After securing our tickets and fighting through the madness that was the Ekaterinburg train station, Conor and I settled into a 12-hour jaunt to Omsk.  We weren’t terribly moved by anything we had read about the city, but decided to spend a day there and judge for ourselves.  Turns out, had we skipped Omsk, we wouldn’t have missed much.

To start, the train station was a 5k walk from the city center, which wasn’t exactly a hoppin’ place.

We found a cheap canteen restaurant called Vilka-Lozhka (basically a step up from a buffet) and had a huge brunch.

We quickly found that the city map provided in our Lonely Planet was horribly inadequate and just plain wrong in many cases.

It claimed there was a Cathedral where the Dramatic Arts Theater was located (which, by the way, looks like a giant potato-sack slide) and failed to mention the location of the actual Cathedral almost a mile away.

It also neglected to mention several large monuments, sculptures and government buildings of note.

Given how inaccurate LP was, we ditched it and headed to The Tourist Hotel, thinking that they must have a more up-to-date map and tourist information.  Wrong.  They had no maps save for the poster sized one framed and mounted behind the front desk.

We were directed to the tourist office on the 9th floor of the hotel next door, where the agent used an online translator to communicate to us that she only handled foreign travel and the city had no tourist office.  Swell.

So we wandered through parks, along the river and around town.  For 50 Rubles we spend about 30 minutes in the city’s sole Art Museum and left pining for our Rubles back – it was that impressive.  The highlight was actually artwork of animals from local school children.

Even though the city had a population of 1.3 million, it felt incredibly small and lacked the infrastructure of other cities its size.

A few other things make Omsk distinct.  For the first time there was a visible Asian minority and we noticed cars with right-side steering wheels.  We were officially in Siberia.

After walking nearly the entire city, we still had seven hours to kill before our train departed.  We spent four hours at Bevitore– where food, vodka and free wi-fi were the draw – before meandering back to the train station.

With nothing to do and no where to go, we turned to an old Siberian tradition…downing vodka.

At 10pm we boarded the train with the intention of going straight to bed as it was only a short seven hour trip to our next stop, Novosibirsk.  However, as had become common practice on this trip, our intentions were foiled by a most unlikely series of events…