Nizhny Novgorod

As you can see from previous posts, I’ve been to a few different countries. I’ve stayed in hostels, guest houses, bed and breakfasts, tents, wigwams, sheds, hotels, couch surfed, and even slept in parks and on streets. I’ve travelled by boat, car, plane, bus and train. I’ve done city breaks, adventure breaks, been off the beaten track, went to festivals. I have immersed myself in local culture, ate a huge variety of food (I’m normally vegetarian, however I eat meat when on an adventure so I don’t exclude any of the experience), consumed many a beer and spirit, and tried to follow local traditions. All of this should make me feel like I’m a traveller. And I know that many of my friends, family and people I meet on my adventures would say I was a traveller. However I never really felt like a traveller. That was until Nizhny Novgorod.

I arrived in Nizhny late afternoon, the weather wasn’t as cold as I was expecting, the town was busier than I was expecting, the train station was a buzz of activity, surrounded by groups of children on what appeared to be school trips (I don’t ever remember going a school trip to a train station, but I don’t feel like I missed out), a few market stalls surrounded by locals, taxi drivers looking desperate for business, and a myriad of people of all ages just standing about smoking. Maybe it was all the people, maybe it was the fact I’d been on a train for ages, but it took me longer than normal to find my bearings. What looked like a 10 minute walk on my map from the train station to my hotel, ended up being a 40 minute hike, some of which was along the side of a 6 lane carriage way. I genuinely thought I was going to die several times.

After several failed attempts to find the hotel entrance (I managed to get in through a staff entrance), and a difficult check in (the language barrier made it difficult for me to realise they wanted to see my passport, visa, rail and flight tickets), I managed to dump my bag, prepare my day-pack and head to the city centre. A little bit of sign seeing, loads of walking and climbing stairs, I decided it was time for food.

After finding a bar I spotted a few people eating pizza. Perfect, who doesn’t like pizza? I picked up the menu and realised I know absolutely zero Russian. After finding the WiFi password I was able to search the word for pizza and then match it to the menu. I pointed to the word “пицца“ on the menu and the bar man replied “Pitsa”…..lesson learned: Pizza is Pizza regardless of the language.

After a few beers and a bite to eat I was ready to explore again. Nihzny is a beautiful city, but the cold and the constant walking up and down hills exhausted me so I had an early(ish) night and caught the metro back to my hotel around 11 pm. Just as well, my train back to Moscow was due leave early.