Tomsk, Russia – 09/12 Daytime

(Michelle) When we got to Grom’s house, we found on the table some wonderful tasting bliny for breakfast (I mentioned them before, their like crepes) that Grom’s mom had left for us. After eating and showering, we were like new people. We relaxed for a bit, while Dennis showed us the wonderful world of the Tomsk FTP site that had all sorts of free movies and tv shows you could download. He showed us a British comedy he really likes called the “IT crowd”. We liked it, so we watched a couple of episodes.

By the afternoon we were ready to go out and see Tomsk. Dennis took us to the main history museum there. It is located on the spot of the original Tomsk fortress on Resurrection Hill. The museum wasn’t anything memorable really, but the view from the rebuilt wooden tower is pretty nice. We then walked down to the main square directly below the hill. There are four obelisks in the square denoting various important Tomsk historical dates (Tomsk recently celebrated its 400^th birthday).

There is also a humorous statue of Anton Chekhov. He is a famous Russian writer who once traveled across Siberia and made a stop in Tomsk. He is quoted as saying that the town and the people of Tomsk were all quite dull. So, in retaliation, the town made a statue making fun of Mr. Chekhov.

After that, Dennis, TJ and I grabbed a couple of tall boys and had a drink in the park behind the WWII memorial. The park overlooks a nice little river valley. We had discussions about history, movies, war and childhood memories. Dennis speaks excellent English. He was an exchange student in Seattle, but unfortunately he was stuck with a very odd Mormon family (not that there is anything wrong with being Mormon, but some of the religious stuff was a bit much for him. Religion aside, they were odd in a number of other ways).

(picture note – check out the picture in the statue or obelisk – it is of the building directly behind it).

(TJ) You should definitely check out the IT crowd, they should play this on PBS like they did for Coupling. Hilarious British comedy, my favorite episode revolved around “Gay: A gay musical”, nuff said check it out.

Denis was kind enough to take us on the tour of Tomsk that he has probably been on 10 times. The town has some great architecture, some buildings look as if they could have been from St. Petersburg and others are the more traditional Siberian architecture. The Siberian architecture is similar to log cabins but they have very ornate wood trimming (aka gingerbread) to roofs, eves, window trim, shutters and door frames. The gingerbread really adds to the appeal of these houses, the ones that have been restored look spectacular. I took tons of pictures of these houses here and in Irkutsk; in my opinion the houses would look great as cabins in Wisconsin or Minnesota. The restored ones are rare however and there are many that are in bad shape that I think will ultimately be torn down instead of being restored with Tomsk’s growth.