6 days in a "choo - choo"

6 days in the Trans Siberian express ( choo - choo ) form Beijing to Moscow.

I cannot believe it is June already. This means we are half way through our World Trip.  It has gone so fast! We   have left Asia and arrived in Europe - Russia/Moscow.  

 We have been in China for 2 months and remember this was my fathers choice, but I am certainly coming back to Beijing to learn more Chinese and to enjoy the fast and confusing life. The Chinese are so kind and helpful. There are many things to do and to discover. We have already done so much, but we're not finished. We loved eating noodles with chopsticks and with the locals. We felt very safe, never a moment of
unsafety. I will also miss all the sports we did, every early morning exercising with Steven and to see the people doing tai chi Mom will miss her weekly Pilates class on Wednesday and I miss playing hockey with my friend Sean. Before he left for London to go and study he lived in the same complex as us. Steven will miss playing soccer with Sunny who also became a friend he visited to play and ate Chinese traditional food (cooked by his Sunny's grandmother). By the way..the Chinese also play a different type of soccer; it is a small heavy piece of rubber with feathers on top. You stand in a circle and without running you keep the feathers in the air and 'pass' on to the other players. And then we had our last lessons of Ping Pong. We have improved a lot!! I LOVE PING PONG. Thank you Teacher Chen!.

Thank you everyone in Beijing for helping us and to make us feel  Welcome. Xie Xie to Sunny, Lihaiyan and Haipeng, Daya and WTP, Audrey , Mei and Jean Pierre and of course Juune and Pieter. 

The 2nd June came fast and we left Beijing with the Manchurian Trans Siberian Train- K19.

We have been in this train for 6 days non stop. It was a special experience to sit in a train for so long en see so many different landscapes passing. The total distance between Beijing and Moscow is almost 9000km and we are passing 7 time zones. Luckily the time in the train was always the same on Moscow time. Every day I wrote something about my highlight of that day.

2012-06-02 / Saturday


We were very excited to go on the train, but we were more scared if they would weigh our baggage. Readers don’t forget we are on a WORLD TRIP!! and therefore have 4  big suitcases, 1 hand luggage each and 3 bags of food for 6 days. For a  minute we freaked out that we had to leave luggage behind or hand in our food. What a luck..........YAAAAAAAAAAAH the scale WAS BROKEN and we could pass.  We had 2 rooms with each 2 beds, a little table, storage for our things and a large mirror.  We had no shower, but a bucket and a sponge. At every end of the corridor there was a toilet and a kettle of hot water . After three corridors you had a restaurant where you could eat and drink.
Steven and I were very quick in organizing our little house, cleaning, unpacking and hanging our Map up on the wall ready for school. We fell asleep very quickly because of the rocking/moving of the train.


2012-06-03 / Sunday 


We met some interesting travelers on the train who were going to different places in Russia. 2 Auzzies from Melbourne (and what a coincidence that I was wearing my Melbourne T-Shirt), 3 Belgiums , 2 Austrians and Adele from Beijing. It was fun to hang out with them and hear their stories and adventures, their thoughts about the China and about the Russians. 

 2012-06-04 / Monday - Crossing the border with China and Russia.

We were woken up by 2 strict Russians who where knocking on our door very loud. They had to see our faces, because they were checking to see if it was the same person as 
in our passports. They checked our luggage too. We had to change quickly into our clothes and were sent outside for 4 hours like all the other passengers on the train. The reason was that they were swapping the wheels for much bigger wheels, because in Russia the train tracks are wider then in China and the train's Restaurant  was swapped for a Russian restaurant. Meanwhile we went to the old Russian village, bought some bread and fresh fruit and had a nice get together with our friends from the train. 

 

2012-06-05 / Tuesday

This morning we didn’t have mom teaching us, but Mr Peter, one of the Belgium friends we met on the train. He taught us about World War I,II & the Cold War. It was very interesting (learned a lot). Unfortunately they left the train in Irkutsk. In the afternoons we read a lot and when we stopped at a station (max for 23 minutes) Steven and I quickly cleaned the windows of the train so we could see and take pictures. At one station we were halfway doing the window when a Russian woman snatched the newspapers from our hands and took the bucket of water out of Steven’s hand. Cannot believe it;  The lady just snatched it away from us!!!!!!!!   I still don’t really know what she said because she was talking half English half Russian but I think she said:

“No,Njiet....(Russian)....not....do.....(Russian)....in....go.....of....train....now.....no....are...stupid (Russian).

She nearly pushed me off the ladder, I . was very cross. Steven said I looked as red  as a tomato. I also felt that way. 

2012-06-06 /  Wednesday

There were many people going off the train, we were the only ones in  the corridor (a corridor has 9 compartments). Our view had changed from rice fields to mountains with snowy top and large forests with pine trees. Then we saw green grass with bright  yellow flowers and a enormous lake - Lake Baikal, the biggest sweat water lake.

Sometimes we past a village with a lot of small wooden houses and also we went over 2 long bridges. We heard that the poor people from Russia live here in concrete houses and the rich lived in wooden houses. 

2012-06-07 / Thursday

We finished all the bits of food we still had left. I read a lot out of my book, Jane Eyre. I am nearly finished with my book. Mom and I know how to read in Russian by now having seen all the posters and billboards in Cyrillic letters. They don’t have 26 letters in the alphabet but 32. Not all the letters are the same, for instance the "P" is an "R" and the "H" is an "N". That night we ate in the restaurant of the train and it looked old fashioned but now again in fashion. I had a delicious salad, so the food was not old fashioned. Meanwhile we looked outside and saw a beautiful church in shiny gold and blue. Also we saw a grave yard with blue fences around the grave yard and many blue crosses. The blue stands for heaven.

2012-06-08 / Friday

Last day in the train. It was cozy in the train since it was now raining for the first time since we left Beijing. Unfortunately the six days went by very quickly. We had school in the mornings, reading in the afternoons, we chatted and made friends, we shopped in the little stores on the platform, prepared small meals for the family and listened to music and saw a movie on my laptop. Black Butterfly -about the story of Ingrid Jonker (a writer of poems during the Apartheid in South Africa). First I thought it would take very long on the train, but it went by very fast and we could have stayed a few more days enjoying the moments in the train. Our first impression of Moscow was high flats and lots of graffiti.

до свидания [desvidanja]
Good bye (for now)


Loes