Siberian Sushi

We spend thirty six hours in Irkutsk and stay at the Angara Hotel. The foyer gives it a cosmopolitan air, but on the seventh floor the carpet is frayed and smells of old vodka and mould. The floor attendant sits behind her desk and views us with Stalinist era suspicion, writing something down in a dusty ledger. I smile at her. She scowls. The people responsible for ordering the beds for the hotel were clearly looking in the wrong catalogue as we have boy scout, fold out camp bed style beds, that sink almost to the floor when you lie on them, and bring the sides of the thin mattress up so you are enveloped like a sausage roll. The shower head falls off and lands painfully on my toe.

We walk to the river Irkuts and watch a wedding retinue tie the traditional padlock to the bridge and throw the key symbolically into the river. Looking at this bride I think I’d invest in a good fishing rod and magnet...There are wedding parties and stretched limos everywhere; weddings are clearly big business in Irkutsk. All the retinue are drinking pink champagne, including a few of the heavily pregnant bridesmaids, cigs hanging out of their mouths. We walk to the nearby ‘White House’, a hotel which was grandly and hurriedly built when President Roosevelt was due to visit. He never did, which says it all really.

The rest of Russia is having a heatwave of record proportions. Whilst we are in Irkutsk the temperature goes down to 14C and it starts to rain. We look to find somewhere out of the Siberian winds and find the indoor market. All the fashions on offer at the clothes stalls would all be roundly rejected from an Oxfam shop. We go downstairs where there are lots and lots of power tools. Time to leave. We try and find somewhere for food, but all the shops have reflective film on their windows and doors with no pictures or signs, so it is difficult to see if they sell sports gear, jewelry or sausages. In the end we find one that is like a canteen and Harry spies the sushi. We are hundreds of miles from the sea but the boy has to have his sushi! We watch the umbrellas go past the window. Time to leave Irkutsk.