Two Days On The Train

This is the longest leg of the Trans-Siberian train that I have taken yet.  It is the section from Chita to Birobidzhan, and I am spending two nights on the train. Siberia is big, and this is just a wee slice of it.

This is also the first time I have reserved an upper berth. It is really not too bad. There is a ladder that folds out of the wall to get up there, though originally I wasn't aware of that. There are also all kinds of amazing little secret nooks and crannies to keep your stuff in the upper berth, I guess to make up for the lack of space that you have otherwise. But after taking the Trans-Mongolian train and several legs of the Trans-Siberian, now I'm a train veteran. I know where the outlets are, so I can charge my device. There are only two in the car, in the hallway, and they are in high demand. Or, that is, until I discovered the secret third one by the bathroom that nobody had been competing for.  But now that everybody knows about that one from seeing me there, I bet it will be hard to use that one, too. Quite a contrast from the Trans-Mongolian, which had outlets in every compartment in the car. The provodnitsas and provodnitsas have extra outlets in their compartments, and I hear if you ask them nicely, they will let you charge your device.

I shared a compartment with Tatiana and Ariana, two lawyers from Ulan-Ude with Buryat features, and a Russian guy who wasn't very talkative, but was helpful when he could be. He got off fairly early from the train, so for the rest of the journey, there were only the the of us in the compartment. At least I didn't get put into a compartment with a bunch of vodka-crazed soccer hooligans or nationalists. Tatiana spoke a little bit of English, but her English was heavily broken (but still much better than my Russian). Between her English, my terrible Russian, a little pantomime, and Google Translate getting whipped out occasionally, we managed to communicate pretty well. Both of the lawyers were on the way to Khabarovsk to undertake some further lethal training. Unlike in the US, where lawyers have to take continuing legal education every year, they told me Russian lawyers have to undertake further study every five years. So they were on their way to do that. Tatiana told me her mother was a judge, and was retired, but there was no way she had the resources to travel around the world on the pension she had.

Tatiana asked me if I had been to any of the Buddhist temples in Ulan-Ude. I told her I hadn't.  She said I should go, because it would change my life. She said there were monks there who were herbal healers, and they were better than doctors. She told me about one monk who preserved his body so well that they say he is not dead, but in a state of perpetual meditation. She asked me if people did herbal medicine in the US, I told her that people sometimes did, but mostly on their own. She said she thought that was dangerous. I told her people sometimes consulted herbalists, but didn't often go to folk healers, but some Native Americans did.

The upper berth was really not bad at all. I would definitely prefer the lower berth, but now that I had an upper, it was OK. The only thing was that it got really hot up there. Russian trains are kept furiously hot anyway, and with heat rising to the top, it got insanely toasty up there. Luckily the window in our compartment had not been locked by the provodnik, so I was able to open the window at the top to let the gathered heat out when I needed to.

The train ride was really mesmerizing, even though it was two days long. The scenery was gorgeous, filled with Siberian taiga and steppe, with the occasional horse-riding shepherd or picturesque village filed with log houses and corrals. The restaurant car was a cool place to hang out for a change every once in a while. They didn't seem to mind if people bought anything, but it wasn't the gathering place that it had been previously when I had taken international trains. The domestic trains in Russia are mostly filled with Russians, unlike the trains that cross borders.

The train stopped often for little towns, and they would only let people off the train if they stopped for fifteen minutes or more. Some of the tiny towns only had stops of a minute to five minutes, just long enough for people to get on or off who were scheduled to do so, but there were a good amount of long stops where I was able to get off the train and run around (usually literally) the towns taking pictures, paying careful attention to the time, because the train will definitely take off without you if you aren't back by the time it is scheduled to leave. There was one time I had a little bit of a scare, because I got off the train in one town, crossed several tracks to get to the station, ran around snapping luxuries, but on my way back, another train (a freight train) arrived on one of the tracks between me and the train I needed to board. It was a REALLY long train, too. I saw Tatiana run across the tracks and beat it back to the train, but I was too far away to even consider that.  So I had to wait a long time for it to pass, and I barely hauled ass back to the train before they closed the doors. Whew.

