Above: Beautiful wooden lattice-work adorn some Siberian homes.
Tatiana prepared a nice breakfast for us, comprising sausage, egg, bread and a sweet. We prepared for Eugene’s pickup which had been indicated as 0930 to 1000. But he turned up at 1045 in an old van for some reason and we had to wait for another vehicle. A Swiss woman joined us for the ride to Irkutsk, where we had arrived yesterday. It is one of the larger Siberian cities.
At Irkutsk We put up at the Intourist Hotel (also known as the Baikal Hotel) opposite the railway station. We rested briefly before exploring town on foot. We ended up in a pedestrian mall near the market and department store. We grabbed a lunch at a fast food cafe, feeding ourselves with pizza, sausage, vegetables, cake and tea.
We wandered around the market hall. It reminded me of Melbourne’s Victoria Market with stalls of meat, fruit, vegetables, cold cuts, smoked fish and flowers. The flowers were nice and I did wonder where they had come from as the weather here didn’t look warm enough.
We made a stop at an internet cafe to check our emails. We were interested in whether Kim’s or our money had been found at the Mongolian Hotel. No such luck but I had heard from one of my agents Rachel McNaughton that I had a renewal back for my old job at Telecom! Woohoo!
We explored off the main street a little. Some of the wooden houses had beautiful lattice work. With clouds getting black and a little drizzle, we walked back. Closed to the hotel, the weather cleared up. My comment about the weather clearing up for some strange reason, drew a bad reaction from Kim. He got all grumpy.
For dinner, we returned to our lunch place. We had a satisfying meal of pizza, borscht soup and lasagne. Taking a different route going and returning, we saw new sights like the circus and different houses. People in some areas didn’t have tap water and pumped for water by hand from the roadside.