Irkutsk

We spent Monday 30^th in Irkutsk. While our hotel is quite good, it still has examples of the service that has made the reputation of the Russian hotel industry. We arrived for breakfast at about 9am, well before closing time of 10 am. It was a good thing that we wouldn’t have liked most of the hot food on offer – nonetheless, the empty rank of bain-maries made an impressive sight. We had what looked like scrambled eggs (but which turned out to be creamed rice), rice and a thing described as boiled sausage. Luckily, it only took two requests and 10 minutes to get two cups so that we could have a cup of tea.

Restored Russian Orthdox cathedral shows a new interest in religion

We went off exploring on our own. The town is 350 years old, a milestone that will be celebrated in June or September or whenever the preparations are complete, Irkutsk was (and remains) a major centre of Siberian trade and this prominence, along with a gold rush in the 1800’s, resulted in a prosperous city with distinctive wooden houses, some impressive buildings and pleasant parks. Apparently, all this is limited to the city centre, with the suburbs being the usual displays of Soviet style.



There are a number of old churches, though what was apparently the largest and best was destroyed on Stalin’s orders to allow the construction of a concrete carbuncle as Communist Party headquarters (used now by the Regional Administration).



Streetscape on Karl Mark St.



The city centre has a wide selection of shops and evidences an interest in fashion and reasonable prosperity. Women are well dressed, including the obligatory tall heels. Certainly the city feels much larger, richer and better maintained than Vladivostok, though the latter may actually have a larger population. Most cars are Japanese and are typically imported as used cars (thereby having a right-hand driver’s seat). Even though a good salary here is 15,000 rbl/month (about $500 a month), some citizens obviously are quite wealthy, given that we saw some new Lexus, Mercedes and Range Rover 4WDs.

Lunch was at the Sneginka on the main street (Karl Marx St.). The restaurant has some ornate decoration, but the food and the service were good. We had a few glasses of the restaurant’s house wine, which was reasonable and unidentified.

Katya met us for a walking tour. In large part, this covered much of the ground that we had previously explored, though it did fill in a few gaps about the city. We discovered that Irkutsk is a something of a university town, with 15 universities attracting students from across Siberia. The other revelation was that water is heated at a central (coal-fired) utility and piped to all homes as the source of heating and domestic hot water, at a cost of about $30 a month per home.

Dinner was at a restaurant in the Hotel Angara. The interior was arranged as a sequence of rooms, each of which was a wooden Siberian house. The muzak was terribly, but the food was good. Our wine tour continued – this time with a Chilean chardonnay, The white wine was served at room temperature, which seems the norm here. Russian wine remained elusive.