Day 5 on Trans-Siberian Train

One of the Russian cars I mention below.

Our morning coffee by the window.

June 12, 2011 ---rolling along between Yekaterinburg and Perm’

We have decided we could do this for a long time. We drink tea, we drink coffee, we stand and look out the open hallway window and breathe the fresh air zipping by. We take naps, we read, we research the next leg of our trip in our Lonely Planet Europe book; last night we watched an early James Bond—From Russia with Love. Overall it is very relaxing. We are shocked that we are still the only ones traveling in this entire car. It can hold 16 passengers, it is just us two. In fact judging from the numbers of passengers that get off at short stops, I’d say this train is about 10% full, there might be only15 passengers on the entire train, maybe 25. So this makes this whole experience very private and contemplative; it’s nice.
I managed to exchange some money yesterday in our café car which I used at a stop and although the lady in the kiosk was speaking Russian and I didn’t understand a single word, I was able to communicate what I wanted. It would have been difficult without arms. A pointing finger with an excited expression can communicate so much it turns out. I bought 3 large fried donut things filled with either potatoes or bits of meat and onions. I also bought a loaf of homemade bread. This supplemented our dinner of instant soups we brought along from Beijing.
Today’s scenery has been more expanses of birch trees, fields, spruce and fir trees punctuated by the occasional village. We are passing through the great boreal forests that circumnavigate the globe between about 45 and 65 degrees north latitude. These are the forests that have given rise to the extensive logging industries in Canada, southeast Alaska, Scandinavia, and of course Russia. Sometimes called the Taiga, it was cool to pass through a town yesterday with the name, Taiga. This afternoon has been cloudy with some drizzle. The temperature in the 50s to low 60s making some of these little villages appear lonely and cold—and this is the beginning of summer. I can’t imagine what it is like in the middle of winter. Every little wooden house has at least one chimney and I don’t think there is any insulation. Occasionally we see an old log cabin and brand new ones being built. Lisa says these villages look like a combination between 1850 and 1950. Time seems to have been lost, then found again and then frozen. It is Siberia after all, it is so cold time freezes. There are muddy roads that wind along the tracks and in and around the villages. People tend their potato gardens, people tend their goats munching away at the green grass.
Rarely do we see a car, if we do it is often a Russian made boxy vehicle with small wheels and a rack on its roof. If you asked a first grader to draw a car, this is what he/she would draw. The other popular car is a 2 door hatchback with bigger wheels and considerable ground clearance. Both cars look like they were designed in the 1950s or 60s, although they might be only 5 years old. (Don’t get confused with the chromed, finned American cars of the same time period. These simple communist cars are from the middle of the Soviet era) They are usually red, blue, black, silver or white. And not a metallic paint with a name like sea mist or midnight pearl, they are the colors of crayons in a box of 12.
It is only at the stations when the train stops that we get to observe people for any length of time. Smoking is popular and common. The edges of the tracks where the gravel meets the raised platform is littered with cigarette butts, thousands of them. They are swept off the edge, but they don’t go away. The choice of clothing is interesting to say the least. Bathing suits or men without shirts are popular on sunny days. I suppose after months of freezing temperatures and darkness when the opportunity arises to bear some skin to the sun, people bear. The clothing people do wear takes a while to grasp in terms of fashion. It would appear as if they went through a thrift shop and blindly picked things to wear. Athletic warm up suits are popular among the men and I have seen not one but two mesh shirts. So we’ve got farming methods from the 1750s, houses from the 1850s, cars from 1950s, smoking like it’s the 1960s and shirts from 1979. Communism collapsed here in 1991 but some things are just hard to shake I guess. For women, the attire is hard to describe. The older women do wear long skirts, shawls or sweaters and a scarf tied over their heads with the knot under their chins. A stereotypical round Russian lady I know but it’s true. Hair dye is common for all ages. For women under that age of 50 the only thing I can say about their attire is…random. Pink spandex tights, denim mini skirt, a long sleeved black shirt under a short white vest, on the feet, black lace up boots with heels circa 1650 or 1982.
We are crossing the Ural Mountains according to the map but we don’t really see any mountains, more like hills. This physical land formation marks the accepted boundary among geographers between Europe and Asia.