Boots on the Loose

It is three thousand four hundred kilometres – a two full-day journey – to get from Irkutsk to Yekaterinburg. It is the most amount of time at one go that we will be spending on a train on the entire trip.

As our train silently begins to accelerate out of the Irkutsk station, we exchange broken French-English-Russian pleasantries with our roommate for the night, Natalia. A few minutes in, she motions for me to leave the room (with the word garçon in there) so she can have some privacy (girls ok of course) to prepare herself for the journey.

The first night offers us views of a landscape very similar to that of Mongolia’s. Still very much coming out of winter, everything is mostly brown. Some trees, plenty of farmland, beat up little villages dotted everywhere. What a sight it must be in the heart of winter. I just might have to come back one day to see it for myself.

We wake up the next morning to a landscape that is starting to go a little bit greener. Overnight we have been transported a thousand kilometres east into the next time zone, after all.

So many people love to load themselves onto a bus, or train, or car… And then almost immediately close their eyes and sleep the journey away.

Not me.

I love to watch the whole thing go by if I can. Having to sleep while in motion is one of the great disadvantages of doing the Trans-Siberian train in not nearly enough time.

Natalia offloads herself around mid day. We say goodbye. And shortly after, Serge enters our room. Similar to Natalia, he knows a bit of French. So we learn a few things from him too.

Train after train zips past us in the opposite direction at a startling difference in speed. Perhaps one every ten minutes. This is actually one of the busiest sections of train track in the world and they are almost all transporting coal. But, as long as we are all recycling our plastic bags at home, everything will be just fine, right?

The landscape becoming increasingly flatter, greener, wetter, and much much warmer, we make our way to the restaurant car for some cards and a beverage.

As evening approaches, the train trundles along relentlessly. We gain yet another time zone. There are in fact TEN time zones across Russia. The train eventually stops in a town called Novosibirsk. “New Siberia”.

Serge leaves the train and we step down onto the platform after him to stretch our legs for a minute. Baby mosquitoes are buzzing around everywhere. The sign says it is twenty eight degrees out. No wonder the train car is feeling like an oven inside.

No new roommate joins us, it looks like we may be in the clear to have the compartment all to ourselves for the night.

As we leave Novosibirsk, we take a bridge across the Ob River. The river you’ve never heard of that is actually one of the longest in the world.

Eventually the sun sets and we go to bed, the day being at least a couple hours longer than it would be if you stood in one place all day.

Imagine this for a second: you and two other people rent a hotel room that has four beds in it. At around 3:00 a.m. someone arrives at the hotel. The owner of the hotel opens the door to your room while you are sleeping, and the new guest makes up his bed and goes to sleep beside you.

Obviously it is not a room you are renting on the Trans-Siberian train. We wake up to another new roommate, this one the least chatty so far. But he does make an effort to say goodbye a couple hours later when he disembarks in a town called Tyunmen.

One final five hour stretch with no more stops, and the revolving door keeps twirling as we meet our fourth and final roommate of the leg. This one will be outlasting us on the journey as he heads all the way to Moscow.

We pull up to the station in Yekaterinburg. It is finally our turn to leave the train.

How to Save Humanity

I once lived in a relatively nice looking, but poorly built apartment building built in the 1920s. One of those wooden, three story walk ups. With next to no closets, curved ceilings, and paper thin walls and floors.

For an entire year, a full-blown monster lived above me. It walked on all fours, three of them were actually wooden peg legs. It had a cold storage room in its suite where it would keep cadavers which it needed to feed on to survive.

The monster was nocturnal. And so every night it would leave the house after dark, and hunt for its next victim. Every few nights or so, it would find one. And at around 5:30am, I would be woken by this beast bringing it home and putting it into cold storage. Cloppity, cloppity, clop. Slide, slide, slide. Cloppity clop. Slide. Bang. Cloppity. Clop.

And on and on.

I put up with this for months and years on end. Why? I don’t know. I guess I was afraid to face the thing for fear of being its next victim.

But then early one morning, I had finally had enough. A life without proper sleep is not a life worth living.

