Trans-Siberian Trip
Part 7:  Irkutsk

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Malaysia - Beijing (pg 1) - Xian - Beijing (pg 2) - Train to Mongolia - In Mongolia - Irkutsk - Moscow - St. Petersburg
June 19th

We're on the train from Irkutsk to Moscow now. It's a full three-day train ride. We left less than 24 hours ago -- Friday afternoon. We slept last night on the train, and then -- without much more than a 20-minute break 2 or 3 times -- we'll be on this train until Monday evening. Now and then, the train stops at major cities for 20 or 25 minutes, when you can get out and buy a bottle of vodka or some dried fish. Every hour or so it stops for 2 minutes; just enough time for people to board and for the bathrooms to get locked.

Our provodnitsa on this train is much nicer than our others. I think Mongolian people in general are nicer than Russians, but the job application process for the Mongolian train line must weed out the friendly people. In this new era of freedom, Russian hotel staff are about as close as you can get to the full experience of the gulag forced-labor camps. Talk about not getting that whole "customer satisfaction" thing! We had to have a travel agent get us checked in, because you have to know how to convince them to let you check in. They don't just greet you with a smile and say "checking in, sir?" Just your being in the lobby is an interruption of their job (which seems to be counting small pieces of paper and putting them in the proper order.) I bet it gets even tougher in Moscow.

Aside from the unsmiling hotel staff (and the institutional starkness of our Irkutsk hotel) Siberia has been lovely. Birch tree forests, the smell of the cedar and wild lavender. The whole town of Irkutsk has a great old-school European thing going for it. Old log cabins, wooden buildings, grand Parisian stone buildings, onion-domed Orthodox churches. It all goes back to the late 1800s, when exiled dissidents built some great wooden houses. At the same time, they discovered gold in Siberia, and fur trappers were making a killing on minks and sables. So there was a lot of wealth, but not a lot of supervision, giving the place a Wild West mentality. Gambling, saloons, high male-to-female ratio. Russia's highest murder rate. A lot of the wooden houses have sunk into the permafrost, the weight of their foundations melting the ice underneath. The bottoms of their windowsills are level with the sidewalks, and you can look down through their lace curtains into the subterranean living rooms.

It's funny that Siberia is still "Asia." It feels so much like Europe. I guess the natives would be basically Mongol (although the natives have their own names -- Evensk, Buryat, and the like -- still they're Asiatic.) But most of the people you see on the street are white, blonde, tall, Russians. I guess they're second- or third-generation dissidents. I doubt that anyone growing up in Moscow says "boy, as soon as I get out of high school I'm ditching this town and moving to Irkutsk!" 
There is a certain charm -- the fancy carvings on the windowsills, the broad, tree-living avenues and grand buildings. You see very little of the institutional starkness of Stalinism. You see Lenin everywhere, though. Big statues of Lenin on every corner. 


We decided to skip the lake. Everyone we met asked "so, have you been to Lake Baikal yet?" It was part of the original package we looked at. Three nights, two of them with a Siberian fisherman family on the shores of the world's deepest lake. A family without running water, indoor plumbing, or any English speaking ability who would likely be deeply offended when we tried to explain that we couldn't eat any of the fish they had worked so hard to catch and serve us. We chose to spend one night in Irkutsk city, then move on to Moscow. I was originally planning on doing a day trip to the lake, but Tricia wasn't too into it. It's the world's oldest lake, the "most beautiful site in Russia," and the collection of fully one-fifth of the world's fresh water. Not to mention a completely isolated and unique ecosystem, home of 2000 species of fish and freshwater invertebrates that don't exist elsewhere, and the only place in the world where you can find freshwater seals. To Tricia's credit, we wouldn't have seen much of that in a day trip to the port town on the south shore of the lake. And it's too cold to swim in, so we wouldn't really have seen any of the fish or freshwater sea cucumbers. And although they have a natural history museum with dead things in jars, the guidebooks have made it sound even worse that Ulan Baatar's. If I'm going to get Tricia to follow along to the museums in Moscow (Faberge eggs, collections of post-impressionist paintings, jewels of the czars) I'm going to have to limit the number of dead-things-in-jars collections that I force her to walk through. 

