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Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
From Siberia to China
The journey ahead from Siberia to China was would turn out to be a challenging one that would take us from the depths of hell, through purgatory to the gates of heaven past the Russian border. Due to the devious machinations of the dark overlord, we were forced into taking a 12 hour stopover in Chita, a city half way between Irkutsk and the Russian/Chinese border.
Our first impressions of Chita were positive. It has a beautiful, new Orthodox cathedral directly opposite from the train station with shining golden domes. As we ventured further into town we found a square with a big slide and sculptures carved from ice as in many other Russian towns in winter. We bought some tasty, cheap Blinis from a food van in the square.
As we went further, ominous forebodings started to present themselves, subtly at first. On the main street off the square there were aggressive dogs outside one of the buildings which were only hemmed in by a one foot fence. We nervously crossed the busy main road to get away from them and were pleased with our decision when these hounds of hell jumped the fence and started barking and intimidating passers by.
After wandering around some more we decided there wasn't much to see or do in Chita for our twelve hours so we thought we would find a cafe to kill time. We surveyed the guide book which had a couple of places listed. After wandering around town we realised we couldn't find these places, had they closed down, were our map reading skills a little shoddy, or were they being kept from us by some dark, inexplicable force? We wandered into one place that claimed to be a cafe bar only to be met with the Russian equivalent of the scene in westerns where the stranger walks into the saloon. The man in the corner stopped playing the piano, the barman stopped pouring the whiskey and all eyes turned to see the folks who aren't from round here. People's expressions weren't too friendly so we decided to leave.
We then found a posh hotel bar and tried to use our remaining roubles to buy a seat with expensive coffee and small sandwiches. Our money was fast running out and the rich Russians who patronised this bar were wondering why these scruffy, malingering backpackers were lowering the tone of their elite establishment. After this we decided to go back to the train station.
This turned out to be a fatal error because we arrived back to find half the Russian army wandering around the station looking bored. This was not good news as we had spent the past 3 weeks avoiding Russian officials because of their reputation for corruption and unfairness. We skulked upstairs to the station cafe to try and hide but the cafe was full of them and they were all drinking beer. So we now realised we were in a train station full of drunk, bored Russian soldiers. We sat down and tried to look unobtrusive which was hard because we'd forgotten to pack our Russian soldier's uniforms. After a while one of the soldiers wandered over in a drunken state and started trying to talk to us but we didn't get very far because of the language barrier. He then started to intimate that we should show him our passports. We decided that handing our passports over to a drunk 20 year old Russian conscript was probably not advisable so we played dumb and pretended not to understand. He got more and more annoyed and started saying what we assumed to be unflattering things at a raised volume. He got up and started loom over me in an intimidating manor. I think he was deciding whether he would get away with hitting me but luckily, after looking round at his fellow soldiers, he decided against this. He walked away and we decided 6 hours in the station with these people was a very bad idea so we legged it.
We wandered around trying to find a bar or cheap hotel room to spend the remainder of the time in but we kept getting turned away. Eventually we found a basement restaurant where we ordered coffee, a kebab and some vodka to calm our nerves. Luckily people in here were friendly and a little baffled at what these foreigners were doing in their restaurant in the middle of the week at 11pm. After a while, the man at the bar came over to speak to us with a small amount of English. He was funny and would write down a question in English such as 'What country are you from?' and then come over and ask us. He would then go back to compose another one and come back in a few minutes with another question. This was Ivan. He asked us whether we were married, whether we liked Chita (to which we said yes :-)) and what religion we were. We found out that Ivan was devoutly religious. He brought his MP3 player over and played some beautiful, harmonised acapella singing recorded at his local church. Some time later Ivan asked if we wanted to leave and go with him as the place was closing and the staff wanted to go home. At this point we were a little nervous because we wondered if there was some con involved but he seemed nice so we tried to prevent our suspicious sides getting the better of us.
What we came to understand was that Ivan was worried about us wandering around Chita on our own with our bags looking like easy targets for muggers. We agreed with this assessment but there was nowhere to go because it was 12.30am and the train station was a worse option than walking around the streets. We had about 3 hours until our train at this point. Ivan then took it upon himself to be our guardian angel insisting on staying with us until our train left at just after 3am. Of all the kindness we had experienced from people in Russia, this had to be the most incredible. Firstly he took us to the town square we were in earlier and insisted we all have a go on the ice slide. We encountered some young blokes here who looked a bit shady and we were worried about why they were hanging around the square at 1am. They also turned out to be nice and wanted to have their photos taken with the strange foreigners who went down ice slides in the middle of the night.
