Moscow - Ekaterinburg

The one task we had to accomplish in Moscow was seemingly simple: to pick up our train tickets from Real Russia's office. It of course turned out, however, to be a bit of an odyssey; having misunderstood the address, we ended up spending about 2 hours wandering round a random Moscow suburb in an attempt to find a building that did not exist. Getting out of the centre and into one of what I imagine neighbourhoods full of Communist tower blocks was interesting, but by the time we realised what our mistake had been we'd grown rather tired of Novoaleksandreevskaya Street and its environs. This, however, is what most of the real, non-touristy Moscow looks like:



Anyway, we did eventually manage to take possession of our grand-looking trans-Siberian railway tickets. They have little golden trains on them and are very pretty, which makes me quite excited. And so, tickets in hand, we boarded the train at Moscow Kazanskaya station on Tuesday afternoon. The first leg of our proper trans-Siberian journey was from Moscow to Ekaterinburg, a journey of about 26 hours through the traditional European centre of the Russian nation.

Each compartment in second class houses four people, and we were sharing with a very nice Russian chemistry professor who now works in the Netherlands but was heading back to Ekaterinburg to visit his parents. He spoke excellent English, which meant that we could have an interesting conversation that included more than the very limited phrases I have picked up from my 1991 Soviet era phrasebook (lovingly adopted from Haringey library). Our other companion rotated as the journey went on; when we woke up in the morning, the young man with terrible gelled hair who had initially been in the fourth berth had been replaced by an elderly gentleman with a wonderful briefcase and fur hat combo that made him look straight out of the fifties. He departed at Perm, and was replaced by Olga, a bubbly lady who I used my limited Russian to hold a basic conversation with and who gave us what might have been the nicest pear I have ever had.

Although this journey did not take us into Siberia, western Russia still looks pretty winter-tastic - everything is covered in snow and there are rows and rows of little dachas where Russians retire to escape from the city and pick berries. There were, of course, also some interesting commie factories and industrial cities, but for the majority of the journey the landscape was enticingly pretty, with. Although we spent a lot of time talking to our cabin-mates and most of the evening in the restaurant car (see next post), it was easy to kill time just looking out of the window at the winter wonderland outside. None of the Ukrainian slush here. Unfortunately fact that the train was moving and that there was quite a bit of dirt on the windows mean that the pictures don’t fully capture the landscape, but hopefully these will give with some indication of how pretty it is.