China post # 8 - On the train!

Finally, on the transmongolian train for a 36 hour trip just beyond the Urals. Board the train at 4 p.m. and find our compartment is shared by a friendly russian lady and her daughter (who is mentally impaired we later discern).

Impressions of the train are stuffy and stinky, but they provide a big teapot and fancy metal and glass mugs for drinking. Not the mad party train that I was expecting, with only a few foreigners scattered around. Off to bed at 10!

We eventually discover the next train that it is not our inability to dicipher the station signs that means we cannot follow our trans-siberian handbook, but rather that we have taken a more southerly route through Kazan (as in mother of ... what russian soldiers used to exclaim in WW II comics). Our russian vocabulary is still limited to spasibo, pivo and nyet.

The train passes through endless kilometres of forest and more forest. When it does make the rare 10-15 minute stop at a major station the platform is swamped with traders selling food and possibly all sorts of other things. In the photo above a guy is hawking a chandelier - we later discovered that this was not normal and I guess since other people at that stop had vases and other glass ornaments that it was a city with glassworks?