About two hours before I was supposed to get off the train, I had gone to the space at the end of the compartment, because there are windows on both sides and it is a good place to take pics. There were two guys sitting there smoking. They started taking to me in rapid-fire Russian, and all I could do was shake my head, and say, "Ni ponimayu," which means, "I don't understand." Suddenly they realized that I was a rare foreigner on the train, and they asked to take their picture with me (that happens a LOT). I complied, and let them take a bunch of selfies with me. They introduced themselves to me as Sergei and Andrei, and insisted that I accompany them to their compartment for some vodka. My spidey-sense was tingling a little, but what the hell, sure.

We went to the front of the car, and they led me into a compartment that I didn't even know was there before. It was between the provodnik's sleeping compartment and his working compartment. It only had one upper and lower bunk, rather than two of each. Sergei and Andrei were very insistent about the vodka thing. They mixed two bottles of liquid together, one clear, and one tannish, and started pouring drinks. I only drank a couple and then begged off.  But then they wanted to talk about political stuff. They asked me what American people thought about Russian people.  Honestly, I didn't know how to answer that, because I have no idea what most people think, so I told them I didn't really know. They started asking me questions about Barack Obama, to which I just answered vaguely and in a non-committal fashion. Then Sergei and Andrei told me they were both police officers.  I tried to just keep the same expression on my face that I had had before,  and started thinking, "OK, time to start figuring out the exit strategy. "

Then Sergei asked me to trade phone numbers. I was a little hesitant to do that, but did anyway. I gave him my number, one/then the area code/then the number, and he put it into his phone and tried to call me.  It didn't work. I said I really didn't know how international codes worked, and what one needed to dial to get through. He insisted that I enter his number into my phone, and then try to call HIM. So I did. This time it worked. So now he had my number.  He kept saying, "Telefon?" I said, "Da." He asked when, I said,  "Cztery dnia (four days)." Andrei told me he was a boxer, and showed me a bunch of pictures of him in martial arts uniforms and in the ring.  Then he jokingly asked me if I wanted to box and started making sparring gestures.  I smiled and said no, but he kept asking and punching the air. I tried to beg off and leave at this point, because I needed to pack my stuff to get off the train in about a half an hour, but they were very insistent I stick around a little longer. So I did, and they played me a bunch of Russian pop music, asking for my opinion. I made thumbs-up gestures. But now I had to get my stuff together to get off the train....they were getting off a few hours later, as were most on the train. I finally managed to escape back to my compartment, and furiously got my stuff ready to debark. Tatiana told me I must be very careful, because I could be arrested, and I told her, "I know." I got my stuff together, went to the front of the train to get ready to debark, and Sergei and Andrei showed up there again to chat. The provodnik didn't seem to want to have anything to do with them.  I just answered their questions politely, and then when the train stopped, I bid them, "Da Svedaniya" (goodbye), and took off into town of Birobidzhan.

Sexist Fucking Anti-Disneyland in the Train Restaurant Car?

Hopefully, this post will completely horrify you. If so, then I've done my job. Not that I get, like, paid to toss out any of the malarkey I spew, but it's my job anyway, and I try to do it faithfully.

I wander back to the restaurant car on the train. I have enough food to eat, but what the hell, it's the experience that counts. I order some potatoes mixed with onions and mushrooms and other stuff. They are delicious.

