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.

Free from the chains of Kazakhstan

Russian independence day, which celebrates Russia's indepdendence from the Soviet Union, is one of the sillier holidays I've ever heard of. Maybe the Russians think so too since, aside from closing some useful things like the post office internet cafe, they don't seem to celebrate it at all. I was hoping for music and parades and beer by the river, but all we got was another trip to the train station and a torrential downpour.

To enter the Ekaterinburg train station, you're supposed to walk through a metal detector; it's just inside the main entrance and comes with several police officers. Or, you can just go in through the exit, which is right next to the entrance. It has no metal detector and is in plain sight of the police. They don't care. We were just going to the train station to leave our bags for the day, but still that meant another line and some shoving. Joder. On the way out we saw a guy, either dead drunk or else just dead, face down on a dolly/wheelbarrow-type thing with his legs bent in very unnatural directions. A Russian train station is no place to pass out.

Ekaterinburg was named not for Catherine the Great but for Catherine I, wife of Peter the Great, who ruled briefly after Peter died. During communist times it was renamed Sverdlovsk after Igor Sverdlov, a crony of Lenin's who died during the 1918 flu epidemic. We learned from the Ekaterinburg City History Museum that other names considered were Revenge-burg and Mestigrad (City of Vengeance). Friggin' Soviets. The City History Museum also had an absurd hilarious exhibition about Soviet food, mostly reminiscing about how bad it was.

And now, we're headed back to the train station 'rest rooms,' which you can rent by the hour, to hopefully get a few hours of sleep before our train leaves at 6am. Wish us luck.

Tsar + martyr = tsartyr?

There are a lot of good things about Russians: their literature, their sense of humor, the way they let you drink beer wherever the hell you want. But holy fucking christ their queueing behavior is postively abhorrent. It's not just that they push and shove and ooze around the sides of lines -- they'll cut right the fuck in front of you if you let them. Don't I sound uptight and whiny? But when you grow up in a culture that's basically orderly, this shit is seriously maddening. For our second round of buying train tickets, my head nearly exploded, Shane nearly punched out an old lady (ok not really, but she did kinda deserve it), and the train we wanted was sold out. We ended up with tickets on a train leaving just a few hours later -- better times, actually -- but still, I'd rather be hit with sticks than go through the process of buying train tickets here.

Anyway. Ekaterinburg, which is where we are now, is not really what you'd call nice. It's a big sprawling mining town where aesthetics were clearly never a high priority. There is a river and a lake and a few parks, which are sort of pretty. And, Ekaterinburg is where the Red Army took the Russian royal family, and eventually murdered them, after the communist revolution. Boris Yeltsin (who happens to be from here) had the house where the murders took place torn down, and now the Church on the Blood (the Russians do have a way with naming their churches) commemorates the family. Nicholas and Alexandra are what first got me interested in all things Russian, so Ekaterinburg was worth the trip for them alone. In front of the church is a big statue of the whole family, except for their dog. The Reds killed him, too. No mention of Rasputin anywhere.

Moscow - Ekaterinburg

This train is much nicer than what I was expecting. It has air conditioning and the bathrooms are basically clean and it's taken the better part of 20 hours to run out of toilet paper. We've so far had a four-bed compartment to ourselves and the beds and pillows are comfortable enough. Under the tables of the cafe car are giant huge bags of carrots and potatoes, which is kind of fun. The other people in our car are some French people who assume everyone speaks French, a Dutch couple who've come all the way from Holland on trains and are going all the way to Beijing, and various Russians including Mikhail, a Siberian mechanic who's been drinking since at least 9am. He even takes his beer to the bathroom with him. When everyone was off the train at a station he asked if I speak Russian and the conductor lady standing nearby told him nyet before I could even reply. Not sure if she thought she was doing me a favor or just being nosy -- I thought I'd been faking it okish in Russian so far. Mikhail didn't have much to say besides "USA good," anyway.

Remote Russia is the kind of place where people come out of the woodwork to sell things on the platform when a train comes in. In addition to snacks and all manner of alcohol (Mikhail stocked up on beer) there was a guy selling pine tree branches. Maybe they were the kind they use for flogging in Russian massage, but there's definitely not a Russian bath car on this train.

It's like Versailles, but full of shit

BVXT, or VVTs, or something, was some kind of Soviet Exhibition center, or something. It's a huge space with something like 100 pavilions and a huge fancy House of Soviets (or something like that) in the middle, with stars and hammers and sickles and a huge Lenin statue. Plus there's a separate building for each of the former Soviet republics and some big gold shiny ostentatious fountains. It was probably nice, in its way, at some point in the past. Now in among the buildings is a super cheesy amusement park with a go-cart track outlined by piles of tires, and those big inflatable things that kids bounce around in, and people yelling into megaphones. Loud bad constantly changing dance music blared and the woman in charge of the pay portable toilets made out with some dude in her own personal portable toilet/office. Inside the buildings were wax museums and cheap jewelry stores and cell phone kiosks. As Shane said "It's like someone took a huge capitalist dump on Versailles."

Anyway, we've got train tickets and now also have toilet paper and snacks and a liter of boxed wine and are just a few hours away from getting on the train. This is gonna be a good adventure.

In Russia, train rides you

Buying train tickets is hard. Even for actual Russians, who speak the right language and presumably know how things work here, it's a slow process that requires waiting in long lines and a lot of talking. We even wrote down exactly what we wanted, in Russian (2 tickets to Ekaterinburg, Jun 9, in the evening, first class), but still the woman behind the counter responded with a whole string of questions that I didn't understand, followed by many minutes of typing and waiting, with a whole long line of people breathing down our necks. When it finally became clear that exactly what we wanted wasn't available, stress and frustration and confusion and exasperation took over and we just left. No travel agent magically appeared, though, so we just ended up in another set of train station lines. The first line we waited in closed as soon as we got to the front of it. The next line seemed to be marked for invalids, but the woman waiting in front of us seemed pretty valid. Suer enough, a helpful/nosy lady soon came over. "Devushka, this line is for invalids." "But she's not an invalid," I said, pointing at the woman in front of me. The nosy/helpful woman butted her way to the front of the line, as Russians are wont to do, and confirmed that, contrary to the sign, one did not have to be an invalid to be in our particular line. The woman behind the counter was nice enough, reasonably patient, and super efficient. No first class seats available, but we managed to book second class sets (more of an adventure) to Ekaterinburg, so tomorrow night we'll start sharing a train compartment with two strangers and 26 hours later (that's 3.30am local time) we'll be in Ekaterinburg. Whew.

Feeling like we'd just been beaten, we recovered with some coffee and a visit to the Kremlin. Then we saw torn-down Stalin statues with broken noses. And then we had a really good Georgian dinner, with more wine than we needed, followed by beers drunk on steps outside the train station. It is confusing and maddening and in parts (especially near train stations) smells overpoweringly of armpits or urine, but I love Russia.

Russia!

I wasn't surprised that the bus to the Kiev airport was a hot sweaty van. I was a little surprised that I didn't have to pay to get on the hot sweaty van. What would the driver do is someone refused to pay once we were already at the airport? About halfway there he stopped the van and made everyone pay. Well worth the approximately four dollars to not be left stranded on the side of the eight-lane highway.

And now, Moscow! Tomorrow, logistics. Then, if all goes according to plan, get on the train to, eventually, Vladivostok. That's about 150 hours of train travel and almost 10,000 km.

I am so freaking excited.