Saartje and Simon posing in Lenin's square in Ulan-Ude
Ulan-Ude is the capital of Buryatia and I spent there two nights.... in a small hostel in the suburbs of the town. Funny was that when I was leaving Irkutsk I once more met Saartje and Simon (the couple I met twice on Olkhon island) on a train platform and we all spent the following two days together exploring the surroudings. We went to Ivolginsky datsan (a Buddhist monastery) and Ethnographic museum and finished our tour with a self-made barbeque. The next halfday I spent with Khun, a Thai guy, with whom I boarded the same train (even the same carriage) heading to Vladivostok but I got off in Khabarovsk. He and three more foreign travellers we met there, Oli, Fridrich and Matylda, continued to Vladivostok. Ohh, one more remark, when we were waiting at the platform for the train a Buryatian man came to me and asked if I was a Polish guy. "Kind of" I answered and we started to talk in Polish. He told me that he and his wife to whom I was introduced a couple of moments later were Presidents of the Polish communnity living in Ulan-Ude....Their ancestors were expelled from Poland and sent to Siberia just after 1837.....The presence of Polish community is also quite visible in Irkutsk as, I think, the main church in town, is called Polish Church :-)
