Days 05 and 06 2nd and 3rd September 2010 - Trans Siberian Express to Tyumen

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Days 05

06 2nd and 3rd September 2010 - Trans Siberian Express to Tyumen

Woke up and packed our bags, and left them at the hostel. We then went to the bakers next door to the hostel for a coffee and a cake, and then decided to wander the east side of central Moscow, which we had not yet seen. We got fairly lost, but after staring at the map for a while, got our barrings. Nice sunny day, so slowly walked to the centre of the town and checked out the souvenir markets near Red Square.

Headed back to the hostel where a cab picked us up from the station at around 9pm. We spent a while in the main train station trying to figure out how the the train information boards worked after being shouted at by the people at the information desk in Russian, and finally noticed a much more basic information board on the far right of the station. This gave the train number, expected departure time, expected arrival time and platform number. Our train “110E” soon arrived, so we headed for platform 1.

The train arrived 5 minutes later, so we jumped on board after figuring out which carriage we were in. My first impression was that it was extremely old, but very clean
(like the trains on the Moscow Metro). It had a real retro feel to it, with very dim lighting and wooden interior. It felt like we had stepped back in time 40 years!
We were instantly greeted by Slava, a Russian citizen who lives in the Ukraine, who was in the cabin next to us. He spoke very good English and showed us how everything worked (how the beds folded out, where storage space was, etc). The forth person in our cabin was a quite Russian man who immediately jumped in his bed, went to sleep and was snoring before we had had a chance to sort out our bags!

Slava showed us around the train. We invited him for drink in the restaurant carriage - he said, “sure, if you are paying”. Slava told us he had borded the train, heading for Yekaterinburg where he was meeting his parents. He had only 200 roubles on him (about £4.50), to last him the two day journey. He was intent on spending nothing, but happy to accept offers of food and drink from passengers he met. He told us about life in the Ukraine and how he wanted to leave, and take his family to the USA. He hated life in the Ukraine - he sad that it was very dirty and overrun with corruption. After a few soft drinks we headed back to the cabin, where we drank some litre-sized cans of Carlsberg we had bought in the station earlier, before going to sleep.

The next day, we woke up to see the real Russian countryside. We passed the occasional town throughout the day, but in most cases, small villages made of wooden, fairly dilapidated houses. we spent time during the day chatting to others on board (pretty much everyone we spoke to was Russian), eating the small containers of food supplied by the staff on board (chicken, rice, smoked salmon and bread). Laetitia gave Crystal a French lesson and Slava (who was a professional photographer) gave me a photography lesson!

Before going to sleep, we double checked what time we were due to arrive in the morning, to make sure we did not miss our stop. Lucky we checked, as it turned out that the trains throughout Russia always run on Moscow time, despite travelling through time zones up to 8 hours ahead of Moscow time!! So, from this we realised we needed to depart at 7am according to the clocks on the train, as opposed to the local time of 9am.

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