Getting to the train
My guide picked me up at 9 and we went directly to the train station. It’s kind of cute and also a little demeaning that every guide is mandated to put me ON the train. Like I haven’t already figured out the platform/track situation and can’t find my carriage. The train arrives late, so we spend maybe 20 minutes awkwardly staring at the timetable, since we arrived an hour before the train departs. Finally I board the train for my final leg of the actual trans-Siberian railroad. Technically, I guess the Moscow-St. Petersburg line isn’t part of it.
First Class
This time, I am booked into an actual first class cabin. There are only 2 beds, and the table in the middle is set with snacks and drinks. Again, a meal is included, and the train attendant promptly shows up at the door and goes through her usual spiel of ‘Toilets are this way, we arrive at this time, here’s how to turn on the television, etc’. Also first class room has a TV. Waaat. I understand only part of it, but I get the idea. Then she asks what I want for dinner, with the choices being “riba” (fish) or “azu” (?). Obviously I pick azu. Apparently there is also like an appetizer/cold plate course and you can choose between cheeses and salami. This I’m not understanding and for the first time, she is like ‘oh… English?’. She asks if I prefer cheese or salami, and I obviously choose cheese. Then she tries to ask in English about my preferences for juice, but she can’t really remember the English word for juice or orange, but fortunatley I know those 2 words. The choices are apple, orange, tomato. I pick apple juice, and reply to her in Russian.
Roommate
I put away my things and my new roommate arrives: an older Russian lady. She speaks no English, but is amused with my attempts to speak Russian. She says lots of things to me, to which I smile and nod, understanding maybe 10%. She learns to slow down and use small words. She points out cool things as we pass. There is a frozen river, covered in ice fishermen. Little tents all over with fishers inside, cutting a hole in the ice. It’s actually quite easy to pick out which parts of the landscape are water in the spring. They are the only bits with flat, expansive patches of snow. Land is either forest with snow or scrubby grassland with snow, with twigs and grass sticking out, making the snow look all dirty. But frozen lakes and rivers are perfectly flat and the snow falls on top of them, perfectly flat and white. She brings up pictures of the river in spring time and tells me the names of the mountains and villages we pass. She is going to Moscow for New Years, and goes every year, but she is from Yekaterinburg. She shows me pictures of her dog, a Staffordshire terrier, and I show her Pooka’s photo. She works on crossword puzzles in Russian while I type. Shows me photos of New Years Eve in Moscow, tells me which city is prettiest from the train station and tells me I can’t go to bed early or I’ll miss it (it’s the 10:37 p.m. stop). Given someone who is patient enough to speak slowly, repeat themselves a lot, and use small words, I’m understanding a lot. She will be my roommate for the next 25 hours, and I am glad to not have to worry about that situation. I am sorry she doesn’t have a roommate she can have more conversation with, though. 25 hours is a long train ride.
Tour Agency
This is the first time I have ever booked a ‘tour’. I’ve never used a tour agency, and I generally prefer to manage things myself. But. Things for this trip are not so simple. While I could have arranged my own hotels, the railway tickets are actually a very complicated dance. The rail tickets are sold, all of them apparently, to tour companies. Or, at least, the tour companies purchase them as soon as they go on sale. Tickets can be fully refunded until 3 weeks before departure. So they offload all the ones they didn’t sell 3 weeks before they can be used and that’s when other people can purchase them. Many of the trains I would need to take for this journey are once weekly through the remote areas of Siberia. So only knowing if you got a ticket 3 weeks ahead of time would have been maddening. So that’s the reasoning for electing to have someone else handle the travel particulars. On top of that, any time I want to buy tickets to a ballet or circus, the website only accepts Russian credit cards. So I have to either go through my tour company or find a different one on Viator. Generally, I have gone through Viator and had great luck. Included with the grand tour, though, are tour guides. I had just accepted this as a necessary part of it, but now realize that that was a mistake. I’m not sure how much, if any of this is normal, but I can definitely say I will avoid at all costs using any sort of tour company in the future. It has been unorganized, frustratingly so, and lacking in communication and responsiveness from the tour company. I can’t imagine anyone finds this to be a vacation. Everything is kind of tightly scheduled, but then nothing happens as planned.