Anyway, skipping the hour-each-way drive to the lake saved us enough time to really explore Irkutsk. We toured two of the preserved homes of the Decembrists -- revolutionary figures who were exiled to labor camps in Chita, then built homes in Irkutsk after their release. The cute little Babushka docents who give tours in both houses had the same conversations with us. I was trying to imagine what my Mom would have done in Bellevue Nebraska when she gave tours of the old Log Cabin. If a group of Russians with zero English had wandered in, would you still give them a tour? Or would you just let them wander and figure it out for themselves? 

 
We had a conversation that went something like "oh, blah blah blah, rosski nyat?" (oh, something, you speak no Russian?) Then a guided tour from room to room, with pointing at the maps and photos. This was so-annd-so's room, here was the camp he was exiled to. It's amazing how much we understood from just sign language and context. But then, some of it was "this large piece of furniture is a wardrobe, where the man who lived here kept his clothes." Well, duh. Followed by an intense description of some letter on the wall which obviously was very important, and yet we will never understand what she was trying to tell us. Part of one description involved the old lady touching her arm and Tricia's, back and forth, making some contrast or comparison about arm size or coloration. Who knows?
We ate in a Russian cafe, where I tried my new skills in speaking Russian and reading Cyrillic. (I'm practicing Cyrillic by deciphering the train timetable. I'll be much better by the time we arrive in Moscow.) In the cafe, I told the guy (In Russian!) "I am a vegetarian. What do you recommend?" and the waiter pointed to the menu, to two different items. He told me what they were, and made hand motions of how they were prepared. Now, you can do hand motions of "this is the living room, where they played violin and drank tea" fairly easily. But "this is a stuffed tomato filled with mushrooms and topped with melted cheese?" Good luck. I just nodded and said "we'll take one of each and two beers." Mostly in English, with pointy fingers and a two-finger numerical counting system, then pointed at Tricia and myself. 

It worked! We got a rice pilaf with peas and carrots, and the aforementioned tomato. Good food, no meat. With beer, it came to fifty bucks. Russia is not cheap, although since no one has any money, I don't know how the restaurants stay in business. But we were still hungry - the rice and tomato were kind of side dishes, so after we were done we went next door to the Domino Cafe. (Same name, unrelated to the American pizza chain.) It was kind of fast-food like -- more like Wendy's than McDonalds. Place your order in one line; pick up food in the next. While we were in line, I was busily deciphering the Cyrillic menu and practicing "I am a vegetarian, what do you recommend?" We got to the head of the line, and I started with my new phrase, and the waitress said "want an English menu?" Oh yeah, baby. So we grabbed it, went to the back of the line, and figured out what to order. Blinis with cheese, eggs, and oregano; Russian turnovers with wild mushroom stuffing, Pizza slice with cheese, tomato and seasoning. It worked, and we got our food. The blinis had ham in them (maybe I ordered wrong, or maybe it's like Louisiana -- if it's just for flavor, it's not worth mentioning on the menu, and anyway, they don't charge you any extra for it.)

Then we stopped and got ice cream for dessert. They have ice cream kiosks that dispense these pre-made icecream cones -- little cardboard-tasting cones filled with really, really good ice cream. Yesterday we had raspberry -- the day before, vanilla. Point and order, and since the price is written on the sign, you can just hand the cash without trying to figure out how much she's asking for. Much easier. 

We found a great Italian restaurant in Irkutsk. On Thursday, we had been looking for the Karlson Kafe (where we had the menu-pointing mushroom tomato yesterday) and just saw this place next door to it, called the Esoterica (or something -- I kept the business card for the scrapbook.) Small, cute, with a waitress who is the only fluent English speaker in Irkutsk. Excellent food, several veggie options. We ate till we were stuffed, then had tiramisu and cappuccino.

It's practically white nights here, and we're nowhere near the North end of our trip. We walked home from the restaurant around 10 at night and you would have thought it was 5 in the afternoon. At midnight it was still light and people were playing in the park. 

Now, it's about noon Moscow time. The train is going through a birch forest, and the low light it making the birch trees glow white. It's like an Ansel Adams painting, but hundreds of miles long flipping past the window at 45 miles and hour. We switched over from Irkutsk time to Moscow time before bed last night. We were tired, it was past midnight, then we subtracted 5 hours from the watch and declared it late afternoon. We could have probably had dinner again (train rides make excessive eating really possible, due to the combination of boredom and the big bag full of food.) We stayed up as late as we could, then fell asleep around 8. Slept as late as we could -- about 5:30. Moscow time. Which is almost 11 Irkutsk time. But I have to stop thinking in those terms. By the time we arrive, we'll be acclimated, and the light outside doesn't match anyone's time anywhere in the world, so it doesn't matter what we call it. It would be a confusing place to live. I bet in the winter, when it's frozen over, you barely get an hour of light at noon. Nice place to visit. . . 

