Our 'hostel' in Irkutsk turned out to be a flat that a couple rented out the dorm beds/private rooms to tourists, and it was just us and an English guy there. Our first day there Michael and I tried to get the local bus to Lake Baikal, but our information was wrong and we got the times all wrong. So instead we visited a house museum where a wealthy Decemberist was exiled to, but unfortunately all the info was in Russian. We walked about the river front and saw some very pretty Russian Orthodox churches, and as it was Sunday, heard the church bells ringing.
Irkutsk looked pretty grim when we arrived and left, as there seemed to be a lot of air pollution from factories etc. The day in between then sun shone though, and it was pretty. There were lots of old wooden houses with shutters and intricate lattice work on the outside that I really liked. Some of the public transport was vans that had numbers on them, and was full of people. We saw some ladas, and noticed that most of the cars were filthy from the dust/dirty slushy snow, unlike UB.