There is this older, gray-haired, businessy-looking guy sitting across from me at a booth who is really creeping me out. He is one of these hyper-aggressive Russians, very demonstrative in his gestures, and extremely  loud. He keeps calling the waitress over and getting really physical with her. First he is rubbing on her arm while she is talking to him. Then he is stroking her butt next time she comes over. Then he calls her over again, and he is stroking his hands up the back of her leg and reaching up her dress to touch her butt.  I am doing a double-take, and thinking, what the flying fuck, do I step in and say anything. She is acting stoic about it. She's not, like, smacking him for getting out of line, or trying to move out of the way, or seeming to talk to her colleagues about what an asshole he is. Just acting professional, and trying to take his order. Every time she walks by, he gets all touchy, and she seems to be taking it in stride. None of my business, I tell myself. I don't know anything about the cultural cues here. I mean, I don't know if we have some kind of sixties "Mad Men" situation here where men are just condescendingly treating the women around them as their playthings, and that is embedded in the culture (to the detriment of those negatively affected by it), or if she has some kind of rapport with this guy.  None of my fucking business. None of my fucking business. Stay the fuck out of this interaction in Russia. But I am seriously ready to push his nose up into his brain with the heel of my hand if necessary. And I am really tempted to type a message into Google Translate for her to see if there is a hostage-y deal, and if intervention is warranted. But I don't.

She comes back and sits across from him at the booth. They seem to have some conversation that gets slightly agitated after a while. Both of them seem to be scolding each other. Then it calms down, and he shows her something on his phone. She watches for a while, and then shows him something on her phone.  They finish their conversation, he pays and leaves. I am just sitting there thinking, "what the fuck just happened here?" But, it's none of my fucking business.  And, jeebus, I didn't even want to look behind me to see how any of the other guys in the restaurant car were interacting with the waitress.

Somehow, it makes me flash back to the hostel I stayed at in Melbourne, Australia, in the St. Kilda district. I think I talked a little bit about this in a prevous blog post, but here is more about it, now that I have had some processing time. There were two English guys there that I nicknamed "Predator" and "Sidekick." Predator was the lead asshole, and Sidekick was his Boy Wonder figure. Predator was just treating all the women in the hostel like he owned them. His thing was doing handstand push-ups up against the wall while he grunt-counted loudly. Sidekick boasted how he hadn't eaten a vegetable in ten years (kudos, dude, on your unhealthy lifestyle...your arterial hardening will be a capstone of your misplaced attempts at masculinity). Their latent homosexual bonding consisted of saying the most insulting things about women that they could muster, and expecting the other guys in the room to nod/leer in bro-hood. I mostly tried not to interact with them at all.

Well, of course, this dynamic duo of cringeworthy behavior got predictably sauced later that night.  They stormed back into the room, and spent the night smacking the women awake in the wee hours, climbing into their beds and trying to make out with them, (mostly Predator while Sidekick cheered him on), and pissing them off vigorously, though one woman seemed to be accepting of this behavior, giggling and giving make-out-y cues. I was barely awake as this was going on, or I would have definitely said something about the women who were complaining. One woman recounted the tale to me the next morning about how she told them to back off, and both of them laughed it off and called her a cunt, whereupon she sang it to them with some severe vitriol. I was drifting in and out of sleep while this whole disaster happened. Mostly I remembered this whole night of carnage through the recounting of it to me the next morning by Taylor, the Canadian woman who called them out, as I was not really in a state of full consciousness. And she was really pissed because she had been especially helpful to them in giving them some job leads for their working holiday in Australia, and they repaid her with this reprehensible bullshit.  I think that even if anyone in the room was digging what was going on, it affected others seriously negatively.  To his credit, Sidekick did apologize to Taylor the next day.

Anyway, my whole point on this is I often have no clue as to whether to step in and say that seemingly rapey stuff is not fucking OK, or whether I would be interfering with somebody's consensual kinda dommy-subby thing. Sometimes it's damn clear, and sometimes it's not. And, hey, I am interested in exploring the possibility of having a rubby-nubby thing with someone who wants to touch me in secret places just as much as the next hominid. But I am totally not into doing things to other people that they don't want done to them, or giving my approval to anyone else doing that. 

I get the feeling that even talking about it opens me up to a rash of shit from hell from all sides in a rage-filled, badly askew world, but here it is anyway; let your neurons be rubbed raw with whatever. Cheers.