over the last 9 months, i’ve had my fair share of train travel. i’ve traveled on everything ranging from ultramodern japanese bullet trains, to rickety dirty trains in india. well, the other day, i took the longest train ride ever. i had been really eager to take the train on the trans-siberian route from one end of russia to the other. this is the longest continuous train track in the world and it takes about a week to get all the way across. unfortunately, i dont have that much time to go the full length. it would have been awesome, but instead i decided to juist do the beginning portion from vladivostok on russia’s east coast, to ulan-ude, deep in siberia. the journey would be 2,190 miles by train and would last 66 hours. yes, thats almost 3 straight days on a train.<\/p>\n
so, before we set out, i was a bit worried. how fun would this be? on one hand, taking the trans-siberian across russia seemed like such a crazy and exciting adventure. siberia just sounds like such a remote and forbidden place. but, on the other hand, i did worry that we might get bored. a few years back, jamie and i took a 2 day boat ride down the mekong in laos. seemed like an awesome idea before we did it… but in reality, you sit there in a boat full of other passengers, with hardly any room to move and nothing to do. after half a day, it was already boring, and just got more so as time went on. so, would this train ride be like that?<\/p>\n
well, it totally wasnt. i had a really really good time. first off, it was really relaxing. caryn and i had a compartment all to ourselves. it was a really roomy compartment, big enough for 4, so there was tons of room to spread out. the train we were on was also really comfortable. i actually got the best night of sleep on a train that i’ve ever had. and also, for some reason, i was never bored. i got to do some reading (read a book start to finish). i spent a bunch of time listening to music on my mp3 player. and then, the scenery outside was just really awesome. lots of really cool forest with tons of tall white birch trees. cool wooden houses everywhere painted in a wide assortment of colors. sometimes there would be these huge stretches of grasslands that were interrupted with sinkholes filled with water. basically, i never tired of just starting at the window and watching russia whirl by. it really is quite a beatiful coumntry. there was definitely a part of me though that regretted that i did this during the summer. cruisng along and seeing everything covered in snow would have been really cool.<\/p>\n
one interesting question that we were constantly trying to solve is what to eat. the train had a dining car so we had kind of assumed that we would eat there for most of the trip. unfortunately, on the first day, the restuarant ripped us off big time. we got our food, ate half of it and then looked at the bill. hrm, there were all sorts of things on the bill that we werent given. oddly enough, itemized on the bill (actually on both of our bills) was: corn, green peas, olives, and mushrooms. none of those things were on our plate. what to do? we couldnt just sit there and wait till the service lady came back and have our food be cold. so we ate. when she came around, we asked her about the items and she said we had receieved them. ummm. well, i dont know how dumb i might look, but i think i would have noticed all that random crap on my plate. but she insisted. so basically we paid for a bunch of crap that we didnt get, and after that refused to order anything from the restaurant again. <\/p>\n
luckily for us, we could hop out during stops and go run and grab food from small booths at the train stations. or, even better, at some stations, there would be a bunch of babushkas out there selling food. we would buy various baked goods, pelmeni (dumplings), tomatoes, and other things. everything they sold was really cheap and good. it was a lot of fun hanging out on the trans-siberian and chowing down on russian foods. we also bought some sprats (these little salted fishes) and borsht (russian beet soup) too.<\/p>\n
the only unfortunate thing about the experience was that we didnt really get to interact w\/ anyone. the quintessential trans-siberain experience is to hang out on the train and drink vodka etc w\/ newfound russian friends. well, our compartment never got any extra people. of course, after one night on the train, i started suffering from some really crazy allergies. honestly, i’ve never had allergies this bad. so in some ways, maybe it was better not to have to interact w\/ anyone. heh, although, the little girl from the neighboring compartment did come over and yell at us from time to time and then tried to tackle us and grab our hair. she was a bit of a manic little kid!!<\/p>\n
one thing that was pretty crazy was how difficult it was to ever tell what time it was. we’re pretty far north so the days are really long here. the sun starts setting around 10 or 10:30 and it’s still partially light out even after 11pm. and then, in the mornings, the sun is already up by 4am. so its pretty much daylight all the time. it’s really disorienting!<\/p>\n
*v<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
over the last 9 months, i’ve had my fair share of train travel. i’ve traveled on everything ranging from ultramodern japanese bullet trains, to rickety dirty trains in india. well, the other day, i took the longest train ride ever. i had been really eager to take the train on the trans-siberian route from one … Continue reading “longest train ride ever!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}