Tour Guides
I have scheduled tons of excursion type activities: cooking classes, zip-lining, kayaking, horseback riding, etc. But this is my first experience having a tour guide. Like a person who walks you around the city and points at things and talks about them. If I had been more than one person the guides might have even carried a little flag or umbrella for me to follow them. So here are my experiences thus far. Obviously, the guide, their personality, and how you interact with them matters. The first guide, Mr. Slackerson, was terrible, didn’t go to the places he was supposed to, and didn’t communicate with me. After that was the female guide I hired myeslf in Beijing. She was fantastic. I think, particularly when visiting places with significantly different cultural backgrounds, having this type of guide is helpful. There is a lot of symbolism in the statues and paintings and architecture of China. Having someone point out why there are 7 dragon statues on this corner and 9 on that corner and why one lion is holding a ball or its ears are down or the pheonix is to the inside instead of the outside, was interesting and helpful. Having the 10th person explain to me in Europe why a horse statue has 3 legs touching the ground vs 2 vs 4, would not be helpful. So it’s helpful in very new places. Also, having a guide who bothers to assess what you find interesting and what you want to see is crucial. Going through the motions, here is the city, here is my tour I give every day… isn’t going to speak to everyone. And your livelihood depends on your ability to engage the traveler. Also, having an interest in traveling yourself is key. If you never travel, you have no idea *why* people travel, and you can’t give them that experience they are seeking.
Particularly in countries with cultures significantly different from my own, it has been interesting to see the inherent thoughts and beliefs of the guides come through in their observations and explanations. All of the countries I have visited this trip have been or are tightly controlled communist countries. So hearing a tour guide in Beijing mention Tiananmen square and say that most Westerners only know about it because of the student uprising, but that Chinese people are still denied any education about that, was interesting. However, the downside to this was listening to the Mongolian guide continually express how difficult lesbians are. And listening to him lament the destruction of his family and culture by technology. He sometimes comes home and turns off all the electronics to force everyone to have a conversation. But… he intentionally moved from a ger village into the city to work and have a family. The Mongolian guide was also just dying to tell me about every other group of tourists he has taken out. Australians who drank so much beer. Malaysian lady who kept calling the horses ponies. Japanese bird watchers. I do want to learn about the everyday life of Mongolians…just not the everyday life of this specific Mongolian dude.
Then there is the gender approach. I have yet to have a female guide or driver ask me the question every man, guide or random train roommate has asked: “Whyyyyy are you aloooone?” The female guides just get it. Like why should they care if you’re traveling alone? Or specifically, why should they judge? The pair in Yekaterinburg, both a female driver and a female guide, were like ‘You’re so brave for traveling in the winter alone”. I joked: “brave or crazy”. No, they said, “brave, definitely”. They were having none of that self-deprecating bullshit. Thanks, ladies. The men wanted an explanation. An explanation for my simply existing unescorted. They assumed, time and again, that I was ill prepared. I asked to go horse riding: ‘oh, I can arrange that only if you have proper clothes’. Then, on arrival to the ger, the man who owns the horses, who was not wearing a hat and gloves because we were INDOORS DRINKING TEA, asked where my hat and gloves are. There definitely seemed to be a difference between the male tour guides, which are likely due to my being female, especially in more patriarchal societies. As parting words, my guide from Yekaterinburg said, “Traveling expands the mind and reduces prejudice.”
