Trans-Siberian Railway (part 2)

Six days on the train seemed daunting, but we felt we were prepared - we stocked up on packets of instant noodles, soup, tea and hot chocolate (hot water is always available from a coal-fired 'samovar'), we each had a couple books to read and we could plan our entire trip through China (not to mention learning Mandarin).

As it turned out, the days flew by and we had a great time. We barely accomplished any of the planned reading or language practice and we slept less than expected, but we did eat most of the food. We had hoped for "authentic" Russian or Chinese people to share our compartment with (four bunks per compartment), but we were very pleased to spend the whole trip with a guy from Australia and a lady from New Zealand, each taking the slow way home. It turned out that "locals" in other cars would often fill their compartment with large bags, smoke filthy cigarettes, try to involve you in their smuggling operations and generally disregard hygiene.

We chatted, played "Settlers of Catan - Travel Edition," wandered the train taking photos and generally just took it easy. We developed the concept of "segments of time." Rolling up the bedroll was one segment, breakfast was one segment, a "shower" in the cramped toilets would be a segment, and discussions ranging from vaccinations to politics to the Simpsons could range from 1-5 segments. The important thing was never to attempt too many things in one segment of time - just take things slowly and you'd be surprised how little you can accomplish in a day.

In each car of the train (there were 14, carrying 400 people), there were two attendants - "provodnistas" in Russian. They were a constant source of aggravation, as they locked the doors to the toilets way before any of the stops, yelled at us for simple requests, and tried to be of as little help as possible. Still, many segments of time were spent complaining about them, and comparing the levels of apathy and incompetence between cars.

Oh, and we got to see Siberia too. It was cold, rainy, sometimes snowy, and as uninhabitable as you would imagine. It felt great to sit in the warmth of our compartment, sipping tea and looking out on a bleak landscape. We also got to see the real level of poverty in Russia (state pensions are less than 100$ a month) which was not obvious in St. Petes or Moscow. Many elderly women have to supplement their income by growing their own food in small plots beside their sparse wooden shacks, and by selling home-cooked food to passengers on the passing trains.

The sun came out (and the people got friendlier) the instant we crossed over into China (a ten-hour border crossing) - but we'll write more about this wonderful country later.

Trans-Siberian Railway

Tonight, we embark on a 9,000 km, 6-day, 7-night train journey from Moscow to Beijing. Our train is called the Trans-Manchurian and follows the route below. It's not technically the longest scheduled train ride in the world, but it's close (it's 300 km more from Moscow to Vladivostok). We should have plenty of stories to tell, but we'll be out of contact for the next week. If you're interested, we've posted some photos on Picasa from our travels so far.

Москва (Moscow)

Moscow is less European than St. Petersburg; much more like what we were expecting Russia to be like. It's been cold and rainy and the city is bigger, more spread out, and more clogged with traffic.

Luckily, the Metro is amazing, so we can get over all of these things. The Soviets were particularly proud of three things: the space program, the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Moscow Metro. The stations are decorated like palaces, with marble columns, colourful mosaics, stained-glass windows and chandeliers. And, they're deep enough that they could be used as nuclear fallout shelters (two minutes down on the escalator)...

We visited St. Basil's cathedral (which had been our only mental picture of Moscow), Red Square and the Kremlin. Inside the Kremlin (which is just a Russia word for fortress), there are many more Russian Orthodox cathedrals and an impressive collection of royal jewels, gold, silver and Fabergé eggs (and our fake student cards got us in really cheap). The Fabergé eggs were incredible: fist-sized "Easter eggs" of hard stone, decorated with precious metals, with intricate jeweled 'trinkets' inside - including a five-carriage clockwork train.

We also visited a GULAG museum. It was shockingly small and unknown, considering that it is the only museum dedicated to a system of forced labour camps that killed more than 2 million Russians. After having visited Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, it was hard to believe that Stalin's crimes are being covered up so well.

Санкт-Петербург (St. Pete's)

Russia is not an easy country to get into (visas require invitations, planned itineraries and registration upon arrival) and the warnings can be discouraging ("don't trust the cops", "you will be pickpocketed", "organized crime runs the country"), but it is certainly worth a visit.

We arrived in St. Petersburg without any expectations - not a clue what it would be like - which made for a nice surprise. After a rough start finding our hostel, we found the rest of the city was amazing.

