Kazan is the greatest place ever. Next to Siberia.

I do not love Western Russia. It isn't Siberia. I might have already said this earlier, but I think Siberia is the Midwest of Russia. I love it.

I also STILL have trouble believing that there are cities bigger than Irkutsk in Russia. I think I've just hung around Lake Baikal for too long. Kazan is also a large city, with more than 3 main streets. Before I get into Kazan I need to talk about the rest of Yekaterinburg and getting OUT of Yekaterinburg.

So we went to the Regional Studies Museum, which was really more like a bunch of old things from Russia/Yekaterinburg put in a bunch of rooms with no real order to them. My favorite was the gigantic piece of wood from the bridge/platoon(?) they rebuilt like 10 years ago. Or maybe the very new looking iron patio set with the fake ivy and the iron garden gnomes was better. The people there also made sure that we went through "in order", although I'm not particularly sure what the order was.

Most of the people in the museums were nice. Most of the people in the train station were not.

So we gathered all of our stuff onto the train which took a ridiculous amount of effort and all kinds of people were snickering at us, to which I responded with large amounts of glaring. We were quite displeased to find we had a roommate (and were more displeased as the night progressed...more to follow), but he helped us store our gigantic suitcases so that was nice of him. BUT red flags for me-he almost immediately referred to us as "ты", which most Russians haven't done EVEN though we were clearly younger (we're still adults), and he was speaking in maternii (Russian's "swearing" language, I think it's much stronger and cruder than anything we have in English). He made sure to pull out his bottles of alcohol at the beginning of the trip (we're talking 2 PM Moscow time/4 PM Yekaterinburg time). We IMMEDIATELY decided that we're going to have to come up with some reason as to why we couldn't drink, and decided that religion would be the best option. So we told him we were Mormans. The only downside, is then he (and his brother/friend? who joined our compartment to drink) began to ask a lot of questions, which we didn't know the answer to. So we sort of formulated our own religion where we don't drink alcohol at all or do anything, really. They, of course, were RELENTLESS in trying to get us to drink with them, which we wouldn't, and got REALLY annoying. They also kept forcing food/tea on us, more on Ivan and Joseph than on me (maybe they realized that I was really quite irritated?), and doing other such annoying things. Such as asking me when I was going to eat. I replied with some sort of "How should I know, I don't have any sort of set SCHEDULE for meals, I'll eat when I'm hungry", which I think ended up working because he stopped hassling me about it.

But anyway they drank A LOT and talked A LOT (many words in maternii, I noticed, and about women in general...there were probably 4 or 5 toasts "to Natasha"), and kept trying to get us to go to sleep. At 5:30 PM. I realize this was probably an irrational fear, but I couldn't figure out WHY else he would try to get us to go to sleep so early-but I thought maybe he was trying to get us to go to sleep so he could steal something. I don't know. He didn't right off the bat strike me as a criminal, but then again, it's very possible, and this was CLEARLY not an honest/decent person. The most alarming was when he and his brother/friend decided that they wanted to get off the train earlier than their stop in order to accompany us to Kazan. Which was definitely not okay. Anyway, he passed out at like 6:30, so we layed down to go to sleep, but there was some pretty awful music playing that we couldn't turn off, which made it difficult. Then again, normal people don't go to sleep at, like, 7. Anyway he requested that we wake him up when we get up so he could accompany us. Obviously we weren't going to do this so we gathered our things as quietly as we could, and even managed to drag Ivan's suitcase out from under this guy's bed, but at some point we banged something and he woke up. But he just asked for his man-purse and went back to sleep, which was a HUGE relief.

So we dragged all of our stuff off the train, again, and tried to call our hotel, whose number had been suddenly disconnected. So Ivan walked to the hotel closest to the train station and found that it was a good hotel with not bad prices. We only paid for a double though, because Joseph didn't want to pay for a double and a single so we each had a bed, saying he'd sleep on the floor, which sort of turned out to be a problem (as I knew it would be). Anyway, it was a HUGE relief to be able leave all of our stuff in a locked room and take a shower.

Then we went to the Kremlin, which was AWESOME. I wasn't really believing what everyone said, that Kazan was a a really beautiful city, but that's probably because our window had a view of the train tracks. Anyway, so Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan. 57% of the city is Tatar, so a lot of the signs are in both Tatarskii (how do you say that in English?) and Russian. The city had its 1000th birthday in 2005, so they built this gigantic and GORGEOUS mosque in the middle of the Kremlin. They also have a Russian Orthodox Cathedral which is SO amazing. Like, icons everywhere, just...SO pretty. I can't even begin to describe it. So we walked around for awhile, saw a bunch of administrative buildings, went to the cathedral, saw the president's house, visited an art museum, etc. We went to a cafe for lunch and had pizza, while they played techno remixes of techno songs. Like, how does that happen? They choose the already techno-y songs and THEN remix them. Like, for example, "Like a Record" or "Barbie Girl". My favorite was the techno remix to the x-files theme song.

So then it was getting late, and we decided we'd see the Regional Museum of Tatarstan tomorrow (so we'd have longer than 45 mins, it should be REALLY interesting). We're also going to see the Museum of Islam tomorrow because it was closed today.

We went to a WW2 memorial museum which was REALLY interesting. I think History museums are in general really interesting, but it's cool to see them from a different country's perspective. Like, WW2 had such a greater impact on Russia than it did on us that it's sort of hard to even imagine. Like, the United States is a really powerful country and has been an important part of both world wars, but in each case we didn't really come in until the very end. And we didn't have the actual war on our land. Whereas Russia has been completely devastated (I'm talking specifically about world wars, not just throughout history in general, which is also very true). I think I find myself defending Russia more and more (and I think I already did that before I came here, I got called out during a history discussion once for doing that). But, I mean, MAN. The two papers I wrote this semester were about Americans on Baikal during the Russian Civil War, and Russia's international relations in between World Wars. I could go on and on about this but I won't because it probably isn't interesting, but things have really sucked for Russia. I can't really say that it isn't the country's fault, because a lot of it is, and I think it's going to take a LONG time to pull Russia together. But anyway, even the posters and newspapers were interesting to read. One of the "go to war and fight for your country" posters said "Kill a German-if you don't kill him, he'll kill you" which I thought was incredibly...well, I don't know. Did we have that kind of propaganda? I don't think so. I think I'm just used to the "defend your country" or "fight for your homeland" or "fight against (insert political regime here)". But just flat-out "go kill Germans"? whoa.

There were a lot of Germans in Irkutsk, and a lot in Russia in general I think, so it's nice to see that they've patched things up.

I hope people know that I'm not always serious on this blog and use a lot of sarcasm, so I'm not really as airhead as I seem.

So then we wandered trying to find this cafe that had a reputation for good and cheap blini. Which doesn't seem to exist anymore, so clearly it couldn't have been that good of a cafe. So I said I saw a cafe with a Julius Meinl sign, and they usually have good tea, so I said we should go there. Except then I didn't order tea, and Ivan and I ordered not very good blini, and this guy next to us started smoking this awful cigar and then some other guy came and it seemed that they were doing very important and illegal business transactions, so I'd say on the whole the experience was not so great. But then we walked back to the hotel and stopped in McDonald's, which is much like McDonald's in America. They even just write the names of everything instead of translating them. A chicken sandwich is not a "kuritznoi buterbrod" but a "chicken sandvich". It was a very trendy place too, very Chipotle mixed with Starbucks mixed with McDonald's feel. And now they have things with raspberries. Which means that, on the whole, was a positive experience.

I'll write more later. I'm really tired.