Omsk City : I walked around town and the museum etc and then met up with HCer Ivan who is an interesting character he's a trainee doctor who became fascinated by Japan , learnt Japanese and is going to finish his studies there. I had planned to take a night train onto Tyumen another medium sized town, but it was Friday night and the station was packed and the queues manic. So even with Ivan's help I couldn't get a ticket. I had to sleep at his house and take a morning train. He and his family were very kind.

The train was 3rd class seats, slow and cheap. At Tyumen the station was under reconstruction and everything was so confusing. I followed the sign to the toilets and ended up in a an underground shopping arcade, no toilets ..so I walked further and found myself on a platform. Eventually found the left luggage hidden in another tunnel. I walked around town found a good agency selling train tickets and got a ticket to Yekaterinburg.

Story : MISSED THE HIDDEN TRAIN When I went to get my train, the board said it was leaving from Platform 3, the platforms weren't signed, but I knew the first platform wouldn't be 3 so I used the bridge and climbed down the first steps. There were 2 trains neither of which were mine I ran back up the step and found for some strange reason the bridge spanned a platform without any steps going down to it, a train was leaving, but I couldn't get to it ! My platform was the one served by the tunnel.

CHASING THE TRAIN The platform staff were no help, the counters were jam packed with people, but I could see another train was leaving in 10 minutes, so in other countries all I have to do is get on and pay the difference if necessary, but this is Russia and the train conductors wouldn't let me on without the right ticket so I had to sneak on . Luckily Some building workers smuggled me into their compartment, which was OK for an hour until the conductress came she dragged me into a spare compartment and ranted on in Russian I knew she was saying I was in a 2nd class train with a 3rd class ticket, I couldn't explain to her that the reason why I was here was the stupid train company had hidden my train. All I had to do was offer more money, $5 was OK which first she accepted and then wanted more money. By then the train had stopped at a village and other people were getting off. I tried to get off, but the male conductor wouldn't let me, I had to trick past him. For some reason he was furious, but at least I was off.
The village station office told me my train would come in 10 minutes at 7.30pm cos according to the timetable the 2nd train had overtaken the train I should have been on. The clock already said 7.50pm .. turns out this clock was wrong and my train did arrive and I was able to take the seat I should have been on in the first place. GOT BACK TO MY TRAIN

view of a village from the railway.

So eventually I arrived in Yekaterinburg 10 hours later than had originally intended at 21:00 Moscow time and I was in a hurry to get to Kazan for the Independent Tatar Republic festival on Sunday. So I did a night time walking tour of the city.

I thought had a ticket for train 095 at 0:59, but when I got back and got to the platform at 00:35 I found I had a a ticket for the train 059 at 0:29 so basically disasterously I had managed to miss 2 trains in one day. Fortunately at this hour the ticket office was not busy so I managed to get my ticket changed and then crawl under stationary trains now blocking the tracks to train 095