I marched up the stairs (unlike one of those new glass things where you don’t even have that option). I banged on the door. I prepared myself for death as I waited.

Who opened the door? Not a monster at all. Some cute, innocent girl. Apparently getting ready for work. She wore high heels to work. And she stored stuff under her bed. With the lack of closet space and all.

She was incredibly apologetic. She even later went on to slide a gift certificate of apology under my door.

* * *

One of the most notable and important things about travelling is the people you meet. The local people, that is. You get to Ethiopia and you learn not everyone has big bellies with flies crawling around their eyeballs.

You get to Libya, and no one is running around with swords in the air. They have a job and a family and like to hang out with friends on weekends.

You go to Mongolia and they like drinking fermented mare’s milk, and hanging out in tents heated with fires made from camel dung. Well, almost like us, but not quite I guess.

Point being, we are all human, we are all pretty much the same. And in the end, we all pretty much want the same things in life.

If we weren’t out seeing the world and meeting people face to face in person? My god, the world would be out to get us. All they would want to do is kill us and destroy our way of living. If we didn’t have footage of what these bastards look like, we would assume they walk on all fours and eat human bodies. There be dragons, as they used to say.

Here’s what I would do to save humanity if I were president and had the power.

Note that its humanity in need of saving, not the planet. The planet will be fine. We could suck the oil wells dry and cover the surface with nothing but plastic bags and cockroaches, and the planet will happily sort itself out. It just might need a few million years to do it. Or something insignificant like that.

I would tax my people, and pay for every single person I was in charge of to spend their eighteenth year travelling the world. They would be required to stay on every single continent for a minimum amount of time.

That way everyone gets a chance to see how other people in the world actually live. So that my people see there are no more monsters out there than there are at home. Note that my plan relies on the fact that there are actually fewer monsters at home than we think too. Which there are.

And we are all after pretty much the same things, and are all pretty much the same.

If all my fellow presidents followed my example, I do believe humanity might have a chance to survive.

Trip Update: Yekaterinburg, Russia

It is a short cab ride from the train station to the Gold Hotel where we are staying. The cab pulls up to a typically ugly, soviet-era building. No signs, no address. Very confused, we try to ask someone if they know about our hotel. They don’t so we show them the phone number and they are kind enough to call for us.

A couple minutes later, out the door we are standing in front of pops a guy in his mid twenties. He speaks very little English, and shows us the way up to his business on the second floor.

As is the case in many of these buildings, the outside is very poorly kept, and so is the inside. But as soon as you get into one of the suites, everything changes for the better. In this particular one, he has converted it to having eight individual (and very tight) rooms for guests. A good little business he has setup for himself.

Yekaterinburg is Russia’s fourth largest city. It actually only has about a million and a half residents, but has a good deal of significance to it. Including being the capital of the Ural region, the birthplace of Boris Yeltsin, and the place where the Romanovs (the last Tsars in Russia) were executed back in 1917.

After settling in, we head out for a walk around town and some dinner. Yekaterinburg is very walkable. There is a large pond (more like a lake) in the centre with rivers flowing in and out. People are out for their evening strolls all over the walkways that surround it.

After a delicious dinner at a slightly fancier (but very reasonable) restaurant called “pashtet” we find ourselves walking past a very small, modern art gallery. It turns out, Yekaterinburg is actually full of galleries and museums. We poke our heads in and before we know it, we are touring through.

Everyone we meet everywhere in the town is SO incredibly nice. Honestly, some of the nicest people any of us have ever met anywhere. Talk about destroying our presumptions and reservations about the Russian people.

Every conversation starts with an apology from them for their bad English, followed by an apology from us for knowing all but no Russian. And then a question from them along the lines of – why on earth would you be visiting Yekaterinburg, anyway?? And then complete and utter thankfulness for coming to visit their city and their country.

Truly humbling.

More wandering we do past some AWESOME old brick buildings. If they were in any other country, they would be fully restored and transformed into microbreweries by now. And then down along the river. The mosquitoes are becoming relentless as darkness approaches.

Up to a Scottish-style pub for a nightcap before bed. I wonder if a Scotsman has ever set foot in the place.

