Y burg, day 3

After a long night, Sonia’s Alarm went off at 8:30. We shut that off quick enough. I slept another hour and then woke Sonia up at 10 because we wanted to meet Sveta at 1 at the Boris Yeltsin Center. While she was fixing here breakfast, Iran down to Burger King and got a quick breakfast sandwich. By this time, Sveta had texted and said she couldn’t make it, so we packed up all our stuff, took it down to reception and left it there because we had to check out, and took off for the tourist office. I wasn’t sure if it would be open because May 1 is such a big holiday here. But it was and we gave the lady here thank you chocolates. One big difference we noticed between Yekaterinburg and Kazan is that a lot more people in Y burg speak English and all the tourist signs are posted in English as well as in Russian. And another thing that really impresses me abou5 Y burg is the architecture. a lot of old buidings from two centuries ago are nicely preserved, but the newest buildings are very, very attractive. I didn’t see a lot of old Soviet style cement clumps. Many of the the new buildings have very original designs and are very colorful. We took off for the Yeltsin Center and enjoyed the fakt that traffic had been shut down on most streets because of the May 1 Labor Day rallies. There were lots of speeches, lots of balloons, and just lots of people out enjoying the nice weather on scooters, by bike and on foot. Talk about an attractive building! The Boris YeltsinCente4 was completed 3 or 4 years ago. It houses a conference center, offices, stores, the Yeltsin Museum and and interactive section where kids and adults could do everything from learning to inline skate to making origami. It was a great place. The museum itself was very interesting and Shed a light of light on that period of Russian history for me. We spent three hours there! It was totally absorbing. We grabbed a bite to eat there at the museum then left to follow the red tourist line on the street which takes you past the church built on the site of the old mansion where the czar and his family were assassinated. Every year, on the anniversary of the deaths, the people hold a procession and walk the four hours from the church to Ganina Yama, the pit where the bodies were originally buried. It’s just so interesting to me that they would make all the family members saints. Now it was about 6 and we had to pick up our luggage at the hotel at 8, so what to do? We decided on a “Tour de Fast Food”. We were both dying for MacDonald’s ice cream, but we needed something hardier in our stomachs before the ice cream. So we hit KFC, where we had hot dogs. (So-so) Then we went to MacDonald’s and really enjoyed the ice cream (two thumbs up). And we decided to go to Subway after that to get a sandwich to take along in the train.(good idea) So back to the hotel we went, picked up the luggage, and took off for the train station. We got there at about 8 so we had about 2.5 hours to kill. I got a lot of reading done and we ate the sandwiches before we even got on the train. (I suspected that would happen.) We got to the train and, what a surprise, Sveta came to see us off. We had about a half hour to talk. She’s just a very pleasant person and I can’t wait to see here in Kazan sometime. We share a compartment with two middle-aged guys who didn’t speak any English. We basically just made up our bunks and went straight to bed. It wasn’t a very restful sleep, but it was sleep.