This is a gallery on my travels in Kazan. Please keep coming back as I have not finished posting commentary. For any question about the place, please feel free to reach out to me.
I arrived in Kazan after failing to get on my original flight as I had arrived to the front desk 1:15 before departure after a long line, so if you're travelling within Russia, don't be like me and don't ask for help and just wait in line + understand you need to be there earlier than 1:15 from departure. You can buy a ticket right then and there should anything happen.
For all the "Muslim appearance" and "decoration", Kazan and the whole administrative subject it belongs to, Tatarstan, is very secular.
This is the main pedestrian street, Bauman St. It goes crazy at night. I saw a lot of people hammered the nights I ventured out. The streets that run parallel to it tend to get full at night.
"Se acabó la diversión, llegó el comandante y mando a parar" was what I thought I would listen as I got in to this place, but was met instead with pop songs. Made me think Fidel would find the dissonance funny. I met a guy and a girl about my age sitting there while I drank a cider. After a few minutes or many, the guy, visibly under some kind of substance got up and left. The girl, a redhead Russian, started talking to me and we both bonded on her love of Spanish. "Down for drinks next Sunday, I asked?" "Down for anything".
Hanging around the bars on nearby streets I loved the anonymity I gained little by little the more the night progressed. Or so I thought, I was always anonymous. Met some people studying in Kazan Federal University around here.
With no tacos in sight to start the comedown after a night binging alcohol, I headed for the next best thing, a Shawarma. Russians either eat this, Vkusno i Tochka (ex McDonald's) or Rostic's (ex KFC).
Tatars have their own culture and everything culture entails. In this case my friend and I had been joking about the letter I left uncovered, a letter that doesn't exist in the cyrillic alphabet. The reason and the joke now exceed me jajaja.