Games and Great food

Two additional restaurants in Perm that deserve a special mention.

Porta's Italian restaurant was on the main street heading from the Ural Hotel to the River front.  The modern restaurant had an outstanding wine list, polite staff that spoke good English, and absolutely phenomenal food!  It was so good that we went back to the restaurant two nights in a row, including our last night without Dennis.  I believe they made their own pasta, and the deserts were very good as well.

Pravila's was for me a new concept restaurant.   We wound up here with our Russian hosts for a night out on the town.  The restaurant had good food, but the really interesting part was that it was a "gaming" restaurant.  Not a casino, but rather old fashioned board games!   They had a "Game Master" who assisted you in determining what type of game you wanted to play, and then explained the rules to you.   That wound up being  a lot of fun, although I am pretty positive we drank the entire stock of Chianti that night, and the 3rd bottle may have been stored outside cause the wine was cold!  You also have the option to share a hookah if you are so inclined, however understanding what a Russian speaking English means when they say that word can be entertaining!   And yes, the Americans did finally prevail in Battleship, however by that time the wine had all been consumed.

Both these restaurants rate highly on our recommended places to eat.  Neither is cheap, but they both had great meals and enjoyable atmosphere's.  

More food choices

During our stays in Perm, we tried to sample a wide variety of restaurants.   The Ukrainian place had great food, but at times communications was challenging.  This place was just down the road from the URAL hotel and was very busy every time we were there.  They also had a really cool xmas tree with carrots and rabbits on it (2011 is the year of the rabbit).  It is common to see the cutout statues outside of these types of eateries, which makes things easier when you can't read the Russian. 

Heba was more of a night club but they also served lunch.  I think we surprised the wait staff by actually wanting to eat lunch there, however the meal was good and reasonable.  They had a pretty nice selection of beer as well. 

On the side of the Heba building is this absolutely wonderful whole-in-the-wall lunch place.  This is a no nonsense workers lunch, with wonderful stuffed breads and rolls.  This was also the first time we saw a mustard dipping sauce available with these foods.  The mustard sauce was very tasty, in fact we have tried to replicate it home a couple of times now.

While walking the green line tourist route, we were starting to get hungry when we ran across this combined Italian and Sushi restaurant.  Depending on what you wanted to eat, you were seated in a different area of the same building.  The food was good, and during the summer months they were running specials on different flavors of mojitos, which is a Caribbean rum based drink.  You may wonder why they have Caribbean drinks in Russia, but then you have to remember that during the Soviet times, Cuba was a very strong friends with Russia.  This place was our first attempt at getting food outside of our hotel, and it went well enough that we were willing to try everywhere else.

Eating Out in Perm

When getting ready to travel to Perm we spoke to a number of folks who had travelled to Perm recently, and asked them about where they ate.  Most of them mentioned eating at the hotel, but very few of them mentioned any other places to eat around town.  We also read several blogs/forums that said finding folks that spoke English in restaurants or had English menus was very hard. Being the intrepid travelers that we are, we decided that we wanted to do more than just eat at the hotel.  Although both hotels we ate at had good restaurants with staff that spoke English and English menu's, we wanted to experience more of foods available in Perm. 

The great news is that almost every place we walked into had at least someone on the staff the spoke okay English, and all but one place had English menu's.  The food and beverage choices were very wide,  including Mexican, Japanese, German, Italian, Ukrainian, Georgian, and of course Russian.    Here is a brief selection of the places where we had dinner:

Locos Gringos

Just up the street from the Ural hotel, and a 2 block walk from the nearest Tram 11 stop, Locos Gringos had a decent selection of Mexican styled food and good beer!  Avoid the hamburgers, but the fajitas and nachos were okay. 

German Restaurant

At the corner across the street from Locos Gringos is this German restaurant.  The potatoes with Dinner had happy faces, and the food was very good!

We ate dinner at these places and enjoyed our meals.  The service was excellent and the food was very good for the most part.  My only disappointment was the hamburger at Locos Gringos (If you need a hamburger fix, go the fast food route!).

One thing to remember is that most of the restaurants in Russia have limited no smoking areas, so you can expect to have smokers nearby. 

