On the Train Again

I say again because I am in the sixty-second of seventy-five hours of this train ride.

That won't be my personal best. I once spent 85 hours going from Istanbul to Teheran. Luckily for me, this train had no grizzled old man trying to steal my boots at knife point like there was in Turkey. 

A couple of nights ago, we had a few hills around Ekaterinburg, where the last czar and his family were dispatched ( except Anastasia, etc. ). This is when we were crossing the Urals, the dividing line between Europe and Asia. I can't say that I was impressed with the Urals, because they were so small.   But, hey, they mark a big border!!!

The whole day looked like this. 

 ( sorry. I cannot upload the movie. )

We had a few station stops, including Novosibirsk, a huge city with a huge river.     

Otherwise the day was  grasslands, an occasional stand of trees, and flatness to make Kansas proud. 

This morning we have clear sunny skies with big puffy clouds over a rolling landscape. Local time is about four hours off train time, which is getting weird. 

We pass little villages now and then. I am told some of the little houses are residences. But a number are "dachas," which I always thought were fancy country estates. In fact, they are any summer cottage. The city people go there, tend vegetable gardens, and drink vodka. 

My Russian family got off the train, and were replaced  by a man and wife, and a single woman. She is also going to Irkutsk. This is good, because I was worried about getting up at 2:27 am Moscow time. Now somebody else in the compartment will be getting off with me. 

I was hungry, and went for the peanut butter and bread in my stash. The bread had turned moldy, though. So I just had peanut butter. 

I dropped an open liter and a half of coke in the hallway, and it joyously erupted all over the place--walls, window, dribbling on the floors of two compartments. Managed to wipe it up with my towel, but things are still tacky. Luckily I am leaving this place in 13 hours!!!

We stopped at a station and I bought two hard boiled eggs for 20 rubles. That is about 33cents each. They were so good I went back and got two more. That was lunch or dinner.  Hard to tell what is what here. It is 7:30 local time and the sun is still real high above some horizon. But it is only 3:30 in the afternoon Moscow time. It is hard to adjust. 

I wrote about it once, but I believe it was on one of the posts that got lost in transmission. The train itself is fairly slow. Intercity trains in Europe travel at up to 150 kilometers per hour. They don't average that, but cruise at that. This train will take more than 70 hours to go some 5100 kilometers. We are as i type going as fast as we ever travel and what little experience I have with trains which indicate their speed on the cars info window, we are traveling only  90 to maybe 100 kilometers per hour.