Foreigner

I am writing this on the mid-morning of Sunday August 26th, from a tiny cabin on the back yard of a local babushka's house, in the small village of Baranchiki by the Baikal lake. This was supposed to be a day of light trekking and glorious lake views, but it's been raining hard since the morning, and walking around would simply be no fun. As this is by no means a hiking trip, all in all, we don't have proper outdoors gear and we don't want to get our regular clothes wet. Oh well.


The day before yesterday, late at night, we arrived in Irkutsk. I was so glad to be out of the train, on our own again, with some personal space and freedom of movement. The third class can get claustrophobic.

Upon our arrival, we noticed that we were not quite sure of our hostel's address, and also as the hostel was a little bit outside the city centre, the map in our guidebook was cut off slightly before it would show the right street. So we walked around in confusion, tried to ask people (who either didn't know or directed us to an entirely different direction than we thought was the right one -- the hostel had recently moved, and while we knew this, it turned out we'd still written down the wrong address) and cursed our stupidity. Finally, we found Wi-Fi in the upper floor of the station, and after some negotiation with a clerk and the maintenance guy we actually got it working, and we could access some better maps and the directions.

The hostel itself was quite nearby, and nice enough, and we met some foreign travellers! We actually spoke some English with people. Which was not something we've wanted to do or will want to do a lot on this trip, as you get pulled quite easily in the Western, English-speaking traveller bubble and you stop seeing the most interesting Russian stuff. It was Friday night and some people were partying a bit in the common room for a while, but I slept all right. (In the first bed on this trip that was actually long enough for me!)

In the early afternoon after a slow morning, we started an adventure! First we went to get some money from an ATM... which ate my credit card. "Due to a failure your card has been withheld." Oh crap. I called Visa in FInland and closed the card, sand now I'm cardless, but Johanna still has several, and as soon as we have internet again, I can put some of my money into her account. Then we got back to the train station, which was just nearby, to buy our next train tickets, as the ticket counters had been closed the previous night.

Then we made our way to the centre with a tram. The tram ride was nice (I have a deep love of Russian and Eastern European public transport), and took us to a big market hall, where we ate a delicious lunch and bought supplies for our excursion to Lake Baikal. Then we walked to the bus station (all the time carrying our big backpacks, but we are Warriors of the Fatherland*) and got tickets to Listvyanka, by Lake Baikal.

(*A running joke about Warriors of the Fatherland, greedy Yankee/Japanese pigs, enemy fighters etc. started from the book Nothing To Envy - Ordinary Lives in North Korea (by Barbara Demick) that Johanna is reading, which listed some rather frightening North Korean school exercises. "Seven boys and eight girls are singing a hymn in praise of Great Leader. How many children altogether are singing a hymn in praise of the Great Leader?")

We got there all right (although the minibus ride was bumpy and I felt slightly road-sick), but the remoteness of touristy Listvyanka was nowhere near enough to the brave Heroes of the Fatherland. So still with the backpacks, we walked to the other end of the village, maybe some four kilometers, to find a ferry to Port Baikal, on the other side of the wide delta of the Angara river. It was longer than we'd thought, and we were already losing hope that we'll ever find the ferry and make it on time for one. But we made it there, and to a ferry, with fifteen minutes to spare. Yay! The ferry ride was only 20 minutes but so much fun, just to be on a ferry on the deepest lake of the world. Also the late-afternoon sun was glinting on the steep hills and white boats, the waters were calm, seagulls were screeching and the whole place was like a fairytale.

We got to Port Baikal and walked to nearby Baranchiki, where there was supposed to be a village with lots of people offering home accommodation. After some confusion and asking around, we met an older lady who said that she actually has a room for rent. The room in question was a perfect tiny little cabin, and by tiny I mean room for one bed and a space to put our bags and not much more, with a small window, a double bed, and even an electric light. We were happy with it and rented it for one night, even if at 1000 rubles it wasn't a very good deal. Then we bough some food at the food kiosk that was just next door, and cooked an instant-noodle dinner with the hot water the babushka provided.

After dinner, it was still light, so we went on a small walk by the lake. It was astonishingly pretty, first a sunset and then a moment of dusk and then a perfect moon. In the night we thought we heard the famous Baikal seals honking, but our hostess tells us it was either dogs or seagulls. Oh well. The bed was surprisingly comfortable and the night was dark and quiet.

And today we haven't done anything except had breakfast. It's now half past one, we're confined to either our host's veranda or our little cabin. Both are cool and damp. But we can see the Baikal from our window. And it's actually pretty cool, being stranded in a small village by Lake Baikal. This afternoon, we take the ferry back to Listvyanka.

