Trans-Siberian Picnic Part 5: Novosibirsk

Trans-Siberian Picnic – Part 5

Novosibirsk

With gasping relief my luggage and I poured out of Wagon 29, Train 63 into the 10 pm Siberian dusk. I was met my bright-eyed Emily, a friend and former KZ Peace Corps Volunteer, and a waiting taxi.

Novosibirsk is said to be Russia's 3^rd larges city with about 1.5 million people. Like Vladivostok it was a closed city until the early 1990's. Emily lives in the scientific/academic suburb called “Little Academic City” (clever name). During the Soviet times this perfect and sterile little planned city housed many of the USSR's top scientists. It was designed to keep them comfy, happy and working on the things military superpowers need scientists to be working on.

Knowing its history I couldn't help but feel like I was walking around a well manicured, tree lined prison community. I enjoyed imagining the people who had lived in Emily's apartment, wondering what their lives were like. Did they enjoy their life and despise the west? And if so, how would they feel about a couple of Americans eating cheese, drinking wine and listening to Frank Sinatra in their apartment. If not, did they always live under supervision and were they forced to live and work in this velvety academic gulag?

I thought about this for hours, at least until the early evening of Sunday when I got food poisoning from some tasty but bad peach yogurt. I then spent much of the rest of my visit on my hands and knees heaving into a Soviet academic toilette.

Before I managed to get sick we got to spend my one full day touring Novosibirsk and exchanging train tickets. A very clean city with a well-developed infrastructure and a thriving natural resource based economy. Lonely Planet (without who's help this trip would have been a non-comical disaster) lists about two things of historical or cultural interest. They didn't miss any. But just wandering the streets for a day gave me a good feel of what life may be like in this functional city.

I spent all the next day up until the last hour before the taxi came lying in bed with a fantastic case of general malaise. Had I a spare day in my itinerary I would have postponed the train ride. Instead, I indulged in a taxi, as I had no energy to lug my luggage through the public transport system, and crawled into Train 67, Wagon 5, Birth 16.