After this we ran out of options for what to do in Chita and had to go back to the station, hoping that the soldiers would have got on their trains. Ivan insisted on accompanying us to the station because he knew, as we did, what a dodgy place it was. There were still quite a few soldiers there but not as many as before. So we sat in purgatory, hoping no-one would hassle us. As we sat there Ivan wandered off for a while and we wondered where he was going. He came back 10 minutes later with some beers for us all and some gifts for me and Karen. He gave me a wooden religious icon for protection and gave Karen a new badge for her Russian hat which she had removed because hers had the old Soviet insignia on. As we sat there we started talking to people around us. There was a guy from the Buryat ethnic group called Jarkal and two Russian soldiers. Jarkal was really friendly and spoke the best English out of all of them. He was studying to be a teacher at the local college and also really liked European football. He supported A.C. Milan. The soldiers were friendly enough towards us but were a bit racist and rude to Jarkal, speaking to him gruffly and saying he was descended from Genghis Khan. He looked as though he was used to this and just brushed it off. We managed to pass the time this way happily for a few hours until the train finally arrived. So with gifts, new friends and a reaffirmed faith in the Russian people, we approached the train. Ivan and the Jarkal helped us onto the platform with our bags and Ivan even got onto the train and showed us all the way to our compartment. The train was the nicest we had seen in Russia and we had a four person compartment to ourselves for the imminent 36 hour train journey and border crossing. After a long and arduous day we had reached heaven.
Karen is still in touch with Ivan 2 months later. They email each other so Karen can practice her Russian and Ivan can practice his English.
Our first impressions of Chita were positive. It has a beautiful, new Orthodox cathedral directly opposite from the train station with shining golden domes. As we ventured further into town we found a square with a big slide and sculptures carved from ice as in many other Russian towns in winter. We bought some tasty, cheap Blinis from a food van in the square.
As we went further, ominous forebodings started to present themselves, subtly at first. On the main street off the square there were aggressive dogs outside one of the buildings which were only hemmed in by a one foot fence. We nervously crossed the busy main road to get away from them and were pleased with our decision when these hounds of hell jumped the fence and started barking and intimidating passers by.
After wandering around some more we decided there wasn't much to see or do in Chita for our twelve hours so we thought we would find a cafe to kill time. We surveyed the guide book which had a couple of places listed. After wandering around town we realised we couldn't find these places, had they closed down, were our map reading skills a little shoddy, or were they being kept from us by some dark, inexplicable force? We wandered into one place that claimed to be a cafe bar only to be met with the Russian equivalent of the scene in westerns where the stranger walks into the saloon. The man in the corner stopped playing the piano, the barman stopped pouring the whiskey and all eyes turned to see the folks who aren't from round here. People's expressions weren't too friendly so we decided to leave.
We then found a posh hotel bar and tried to use our remaining roubles to buy a seat with expensive coffee and small sandwiches. Our money was fast running out and the rich Russians who patronised this bar were wondering why these scruffy, malingering backpackers were lowering the tone of their elite establishment. After this we decided to go back to the train station.
This turned out to be a fatal error because we arrived back to find half the Russian army wandering around the station looking bored. This was not good news as we had spent the past 3 weeks avoiding Russian officials because of their reputation for corruption and unfairness. We skulked upstairs to the station cafe to try and hide but the cafe was full of them and they were all drinking beer. So we now realised we were in a train station full of drunk, bored Russian soldiers. We sat down and tried to look unobtrusive which was hard because we'd forgotten to pack our Russian soldier's uniforms. After a while one of the soldiers wandered over in a drunken state and started trying to talk to us but we didn't get very far because of the language barrier. He then started to intimate that we should show him our passports. We decided that handing our passports over to a drunk 20 year old Russian conscript was probably not advisable so we played dumb and pretended not to understand. He got more and more annoyed and started saying what we assumed to be unflattering things at a raised volume. He got up and started loom over me in an intimidating manor. I think he was deciding whether he would get away with hitting me but luckily, after looking round at his fellow soldiers, he decided against this. He walked away and we decided 6 hours in the station with these people was a very bad idea so we legged it.