About halfway through our drinks, Vlad and his friend Maxime approach us and say, “Ah – that is English you are speaking.” And after only a half hour of chatting, for the first time in my life, we all feel close enough that hugs goodbye are in order.

The conversation starts with the usual orders as described above. But then it quickly moves on. Vlad’s English is very good. We find out Maxime works for Volvo, and Vlad works in tech serve. I later get a high five when I tell him I’m a programmer.

We ask him what he thinks of English people. He brings up that he thinks it is funny how we smile so much. Because we don’t always mean it. It doesn’t feel authentic. When Russians smile, they mean it.

It is a great point.

He asks us what we want to know about Russians. We have a list that is a mile long, but of course we are all drawing blanks in the moment. So I resort to going there.

I bring up politics. But almost immediately we have a good laugh about the fact that I did. Almost like we all understand that it should be a really touchy subject. But at the same time we all know that Russia and England and Canada and ISIS and Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and NATO and bombs and cold wars and fighter jets and communism and democracy and … have absolutely nothing to do with us four individuals getting to know each other.

Vlad does answer my question and that is basically what he says.

After hugs goodbye, we leave him with our email addresses in case one day he makes it to England or Canada.

The next day is our one and only full day in Yekaterinburg and there is a lot to squeeze in. At Vlad’s suggestion, we start by having breakfast in the restaurant on the thirty seventh floor of Yekaterinburg’s tallest building. Champagne and caviar in Russia? Yep. Why not.

We make our way to the “Church on Blood” afterwards. It is a beautiful Byzantine-style church that was recently built on the site of where the Romanov family was killed in 1917.

For some reason I still snicker at the literalness of the name. They even chose red as the colour of the tiles in the basement to represent blood.

Onward to the Boris Yeltsin museum which was also very recently completed. It is up there in some of the best museums I’ve ever seen.

A quick refresher: Gorbachev was leading the communist party back in the eighties and very early nineties. Yeltsin was also a member of the communist party, but walked out due to disagreements he had with policies. The museum shows how clearly that pivotal moment was in Russian history.

Yeltsin eventually went on to become Russia’s first democratically elected prime minister in nineteen ninety one. He was leader until he voluntarily stepped down in nineteen ninety nine, due to health issues. It was a very tough eight years to lead Russia. Clearly.

He appointed an up and coming Vladimir Putin to be his replacement. I guess I knew there has only been two leaders in Russia since nineteen ninety one (well actually there’s also this Medvedev that’s hanging around somewhere). But somehow the fact struck me as I walked through the museum.

I hate to say it (you really should see how beautifully done this museum is), but the whole thing is undoubtedly a giant piece of propaganda. No doubt, Boris Yeltsin was a great leader and a great man and he deserves to have a museum made for him. But the reality is, the massive amounts of money it took to build this beautiful thing came from the current government.

And the end goal is, to point out how bad communism was. And in the process to associate the current government with the great Boris Yeltsin.

But however you paint the picture, it is a fucking great museum.

On to the last big activity for the day, we head to the theatre to see the Yekaterinburg symphony play. A trip to Russia of course wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the symphony.

A fairly quaint building, almost dare I say, slightly resembling a high school gymnasium in the performance area. But actually much nicer than that.

The music is fantastic. Only three songs are actually played and have some relation to Don Juan (though I’m not nearly cultured enough to tell you how). During the second piece, a fifty-two-person choir comes on and joins the orchestra. There are easily over a hundred people on stage. Pretty spectacular.

We may still in fact be (very slightly) east of the Ural Mountains. That is, the disputable divide between Asian Russia and European Russia. But make no mistake about it, Yekaterinburg is very much a European-style city.

I’m really glad we took the time to stop and see Yekaterinburg. Clearly, not many tourists do. Somehow it feels like the perfect stepping stone as we progress physically and culturally from east to west.

I want to say that when I’m not around it, I forget how great the lifestyle is in a European city. But that’s not the case. It only slips my mind. I know that to be true because any time I do get back to a European city, something deep deep down feels right to be there.

Thanks for the reminder, Yekaterinburg.