4 days, 5000km, 7 new friends, no showers... That's one long train trip...
Seeing as how there's been a distinct lack of pictures lately, I'll start this post by throwing up a few shots from St. Petersburg and Moscow... I've talked about both in previous posts, but words really don't do the places justice...
(Below: One of the more historically interesting (to me) places that I visited in Moscow, the Lubyanka, former KGB headquarters. There's an old Russian joke that says the Lubyanka is the tallest building in all of Moscow because you can see Siberia from the basement... It's funny now, but perhaps not so much 30 years ago...)
(Below: A view looking up a canal at Peterhof Palace, just outside of St. Petersburg. The place was created largely by Peter the Great and is really a collection of palaces, gardens, fountains, forrests, and pretty much anything else you can imagine.)
Since departing St. Petersburg I've managed to successfully get myself back to Moscow, and all the way from Moscow to Irkutsk in one very smelly, tired, jetlagged, happy piece... The train itself was fairly decent by Russian standards, though I expect it was probably built sometime in the mid-1970's...
The trip, all 5000 km or so of it, has entirely reaffirmed my belief that trains are in fact the best way to to travel. In the space of 3 days and four nights I managed to make friends with a WONDFERUL German couple, a pair of amazingly friendly (and exceedingly beautiful) Swedish girls, a Canadian girl from Vancouver (It's a very small world...), a satellite electrical engineer and his girlfriend on Vacation from Moscow, a trio of extremely drunk Latvians on their way east after two weeks of camping and hunting in the depths of Siberia, and a Tibetan/Russian martial arts Master who could (disturbingly accurately) read peoples palms... The latter, named Yuri, was my roommate for two nights. More on him later...
The German couple I mentioned, Miriam and Roland, a pair of social workers from Frankfurt quite brilliantly had the foresight to bring along a squeegee to try and clean the windows on the train in order to get a better view (When we boarded in Moscow the windows of our car were so caked with mud that we could hardly see outside at all, let along enjoy the scenery)... After nearly 10 minutes of scrubbing with soap and water the windows were sadly just as dirty as they were when we left Moscow.
(Below: Roland made a valiant attempt to clean the windows of his and Miriam's cabin. He received quite a few very strange looks from the babushkas on the platform, and many of the Russian passengers, largely because cleaning is a "Woman's job" in Russia. For a man to pick up a bucket of soap and water is practically unheard of... Miriam is in the background, holding a bottle of soapy water and looking on in amusement.)
The air-conditioning in my carriage broke on the first day, and the rising temperature (I clocked it at 35 degrees in my cabin) forced most of the people in the car I was in into the halls, where we staged a small coup and forced open several windows and jammed or tied them open with empy pop bottles and some string... Quite a few people in my carriage, including Pavel, the aforementioned satellite electrical enginner, went shirtless for much of the trip.
(Below: The ever-cheerful Pavel. His girlfriend, Olga, took more pictures than I did. Both were quite excited to see Siberia for the first time.)
(Below: Olga, beer in-hand and camera hanging from her wrist, at one of the many stops. Babushkas selling a variety of (to Canadian's) unimaginable foods, are in the background.)
The Swedish girls I met were perhaps one of the more random encounters I had along the way. I said hi to them after hearing two of them speaking English in the corridor of the train. (While many russians speak a few words, or even have basic English down pat, it's tough to find fluent English-speakers.)... One of the girls, Maria, a social worker (yes, another social worker) from Sweden and I ended up chatting for a few hours afterwards... Later that day I was distracted from the book I was reading (Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. HIGHLY reccomended to any fans of literature.) by Maria asking me if I could "be her hero" ... One does not often get asked to be the hero of tall, blonde, and beautiful Swedish girls, so I of course obliged... Turns out she'd accidentally deleted all of her holiday photos from her digital camera and I was the only person on the train with a laptop and a copy of Lexar's PhotoRescue software (a rather handy piece of professional software sold with Lexar-brand memory cards and used specifically to recover deleted and damaged photos from memory cards...) ... 90 minutes of image-recovery later and I found myself one friend richer in the most unexpected manner. I was shortly introduced to the rest of the Swedish contingent, including Lousie, a teacher. The two together were irrepressably cheerful, and I spent a good portion of the rest of the train trip hanging out with them in the dining car.
