Teradactyls, rhinos and more!

Hello friends! Here we are in Shanghai. We arrived in Beijing on the train on Monday (a full 20 minutes early!) and were very pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get down to Shanghai. In the last hour or so of our train ride Elizabeth and I were putting together a plan (rather plans- plan A, plan B, plan C, etc.) for accomplishing all we needed to in order to get down to Shanghai. Get off the train, change some money, find out where the airport is, get to the airport, buy plane tickets, and finally get on the plane.

Well as we came out of the train station I noticed a "Air Ticket Office" sign. So we walked up to the counter and told them where we wanted to go and bought tickets for a 5pm flight (it was just before 3pm at this point). They even wrote down the name of the airport for us in Chinese so that we could give it to a taxi driver. So we got a taxi, went to the airport and caught our flight down here to Shanghai.

We are staying with Matt, one of Elizabeth's friends from college while we're here. He has been in Shanghai for about six months teaching English. Right now Elizabeth and I find ourselves sitting in City Diner with the full repertoire of Michael Jackson's career playing somewhat loudly in the background. I seriously haven't heard this much Michael Jackson in well over 15 years! It's cracking me up.

So what have we been doing for week since we last posted? Traveling. Lots of traveling. Traveling in the form of sitting on a train. After nearly a week on the train I thought I might never want to see another train in my lifetime. That is not at all how I feel though.

The train ride was absolutely incredible. We saw so much! From Moscow through various cities and villages in Russia, past the beautiful Lake Baikal, into Mongolia and through the Gobi Desert with wild horses and camels at watering holes and yurts dotting the landscape to the corn fields and sunflower patches and enormous canyons and gorges of China. Standing at the window staring out at the incredible sights hours could pass by without seeming like more that a couple of minutes.

The first couple of evenings were filled with games of Scrabble and Monopoly with our three British friends who we met at our hostel in Moscow. Generally not a fan of Monopoly because of the sheer ridiculous length of the games I was pleasantly surprised to find that we had finished a six or so hour game without having felt like we had spent a whole day playing. Somehow time on the train disappears as the thousands of kilometers pass by. Changing about an hour a day due to time zones has an odd effect on one's sense of time as well.

We are heading out, enough Michael Jackson for one sitting, but we will report back soon. Perhaps more on the train ride as well as our very interesting bunk mates (and their snoring and toenail clippings) next time. Definitely more on our Chinese experiences though. Be sure to ask Elizabeth about spitting food on the floor in the nice restaurant we went to on her birthday!

Take care.

Suffering in Silence

Don't let the title of this blog entry scare you. It's from a magazine article about the Trans-Siberian Railway. This particular portion of the article was talking about the bathrooms on the trains and how they are closed when the train is stopped at a station (since flushing the toilet is essentially opening a hole to the ground. The quote was something to the effect of "memorize the schedule or suffer in silence."

That is one of the many things we have to look forward to in the next six and a half days. We leave tonight at 9:30pm and are scheduled to arrive in Beijing at 2:30pm on Monday. Getting to the train station tonight ought to be an interesting experience as we each have our backpacks, smaller day bags and also have a large duffel bag full of food. Shopping last night for food for our journey it really sort of hit me that we will be on the train for a week. Elizabeth was quick to point out that it isn't a full week because we will be arriving at 2:30, plus there is a five hour time difference between Moscow and Beijing. So we'll be on the train for six days and 12 hours. I'm still going to call it a week.

Since we will be on the train we will not be posting on the blog in that time, so you'll have to wait a whole week to hear from us again. My how things have changed that not hearing from someone overseas for a week is a long time! I'm sure we'll have plenty of adventures from the train to share with you all. There is so much from Moscow that we haven't even had a chance to cover here. I was a bit worried that keeping a blog would leave me with nothing to say when I got back, but that most certainly hasn't been the case so far. We have a couple more things to take care of before we head out, so I'm off.

China here we come...

Monday Evening

Tomorrow is our last day in Moscow! I am sad to go, but I'm ready to get on the train again. I'm definetely not tired of the train yet; in fact I feel as if our great train adventure is just beginning (which it really is since we will be traveling until next Monday). We've met these three great English guys in our hostel who are also traveling on the same train and will be going with us to Irkustk. One of them is in a choir and will be doing a concert in the Forbidden City the same weekend we'll be Beijing!! How crazy is that? Unfortunately they are in the 3rd wagon and we are in the 15th, but I'm sure there will be much going back and forth between our wagons, especially since they saw the food Katie and I purchased today for the trip:) I don't think they've thought about food yet, although they will only be on the train for 3 days instead of 6. I could probably eat noodles for 3 days, but not for 6 days straight! It's so great to have met friends already and in fact i can hear Katie laughing and talking with them now in the other room! We've actually met quite a few friends, all of whom we refer to as "our friend..." (followed usually not by their name - names aren't always necessary among travelers, but by some descripter like "our friend the English teacher" or "our friend the German Austrian". Some we'll never see again but some we'll meet later on in the trip, like our English friend in the choir.

