i was very blessed this summer to be able to go on an epic month-long journey with my sister maria: the trans-siberian railroad! its been THE item on our sibling-bonding bucket list for as long as i can remember! after a very enjoyable couple weeks at home in canada after a study-filled first year of medical school, my sister and i made our separate paths to moscow, me arriving with little more than some short shorts, as airlines recently seem to becoming more adept at loosing luggage. not to worry though, turns out short shorts are the russian way! we spent three glorious days in moscow – perusing shopping malls, grocery stores, the kremlin, subway restaurants, more grocery stores, and a ubiquitous and amazing russian cafeteria chain called mu-mu (they have life-sized, ride-able cows out front if you’re ever there and looking for something to get up on).
moscow is superlative central: home to more billionaires than any other city in the world; most expensive city in the world, and… well that’s enough! some particularly vivid moscow memories include peering at vladimir lenin’s wax encrusted corpse in his mausoleum in red square, being refused entry to the epic cathedral of christ the savior (recent site of a protest concert by activist russian punk rockers pussy riot) because i was “immodestly dressed” (the short shorts), and a whole lot of walking! my valiant sister also managed to book us all our train tickets across russia in russian (the agent thought we were insane for wanting to go to siberia)! maria’s russian skillz were lifesaving as it turns out absolutely no one speaks any english and you are guaranteed to be indefinitely lost if you can’t read cyrillic. thanks for saving my life so many times maria 🙂 she also taught me a lot about russian history- those tsars, those commies, those oligarchs… those old believers that nobody knows about…
our first of many train rides was one night to the east to niznhi novgorod, where my sister happened to spend a semester a couple years ago! what a nice little city – it used to be the capital of russia! a highlight there was being invited over for dinner by a middle-aged english teacher who maria worked with when she lived in niznhi. first question asked: “do you like mayonnaise?!?” we ate a lot of mayonnaise that night, and it never tasted so good. this particular woman also had a pet crow in the house and a propensity for telling really interesting stories! also there was a girl who came to learn some english from us, and the english teacher’s son who is apparently great at english but refuses to speak it (we bonded over this fact). over the eight hours of deep conversation there were many champagne toasts; we all were required to give at least one! we also went to maria’s old university, where she regaled me with tales of the horrid soups that the communist kitchen commanders would force them to eat lest they die out in the cold. we snuck into some academic buildings with some stray cats and managed to escape before security locked the place up for the rest of the summer.
the next train ride was a 24 hour one, to yekaterinburg in the heart of the ural mountains. most of our train rides we took the platskart, or “most budget” cars, which are 60 people sleeping in one big train car room. actually pretty fun! (at first at least 🙂 those were sold out for this particular trip though, so we ended up being stuck in a “kupe” compartment with an aging pervert. i’ll spare you the details but lets just say i couldn’t step out of the compartment for ten seconds without this guy making maria really uncomfortable. we finally arrived in yekarterinburg, having no idea what to expect, but knowing that anything would be better than the reality on that train. the hostel we booked turned out not to exist, but no problem! our 24 hours in yekaterinburg were quite enjoyable. we chanced upon a real tgi fridays, and decided we deserved juicy burgers! we also found what is probably one of the nicest shopping malls in russia. more uniquely, we visited the church that marks the spot where the last tsar, nicholas, and his family (except anastasia?) were murdered by the bolsheviks. the church was only completed a little over a decade ago, and it and the family burial site have since become something of a pilgrimage destination for those in the russian orthodox church who view the tsar as being a little closer to g-d than the rest of us.
continued in part 2, here.