Day 4: Trans-Siberian railway

 

The steady rocking of the train, combined with the exhaustion of the past few days (well, make that months actually) resulted in the best night's sleep I'd had in a very long time. Even though the bunk was somewhat too small for me, lacking both length and width, I slept in till midday. This long lie-in was slightly helped by the fact that we had just crossed our first time-zone, so I could put my watch one hour forward.
All three of us had in fact slept until late, but we couldn't care less, it was not as if we were going anywhere... Well, we were, but being awake or asleep would not change anything about it.

Maciek turned out to be great company - pleasantly mental, full of funny stories and a keen photographer too. Our next door compartment had three Germans in it.

As they had grown up in East-Berlin they knew some basic Russian, which was very convenient, as not a single person of the train staff could speak a word of English.

The six of us were the only foreigners on the train, for the rest it was just Russians.

While sitting on a train for three days and four nights may seem boring I must say that I wasn't bored for a single moment during those 77 hours we spent on the train. I was sitting, watching the endless beech forest roll by, listening to some Pink Floyd on my Zen, reading a book (I finished Dave Gorman's "America Unchained" in the span of those three days) and I was truly enjoying myself thoroughly throughout these three days. 

Something that made the time literally go faster was the fact that every 15 hours or so we passed into a new timezone.

Our first big stop of the day was the city of Perm, which is two hours ahead of Moscow - even though the trains utilize Moscow time throughout, we had decided to change our clocks to local time zones, in order to avoid having a jetlag - erm, trainlag - by the time we got to Irkutsk.

At the bigger stations we had the chance to stretch our legs a bit, as the train usually stopped about 15-20 minutes here. These were also the places to buy food, as each platform was literally a market where peddlers were selling anything from instant noodles to cans of beer to complete meals. We found some great freshly made potatoes with meatballs which turned out to be literally the best meal we'd had in Russia thusfar.

All in all a great first day on the train.