24 hour party people

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The Russians can be real miserable looking sods when they want to be (although not quite as much in the east and, lets face it, they have more to moan about). To 'fit-in' in Russia (and therefore not shine out too much as a foreigner who may as well be walking around naked with Euros sellotaped to himself) it seemed necessary to go native and adopt the 'stoic look'. It reminded me of my favourite scene in 'Shaun of the Dead' when they try to mingle with the zombies. After spending days at a time on trains whilst traversing time zones (it is murder on the Trans-Siberian), it becomes natural to look like this.

A typical sight in Russia is a Lada parked in the middle of the road with the driver asleep in the back and the engine running as if they were trying to commit suicide but had forgotten to connect the hose round to the front. Fuel is obviously quite cheap.

There are two common smells in Russia. In between gasps of fresh air, one gets either a deisel/junior-chemistry-set polluted lungful (outside) or a halitosised whiff of booze (crowds and buses). I thought we Brits drank too much, but these guys are Premier League. One way of being hospitable to a foreigner is to get them legless on ropey vodka - in traveller folklore it is known as "Vodka Terrorism". Even the rail engineer who caught me taking photos of the train at Omsk coerced me into taking a slug out of his handy hipflask (okay, I wasn't exactly forced). At Irkusk railway station at 8 in the morning, a bunch of young hipsters waved a half full bottle of local champers under my nose and invited me to change my plans and go with them to Krasnoyarsk (wrong way). I was sorely tempted (The girls in the group were gorgeous) except that I am sure they would have forgotten who I was the next day, by which time I would be on a train to nowhere.

I wanted to end this blog by writing something nice about Russia, but after the hellish day I had today, I am uninspired. If you stay in any Russian city for more that 72 hours, you have to register your visa with some sort of local authority in that town or you can get a pretty bad shakedown by the local filth. As I am now getting a visa for Mongolia, I need to stick around in Irkutsk for a couple more days and so needed to do this. I had an address to go to to 'register'. Normally, one might expect this place to turn out to be some sort of official looking joint. Nope. It was a random white door on the side of a nondescript building with no information posted outside. After walking around the buiding three times, I tried this door. Inside, it looked like the waiting room of a shit private cab company. After finding out that this was the correct address, I get told that I need to go to a different shit, hard-to-find office in a different part of town and, you guessed it, they then sent me to another office. After being shunted round town all day to 4 different places (I wanted to go dog sledding by the lake today (sob!)), someone finally took my passport and some dosh and told me that I could get it back at the original office by the end of the day. I looked *very* 'Russian' after that! My day was made slightly easier by a very nice local lady who helped me find one of the places, but she then tried to get me to join some sort of "business" (snake-oil selling pyramid-type scheme or "network marketing" as it is now known).

At least I am not stranded here - the train to Beijing was full, which means that a detour through Mongolia is necessary, which may be a good thing. The people at the Mongolian Consulate were all very nice and had a good laugh when I told them about my day. I take that to be a good omen.

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Photos

Santa - The Early Years
Dog Sledding in Listvyanka, Siberia.