Day 46 - Trans-Siberian Train.

It's been two days and three nights on this train now and it's the longest single journey that I've ever been on. We're nowhere near our final destination yet and the last distance marker that I saw yesterday indicated that we'd travelled almost 3500Km; that was almost 12 hours ago. We've just about settled into a routine in our little carriage, though it's a little disorientating because we're going through so many time-zones. The whole train system runs on Moscow time which is three hours ahead of London but every few stops the local time is Moscow time plus an hour. We're are currently on Moscow time + 4 hours and I think it'll stay like that up to Irkutsk. Rich has been keeping his watch on local time and mine is on Moscow time so between us we should be OK.

The train is pretty much as I expected. By the general decór and colour scheme (a sickly shade of beige) I'm guessing that it was built in the 1960's. It's comfortable though the toilets really could do with an occasional scrubbing down with some industrial disinfectant to get rid of the smell. It's quite a novelty seeing the tracks whizz by beneath the loo as you flush it and I can understand why the toilets are locked while we're at the station now.

There's a restaurant car that's more like a builder's cafe, though with far less a cheery welcome. The woman that works in there looks like she's on a knife-edge at most times and her expression flits between panic-stricken bewilderment to surly indifference. I can't blame her, the only people that seem to eat in there are the other tourists on the train and she barely understands a word of English. Almost all of the Russians just buy stuff when we stop at the stations, ranging from dried, smoked sturgeon to caviar stuffed blinis. On the walk down to get our dinner yesterday, we passed a carriage that stank of a combination of this dried fish and stale vodka - somewhat of a staple diet it seems. The menu is actually better than it sounds. We have a choice of things like 'Chop with garnish', 'Steak with egg', 'Sliced fried meat with garnish' amongst other things. I went for the safe option and had pork with chips yesterday, though one of the Finnish tourists on the train ordered something that when the waitress bought it over, I thought she'd mistakenly brought out her cat's dinner. It was a small bowl of silvery looking sprats floating in a pool of oil. He ate most of them.

We had quite a result with the carriage. Usually, these sleeping cars get quite booked up and because they sleep four people we were expecting to be shacked up with two drunken Russian blokes. Instead we've got a cute little old lady who firstly introduced herself in the full Patronimic form, but this confused us so she just calls herself Liliana. We've been trying to communicate with each other but she only has a little English that she remembers from school so much of our conversation has involved weird facial expressions and frantic arm waving. What little Russian we can speak is from the back on The Lonely Planet guide book so is limited to the numbers 1 to 100, asking what time the train leaves and saying hello and goodbye - these phrases will only go so far in four days with the same person! During one of our difficult conversations, the subject go on to snoring and up until that point Liliana had been an amiable little soul but her expression changed in an instant. She looked at Richard and said 'Nyet' (No), then pointed to herself and said 'Nyet' (No) then, through an armour-piercing stare, she gave me a look over the top of her specs that would have made the beard curl on Lenin's statue and simply said 'Da' (Yes). I'm now really self-concious every time it's time for bed.

We had a little excitement yesterday when another person joined our cell, erm... I mean carriage. I did a double take at first as she was the image of my Aunty Rosemary (mother's side) but then I clocked the white, fish-net pop-sox, silver slingbacks and the most hideous piece of knitware since Pauline Fowler's cardigan and realised that it couldn't possibly be her. The last straw was when she gave us both a big smile revealing that most of her teeth had been replaced by dodgy looking gold ones. Luckily, she didn't stay for the night. She got off about four hours later after talking non-stop (and it seemed without breathing) to Liliana.

Only one more day and night on the train now until Irkutsk. I'm sure that the day will pass quickly, especially now I've put my watch forward by four hours to 'local' time. Now shall I have the 'Soup with pickle garnish' or the 'Caviar and blini'for tonight's dinner...