Bridge

Traveling with a smartphone is easy. If you’re ever in the slightest doubt about which direction to go, a live map with your position is a tap away. No more wandering, wondering, or feeling a sense of accomplishment when you reach your destination at last. Of course you reached it, you have Google Maps!

It was with this confidence that I stepped off the Tran-Siberian train in Yekaterinburg, after a 27-hour ride from Moscow.

After punching in my hostel’s address into Google Maps, I strode out of the station and onto a wide expressway lined with drab concrete buildings and carrying muddy Soviet-era busses, and turned west in the early daylight.

One kilometer later I turned off the expressway and onto a small residential street. I continued following the phone’s instructions even as the streets turned into winding alleys, then driveways, then overgrown footpaths past children’s playgrounds that should’ve been decommissioned decades ago. To my left appeared a railway ditch, with my hostel somewhere on the other side.

As I approached the crossing per my phone’s instructions, there was no crossing in sight. So I kept going straight, past some fence and idle security guard. After a few minutes of wandering around this… Base?… I turned back.

This time the security guard, recognizing his error in letting a non-uniformed stranger stroll past him, asked me with a tinge of nervousness: “Do… You work here?”

— “No, I’m looking for a bridge.” — “A bridge?” — “Yes, my phone says there’s a bridge here, to cross the tracks.” — “Never seen one.”

At that moment I noticed another man, wearing a suit and carrying a small travel bag in one hand and his smartphone in another. “Have you seen a bridge?” he asked us.

The man and I left the helpless guard and meandered back through the overgrown yards, this time staying alongside the tracks. Not far from there we noticed something in the overgrowth: Two wooden posts that resembled the start of a small footbridge, but they were criss-crossed with slats of wood and there was nothing beyond them. The bridge was gone.

We continued walking back towards the expressway, planning to take the long way around. At some point I considered climbing the fence, climbing down the wooded side of the ditch, over the tracks, and up the other side. That would mean leaving my companion, however, so I scrapped that idea.

Our wandering came to an end when a footbridge appeared before us. It was a newer and better replacement for the old bridge, but why it wasn’t built in the same place as the old one I couldn’t answer, and neither could Google Maps.

Past the tracks it was an easy trek through more alleys and uneven parking lots until I spotted the building number I needed. I pointed my companion—who was in town for work-related training—in the direction he needed to go, full of confidence once again, and wished him vsevó horóshovo (all the best).

The building, a concrete monstrosity that can be found all over Russia, seemed an odd place for a hostel, but on second thought it wasn’t surprising that a Russian would be tempted to turn their apartment into a guesthouse to earn money. The average Russian earns 42,000 rubles per month before taxes, equivalent to around $600.

Soviet apartment buildings don’t have lobbies; instead, they have multiple entrances from the outside for direct access to a stairwell or elevator. This building had four such entrances, and I walked up to all of them in search of a hostel sign. There wasn’t one. I called on the intercom and by phone, but nobody was up that early.

Twenty-something minutes later I got a call back from the hostel owner. After a few rounds of misunderstandings and clarifications—nobody expects a hostel guest to speak Russian, so their first thought is that I’m a confused or scheming local—the owner directed me to another hostel she owns that has available beds at this hour. It wasn’t far… Just over the train tracks.