Having awoken to a beautiful sunrise, our 32 hour train journey ended in Irkutsk at 08:20 on Friday. Now we’ve visited several Russian cities, we expected Irkutsk to look similar. However, on walking out of the train station, we realised that Irkutsk looks far less like a European city than those further west. We took a taxi to our hostel, and we’re surprised by just how crazy the drivers of Irkutsk are during rush hour.
After walking around the city watching the market stalls set up for the day, a very helpful woman in the tourist information office pointed us in the direction of 130 Kvartal, an area of new wooden restaurants & bars plus a modern shopping mall. On the way there, we passed the bronze statue of a babr with a sable in its jaws, which, according to Lonely Planet, “features on the Irkutsk municipal coat of arms”. As none of the restaurants looked open, breakfast was found at the food court in the mall. We ordered ‘kasha’, which translates as porridge. My guess is that it was rice pudding with butter, and was rather good.
Kasha consumed, we took trolleybus 7 to the Angara icebreaker museum. The ship was on our list of things we definitely wanted to see while in Russia, as it was built by Sir V.G. Armstrong and Co. in Newcastle, where our journey began. Although the exhibition was entirely in Russian, we’re really pleased we visited. More info can be found about the Angara at http://www.irkutsk.org/fed/icebraker.html.
After lunch in an Irish-themed bar named Harat’s (Fionnuala didn’t even get a free Guinness!), we walked back to the hostel, passing several of Irkutsk’s sites, including the Lenin statue, the university and puppet theatre. Back at the hostel, we showered for the first time in a while, Skyped family back home and did some planning for our trip to South Korea. Having packed our bags for Lake Baikal, it was time for some train-free sleep.
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