I actually might like living in Moscow, though. We have friends there, who teach at the school and like it. It sounds like a cosmopolitan --- but expensive -- place. Full of mafiosos and expense accounts. Of all the cities in the world, it has some weird "number one" statistic involving cost of living and per capita income. Like "the world's most expensive city considering how poor its people are." Less than 1% of the population eats out more than once a year. 

I've been planning our trip -- another nice aspect of long train rides is the amount of time you can spend getting ready for the next stop. I figured out what days the Kremlin is closed (Thursdays) and when St. Basil's Cathedral is open (not on Monday, the day I originally thought we'd tour it.) I've got us tentatively planned on walking the Arbat, touring the Kremlin, visiting St. Basil's, seeing the paintings in the Pushkin museum, and looking at the old streets of Kitay-Gorod. There's also a beer hall in Gorky Park I need to read more about. If it's like the Hofbrau House in Munich, just try and hold me back!
I don't know why they don't have 2-gallon plastic juice jugs of beer in the States.  It's a pretty good idea.

We're about to hit one of those 25-minute stops. I'm going to change out of my pajamas and brush may hair. I'll empty our trash and maybe grab a bottle of water or a can or two of beer. Take some pictures. Remember that time we spent 25 minutes in Mariinsk.

June 20th

It's 7 AM, Moscow time. We woke up around 5:30, and the sun was already pretty high up, coming in through the window and waking us. Last night it wasn't down when we went to bed, and that was something like 11:30. We ate in the dining car, and it looked like late afternoon outside. Eventually we realized that we were the only ones in there, and I think they were trying to close up. 

There's a sweet old lady who comes around with a cart full of drinks, or a basket of food. I have learned a few new phrases -- now I can say "without meat" and "cold." Cold comes in handy when buying a beer or a diet coke. Why would you choose to drink warm diet coke? If you sold cokes, and you had a fridge, wouldn't you put a few in there, in case someone wanted them? Anyway, at one of the stops yesterday I got out and hunted down a cold diet coke for Tricia. I also used my Cyrillic guide to translate the label on the mineral water bottle. Sparkling and still look the same from the bottle, so I had to learn how to ask for it. "Still" is such an easy word in English. In Russian, it's something like negetavvaksssky. I cut the label up and put part of it in my wallet, so if I'm saying it wrong, I can at least have a visual aid next time. And if it doesn't work, at least Tricia likes sparkling water.

I'm wearing the same t-shirt I put on Friday morning after my shower. More than 48 hours in the same shirt I've slept in twice now. Disgusting. I think this is a record for me. I can't remember ever in my life going 48 hours without changing shirts, especially after sleeping 2 nights in it. Maybe at scout camp? I think I'll try to wash my armpits and face and change shirts today. The guide book gives a detailed explanation of how to take a shower -- we even went to an Indian hardware store before we left and bought the supplies. A length of flexible plastic hosing, a rubber connector, a sink stopper, 2 washcloths. Turns out, I can barely stand up and pee at the same time, the train wobbles back and forth so severely. And the bathroom's tiny! There's a bucket on the floor in about the only spot your feet would fit, so you can barely turn around, much less change clothes, MUCH less take a hose-enabled shower. (You can't use the bucket to wash in. It's what the provodnitsa uses to soak her wood-choppin' axe. Seriously.) Plus, you're sharing the bathroom with 9 berths of people. We gave up on the shower idea after the last train ride and left the hose in the hotel room in Irkutsk.

The food delivery lady brought us piroshkis. They're little fried Russian doughnut things. I asked for "without meat" yesterday and we got one stuffed with potato and one with cabbage. This morning when she came around, I looked up cabbage and potato in my phrasebook, so we were able to order the same thing again. They're like doughnuts (or samosas) and they go really good with coffee. Last night in the dining car, I tried "I am a vegetarian, what do you recommend?" and we got macaroni, peas, an omelet, a salad (bowl of tomato and cucumber slices) and 4 beers. We ordered a plate of cheese on the side to mix in it all, and made a fairly nice dinner out of it. At least it was a break from ramen. Getting tired of ramen!