(Posted from Irkutsk. It's different, though I can't yet tell you exactly why.)


Quick programming note: Comments left in this blog or any other social media are read, appreciated, and thought about with warmth even days later! Anyhow, my internet time is limited (as there is, after all, a Siberia to see); I produce these huge walls of text in trains, where there is no internet connection and nothing much to do except relax. So I'm not replying to comments unless they contain a direct question that I can answer rather quickly. That doesn't mean I don't love 'em!


I'm writing this in a train again, from Novosibirsk to Irkutsk. It is now, oh dear, 11.24 Novosibirsk time, 13.24 Irkutsk time, 8.24 Moscow time (on which all trains operate) and 7.24 Finnish time (which I have to take into account when sms'ing to people at home). We're losing an hour or two every couple of days, and while we try to keep our sleep schedule in sync with wherever we happen to be going, the multitude of times to think about is still confusing. But it's still easier to go slowly east and then quickly back west, as you lose hours gradually and then gain about six hours all in the sudden.


We've left Novosibirsk behind, and with some regret. For some reason we can't quite explain, we both loved the city. I'd describe the atmosphere as continental, if such an Europe-centric adjective wasn't absolutely ridiculous, and also maybe vaguely colonialist, in this mid-Siberian context. (Novosibirsk was pretty much as close as you can get to the middle of the two pages of our guidebook that have a map of the whole Trans-Siberian railway. This delights me.)

On our first night in New Siberian, as Novosibirsk can be translated, we arrived in town rather late, and made our way to the hostel we'd reserved with no big problems. Even as we arrived at the station, we were very impressed with what is the biggest station building in Siberia, and in my opinion one of the most beautiful. (Mint green again.) And upon leaving the station, we were greeted by the huge, ugly Soviet monster that is Hotel Novosibirsk. All the way to our hotel we marveled at the contrast between buildings old and new, beautiful and ugly, small and large, long abandoned and just being constructed. That first night, after settling in, we went in search of first the opera house and then food. We found the opera, and although it turned out that they're still on summer break and therefore we couldn't go see a performance, the opera building was really something. It was lit up with coloured lights, and it made me feel half like I'm in ancient Rome and half like I'm in the Soviet Union and a hundred percent in awe. Magnificent, I say.

Then, for food. We first sat down in a Japanese restaurant, but there they told us (after the customary moment of us not understanding what is being said and asking the speaker to speak more slowly) that it would be an hour before any food would arrive. Then the only place that looked to be inside our budget and still open was a kebab joint, and for the first time during our trip I had to resort to the classic "Well, do you have anything without meat?" They cheerfully offered to make me a shawarma without meat, which sounds rather bad, but it was delicious. Lots of sauce, sauerkraut, vegetables, and mayonnaise. I ordered a second one, and had my choice of food laughed at by some young people who were ordering their shawarmas definitely with meat. Johanna had shashliki, a Russian classic, and was equally happy with her choice.

After our dinner, we went to a supermarket. A supermarket! Russian shops are traditionally small ones attended by a clerk, all the products are on display behind a desk, and then in your best Russian you have to try to explain what you want, while making choices between unfamiliar products in a relative hurry, as the next customer is waiting in line after you. So a supermarket was a luxury, we could actually compare products and use our dictionary to find out what things were. We bought a good breakfast for the next morning, as well as some other supplies.

The next day, we again tried to find a museum (a folkloristic one, this time, if I remember correctly), once again to no avail. We decided that looking for museums in Russia might be pointless; you have to take museums as they come, but actively looking for one is never any good. (Later in the day, we happened upon a museum that had a "Planet Of Dinosaurs" exhibition. Being a big dino fan, I thought about going, but even the cashiers didn't recommend the exhibition but actually waved us away when we asked about it. So we decided against paying 250 rubles (some seven euros) for it.) Instead, we found a beautiful park, some kiosks that sold me two rather bad ballpoint pens, and a small wedding party. Needing caffeine and a bathroom, we went to a very expensive, Western-style coffee house and had delicious flavoured mochas. We contemplated going to see The Expendables, dubbed in Russian, in a nearby cinema, which would definitely have been an experience, but in the end we never ended up doing that.