Artillery and Rocket Muesum

At the end of the Route 11 Tram line is the Artillery and Rocket Museum.   There is a small building which is the actual museum.  Around the museum building is a display of real and mock up Soviet artillery and missile systems.   Perm still has ties to the Russian defense establishment, however with the exception of the S-300 missile tubes (Nato designator: SA-20) most of the equipment or mock-ups on display date from the 1960's or earlier.   As a former cold war warrior, it is neat to be able to get you picture taken in front of the old equipment.

The silver tubes are for the S-300.

That is a MRL, PT-76, SA-5, and a SA-2.   They all looked like mock ups or training equipment.

A slight word of caution, this isn't the nicest of areas to be wandering around.  We are pretty positive that we saw some folks stealing a section of sewer pipe for the recycle value.   It's okay in daylight, but I wouldn't suggest the area after dark.  There is also supposed to be an Arc Welding museum in the area, but we couldn't find it.

Taking the Tram (part I)

Perm has a number of tram lines within the city.  When we were there in late 2010, the fare was 12 rubles (US $0.30) per trip.  It looked like they sold multi-trip tickets and transfers, but since we barely spoke any Russian, we simply paid cash to the conductor on the tram.

One very important tip is to keep your small change/bills and use them to pay on the tram. The conductor on the tram (most of them were older ladies, a.k.a. ba-bush-ka's) do not like it if you gave them a big note (like a 100 ruble or larger). The conductors didn't appear to speak English, but I could tell she was giving the payee a piece of her mind when she had to break big bills.

Locating the tram stops and boarding was an interesting exercise.  We simply asking at our hotel, they explained about paying the conductor, but cautioned us about walking out into the street to catch the tram.  We finally found a tram stop and watched a group board before we figured out the right way to get on a tram and where.  In the main city center the tram stops are clearly marked and easy to find even for non-Russian speakers.  The process was a bit more challenging  in other parts of the city especially near the Hilton Garden hotel.  The trams were crowded during rush hour, but off hours they weren't that bad.

Tram 11 goes from the Hilton through downtown and then ends next to the artillery muesum.  At times the tram track is very rough when going through the woods, but most of the ride in the middle of city streets which isn't much smoother.  There are english language toursist maps availbale in Perm and the tram routes and numbers indicated on them. 

Some of the trams are modern, and this one is an advertisement for the local professional hockey team.

The Tram in the background is waiting for the traffic light to change before turning onto the street in front.    The Trams in Perm reminded me a lot of travelling around Philadelphia as a child in the early 70s.

Quick comments on travelling to Perm

Quick comments on travelling to Perm

Our travels took us from the outback of Australia to the "Gateway to Siberia", as you can imagine that involved a lot of travel.  A couple of quick comments and observations about getting to Perm.

The direct Lufthansa flight from Germany was not an option for us - we arrived in Russia via Moscow both times we travelled via Helsinki on Finnair.

S7 (the former Siberian Airways) is now a One World partner, and has pretty darn good service. The staff at the gate and onboard understood English. S7 flies from Domodedovo, the "nicer" of the two airports in Moscow. The meals were warm, and the coffee and tea pots were impressive on the plane.

Aeroflot serves Perm out of the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow. Their terminal at the airport is new and quite nice. The staff spoke and understood English. The planes weren't quite as nice as S7's (about on par with my recent United experiences in the states), but the flight wasn't bad. Finnair and Aeroflot code share a number of flights.

Finnair is a great airline and was the cheapest flights we could find that used the One World Alliance frequent flyer program. I would recommend that you skip the Reindeer soup however - it bloody aweful!

The airport at Perm is interesting to say the least - especially when you land and it's -40C outside! Regardless the weather, they still put you on a bus for a 30 second ride to the door of the terminal - you could walk faster than bus ride process. The airport is split between the civilian side and the Air Force side - a close look out the window will reveal several of Russia's finest fighter aircraft.

There is good train service from Moscow to Perm, which was an option we considered but didn't do becasue of time constraints.

So Where Did We Go?

While in Perm,  we did quite a bit of exploring.  Perm is an amazingly diverse city, and I've tried to capture a number of the places we explored.  

Google Earth locations in Perm

This is a Google Earth file, you will need to download it to your PC and then open it with Google Earth.