Perm is a cool city. I only came here so I could visit the Soviet Gulag museum, called Perm-36, but today after I checked into the hostel, I walked around the city for a few hours and was pleasantly surprised. Let me step back a bit.
I found the hostel, the only hostel in the city, very easily. It’s located on Lenin St. (as is every hostel in Russia), about a mile from the train station. No problems. The young woman who checked me in stopped me before I headed out to go walk around the city and asked me if I had any questions or if I wanted to look at their English language city guide. I said, sure! This hostel, as I’m quickly finding out, mostly caters to Russian, regular people, not really backpackers, even though it is a hostel for backpackers. The truth is, not many foreigners stop in on this city. So when foreigners do come, the staff at the hostel get excited. She came back from looking for the book but said she couldn’t find it. But I asked her some questions. I told her that I wanted to see Perm-36, the gulag camp, and I knew it was located outside of the city and might be tricky to get to. She immediately looked disappointed. She told me every foreigner that comes to the city only comes to see the Gulag camp. To be fair, it is what makes this city a stopover for foreign travelers on the Trans-Siberian train, if they do stop here. She’s a local and so wishes people would come for the city itself. But, friendly as she is, she gave me the low down for how to find the bus to the village where the camp is located (and it is complicated - I hope this doesn’t turn into another Eruope-Asia border monument deal). I’ll do this tomorrow.
I thanked her and set out. As I was walking I slowly started to realize that this is one of the hippest cities I’ve ever seen. It’s not a big city. It’s buffered up against a big river and the downtown area, that centers around Lenin Street, sits on a hill above the riverbank. A lot of the buildings are old, factory or Soviet style buildings but for some reason, although they are mostly decrepit, these buildings are still lived in, they still serve a purpose and are therefore somehow oddly appealing, aesthetically. It’s hard to describe. The city just glows with this artsy vibe. Young people walk around with fashionable clothes, dyed hair, nose rings, completely different from the fancy, elegant crowds you find in every other Russian city. The old buildings all have their original, wood paneled structures with bright, peeling paint. But it all fits the artsiness of the city.
And every building in the entire city is graffitied. Some of it is normal, crappy graffiti. But mostly it is wildly impressive street art. No building was left unscathed by this artistic movement. I’m pretty sure the movement went generally accepted by the city’s inhabitants. It’s as if the city mayor stood out on the balcony of city hall and yelling out to all his townspeople said something like, “Artists of Perm, the city is yours!” Factory walls, several floors high, are painted with massive murals. Small fences are covered in small paintings and slogans. Doors to restaurants, shops, auto repair garages, all covered in art.
I walked along the river, close to the downtown strip, to locate PERMM, an art gallery of contemporary art. It is housed in an old factory building on the river right across the street from Perm I Station, the old abandoned train station before Perm II was built (I pulled into Perm II). The area is really cool. I paid a few dollars for a ticket and walked around the gallery. Other art forms are everywhere in the city too besides the government approved street graffiti. The first thing you see when walking out of the train station is a massive sculpture made from wooden logs in the shape of a “п”, the Russian letter for “P”. It symbolizes the city of Perm, “п” being the first letter in the name. The city uses it as a symbol. The hostel I’m staying in is called “Hostel P” for the same reason, as are cafes, restaurants, etc.
I think I am starting to understand why the reception girl at the hostel was disappointed that I was staying in her city for one full day and only asked about the one thing that all foreigners ask about, the one disastrous, sinister thing that makes this city famous. She (a hipster herself) is doing everything in her power to rebrand this city. To let the artists take back the city and turn it into a cultural haven, a distant cry from it’s less glamorous past. I’l help her. I’ll promote the other good things about this city. (GO TO PERM FOR ITS ART!) And this opinion came about from only a few hours of walking around. I think I could spend a good deal longer here if my itinerary wasn’t so lock tight.
I also found my first McDonald’s since Beijing. This wouldn’t be noteworthy except for the fact that I think it’s pretty cool to visit McDonalds’ in every country to see how they differ. For example, the McDonald’s in Japan features the “mega tomago” or the super egg Big Mac which is like two Big Macs on top of one another with a giant, fried egg in between. Indian McDonald’s have no beef - just a lot of variations of the McChicken. Chinese McDonald’s are obnoxious because the menus are all in Chinese characters (none that I could easily recognize). But the one today, the Russian McDonald’s, was awesome because I understood the entire Russian menu. My cyrillic reading ability is getting really good. After more than a week of practicing (I read aloud everything I see), I could read the words on the menu above the super-skinny Russian McDonald’s girls and understand them because they are all words taken from English. It’s like they don’t have Russian words for McDonald’s menu items so they appropriated English words and just wrote them in cyrillic. So all I had to do to order was say, “Big mac, fries, coke, ketchup,” reading them from the menu. She got it all. Awesome.