Certainly if I would have had more time here there are more things I would have liked to see or do, but I feel satisfied with our time here. Going to Ryazan would have been great, but I think it was really important that I stay in the once place for a few days and not be traveling or moving. Today we visited Christ the Savior Cathedral and we did make it to Novodevichy as well. The convent has a fascinating history, which we caught bits of pieces of by readings an excerpt of a book I'm reading called "Around the Bloc; My life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana" and eavesdropping on English tourguides, and remembering a bit of Russian history that we both have studied at one point. We of course did not pay to have our own tour and in fact we didn't even pay what we were supposed to as foreigners (it's better not to read the signs but just walk up to the cashier and ask for a ticket). The cemetary was free; however we paid 50 rubles (2 dollars) for a map telling us where to find all the famous dead guys. This came in handy as it's a very large cemetary and we didn't want to miss anything. I could have spent hours walking around just looking at the ornate gravestones and decorated plots. Some of the more famous people we found were Tolstoy, Gogol, Breshnev, Chekov, and Yelstin.

Katie did not mention the two highlights of our trip to Izmailova; the vodka museum and our soviet propoganda posters. We both saw an add for the museum and knew that our trip to Moscow would not be complete without visiting it. It gave a very fascinating history of Russia's most famous drink. I'm coming up with some "fun facts" that I learned so if you're interested i can share that with you. The second highlight for me was the posters we purchased. We were both looking really without any intention of purchasing anything but ended up coming away with with tw0 large envelopes containing about 24 posters each. The guy who sold them to us was so sweet! When he found out that we were continuing on our train trip to China he rushed to the back of the stall and pulled out this set of posters all celebrating the friendship between Russia and China during the Soviet period. Some of them have pictures of a Russian guy and a Chinese guy holding hands and they say something like, "we celebrate friendship for the sake of happiness and prosperity" or "Those who strive together, stand together", or "We seek true communism".

It's getting quite late and I haven't packed my things yet. We may be able to post again tomorrow otherwise the next one will be from Shanghai!

Monday Morning

It's Monday morning and it's pouring outside. Although the rain is extremely welcome after such a hot spell in Moscow, I have to say that I'm a little disapointed. We had planned to walk to the forest around the area where I lived when I first moved here. It's a beautiful walk through the forest to an underground spring there with pure water that i'm guess has been blessed by an orthodox priest at some point in history. Our plan was to load up all our water bottles and fill them up for the train while enjoying the natural beauty of the forest (wonderful - aside from the heavy water bottles and mosquitos!).

I would still like to visit the Novodevichy Convent and so hopefully if the rain subsides a little we will be able to do that. In every country I go to I always try and visit a cemetary or a graveyard. I love the history, the symbolism, the beauty, and the peacefullness. There are several fascinating cemetaries in Ryazan (the city where I spent the last 3 years living) that I would have like to take Katie to, but unfortunately we won't be making a trip there this time. There is a WWII cemetary there and I love to walk up and down reading the plain white gravestones. It's not hard to calculate the ages of the young men when they died because they were all around 18 or 19. Anyway, I'll tell you more about Novodevichy a little later. I have to get off the computer and eat some breakfast!

It's a small world

I can hardly believe that we only have two days left in Moscow. Our time here has passed by so quickly. After the adventure of getting our tickets things have gone far more smoothly.

We spent an afternoon/evening at Red Square and the surrounding park. We were there early enough that it was still light out, and we stayed until it got dark and the lights turned on in the square. It is beautiful at night. There is a completly different feeling about the place. Yesterday we went to Ismailova which is basically a souvenir market, but there are all sorts of wonderful things to see. Basic souvenirs, art, antiques, etc. Elizabeth and I both decided that if we weren't traveling by train we would have each bought a samovar.

We had planned to go to Novodevichy Convent after Ismailova, but realized that it had closed by the time that we were done. So instead we went to Victory Park which is a HUGE war memorial with really fun fountains. It was nice to just wander around and do lots of people watching. The current fashion for men in Russia seems to be capri pants and a pseudo-mullet hair cut. Slightly frightening.

As we returned to the hostel last night I had sort of a weird moment of confusion. The gal sitting at the counter looked very familiar to me, but she was totally out of context. As I fully entered the door she smiled, laughed and said, "I work at this hostel." She had been one of our roommates at the hostel in Prague. It's a crazy small world.

Today Elizabeth and I headed in different directions. Elizabeth went to see her friend Boris and his family (she never actually saw him, but I'll let her fill you in on that) and I was able to spend the afternoon with my dear friend Masha. I met her family and we spent some time catching up. Masha is one of the people I became closest with when I was in Russia last (eight years ago).