We wandered around trying to find a bar or cheap hotel room to spend the remainder of the time in but we kept getting turned away. Eventually we found a basement restaurant where we ordered coffee, a kebab and some vodka to calm our nerves. Luckily people in here were friendly and a little baffled at what these foreigners were doing in their restaurant in the middle of the week at 11pm. After a while, the man at the bar came over to speak to us with a small amount of English. He was funny and would write down a question in English such as 'What country are you from?' and then come over and ask us. He would then go back to compose another one and come back in a few minutes with another question. This was Ivan. He asked us whether we were married, whether we liked Chita (to which we said yes :-)) and what religion we were. We found out that Ivan was devoutly religious. He brought his MP3 player over and played some beautiful, harmonised acapella singing recorded at his local church. Some time later Ivan asked if we wanted to leave and go with him as the place was closing and the staff wanted to go home. At this point we were a little nervous because we wondered if there was some con involved but he seemed nice so we tried to prevent our suspicious sides getting the better of us.
What we came to understand was that Ivan was worried about us wandering around Chita on our own with our bags looking like easy targets for muggers. We agreed with this assessment but there was nowhere to go because it was 12.30am and the train station was a worse option than walking around the streets. We had about 3 hours until our train at this point. Ivan then took it upon himself to be our guardian angel insisting on staying with us until our train left at just after 3am. Of all the kindness we had experienced from people in Russia, this had to be the most incredible. Firstly he took us to the town square we were in earlier and insisted we all have a go on the ice slide. We encountered some young blokes here who looked a bit shady and we were worried about why they were hanging around the square at 1am. They also turned out to be nice and wanted to have their photos taken with the strange foreigners who went down ice slides in the middle of the night.
After this we ran out of options for what to do in Chita and had to go back to the station, hoping that the soldiers would have got on their trains. Ivan insisted on accompanying us to the station because he knew, as we did, what a dodgy place it was. There were still quite a few soldiers there but not as many as before. So we sat in purgatory, hoping no-one would hassle us. As we sat there Ivan wandered off for a while and we wondered where he was going. He came back 10 minutes later with some beers for us all and some gifts for me and Karen. He gave me a wooden religious icon for protection and gave Karen a new badge for her Russian hat which she had removed because hers had the old Soviet insignia on. As we sat there we started talking to people around us. There was a guy from the Buryat ethnic group called Jarkal and two Russian soldiers. Jarkal was really friendly and spoke the best English out of all of them. He was studying to be a teacher at the local college and also really liked European football. He supported A.C. Milan. The soldiers were friendly enough towards us but were a bit racist and rude to Jarkal, speaking to him gruffly and saying he was descended from Genghis Khan. He looked as though he was used to this and just brushed it off. We managed to pass the time this way happily for a few hours until the train finally arrived. So with gifts, new friends and a reaffirmed faith in the Russian people, we approached the train. Ivan and the Jarkal helped us onto the platform with our bags and Ivan even got onto the train and showed us all the way to our compartment. The train was the nicest we had seen in Russia and we had a four person compartment to ourselves for the imminent 36 hour train journey and border crossing. After a long and arduous day we had reached heaven.
Karen is still in touch with Ivan 2 months later. They email each other so Karen can practice her Russian and Ivan can practice his English.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Listviyanka on Lake Baikal
After a few days in Irkutsk we got the bus to a small Siberian village next to Lake Baikal which is a huge fresh water lake in the middle of Siberia. It's so big it looks like a sea and is frozen a foot thick throughout winter. The views around here are amazing with bright white glistening ice that turn into a skyline of snowy mountain peaks in the distance. Listviyanka is a lovely place to get out of Russian cities and breath the freezing cold but clean country air. It's a really atmospheric place and if you go out at night you can hear nothing but the wolf-like howling of Listviyanka's hundreds of big dogs and smell nothing but the wood smoke from the cottage chimneys.
When we arrived it was bright sunshine and the views, which can be obscured by mist, were very clear. We wandered around town looking for somewhere to stay until a friendly man showed us a cottage he had for rent. It was a gorgeous, ramshackle traditional wooden siberian cottage with 3 bedrooms and, crucially for Karen 'Pyrofeatures' Higgins, a wood burning stove in the lounge area with an unlimited supply of wood. We stayed for two nights during which time Karen would test the definition of the phrase 'unlimited wood' to its limits. By the second night Karen had made the cottage so hot that I had to go out into -20 degree temperatures to keep cool. Karen considers this her finest achievement to date.
We had a very nice couple of days here relaxing, reading and playing chess in front of the fire at night and walking along the main street in the village with me obssessively taking photographs during the day. We walked on the lake a bit but were quite tentative about this due to a few wooden crosses on the lake which seemed to suggest some people had died before the ice had got thick enough to walk on.