We read about "babushkas," the grandmotherly ladies at the train stations who sell salted fish from baskets. At each stop, I get out hoping to find one and take her photo. I'm hoping for a withered old fairy tale lady in her 90s, wearing a flowered dress with a scarf on her head. Instead, there's just a few 40-something ladies in normal clothes, with normal hair, pushing carts like an ice cream vendor. Not as photogenic as I'd hoped. I did find one picturesque babushka selling flowers that she had probably picked herself. 

Tricia finished her book and is now halfway through Oryx and Crake, the new Margaret Atwood. I'm about a quarter through Umberto Eco's Island of the Day Before. Back in Mallorca, I would read his books knowing that it would likely take me the whole summer to get through them. Trains make for good bouts of uninterrupted reading time. It's like Tricia's birthday, when we laid in bed and read all day. She's also studying for the NBPTS. When we get to Arizona, we'll be taking this test to get our National Teacher's certification. The test is going to be tough, but they put their rubrics online, so you can see what they'll be grading you on. But there are 6 kinds of questions, and they only give you 2 examples. If I gave a high-stakes assessment to my students and didn't' provide them with a guide as to what they were being assessed on, I'd say I wasn't doing my job. The good part is, you can re-take the NBPTS exam. We might be flying back at Christmastime to re-take the test.

The Siberian landscape has been awesome. These amazing birch forests, so deep you can't see through them, now and then giving way to big empty plains of grass or bushes. Last night as the sun got lower it cooled off, and the grassland got covered in foot-deep fog. Not heavy mist, just a light blanket. And only the grass -- the trees must have insulated it or something. It was spooky -- like the land where vampires come from. 

8:00 AM

I changed shirts, but I'm not convinced that I changed into a clean one. I know for sure that my red t-shirt and black t-shirt are filthy. And the green one I was wearing (2 days straight) is for sure not clean. Which leaves my grey one. Now, I haven't done laundry since Mongolia, so maybe it's clean. Maybe not. I sniffed it a little, and wasn't put off by it, so I'll assume that it's as clean as it gets.

I packed for the frozen wasteland of Siberia, not for this sunny weather! A couple of t-shirts for China, and then long-sleeves and layers for the rest of the time. I certainly wasn't expecting this balmy wonderful weather. I could have packed jeans, travel khakis, and t-shirts and been perfectly happy. But then, we'll be going to the Bolshoi and to some nice restaurants in Moscow. Plus the temperature in St. Petersburg might be freezing. This is certainly a trip that's hard to pack for!

On the train from Mongolia to Russia, we had a weird experience that only made sense after we crossed the border. Right as we left Ulan Bator, a lady with a large bag of plastic sandals came to our car and put a pair under our bed. Since we had received complimentary terrycloth slippers in Beijing, we figured they were for use to wear to the bathroom. Of course, they were too small for me, so I didn't really need one. But to be polite, we didn't complain. Then the lady said "until after Russian border." Which made me suspicious. Was she smuggling something? Maybe the shoes were made of some plasticised heroin or something! I didn't want to go to jail as the unwitting accomplice of an international smuggling ring. Walter and Joelle had turned her down, but they thought she was selling slippers door-to-door. 

The train was in the Ulann Bator station for a while, and the lady and her husband kept coming back on with more stuff. They had a giant sack filled with red fuzzy blankets, a big bag of blue plastic shoes, and about twenty Chinese oscillating fans. She kept walking by with box after box of fans. Oddest thing. Oh well. I paid little attention to her comings and goings. Then, after we crossed the border, she came by to collect her shoes. The border crossing itself was uneventful for us. The guards checked under the bed, and in the overhead compartment, mostly (I figured) looking for stowaways. 

On the Russian side of the border, after we had all cleared our passport check and filled out our customs forms in triplicate, we were allowed to roam around the station for a half hour or so. Good time to find a toilet and change some money. Well, the toilet was so horrifying that I had to take some photos of it, as no one will ever believe my description. Tricia came back and said "imagine your worst nightmare of a prison bathroom. Times it by ten." And when she described it to me, all I could say is "I think the men's room is worse." Luckily, I didn't need to spend much time in the bathroom. 

If you'd like to see this horrifying photo, click on it.  I dare you.

