Russia through a moving window

In the Transsiberian

And once again our journey to the next country started in a train: the Transiberian from Ulanbaatar to Novosibirsk. Completely different this time were the passengers. They were not tourist like in the Mongolian but just Russian, Mongolian and Kazakh people who needed to go from one point to another. We shared our comfortable four beds compartment the first night with a Russian couple. They were quite nice and helped us a lot in form of translation as the train crew and the border police were speaking Russian with us.
 

Through the window...

The Russian border control was one of the strictest or the strictest we experienced since we started travelling. The entire train needed to stop – of course at 12 o'clock at night- everybody needed to get up but wasn't allowed to leave their wagon and the toilets were locked for three hours. Then the police came first with a dog, then they checked the luggage spaces for people – we guessed, we needed to open our luggage for them and at last a police man came to check our passports. He was starring at our faces for an eternity: it felt like till he was sure that we are we…. Puh... luckily we look more or less like our passport pictures. 

Inside the wagon

The next morning when we got up the confusion started. We were in Russia and in Russia there are at least five different time zones. Our bodies still felt like being in Mongolian or Irkutsk time but the train schedule in Russia is always in Moscow time which is 5 hours ahead. And our city of destination – Novosibirsk - would be three hours after Moscow time so two hours before Mongolian time. We didn't know for a moment when we should get up, have breakfast or lunch or go to bed. In the end we just made it dependent on what we felt like. But an interesting experience how much we structure our time and day depending on a clock. 

Russian time zones (Novosibirsk is in the light green)

One of the many stops on the way was Mariinsk. Small town, nothing special, but a city which will remain in our memories or at least the platform of Mariinsk. We had a 20 minutes break and we both went outside on the platform as usual. Julie decided to go to the toilets and needed to take the small bridge over the platforms to the other side. Unfortunately she forgot the money and needed to come back. Already in a hurry she wasn't so careful walking and twisted her ankle but continued her way a little slower. A little bit later people on the platform started to get back into the train and the train crew asked everybody to go inside. But Hannah didn't want to go inside because Julie wasn't back and she couldn't see her anywhere. She tried to tell the quite dominant wagon crew lady but she was shouting at her in Russian and forced her to go inside. Hannah only understood words like: taxi to Moscow, no waiting, sorry, sorry, sorry … and finally she needed to go to her compartment and the train started to move – without Julie in the compartment or wagon. 5 minutes of pure horror and unbelievability of the situation before the Russian crew lady went by the compartment loudly shouting and came back again with Julie behind here. Apparently she just came down the stairs to the platform when everybody was already inside of the train, the doors locked and the train ready to start. The closest crew member opened the door and let her in. And then the train started to move – with Julie. How lucky we were this day!

 Food - a main activity!

In total we spend three days in the train. The different landscape of mountains, fields, forests and the huge lake of Irkutsk went by our windows and we looked and enjoyed. Not only the landscape changed but also the weather. There were sunny mornings, rainy nights with some thunderstorms, sunny mornings again and then suddenly some wet snow and ice rain. Such a drastic change of weather. We spend the time reading, playing chest with the neighbor, eating, drinking chai, watching a movie and writing diaries. But when we arrived we were really happy that we could finally get off the train except this one problem we discovered on the morning before we arrived. With all this time confusion we told our couchsurfer Andrey the wrong time. Well not the wrong time but in Moscow time and not in Novosibirsk time which is a difference of two hours. As we didn't have internet and also trying to call him with our neighbors' phone wasn't successful, we decided still to go to the meeting point. 

And there he was still waiting for us – two hours to late. Such an amazing couchsurfer!!! 

Overview of a lake through the window