Our desserts at a restaurant where we had dinner one night. Before the trip, the reactions we got from people when we said we were going to Murmansk were generally ones of confusion as to why we would want to go to such a depressing city. In fact, though it won't come through in the cloudy, snowy scenes, the city was quite lively, with nice restaurants, lots of varied stores, crowds of people, and a lot to do. Of course, the Soviet arcetecture is anything but exciting, but the older buildings were often quite fancy and interesting. Like any city, it has its dull, uninteresting parts, but it was far from the depressing place it had been made out to be.