Day 4: normal service resumed.
The stops were running on time, and to sufficient length for Babushka-brand shopping, we were starting to get into the real Siberia (stops today included Krasnoyarsk), and scenery-watching in the marshes, birches, and wide flat grasslands became a real treat. Also everyone was tired from the sun coming up at what our clocks said was before 4am; a lot of the group woke up for a while when the sun came up (even with the window shades closed), and then when promptly back to sleep an hour or two later.
Steve (guy from Perth) had a cold and slept most of the day; Dinesh is about 6’4″ and had no comfortable way to sleep; meanwhile Chu and Luan (two sisters in our cabin from Malaysia, but who live in Melbourne) had been going to bed at sensible times and even they spent half the day asleep. It was just the thing to do. There was hardly even a card game on offer, everyone was just floating about dreading the 5am start tomorrow in advance, and doing their own thing.
There was a solid consensus in the group that the younger provodnitsa was actually a nice person (or at least not rude and shouting all the time), and so Alice sat down and got me to pick some phrases out of our Russian book for her to learn. we even knew the younger girl’s name was Alyssia because the older spent a lot of time shouting at her to do this do that and do it a bit faster please. When the chance came she introduced herself, said she was from Australia, and that she was a journalist. Alyssia was amazed and poked her head back into her cabin to tell the Dragon lady this exciting news.
Or maybe they just thought we were going to write about the whole experience in some lavish colour-print Western newspaper.
But anyway Alice had made a friend and the Russian girl was amused when I pointed at them in turn saying ‘Alice, Alyssia, Alice, Alyssia’. That made the rest of the afternoon a bit nicer, a few more smiles being returned and so on. I can’t resist saying it again – we would have done better if we could speak more Russian. But we didn’t really make time to learn, despite having a phrasebook and a CD with the pronunciation in our possession.
Greg
