There’s no time to waste. All we have IS time, and we don’t have much of it. Sure, we can lose more than time. There are things we like, people we enjoy being around, habits we don’t care to break. And circumstances can force you to live without those things. Painfully, in many cases. But we never really HAVE those things. We just have the time in which we can appreciate them.
Well, such was the moody brew in which I began to stew as the train bounced along its seemingly endless tracks through the snowy desolation of Siberia. I felt that time was short. I felt that soon, the ride would be over. Soon, I’d be teaching again. Soon, I’d be away from people I didn’t want to be away from. Soon enough, I’d be leaving China. Soon after, I’d have to embrace a future, or flee from it. After that, well… nothing is as far away as we’d sometimes like for it to be.
Needless to say, this is not what I should have been thinking. No, what I should have been thinking was how much I had absolutely loved the places I’d been the past few weeks (to say nothing of the company), and that I had several more days to enjoy both of those things. Still, I did succeed in cramming most of my nonsensical worries into a little black box and telling them to stay the hell away from me until February 9th, when I would (and have since) resumed classes in Anqing.
First, I have to tell you about the train, because the train was… well, it was awesome.
Now, there are many things our little Lonely Planet guidebook got wrong about the Trans-Siberian Train, and I won’t really go into them here, but as it only seems to explore things from the Moscow to Beijing side of the trip, I think we got the journey with a decidedly different flavor.
First off, the train is damn near deserted--although this probably had to do with season--and very few of the passengers are Russian. That's not surprising, considering no one really seemed to get on after Mongolia. In our entire carriage (with maybe 15 cabins, give or take a few) I believe we had less than a dozen people for most of the ride. And each of those cabins can hold four, folks. Yeah.
So we could spread ourselves out. Relax. Have some privacy. That was an unexpected perk. I mean, in China, trains are crowded, dirty, sweaty journeys where you’re basically doing your damndest to keep to yourself in the middle of 8 – 10 people.
Well not so for this train, and happily.
Now, there are only so many things you can do in a train cabin. Let’s have a list.
There’s reading.
Writing.
If you just said 'rithmetic, shame on you. No.
If you have a laptop, there are movies and games.
If you have a deck of cards, well, you better have at least one friend and some knowhow. And preferably alcohol.
There’s Uno.
Drinking. (Already alluded to.)
Eating (but only if you brought food).
Sleeping.
Exercise. Yep, it’s true; with careful examination of your various available grips and points of leverage, it’s quite possible to manipulate your own body weight in at least a hundred different ways. Nice. But no cardio (unless you’re a spy/adventurer on a high-speed inter-carriage foot chase, like myself).
Waiting.
Getting off.
Feeling nervous about getting off because none of the stops last long enough and you're worried the train will run away with all your things and leave you stranded in a frozen wasteland where you last approximately 7 hours before dying a horrible, frost-bitten death... ok, so that's probably just me.
Watching the windows.
And of course—did I say it already?—drinking. Yes, well, our few carriage-mates
were all Mongolian, and turns out they had a little something about drinking they wanted to show us.
It all began after two toilsome nights waiting to go through customs. Luckily we didn’t piss anyone off enough to get shaken down (I heard about this happening to several others). Anyway, after these two joyous evenings of nail biting while waiting for several unknown uniformed individuals to return our sacred, life-giving passports (both of which dragged out to about 4 or 5 am), the Mongolians came a-knocking the third night. I’ll admit, I was a little uneasy at first, but after a few beers it seemed as if we would become fast friends. Still, the night had already grown old, and none of us could last for long.
The next day was different. After lunch, in the midst of the movie Australia (don’t ask how I got it, it is China after all), there is a quiet knock at the door. Lo and behold, a Mongolian bearing gifts! No, wait, that’s not a gift. That’s bad.
That’s vodka.
As we settled into their car, they began pouring huge shots of straight liquor, which, you know, it seemed impolite to refuse. After the liquor came strange meats, strange vegetables, bread… more meat. More meat. More bread. Much more vodka. A veritable cocktail of strange was brewing inside me. Anyway. The remainder of THAT story need not leave the train. The end.
Soon enough the train ride ended, as I knew it must, and we stepped off into a frozen world with yet another alphabet that my idiot brain finds unintelligible. Well, it did at first, anyway. Turns out, Cyrillic, as you might imagine, is a LOT more intuitive than Chinese. Anyway, a brief and somewhat confusing subway ride later, we were lugging luggage up the street toward a quaint hostel, which was all too welcome because of the cold outside and the hot shower within.
Yeah, you know, showers seem a lot more valuable once you’ve been on a five-and-a-half day train where they don’t exist.
The hostel was extremely comfortable, but deserted. Guess tourist season for Russia is probably during a month when the ol’ air outside isn’t hanging out somewhere well below 0. Our host Alex was extremely generous, AND helpful--he directed us very ably on our journey to Moscow's Chinese Embassy and into the hair-raising adventure that followed there during the next couple of days. But that, as they say, is a story that will have to wait.
More later, I swear. Or I’m Genghis Khan.
...To be concluded.
