Ekaterinburg - Irkutsk

The 'rest rooms' were clean, which is all one can reasonably expect of hourly-rental sleeping rooms at the train station. The downside was that the nonstop train announcements were made, loudly, right outside the window, making it hard to do any actual sleeping, even with ear plugs. Whatever.

We're not officially on the Trans-Siberian Railroad for this leg of the trip. That train (the #2) was sold out, so we're instead going to Irkutsk on the #10 train which starts in St. Petersburg and ends in Irkutsk. This train has fewer plugs and grosser bathrooms than the first train we were on, but it is air conditioned. The AC is very much appreciated because, even though it was in the 50's (and raining) yesterday, it's supposed to be in the 90's around Irkutsk. Joder.

There aren't many passengers on this train, and aside from us they're all Russian. People mostly stay in their own compartments and the only person who's expressed any interest in us whatsoever is a sevenish year old girl with some kind of hearing impairment that means she can't really talk to us in any language. One of the train workers walks through the cars singing songs sometimes, and we got a kick out of the guy in the dining car who ordered a bottle of juice and a bottle of vodka for breakfast. He drank nearly half the vodka in the time it took us to have coffee. Mostly, though, we're just doing a lot of sitting around and reading -- more relaxing than adventurous. Luckily Shane and I can have fun together in most any situation, and there is a constant supply of alcohol.

At the beginning of this leg of the trip, we officially crossed into Siberia. It is big and green and empty. There are some cute little villages and some crappy little villages and some rivers, but the only real changes in the scenery are whether the trees are relatively more birch vs. pine, whether it's mostly flat vs. slightly hilly, and the presence vs. absence of dandelions. Even the bigger 'cities' we've stopped in (like Omsk, to where Dostoyevsky was exiled for a while) haven't really been recognizable as such from the train. I'm trying to imagine being forced onto a cattle car to go thousands of miles to this nothingness to spend years doing hard labor, but it's not quite working. This leg of the trip alone is 50-something hours long and about the same distance as going across the United States. At the end of it, we'll be a little over halfway to Vladivostok.