The Trans-Siberian Railroad

After a wonderful New Year's spent together in Moscow and Tver' seeing the sights and stuffing ourselves in a 3-day food marathon with some Russian friends of mine, Jacob flew back to the U.S., leaving me to return to Ulan-Ude with fellow researcher Kate on the Moscow-Beijing train.

5,500 or so kilometers and 82 hours later, I arrived in Ulan-Ude.

I have a new appreciation for Russia's size. Flying for a long time (it takes five hours to get to Ulan-Ude from Moscow by plane) and still not being anywhere near all the way across it gives you a little sense. But actually having all of that countryside pass by your window is something entirely different. The really shocking thing is how very uniform the country is.

Mile after mile after mile, all we saw was tiny village after tiny village, interspersed with large tracts of birch and pine forest. And it was flat. We crossed the Urals at night, so I missed them, but judging from the way the train was moving, all they really are is big hills. Flat on one side, flat on the other. All the way to about kilometer 4,800 or so, when things got hilly as the approach to Lake Baikal began.

It didn't actually seem anything like 82 hours stuck in a tiny compartment, with 20-minute breaks to walk around when the train stopped every 5 or 6 hours. Four times, I woke up in the morning after a good ten hours of sleep and sat around in my pajamas drinking coffee and watching the landscape roll by for 45 minutes. Granted, it would have been better if the coffee had been something other than black Nescafe, but you make do with what you've got. Then breakfast - a difficult choice between bread and cheese, instant mashed potatoes with cheese and hot sauce, and ramen noodles. After which I was forced to make the dreadful choice of how to amuse myself: read a book (thanks to Jacob, I was working my way though Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)? read some essays (Kate's husband brought over an issue of Harper's full of trenchant political criticism)? work on my current craft project? or just stare blankly out the window? Followed by some cookies, a little chocolate, perhaps a mandarin orange or two. More tough decisions about what to do. 4:00? Beer in the lounge car. 11:00? Fall asleep gazing out the window into a landscape lit up by a full moon reflecting off of the snow. Very Dr. Zhivago.

It's amazingly easy to while away three entire days like this. After a while, it seems like there isn't anywhere else that you could possibly be other than inside the compartment or standing on a train platform. Because the car attendants lock the bathrooms at stations (Russian train toilets flush straight onto the tracks), I found myself in pretty bad shape at one station post-4-pm-beer. Kate and I dashed down the platform and found at bathroom, at which point I suddenly realized that I was inside the first actual "building" that I had been in for days. My voice echoed strangely and I felt very small and unsheltered.

When we got back to Kate's apartment this afternoon, we found out that in our absence, some sort of accident had caused hot water and heating outages to our neighborhood when the temperature was about -25, that one of her downstairs neighbors had left a window open and then disappeared for a month so that when the hot water went out, his pipes froze, causing pipes in other parts of the building to burst, and that the building superintendent, in an effort to thaw one of Kate's radiators, had plugged in a space heater and nearly burned the building down when she walked off and left it. Compared to all of that, the train car and its happy, lazy pursuits seem like heaven.

Check back - I'll be putting up pictures from the train trip.