All aboard the Trans-Siberian Express...

So we went to Yaroslavsky train station to figure out Russian platform numbers and work out where the 68 to Tayga left from. With a little luck and lots of judgement we boarded our carriage and sat back in anticipation of meeting our companions for this two day leg of the journey.

All aboard

It turned out ok as a Russian family emerged out of the darkness and we set about many hours of comedy Russian and English, with hand gestures and dictionary look-ups being obligatory. The Mum (Olga), Dad and their son (Rooslan - 13) and daughter (Madenna - 5)tried in vain to improve our Russian language skills but the outcome only served to confirm the fact that the English mouth isn't designed to make certain noises.

Babushkas

We established that the boys of the party (all of us cramped into a small sleeping cabin rocking about on the rickety old train while sharing Russian chocolate & tea) like football and the girls like Madonna and cheeky Rooslyn asked us how much we earn - to his mother's astonishment.... We resorted to learning the Russian names of extremely useful words like 'flowers' & 'hammer' (both of which I'm sure we'll need in Russia) from little Medeena's picture playing cards.

For those of you new to the Cyrillic alphabet, it has 32 letters many of which are completely new shapes or are backwards Roman letters. There are even two out of the 32 that have no sound! Nevertheless, the Hitch's year of Russian study in Nottingham proved that she did spend some time in the classroom as opposed to in the pub as we managed to grasp all 32 letters and make a good attempt at putting the English 'don't make the language effort' myth to bed.

Lenin

In the morning the family were replaced with a group of burly Russian men who had no English but we managed to communicate by means of beer. We talked at length about Vodka and it turned out the only English words the knew were 'guns' and 'shooting' - they also told us they have no jobs... meaning we put 2 & 2 together and figured we were sharing a sleeping cabin with the Russian Mafia... not a comfortable bed to share.

We arrived into Tayga and then went onto Tomsk where we spent the night and it was pretty cool - see pics.

Russian Family

Tomsk