day 101, train to Irkutsk

After the most amazing midnight stroll through the red square I woke up a bit before everyone else to sort myself out with some shopping ready for the 3 and half days on the train. It were a bit tricky to work out what to get, a mixture of shit that needed to be hydrated, fresh fruit, bread and nutella, sweets and chocolate and tea bags and water!  My eggs and bread had gone walkies overnight though scott and ali were kind enough to give me some eggs and kelly gave me some bread, so again ate like a king at breakfast, before boarding the bus to go to the train station. Everyone was up and about in time and we left on time, which meant we hung around the train station for a hour waiting for our platform to come up. Feeling round the camp was quiet excitement and a little nervousness of not knowing what exactly to expect. We boarded our train after a little fuss with our tickets and passports, no doubt pissing everyone off taking up most of the platform to have our picture with the train. Together we took up 3 and half cabins, hollie and kim sharing with 2 random Russian people and the rest of us together, I was sharing with Brian, the lovely irish bloke, and Seb and Nikki, the couple from Southampton. The first day was really cool, we got ourselves settled in and sorted our stuff out. The cabin was a normal 4 bed cabin, space enough to sit up on the bottom bunk, with a sort of harness to stop you falling off the top bunk. It wasn’t as nice as the train from st Petersburg to moscow but it was more then passable. We played a few card games, mostly shithead, and had a couple of drinks. This fat Russian man in a tracksuit who fucking stunk started trying to talk to us, who we immediately nicknamed boris, and he was stinking drunk and all. Imagine a stereo-typical,  middle aged, fat, drunk, ugly Russian and there you have boris. To begin with he was very friendly, showing us his tattoo, laughing, playing cards, having pictures and taking them. After a bit he became a bit tiresome and left us alone. We stopped at a place called Yaroslavl for half hour, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful cities on the Golden Ring, and celebrated it’s 1000 years in sep 2010, however we just saw the train station.  After a bit more cards and some people drinking, particularly lucas, Boris came back, this time a bit on the angry spectrum and wanted all pictures of him to be deleted. I was knackered from the day before so went to bed to finish my rebus book I started in Belgium, and thoroughly enjoyed it, then ended up chatting with Nikki, turns out we went to the same dance place when we were young, so spent a good hour or so playing the “do you know game”  before calling it a night.