I like Perm. I knew I was going to like Perm before I even got there. The train there was fun. Having travelled from Tomsk to Irkutsk, I now know that the earlier train (from Moscow to Perm) was preparing me for real Trans-Siberian travel.
I managed to get the train from Moscow, without any of the problems of before. As an update to my previous post, the 3 over-land train stations do not have the same name, they just look very similar to someone who is in a hurry and hasn’t seen them before.
In Moscow, some army recruits were boarding the train and I remember hoping that I wasn’t going to be in the same compartment as them. Once I’d found my compartment, it turned out that I was sharing with them and none of them spoke English. Within a few minutes of the train leaving the station however, I had a copy of Russian/Ukrainian Maxim shoved in front of me and was being told to look at “Russian womens”. The owner of the magazine happened to be the most conversational and the one with the best English and we spent the remainder of the journey talking about family, home life, tastes in music, etc. The paratroopers left at Nizhny Novgorod and at that point, another bloke boarded. With the train leaving at 16:20, I was talking to various people until 02:00. Passenger number 2 departed at Vyatka, leaving me with the compartment to myself until Perm.
Day 1 in Perm was spent organising myself and going to the PERMM art gallery. I had specifically held-off going to any more galleries in Moscow, just so that I could go to this one. Day 2 was spent going to Perm-36, a GULAG museum in the countryside surrounding Perm. I think this was my first real adventure.
I spoke to the bloke in the tourist information office in Perm, who gave me all of the details that I needed in order to reach the museum. Many people had done it before, so it shouldn’t have been a problem. Once I’d got my ticket in the bus station, I managed to find the right stop and get on the bus to Kuchino, the village where the camp is located. After handing the driver a piece of paper that asked him to let me know when to get off, we stopped along a large stretch of motorway, the door opened and the bus driver pointed to a country lane. I got off and walked the 3 Km to the museum, which, unlike the advice of the tourist information office, was not signposted at all. When I found the camp, after walking through the village and by-passing several barking dogs on the way, I found that the woman on the reception desk was willing to show me round, but only spoke Russian and French. As my French is better than my Russian, I opted to have the tour in French. What followed was a very interesting video (in English!) and the tour guide/receptionist giving me as good a tour as she could have done, based on my understanding of French (limited) and the fact that all of the displays were in Russian. I thoroughly enjoyed the tour and was left to my own devices when the woman had to leave, so once I’d finished, I headed back to the main office where I was given a cup of tea and a biscuit (as it was so cold outside). About half-way along the journey back to the main road, a coach stopped beside me and the French/Russian woman gestured for me to get on. I got driven practically the entire way back to the motorway and the coach driver found a bus stop on the other side of the road that the French/Russian woman practically walked me to. All-in-all, it was a very rewarding experience.
Links to the two galleries/museums are as follows:
- PERMM [http://www.permm.ru/]
- Perm-36 [http://www.perm36.ru/en.html].