We had heard that you could go huskie sledging in Listviyanka so we walked around trying to find out about this. We walked a couple of miles out of town in the cold and eventually found the place. Unfortunately we didn't have enough Roubles and they didn't accept U.S. Dollars or Visa. They helpfully told us that their was a cash machine back in the centre of the village two miles away. We dutifully trudged back into town to find that the entire village was without electricity which made withdrawing money a bit difficult. At this point we decided that dog sledging was not to be and got the bus back to Irkutsk. A couple in the hostel in Irkutsk later, annoyingly(!), told us that this was highlight of their Russina trip.
Photos for Listviyanka and Lake Baikal can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianwhitfield/sets/72157603797379769/
When we arrived it was bright sunshine and the views, which can be obscured by mist, were very clear. We wandered around town looking for somewhere to stay until a friendly man showed us a cottage he had for rent. It was a gorgeous, ramshackle traditional wooden siberian cottage with 3 bedrooms and, crucially for Karen 'Pyrofeatures' Higgins, a wood burning stove in the lounge area with an unlimited supply of wood. We stayed for two nights during which time Karen would test the definition of the phrase 'unlimited wood' to its limits. By the second night Karen had made the cottage so hot that I had to go out into -20 degree temperatures to keep cool. Karen considers this her finest achievement to date.
We had a very nice couple of days here relaxing, reading and playing chess in front of the fire at night and walking along the main street in the village with me obssessively taking photographs during the day. We walked on the lake a bit but were quite tentative about this due to a few wooden crosses on the lake which seemed to suggest some people had died before the ice had got thick enough to walk on.
We had heard that you could go huskie sledging in Listviyanka so we walked around trying to find out about this. We walked a couple of miles out of town in the cold and eventually found the place. Unfortunately we didn't have enough Roubles and they didn't accept U.S. Dollars or Visa. They helpfully told us that their was a cash machine back in the centre of the village two miles away. We dutifully trudged back into town to find that the entire village was without electricity which made withdrawing money a bit difficult. At this point we decided that dog sledging was not to be and got the bus back to Irkutsk. A couple in the hostel in Irkutsk later, annoyingly(!), told us that this was highlight of their Russina trip.
Photos for Listviyanka and Lake Baikal can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianwhitfield/sets/72157603797379769/
Monday, March 10, 2008
Train from Novosibirsk to Irkutsk
We were to spend two nights and a day on this train so we were hoping it would be a nice one. Unfortunately the train gods were in prankster mode when our tickets were allocated and we were put on THE-WORST-TRAIN-EVER-TO-TRAVERSE-THE-RUSSIAN-CONTINENT®. Even though we were in a 2nd class sleeper compartment the journey was far less comfortable than previous 3rd class journeys. We were to later learn, from the Russians sharing our carriage, that this was a Ukranian train and emphatically NOT a Russian train.
The first big problem with the train was that the inner window pane was held in with gaffer tape. This wouldn't necessarily be a huge problem if it hadn't been -25 degrees outside the train. When we arrived in the cabin there was snow in between the two panes and none of us bothered taking off our hats and coats for the whole journey.
The second big problem was that the Provodnik didn't appear to have cleaned the train since it set off from Kiev, including the toilet. We were later to find out that if you want the toilets cleaned then you have to bribe the guy. This helped to confirm Karen's theory about female carriage attendants keeping their carriages much cleaner than their male counterparts.
Fortunately, the people in our carriage were, again, really friendly. We were beginning to wonder if some counter divine intervention was at work here. The Prankster God arm wrestling with the God of Pleasant Journeys as the train trundled across the snowy Siberian wilderness.
Yuri and Helena were probably in their early forties and were from Novosibirsk on a weekend skiing excursion to the mountains south of Lake Baikal. They spoke no English so we were again reliant on Karen's Russian and the phrasebook and dictionary.
Helena was a teacher. Yuri was an electrical engineer who worked on the electronics that control the launching of rockets that go to the international space station. At this point we were quite excited to be in the presence of a real Russian rocket scientist :-) They were quite positive about the direction Russian society was heading and were critical of the stilted old soviet days which they saw as being primitive and backward. As an example of this Yuri explained that, apart from soviet Russia, the only sorts of societies that preserved their leaders physically through embalming were thousands of years in the past.
