Kirov Street – one of the most elegant in the city – is called the 'Chelyabinsk Arbat' here
Of course, Chelyabinsk is not the Maldives, and there is no need to agonize over where to find cheap last-minute tours from Moscow. However, the lack of hype around tickets sometimes benefits us – it makes us healthier!
All we need to worry about when organizing a trip to Chelyabinsk are train tickets, schedules, etc. Traveling to the South Urals by train, by the way, has its own logic. How often does any of us get to see our vast country so close up? I recall that even the leader of the DPRK, Kim Il-sung, specially traveled across Russia in an armored carriage, disrupting schedules and delaying train movements for hours.
A trip to Chelyabinsk by plane is not a bad option. Those who have flown know that cheap airline tickets online to the South Urals can be easily ordered via the Internet.
So, we are in Chelyabinsk, or as it is sometimes called, the 'Trans-Ural Chicago' – a city with dozens of large and hundreds of smaller factories, and a population of at least a million. What to do? Of course, we'll explore, if not all, then the main attractions of the city.
First, of course, we'll visit one of the most elegant streets of the city – Kirov Street, which is called 'Our Chelyabinsk Arbat'. We'll also visit the wonderful gardens named after Alexander Pushkin and Yuri Gagarin. We won't forget to visit the animals at the zoo, see the Sphere of Love, the Ice Palace, and the Scarlet Field. If the intellectual itch hasn't subsided after that, we can go to the local history museum, attend a performance at the drama theater, or drop by another art exhibition at the Exhibition Hall.
For a couple of days, you can calmly walk around the city, admiring its beauties and industrial exoticism. Then, every day you can make trips to nearby cities – Zlatoust (where Anatoly Karpov was born), Miass, Verkhneuralsk, Kasli, Kyshtym, Troitsk. Each of them is beautiful in its own way. Besides the obligatory factory, each of these cities has other attractive historical landmarks: churches, estates. The Ural city of Arkaim became known worldwide; some scientists now suggest it is the ancestral home of all humanity.
In addition, we should not forget that the territory adjacent to Chelyabinsk has unique lakes, natural parks, mountains, and caves. Time should also be set aside to visit them.
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