Way to Russia Talk Lounge

Babuschka · Frequent Guest Joined: 03 Mar 2005 Posts: 28

Vorteks

your account gives chilly impressions.
Must be a horrible place to be. Every time I read something like this I am just so very thankful to be living in Middle Europe and nowhere else!!!!

Good luck on your road.

rodionx · Frequent Guest Joined: 31 Jul 2004 Posts: 19

Well, someone ought to defend Ufa, so I'll give it a shot. I lived there for quite a long time myself, and enjoyed it a lot. It's still one of my favourite cities and definitely my favourite Russian city.

If you're just passing through, though, it's not a city you'd enjoy very much. It doesn't have a lot of historic sites or special things for tourists to do. However, if you lived there for a while, you'd find that it's one of the friendlier Russian cities, and culturally quite complex. It's basically an ethnic Russian city, but there's a very large Tatar minority, and another, somewhat smaller Bashkir minority. The Bashkirs and Tatars are Muslim Turkic speakers, and you'll hear their languages spoken on the street, and see both mosques and churches near the centre. If you had just a day to spend in Ufa, an interesting thing to do would be to visit the main church and the old mosque near the centre, and then go out to the suburb of Chernikovka and visit the huge new mosque with the tulip shaped minarets.

Another interesting characteristic of Ufa is that it really only became a proper city in the early 1940's, when Stalin moved a chunk of Soviet industry there. As a result, a lot of the inhabitants are the children of recent arrivals, and a huge number are former villagers, and still have relatives in the village. The result is that you have a city of over a million people that still feels, somehow, like a gigantic village. You won't find Moscow-style nightclubs, for example, but you'll find these little outdoor discos in parks that feel like village discos. It's great just to visit these parks on long summer nights, eat Shashlik and drink beer. You'll also see outhouses and people fetching water from wells right in the middle of the city. Sometimes, a few blocks away from these wells you'll find new condominium complexes that the government built with petrodollars, but which hardly anyone can afford to live in.

And finally, Ufa is also a good launching pad for visiting the Urals, which are truly beautiful and still very wild. You'll see some weird stuff in the Urals. Locals say its because the Urals are ancient, but I think it's because of radiation - both natural and man-made.