Trans-Siberian Picnic Part 2: Vladivostok to Irkutsk

The Trans-Siberian Picnic – Part 2

On the Train Days 1, 2 & 3

*These are my sloppy, shaky notes taken directly from my notebook as composed on the train...as you will see by the nihilist approach to tenses. Sorry.

A pig would find these bathrooms too dirty. But it is “Platzcar”, the Russian/Soviet railway equivalent of 3^rd class.

I spent the first day getting to know my neighbors in the cautious way young macho boys do (not me, them). They no doubt thought I was worse than weird when I pulled out my Korean hand-fan. They declined my offer to use it, naturally. But by the end of the day we were all passing it around as the heat in our area of the wagon became oppressive due to our poor fortune of getting the emergency escape window which doesn't open.

Platzcar and the train are exactly like in Kazakhstan, except with our sheet compliment we get a little packed with 10 tissues, one face wipe and a shoe polishing wipe...although there is no way to distinguish which is for the shoes and which is for the face.

The “Provodnik” (one of the two attendants for each wagon who exist to ensure a smooth and generally impolite journey) hopefully asked if I was from Poland after hearing my accent. I said my relatives were from there in order to make him happy and establish a good rapport at the start of the three day journey. From then on he referred to me as his “zemlyak” (countryman).

He is chatty, constantly making jokes which go unappreciated, and shamelessly flirting with the young chubby girl traveling alone.

He runs the wagon like a little profit center: selling borscht, potatoes, coffee, tea, “cappuccino”, beer, etc. “Summer showers” from a suspect nozzle poking out of the ceiling of the dingy bathroom are 50 Rubles.

There was much discussion and comparison among the other travelers/picnickers and it was decided he provides the best prices and value.

On the first evening I bought one of his homemade meals: 2 big pieces of salmon and well spiced potatoes. 60 Rubles.

Later in the night he served as barman when I bonded with my bunkmates (Zhenya, Anton and Aleksandra) over games of “idiot” (the official card game of the post-Soviet railway system) and liters of beers.

Bunkmates & Neighbors:

Zhenya is a reserved, blond haired and ruddy cheeked Russian of 19 studying in Vladivostok to be a ship mechanic. After a dozen or so hours of warming up, his social graces and sense of humor arrived and he's proved a good bunkmate.

Anton is a gorilla like figure who frequently practices his shadow boxing skills, throwing around his giant hands. He's on his way home from the Navy and is constantly polishing his brass belt buckle. He speaks slowly and with a pronounced stutter. He pauses at numerous points in a sentence and repeats the first letter of words 7 or 8 times, then slowly proceeds. This made him the perfect conversation partner for me, simple sentences, short words and when he stuttered on an “s”, for example, I had the chance to briefly catalog all the possible words I knew that started with an “s”. After his toughness was established, he turned out a very nice kid and was giving away extra parts of his uniform to his new friends, including a pair of epaulets to me. Like nearly all males on the train, he lives only in shorts & sandals.

Aleksandra, a 19 year old party girl who boarded in Khabarovsk, hasn't eaten or drunk anything except for a cup of apricot juice and a piece of my bubble gum. When pressed by our gregarious ethnic neighbors (more later) she admitted she is of 5 ethnicities ([Siberian Eskimo...sorry I didn't catch the exact name], Korean, Tartar and two others which “you would have to ask her Dad, who she doesn't know”). And indelicate and endearingly “Russian” exchange. Tact be damned!

Sasha and Wife: Sagin (sp?) in ethnicity hailing from one of Russia's many non-Caucasian republics. They are a middle aged married couple with matching gold front teeth, matching hands that could unbolt guardrail and matching mustaches. Very generous and gregarious once they get their morning glass of vodka in them. In the mornings before his vodka constitutional Sasha would look at you as if he was trying to remember if he punched you or kissed you the night before. He loved showing card tricks as if he had invented them, and was constantly trying to get people to bet a bottle of vodka that they couldn't solve his match-stick puzzles. All with a golden grin and an open shirt.

As the train and sun moved during the days the blinds would be pulled down or lifted up to regulate the heat...because of course there is no air conditioning in Platzcar.

The Russian Far East landscape was subtle and endless. Once you look out the window for a while, assign it a color, a topography and generalize the plant life there isn't much more to say...other than it's HUGE!!! Color: spring green. Topography: lush hills and billowing grass planes. Plant life: tall green grass, endless stand of birch and their crooked lines of white bark hanging between the ground and the canopy.

Day 2 saw us change officially from the predominantly grass and birch landscape of the Russian Far East to the Taiga and grass of Siberia.

It's baffling passing the little collections of cobbled together wood homes in the middle of nowhere and trying to figure out why and how anyone would live there.

A couple times a day the train would stop at a station/town large enough to warrant a 20 minute break. The vendors from this town would pace up and down the platform selling what they had and trying to make a living. Many of them are sad and weathered looking old women with shawls on their head selling homegrown potatoes out of an old Soviet pram. There's also the younger generation who look as if life has taken no mercy on them, they are beaten down (often literally) and dirty selling soda or beer or hardboiled eggs.

Back on the train a little kid from the neighboring set of bunks amused himself for the 3+ days by driving radio controlled cars into people feet, then manually pushing them over toes when the batteries ran out. I didn't like this little kid.

The size of Russia is too big to really comprehend. For each of the thousands of kilometers I saw click by out the window, there were thousands more behind it, beyond my field of vision. It's like laying on your back on a clear night in the country, looking up at the stars and contemplating the size of space.

In the three days from Vladivostok to Irkutsk our 3^rd class wagon became a community with its own neighbors and characters, smells and sounds, pace and schedule. It was convivial, homey and comfortable. Maybe all wagons feel that way after three plus days, but when I stumbled the length of the train to the restaurant car for my one and only over-priced and flaccid dining experience, I got a different impression. Each wagon had it's own foreign feel. I felt like I was walking through an overflowing sick ward in a public hospital. They seemed stuffy, smelly and sickly and after that 2^nd morning I only left my community to stretch my legs on the long 20 minute stops that came along a couple times a day.

Three days passed so quickly and pleasantly I was almost disappointed to see the massiveness of moon-lit Lake Baikal appear out the window and announce the impending arrival of Irkutsk, my first stop along the way.

**For as rude and hard as nearly every stranger is here, once you forge even a slight relationship in commerce, shared circumstance or conversation, they are equally generous, caring and warm. The people on trains with which I have shared space amaze me with their generosity and tolerance. It's a drastic and baffling dichotomy.