The Terrible Travellers: Trans-Siberian (Yekaterinburg Day-2)

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to you guys, wherever you may be. For us it is good evening, the night before our next train journey. Yekaterinburg to Krasnoyarsk, literally crossing from Europe to Asia and entertaining Siberia.
But first some photographs from today. We'd like to start with some street art as this city seems to be quite interesting. This first one is my personal favourite, when I saw it in the distance I became embarrassingly excited! Justified in my eyes as it was just so good to see.

Some history about Yekaterinburg, or Sverdlovsk as it was formally known. The area is well known for it's heavy industry. During WW2, arms manufacture was moved away from the Western border for obvious reasons. And during the Cold War, Soviet era, it was an important centre for nuclear research and production. A lot of cities in the area were designated 'closed cities' and not featured on any maps. Thankfully when the Soviet era ended, most of these cities were opened again, although from what we have read, some still exist.
Some of this heavy industry still shows itself in the city.

Before Soviet times, when Russia had a monarchy, the last Tsar, Nicholas II and his family were taken to this city and murdered. This ushered in the Bolshevik Revolution.

The city overall, it has to be said is quite dull, we have maybe been spoiled after being overwhelmed by the beauty and atmosphere of Moscow and St Petersburg. Some nice little quirky things though.

Eva on a climbing wall.

Cool statue.

The air pollution here is quite bad and makes it hard to enjoy walking around. So as promised in the last blog entry, we returned to the restaurant we had found and this time got pictures!

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