What can I say about the train, it’s cleaan, quiet, it doesn’t smell, the people working on it are friendly, none of the passengers stink or have odd habits, I basically have no material.
After what I call a bears breakfast, of almonds and dried fruit, we lay back on our comfy beds, chat, read and occasionally look out the window at quaint Russian villages, with quaint wooden houses, all in a quaint forest setting. The scenery ranges from pretty to dead boring, sometimes it’s forest, sometimes it’s farmland, sometimes it’s something that looks like prison camps, occasionally it’s army barracks with hundreds of mothballed Soviet era tanks and other vehicles. Once Tanya saw an army truck towing a tank.
One highlight of the day was finding chicken and chips on the station. The chips were cold, but my godfathers the chicken was melt in your mouth divine and certainly made a good lunch
One lowlight was buying bowls of instant noodles and noticing the chicken joint on the way back to the carriage.
Our afternoon consisted of reading and sleeping. We did venture down to the dining car, which is expensive and pretty ordinary. I had chips and meatballs, Tans had pork and chips.
The only spot of bother is timezones. Everything runs on Moscow time, but it’s a bit confusing, as our itinerary is all in local time. Tans spent half the night awake thinking we’d missed our stop, as it turns out we still have around 10 more hours to go, as I write this it’s 12:30pm, Moscow time.
We have also seen some evidence of forest fires, and some bog fires that are still smoldering away.
Tonight we arrive in Ekatirinburg, the city where the Romanovs were executed by the Bolsheviks and a city that has only been open to foreigners for the last 20 years.