(Below: Olga, beer in-hand and camera hanging from her wrist, at one of the many stops. Babushkas selling a variety of (to Canadian's) unimaginable foods, are in the background.)
(Below: Maria (left) and Louise at one of the many small stations along the trans-siberian.) 
There were countless other interesting, friendly, and in general quite amazing characters on the trans-sib, but the last I'll have time to mention in this post is my roommate for more than half of the trip, Yuri:
Yuri arrived in my cabin on the third night of the trip at around 11PM in Novosibirsk. He seemed quite friendly at first, and it didn't take us long to determine that he knew even less English than I did Russian. Yuri's spoken vocabulary consisted of "Sit down please" and "Kung Fu", the latter of which I quickly learned he was actually an avid practitioner of... I learned very quickly that when the English phrase "Kung Fu" was uttered, it was often followed by a brief demonstration of one of the several martial arts that Yuri was quite proficient in. After the second or third such demonstration I learned to step back, very quickly (though often not quickly enough) whenever Yuri decided to talk about his profession...
Over the course of the next two days we managed to communicate basic information about each other through the use of several Russian/English bilingual people on board the train (Pavel and Olga, my next-door neighbours, being the most prominent among these.) ... Seems Yuri runs several martial arts schools across Russia, has just returned(brand new iPod in hand) from opening one in Atlanta, Georgia as well. I was somewhat skeptical at first, until he produced both business cards (bearing his name, and the title "Master of Asian Martial Arts" and several rather official-looking certification cards that, from what little Russian I know, I managed to gather were "Master" certifications in various martial arts... One of his other skills that I, as well as my Swedish friends, were introduced to, was his ability to read palms with (in my case) rather disturbing accuracy. Several of us (myself, the Swedish girls, another Canadian named Natalie, and a few Russians) were treated to a demonstration of Yuri's prophetic skills.
There were countless other interesting, friendly, and in general quite amazing characters on the trans-sib, but the last I'll have time to mention in this post is my roommate for more than half of the trip, Yuri:
Yuri arrived in my cabin on the third night of the trip at around 11PM in Novosibirsk. He seemed quite friendly at first, and it didn't take us long to determine that he knew even less English than I did Russian. Yuri's spoken vocabulary consisted of "Sit down please" and "Kung Fu", the latter of which I quickly learned he was actually an avid practitioner of... I learned very quickly that when the English phrase "Kung Fu" was uttered, it was often followed by a brief demonstration of one of the several martial arts that Yuri was quite proficient in. After the second or third such demonstration I learned to step back, very quickly (though often not quickly enough) whenever Yuri decided to talk about his profession...
Over the course of the next two days we managed to communicate basic information about each other through the use of several Russian/English bilingual people on board the train (Pavel and Olga, my next-door neighbours, being the most prominent among these.) ... Seems Yuri runs several martial arts schools across Russia, has just returned(brand new iPod in hand) from opening one in Atlanta, Georgia as well. I was somewhat skeptical at first, until he produced both business cards (bearing his name, and the title "Master of Asian Martial Arts" and several rather official-looking certification cards that, from what little Russian I know, I managed to gather were "Master" certifications in various martial arts... One of his other skills that I, as well as my Swedish friends, were introduced to, was his ability to read palms with (in my case) rather disturbing accuracy. Several of us (myself, the Swedish girls, another Canadian named Natalie, and a few Russians) were treated to a demonstration of Yuri's prophetic skills.
(Below: On the third day of the trip Yuri (left) joined several of us, including Maria (right) in the dining car and offered to tell our fortunes. Most of the westerners received somewhat similar news: None of us have any love in our lives. Similarities aside, a few of the details Yuri managed to conjur up were a tad closer to home than would be expected, especially given that he didn't share a language with more than half of us... )
I'm now several hundred rubles in debt to the internet cafe that I'm writing this post from, and need to find some food for my rather vocal stomach. I'll leave my more dedicated readers with a view of a Siberian sunset. Suffice it to say that most of what we've heard about Siberia in Canada is only true during the winter (I think) and that this place really is one of the more beautiful corners of the world that I've visited...
(Below: A Siberian sunset, shot through an open window on the train.)