Housing
One of the intereting things I have notices while traveling is the housing. I generally think of myself as living in a rather large city, or at least, near to one. I’ve also been to many, many large cities. But the absolute volume, block after block after block, of enormous apartment housing buidlings is staggering. In Beijing, they stretch for miles, high-rise buildings that must hold thousands of people. My guide shared stories about how some of those came to be: as older, smaller housing buildings were taking up the space wanted for giant high-rise buildings, when once there was a fire, the police barred anyone from stopping its spread, leveling entire blocks, displacing hundreds of people, to make way for progress. The ones in Russia are different, many being quite old now. In the outskirts of Irkutsk there are huge, several-blocks-long buildings, just giant rectangles with balconies. The enormity of it is difficult to express. We have nothing like it. Not in LA or San Francisco, not even Chicago. New York City has skyscrapers, but not the buildings that are entire city blocks. Perhaps Philidelphia is the closest I’ve seen in the US? But the giant block housing is also in smaller towns, ones the train doesn’t even stop in, ones I’ve never heard of. It’s a Soviet construct, boggling the mind in its size and, from all accounts, unpleasantness. The ones in Yekaterinburg, slated to last 50 years, are now nearing 70 years old. They are not modern, cold in the winter, hot in the summer, cramped, small living spaces. I did not see the inside of any of these buildings, but listened to my tour guide describe them. She said, repeatedly, “They aren’t much, but the working class people are glad to have them”. A bit of an interesting class observation from the guide. She frequently used “they” to describe this working class, this ‘other’ type of person. Who works in a factory and is glad for what they have. They do what they can to personalize the place, with doors and windows and balconies often being unique. Not decorative, but at least modernized. I mention having seen similar buildings in Budapest and Bratislava. She quickly shot back “And who do you think built those? We did!”, both with a sense of pride and almost an annoying assumption that I didn’t understand that. But also…with a complete lack of understanding about how the local people in those places view those housing complexes now. A total erasure of the perspective of the former Soviet occupied countries.
Traffic
Every town has rush hour traffic. I get it. But some are worse than others. Beijing traffic is a nightmare. It is constant; there is never a time day or night or weekend when the roads are clear. There seem to be a ton of toll roads and very few controlled access freeways. This is understandable in a city where the number of cars has ballooned in the last few decades, transitioning from millions of bicycles to bulky cars. Ulan Bator was similar in traffic. It often took longer to drive places than it would have to walk, but it’s cold outside. There were, at least in the early mornings, times when the Ulan Bator traffic waned. Each city designates cars as being unable to drive in the city center 1 day a week, to reduce traffic. But in both places, I found myself utterly at a loss for how the traffic laws must work. Similar to standing in a queue at the 99 Ranch market, driving the streets of Beijing and subsequently Ulan Bator, involved tons of close encounters, near hits and misses, metaphorical elbows thrown and shoulder checks. Traffic is a slow crawl, jockeying for position by splitting lanes (in a full size car!), ignoring the concept of lanes completely, lots of very aggressive left turn lane antics (many times I witnessed a line of traffic in a left turn lane at a red light and a car from the through-lane pull in front of them, often 2 or 3 cars), and an acceptance that everyone else is just going to behave the same way. Perhaps it is an effective way of moving people around. Really, it was very rare to find myself in stop-and-go traffic similar to the Bay Area. But it was always a crawl, and I witnessed numerous times where left-turning and right-turning traffic had lanes blocked behind them for miles because no one would leave space for them to get through. It is chaos to my eyes, not understanding the intricacies of the norms of driving here, terrifying from the back seat, and I can’t possibly imagine renting a car in these places. But I never witnessed any actual accidents, so it can’t just be chaos.
Once I crossed into Irkutsk, though, the traffic laws seemed more similar to those at home. Lanes and stop lights and turning left only from the left lane. There are some strange signs and signals, as well as the sand and mud on the roads making the markings on the road nearly impossible to read. But for the most part, it’s a very European wait in line, go on green stop on red kind of thing. They don’t seem to have round-abouts. In both Russia and Mongolia, there are many cars with the drivers seat on the right side. I’ve seen both types of cars on the roads, but only in Mongolia have I seen the road direction actually change based on the road. I asked the guide and he said yes, they allow both types of cars because their roads can be in either orientation. Do not rent a car in Mongolia.
