Transmongolian, part II (Thursday, 27.8)

Time here really loses its meaning, because for the most of the trip (i.e. inside Russian borders) the train time is in Moscow time but the sun rises every morning like an hour before yesterday, so it wasn't one or two times when during our card game session we would see sun rising e.g. at 4 A.M. After all, we were travelling towards east - the place from where the sun rises.

In the first few mornings I was up quite early, or at least none of the guys or girls had come out of their cabins. This was not such a good thing, as there is not so much to do alone, especially if using laptop was not an option and the scenery might be monotonous. For the whole trip I had the movie "District 9" on my laptop, but was unable to watch it now...grr!

It is basically just laying down, eating noodles, fruits, sausage, bread, tuna, cheese, plus a whole lot of the specialities what the old grannies were selling in the train stations, and talking to people and watching scenery in the afternoons. In the evening we take out the cards and the beer (at least the most of us anyway). Today's morning cheese (on 27.8) had been without a fridge for 36 hours or so. It looked kind of eatable so I ate it. Stomach is still working somehow after three hours, so maybe the foor safety regulations in Finland are an overkill :).

The bathrooms were okay considering the circumstances: there was usable water from a tap and the actual shitting can was intact and worked well (all "leftovers" were of course dropped onto the track). There was sometimes even toilet paper!

The conductors in our wagon were two Chinese guys, of which the other one talked a bit English and the other one was very small and talked only Chinese, but was very friendly and was always smiling and pulled some pranks on us every now and then. I tried a bit to polish my non-existent Chinese vocabulary with them. It was actually quite fun. One time I even managed to say to the small guy - at 11 P.M. with Yanjing beer bottle in my hand at some god-forsaken Uralish train station - that "I like to drink beer" (Wo xihuan he pijiu). The conductor, at least, had some fun then. The other time I spoke to the English talking guy, and always they were excited if one of us passengers came to talk to them. I showed the guy my collection of Finnish-Chinese translations, and he told me about - sometimes with the help of his handheld translator - about his wife and his upcoming one month vacation and that he didn't like to go e.g. to Shanghai because of the tourists (I can imagine if one spends 11 months in one week bits with westerners like us on a train, it might get a mighty bit boring and mentally exhausting). His work shifts and a good Beijing restaurant place were pretty clear to me also after the conversation. I even asked him to join us to play cards but he kindly refused as he was on duty, and didn't anyway like drinking that much. It was from these Chinese conductors that we could buy the two chinese brand beers - Tsingdao & Nanjing beer - for the price of 50 roubles (a tad over a euro). I found out from the English conductor that they themselves paid for those 18 roubles, so they have a pretty good business going on over there. It was surprising to find out that this guy actually lives quite close to our Tsinghua University in Beijing's Haidian district. Yeah, it was nice shatting and I bet he liked it too, because all he seemed to be doing was just sitting in his dark cabin (actually all the conductors did that, maybe they like it dark) fiddling about his cell phone. At the end of the trip I tipped both of the conductors with all the rubles I had left, of which they were naturally quite happy about.