Tonight is a laid back night. I had a great time in Ekaterinburg but it was super jam packed with events that kept me up late into the night without time to stop and reflect a bit. So I’m kind of doing that now. Lastly, and this is just an unrelated side note, I know this is a Russian hostel because I’m writing this in a kitchen surrounded by big men with no shirts on cutting potatoes on the table, working up a stew. It feels like the train.
Tomorrow, the gulag!
I found the hostel, the only hostel in the city, very easily. It’s located on Lenin St. (as is every hostel in Russia), about a mile from the train station. No problems. The young woman who checked me in stopped me before I headed out to go walk around the city and asked me if I had any questions or if I wanted to look at their English language city guide. I said, sure! This hostel, as I’m quickly finding out, mostly caters to Russian, regular people, not really backpackers, even though it is a hostel for backpackers. The truth is, not many foreigners stop in on this city. So when foreigners do come, the staff at the hostel get excited. She came back from looking for the book but said she couldn’t find it. But I asked her some questions. I told her that I wanted to see Perm-36, the gulag camp, and I knew it was located outside of the city and might be tricky to get to. She immediately looked disappointed. She told me every foreigner that comes to the city only comes to see the Gulag camp. To be fair, it is what makes this city a stopover for foreign travelers on the Trans-Siberian train, if they do stop here. She’s a local and so wishes people would come for the city itself. But, friendly as she is, she gave me the low down for how to find the bus to the village where the camp is located (and it is complicated - I hope this doesn’t turn into another Eruope-Asia border monument deal). I’ll do this tomorrow.
I thanked her and set out. As I was walking I slowly started to realize that this is one of the hippest cities I’ve ever seen. It’s not a big city. It’s buffered up against a big river and the downtown area, that centers around Lenin Street, sits on a hill above the riverbank. A lot of the buildings are old, factory or Soviet style buildings but for some reason, although they are mostly decrepit, these buildings are still lived in, they still serve a purpose and are therefore somehow oddly appealing, aesthetically. It’s hard to describe. The city just glows with this artsy vibe. Young people walk around with fashionable clothes, dyed hair, nose rings, completely different from the fancy, elegant crowds you find in every other Russian city. The old buildings all have their original, wood paneled structures with bright, peeling paint. But it all fits the artsiness of the city.
And every building in the entire city is graffitied. Some of it is normal, crappy graffiti. But mostly it is wildly impressive street art. No building was left unscathed by this artistic movement. I’m pretty sure the movement went generally accepted by the city’s inhabitants. It’s as if the city mayor stood out on the balcony of city hall and yelling out to all his townspeople said something like, “Artists of Perm, the city is yours!” Factory walls, several floors high, are painted with massive murals. Small fences are covered in small paintings and slogans. Doors to restaurants, shops, auto repair garages, all covered in art.
I walked along the river, close to the downtown strip, to locate PERMM, an art gallery of contemporary art. It is housed in an old factory building on the river right across the street from Perm I Station, the old abandoned train station before Perm II was built (I pulled into Perm II). The area is really cool. I paid a few dollars for a ticket and walked around the gallery. Other art forms are everywhere in the city too besides the government approved street graffiti. The first thing you see when walking out of the train station is a massive sculpture made from wooden logs in the shape of a “п”, the Russian letter for “P”. It symbolizes the city of Perm, “п” being the first letter in the name. The city uses it as a symbol. The hostel I’m staying in is called “Hostel P” for the same reason, as are cafes, restaurants, etc.
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| The pop art symbol of Perm, artwork outside the train station |
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| A mural, one of many in the city |
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| A mural over an old factory building |
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| Decrepit but appealing, no? Outside the old Perm I train station |
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| Graffiti on a new construction site |
I also found my first McDonald’s since Beijing. This wouldn’t be noteworthy except for the fact that I think it’s pretty cool to visit McDonalds’ in every country to see how they differ. For example, the McDonald’s in Japan features the “mega tomago” or the super egg Big Mac which is like two Big Macs on top of one another with a giant, fried egg in between. Indian McDonald’s have no beef - just a lot of variations of the McChicken. Chinese McDonald’s are obnoxious because the menus are all in Chinese characters (none that I could easily recognize). But the one today, the Russian McDonald’s, was awesome because I understood the entire Russian menu. My cyrillic reading ability is getting really good. After more than a week of practicing (I read aloud everything I see), I could read the words on the menu above the super-skinny Russian McDonald’s girls and understand them because they are all words taken from English. It’s like they don’t have Russian words for McDonald’s menu items so they appropriated English words and just wrote them in cyrillic. So all I had to do to order was say, “Big mac, fries, coke, ketchup,” reading them from the menu. She got it all. Awesome.
Tonight is a laid back night. I had a great time in Ekaterinburg but it was super jam packed with events that kept me up late into the night without time to stop and reflect a bit. So I’m kind of doing that now. Lastly, and this is just an unrelated side note, I know this is a Russian hostel because I’m writing this in a kitchen surrounded by big men with no shirts on cutting potatoes on the table, working up a stew. It feels like the train.
Tomorrow, the gulag!
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