Train to Irkutsk

Trip Start Jul 21, 2008

Trip End Ongoing

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Flag of Russian Federation Moscow, Russian Federation
Thursday, July 24, 2008

After queuing for 1 hour the day before for tickets, we returned today and managed to successfully book tickets to Irkutsk. We ended up spending the rest of the day sitting in the hostel waiting for 3 french people to come back that we had met earlier in the day. We managed at 8pm to weave our way through the metro, which was decorated with marble floors and massive chandeleers, and then met up with another french man, Phillipe, who helped us to find our carridge. He was from cambodia and was doing the whole train journey in one whole swoop, all 8 days on the train. He was a great guy, had all the time in the world for you.

Once on the train we were soon joined by two men from Uzbekistan, who had the most amazing gold and silver teeth, the yonger of the two ( 26 ) took a real shine to merlin, and they sat together for up to 4 hours at a time teaching each other english and russian, he was a very quick learner, unlike merlin

The old train that used to run along the railway

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We soon realised that the air conditioning didn't work in our carridge and on one day the temperature reached 36c, after a day of this we had had enough and we ventured out up the train to see if there were any other english speakers on board and also to find the restraunt cart. We met 3 lovely girls Sophia,Julia and kate and we ended up playing scrabble in there air conditioned carridge.

When we finally got to the restraunt cart for BREAKFAST at 10.30am we were presented with a large menu all in russian and of course we didn't have a clue what anything was, so we just ordered some apple juice, then we over heard a young couple talking english to each other who were eating chicken with rice and melted cheese and mushrooms!! yum! so we pointed to their plates and ordered 2 of them for breakfast!

After staying in our hot carriage, which recorded 37c on the themometer in our room, we decided that we should try and get moved to another carriage, but they wanted 10,000 roubles which is about 200 pound.... which would go straight into the attendents pocket of course... so we decided to stick it out and fry in our little room.

The 2 Uzbekistan lads got off about 16 hours into the train trip and, we were soon joined by a family of 4! our beds had been double booked, so at 12 midnight the dad of the family was arguing with the attendent about us being in his bed.... in the end it was the 2 of us sharing with the mum and 2 kids and the dad joined us during the day. So not only was it increadibly hot in our room we were now sharing with 4 other people during the day in our 4 bed cabin.... it was unbearable in that room! Helen had fun playing games with the kids, neither spoke each others language so it was amazing how we managed to communicate through a game of charades!