We have no plan for our first few hours in Russia and no place to stay, so we leave our bags at the left luggage office and wander downtown. As always, the area around the train station is pretty grim - warehouses, overhead wires, rundown brick buildings, and not much of a pedestrian area. It doesn't feel dangerous at this time of day, merely neglected, and after a 15 minute walk we reach the town's more scenic main square, which is actually a rectangle. At one side is Ulan Ude's former pride: the world's largest Lenin's head. We stop to get a photo.
"I think they're pretty safe with that record now," says Pierre: not too many new Lenin heads going up anymore. Ulan Ude's version is slightly cross-eyed and is big enough to dwarf an adult. The locals who pass by us on the sidewalk barely notice it.
The hotels in town are busy today, though we don't see many tourists around, and the prices are generally 50 to 70% higher than the guidebook suggests. We hope this isn't a hint of what we're to expect price-wise in the rest of Russia. In the end, we settle on a fairly central, fairly cheap hotel in the southwest part of town, near an outdoor market. The room is on a half-renovated floor. When we walk to the communal toilet (not yet renovated) at the end of the hall, we pass by the older rooms, airing out after their cleanings. The white walls are chipped and graying. In contrast, our room is neat and freshly painted with a sink in one corner. From our window, we can see down towards the market, and down onto the streetside kiosks that sell cigarettes, beer and hot snacks. The pay showers (thankfully, renovated) are down the hall and for 2.50$ CAN per person you get all the hot water you can stand once the water finally works its way from the basement up to the third floor.
The key to the shower is held by the floor monitor/concierge that the Russians call a dezhurnaya/дежурная (from the French term de jour?). She is also our main source for boiled water and new towels. By the front door there is a guard reading a paper who registers us in his guest log the first time we head out into the city.
The center of Ulan Ude is small and a bit run down, but still beautiful and very different from what we've seen in the rest of Asia. Many of the older residential buildings are made of dark stained wood planks with carved wooden lattices framing the windows. The foundations of most buildings are no longer level, with many buildings either tipping down into the dirt on one end or warping in the middle near the sidewalks. We wander around for a few hours before deciding to find something to eat.
We decide to head into a "zakusuchnaya" (закусочная). The word is on signs almost every few houses in our part of the city - the word doesn't ring a bell from my first trip but I know it translates into something like "snack shop." We head into one one of them - a small gate in the fence leads to a short mud path that leads into what looks like someone's private kitchen. At first I'm not sure if we're in the right place.
We poke our heads in and I ask a passing woman "Can we?"
She nods. "Of course, of course," and waves us through to the dining room. The room is painted robin's egg blue from ceiling to floor, with plastic blue table cloths over mismatched tables. Some tables have benches, others have wooden chairs. A fly strip hangs in the middle of the room. From a menu taped to the table by the cash I order us two bowls of beef noodle soup. When we take a seat we discover that each meal also comes with all the fresh baked bread you can handle.
We wander out again. At one point, while Pierre is (re)taking a photo, I go into a grocery store to kill time. When I meet up with him again I show him our travel buddy for the day: a round loaf of bread that works out to about 40 cents. It's roughly the size of a cantaloupe. We have a bite and instantly realize that it's been 10 months since our last real loaf of bread. Fresh whole wheat bread. Pierre is glowing.
Later on the same street, while Pierre is taking a photo, a man pops his head out of a window - he's heard us speaking English and is curious. "Where are you from?" We tell him and he leans onto the window sill and makes himself comfortable. His name is Victor, he looks to be in about his 50s or 60s, and used to work as a school teacher. The building he leaning out of at the moment is under renovation - we're not quite clear on what he's doing there or if he's one of the workers. He talks a bit about his background (Buryat), the building's history (someone famous lived in it once) and Princess Diana (because of my name). Another worker passes by and says something to him - it seems to be his signal to go back to work. He says goodbye and disappears back into the building. Later on we pass him again on the street and chat again for a few minutes.
Day 279 is rainy, so we make a few trips to the store for supplies and explore another corner of our neighbourhood. Nearby is a Russian Orthodox church where we are treated to the first onion domes of our trip.
The rain falls sporadically and the streets are still flooded with last night's rainfall. We make running jumps over puddles to make it dry to the other side. One of Pierre's jumps meets a slippery end, so we make a pit stop to patch up his scraped hand with disinfectant and bandaids. We head to a nearby pharmacy to replenish our supply of portable swabs of rubbing alcohol.
At the pharmacy we enter into a situation which is common of the next weeks of our trip: myself and my dictionary acting the role of interpreter/communicator for our little group of two. To Pierre, it is as though the Russian version of Shakespeare is flowing from my lips. In reality, it's often more like this:
"Hello. Please help us. I do not know the name of the thing we seek. It is small and square and when you have a hurt, you can open and do this [mime wiping wound] to clean. Do you know this thing? Do you have them?"
Functional, yes - it's gets us the swabs we need - but not much finesse.
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