The hangover.

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Everybody woke up feeling bad. The linen that the women on the train hand out for 67 roubles is never big enough to serve as a real blanket, and the compartments are very hot all through the night. Even on the bottom bunk there is the threat of falling out when the train jolts. When the lights came on at 6, an hour from Moscow, my skin was greasy and my head hurt. The queue along the aisle to step off onto the platform after a long journey is always funereal.

We bought our elektrichka tickets at 7.30 and walked towards the 8.12 train with 'TVER' written on the side, until Kaisa noticed that on the departures board it was only scheduled to go as far as Kryukovo half an hour away. To our horror the only train we could get was at 11.29, a four hour wait. Worse, it was a stopping train that would take another four hours to crawl to Tver. The girls sat in a dirty café and chatted in Finnish and I went for a walk around the station to lose my bad mood as best I could. The woman in the first waiting hall through me out for entering without a ticket, and man sitting at a table outside the one upstairs refused to let me in because my elektrichka ticket wasn't long distance. If I just want to sit down what does it matter where I will go when I get up?

When 11.29 came the elektrichka was too full for us to sit together. I was squeezed between two babushki, one with bright red hair who looked at me while she was talking to her friend. After four hours of still not being comfortable to sleep properly my body was exhausted. We met up at Tver station to take the tram back to ulitsa Zhelyabova, and when I got back to my flat in obshezhitie the first thing I did was collapse on my bed.

When I woke up my sinuses and throat were telling me I was about to get 'Moscow sickness' again. It seems whenever I am in the capital - even for a few hours like today - I catch something. I wanted to fall asleep and throw up at the same time, and my head ached from all the 'background stress' of Kazan.

Luckily Linda and Karin came to number 44 at 11, to give me some material they had found for my project and to find out about Kazan. Chatting to them cheered me up a bit; it always does.

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