Moscow to Irkutsk with the Trans Siberian Railway
5. August 2007 - 8. August 2007
We flew from Berlin to Moscow on the 5th. Lena's parents and brother had driven us to the airport with our back-packs stuffed to the limit for half a year abroad.
My hand luggage was checked for explosives - I had to go into a little room and the security people used an ancient machine to suck particles from the inside of my bags. Then they put the vacuum device into an even more ancient looking computer to get an analysis... pretty bizarre...
After arriving at Moscow Domodevo and taking the express train into town, we managed to use the metro to get to Komsomol'skaja metro station. We locked up our bags at one of the three train stations and tried to find out from where our train would depart at 11 o'clock that night: Nobody at the information desk spoke English, so after some guessing and looking around we assumed correctly that the train to Irkutsk would leave from Jaroslavskij station.
Lena and I hung around the station for a few hours, shocked by the cliché that nearly everybody was either drinking or completely drunk! Normal looking young menwere out cold, lying on benches or propping each other up, or in a drunk embrace - snoring quietly.
From Moscow to Irkutsk we shared our compartment with a lovely English couple from Norwich - Anne and Malcolm. Thank God we weren't thrown in with the Germans in the compartment next to us. Anne and Malcolm dubbed them the "Happy Clappies". They started singing and played the guitar at 10 in the morningand stopped late at night. Luckily they quite often departed for the resataurant carriage to continue their singing there... They behaved as if they were part of a Christian sect or something...
Every carriage has its own attendant - nearly all of them women, dressed in blue and white uniforms. At every stop they lock the toilets, open the doors and wipe the hand rails with a little cloth. After two days we also found out that tere wasa shower in one of the carriages, and we happily paid the 111 Rubels to be able to use it! The food in the restaurant carriage was ok, but too expensive for what it was, but we bought our supplies from loclas selling fruit, vegetables, bread, dumplings, drinks etc. at some of the stops. The rural places had a much better and wider range range of products than the stops in the cities.
The landscape varied only subtlely: birch trees, wide and open pastures and the occasional small village or town with expansive vegetable gardens. We covered 6700 km from Berlin to Irkutsk, crossing seven time zones, and our sleeping pattern is a shambles...
We flew from Berlin to Moscow on the 5th. Lena's parents and brother had driven us to the airport with our back-packs stuffed to the limit for half a year abroad.My hand luggage was checked for explosives - I had to go into a little room and the security people used an ancient machine to suck particles from the inside of my bags. Then they put the vacuum device into an even more ancient looking computer to get an analysis... pretty bizarre...
After arriving at Moscow Domodevo and taking the express train into town, we managed to use the metro to get to Komsomol'skaja metro station. We locked up our bags at one of the three train stations and tried to find out from where our train would depart at 11 o'clock that night: Nobody at the information desk spoke English, so after some guessing and looking around we assumed correctly that the train to Irkutsk would leave from Jaroslavskij station.
Lena and I hung around the station for a few hours, shocked by the cliché that nearly everybody was either drinking or completely drunk! Normal looking young menwere out cold, lying on benches or propping each other up, or in a drunk embrace - snoring quietly.
From Moscow to Irkutsk we shared our compartment with a lovely English couple from Norwich - Anne and Malcolm. Thank God we weren't thrown in with the Germans in the compartment next to us. Anne and Malcolm dubbed them the "Happy Clappies". They started singing and played the guitar at 10 in the morningand stopped late at night. Luckily they quite often departed for the resataurant carriage to continue their singing there... They behaved as if they were part of a Christian sect or something...
Every carriage has its own attendant - nearly all of them women, dressed in blue and white uniforms. At every stop they lock the toilets, open the doors and wipe the hand rails with a little cloth. After two days we also found out that tere wasa shower in one of the carriages, and we happily paid the 111 Rubels to be able to use it! The food in the restaurant carriage was ok, but too expensive for what it was, but we bought our supplies from loclas selling fruit, vegetables, bread, dumplings, drinks etc. at some of the stops. The rural places had a much better and wider range range of products than the stops in the cities.
The landscape varied only subtlely: birch trees, wide and open pastures and the occasional small village or town with expansive vegetable gardens. We covered 6700 km from Berlin to Irkutsk, crossing seven time zones, and our sleeping pattern is a shambles...
posted by Daniel.Lang at
12:09
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