I was babbling along endlessly, as I usually do, when she finally snapped. My only question is, what took her so long?

NOTE: We both know that this incident didn’t actually occur in Siberia, but where it did happen is in dispute. She says it was on the street in Bergen, Norway but I contend it was probably much sooner than that — possibly as early as the plane between Denver and Iceland.

 

The train has been very different since Denise and Lars and several other couples disembarked in Irkutsk. Everyone on our car used to keep their compartment doors open and greet each other and talk in the aisle. The new people aboard the train keep their doors closed and don’t speak at all.

This morning I noticed a young dad playing with his toddler daughter at the end of the car. I spoke to him little later as he walked past our door.

“Do you speak English?”

“Yes. Speak English.”

“Your daughter is beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

That was the extent of our conversation. A little later they were at the end of the aisle again and I tried to get the little girl to wave to me. She wouldn’t.

Later this morning Rustam told us we would be stopping at Zabaykalsk, the next station, for seven hours. Thirty minutes before we arrived a young woman stopped at our door and asked — in a perfect British accent — if we knew anything about Zabaykalsk.

At first we both thought she was asking us for advice, but it turns out she was was offering to show us around town and take us to lunch. She was also the mother of the beautiful little girl.

The young couple, Irina and Evgeny, and their little girl, Sophie, are Russian. He’s 30, she’s 28 and Sophie is 18 months old. Irina was a teacher before Sophie was born and seemed pleased to learn that she had a British accent. Evgeny owns a company in China that sells mining equipment.

They took us out of the station and down the street to a local restaurant to treat us to an authentic Russian lunch. Jamie kept her composure, but I’m pretty sure she was freaking out on the inside and wondering if these people were really members of the Russian mafia intent on kidnapping her and selling her into a life of sex slavery. (UPDATE: Jamie just read this entry and said, “Yes, I was freaking out on the inside.)

Lunch was great. Sure, there were huge flies constantly circling and occasionally landing on our food, but this is an adventure, damn it, an adventure. We had two soups (including borscht), several salads (beet, potato, and cabbage), meat balls boiled in a doughy pastry, and tea. And, of course, we had conversation.

Irene and Eugene both grew up in Chita, Russia, which was a station we stopped at late last night. He got a degree in petrochemical engineering in Beijing and they lived there for three years, but hated the smog and congestion in the big city so they moved to a smaller town on the Yellow Sea. Now they’re on their way back home to China after taking Sophie to meet all four of her Russian grandparents for the first time.

They told us Zabaykalsk is a town full of very prosperous people, but holy freakin’ moly, it looks just like Tijuana. There’s a big project right outside the railway station and, to repeat the question Jamie asked several days ago, are they putting it up or tearing it down? Really tough to tell.

We went to the drug store with our new friends and they bought us a small bottle of tasty, healthy pomegranate drink. I think it was intended as a show of friendship, but Jamie and I are looking pretty rough after five days without showers, so they may have thought we both needed a little pick-me-up.

Lunch was delicious and they were warm and welcoming. Meeting new, interesting people really is the best part of traveling.

The counterpart of that, I guess, is that new, interesting people get to meet us. Evgeny stopped on the street to get directions from a group of people. He told us later that they had asked if we were Americans and wanted to know if they could have their photos taken with us. We would have been happy to do it had he told us at the time, but we wondered how they knew we were Americans since we hadn’t spoken. Irina laughed and said our appearance screams, “American!” She didn’t (or perhaps, wouldn’t) elaborate. We’re looking around the waiting room here at the train station trying to figure out what might set us apart and the only visual clue we can figure out is that we’re both wearing baseball caps, but no one else is. Guess this will just remain another one of those unsolved mysteries.

The photo above shows Lake Baikal, where Lars and Denise are spending three days before catching another train for Mongolia.

It’s huge. I knew it was the world’s deepest lake, but I had no idea it was so large nor so beautiful. We’ve been rolling along its southern and eastern edges for hours now.

I looked it up on Wikipedia and learned some amazing things: Lake Baikal is the seventh largest lake in the world in terms of surface area, but it is so remarkably deep that it is easily the most voluminous freshwater lake in the world. It‘s also thought to be the world’s oldest lake at 25 million years.

How much water does Lake Baikal hold? If you were to add up all of the fresh surface water in the world — every lake, every river, every stream, every swamp, and every marsh, plus all the water contained in every living creature, and every drop of water found in the earth’s atmosphere — you’d wind up with water enough to fill a cube approximately 22 miles on each side. Lake Baikal accounts for a whopping 22% of it — twice as much as Lake Superior, five times more than Lake Michigan, and, in fact, more than all of North America’s Great Lakes combined.