The bank was out of money, so they couldn't change more than ten dollars. We didn't find that out until after we'd stood in line for fifteen minutes or so. I picked up a couple of cans of random Russian beer, and headed back to the train.

 On the way, I saw a little festival going on in the park next to the station. I only had a minute or two, and didn't want to miss the train, but I had to check it out. There was this flea market going on, and the whole town had come out to shop. A guy was selling shampoo and soap from a blanket, another guy had a table set up like a garage sale. And these Mongolian smugglers from the train were selling their blue plastic shoes, fuzzy blankets, and fans. Now it made sense -- once a week when the international train arrives, the people from the little border town of Naushki get to shop for duty-free low-quality smuggled goods from Mongolia and China. And as long as the customs officials don't check the car too well, this Mongolia couple can import whatever they like and possibly pay for their trip. Maybe they're visiting relatives, or maybe they just do this once a week for a living. But by spreading their goods around the train in everyone's car, they have apparently pulled the wool over the (not too bright) customs officials. I mean, come on! If I was able to figure out what they were doing, I'm sure the Russian border guards are onto it. Maybe they pave the way with some cash or a bottle of vodka.

We're digging into the food bag. The goal is to eat it all before we leave St. Petersburg. We don't want to carry ramen noodles on an international flight to Los Angeles. That would be plain silly. Today I ate some of my weird dried fruit I picked up in Beijing. I had some Jibao Red Bayberrys first. Those have a photo of red berries and bay leaves on the package, so they must come from the bay plant. But I don't think it has edible berries on it! Maybe in China it does. They don't' taste too good, though. Bitter and astringent. I ate two, then chucked the package into the little hanging grocery bag that is our trash can. Then I tried something that I figure (from the illustration on the bag) to be dried persimmon. Not bad! Kind of like sugar-frosted fruit roll-ups, with an indistinguishable taste -- sort of a cross between dried apricot and Hawaiian Punch. I've still got some Thailand-Style dried milky plums, and a bag of tamarind pods. And some of that Japanese-style nut and soybean mix, with the hot spicy crackers. When we eventually have a Russian beer this afternoon, I'll bust that one open. Japanese nut mix goes really well with beer. 

Russian teens are enjoying the new freedoms that democracy brings.


It's kind of fun, being on the train for 3 days. You can do whatever you like, within some boundaries. You can't really shower or do yoga, what with space constrictions. And you can't go hiking in the woods. But because you have all the time in the world, you can do things that would be unthinkable in a normal context. We only have 4 days in Moscow, we're not going to spend one day reading or sleeping late, or poking around taking naps. But on the train, you can wake up at 5 or sleep till noon. You can take a nap at 9 AM, eat dinner at midnight, or have beer for breakfast. I had two giant cups of coffee this morning. (My big starbucks mug from Beijing holds about 24 ounces of coffee.) And why not? I don't need to sleep, and if I have to pee, the bathrooms right next door. As long as we don't have any more of those 8-hour locked-bathroom border stops (and we don't!) I can drink as much coffee as I want to. Whoo-hoo!


10:30 AM

We're ascending into the Ural mountains now. We stopped briefly in the town of Tiumen, the last stop before Ekaterinburg. We'll hit Ekaterinburg at 2 pm, where most of our fellow travelers are getting off. It's the city where the Romanov's were killed, and it marks the border between Asia and Europe. But there doesn't seem to be much else to see or do there, at least in the Summer. There's skiing and sledding in the winter. We'd rather just get to Moscow. Lots to see there!!

We should see a big granite obelisk this afternoon around 2:30 that marks the Continental border. I hope the train slows down for a photo opportunity. 

3:30 PM
We're in Europe now. Funny, I was planning on a memorial somewhat larger than what we passed. After having been to Istanbul, Washington DC, and Luxor, I've seen some honkers of obelisks. Even Delhi has its share of obilistic monuments. So I had the camera ready, we knew what kilometer-marker number it would be at, and when it was coming up a guy also watching out the windows said "here it comes!" Then I angled the camera out the window and saw it -- this little gravestone, maybe 4 or 5 feet tall, that had "Europe / Asia" written on it. It was made out of poured concrete, I think. If we had spent the night in Ekaterinburg and hired a taxi to drive us the 25 km each way to have our picture taken with it, I think we'd have been a bit disappointed. Or at least laughed about it. 