Then we just walked along one of the bigger streets. We came upon a few beautiful churches and then the bus station, and next to the bus station we bought blinis (pancakes stuffed with anything you can imagine, savoury or sweet) from a small stand and kvas (an unfiltered, non-alcoholic fermented drink that tastes like a cross between dark beer and sweet mead) from another, and had a nice informal lunch on a small patch of grass near the station. After that, we realised Johanna's idea and took the first trolleybus (an electric bus that gets its power from overhear wires like a tram) and saw where it would take us. We chose a trolleybus instead of a bus, as due to their nature, trams and trolleybuses are bound to stay at least somewhere near more populated areas and won't suddenly take you on a motorway to dozens of kilometres away. We got out rather randomly, maybe 15 minutes later, near a big shopping centre, which proved to be uninteresting. But the trip itself was great. We saw auto repair shops and shacks and small wooden houses and streets we'd never happened on if we'd just walked. Shortly we took the same trolleybus, #13, back, and got out a bit early when we noticed a demonstration or parade for... United Russia? That is, Odinnaya Rossiya, Vladimir Putin's political party, I've no idea what it is in English. We stared at it for a while, until a policeman, in turn, started staring at us, and while it was probably nothing we decided to leave then instead of seeing if he'd take an interest in us.

We walked the short way to the centre and sat in front of the opera building, still impressive in daylight, and lingered there for a while, drinking a bottle of beer and discussing feminism, power structures, and our favourite fictional books. After that, we went to the supermarket again, to buy supplies for the next train, and nearly didn't make it through the enormous shop because all the choice was so exhausting. We got back to the hostel, made dinner, and went to sleep.


The next morning, it was back to the station and on to another train, which left shortly after noon. We spent a lot of time reading and lazing around there, until Johanna found some company to chat with. I felt the need for some alone time (although the word "private" might not apply to these open train carriages), so I wrote in my diary for a while. I only joined the conversation later, and even then mostly because an incomprehensibly-drunk man from the other end of the car was threatening to join my company to speak his version of English (and didn't get it when I said he can speak Russian), but I ended up enjoying the chat. We talked with two middle-aged women and a teenage boy about health care, childrearing, the social an economical situations in our respective countries, and our travel plans, among other things. Johanna's and my Russian is pretty much on the same level, which is good in the way that neither of us really seems to dominate conversations while the other one can't get a word in for lack of vocabulary, and we compliment each other in that if one of us doesn't understand something being said there's a good chance that the other does. Then, it would be nice if we both spoke a bit more Russian; the conversation was at best halting, and misunderstandings abounded.

My asocial bout was maybe also brought on by the fact that I have a tiny bit of a flu or something. But it's probably nothing that will disrupt our plans too much. For some reason, I hadn't slept that well on either of our two nights in Novosibirsk, which naturally didn't help my health. But last night in this train, I got a good 12 hours of shut-eye, and that worked miracles. I had the dreaded top bunk, but their design in this particular train is such that they're as long as the bottom bunks. Also I had an extra pillow, which allowed for much more comfort. So yay. I'm still too tall for the train, and there should be a word for that disconcerting feeling of waking up to a stranger lightly touching your bare feet, but this night was all right.

Other than that, this train is definitely older than the last one.The blankets are rough wool instead of synthetic filled ones, and the toilets are the dump-everything-on-the-rails model that you can't use on stations. Also, in the evening, there was a group of disruptively drunken and loud guys in the other end of our car (one of them being the invented-English-speaking one); fortunately the provodnitsas are strict and don't allow too much misbehaviour. Anyhow, we've unintentionally downgraded our experience train by train by train; maybe the gods of Russian travel wanted to give us an easy start.


Final notion: Besides the well-functioning railway network and the grand architecture we've been enjoying, as well as the free health care we've heard about, another very positive legacy of the Soviet Union is the very apparent equality between men and women. Not that Russia undoubtedly doesn't have its share of sexism, but still, it's perceived as perfectly normal that women and men travel in the same train carriages and use the same bathrooms, and usually no problems follow from this mixing. Also middle-aged and older women enjoy considerable social status, and matter-of-factly steer many social and practical situations. And Johanna and I are a woman and a man travelling together, and we've been more or less open about the fact that we're not married and not even dating, just friends, and Johanna is in fact married to someone else, and no one has shown any contempt or even surprise at this.

Writing in a train again. It is the late afternoon of Tuesday, August the 21st, and posting will, again, happen at a later time. We've left Yekaterinburg behind and are heading straight for Novosibirsk. We decided we don't want to hurry and spend just one day in Omsk, so we're skipping it entirely, thus winning a while day. Having a spare day in our schedule also can't hurt, given that trains CAN be booked full.

