Historical buildings in Kazan

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We walk into the city centre

The next morning we ate breakfast with Daniyar and his parents. We had some rissoles, onion and beetroot salad followed by porridge. Russians don't seem to have milk with their porridge. We had butter and sugar with ours. We enjoyed our breakfast.

Daniyar had to take his mum and Step Dad out to the country with his Granddad for the day so Alsoo was going to be our host. She suggested we all walk into the city centre. The walk was a bit longer than we anticipated and it was quite hot even at 9:30 a.m.

Alsoo kindly showed us Kazan when Daniyar was busy We went to the Tatar Cultural Centre and had a look at the history of the Tatar people. It was quite hot and humid inside the building and Ian said that at one stage he thought he was going to faint. We came outside and it was hotter than ever.

 

 

We wandered along very quiet streets looking for somewhere to eat lunch. We found a pizza restaurant. It wasn't air-conditioned inside but it was marginally cooler than outdoors. Alsoo did the ordering. The poor girl thought she had ordered two large pizzas but three were served, two of which were the same. I know she felt awful seeing as were paying, but we decided we would take the left-overs with us and have them for dinner later so it was no big deal – except that we had to carry it around with us for the rest of the afternoon.

We could see the waiters in the restaurant were surprised by how much water we were drinking. Russians, even on hot summer days, don't walk around with water bottles and nor do they wear hats.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the pizza restaurant we wandered on looking at as many tourist attractions as was possible. The temperature was well into the thirties and we eventually had to say to Alsoo that we were tired. She is an extremely good host and tour guide and we felt we were letting the side down when we had to say we needed to slow down and cool off. We were near the shopping centre again so we opted to visit Baskin Robbins again. The ice creams weren't cheap but we needed to restore our spirits.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We wanted a couple of supermarket items so Alsoo led us down the escalators to the supermarket in the basement of the shopping centre.

Before being allowed in through the supermarket doors we had to have our small rucksacks wrapped in cling film. This was to prevent us stealing anything. There were heaps of security men in the store too. If the cling film wrapping worked so well then why did they need security men too. It all seemed a bit over the top to us.

This time we didn't get a taxi home but caught the bus instead. It cost only 15 roubles each which is about 55 cents in Australian money.

 

 

Later on Daniyar arrived back home. He was keen to take us out looking at the lights of Kazan but we felt he had had a long enough day of driving already without ferrying us around in the evening. Plus, we were quite pooped too.

 

Next page - Mosques in Kazan

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