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Archive for October, 2008

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Nomadic journey

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Just a quick update, I have left Russia and in Mongolia, home of Nomads, camels, mutton and bad lighting. We are leaving tomorrow on a 13 day journey into the Gobi desert, should be very intense and bad food. So I will be out of action for a bit but am still alive hopefully somewhere out there. When we get back we will be straight on a train to Beijing. A busy next few weeks….will write about it later….

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Trans-Siberian part 4: Tomsk-Krasnyarsk

Monday, October 13th, 2008

Tomsk turned out to be a lovely city, the great bargain rooms helped and the weather was perfect, so finally good enough weather to lie around in the sun. Tomsk is a university town so lots of young people around who are generally a bit happier and more friendly than old people, lots of nice cafes and a big park where people hung out in.

Being Autumn as well the colours of the trees were changing and everywhere was orange leaves and trees, good times. We spent 3 days there, catching up on sleep, lying in the park, eating at this great cheap cafe with amazing cake and watching MTV on our TV’s. I may have mentioned this before but all western tv is dubbed over with the worst Russian voice overs, you can still hear the english underneath. But because MTV is so trash you don’t really need to understand what was going on.

Tomsk is famous for its wooden houses so we wandered along one of the roads to see some of the nice ones, lots of them have all gotten old and falling apart heaps, literally sinking into the ground. I don’t think they have many building regulations here as lots of houses have whole corners sinking into the ground. But there are a few that are restored. We wandered through a really cool market as well, packed with old ladies selling vege’s and clothing, knitted hats, berries and meat. Loads of food everywhere, a few people told me that food was hard to come by in Russia but there are always old ladies selling things on the road. Someone was also selling cigarrettes in boxes with Stalin and Lenin on the front…very random but had to buy some as they only cost about 30 cents a box…not sure how they can seriously sell things with Stalin on the front when he was the cause of so many problems and they don’t really celebrate him, but still got myself some Stain cigarettes.

One restaurant we went to, recommended by both guide books, nice food and things but we had to pay a 50 rub ($3) charge for the ‘music’, which turned out to be a guy wth a laptop who sung terrible karaoke style music over top. So typically Russian and so bad…but people seem to love it. There were groups of girls singing and dancing along and taking photos of themselves. One thing Russians seem to love is photos and everywhere we go people are taking photos of themselves in these bizarre over posed styles. Like in the park there were girls down there dressed in red stilettos and mini skirts posing in the tree’s, their high heels sinking into the dirt. its just very very strange…kind of like all young girls want to show off and pose with their “I am hot and bitchy” face.

Our last day we had a train late at night and the weather was a bit colder so we dragged out the day in a cafe where everyone ordered fired dumplings all day long, not sure if it was a special thing for the day but obviously it was the cool thing to order, however their “English” menu was actually German and we ordered a few wrong things before we finally got ourselves some fried dumplings filled with potato and meat. We often spend a lot of time in cafes waiting and ordering things spaced out over time so we can stay longer!

We jumped on the train, a short overnight journey to Krasnyarsk, another train journey, no vodka this time and arrived in the afternoon the next day. One difficult thing to adjust to hee is the time difference, with just about every city being an hour or 2 ahead of the last. But all the train timetables are on Moscow time, and the train station clocks on Moscow time, but the towns up to 5 hours ahead of Moscow, and then daylight savings apparently in some places and also our guide book actually having the wrong time zones…it can get very confusing about what time it actually is and making sure you get the right ticket and gt to the train station not local time but Moscow time….confusing. Also having to adjust to a new time zone every 3 days, for ages I still felt I was on Moscow time so getting up in the morning was like getting up at 3am, However am used to it now and we will be staying in the same time zone for all of Mongolia and China.

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Trans-Sib part 3:vodka filled trains

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

(Russian train station...we spend a lot of time in buildings like this waiting....)

So this leg of the journey turned out to be one of the toughest. Our train ride was 24 hours, and ... [Continue reading this entry]

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Trans-Siberian part 2: Kazan to Yekaterinburg

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Trans-Sib part one: The real journey begins

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

last days of Moscow

Sunday, October 5th, 2008
Our last couple of days in Moscow before heading out east on the Trans-Siberian proper, we spent the day out in one of the "golden ring" towns called Sergiev Posad. Of course a very complicated train situation to get ... [Continue reading this entry]

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Moscow? Nyet…

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

n619232424_1420075_4949.jpg

(St Basil's Cathedral) Nyet (No) seems to be Russian service people’s favourite word. Particularly at train stations where we write in Cyrillic what we want and hand it over, waiting in ... [Continue reading this entry]

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