The land is almost the same -- maybe we haven't really hit the tall parts of the Urals yet. I had in mind that they'd be like the Swiss Alps or the Rockies. Big foreboding mountains that we'd have to wind through on switchbacks, with craggy cliffs and bears and eagles. So far, it's a lot like Siberia, except the towns are bigger.

4:15 PM
Man alive, I could eat dried tamarind all day long! This stuff, from China, is different from Thai style. It's sweeter (Tricia hates it) and doesn't have the chili kick that Thai dried tamarind does. It's called Bing Tang Suag Jiao, which is fun to say, even if you don't like the flavor. I think a few pieces jammed into a potato piroshki would add just the right amount of samosa-chutney flavor that it's missing, but Tricia says it'd be too sweet.

The Japanese nut mix was actually Chinese. I didn't realize they were different. Instead of being light and spicy, this one was dry, bland, and fried. No wasabi-flavored rice crackers, just a lot of heavy, dense, fried soybeans. At least we won't be carting it to St. Petersburg with us.

Tricia has finished her book, and I'm more than halfway through mine. I think half of an Umberto Eco novel in less than 24 hours might be a world record. An entire Margaret Atwood in the same time is doing really, really well. She wants me to put mine on hold and read hers so we can talk about it. I said by the time we get to LA, we'll each have read both of them. We have another 24 hours in this train, then an 8-hour train from Moscow to St. Pete's, then a 3-day flight to LA. 8 hour layover somewhere in Russia, layover in Beijing, Layover in Tokyo, then a really, really, long flight to LA, during which the clock turns back so that we land before we take off. We'll be traveling for 3 days, and arrive the day we left, or something horrid like that. I'll just say right now that when we show up in LA I'll be smelly and scruffy. I'm smelly and scruffy right now, but I'll clean up in Moscow. And shave. If I tried to shave on the train, I think I'd cut myself to death! I can barely type!!

Sunday, Just 21st 9 AM

Eight hours till Moscow! I can hardly wait. There are people (I've read about them, but never met one) who say that the "real" way to do the Trans-Siberian is the full-on 7 days straight from Vladivostok or Beijing straight to Moscow non-stop. I say they're silly and smelly. Not only would you completely miss Mongolia, but you would be stuck in a little bedroom eating ramen and wearing the same shirt without being able to wash much more than your face for a week!

Tyumen Novosibirsk

 

The Urals were a much smaller mountain range that I had anticipated. More like rolling hills. We didn't even know when we were in them, or when we came out. If you've ever driven through Colorado, you know for darn sure when you hit the Rockies, and when you're in them. 

So, we're in Eastern Europe. The houses look the same -- "charming" would be the best word I can think of. Maybe "picturesque." It would be unfair to call them run-down or dilapidated, because the owners keep the shutters painted and there are cute lace curtains in the windows, even if the roof is sagging and the timbers on the outside fall off now and then. It would be hard to maintain a home in this country, with its extreme temperatures. So many of the houses are log cabins in the old big-round-log sense of the word. Even new ones! We saw a guy who must have had a log delivery in the last week or so, building a new house on his lot. The logs were still yellow from the mill, big foot-diameter telephone pole looking things, and he was stacking them up just exactly like Lincoln logs. When people in the US say "log cabin" I picture a wood-framed A-shaped house or a square house covered in Colorado-style wood slats. Not big round telephone poles stacked up like Lincoln Logs. But I guess as long as you live where there's a big supply of giant trees, why not? More then one-fifth of the world's forest is in Russia. One more thing I didn't know 2 weeks ago.

I am changing my mind about the flower I called "wild lavender" a few days ago. I think it might be purple Russian lupine. It's gorgeous. Now and then we'll come upon a clearing surrounded by white birch, with a log cabin in the middle of it, and the clearing will be filled with patches of purple, magenta, and yellow. It looks like a photo you'd see on a jigsaw puzzle. So of course, I stick my camera up to the window (it's air conditioned, so you can't open the windows!) and try to capture it. What I have is a big collection of blurry green photos. Now and then an electrical pole or a mile marker. Nothing you'd put on a jigsaw puzzle. You'll have to take my word for it. Dang pretty countryside.

Just about every Siberian town has these cool old brick watchtowers near the train station



Malaysia - Beijing (pg 1) - Xian - Beijing (pg 2) - Train to Mongolia - In Mongolia - Irkutsk - Moscow - St. Petersburg