St. Petersburg is a beautiful city, with a very European feel - we could be in Paris, Venice or Amsterdam. The streets are lined with palaces in pastel colours (blue, yellow, green, pink...). There is a huge art gallery (called the Hermitage) that easily compares to the Louvre - and the building itself is as impressive as the art. And there is an incredible Russian Orthodox cathedral, with colourful "onion domes."

And there's not just cultural things to see. On our first day, we visited a museum of "curiosities" - basically a room filled with two-headed babies and other mutations, collected from around the world by Peter the Great. And on our last day, we visited the Russian Erotica museum - located in the waiting room of a practicing sexual health clinic, the main exhibit is (allegedly) Rasputin's penis.

CИРИЛЛИК ИС А ФУН ЛАНГЪАЖЕ

АС ВЕ ВАНДЕР ДЕ СТРЭТС, ВЕ ТРИ ТО ТРАНСЛАТЕ СИНС. РЕСТОРАН ИС RESTAURANT, КАФЕ ИС CAFE, ИНФОРМАЦИЯ ИС INFORMATION.

ВЕ ФЭЛ ЛИК ВЕ АР ИН КИНДЕРГАРДЕН, СЛОЛЙ ДЕСИФЕРИНГ ЕАЧ ЛЕТЕР, ДЕН САЙИНГ ДЕ ВОРД АЛОУД, УНТИЛ ВЕ ФИГУР ОУТ ВАТ ИТ МЕАНС.

Clue

First impressions of Russia

This was our sixth border crossing, but the first "real" one - not within the EU. We were on a night bus, and we were rudely awoken at 4am. Everyone got off the bus (we slowly realized what was going on and followed). At passport control, the border guard was not impressed with Anthony's arrival card and demanded "ручкой." Due to his uncomprehending stare, she began to wave her hand, giving the international signal for "pen." Unfortunately, Anthony misinterpreted this for the international signals for "sign here" and "waiter, cheque please" and continued to stare uncomprehendingly. Eventually, another passenger provided her with a pen, she made some illegible notation, and we were allowed into Russia (after passing our bags through a metal detector)!

We got minimal sleep on the rest of our night bus ride, due to poor roads, bad driving and squeaky brakes. At 7am, we were again rudely awakened, to find that we were in St. Petersburg (an hour early! - or so we believed until we realized that we'd passed into a new time zone). We were dropped unceremoniously on a street corner, with a small map to our hostel - that did not have a scale, or the street names in Cyrillic (the funky alphabet that Russians use). We had been warned not to look too much like tourists in Russia, as cops will ask to inspect your passport - and then demand payment to get it back. So, we were tired, grumpy, disorriented and trying not to look like tourists as we looked for street signs (and lugged around backpacks with Canada flags on them).

We walked for about fifteen minutes, until we found a street called Лабутина, which we guessed was the Labutina on our map (as it had an 'a' 'b' 't' and 'a' in the right places...). We found the right building, and the right door (entered the security code that they post on the web) and climbed some dark, dirty, unwelcoming, creepy stairs to door #34 (the hostel's "address"). Still no signs of a hostel. We rang the doorbell and knocked repeatedly. No response.

Feeling defeated, we retreated to a nearby park to eat some breakfast and figure out what to do. We were completely unconvinced that we had found the right place (despite the correct security code). We had no way to check the internet, or to call the hostel. We decided to forfeit our deposit and just go find another hostel, but that we should check door #34 one last time.

This time, we rang the bell and someone answered! What a relief! The hostel people were just waking up and I guess no one was awake yet when we first arrived. When we came in we were offered tea (just what we needed) and shortly afterwards we met several nice people staying at the hostel. After Marieke took a nap - she was a bit of a zombie by this point - we all headed out for a day of sightseeing.

St. Petersburg is a beautiful city, easily as stunning as Paris or Venice. Our first impressions quickly melted away.

Tallinn

After a too-brief stay with Ieva, we left for Estonia (the third and final Baltic state). We spent a very rainy morning in Tallinn - mostly just walking the winding streets, and admiring the medieval towers. The afternoon involved many hot cups of tea, and the day was finished off nicely with savoury Estonian pancakes - a lot like Dutch pannenkoeken.

Marieke's essay about Latvia and Rīga

We've spent the last three days in Latvia, visiting our friend Ieva and her family. After a couple of weeks of traveling and just seeing museums, city centres and hostels, it was really nice to relax with friends and see a bit of countryside.

