Farewell & Thank You Dinner

The boys came back from washing the car, or getting the car washed as the case may be, still with the car as the guy hadn’t turned up to pick up the car. They had waited around for an hour. We had had to pay a $200 bond which we thought perhaps they didn’t want to return to us... 🧐

Eli had arranged to have dinner with Suren and his family as he had been so helpful in arranging various things for us when we arrived in Ulan-Ude. We were going to go to our Churchill pub but Suren said that gets a bit noisy on a Friday night so we agreed to go to a Russian restaurant he arranged.

As we still had the car we decided to drive which was a bad decision cos we ended up going to the wrong spot which was a nightmare getting to cos of all the one way roads and Apple maps kept changing the route every 5mins. I think it would have been quicker to walk! We gave up eventually and rang Suren who found us and lead us to the right place. Suren had arranged for the car guy to pick the car up from the restaurant which was handy.

It was a really nice place with very nice food. We had been looking forward to some more familiar foods from the churchill pub after having only Russian fare at Lake Baikal but were pleasantly surprised by the food on offer. Suren had bought his wife and daughter who was just a bit younger than Heidi. His wife didn’t speak English but Suren translated. It was quite a nice evening. They had some live music at one point played on traditional instruments. Suren’s daughter was loving it and was dancing around. Heidi joined in for a bit towards the end of the evening with Suren’s wife Natalia.

We said goodbye and thank you afterwards and walked back to the apartment. We had to be up early the next morning to catch our plane so we hit the sack.

I’ve decided that when we go out for dinner in Mildura we should just walk there and back instead of driving the car as we’re walking that distance now and it doesn’t seem that long!Read more