We are now in a small East Russian city callled Irkutsk. Having spent the last 6 nights on the trans siberian train, its nice to sleep in a normal bed! However, tonight we get on the train again to cross the border into Mongolia to Ulaanbaatar. Irkutsk is a nice city, with lots of trees lining the streets. There is also a lot of very old, unique, timber buildings scattering the city. Our main aim while here was to get our Mongolian visas as Roy's Russian visa expires on the 29th of June and you don't want to get caught in Russia without a visa!!! So, we turned up in the Mongolian Embassy at abour 4:15pm (they close at 5pm). We had filled out the forms when Roy remembered he had no psssport photo with him. Using our, by now, well practiced Russian sign language we managed to find out where he could get a photo taken. We returned at about 4:40pm and waited in line. At 5:10 they started to processs our visas (remember they were to close at 5pm). They only accepted either Rubbles or Dollars and not Euro. We had Rubbles, Dollars and Euro. However, we had not enough of either currency to pay for the visas in full. After a lot of running in and out of offices and what seemed to be arguing they eventually let us pay with Rubbles, Dollars and Euro (we told them the exchance rate for euro.....and they believed us!). It was close to 6pm when we were leaving. If we were in any other Embassy I would say we would have been told where to go. In fairness to them they went out of their way to look after us, very nice people. We're all set for Mongolia, visas got, train tickets got........we probably should get some Mongolian money!