They were very kind to us and gave us slabs of amazing lattice fruit pastry. They seemed very bemused as to why we had decided to go to Russia in winter and tried to tell us in the nicest possible way that it would be unpleasant and cold. They illustrated this point by telling us a cautionary moral tale about their cat. Apparently, during a previous winter, their cat had decided it would be nice to have a sleep on the window sill in their front room. Unfortunately it got a bit too close to the window itself and they came down the next morning to find the cat frozen to the window pane. They eventually managed to extricate the traumatised cat from this position and nurse it back to health.
They were also very interested in our Russian guidebook. They wet themselves laughing when they came across a picture-postcard photograph of a Russian babushka in traditional dress who looked like a human incarnation of a Russian doll. Underneath the photograph it said 'Novosibirsk'. I suppose this photo seemed a bit unrepresentative of Novosibirsk which is a sophisticated city of two million people with large scientific and University research establishments :-)
They also enlightened us to something that had been confusing us since the train to Yekaterinburg. On this train an old lady had expressed concern at Karen's cough and cold. She tried to explain how this could be cured. We didn't understand what she was trying to tell us so, as if this might help, she wrote it down for us in Russian :-) Karen kept the piece of paper as a memento and, as she still had a bit of a cold on the train to Irkutsk, the note came up in conversation. We showed it to Yuri and Helena who burst out laughing. After much miming and dictionary referencing they were able to get across to us the magic formula to cure the common cold: to rub goose fat and onions on your chest. Suffice it to say this was the first thing Karen did when we arrived in Irkutsk.
Photos for this journey can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianwhitfield/sets/72157603797561217/
The first big problem with the train was that the inner window pane was held in with gaffer tape. This wouldn't necessarily be a huge problem if it hadn't been -25 degrees outside the train. When we arrived in the cabin there was snow in between the two panes and none of us bothered taking off our hats and coats for the whole journey.
The second big problem was that the Provodnik didn't appear to have cleaned the train since it set off from Kiev, including the toilet. We were later to find out that if you want the toilets cleaned then you have to bribe the guy. This helped to confirm Karen's theory about female carriage attendants keeping their carriages much cleaner than their male counterparts.
Fortunately, the people in our carriage were, again, really friendly. We were beginning to wonder if some counter divine intervention was at work here. The Prankster God arm wrestling with the God of Pleasant Journeys as the train trundled across the snowy Siberian wilderness.
Yuri and Helena were probably in their early forties and were from Novosibirsk on a weekend skiing excursion to the mountains south of Lake Baikal. They spoke no English so we were again reliant on Karen's Russian and the phrasebook and dictionary.
Helena was a teacher. Yuri was an electrical engineer who worked on the electronics that control the launching of rockets that go to the international space station. At this point we were quite excited to be in the presence of a real Russian rocket scientist :-) They were quite positive about the direction Russian society was heading and were critical of the stilted old soviet days which they saw as being primitive and backward. As an example of this Yuri explained that, apart from soviet Russia, the only sorts of societies that preserved their leaders physically through embalming were thousands of years in the past.
They were very kind to us and gave us slabs of amazing lattice fruit pastry. They seemed very bemused as to why we had decided to go to Russia in winter and tried to tell us in the nicest possible way that it would be unpleasant and cold. They illustrated this point by telling us a cautionary moral tale about their cat. Apparently, during a previous winter, their cat had decided it would be nice to have a sleep on the window sill in their front room. Unfortunately it got a bit too close to the window itself and they came down the next morning to find the cat frozen to the window pane. They eventually managed to extricate the traumatised cat from this position and nurse it back to health.
They were also very interested in our Russian guidebook. They wet themselves laughing when they came across a picture-postcard photograph of a Russian babushka in traditional dress who looked like a human incarnation of a Russian doll. Underneath the photograph it said 'Novosibirsk'. I suppose this photo seemed a bit unrepresentative of Novosibirsk which is a sophisticated city of two million people with large scientific and University research establishments :-)
They also enlightened us to something that had been confusing us since the train to Yekaterinburg. On this train an old lady had expressed concern at Karen's cough and cold. She tried to explain how this could be cured. We didn't understand what she was trying to tell us so, as if this might help, she wrote it down for us in Russian :-) Karen kept the piece of paper as a memento and, as she still had a bit of a cold on the train to Irkutsk, the note came up in conversation. We showed it to Yuri and Helena who burst out laughing. After much miming and dictionary referencing they were able to get across to us the magic formula to cure the common cold: to rub goose fat and onions on your chest. Suffice it to say this was the first thing Karen did when we arrived in Irkutsk.
