Patamateria

It’s now Sunday April 17th (Happy birthday Maddy!) and a lot has happened in the last few days. So this will be a long post – or maybe I’ll make it two…

We got on the train a few days ago in Moscow, had 4 nights on board and were actually quite comfortable. Until the Provodnista (carriage attendant) and maybe other staff, decided to heat us up to about 29C. If you’ve ever been on a train with windows hermetically sealed with expanded foam, in groups of four in a compartment (luggage under the bottom seats/bunks and two more bunks suspended above, all this heated to 29C – but considerably more if you’re in a top bunk – then you understand exactly what our conditions were for 4 days. The train stops at intervals, sometimes for 2 minutes, sometimes for 25 or occasionally longer. At the longer stops the provodnista would open the doors, stand outside and we’d file past to freedom and cool air. And ice-creams. The platforms at the longer stops would fill with local men and women selling vodka and other bottled drinks, home-made pasties, or rolls filled with potato or meat. Also dried fish, borsch, blini, fruit, and a variety of dried foods that you’d get on supermarket shelves. I don’t know what we’d have done without them – I bought rolls, fruit juice, apples and oranges – and of course ice-cream. Anything to cool the throat that was now a problem.

And the time differences – changing of time zones! Imagine a train travelling from Moscow to Beijing, travelling through a number of time zones, but the train times – and the time on every station platform clock on the way – are Moscow time! This would be just about manageable, but the dining car operates on local time. So by the time you get near Irkutsk, which is 5 hours ahead of Moscow, it could be e.g. 4am Moscow time but the sun is up and breakfast is on the table. Or not, depending on the mood of dining car staff. Worse still, if you have kept your watch to Moscow time so you can follow the timetable pinned to the wall and know which city you’re stopping at next, then at 8pm you won’t get dinner as the dining car is asleep and it’s 1am local time. The secret is to ask Tony which station we’re at and keep local time! The whole thing is obviously done solely to keep strangers out of the dining car.

All the while, we were passing through the most stunning landscape. Strangely, it was colder, icier, snowier near Moscow than in Siberia! Is this climate change turning everything on its head? The silver birch from the Baltic states accompanied us across hundreds and hundreds of kilometers and towards Siberia became a little interspersed with firs instead of aspen. The houses – mainly of wood – were in various states of dilapidation or reconstruction. I think what struck me was how close some of it looked to the set from ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’….. right down to the vegetable patch and midden! rivers were frozen, snow patches evident here and there, until Siberia where the sun shone (and made our compartments even hotter!) and we could get out at stations without fleeces. Crazy.

A few days before all this, some of our group came down with sore throats, coughs etc, so when it reached me I made sure I took my inhaler and paracetamol, throat pastilles etc. It might have had a chance of clearing up if we hadn’t been breathing each other’s 29C heated carbon dioxide for 4 days on the train. Ah well.

But back to the provodnistas. Twenty minutes before each stop, they lock the toilets at either end of the carriage and open them again after. Often the one next door to their room would be locked – for their use only! I got up one night, crept along the corridor in my PJs to find the door locked. Just then we pulled into a station so I stayed near the door to get some air. It just had to be the longest stop – about 40 minutes, and think it might have been Tyumen, Siberia’s oldest town dating from 14th century and now becoming important on account of the oil and gas discovered in the oblast/region. Anyway, after leaving there, and hoping the toilets would be opened, we went a few minutes down the road and stopped again for ages, about 20 minutes. Finally, after sitting on the wooden lid of the rubbish container near the open door (I opened it) of the rattling space between carriages, for about one and a quarter hours, I finally got to the loo. One or two of the group were also prowling – all this was about 2.30 am onwards – and trying to keep cool.

Other memories of the train that are forever burned into my mind? The camaraderie – playing cards/Uno in the dining car, visiting each other in our cells, partying and chatting about allsorts, falling out of the train everytime it stopped at a station, stopping at Yekaterinburg late at night – and still getting off for a bit of cool air, the staff in the dining car…(more of that later), lining up at windows to take photos, looking for the obelisks that mark the border with Siberia and the halfway point to Beijing… and finding neither, sharing food and drink and sometime meds, the sound of ‘Life of Brian’ from next door (Ciaran’s laptop?) which lulled us to sleep, sleeping with the door wide open to get any movement of carbon dioxide–laden air we could, sleeping on top of our valuables to safeguard them, buying water and jam blinis from the rattling trolley that trundled the length of the train several times a day – operated by the only smiling lady amongst the staff. Our efforts to get the provodnista to turn down the heat were unsuccessful until a Russian man also complained – then it happened! Things got hotter still in the dining car one afternoon and evening, where the staff tried to show their disapproval of our efforts to spend our roubles on their food and drink by turning up the heating to the mid-30Cs. I believe there was a stand off before the staff capitulated. They were wearing more clothing and nearly passing out, so turned it down.

Having said all that, it was really evident that the communist regime died 20 years ago (witness the killer heels on some station staff!) but those born into the regime and indoctrinated over decades are finding it so difficult to adjust. Old habits and work practices take a long time to change, and from the moment I entered Russia I’ve been aware of instances of resentment, distrust of foreigners, and unwillingness to cooperate or even provide a service. The negativity sits on you like a heavy blanket.

Which brings me again to the dining car staff! Four of them, supervised by a strict looking woman who occupied one of the tables with her laptop, her files, invoices and calculator. The cook was an unsmiling younger woman who had no difficulty breaking up a fight between two drunks from 3rd class (we were 2nd, way superior). A very thin man who appeared now and again, and the smiley lady from the trolley service. There were two menus in the whole dining carriage; when you entered, you would either be ignored (I sat and read a book for over an hour and wasn’t approached) or there’d be a sigh and defeated slump of shoulders: ‘Oh God, not people wanting to eat… what a pain..’ Other times it would be staff mealtime (lots of other times) and we’d not even get a menu. Russians always got served first. The menu was in Russian and English but sometimes you didn’t get what you ordered. Other times you’d be told it wasn’t available. Nyet. Apparently the service is a franchise, in which case some customer service training might help to make it more profitable. On our last morning, the Madam appeared on and off in stripey nightdress, sleepy hair and no make up. She then eventually changed into her ‘don’t mess with me’ black suit and grim face. I managed to put together the words for fried eggs and bread and got that, but couldn’t make myself understood about milk in coffee. I said the words but they didn’t work.

Starting in St Petersburg we’ve been very aware of unfriendliness – even arrogance – from some people (but not all), and this continued till we got off in Irkutsk. By this time, I was almost resigned to never seeing a smile from most of the people we encounter, so it was lovely to step into another world in this far-flung outpost in Siberia!