As I said, our hostel in Yekaterinburg was rather nice. We had not much trouble finding it, but it was at first hard to believe it was where it was said to be. At the address specified, we found a perfectly ordinary apartment block, and nowhere was there a hostel sign to be seen. We went to a stairway and climbed to the correct apartment; at its door was a small logo but still no writing. We dared to go in, and inside were some friendly guests and an equally friendly, very very old man, who was the janitor, housekeeper or similar. He welcomed us and let us leave our bags in a nice, modern, white room which wasn't ready for us yet (as it was still morning) but would be ours. The hostel itself was just a normal two-bedroom apartment converted to a hostel, with one two-person room and one dorm. So we left our stuff and went exploring the city.

Our first targets were a couple of churches. Yekaterinburg is perhaps most famous for being the death place of the Romanovs, that is the last Czar and his family. The house whose cellar the killing happened was demolished in the 1970's, for then-local-governor Boris Yeltsin's fear that it would attract monarchists. But there's now a cross that marks the place the house once stood in, and near it there's the stunningly beautiful Church On Blood. We went inside to see the interior and hear people chanting, and it was great.

What else did we do? Ate! A couple of times during our stay in Y-burg we ate in rather fancy Russian restaurants, in order to have our share of pelmeni, shashliki, borsch and chai. But we also got to know the cheap but very decent eateries where everything you can order is on display in front of you and you can just point and order, and it comes quickly and cheaply. Pies, main courses, drinks, and a seemingly endless choice of cakes. We also checked out a Lonely-Planet-recommended microbrewery pub, but it turned out to be a rather soulless big sports bar and even the unfiltered wheat beer wasn't very good.

On our second day we tried to go to several museums but mostly failed. There was supposed to be a railway museum on the station, but it was nowhere to be seen and a policeman we asked said there is no museum there. We walked around the station and checked a few of the neighbouring buildings, but no. Then we walked across the centre in order to find the war museum, but it was closed on Mondays. There was a fascinating inner yard that we could access, though, where numerous antique tanks stood and children played on and around them. Nearby was an impressive monument to Russian soldiers who had died in all the wars Russia had fought in the 20th century. (Including "Finland, 1939-1940".) All but despairing of any hope to see any museum in Y-burg, we happened upon a building that said Museum of Russian something (we didn't understand the rest), and went inside to see; the building itself was also intriguing, an old, brown wood-lace house. It turned out to be a museum for literature in the first half of the 20th century in the Urals, and for under one euro, we saw a beautifully put-together little museum and even had an English-language explanatory leaflet. We learned that literary life in the Urals flourished during and after WWII, as so many authors from Moscow and St. Petersburg were evacuated to the Urals.

We also got to know the city's very attractive riverside quite well. There's a "City Pond" (as our guidebook calls it), and a river that the pond is a part of, cutting the city center in half, and on both sides of the river/pond there are very nice promenades. People, especially young couples, gather there in the evening to hang out and take walks. The weather during all of our stay was quite pleasant, a sharp, hot sun alternating with partly cloudy skies and just a few drops of water.

All in all, Lonely planet let us believe the city would be unattractive and made mostly of Constructivist concrete buildings, but that was not our impression of the place at all. There was the run-down concrete side of it, yes, but all in all, it was a nice place full of charming wooden houses and splendid palace-like 1800's buildings as well as several magnificent churches. Also remarkably peaceful for a city of 1.2 million inhabitants.


Russian trains have modernised a lot since I last was here, in 2005, by the way. At the Yekaterinburg station, we bought our tickets at a machine. A machine! Which spoke English. English! (Rule one: If you can avoid Russian officials, do.) There are so many variables when buying train tickets that this ease of communication and explicit choice is a godsend. There's the choice of train by departure and arrival times, class, top or bottom bunk, corridor or not, bedsheets or not.

Another modernisation: the train lavatories nowadays seem to be bio-toilets, which you can use even if the train is at a station. A great improvement!

But the beds are not any bigger... At quite exactly six feet (183 cm), I definitely feel two sizes too tall! During the night, I have a choice between various cramped positions or having my feet on the corridor from the ankles down, for passers-by to hit. I spent the night changing from one bad position to another, and in the morning was glad that today we mostly sit in the train instead of doing anything active. Next time, I'll want the bottom bunk; it's at least slightly longer, since the supporting wires that the top bunk hangs from cut another couple of inches from the length.

All in all, Russia feels so much more like home than last time. I have no idea how much it is westernisation and how much I've just grown up, learned more Russian, and learned to be at peace in different places of the world. And maybe I've stopped expecting the people and the food and everything to be the same as at home, and just learned how it is here.


Our plans for Novosibirsk include at least trying to go to the opera or ballet! They have an opera house that is bigger than Moscow's famous Bolshoi theatre, and supposedly it's magnificent. Also what is Russia famous for if not ballet?


Pics later!