After Yekaterinburg we came up over the Ural mountains and therefore crossed from Asia to Europe and towns became more common I met a friendly family on the train, like most people they had another 20 hours to travel Moscow.

Kazan is the capital of the independent Republic of Tatarstan, which is rich from oil. I didn't arrive in town till 2pm and when Ruslan came to meet me I found the Tatar festival had finished the day before !

I was staying with HCer Ruslan who kindly showed me a round town including the rebuilt Kremlin etc. He is a final year geology student who will go back to his home town to work in the oil industry. He rents a whole small flat to himself. We met this interesting guy on the bus who was selling this book he wrote

Mon - After travelling since Thursday night I needed a calm day. We went to change money which took ages as usual, then back to the Kremlin (walled area of the old city) to see the museum and the shiny new mosque (not as big as ones in Malaysia), Most Tatar people are Muslims, which is a surprise cos it's not so far from Moscow. Then to the Volga River which flows thro the middle of the city. It's like a sea: there are beaches and cruise ships travelling 1000s of Km from Moscow to the Caspian sea. To get to Ruslan's we had to cross 1Km long bridges. His neigbourhood was different a kind of communist Las Vegas : a wide highway strip with concrete apartment blocks and shoppoing malls stretching for many kilometres. The stores were new, but apartment buildings had the normal run down lifts and corridors. But it did seem that as I was getting nearer to Europe/Mosow there was more money and development around.