And here’s a chart that shows you how deep Lake Baikal is compared to the world’s other “great” lakes.

Incredible, huh?

I often refer to my position in life as “slum lord”. Trust me, the rental houses I own in San Bernardino are like Peter the Great’s Summer Palace compared to the average house we see as we roll through Siberia.

Most of the houses are ramshackle hovels. They’re made of rough logs, unfinished boards, irregular chunks of plywood and misshapen pieces of corrugated tin. Many of their roofs are falling in. Interestingly, no matter how awful the condition of the houses may be, many owners give them colorful paint jobs or add bright, decorative shutters to the windows. Electric blue seems to be the color of choice.

The people appear to be desperately poor. We often wonder how they eke out their livings here in the middle of nowhere. As I’m writing this, Jamie said, “Half the time I can’t tell if they’re putting something up or tearing something down.”

It appears that all the Soviet-era buildings are falling down. Every town seems to have a couple large red brick or concrete factories that have been abandoned and are in various stages of decay.

I said to Lars and Denise the other day that the difference between the lifestyles they lead in Germany and we lead in the United States are this close (holding my thumb and forefinger just a smidgen apart), but the difference between the four of us and the people in Siberia is immeasurable. They wholeheartedly agreed.

I’ve tried to take photos from the train to show what I mean, but none of them ever look as poor as the reality. Trust me, reality is worse than this photo indicates.

If our Ginsberg godchildren are reading this, get down and kiss the ground and thank god that your great grandparents escaped from Russia and made it to America.
_________________________

“What time is it?” is a frequently asked question out here in Siberia. And there’s a very odd reason no one seems to know the correct answer.

The Russian railroads all run on Moscow time. So the clock on the train and even the clocks at the stations tell you the correct time in Russian capital way off in the west instead of the local time here in the east.

The printed schedule and the clock aboard the train may say we’re arriving in a particular city at 17:51 and the clock atop the tower at the train station may confirm that time, but if you walk outside the station it suddenly, miraculously becomes 21:51 local time.

It doesn’t matter that we’ve traveled through four or five time zones to the east, the time in Moscow is the time on the train. This was very confusing to us because the farther east we went, the earlier it seemed to get dark. Jamie finally said, “Why is it getting dark at 4 o’clock?”

Reminds me of the lyrics from the old Chicago song, “Does anybody really know what time it is?”

And the answer out here is probably not.

 

There’s one thing you can say for Siberia: There’s a lot of it.

It covers more than  million square miles. Russia’s by far the largest nation on earth and Siberia accounts for nearly 80% of its territory. In fact, almost 10% of Earth’s land surface is Siberia.

That being said, I realize that we’re not seeing much of it from the train and that railroad tracks are usually laid on the flattest ground possible. So that being said, I assume that Siberia may well have towering mountains and deep canyons that we’ll neer see.

Nevertheless, we are now well into our third day on the train and the scenery varies very slowly.

The first day was all forest. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of forest. The second day was also forest, but a bit more of it had been cleared away for farms. Here on the third day the ratio of farmland to forest has reversed so that there’s more farmland than forest, but other than that the landscape remains the same.

Mile after mile after mile of land that’s flatter than yesterday’s Coke. It’s really quite pretty, like the slightly undulating hills of eastern Montana, but far greener with more water and trees.

I’m sure someone who’s familiar with the territory would recognize landmarks, but to a stranger it all looks the same.

I’m pretty sure we have enough money to feed ourselves all the way to Beijing, but I’m a little paranoid about it. So I get off at every stop in an attempt to find an ATM.

After looking at the train schedule I realized that we were going to stop at the largest city between Moscow and Beijing at 3:00 a.m. It was a long stop, 20 minutes or thereabouts, so I determined that I should get out and scour the station for an ATM.

When the train pulled into the station I jumped up, pulled on my pants and threw on my shoes. Jamie jerked awake and mumbled, “Where are you going?” When I told her she said, “I’m going with you.”

There’s no arguing with this woman when she’s halfway awake, so I said OK.

But when we got to the end of the aisle she said, “I’m really dizzy. I think I’ll go back to bed.”

Fine, I thought. I don’t need her screaming in my ear that we’re out of time and we’re going to miss the train 30 seconds after we get off the train.

She headed back to the compartment and I took off in the other direction, running like a maniac up and down stairs and into the main station in search of an ATM that could solve our problem. I found one and it actually had an English-language option. This, I thought, is our lucky day (or night).

