Accommodation

During the registration progress, you will be able to book rooms in two hotels in Akademgorodok.

Golden Valley (Золотая Долина)

This is the two-stars guest house of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Restaurants, cafes, the university and grocery stores are in distance of a five minute walk. Employees of the Russian Academy of Science get a special rate.

Park Wood (Парк Вуд)

A four-star hotel in the Щ-district of Akademgorodok. The university is within a walk of 45 minutes, yet the hotel provides a free taxi to the conference venue in the morning, is well-connected to the restaurants and cafes of Akademgorodok via minibus line 7, and taxis to any place in Akademgorodok cost at most 150 roubles (2 euros); see below.

Summarizing, the location of Golden Valley is better, whereas Park Wood is generally considered to be the better hotel, whose location is compensated for by the free taxi service in the morning.

Getting around Akademgorodok

Besides walking, the most comfortable ways of getting around in Akademgorodok are minibus and taxi.

Minibus line 7 (30 roubles)

Minibus line 7 takes you to about any place in Novosibirsk Akademgorodok. These minibusses go every 5–10 minutes. A ride costs 30 roubles (40 euro-cents) and is paid to the driver when entering the bus. However, since the stop names are not announced and the stop names are written only in Russian, using the minibusses, you are advised to track your position on your smartphone using GPS or to ask local passengers to help you not missing your stop.

The smartphone app Yandex.Taxi may also be helpful: it shows available bus routes and where busses are on the route.

Taxi (Yandex.Taxi or Gett, no more than 150 roubles)

Taxi rides within Akademgorodok generally cost no more than 150 roubles (2 euros). To comfortably order a taxi without speaking any Russian, we recommend installing the apps Yandex.Taxi or Gett on your smartphone: you mark start and end positions of your ride in the app, a taxi will arrive, the app tells you the number of the car's license plate, you enter the taxi, and after arriving at your destination the app will automatically charge your credit card.

Russian alphabet

Since all street signs are Russian only, knowing some Russian letters will certainly help you a lot. There's only 33 of them. As mathematicians, you will quite easily learn them: many of them are similar to Latin or Greek ones.

Going from the airport to your hotel or the conference venue

The most comfortable way from the airport to Akademgorodok is by taxi. It will cost from 700 to 1400 roubles (10 to 20 euros) depending on the class of the car. The official airport taxi is Taxi Tolmachevo (Такси Толмачево). You will find their stand on the ground floor in the arrival hall of Terminal A (after the baggage claim). Their drivers can also be recognized by their green vests. Should you arrive at Terminal B, don't worry: Terminal A is right next door, the airport is rather small.

Closer to the conference date, we will collect the flight numbers from the participants and organize bus transfers to the hotels Golden Valley and Park Wood for groups of participants arriving with the same flight. Should you need cash to pay for the taxi, there are ATMs in the airport that allow you to draw roubles using MasterCard or VISA.

We point out that, In the airport arrival hall, you will be met by many private people offering you taxi service. We recommend to ignore them.

Payment

All payments in Russia are in Russian roubles, generally nobody will take Euros or US Dollars. You can draw roubles using MasterCard or VISA at ATMs in the airport, at Novosibirsk State University, or at the nearby Akademgorodok shopping center.

However, usually you will not need a lot of roubles in cash, since in restaurants, cafes, shops, and taxis you can pay even small amounts using MasterCard and VISA. The main exception are the minibusses, which only accept cash. Carrying around 500 roubles in cash is enough in most situations.

Maps

The smartphone apps "2GIS" and "Maps.me" provide offline maps for Novosibirsk. Maps.me has the advantage that it shows street names in both Russian and English, where 2Gis shows street names only using the Russian alphabet (like on street signs), but its interface is in English. The advantage of 2GIS is that it knows public transport routes.

We also recommend the Campus Guide provided by Novosibirsk State University.

The left map below shows Novosibirsk State University, the Golden Valley hotel, and a number of restaurants. The right map shows the route of minibus line 7 between Novosibirsk State University and Park Wood Hotel.