Come on ride the train....

Currently I am about halfway between St. Petersburg and Moscow on a train. I happen to know that these tickets weren’t particularly cheap, but this is the way to travel.

There are nine of us from UNI taking the so-called “day train” to Moscow. It is largely a direct trip with only two stops along the way. We pulled out of St. Petersburg at precisely 4:00 PM and I have no doubt that we will arrive in Moscow at precisely 9:30 PM as our ticket states.

We are traveling 2nd class (business class) which is pretty dang nice the way it is. I wonder what 1st class would be like? The seats are wide and comfortable. There was a box lunch of non-refridgerated things at our seat when we arrived (rolls, salami, chocolates, water, etc) and as soon as we departed they came around and took our order from the menu of several choices of both food and drink. I am having the fried salmon and the german beer and it is delicious. There are movies on the monitors, but they are in Russian so I am not bothering to listen.

The countryside out our window is fascinating. It is relatively flat and a mixture of “meadow” and woods. The trees remind me of driving along Lake Michigan to Muskegon, or from Minneapolis up to Duluth - a mixture of tall pines and Aspen like trees and some lower bushes that suggest that the soil is rather sandy like that in Michigan. The meadow lands contain a kind of grassy/shrubby flowers but do not appear to be pasture. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be much of anything out here. We have passed VERY few towns. What we are passing appears to be summer cottages with small garden patches out back, but they do not appear to be full blown villages (as there are no signs of businesses either for employment or to support the community that is there nor schools or gas stations etc). They tend to be small “run down” looking places, but my guess is that they are the small summer cottages like we saw when we visited Hungary. They have that feel.

At the first stop there were people waiting on the platform and it appeared that they would sell their wares in certain compartments (although not in ours). I watched big baskets of dried fish, morel mushrooms, and bouquets of flowers all go by the cabin.

It is clear we are heading south because there is actually a sense of night coming on - a color in the sky that we didn’t have in St. Petersburg - although I might be making it up more than it actually is happening as there it is hard to belief that a five hour train ride would make that much difference.

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