I slipped in my card, pushed all the right buttons and expected money to come pouring out, but instead got a message that said, “Transaction cancelled.” I tried it again. Same result.

Crap. Even I knew I was running out of time at this point, so I ran back to the train covered in sweat and remembering with great regret that it had no showers, and slipped into our compartment where I found Jamie on the floor gasping for air as if she’d lost our passports again.

She said she had passed out just as I ran off the train and had crawled down the aisle to our compartment. She was drenched in even more sweat than I was. I got her sweaty clothes off of her, got her some water and put her back into bed.

All I could think was, what the hell do we do if this turns out to be a medical emergency and we have no money out here in the middle of Siberia? Luckily, she slept through the night and felt absolutely fine this morning except for a scrape on her knee from falling in the aisle.

Whew. That was a close one.

UPDATE: I think I’ve figured out the problem with my ATM card. The maximum withdrawal at the Marriott Grand’s ATM machine was 3000 rubles. I made the maximum withdrawal twice, one right after the other in rapid order. I’m not sure if I notified Wells Fargo that we were going to be out of the country, so my theory is that they saw two maximum withdrawals within two minutes in Russia and some computer screamed, “Fraud alert! Fraud alert!” If that’s the case, I won’t be able to fix this until we get to Beijing.

Jamie always accuses me of getting into conversations with every stranger I meet and there’s some truth to it. OK, there’s a lot of truth to it.

In this case, as soon as we boarded the train in Moscow and put our suitcases in our compartment, I walked down the hall and introduced myself to the only other people in the car.

Lars and Denise are a young couple from Germany. She’s a air traffic controller and he travels the world working for Nokia. Her mother is Polish, her father came from Zaire, she was born in Poland, but grew up in Germany. She speaks Polish, German, a little Russian and they both speak English with just a touch of an accent.

We usually end up hanging out with them on the platform at every stop and Denise occasionally helps translate our conversations with Rustam, the attendant in our car.

We stopped at some unknown, unmemorable city this morning and as soon as we stepped off onto the platform Lars said, “This looks like a big station. Let’s see if we can find you an ATM or a currency exchange.”

Denise and Jamie looked horrified, but we tore down the stairs and into the main terminal. We saw no ATM machines, so Lars said, “Let’s see if we can find one outside.”

Out we went, across the parking lot toward an official looking building. I opened the door and a group of women with curlers in their hair stared at me like I was from another planet. It was a beauty salon. We quickly walked to the other side of the huge parking lot and still couldn’t find what we needed. Lars and I agreed that we could probably find one just down the street, but time was running out so we hurried back to our train (much to Jamie’s and Denise’s relief).

Oh, well, I really appreciated Lars’ efforts. He’s even offered to lend us money, but I’ve assured him that we won’t need it.

Denise and Lars are on a three week vacation and this trip has been her dream since she was a child. Their route is slightly different than ours. They’re getting off the train tomorrow night in Irkutsk and then spending three days with a Russian family in Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake and the only real tourist attraction out in this neck of the woods. Then they’ll catch the next Trans-Siberian train down through Mongolia and on to Beijing.

Our train, on the other hand, bypasses Mongolia but goes through Manchuria on its way to the Chinese capital.

They’re very nice people. We like them a lot and we’ll miss them when they get off the train tomorrow night.

 

If you’re old enough (unfortunately, I am), you may remember when Americans sent Care Packages to the poor and downtrodden overseas. I’m embarrassed to say that that display of generosity has been reversed here in Siberia.

Lars and Denise got off the train very early this morning in Irkutsk. Rustam knocked on our compartment door at 7:30 a.m. and said he had something for us. He pulled a plastic bag from behind his back and revealed that Lars and Denise had left us their own special care package — candy bars, bagels, cheese, a bag of apples, and best of all, a special Moscow-to-Beijing hat they knew I wanted, but didn’t have enough cash to purchase.

Thanks, guys. How very kind of you.

Please come visit us in the United States.

I swear we’re not destitute. We’ll have all the food you can eat.

 

Jamie picked up an interesting new mannerism on our flight from Iceland to Norway.

The flight attendant brought us the breakfast menu and I chose one item. She looked surprised and said, “You only want one thing?”

“Can I have more than one?”

“You can have everything on the menu.”

“Then bring me everything on the menu.”

She responded by saying, “Yep!”, giving me a quick smile, a thumbs up, and making a little sucking/clicking noise with her cheek.

Ever since that moment, Jamie has responded to everything she likes with the same mannerism.

It’s funnier than hell. Makes me laugh every time she does it.