Photos for this journey can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianwhitfield/sets/72157603797561217/
Friday, February 22, 2008
Train from Yekaterinburg to Novosibirsk
For this two day journey we were in a second class carriage. These are very similar to third class but the carriage is divided into about 20 4 person sleeping compartments. This has the advantage of giving you more privacy but it also means that if you are assigned a carriage with annoying/scary weird nutter type people you are stuck with them for two days with no escape. Luckily, we were in a carriage with a very friendly Russian couple in their 40s/50s called Alec and Natasha.
They spoke no English so we had an opportunity for Karen to practise her Russian and, when our dictionaries failed us, to develop our sign-language skills. We were a bit worried at first when we found out that Alec was a member of the Russian army who spent 20 years on the Chinese border. Our fears were allayed when Natasha produced a whole roast duck from her bag and proceeded to rip it to pieces with her bare hands while Karen searched for a knife for her. We were amazed and pleased when they kept offering us more and more. We found that people were very generous in this way quite often in Russia. They also don't let you refuse their offerings without a fight. "Go on, go on, go on, go on. You will have another piece of duck now."
We certainly weren't arguing when they brought out the Russian brandy and started pouring shots to be downed. After the second or third we felt a bit bad that this exchange was so one sided. Normally, we found that Russian people would refuse our offers of food and drink but Alec seemed quite keen when we got out the posh vodka we bought in St. Petersburg.
As the shots were downed we began to worry that we may go beyond the point of no return. Wanting to avoid the embarassment and unpleasantness of us being sick we decided to distract them from the drinking with a game of travel Frustration. This appeared to do the trick and Alec seemed to really get into it shouting "Shest" every time he got a six and then got quite excited when he won. By the time we finished the game I think Natasha had decided that Alec had had too much and so, thankfully, we stopped drinking.
When we arrived in Novosibirsk we were met by Alec's brother who spoke a little English. Apparently Alec had rang him on the mobile before we arrived and had asked him help us get on the local bus to the hotel :-)
They spoke no English so we had an opportunity for Karen to practise her Russian and, when our dictionaries failed us, to develop our sign-language skills. We were a bit worried at first when we found out that Alec was a member of the Russian army who spent 20 years on the Chinese border. Our fears were allayed when Natasha produced a whole roast duck from her bag and proceeded to rip it to pieces with her bare hands while Karen searched for a knife for her. We were amazed and pleased when they kept offering us more and more. We found that people were very generous in this way quite often in Russia. They also don't let you refuse their offerings without a fight. "Go on, go on, go on, go on. You will have another piece of duck now."
We certainly weren't arguing when they brought out the Russian brandy and started pouring shots to be downed. After the second or third we felt a bit bad that this exchange was so one sided. Normally, we found that Russian people would refuse our offers of food and drink but Alec seemed quite keen when we got out the posh vodka we bought in St. Petersburg.
As the shots were downed we began to worry that we may go beyond the point of no return. Wanting to avoid the embarassment and unpleasantness of us being sick we decided to distract them from the drinking with a game of travel Frustration. This appeared to do the trick and Alec seemed to really get into it shouting "Shest" every time he got a six and then got quite excited when he won. By the time we finished the game I think Natasha had decided that Alec had had too much and so, thankfully, we stopped drinking.
When we arrived in Novosibirsk we were met by Alec's brother who spoke a little English. Apparently Alec had rang him on the mobile before we arrived and had asked him help us get on the local bus to the hotel :-)
Photos for this journey can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianwhitfield/sets/72157603794179836/
Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk
So now we enter the cold zone. -20 degrees in Yekaterinburg and -26 degrees in Novosibirsk... It's a strange type of cold here compared to Britain. It's very dry and there isn't much wind so at first it can seem o.k. until you notice that your lungs feels a little strange when you inhale the air and that your nostril hairs feel like they're freezing. 20-30 minutes outside results in your face freezing and the immediate desire to rush into a warm cafe to avoid losing vital extremities.
Some of you may be thinking: "Well, you did choose to go to Siberia in winter Ian".. This is a very valid point but, in my defense, I wouldn't be British if I didn't get at least a small whinge in about the weather :-)
The atmosphere in Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk is very different to St. Petersburg and Moscow. They are still fairly large cities but have a much more relaxed atmosphere. We hardly saw any police here and didn't feel that we would be asked for our papers at any moment. It seems as though people here are less under the watchful eye of the state because of their distance from the centres of power in European Russia. People in hotels and cafes greet you more enthusiastically and there is much less evidence of the all pervasive Russian glum face.
