After a 28-hour train journey from Moscow I arrived in Yekaterinburg, the fourth largest city in Russia, just past the border between Europe and Asia. The landscape along the route is dominated by hundreds of miles of trees, occasionally interrupted by villages that mainly consist of small wooden houses with corrugated iron roofs - most of them look like they hadn't been fixed up for the best part of a century though I saw some with satellite dishes attached which looked bizarre.

A day of resting on the train couldn't have come at a better time - I have a cold so I was sniffling my way from one cup of Lemsip to the next. The train wasn't very busy - there were two of us in a four-person cabin so it was quite comfortable. I was sharing with a Russian lady named Natalia, a computer programmer from Yekaterinburg who had been visiting her mother in Moscow. We could vaguely communicate as she could speak a bit of English - my Russian wasn't very useful but she helped me with some phrases and took great interest in my guide books.

I like Yekaterinburg, it's quite a relaxed place. It's been hot and sunny I had a refreshing pint of Harp lager in Gordon's, a Scottish-themed pub where the bar staff wear kilts (I can't even find Harp in England but it's being served in the middle of Russia!).

Most of the current city seems to have been the product of Soviet planning, which was sometimes successful (wide, well-marked streets in a grid system that make it feel safe and easy to navigate) and sometimes less successful (blocks of flats with no kitchens in them - apparently because, in the Soviet plan, women wouldn't be tied to the kitchen but out working instead and everyone would eat in communal canteens - they're now trying to install kitchens in them because there isn't much demand for flats with no kitchens). The city is hosting a conference of Asian nations next year so lots of new hotels are currently being built and other areas are starting to be cleaned up.

My tour guide here told me that Yekaterinburg holds some unusual world records - the longest time that a cinema ran the film Titanic (five months), the greatest consumption of mayonnaise per person and, previously, the smallest metro system before they extended their four stops to seven.

The city is better known as the place where the Romanovs, the Russian royal family, were allegedly murdered in 1918. They were subsequently made saints in the Russian Orthodox church and in 2005 there was a beautiful church built on the site where they were killed. Like most things in Russian history, there are many different versions of events and conspiracy theories abound about what happened to the bodies (if indeed you believe they were killed here in the first place...). As I far as I know, several sets of bodies have turned up over the years which were attributed to the Romanovs and their staff. The Russian Orthodox Church has built a monastery where they believe the bodies were buried - it's in a very remote spot in the forest - there are now many beautiful churches built from logs in the traditional style. The State's official version of events says that the bodies were moved to another part of the forest and now there's a small monument there. Because these places are hard to find, it is necessary to have a driver and guide to see them - I was lucky my guide had been doing this excursion for years and was a bit of guru, not just about the history but the local area generally (and he had two trainee guides with him too so I was well looked after!).

Later we visited a monument to those who died in one of the gulags nearby during Stalin's time (camps where people were sent, often for trivial or trumped-up offences, and worked to death). Then I went to one of the official points on the border between Europe and Asia - it's not just an arbitrary line, there's some geology behind it.

In the evening I was killing time before I had to leave for my next train at 3am so I popped into the bar next to my hotel. This place, bizarrely, also had Harp lager and served it in a Charles Wells pint glass (a random English ale brewer). At one point some Lord of the Dance music came on and the bar/kitchen staff ran to the middle of the floor and started doing some Michael Flatley-esque dancing. I was starting to wonder whether I'd been drugged or was hallucinating from too much Lemsip...