Siberia~!~! It has such a cool ring to it doesn't it? Everyone has heard of it one way or another, and always associates it with bitter cold, but trust me it can get pretty hot too!!! At uni we had two carparks on campus. the "Grand Canyon" and "Siberia" so named because of the depth and vast distance from anywhere of their locations. I always parked in Siberia, preferring the long flat walk. And now I'm here in the middle of the real thing!

Well Novosibirsk has the biggest, cleanest train station I've seen in a long time. And at 1am local time a hell of a lot of sleeping bodies everywhere! They have a fabulous idea here of having basic hotel rooms upstairs in the train station. I managed to get one for 6 hours and slept like a baby before plunging into the chaos of a new city.

Dodged the scamming taxi drivers and found a mini bus to the bus station. They also have the fabulous system here, like in Turkey, of minivans that operate along fixed routes but you can flag them down or get off anywhere along the way. Sometimes a bit crammed but the routes are usually listed and thus easier to work out than the mysterious bus system, and they run every few minutes usually.
Tomsk, 4 hours north, was my destination, chosen for the simple reason that there was a Womble named after the place. It's as good a reason as any to go to a place I figure!!!
The LP reccommended the city as a pleasant place for strolling, lots of lovely traditional wooden architecture. Maybe so, once, but the place is booming, everything under renovation for their 400th anniversary, and there's a huge Yukos building there (the owner has been famously in court for the past year, over what some say is dubious charges by Putin) so presumably there are some mining operations in the area. Still I found some nice arhitecture eventually and spent a pleasant evening in the main park drinking pivo and eating shishkebabs.
Rattled back on a bus to Novosibirsk where I went to the local museum and ended up chatting to a lovely lady who works there. Within 2 minutes she was searching through her bag for a souvenir to give me. She took off her own earings to give me but I refused. She eventually found a special 2 rouble coin with Yuri Gagarin on it which she gave me. Her English was about as good as my Russian but I had plenty of time to kill as I had well overestimated my time needed here so we chatted away, comparing countries. Lovely lady.