trans sibby part dos

so we crawled in to irkutsk thankfully.

our first night out for dinner in the place we managed to get ourselves in a pickle with not having a single idea what was listed on the menu. we blindly chose a few dishes and crossed our fingers. i got some sort of creamy crab salad that tasted like bad cole slaw. not even sure what bryan had. we washed it down with a little beer and were joined by a random russian guy that spoke a little english.

three takeaways from that conversation:

1) it was nice to see americans in his town as he did not meet many.

2) america is a good country.

3) irkutsk is a "city of descendant criminals" he said. everyone has a family tree littered with crime. he mentioned we should be "very careful" in certain areas and not stay at that particular cafe too late. wonderful.

and about 30 seconds after him finishing the sentence regarding item number 3 above, a fight broke out in the cafe. the one guy got pretty lit up and we ran out of there like dogs with our tails between our legs.

we bought our train ticket that day for the remaining leg of the trans-siberian rail-- the 80 hour mother journey from irkutsk to moscow. 2300 russian roubles later (about 80 USD) and we were booked for train N9 and on our way.

about 6.4 minutes in to sitting on the train i noticed a guy walking by with just an absolutely absurd amount of instant noodles overflowing out of his bag. honestly though, the guy could survive in a bunker for 50 straight days with the amount he was carrying. i naturally gave a chuckle and kind of pointed at the bag. i must have made my snicker a little too obvious (surprise) because old sergei wanted to box me out with his cunning rambo-like expressions of stone cold stare-down.

i just sort of nervously laughed that one out.. i felt about the same as when you make a joke that has obviously really offended someone. you kind of get red and hot in the face and feel just a tiny bit out of place. well, after that the next 80 hours looked peachy keen. i had already made a fantastic friend only a handful of minutes in!

day 1 and i just had no idea how to kill time on the train. i was drinking coffee like a goddamn mad man. im talking about the sort of fervor towards coffee drinking you have when you are trying to pull off an all nighter or kill a nasty hangover.

i finally stopped drinking the stuff when my piss resembled the color of tree bark. it was right around then that i picked up some water and took care of that little issue.

as a side note, its amazing-- on the road you pick up some excellent standards of living. life can get really simple: you need 3 kebabs-- 1 for breakfast, lunch and dinner. add about 2 liters of water and you are living the high life.

ok, ok.. you say that sounds absurd when you get to a city with no kebab stand. no problems. hit the supermarket up for: 1 loaf of bread, 1 block of cheese (likely cheddar or brie) and one cucumber. make a sandwich for all three meals. done deal.

i bring my current habits of eating up, but sadly enough, i didnt follow those "simple" sort of standards on the train. in fact, i decided to simplify it even more. i chose-- god help me-- one box of instant oats and an assortment of shitty fruit.

you know, its no surprise though that i seriously botched up the whole grocery list for the train. see, i go grocery shopping and gets tons of really cool things that taste good, but never manage to construct one nice meal, but rather just a bunch of random pieces that dont fit together. super.

for the next two days i felt like mr. ed eating his horse feed. it tasted like wallpaper paste. water, oats, water, oats. maybe coffee?

ugggh, just awful.

by day two on the train i felt like i was really in the groove of things. no more evil glares from rambo down the way, i stopped drinking as much coffee and i even managed to grab a roll of salami and some fresh bread to alleviate my dietary issues. life was good.

i started a really excellent book called "red dirt-- a path through china." based on the true story of the author's (ma jian) 3 year trek through china in post cultural revolution china (early 80's). being a particularly interesting historical time for the country, it is filled with incredible stories about life on the road and the sleu of political issues that littered the country at the time.

i occupied other spare moments by what seemed like endless amounts of gin rummy with bryan. that little bastard can play the game, let me tell you. i won the first three games and got all high and mighty on myself, only to be repeatedly smacked by his carnivorous style of game play. he is just an animal with that card game.

we drank that evening with a new found amigo. he was a russian federation boxer named alexi. it was a really nice "pickup" honestly. we were riding pretty deep on the train now. any shots rambo wanted to make at me were now well accounted for now that i had alexi the boxing monster in my corner.

we exchanged "gifts" with alexi. it was kind of sad-- we had pennies to share, but he still loved them and thought it was cool to hold a small piece of america in the palm of his hand. he wrote us a note in my journal that i will need about 10 years of russian language classes to understand. the thing is not only in cyrillic, but the old style scripted version. ill see what i can do.

by day 3 on the train i was getting itchy to pull in to moscow. i awoke that morning with a hellish sort of aching in my head. great.

omri and i-- in a pure state of desperation and boredom-- decided to begin playing hangman. now come on, thats pretty bad. the words that we made each other guess slowly got more and more grotesque and perverted to try and pick up the general spirit and morale. i guess it worked.

i tried to take photos from the train window. every time i saw something cool a huge bunch of pine trees would sprout up and cover up the scenery i wanted to shoot. now let me tell you, that just got unneccessarily frustrating. when it happened about 5 times in a row, a threw a childish frustration tantrum and damn near knocked a full cup of hot coffee in my lap.

...but then we pulled in to moscow. it was quite chilly, but that was to be expected.

i hadnt really heard anything positive about moscow. a work friend from a prior summer who was bord and raised in russia told me this:

"moscow is cold. russians are cold. if you dont speak the language, just stay inside so you dont get frustrated.. or cold."

i didnt have high expectations-- little did i know the nice little surprise that was on its way.