We arrived in Rīga on Friday evening after an almost five hour bus ride from Vilnius. Ieva came to pick us up after work and we headed to her parent's house in Inčukalns (about an hour from Rīga). Ieva's family built the house themselves throughout the nineties after the Soviet era. The house is on a huge plot of land in the forest, which has fruit trees, veggie patches and even a sauna on it. The inside of the house is gorgeous - very reminicent of Canadian style cottages complete with pine hardwood floors. The whole house has a really cozy feel to it, but for me the highlight was the rustic kitchen, with an old-school aga. Ieva's mother - who is an absolutely amazing cook - makes her own preserves, and dries homegrown linden for tea and dries forest picked wild mushrooms.

We spent Saturday and Sunday driving around the Latvian countryside (after sleeping in late and filling up on a delicious breakfast) and visiting both tourist destinations and places that Ieva really had a connection to. On both days Ieva's friend Elīne came along with us and on Sunday we met up with Ieva's friend Diva and her boyfriend.

On the Saturday we drove south to Bauska (a town near the Lithuanian border) to check out an old castle. Ieva was really disappointed with the castle as it has been destroyed and fixed numerous times, each time using different stones or bricks, giving it a bit of a patchwork look. We then headed to Rundale Castle, where there was a huge rose-themed exhibit. We generally just checked out the artifacts and art inside the building and searched the castle gardens for some non-existent "free wine" that an old lady in the castle told us about. After eating lunch in the castle cafe we headed to Tervete Nature Park. Tervete has number of Latvian fairy tale characters that are carved out of wood, scattered throughout the forest. It was a really fun and beautiful place to walk both for adults and for kids. After a long drive back to Inčukalns, we went out to a restaurant for a hot bowl soup and then came home to find that Ieva's mother had left out wine, cheese and other snacks for us to eat!

The next day, after a delicious breakfast that included potato pancakes, we headed northeast to Sigulda to check out castle ruins and the gorgeous autumn colours of the surrounding area. Since just about everyone else in Latvia was also in Sigulda to enjoy autumn, we decided not to hike around as parking was hard to find. We then headed to Ieva's mother's cousin place, as he has a private museum of Soviet and German artifacts (including a Soviet tank!) that he's collected from the WWII battles that took place in the nearby area. Ieva had so many places to show us so we spent the rest of the day trying to see as many of the sites as possible, including:

• Araisi, which were castle ruins on a peninsula.
• Līgatne Nature Trails, which we only saw for about 10 min., where there is a massive rock and hiking trails. Legend has it that the rock was a meeting spot for witches of the area.
• Cēsis, a cool medieval town with ruins and outdoor choir singers

We then headed back to Ieva's house, where yet another delicious dinner was waiting for us.

On Monday we got a ride to Rīga with Ieva. She had to work, so we spent the walking around the city. We spent a couple of sleepy hours in the morning trying to book hostels and buses for the next few days. We then headed to the huge city market, where we successfully found many of the things that we forgot to buy for our trip when we were in Copenhagen. We met up briefly we Ieva for lunch, and then spent the afternoon generally just walking around the city (checking cool downtown streets and the art nouveau section of town), going to a museum of Riga's history (which was quite interesting, as Latvia has been controlled by several different countries over the years) and buying tea both for Ieva's family and for us on the Trans-Manchurian (from the coolest tea shop ever that was recommended by a British guy that we met in the Czech Republic). Later in the afternoon we headed to a big mall on the outskirts of Rīga, where Anthony had an appointment to get his hair cut. The haircut turned out to be great, but the way that the hairdresser styled his hair afterwards was hilarious! She combed Anthony's completely straight so that Anthony had bangs! Don't worry, we had photographic evidence...After the haircut we met Ieva and then headed back to her place. We had dinner with her parents and watched Little Miss Sunshine (with Russian subtitles for Ieva's parents - they didn't have Latvian subtitles and Ieva's parents are both fluent in Russian). I think everyone really enjoyed the movie, which didn't involve lots of language specific comedy like a lot of other movies have.

On Tuesday morning we woke up crazy early (5am) to pack and to leave early with Ieva so that she could avoid the traffic jams in Rīga and so she would have time to run some errands. Once again, Ieva's mother had breakfast for us, which meant that she was also up around 5 or 5:30 to cook for us! What a wonderful lady! We said our sad goodbyes and then we headed to Rīga for a bit more sightseeing before heading to Tallinn (Estonia) on a 3:30pm bus.

We had a really wonderful time catching up with Ieva, seeing Latvia and meeting her family. Ieva's parents are the nicest people and although we didn't speak Latvian and Ieva's mother didn't speak English we managed to communicate through Ieva translating and with lots of smiles and "Paldies'es" (thank you's).