Sunday - First we went back to the museum as it was the public opening of an exhibition by a now superfamous Buryat jeweller and artist. Then I met up with Tania to tour the nearby wooden building museum. Actually it's interesting to see that in the centre of town there are so many old wooden buildings preserved. Usually these are in a bad state of repair and poor people live in them. Of course in a capitalist country the pressure of city centre high land values would have meant they would have been torn down years ago to make space for new shops or banks. Rain and cold 10C which people said was very cold for summer. So even though the log cabin buildings were nice I didn't take any photos. The settlers and deported people 100-150 years ago built log cabins centred around a brick fireblock, children slept above it. They also built log churches. Meanwhile the Buryat had evolved from the Mongol yurt to a kind of log cabin yurt. There were also other races one of which built tipis like the American Indians.

Photos outside 1 Me and Carl 2 Sasha/Petr/Me

Carl introduced me to Kvass populary referred to as the Russian Cocal Cola it's a malt drink like English beer before it ferments sold from barrels on street corners in the mornings .

Monday .. as well as Russian constitution day it was the UU 340th anniversary day. There was a street parade with every company, group, organisation you could think of e.g. local BMX boys. I swear there were more people in the parade than in the crowd.

I could see that modern culture still has large parts of the old Soviet culture in it. It was interesting to see so many people dressed up in traditional Buryat costume, and there was of Buryat singing.

Buying a train ticket is difficult even for Russians, but Petr has a lot of experience so it was much easier for him, so he was a great help. The Monday night train was full and even though one is supposed to register with immigration if you stay more than 3 days in onetown I decided to take a Tuesday night train. It's a pity there are such strong visa regulations in CIS. I had met good people and would have liked to have stayed in town longer, but there was always pressure on me to move on in order to reach the European border before my visa expired.

Siberia is mostly empty forest, but UU is suddenly a large city as the soviet government chose to put aeroplane and train factories there. So it's actually pretty big there are endless basic concrete apartment blocks to hose half a million people. Downtown is slowly getting more developed with some new shops etc. One of the benefits of capitalism is that they now have gambling machines in the streets.
I met up with Tania and gave a special guest lecture at her English class. Later Carl, Petr and I went to a Mongolian restaurant. I tried the Mongolian tea with horse milk reputed to be awful which wasn't bad.
If it had not been raining I might have visited the Buryat village of Ivolga. I really regret not doing this. I'm not interested in seeing another temple, but I wanted to see some Buryat culture; as it appears in the town Russian culture dominated Buryat. I had seen Buryat dancing in the parade, but everything else and all school and TV appeared to be in Russian language.