Tyumen part 2 - the nightlife for the lucky ones

I am enjoying my week in Tyumen, which is definitely a nice little city with lots of coffee places and restaurants. Last night was bowling night with my colleagues (where I managed to extend the Stella Artois peak long enough to score a good 127, before it screwed my ability to shoot straight in the second game). After that we went to a place called "Kaliant house" (the house of waterpipes). There, my friends asked me to go in and ask for a table, as they thought I had more chances to get one as a foreigner than they would as locals. I quickly rehearsed the necessary sentences in Russian to do so, went in, and asked for the table. There, the bouncer told me bluntly that they had "face control policy", and that I did not qualify.
I was not told which exact criterion I failed...was it a specific part of my face or my face as a whole? It took my friends to discuss for a while (in real russian) for us to get in, while I was crying in a corner of the room for this is the first time that I could not go in a pub because of my face.
In the end, I don't know what my friends said (What would you say: "that's not his real face"?, "Come on, the accident was already bad enough in itself, don't rub it in"), but the manager of the place came in and decided to let me in...
The official version is that when I try to speak russian, I sound like I am drunk, so the security did not want to let me in. So, lesson learned: "Be sober and don't try too hard to speak the language".

A tour in Tyumen...

I used the opportunity of a business trip to visit Tyumen, a city near the Ural region to do a bit of tourism today. Below, some pictures I took today during a walk in this charming town, but that I unfortunately chose to visit while the snow is melting and making big muddy puddles. The highlights are:
-lots of old typical wooden houses, like they had at the end of XIX century.
-the bridge of love, where the lovers put locks on the barrier of the bridge to symbolize the way that true love feels (being locked in the cold wind above 100 feet of void).
-orthodox churches
Not in the pictures: how the only shoes I brought for the 1-week long trip are now soaked and muddy, the delicious pub food I missed for so long, and that I enjoyed with a pint of HARP at the local irish pub “O’Brian’s”.

The Bania

One nice way of passing the long and cold winter nights is to go to the Bania, the russian equivalent of sauna, picnic and sado masochist boot camp all at once. The concept is simple: you rent a small 2-story house, with the ground floor being the oven and the second floor being the 3-room sauna, where you can bring your drinks and food. For 2 to 3 hours, you go from overheated room to not so overheated room, pouring some over cold water over your body from time to time and whipping your friends with the branches of a miraculous tree which have an exfoliating effect. Where is the fun part in this? Well, it is still better than being cold outside with a skin that has not been exfoliated I guess.


Behind the awesome cars, you can see the wooden house with the host, whose role is to make sure that it is really hot in there. On the right, this is the not so hot room with the branches on the bench.

The 2nd hottest room in the house with more branches and a bucket of really cold water. On the right, that's me, ready to be exfoliated for the 4th time that night.

Sheregesch

I had heard about it for such a long time: Sheregesch, the ultimate ski resort. Pronounce its name and you'll see the local snowboarders have their eyes shining and their mouth watering with awe. Sheregesh is definitely pretty cool, with soft and fluffy snow that you don't get in lot of places in Europe. And the skiing between the trees is definitely awesome... "between" is the keyword here, that my good friend Aigul did not get apparently. She left patches of skin and some blood on a pine tree she met on the way down, and thought she broke a rib. A glass of vodka over lunch at the cafe at the top of the hill helped her see all this in a positive way.
The Niva rode the 1600km round trip without issue, which added to the good quality of the week end.

Towing the Niva-lesson 2

Definitely, a good training for towing vehicles is required before driving a Niva around here. About 24 hours after i got Niva back from the mechanics, here I go and screw up again. I managed to get the car stuck in a snowbank on my way back from skiing in Tanaii, at 11pm, on a little road that I took as a shortcut in spite of all my passengers unanimously voting against it.
Note the different configuration this time to tow the car out... you won't find it in the user manual. As a result, I broke the rope. Before that, we tried several old tricks, like shoveling the snow from behind the tires, or teaching my good friend Aigul how to put a car in reverse so that I could help pushing the car out... We gave up quickly on that option when Aigul asked which pedal was the brake and how to operate a stick.
I want to thank that one car that drove by 5 minutes later with a good cable which we attached to the plow to get out.