Khabarovsk -- Vladivostok

I forgot to tell you another thing about Khabarovsk. Vlad showed us the United Russia (Putin's party) building and it is pink. Pink. Really light, delicate pink, the kind of pink that gets used for frilly dresses and is not remotely terrifying.

Anyway. Our last leg of the Trans-Siberian was the first where we've had other people in our compartment. The Russian woman seemed nice, but saw that we don't really speak Russian and so didn't say much; the Tajik man was a talker, and so didn't much care that we didn't share a common language. Once I found out he was Tajik I thought I would instantly endear myself to him by hacking together the Russian to tell him that I have a friend who is in Tajikistan now learning the language. (She's not actually there right now, but I don't know how to use the future tense in Russian -- close enough.) He seemed uninterested and asked if I was going back to New York after Russia. "No, to Spain," I told him. He looked at me for a minute and then said, in English, "Papa millionaire." Fuck. My first reaction was to be sort of offended. No, I'm not some spoiled rich kid. "No, I work a lot," I said as indignantly as I could in bad Russian. But as I said it I realized that he probably works a lot; he probably works a lot harder than I do, even when I'm not running around the world on vacation. And no matter how hard he works, he'll probably never get to take a three-month vacation to travel around the world; probably not even a two-week vacation. That my trip is self-financed suddenly became sort of tangential. While he complained about us to the Russian woman (who must have felt sort of awkward and mostly just looked out the window), liberal guilt took over and I decided I needed to make things right with this man who probably hated me and with whom I could barely communicate. I thought things got a little better when I asked what he thinks of Moscow (he hates it), but then he wanted to know if Shane and I are married and if I have babies, and was not happy with my replies. (I'd rather not lie about stuff like that, even if it means making people angry, and lying in Russian would have been too complicated anyway.) This man and I were clearly not going to be friends. I made one last half-hearted attempt, saying that the scenery out the window (which happened to be in the direction of the Chinese border) was beautiful. (Most of this leg of the trip runs not far from the border and apparently that's why the trains go at night. According to the guidebook, the blinds used to be locked shut for parts of the trip.) "No," he said firmly and pointed in the opposite direction. "That is beautiful. Russia is beautiful. That," pointing back at the window towards China, "is like Africa." I'm not sure what he even meant, but I was done trying to make nice, anyway.

We finished off the Schweppe's bottle of cognac/moonshine from the mean-looking woman in Irkutsk, closed down the cafe car, and got maybe four hours of sleep before arriving in Vladivostok dizzy and hung over. Our Tajik friend probably didn't approve of that, either.