Train train, sixteen coaches long

N 56 18.297 E 68 50.818 - 23 September 2008 - Tuesday 14.34 Moscow Time

Not exactly sure what time it is now, local time that is. I think we recently crossed over our third time zone in two days. The next one should probably be sometime tonight when we are sleeping. Our train might be running about an hour late, but it is hard to say. The timetables are confusing and they run on Moscow time, and it is hard to say what time it is anyways. I guess it doesn't really matter so much anyways.

We have another about 36 hours to go. The last mile marker I saw was about 2800 something (kilometers). I'm starting to get better at sighting them. They are just along the tracks, you really have to scrunch down and press up against the windows to see them. You also have to watch carefully for them. I generally sit there, count slowly, if I see one flash by then counting again to like 35 I'll see the next one. The guides (one of them, we have two with us) have different points of interest and towns listed by the kilometer markers. There is this tension between being a little obsessive about seeing where you are all the time and just sitting and letting it flow by.

For a 72 hour train trip. it is easier to just let it flow by. Fall is in full flush here and it is very yellow outside, little flashes of red and green. The landscape changed quite a bit from what it was yesterday. It was more pine sort of forests yesterday, a little more dense than it is now. We passed through and over the Urals mostly last night while we slept, although they don't seem to be super high and spectacular of a mountain range, and passed into Asia (my first time in Asia) and into Siberia. The trees turned more into birch, become more sparse, the land is more meadows (apparently bogs) with numerous small lakes and reed marshes. I haven't seen much wildlife, but then we are whizzing by. There are occasional fields of crows and some ducks on lakes but I couldn't say about much else.

Ora (maybe Aura or something similar) is asleep in her bunk. We are sharing the cabin with just one other woman. The other bunk is unfilled. She is on her way back to Vladivostok or I think she said she lived somewhere near there, her seventh trip from there to Moscow. At least I think that is what she said. Her knowing almost no English and between C and I, our Russian is about the same. Our phrase book is only useful to a point. I wish we had bought the full dictionary. It makes communication very frustrating and extremely limited (not to mention very time consuming).

She is pretty nice though, a grandmother, she bought a few toys from vendors on the platform at different places we stopped. We disagree a little bit on the heating and the music. Have I mentioned the music yet? It is very cheezy, a strange mix too. It sounds like Russian pop (not quite as sickly sweet as Japanese pop, slightly more folk music) and some rap and even English language R&B/rap thrown in occasionally. One was singing about her lady lumps earlier this morning.

But when we got on the train, we noticed two things immediately. One, it is stiflingly hot and two, well, there was blasting cheezy music. We were happy to discover a volume knob in our cabin to silence it, but Ora seems to like it, so we turn it off and on occasionally. She is a brave woman, she is headed all the way to the end of the line (8 days worth) and she didn't bring anything to read. As for the heat, there are no controls that we can find. The first night was a sweaty one, until probably about midnight when the heat went off all together and it cooled down until they turned it on again sometime in the morning. But you can open the door into the corridor and cool the room down a bit, but I think Ora is also a bit sick (coughing a bit) and has been cold, even when the heat is blasting.

The provodnitsa (well, two of them but since they are on 12 hour shifts, we mostly just see one of them) runs a tight ship here. Open a window in the corridor and she shuts it for you. You have to sneak into the toilet to open that window and poke your head out. Well worth the view mostly and the fresh air. But she keeps things running well and nice and clean. The samovar is fantastic, loads of hot water all the time for tea and soup and I've just been drinking hot water most of the day on its own. She went through today sweeping (whisk broom) and fixing the carpet in the corridor and swept into our compartment. The nicest thing, they seem pretty proud of the carriage and their domain. Every time we stop at a station and get off and wander around the platform for 5-15 minutes, first thing, she heads right to the plaque on the side of the train (says Russia, Moscow to Vladivostok, or something like that, of course in Cyrillic) and she gives it a nice wipe down. The other provodnitsas seem to concentrate on wiping down the handrails as their first task off the train.

Time is strange on the train. It seems like a long time but is strange to think we are already half way there. It seems to pass quickly, especially since it has started getting dark fairly early, so much of everything passes by after dark (like the marker marking the beginning of Asia). I will probably just get into the rhythm of it all and we will be there and have to adjust to normal life again. Here you wake up, see where you are, make porridge and tea, read, get off the train when we stop at stations and see what they are selling on the platform, read some more, dig in the food bags for lunch (we stocked up before we left Moscow, cups of soup, bread, sausage, etc), read and look out the window more, find dinner things, etc. It is an enjoyable time.

I might head out into the corridor, sit on one of the seats there next to those windows and read there for a little bit.