On the way back to the hotel we only found dark and desert streets. Really time to sleep. Once in our beds, the phone rang a couple of times and, while the person on the other side only spoke Russian, we understood that she was offering us some kind “extra room services”. Funny, in Russia, and especially in these remote places, certain habits will never disappear.

Besides all the cloppete cloppete on the dark streets and the very lound music coming from an empty bar in the park, the city was quite dead. At least, we couldn’t find a better place than an almost empty pizzeria near the park where they actually served us an excelled pizza with no mozzarella(it was finished).

There he is. Stil alive. In the wind, watching the rising sun from the East while holding the left fist. Perfect statue. I thought you could only find them in museums or in Belarus. Just wondering why it was left here…

If in the early morning we were struck by the silence of the forest, in the afternoon the silence was broken by something that cannot pass unnoticed from St Petersburg to Vladivostok even to a distracted traveller: the ubiquitous sound of “cloppete cloppete” produced by the high hills of the Russian women who are constantly trotting up and down the big avenues while wearing their extremely short and provocative mini-skirts… This definitely scored as cultural shock number one.

Jetlagged + no sleep last night…

We spent the night on the plane. It was actually a very short night due to the time difference. But we are finally arrived in Novosibirsk, Siberia. Really a different place than Sp. It’s cold, humid and foggy. It’s also very silent here. It’s very early morning, about 6 am, yet it’s like if all the sounds have suddenly softened from the noisy Sp. There is the huge Siberian forest, taiga, around us. That must be reason for such a silence. We don’t say a word like the other passengers and silently we walk to an old soviet construction that looks like the terminal of the airport.