Ekatherinburg

5 July 2008- Saturday

The next day we had breakfast as usual starting at 7:00 a.m. My routine was to get up at 6:00 and be ready to go at 7 o’clock. The train got in to Yekaterinburg. We made a quick trip to just outside the city where we found the separation of Europe from Asia by a marker. We went by a ‘border guardsman’ with the rank of major who was obviously a college kid and for his summer vacation. After the photo ops, we returned to Yekaterinburg which was founded in 1721 and named after Katherine I, the wife of Peter I, and went to the place where the Bolsheviks had executed the Czar and his family in attendance. The house that they were kept prisoner in was that of an engineer and, in 1991, this was ordered bulldozed by Yeltzin who was mayor of the city at that time and in its place a cathedral which is still being built. A very impressive edifice and of course because the Czar was martyred, immediately became a saint in the Russian Orthodox Church. We then saw some of the typical decorative wooden houses before returning to the train for lunch at 1:00 p.m. Another restful afternoon after the wine and dinner was at 7:30 p.m. This is the evening I decided to watch the movie Genghis Khan which was a Chinese production and essentially paralleled a lot of the movie I had seen before I started this trip. However, it told the same story with a slightly different slant and, unless you knew the players, it would be hard to figure out what was going on. Again, this was a subtitled movie.