Siberia

09:42 - Moscow time: we passed Yekaterinburg during the night. Now it is Siberian morning and it is raining. We passed a rain-washed town with a golden-roofed Orthodox church, some surprisingly new (post-Soviet) buildings, and a lot of collapsed industrial buildings and abandoned grain storage silos. 

The landscape is flat, with endless stands of silver birch trees, occasionally opening out to untouched and wild grassy plain. The train rumbles along at around 60mph. I suspect it is bracketed fore and aft by freight trains. East-bound freight trains pass every every few minutes - the trans-Siberian railway is a very busy train line.

It is post card time. All three of us are writing post cards or diaries. We just had a teach-in from Josie on how to write "Great Britain" in Russian: великобритания 

14:24 -  East of Ishym, on an absolutely featureless flat plain. We can see some woods in the far distance. And here is a town - Mangut.

I've downloaded and been trying to read E. F Gurdjieff's "Meetings with remarkable men" which I first read in the late 1980's. But much water has gone under the bridge since then, because today I find it pretentious and self-absorbed nonsense. For some reason I have vague memories of it being a worthwhile read. Also reading R.A Heinlein's rare travelogue "Tramp Royale", William Gibson's "Count Zero" and John le Carre's "Our kind of traitor". 

In the next compartment there is a Russian family with a little toddler boy. His gurgling, yelling and playing has enlivened our day and provided much entertainment, and his crying has hardly disturbed us. Last night our relationship with the youth with whom we are sharing a compartment took a step forward when we offered him some wine.His name is Alexei and he is a motor mechanic from Irkutsk. As had no English he had been completely unable to communicate with us - he talked to us in a desultory fashion through Josie, telling us that the train fare was a fifth of the air fare between Moscow and his home city.

18:13 local time (16:13 Moscow time)

The train trundles on across the endless plain. Grass almost to the horizon, and occasional stands of trees. Four or five huge thunderheads tower up over the late afternoon landscape. Here is a town approaching - some old and disused buildings, sidings and goods yards and long rakes of wagons and freight cars. Flats and gardens, pylons and wires. Garden sheds and allotments jumbled together, grey weather-beaten wood. Thunder is in the air, but we are stuck in an air-conditioned train. Every four or five minutes, an east-bound goods train passes.

21:40 local - Barabinsk
A stop in the late evening at a modern looking station. We were getting hungry as the train made its way ant-like across the endless plain. Glad we were to find that this station had lots of little kiosks selling food and such. Here for the first time we saw the old ladies selling dried fish on the platform. We bought from a pleasant and cheerful babushka, some tomatoes, little cucumbers, a box of chicken noodles, a load of bread, a long curly sausage and three deep-fried pasties - for R500, about £10.
The deep-fried pasties (basically doughnut mixture stuffed with egg, onion and potato) were so tasty I went back for more, buying two more with meat in, and a tin of beer. Total spend R700 - about £13.50. Not bad for an evening repast for three adults. At Barabinsk we were comprehensively assaulted by mosquitoes, and had to retreat to our compartment and shut the door. Nonetheless some mozzies managed to get in the compartment, and there were some bites.
Back on the train I stubbed my toe on the heating duct whilst making my way down the corridor. I noticed blood - what seemed to be a reasonable sized cut on my middle right toe, and a badly damaged nail. Treating it took some doing, as it was bleeding like a stuck pig. Dressing a middle toe yourself is no easy matter.
And the train rumbles on through the night.