The Cornered Washing Machine

Haven’t renewed that in a while:

Moscow in the clouds. And I don’t mean the good kind. I mean the nasty wildfire smoke clouds. We arrived early afternoon, but the smoke made it look very dark, like very very late afternoon. The streets were mostly empty, as the people were told to stay inside and all the foreign personnel of companies/embassies had already been evacuated. Our taxi driver use the opportunity to race around town to our hotel, as there were no other cars on the streets. Definitely fun. Looked all like some 80s version of a depressing future.

We got some mask the next day which made breathing in the smoke filled streets a bit easier. But even this way, Amy didn’t deal with the smoke very well, she felt pretty bad at the end of the stay. At least in the hotel the A/C cleared out the smoke, so sleeping was ok. It was good we didn’t stayed more than 3 days.

Moscow reminded me most of Paris, with it’s big alleys and the 19th century buildings. I liked the architecture a lot. We went to the Kremlin, Lenin museum (Lenin looked like a wax figure to me) and St. Basil’s Cathedral. Looked all very surreal in the smoky sunshine and the grey background. Like a bad version of communism from an old American movie. Nevertheless, pretty impressive overall, I definitely want to go back, when there is more life in the city … and more sunshine.

Next train ride, another overnight, to Novosibirsk, but the first one without a border crossing. Train was nice, but nothing special. We only had one compartment companion, a very quite man, who didn’t speak English and was also not very interested in hand signal communication. He did share his food with us (He had boiled eggs, very nice). As this time it was a long overnight, I tried to actually find the mysterious train shower. Every train of the fast class is suppose to have one, but nobody really knows where it is. Russians don’t use it, backpackers don’t want to pay the fee. I first learned the word for shower (pronounced Dusch, like in German). After asking around in three successive train cars, I found a train attendant that was genuinely surprised, brought me to the shower room and immediately started taking her stuff out it. Didn’t figure out if she slept in it or just stored random stuff. As nobody ever seems to use it, it kinda made sense for her. Anyway, the shower wasn’t bad, except that the floor is actually a metal grid and you stare directly at the tracks. Fun.

Novosibirsk wasn’t our first choice, we wanted to go to Tomsk. Unfortunately we didn’t have much time until the next train and Tomsk was pretty far away (like 6h). The relatively fancy hotel was for business people, it had free WiFi, a steak restaurant and a strip club. Otherwise Novosibirsk didn’t look much different than Irkutsk/Europe. A funny thing was the railroad museum. When we told the security guy we wanted to visit it, he almost fell over backwards. He had to get the museum curator to unlock the door. It was freshly renovated, but had no English guide or signs. So we just look at the pictures and models while the curator followed us three steps behind, switching stuff on and off as we passed it. One of the weirdest museums ever.

The next train, to Moscow, was long (2 nights), otherwise boring. I got used to the metal grid in the shower. We were really good at getting the nice foods from the stations. Only really cool think was when we crossed the Europe/Asia border in the Ural mountains.

Irkutsk looks like Berlin! Here we were in the middle of Asia, but I was feeling like walking around in a typical European city build in the 19th century. Wide streets, Jugendstil buildings together with Plattenbauten. So very different than China or Mongolia. Our hostel was actually just an apartment with kitchen/living room and 3 bedrooms run by a couple of young Russians. Very cool, was just like staying in a friend’s apartment. Otherwise, walking around in Irkutsk was quite fun, especially the Volkonsky museum. We also hung out with Wilm again, drinking vodka in a beer garden until later that night.

On the second day, we went to Lake Baikal. Why the nature and views were great, there wasn’t a lot to do and the boardwalk was quite uninteresting. Especially the Baikal Hotel was bad, looking like an Eastern German hotel ca. 1987. What was great was the Omul fish (a species unique to the lake) they sell everywhere. You essentially buy it fried and eat it just like that. Delicious. We spend the evening hanging out with people from the hostel with a lot of vodka. 😉

A big problem was actually getting our train tickets for the next leg. On the first day, we walked up the train station asking around, but everybody pointed us in a different direction and nobody understood English or the Russian phrases we tried. We gave up. Second day, we actually figured out that the train station has three separate buildings that are not connected. After that, getting the tickets wasn’t so hard. A station map would have been nice.

Oh my, no wonder this train right is so long. We first sat for several hours on the Mongolian side of the border without much happening at all. A Mongolian woman and her son asked us if they could hang some jackets in out cabin. Took us a while to figure out they were smuggling. 😉 I was already dawn when we moved and crossed into Russia. Weird feeling actually (growing up in Eastern Germany gave me a certain “caution” about Russia), the big crowd of guards with machine guns certainly didn’t help. Wilm, our Dutch train companion, told me there would be showers on the other side, but only one. So, as soon as we stopped at the Russian border station, I jumped out and ran for it. Really nice shower, big with all extras. After I was done, only in a t-shirt and a towel, I walked our. Unfortunately the train was gone (for several hours)! I was pissed, but Amy got me a chess board from a market and I played chess to pass the time. Even after train was back, the Russian guards searched the train several times and confiscated our passport for a while. You need patience for the Russian borders!

Second train, Ulan Bator to Irkutsk, actually a shorter trip by distance then Beijing – but there is a Russian border and crossing takes a lot of time apparently. The Russian portion of the train (aka the part actually allowed to cross the border) was only two wagons with own Russian staff. The train was a weird combination out of old and new style, completely sealed windows and some form of air-condition based on the movement of the train. There was also carpet and it looked much more nice than the Chinese train before. The Russian staff were two old ladies, unfriendly, but helpful. I felt almost home. 😉
For companionship this time we had a guy from Tuva (looked Mongolian, but was actually Russian) and a very cool old guy from Holland (yes, Dutch again): Wim. He was a Doctor of Anthropology on a research trip. We must have had hours and hours of conversation about all kinds of topics …