Dear Mom and Dad,
Another city has come and gone and I don’t know if I’m numbing to the constant newness of every day or I’m just physically exhausted, or perhaps a combination of the two, but I don’t really know what happened in Novosibirsk.
I guess I’ll start, as is tradition, with the train ride there.
As of now, Krasnoyarsk stands alone at the top of my list of cities visited thus far on the Trans-Siberian, so I was almost a little reluctant to leave, despite my continuously growing desire to get back to Petersburg and lock myself in my apartment for a week. But my evening train was pulling out of the station, so it was time to move on.
All the trains I have taken have been with separate tickets and, usually, different trains on different routes. That is, I started on the Vlad-Mosc train, but have since not been on it, but on other trains running different routes that happened to suit my needs of the day. In fact, all of them had previously either continued on after my stop, started before, or both. However, as I travelled from Krasnoyarsk to Novosibirsk, I had apparently purchased a ticket for a train that only ran between these two cities. I’m really amazed I haven’t mixed anything up at this point with all the different tickets and hostels and Airbnbs. Time yet remains though. I immediately noted the differences, if slight, in the interior of the train; most notably, it was equipped with wifi. An added bonus came when no one else joined me in my compartment. And I thought it was nice having one end of the open compartment cars to myself…
So I arrived in Novosibirsk at 8am, at which point, to my surprise, my landlord told me she could let me into the apartment at 8:45. As the size of the cities has been progressively growing the farther west I go, my apartment was a good 8km from the train station. Here I was forced to break from my habit of strictly on-foot exploration and descended into the metro. Novosibirsk is one of seven cities in Russia with a metro. Though while Moscow and Petersburg have several different lines in their metros, Novosibirsk’s features but two. The metro here is also only a few meters down, whereas in Moscow and especially Petersburg, you descend several minutes on the escalator. I paid my 22 rubles and shot across the Ob River as the metro traverses the waterway from above. As I approached the address of my apartment for the evening, I noted the several different corpuses with the same building address and tried to find the correct entryway. Russian addresses always feature a building number followed by an apartment number. However, they might also include the corpus number and/or the entryway number. Here I had building number 67 followed by 153. As neither corpus contained so many apartments, I assumed it was either entryway 1, apartment 53 or corpus 1, apartment 53. As the first entryway of building 1 did not go to 53 apartments, I assumed it must be corpus 1 apartment 53, at which point the landlord arrived to tell me she had listed the wrong apartment. So much thought, all for aught. She told me to get in her car and she’d take me to a nicer apartment since she had messed up. Wary of jumping into a stranger’s car in a strange city somewhere in Siberia, I decided I could rag-doll the middle-aged woman if push came to shove, so I hopped in, much obliged.
True to her word, she took me to a very nice apartment on the 16th floor of a high-rise with an unobstructed view of the Ob from its left bank. The “central region” of the city is located on the right side of the river, which cuts a vertical line through the city. But I was just a few minutes from the metro and the bridge across the river, so I was more than pleased. I then went down to the store, bought some things to make a decent meal, made a decent meal, then went out to explore, though I would have been just as happy to sit and stare out the window. I knew, however, that you all eagerly await my juicy posts about the shades of gray of Russia’s interior, so I was off to the city. For you.
My first destination was the waterfront on the right side of the river. Like in Krasnoyarsk, it had recently been renovated with new pavement and stonework, various art-objekty and has been kept meticulously clean. As I walked across the bridge to get to said waterfront, I noted how low the water level was, exposing much of the bed closer to the shores. I later found out that upriver there is a large hydroelectric dam. Perhaps this relatively clean source of energy has kept the water likewise relatively free of pollution and allowed for the city beach on the river’s left bank. Or perhaps people swim in filth. The beach, however, was visibly clean.
The waterfront then led on to Red Avenue, the city’s Main Street – the longest straight street in the world I was told. This was especially impressive, as on my way to Krasnoyarsk, I overheard one of my compartment mates telling the rest that his village features the longest street in the world. Non-straight one must assume. From there I saw the largest theater building in the whole country (!), with Lenin & co. standing watch out front, the largest shopping center in all of Europe (I was literally told all of this…) and a collage of more or less unremarkable streets and structures. Novosibirsk, the unofficial capital of Siberia, but the actual capital of the similarly named oblast’ and the third largest city in Russia, doesn’t feature much topographical variety, so there were no good natural vantage points to be exploited here.
The next day was much of the same before boarding the train, which I am now on, in the afternoon to my second to last stop, Yekaterinburg. I’ll have right at 24 hours there, then my last stop before Petersburg, Nizhny (literally Lower) Novgorod (literally New City), where I’ll be staying at a friend’s apartment. I’ll arrive back in Petersburg on the morning of the tenth. I already know the sensation that awaits me at the end. It can best be summed up I think by the saying about the fall of the Soviet Union: how no one thought it would end until it was over or something like that. I can’t recall at the moment. But I know it’s the one.
My stop is approaching so I’d better go,
Alex
Comments