Train Living
I am on the commuter train, stopping at every stop, seeing all of the cool things. I’m also in a tiny room for 56 hours. Things start to get…interesting. My hair is oily. My face is oily. The train bathrooms are nowhere you’d want to brush your teeth. I do not smell worse than anyone else in my carriage. Also, the carriages are all full, so there are lines for the bathroom and the trash bin is constantly overfull. The Russian and Mongolian train do, at least, have toilet paper, where the Chinese train was a BYO-TP. The dining car is my only respite from my room, and today I spent 2 hours having lunch. I had 2 beers and the ‘beer plate’, which sounded like delicious pub food but in the end was terrible. I tried my first bowl of borscht for dinner, and while I didn’t particularly like it on its own, it was passable with sour cream. Again, the Russian and Mongolian dining cars are great, both open most of the time the train is operating, good selection of food and drink. The Chinese train was again the worst. The dining car opened for 30 minutes each meal, and there was no menu: everyone was given the same thing.
Final Hours
As I continue to sit in my tiny room looking out at all the snow-covered villages, I think: There is no way all snowflakes are unique. Look how many of them there are.
Feeling like I’m in a cell, I ponder doing pull-ups from the top bunk, but all of my muscles are quite sore from all the walking and carrying things.
In Russian, the diminutive form of words is formed by adding ‘ka’ to the end. So ‘shuba’ is a coat and ‘shubka’ is like a smaller ladies coat. So like… water in Russian is voda… is vodka ‘little water’?
Please let me off the train.
Arriving in Yekaterinburg
The train finally came to a stop in Yekaterinburg at around 10 p.m. The driver was there to pick me up and it was a quick jaunt, less than 10 minutes, to the hotel. The hotel is nice and I immediately go through my things to submit them for laundry. My plan before leaving was to only wash my thermal layers and underthings, by hand in hotel sinks. But I hadn’t planned on the permeating smell of Mongolian horses and Russian dogs. Every layer is unbearably pungent. I packed a bag of clothes to be properly washed before I go into the city this week.
Then I take a shower. Hot water! I real bathroom! I brushed my teeth and washed my face and put on lotion. Ahhh. Now it’s bed time and tomorrow I explore Yekaterinburg.
