Gorodskoy Prud

Today was a bit of an off day ... we went through two time zones last night so when we woke up this morning thinking it was 7 am, it was 5 am ... ugh, mornings 😞

This made this day a bit longer since we still had another 6 hours to go on the train ride, but it was helpful to allow us to pack leisurely, condense bags down, and just relax.
We had a few stops along the way, and I did get out at the first one just to stretch my legs and get some fresh air. I joined a group as we walked to the train engine and back again. The conductor however thought it would be funny to prank us through and honk the horn so that we started to run to our car. When we saw him after he was in hysterics (very rare for a Russian) ... I should also mention our car was the last car so we had a bit of a distance, but we realized shortly that the train was still in the station for a bit longer. We all had a great laugh at ourselves.

We arrived into the city at around 1:30 pm, and traffic was so horrible it took us almost an hour to get to the hotel, when it’s maybe a ten minute drive. Yekaterinburg is hosting the 2018 World Cup, so they are doing a lot of upgrades. Hopefully it will be better than Sochi.

We had just over an hour to get showered and changed as we were heading to out to dinner and then to the ballet that evening.

Alex took us to this cute restaurant that was devine. The decor was super cute, and the food was amazing. The piroshkis were out of this world. We even sampled some of the restaurants homemade Horseradish vodka ... that was different.

The ballet was held in the opera house, and the building was magnificent. It was just draw dropping to be inside of this place.
Our seats were in rows 1, 2 and 3, and were excellent. I made friends with a Russian lady beside me, who was quite nice and very sweet.

The ballet ... now I’m open minded to new experiences, even though I don’t consider myself an artsy/interpretive person who can look past the brush strokes and see the anger or pain, blah blah blah. I take it at face value.
So this ballet was a bit of a challenge for me, there were parts that were what I expected a traditional ballet to be and that was great ... then there were the other parts where I was like WTF is going on. The women were graceful and beautiful, a little too skinny to be honest, but they are ballerinas. The men were just as graceful and had butts you could bounce quarters off of (legit!)

After the ballet we headed back to the hotel, some opted for a nightcap, I opted for bed. It was a great day, with some new experiencesLäs mer