Fork And Spoon for lunch. It was a nice little cafeteria right around the corner from our hotel where we really ate well. The three of us ate three courses with drinks for less that $15  for all of us. Then we just started walking around the downtown area. Sveta pointed out monuments and gave us a little history of the place. Then she had to leave us to get off to work (she teaches linguistics and rhetoric at the university.) and we started heading back to see if we good find a paper map of Y burg. We stopped at the book store and found a brochure in English that we got. But we also checked on google and saw that there was a tourist office right around the corner of the hotel which was open today until 5, in spite of the fact that it was Sunday.
We went in and, lo and behold, not only did the young lady speak English very well, but she also spoke Spanish. She gave us lots of good tips about what to do. So it looks like we will start tomorrow morning by taking the elevator up to the 52nd floor of the tallest building in Y burg and checking out the view. Then, although we are technically now in Asia, we are going to grab a taxi to the demarcation line of Asia and Europe about 10 miles west of us. On the way back, we want to hit the monastery where the last of the Romanov family were originally buried. This was the czar who, with his family, was assassinated when the revolution came. Then we’ll  just come back and chill out until concert time.
Right now we’re just resting in the room before we go out to get something to eat. Then we will probably sack out. It’s better sleeping in a bed in a hotel than in a bunk on the train.