We mainly spent our time here relaxing and hiding from the weather in really nice cafes with hearty Russian food and drink. Karen discovered her love for Blinis (pancakes with stuff in them). She got a bit of a taste for Blini with caviar. I ate Solyanka (clear soup with various mixed meat and veg and a splodge of sour cream. This is a great way to warm yourself up. We also had a try of the Kvas (strange non-alcoholic malt drink that kind of tastes like liquid Malt Loaf).
We also took a look at the town squares which have beautiful ice sculptures throughout winter. We had a fun bum slide down quite a big ice slide in Yekaterinburg, much to the amusement of the Russian teenagers. They seem to be able to effortlessly slide down while standing up which was quite impressive. We thought about trying it but decided it was less embarassing to go down on our bums than to go down standing up and then go arse over tit.
Photos for Yekaterinburg can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianwhitfield/sets/72157603745890272/
Photos for Novosibirsk can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianwhitfield/sets/72157603750347769/
Some of you may be thinking: "Well, you did choose to go to Siberia in winter Ian".. This is a very valid point but, in my defense, I wouldn't be British if I didn't get at least a small whinge in about the weather :-)
The atmosphere in Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk is very different to St. Petersburg and Moscow. They are still fairly large cities but have a much more relaxed atmosphere. We hardly saw any police here and didn't feel that we would be asked for our papers at any moment. It seems as though people here are less under the watchful eye of the state because of their distance from the centres of power in European Russia. People in hotels and cafes greet you more enthusiastically and there is much less evidence of the all pervasive Russian glum face.
We mainly spent our time here relaxing and hiding from the weather in really nice cafes with hearty Russian food and drink. Karen discovered her love for Blinis (pancakes with stuff in them). She got a bit of a taste for Blini with caviar. I ate Solyanka (clear soup with various mixed meat and veg and a splodge of sour cream. This is a great way to warm yourself up. We also had a try of the Kvas (strange non-alcoholic malt drink that kind of tastes like liquid Malt Loaf).
We also took a look at the town squares which have beautiful ice sculptures throughout winter. We had a fun bum slide down quite a big ice slide in Yekaterinburg, much to the amusement of the Russian teenagers. They seem to be able to effortlessly slide down while standing up which was quite impressive. We thought about trying it but decided it was less embarassing to go down on our bums than to go down standing up and then go arse over tit.
Photos for Yekaterinburg can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianwhitfield/sets/72157603745890272/
Photos for Novosibirsk can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianwhitfield/sets/72157603750347769/
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Trans-Siberian Express - Moscow to Yekaterinburg
This is where the Trans-Siberian starts. Moscow to Yekaterinburg is about a 30 hour train journey which took us across the border from European to Asian Russia.
We had booked 3rd class tickets for this part of the journey which means you are in an open carriage with dozens of other people, each with their own bunk. The trains in Russia are mostly clean and comfortable and each carriage has a manager called a provodnitsa who is responsible for order and cleanliness. This was a nice contrast to British trains where the only people on board are the driver and the person in the shop who will sell groups of lads vast quantities of Stella and then abandon the passengers to their fate.
It's important to note that the 'Express' part of the title for this journey was abandoned long ago and that the 'Trans-Siberian Amble' may be more appropriate with an average speed of under 50 mph. This is not necessarily a bad thing because it gives you a sense of contemplation and the kind of free time to talk, think and read that it's often hard to find in the busy shuffle of daily life. You can attempt that Russian novel you've never got around to reading, get intimate views of small, anonymous towns where the children go to school on skis and 2000 mile rivers are frozen all the way up to the Arctic Sea. The majority of the views out of the train windows are vast empty snowscapes which creep by with monotonous beauty. The bright winter sunshine reflects off the snow and the barks of silver birch trees making everything sparkle.
We were very lucky that for this journey we were sat with some really friendly Russian people and one person who spoke a little English.
One girl, Eena, was around 30 and was a nurse in an Aids Hospital in Norilsk which is an industrial town in the Arctic Circle which is known for Nickel mining. There was Tonya who was a Grandma and was from Yekaterinburg and spent a lot of the journey knitting. Then there were Artur and Ivan (my namesake) who came from Kazan, which is in between Moscow and Yekaterinburg and has a large muslim population and a beautiful mosque that we saw from train. Artur was a fireman with incredible boots. They were proper big fire-retardent boots with uber-warm felt lining. He mocked our trainers as being unfit for a Siberia winter and we feared for our toes. He also managed to beat me at chess within about 5 minutes. I sat staring at the board for minutes on end with sweat forming on my forehead from the intense concentration, meanwhile Artur would come back from making his bed and make a move which swept away my defences after 10 second's consideration.