As I was on the metro on the way back to the hostel I was doing some thinking and realized that I could stay here in Moscow. I'm definitely excited about the rest of our trip and can hardly wait for our continued adventures, but I could stay here if we weren't continuing on. I'm not sure what will become of that, but I see more time spent in Russia in my future- not that that will surprise anyone.

Some things don't change

It's been quite interesting for me to be back in Moscow. It's been six years since i was here last and so many things have changed, but somethings have changed at all. We arrived very early on Thursday morning and went straight to the ticket counter to try and purchase out tickets to Beijing. I met a really nice lady on the train from Kiev and she has told me which train station we needed to go to, which was really helpful because there are several major stations in Moscow (each one has trains going to a different region or in a different direction). We hopped on the metro and arrived at the Yaroslavsky station where i preceded to wait in line at the ticket counter. There's no way for me to explain how intimidated i am by the whole experience of buying train tickets in Russian! this is one area of area of Russia that has not been affected by the new effort to provide better customer service. If you don't speak the language it is impossible to accomplish anything. The ticket sellers are for the most part, extremely impatient, extremely rude, and extremely unhelpful. I have decided that the fact that i can sometimes pass for a russian (something i am actually quiet proud of) is really a hinderance to me when attemping to communicate to the ticket sellers. I know the right way to ask for what i need, and the woman behind the counter assuming that since i can speak Russian (they would refuse to deal with me if I didn't) that I can understand everything usually procedes to speak very quickly and impatiently with me. This time after waiting in line i stepped up the counter and asked the woman very nicely if I could buy tickets to Irkutsk and then from there to China. First she glared at me and then proceded to yell at me and tell me i was a stupid girl, didn't I know that the international ticket counter was in a different place (and she waved her hand in that general direction). Katie and i found the international ticket counter in a building across the way but they didn't open for another hour so we decided just to sit in the station and wait. Although there is a large waiting room with lots of chairs, almost all of them were taken up by people sleeping. Some were homeless and some of them just waiting for trains. At this point i just broke down and had a good cry. it wasn't that the woman has just yelled at me instead of kindly telling me where to go (this happens quite frequently here) it was that fact that my first encouter back in Russia had to be such an unpleasant one. It was also such a strange experience for me being back in moscow but not really knowing my place here. I was having a bit of a identity crises because I don't live here anymore but I'm not a tourist either. Anyway i felt much better after having a good cry and then by that point an hour had gone by so we went to the international ticket office. That experience went much better - first of all the place was pretty empty, and it was air conditioned!! The woman at the counter was more patient with me and after a few minutes I as able to purchase our tickets from Moscow to Beijing. i'm just thankful there were tickets still available on the train we wanted (train #43 only runs once a week). It probably would have been possible to take another route, but then we would run the risk of getting stuck in irkutsk or Ulan Batar for a week. Although this would have been an adventure it could have turned ugly pretty quickly because our visas run out on Sept. 5th (my birthday). Katie pointed out that either we would be leaving the country on my birthday or we would be going to prison! The prison part is not a joke!

My time is running out on the computer, so i will update more on our activities in moscow soon!

For no apparent reason

Hello from Moscow! Elizabeth and I arrived at the Kievskaya train station here in Moscow at about 5:30 this morning. After spending three days and nights on the train we were glad to be standing on some solid ground.

Monday evening we headed out from our hostel in Prague to catch our train to Kiev as I had mentioned in the previous post. The tickets we purchased were for a kupe (2nd class). On this particular train the kupe had bunk beds three high. On the bottom bunk in our kupe was a mother with her 2 year old daughter, Elizabeth had the middle bunk (once we determined it was safe to sleep on despite missing a piece) and I had the task of climbing to the top bunk.

The trip was long and extremely hot, but fun as well. We met a couple of other Americans who were also heading to Ukraine. The four of us entertained each other helping to keep our minds off of the tremendous heat in the train.

Oh yeah, that 10 hour border stop that I mentioned before, the one where they change the wheel sets on the train, yeah that wasn't exactly what happened. We reached Krakow, Poland at about 6 or so in the morning on Tuesday and just didn't move anywhere for 7 hours. For no apparent reason. We weren't even at the station platform, we were in the middle of the train yard with nothing in sight other than concrete cable poles and car trains. The actual border crossing and wheel change only took about two hours.

Once we got into Kiev on Wednesday morning we went straight to the ticket counter to get tickets on to Moscow. Elizabeth stood in line and worked on getting the tickets while I went back and forth to the currency exchange counter trying to get the right amount of Ukrainian Grivna to actually purchase the tickets. We were able to get the tickets for that evening and the woman at the counter even assured Elizabeth that she was giving us the least expensive tickets available. As we boarded the train we realized that the least expensive available was not the same as the least expensive. We once again were in a kupe car. This one was much more roomy and even had A/C! The ride to Moscow seemed to fly by.

And so here we are at the Lenin Hostel. We just finished dinner and are contemplating evening plans. So there you go. More later...