Ulan Ude - Khabarovsk

This train smells like fish. We are near Lake Baikal still, and Baikal fish is a big deal here, but of all the things to sell in closed train compartments, smoked fish has to be among the worst. Ew.

This is our second and last reeeaaalllly long train ride -- about 50 hours -- taking us out of Siberia and into the Russian Far East. It's hillier and more rivery out here and it's pretty -- the little wooden houses often have cute blue shutters --but this is not scenery that needs to be described in detail. Instead I'll just tell you some things about Asian Russia and the train in general.

Aside from our very first leg out of Moscow, the trains have been fairly empty and the other passengers are all Russians who mostly keep to themselves. The Russians pack tons of food and the cafe car is usually empty except for sometimes us. The cafe cars are generally fairly grungy, but today one of the waitstaff is wearing a see-through shirt, thigh-high fishnet stockings, and a skirt that's not long enough to cover the tops of the stockings. Russian men of all body times and smelliness/hairiness levels go shirtless.

All Russian trains operate on Moscow time. In a country with ten different time zones (we're covering eight of them), I guess it is probably the least confusing way to operate, but also speaks a little to Russia's extreme Moscow-centricity and central planning. I get the impression that the Russians who don't live in Moscow sort of hate it. ("That's not Russia," our friend Yegor from Ekaterinburg said of Moscow, with no trace of irony.)

There are towns out here with names like Perm and Perm-2, and Krasnoyarsk and Krasnoyarsk-26 (not sure about Krasnoyarsk-2 -- Krasnoyarsk-25). You'd think that with a language where it's considered perfectly acceptable to have words as long as several English sentences, they could have given these towns better names.

You're allowed to smoke in between the cars and people do, a lot. As we get farther east (and some people have been on this same showerless train since Moscow), it's a close call as to whether the smoking areas or some of the smellier cars smell worse. Luckily the fishiness of our current car is more benign than either.