As the guide book informed us is often the case with meeting Russian people, the conversation turned to money and the cost of living. The general impression we got was that wages in Russia for most people don't meet the costs of living. It seems that things have improved for some people since the economic turmoil of the late nineties but there was certainly anger at the epic scale of corruption in Russian society which seems to have turned from a totalitarian communist state to a totalitarian capitalist state within a very short space of time. The average worker in Russia is forced to spend half their wage on gas while the oligarchs that control the industries expolit their privatised monopolies to extract as much money from people as they wish and use it to buy mansions and football clubs abroad. As soon as we told people we were from England they would say: "Ambramovich"; "Chelsea" and shake their heads in annoyance at the state of their country.
We got a very good impression of Russian people from this journey. They are very kind, generous and open and will share whatever they have with you and go to extraordinary lengths to help poor clueless English tourists who barely speak Russian. I suppose sharing and helping other people is essential in a society where so many people have so little.
At the end of the journey Tonya inisisted on taking the time to walk us to our hotel near the station in -20 degree cold because she feared we would get lost on the way.
We had booked 3rd class tickets for this part of the journey which means you are in an open carriage with dozens of other people, each with their own bunk. The trains in Russia are mostly clean and comfortable and each carriage has a manager called a provodnitsa who is responsible for order and cleanliness. This was a nice contrast to British trains where the only people on board are the driver and the person in the shop who will sell groups of lads vast quantities of Stella and then abandon the passengers to their fate.
It's important to note that the 'Express' part of the title for this journey was abandoned long ago and that the 'Trans-Siberian Amble' may be more appropriate with an average speed of under 50 mph. This is not necessarily a bad thing because it gives you a sense of contemplation and the kind of free time to talk, think and read that it's often hard to find in the busy shuffle of daily life. You can attempt that Russian novel you've never got around to reading, get intimate views of small, anonymous towns where the children go to school on skis and 2000 mile rivers are frozen all the way up to the Arctic Sea. The majority of the views out of the train windows are vast empty snowscapes which creep by with monotonous beauty. The bright winter sunshine reflects off the snow and the barks of silver birch trees making everything sparkle.
We were very lucky that for this journey we were sat with some really friendly Russian people and one person who spoke a little English.
One girl, Eena, was around 30 and was a nurse in an Aids Hospital in Norilsk which is an industrial town in the Arctic Circle which is known for Nickel mining. There was Tonya who was a Grandma and was from Yekaterinburg and spent a lot of the journey knitting. Then there were Artur and Ivan (my namesake) who came from Kazan, which is in between Moscow and Yekaterinburg and has a large muslim population and a beautiful mosque that we saw from train. Artur was a fireman with incredible boots. They were proper big fire-retardent boots with uber-warm felt lining. He mocked our trainers as being unfit for a Siberia winter and we feared for our toes. He also managed to beat me at chess within about 5 minutes. I sat staring at the board for minutes on end with sweat forming on my forehead from the intense concentration, meanwhile Artur would come back from making his bed and make a move which swept away my defences after 10 second's consideration.
As the guide book informed us is often the case with meeting Russian people, the conversation turned to money and the cost of living. The general impression we got was that wages in Russia for most people don't meet the costs of living. It seems that things have improved for some people since the economic turmoil of the late nineties but there was certainly anger at the epic scale of corruption in Russian society which seems to have turned from a totalitarian communist state to a totalitarian capitalist state within a very short space of time. The average worker in Russia is forced to spend half their wage on gas while the oligarchs that control the industries expolit their privatised monopolies to extract as much money from people as they wish and use it to buy mansions and football clubs abroad. As soon as we told people we were from England they would say: "Ambramovich"; "Chelsea" and shake their heads in annoyance at the state of their country.
We got a very good impression of Russian people from this journey. They are very kind, generous and open and will share whatever they have with you and go to extraordinary lengths to help poor clueless English tourists who barely speak Russian. I suppose sharing and helping other people is essential in a society where so many people have so little.
At the end of the journey Tonya inisisted on taking the time to walk us to our hotel near the station in -20 degree cold because she feared we would get lost on the way.
Photos for this journey can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianwhitfield/sets/72157603739778692/
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