Travel Photography| 14. Trans-Siberian train

Trans-Siberian train, Russia

Dobraye ootra! (good morning) I slept like a baby with a lot of interesting dreams of my past. Slept well until noon when people getting off the train woke me up. Made some instant coffee and another stuffed pita chased down with berry juice and flu medicine. I’m a new man now. The weather outside is just awesome! (apart from occasional sleet) Imagine the best autumn view you can find in Finland and double that!

Here are some snaps through the window. Apologies for the quality. Like the pictures would ever do justice to the view anyhow 🙂

What I love about train travel is people going about their daily life and I’m just watching, passing by and then I’m gone. Just a blink of an eye. (note the two geese in front of the barn)

Sleet

Good example of how I’m interpreting the Cyrillic alphabet: I guess that’s saying “novo trans” just because the “HOBO” -part is easy to remember, and the number of letters matches 🙂 also tells me that letters O, T and A are the same in Finnish, for R, just lose the other leg. I imagine if I stayed here a month, I could learn to read it properly…

According to my map, we should soon arrive at Yekaterinburg so should be plenty time to go outside. If I’m not mistaken, the station building there should be something to behold… Apparently, Boris Yeltsin was born here too.

Btw, just love Off Maps for iPhone! I can download any maps to the memory of the phone and use them with GPS without access to the internet. Anyone who knows me also knows I’m shit with navigation, so this is a necessity for me 🙂

Just before Yekaterinburg, there was another pit stop so I went out to grab a cold one. Either I got ripped off (likely) or the distribution costs to bring beer next to the train are huge. One can of Baltica set me back 50r. Well, it’s 30r in Moscow supermarket so I guess it is ok To pay a little tourist tax 🙂 besides, cold beer is cold beer, right? snapped few quick ones too.

Provodnitsa from the other neighbour car.

Child labour is so normal here you don’t even pay attention to it. This reminds me of another great quote, by Chuck Palahniuk:

“Nobody lay awake at night wondering if the wheat they’d raised was truly happy and fulfilled being made into bread.”

Near Yekaterinburg, I finally managed to strike a “conversation” with Sergei! And Vladimir was working as sort of his backup. With my very very broken Russian and their equally broken English, I managed to find out this: Sergei was on his way back home (didn’t get where) to his wife after a long (didn’t get how long) work commission. He lost all his front teeth in a work accident and now he has a set of golden teeth, which I think are pretty cool!

Also, he told me he served 2 years in the army near the Mongolian border. The subject came up when I told him about my travel plans. He also wanted my address so I gave him my old, now my brother address. I also shared some of my Swedish snus with them and everyone was super happy. ^^

Here is the Yekaterinburg station. I’m sure it looks better from inside but I didn’t have time to check.

Met Nikolai on the smoking spot. He is on his way to Omsk. The next leg so happens to be Yekaterinburg-Omsk.

Next stop should be the oil-city of Tyumen, the official starting point of Siberia! Moscow-Tyumen is 2138 km btw 🙂

Jackpot! Returning from the smoking place, two guys say “somethingsomething” in Russian to me. After I told them “ya ne gavary pa rooskie” we got into talking. It was Ivan 23 years and Borya 19 years old and an older couple(?) whose names regrettably escaped me. Anyhow, here’s my new friends: Ivan on the left and Borya next to him.

If I didn’t hear it, I would have thought Borya is from eastern Russia, maybe Ulan-Ude. Well, he is. And seems like a good guy anyways. He likes to read and recommended me this book about Azazel that I’m definitely going to hunt down and read. (Honestly, it seemed to me that the old man knew the best English because he was sometimes shoutingEnglish translations when the boys had trouble finding the word.)

Then, the most unpredictable happened. Before I knew, I was troubleshooting a 3G dongle problem with Ivan’s Shanghai-bought “iPad” with “Android” OS and Russian 3G service provider. Wth? I so did not see this coming. Anyhow after fiddling around with it I “told” him he needs to contact the service provider to ask for the dial-up number as well as the username and pin code. And as the dongle he had was not on the support list, it is very unlikely it will work. I’m sure he got all of that.

Anyway, Borya went on with reading his book. Ivan and I went on destroying the bottle of vodka I brought. After long attempts for conversation, I managed to find out he is married and has a baby girl Uliana aged 2.5 years. He works on an oil rig. He even showed me pictures and video about the both! And in return, I showed some videos of my own. For the elderly couple, I showed some farewell pictures by my photographer friend Matti, which were a huge success.

After the vodka ran out, we went to bed. Except. I went on writing this 🙂

Sidenote: I’m so happy!

Oops, the story isn’t over. Ivan comes back asking for the light. After we go for a smoke, he plays me some very nice acoustic guitar music played and sung by him. I just love it when people can surprise me!

Ivan having a puff of a toscanello, aka “Clint”