Trans-Siberian

In my third day in the trans-siberian, I decided to interrupt my daily train routine of listening to music, eating, and sleeping with a mid-trip blog entry. As you would expect, internet connectivity is not one of the trans-siberian's many luxuries, but thankfully AC power outlets are, and these wonderful inventions allow me to at least type my thoughts away and store them in a trusty magnetic medium until I find a LAN somewhere to send them off to a blogger.com server.

Obtaining my ticket to go to Beijing on the trans-siberian was one of my most time-consuming and frustrating activities while in Moscow. I looked up the names of the stations where I could buy my ticket (Komsolskaya metro station or Yereslavsky train station), jotted them down, found them on a metro map, took my wallet with around 2900 rubles on it and my passport, and walked off to find them. I had almost assumed that, unlike the small food booths on the street, a proper railway station that sold international tickets should have at least one person who could speak english to attend the foreign customers. My problem was that I was mistaken. At every window my experience was about the same:

-Excuse me, do you know English?

-(Confused face)

-Angloski? (pointing at the confused attendant)

-HET (Nyet)

-(Disappointed frown) (Pointing at the other window booths), Angloski?

-HET (Nyet)

-(Further disappointment) (Pointing at myself), HET PUCCKN (Nyet Russki). (Pointing at myself and drawing a line to a far away place), Pekin?

-(Confused face again).

-(Same mimic again), Pekin!

-Pekin? Ahh! HET!, (followed by about 10 seconds of fast russian of which I understood not a syllable, but directing me with their hands towards another station).

-(Partially understanding I was being redirected somewhere else), Spasiba, (smiling and leaving).

This occurred to me 4 times in different booths, in different floors, and in different stations. By the fifth time, I was getting scared that I would never be able to communicate with any of the russian attendants, and I began asking random people on the queues who looked like they might have known english to help me. None of them knew any english, but a nice russian girl and guy on the queue behind me did understand what I wanted, and told the attendant that I wanted a ticket to Beijing. Not surprisingly, I was in the wrong station again, but the guy who had helped me out told me to stick with him and that he would help me.

I'm not easily given to trust random russian people on railway station queues, but I was desperate. He looked about 30, had a backpack with him, and was buying a ticket for a train that would leave that same night for a place called Krygrz. If he was going to scam me, at least he wasn't initially planning on it, so I decided I was better off with him than without him.

He did not know two words of english, but we stuck together for enough time so that he understood through sign language only what I wanted: a one-way ticket on the train to Beijing to leave on Tuesday, June 16th. We still walked to two more stations before he found the correct place, and after a 10-minute queue, the russian guy told the lady what I wanted, and the lady told us the price: 15783 rubles. I quickly made a gross conversion: 15783/30 = about $526.10. More expensive than a plane ticket, but not excessively so. OK. We told her we did not have enough money yet and slipped off to a nearby ATM. It allowed me to withdraw a maximum of 10000 rubles. I did, and now I had 12900. I tried the same thing again, and DANG, the machine didn't let me. Tried again, and nope! Tried with the credit card, and nope! Apologetically, I told the russian guy that I had 4000 more rubles in my hostel, and that we should go get them. He was OK with that, so we walked out. While walking out to the metro station, I offered the russian guy something to drink, since he was helping me so much. He got something to drink AND something to eat, and then asked me for money to store his luggage on the station for a few hours while he waited for his train. I felt I owed him at least that, so I gladly paid for him, was left with 12600 rubles, and then we went back to my hostel.

I was almost certain that I had 4000 rubles in my reserve money. Sadly, that was not so. I had 3000, and that added up to 15600 rubles. I thought of the ticket price again: 15783. "Oops", I thought, "short by 180!". 180 flimsy rubles! I had taken all the money I could readily obtain, and I was short by 180 rubles! I desperately decided to find another ATM (or bAHKOMAT in Russian) and see if that one gave me some more money. And what do you know, it did! I withdrew 200 extra rubles, happily told the russian guy I had enough, and we went back to the lady selling the train tickets.

I'm still not sure what happened, but when we got back, the lady showed us the price on her calculator: 14992. "Oh", I thought. Wasn't that a little higher before? I wasn't about to argue with that, however, so I readily paid and got my ticket to PEKNH. Finally! Then as we were sitting down, the russian guy put on a very serious face and told me, by writing numbers into my notebook and pointing to them, that it was in fact HE who had lowered the price from 15783 to 14992 rubles, and that he requested me to pay him 500 rubles for it. Now that I think of it, it was a discount of almost exactly 5%. Hmmm, ok. Well, needless to say, I was fine with that, I had paid less than I had expected to anyway, maybe just about the same considering the extra food and luggage storage. I gladly paid him, thanked him, and then we said goodbye.

It took me about 4 hours to get a hold of my ticket, but the important thing is that I did. And if I can get any moral of out of it, it's the following: do not expect russian people to speak english, or any other language besides russian. They mostly don't. So learn Russian or get a phrasebook or a translator if you're coming to Russia - you'll be glad you did.

I asked for the cheapest possible train ticket to Beijing, of course, and considering my previous experiences on some european trains, I was expecting the trans-siberian to be a grueling, uncomfortable, 6-day trip. Something like sitting on a plastic or wooden chair inside a 6-chair hot, humid cabin, surrounded by shady-looking passengers constantly eyeing you and your possessions, just waiting for you to go to sleep. Well, I was very wrong about that. Very wrong indeed. This little train ride I'm on is one of the best I've taken! My first big surprise was my spot: I had not gotten a chair, I had gotten a bed! A whole bed, for me! It is indeed more comfortable than the beds of many hostels I have stayed at, and the bedsheets and pillow are cozy and soft. Just that one thing was enough to make my trip far more comfortable than I would've imagined, but my little cabin does not stop at that. Each of the 4 beds in the cabin is foldable in case you need some more space. It has a table to share amongst the passengers, several storage bins, a slidable, working door, a general light switch, a gentle nightlight switch, 4 individual passenger reading lights, a fan, foldable ladders on either side to climb unto the upper beds, a big shared thermos to store boiling water (of which there is a dispenser on each wagon), and a nice rug. It is GREAT! Only power outlets inside the cabin and a free WiFi internet connection would have plausibly made it better! Alas, power outlets are only available in the corridors outside the passenger cabins, and this little inconvenience is what has me sitting in the hallway right now, writing this entry.

I must say that my ongoing journey on this 6-day train ride is certainly one of the most satisfying and relaxing experiences I have encountered in my whole RoundTrip. Possible activities while traveling are limited, and up to now, I have been spending my whole time in the train by sleeping, eating, writing postcards, narrating other events in my trip, talking to my 2 Irish cabinmates about miscellaneous subjects, playing diverse card games and Scrabble with them, meeting random passengers from nearby cabins, buying food and drink from local vendors at the occasional train stops, and watching the colorful russian landscapes and towns pass us by outside the windows as the train rushes steadily over the tracks, hour after hour after hour, after hour. It is a rare, slow-paced experience to find or even fathom in the culture of our big modern cities today.