Day 8

We met a tour guide for a tour of the city of Irkutsk.  The majority of the tour was churches and monuments.  Monuments were of  the many fascinating people connected to Irkutsk: Alexander Kolchak – a brilliant white army military leader, polar explorer, politician who established a provisional anti-bolshevik government in Siberia. His monument miraculously survived communist times and is still standing today. Grigory Shelikhov (18th century) organized voyages of merchant ships to what is now Alaska, for fur trading. He led an expedition to the coastal shores of the mainland, where they founded the first permanent Russian settlements in North America founded the Russian-American Company. He did it pretty much on his own dime because Catherine the Great was not interested in supporting him. Decembrists – political opponents were exiled to Siberia at the beginning of the 19th century, including many intellectuals and aristocrats like the Trubeskoy and the Volkonsky whose Irkutsk houses are now museums. There were also a lot of Polish people exiled to Siberia, and descendants of some of them are still living here. The Polish catholic church is one of the biggest churches here and it has supposedly one of the best organs in Russia so there are a lot of concerts held there.

The tour ended in the hippiest part of Irkutsk, which is called 130 Quarter, and has lot of nice restaurants. Bo had recommendations for restaurant but tour guide claimed he knew a better one (Misha).  We went there for lunch and it was bad.  From there we took #16  bus to the old icebreaker museum. Icebreaker Angara was built in 1900 and served until 1962. It was interesting to see it.  For dinner we decided to go to Bo’s recommended restaurant (Rassolnik). It was a soviet style place with old soviet movies playing on old black and white TVs, live soviet music and a very lively atmosphere. It was great. We took #16  bus there and back.